I steeped in the darkness for a long time before I got the lamp lit. I have light now. It is dim and blue, but I can see to write if I press my notebook flat on this broad rock and lean the flame toward it.
The full details of my fate can be found in my final phone message. The battery is gone, but I will keep the phone close by my body when I die. It tells my name and how I became trapped down here. How my father and I researched Paleolithic cave paintings depicting a star-faced shaman, and how the oldest human words were written in kaolin clay beneath one of the paintings. Those words told my dad that he could trade the life of his daughter for the original secrets of the human species.
He believed the ancient message and tried to kill me by trapping us in the cave and attacking with a rock. After fleeing headfirst down a tapering passage, I had to journey even deeper into the darkness after he got stuck chasing me.
144 eels. I am now in a subterranean cavern so large that I probably couldn’t see the far wall with my phone flashlight. When I first fell into this chamber, I believed my father had found a way down here, and would emerge from the dark to attack again. I believed this because his stone lamp was waiting for me when I climbed out of the crystal pool. I had no other explanation for the lamp beat me to this reservoir. It was impossible, but there it was.
But my father didn’t bring it here. I’ve searched this cave dozens of times. I still have no answers.
I’m not the first human to find there way down here, so when I’m not fishing, or making lamp oil, or sleeping, I spend my time excavating all of the skeletons. Almost wherever I dig in the sandy cave floor I find fossilized bones of ancient people. I’ve cataloged bones from 11 separate individuals. Taking measurements and arranging each skeleton as it comes together (strangely, I haven’t found a skull yet) makes me feel like a human instead of a cave monster. It feels good to know that I’m still an archaeologist, even with the burden of my father’s expectations lifted. Even though I hate him and would spit on him if I could.
He must have died up in the long worm passage, I concluded. The blood pooled in his face until his tongue was too thick to keep yelling after me. Just like I would die in this sealed cavity, after scrabbling around the bottom of an unexplored cave system like a bug in a bucket. In a couple of weeks, at most, I would begin a process of decay, and the bottled air of ten thousand years would be once more undisturbed by my breathing. But I would die an archaeologist.
I read that people who have lived in caves for long periods of time develop a sleeping pattern that’s nothing like the surface’s day-night cycle. Strange sleep. Sometimes I would wake up with a wet face. In the dark I can’t tell if I am awake or asleep sometimes. I walk slow perimeters of the cave wall, feeling for drafts or other signs of a passage on, knowing I won’t find anything this time either, and I’ll stop and curl up in the sand, or against a stalagmite the size of a telephone pole, and I’ll dream. I dreamed of a giant with many limbs, moving in the dark, but I was paralyzed, and I couldn’t even lift my head to listen.
But I never dreamed that I discovered a way out. My dreams had no hope to draw from.
Determining how long I’ve been down here was impossible, but I kept count of the eels I’ve eaten: 148 eels, usually three per meal. That’s the only way I have to measure the passage of time. The pool seems undepleted still.
I don’t know how many hours or days it was before I caught one of the eels in the crystal pool. I tried rocks, tried scooping them out, but the eels floated away from every attempt, with only the slightest bioluminescent glow suggesting they noticed my efforts at all.
What finally worked was holding my shirt like a net and keeping it perfectly still under the water’s surface. It was aggravating and boring, and my muscles were on fire by the time one of the eels hovered over, but eventually I learned to lift one end, then snap up the other, catching them in their backward retreat. (I’m hungry, will finish later.)
151 eels. Now I rip eels from the water, fold them over in my shirt, and smash the bundle against a rock until it stops squirming. I swallow them whole so I don’t have to chew on them. They slide right down into my stomach like a long glug of oil. Which is how I got the idea of making lamp fuel from them.
It took a lot of experimentation, but here’s my recipe:
My phone battery was too drained to throw sparks, so I re-lit the lamp by stabbing directly into the battery’s cell using a spoon-sharpened rock. The battery opened like petals on a hot-white flower, throwing up a bloom of sparks and toxic gas instead of pollen. I stopped my coughing in time to nudge the spraying flame toward the lamp’s reservoir, lighting my greasy fuel and my cotton wick. I have been tending the low flame ever since. The light is blue and dim. I don’t know how I would light it again if it went out.
164 eels. I found another body in the cave, and this one is different than the others. There was a soft spot in the cave floor where the earth was loose and pulverized (I don’t know how it’s possible that I missed it before, since I’m always probing for signs of a passage onward). My hand sunk into the deep silt. There was something hard down there.
I came up with a humerus. Briefly holding the bone over my lamp flame let off a smell like burning hair–it wasn’t fossilized, it was modern. I was able to pull up most of a skeleton, but never found the skull.
168 eels. I woke up with a wet face again.
171 segmented cave worms. They are not eels, they are worms. I found another body entombed under loose dirt. But this one wasn’t a skeleton. The skin was purple and burst. The subcutaneous fat was partially dehydrated, shrinking into globules like strung beads.
There was no head, but I recognized the hiking boots, the always-scraped knees, and the jean shorts. I knew right away it was my father, even with the head gone. His deflated, headless body looked so harmless, propped in the dirt with his hands tucked his lap.
When I fully unearthed him I found his body split and spilled. There was a writhing ball of worms in the open cavity of his pelvis. The ground around the body seethed with them, and I realized they were my eels… not eels, cave worms.
I couldn’t let the dead worms down my throat again. Already on the edge of starvation, I soon felt woozy and disoriented. Focus came when I thought about my father’s body. It wasn’t down here before. Someone put him here. That meant there was a way out.
My father’s body was exsanguinated enough that it barely weighed anything. After dragging it out of the silt pit in the cave floor, I started digging with my digging rock, cutting through the big worms and tossing their bodies aside as I went.
Beneath the grave’s silt was jumbled rock, which looked like crumbled fragments of the slab bedrock framing the rest of the cavern. I took a break. Silt was already filling in the meter or so down I had dug. I don’t know that I could have lifted my arms again. I closed my eyes and lost time.
When I floated back to semi-consciousness I knew it wasn’t a dream. There was something wet against my face. It felt like dozens of fingers were massaging the sides of my head, while a cat’s tongue probed my mouth and nose. Then before I could react it pulled away. I felt incapacitated, and the torpor even extended to my eyes, which I opened with tremendous effort.
A face like a starfish, with a tumble of appendages, floated over my body in the lamp gloom. Its face fingers nosed around, poking the air in radiating patterns, and orbited flat black eyes, which were open but unmoving.
The thing reacted with a chirrup, brought down an unseen limb, and slapped my lamp light out, providing a dreadful sense of the creature’s size just as it plunged us back into total darkness.
While my heart raced, my body could not move. I could hear the monster retreating back into its pit, scraping away rock with rhythmic strokes like a sea turtle paddling for the surface. My glimpse of the creature was so quick I was already convincing myself I had imagined it.
I had no way to ever bring my light back. That’s what really filled me with fear. I pulled up the blanket and went back to sleep.
171 segmented cave worms, scrambled eggs, coffee, wheat toast, two slices pineapple, fried tomatoes, orange juice. I woke up and my first thought wasn’t about starving to death, or my dad’s wormy corpse, or even the mole monster sucking my face—it was the blanket. More accurately, I could now see, a quilt with down fill and green wool panels. My stone lamp was at my side, unlit but visible.
I sat up and saw a doorway cut out of the cave wall and filled with wan, pink light. It looked blinding to me, so I turned away.
There was a breakfast tray set out. It was sterling silver, with scalloped edges and ivory handles, crowded with bone china dessert plates under a glass lid. I could smell butter.
I didn’t know what was on the other side of that doorway. I had been so certain I would die down here. Whatever dangers were ahead, at least I wouldn’t die in this cavern with the worms.
But first I ate breakfast.