Subterrestrial (11 page)

People would have to believe him now. This would be his new beginning. He could positively feel a part of himself he thought was lost forever awakening inside of him.

Nabahe was just about to haul himself up through the gap between stalactites when something caught his attention. It was a print, although unlike the others. It reminded him of a maple leaf. There were three digits. The one in the middle was significantly longer than the other two, which themselves were asymmetrical. Were it not so well preserved, he might have written it off as a print of where a foot had slipped. He placed his hand on top of it for comparison’s sake. They were roughly the same size.

“Where does this lead?” Hart called. Her voice echoed from inside the earth. She wriggled between the stalactites. Her light limned a narrow oblong crevice that looked barely wide enough for her to squeeze through if she turned her head to the side.

“The Vale of Mourning,” Mitchell said.

There was something about the way he said it that caused Nabahe to glance back down at him. He shielded his eyes from the man’s headlamp, but it wasn’t until Mitchell crawled past him that he could see the other man’s face.

Mitchell and Thyssen were the only ones who weren’t smiling.

Hart could hardly climb with her hands shaking so badly. She imagined this was how the first Europeans to explore the Dark Continent must have felt, stumbling upon strange remains and artifacts and following the footprints of unknown species to their source. Only this was beyond anything humans had experienced in history. They were dealing with a species capable of creating artwork in its own likeness, which was a decidedly human trait, one beyond even the bonobo’s seemingly limitless potential. And the idea that it still might be living down here . . .

She chased away the thought. The last thing she wanted was to get her hopes up. How crushing would it be to discover that this whole thing was an elaborate hoax or, worse, that this species that had somehow managed to survive inside the planet had only recently become extinct. With as much water as had flooded this area, it was hard to believe that anything could have survived.

Instead of thinking about the carvings that could be mere centuries old and their resemblance to remains that weren’t much older than she was, Hart focused on Mitchell’s silhouette, which nearly sealed off the tunnel ahead of her. Their combined heavy breathing and the scraping of knees and elbows and helmets amplified the claustrophobia and made her feel as though she were being buried alive. The weight of the island and the ocean pressed down on her, smothering her. Each breath came faster than the last. Her vision dimmed around the edges and she realized she was hyperventilating. She glanced back, but all she could see through the slim gap over her own shoulder and hip was the blinding light on the head of the person behind her, whose body physically blocked the only known way back to the surface. The crown of her head struck Mitchell’s heels and she nearly cried out.

He’d stopped crawling and appeared to be in the process of contorting his body to climb out of the tunnel. She felt an enormous swell of relief when he stepped aside and she saw open air through the earthen orifice.

And then she saw the ledge.

It was barely eighteen inches wide and what looked like fifty feet straight up from water so far down it barely reflected her light.

Mitchell stood to her left, his back pressed against the smooth stone. His head was turned so that his light shined onto the ledge ahead of him, which seemed to narrow as it charted a wending course toward a point where it appeared to simply terminate.

Duan ran into her from behind. Her gasp of surprise echoed into the far distance.

“Take my hand,” Mitchell said.

“I can’t do this.”

“Of course you can. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I could
fall
.”

“Okay. Then don’t fall.”

“That’s your advice?”

“Falling is an absolute state. Either you’re falling or you aren’t. There’s really no in-between.”

He offered his hand. She stared at it for a moment before looking up into his face. She blew out her breath to steady her nerves and grabbed his hand before she could change her mind. He didn’t pull; he merely steadied her while she rolled onto her side and squirmed out onto the ledge, which felt considerably smaller than it looked. She stood, leaned back into the wall, and slid sideways, away from where Duan effortlessly rose to his feet, as though he’d done so a million times before.  

She tried not to look down as she scooted along the wall behind Mitchell. The water was as black as oil, making it impossible to gauge its depth. Her fingers probed uselessly for any sort of irregularities in the stone she could use for balance. She tried to slow her breathing to no avail.

“How much farther have you gone?” she asked, hoping conversation would distract her from the irrational sensation of the stone ledge cracking beneath her.

“Not much farther,” Mitchell said. “We’ve identified five egresses from this cavern, but so far we’ve only explored two of them. Both were dead ends.”

“What about the other three?”

“We haven’t had time. Even finding our way into this enormous formation took several days of trial and error.”

“How much longer do you think you’ll have?”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it? None of us knows. That’s why we decided to bring all of you in. We’re hoping you can help us find whatever life is down here before either the water level returns to normal or the government swoops in and snatches this from us.”

“So you work for Halversen?”

“I’m with the coast guard. The Department of Homeland Security, technically. I’m what they call a rescue swimmer. You know, the guy you see on the news hooking people to the winch line of a helicopter in the middle of a hurricane?”

“How did you end up down here?”

“Bad luck and timing. That being said, there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be. I mean, who ever dreamed a place like this existed? And I got to be the first to explore it.”

The echo of his voice sharpened as they rounded the bend into a narrowing maybe fifteen feet wide. The ledges on the opposite side were far thinner and irregular, nowhere near as accommodating as the one beneath her feet. Where the two sides met, the cavern wall was rounded and smooth, with the exception of random outcroppings shaped like scallop shells, staggered down the escarpment toward the water.

Mitchell lowered himself to his rear end and dropped down onto the first outcropping with a splash. Each of the semicircular projections was filled with several inches of water, which dripped down into the next in the series like a stone waterfall.

“These gours are spectacular,” Payton said.

“Also very fragile,” Duan said. “They form from calcite as the water level drops. Like tide pools in wine glasses.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing they don’t have to hold our weight for very long,” Mitchell said. He stepped off the edge, brought his arms to his sides and his feet together, and hit the water with barely a splash. His light faded until it nearly extinguished, then diffused into a bluish glow as he rose to the surface. He breached with a laugh and backstroked toward the edge of the pool. “It’s got to be at least fifty feet deep back here. You won’t even come close to the bottom.”

Hart lowered herself into the first gour and stepped onto the edge. It cracked beneath her weight and a ribbon of water trickled down the falls.

“You have to be kidding.”

“Nothing to it,” Calder said. She didn’t even bother stepping down onto the gour. She leaped away from the wall and splashed down into the water.

“We’re really doing this, aren’t we?” Hart said.

“Just keep reminding yourself why you’re here,” Payton said.

Hart smiled.

“I signed a fake name on my liability waiver anyway.”

She took a deep breath and stepped out over the nothingness. Her heart rose into her throat and she barely managed to plug her nose before she hit the cold water and sank into the depths. Everything was a murky shade of bluish-green. Tiny bubbles and clouds of microscopic organisms sparkled in her light. She kicked and swam for the surface, where she could barely see the rippling reflection of the others’ headlamps.

The moment her mouth cleared the surface, she coughed out a mouthful of fluid that tasted like someone had put out a match in it and swam toward where Mitchell and Calder had already climbed onto limestone riddled with craters.

A shout behind her preceded a splash. Droplets of water pattered around her. Thyssen, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet since entering the cavern, was the last to jump from the cliff.

She was just about to crawl onto dry land when she smelled something that reminded her of Tanzania. She’d been following a mother orangutan and her offspring to a stream when she smelled an organic stench that made her stomach turn and heard the buzzing of flies off in the brush. The orangutans must have smelled it, too. The mother swung her child onto her back and tore off through the trees, leaving Hart to follow her nose to the dead rhinoceros. Its horn had been torn right out of its snout and the remainder of the carcass had been left to rot, liquefying from beneath tough hide crawling with black flies. It was a scent she would never forget and one that seemed entirely out of place down here. At least until she saw the dark spatters on the ground and the tarp off to her left. It was weighted down with rocks around the edges, but she could still clearly see the shapes contained underneath it.

“What’s under there?”

She strode straight toward the tarp. If they’d found the unclassified primates and killed them, then so help her, she was going to make them wish they’d never been born.

“You don’t want to do that,” Mitchell said.

“Oh, yeah? Try and stop me.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Hart kicked aside several of the stones, grabbed the edge of the tarp, and yanked it upward. She covered her mouth and nose and staggered backward.

“I tried to tell you,” Mitchell said.

While whatever was under there might once have been living creatures, it was nearly impossible to tell which species. The only thing she could say with any kind of certainty was that whatever they were, they had died badly.

At first Payton thought they might have been dogs, but their legs were disproportionately short in relation to the overall length of the bodies and the cervical spine lacked the lordotic curvature of an animal accustomed to holding its head upright for extended periods of time. The scraps of pelt were greasy and desiccated. The fur was grayish-black and consisted of bristly guard hairs with a fine undercoat. It was the structure of the feet—or, more precisely, the flippers—that gave away their identity.

“They’re sea lions,” Calder said.

“We figure they must have been sucked down here when the caves filled with water,” Mitchell said.

“That doesn’t explain how they came to be in this state,” Payton said.

Calder knelt over the mess of carcasses. It was obvious by their arrangement and the patterns of dried blood around them that they’d been dragged to this one spot where they could all be covered up together. There were smeared footprints everywhere. Most had tread like their diving boots, while others were vaguely triangular, but she couldn’t even wager a guess as to which species could have made them. She traced the sloping lengths of several ribs still articulated with the spine.

“The arched scratches in the cortex suggest a biting motion with a sharp row of teeth. This is the kind of thing you see in the wake of a shark attack.”

“You think sharks got sucked down here with them?” Hart asked, and quickly looked back at the water in which they’d been immersed mere moments prior.

“I can’t think of any species of shark capable of attacking them on dry land,” Calder said.

“It could have gotten them while they were in the water and they somehow managed to crawl up here to die,” Payton said.

“No. Wounds of this nature and with this kind of prevalence are characteristic of a feeding frenzy. Nothing crawls away from something like that.”

“Then what could have done this?”

Calder looked at Thyssen for a long moment before answering.

“I don’t know.”

Payton waved away a handful of flies and scrutinized the carcasses. Calder was right; between the ragged edges of the tattered pelt and the deep furrows in the bone, the injuries weren’t consistent with those inflicted by any land animal he could think of, with the possible exception of larger species of crocodilians, but there was no way they could survive for any length of time in this arctic environment. He again stood and looked deeper into the cavern, toward a rock face positively covered with gours.

He swatted one of the blasted flies away from his ear and was about to head uphill when it hit him.

“The flies,” he said. “How did they get in here?”

“Same way as the rest of us, I’m sure,” Hart said.

“They smelled these carcasses from all the way up there? Outside? In a storm like that? And then they flew down a quarter-mile shaft full of heavy equipment and navigated that maze to get here?”

“That’s their sole biological imperative,” Hart said. “You of all people should know that. How do you think they’ve survived relatively unchanged through the eons?”

Payton turned to Thyssen.

“What aren’t you telling us?”

“There’s something you should see,” Thyssen said.

He nodded to Mitchell, who led them away from the remains and toward a fissure in the wall. It was barely wide enough to allow them to squeeze through sideways. It widened several paces in, although the roof continued to lower until they were forced to crawl. Mitchell shed his pack, rolled onto his back, and used his feet to scoot deeper into the tunnel.

“Toss me my lighter, would you?” Mitchell said. “It’s in the front pouch, with the medical kit.”

Payton removed the waterproof emergency lighter and tossed it to Mitchell, who caught it and flipped the lid open in one motion. He clicked the ignition button with his thumb and a blue butane flame bloomed from the housing.