Cave

This was a contribution to the Drek, Death and Doom writing contest among some uniformly excellent other stories and I recommend you check them out.

In the dark, he feels around for pieces of himself. A couple of bumps and bruises. A wicked gash up his right thigh too, but he’s all there.

He picks himself up. The darkness is total. Blacker than a coalminer’s asshole. His father’s phrase.

He can’t see shit.

Grunting, he fumbles for his phone. In the dark he feels the seismic crack in the screen. His fingers pore over it as though it were a scar on his own body. He hits the flashlight.

There is a single wall. Curved, like a well. It’s not flush, slightly angled and bevelled into a curve at the bottom so that there is no clear vertex between wall and floor.

He touches it and it’s cold and wet and has too much give. He must have fallen. Or, no… Skidded at an irregular angle down into this maw. He can’t remember how.

They’d been walking – caving, Nathan had called it – and the other two had rounded the bend and he must have lost them. He could remember running to catch up but there had been a fork and maybe he’d taken the wrong turn, slipped.

Without warning, the room shakes violently and he feels his jaw collide hard with the wall. There’s a nauseating crunch and he comes away from it. He touches his chin and pulls his hand away. It’s slick with something. A dull ache begins to throb at the bottom of his face.

He hears a plop of liquid hit the floor and instinctively looks up. There’s something glistening up there, but he can’t make out any more than that. For a second the glistening stops, as though a shutter had closed over it. Another plop. His jaw burns and he feels a ragged claw gripping at his heart and squeezing. There is something very, very wrong going on here.

He casts his phone around the small space, suddenly desperate. There must be an exit, an escape, a button, a trapdoor, something. All he can see is the slick, almost unseemly meeting of the floor to the wall. No change, just a smooth incline up. Like a test tube. He looks back up at the ceiling. It winks again and he feels something wet land on his bad thigh. Within seconds, there is a prickling sensation. Atingle, then a sting.

It's burning now, like a bad sunburn. Now like petrol on bare skin. He cringes back against the wall, eyes rolling up and sees it. For a second he forgets the burning.

There is something snaking down the pit. It looks like a gigantic elephant’s trunk or a fly’s proboscis.

Black or a deep purple. The orifice at the end expands and contracts, outstretched and eager.

It bears down on him, faster and faster. In a searing flash of comprehension, he understands where he is. He understands why his leg is burning. He begins to scream.