Once upon a time, I stumbled upon an opportunity that put me within reach of complete and utter insanity. The promise of excitement and adventure also lurked quietly nearby, but when you start adding and multiplying fear with terror and a little bit of horror, the insanity looms much larger. And that’s ultimately what I only just avoided, while merrily breezing through the adventure. For I had found a cave.

And I’m not talking about the Carlsbad Caverns. That shit is artificial and bi-curious at best. I mean, really? Hand rails? Yeah so what for tourists; I think they should have to crawl and climb through there like Harvey Carlsbad when he discovered the damn thing. There are lights drilled into the ceiling for Elephant’s sake. No, I’m talking about the cave in West Texas where we found the skulls. Oh, I haven’t told you about that? Well allow me to elaborate.

A few buddies and I in the service used to run out to Anson and watch the Anson Lights, with a scientific approach. We would station one guy up by the road, have our flashlights and walkie talkies and, well, just generally being as high-tech and prepared as you could be back before there were iPhones and SD cards. Though we consumed much alcohol, we were scientists. Once for enjoyment, the rest of the time for dissection and education. And possibly a good drunk. But anytime we found anything cool – like a haunted house or an abandoned missile silo or a dead cat – we would investigate until we knew exactly what was really going on.

So when we stumbled onto a little cave outside of Sonora, Texas, we obviously had to get our science in order. Lest someone get eaten by the dreaded cave monster, we were going to be prepared. You heard what happened to Ted, right? Yeah, eff that ess, friends. Well of course none of us had read that story before we stumbled onto this cave. The story wasn’t even posted until 2001. I got out of the service in 1998. But still. Things like that have a tendency to pop up in your head when you’re in an absolute dark cavern with no one around, and a great possibility of getting stuck.

But wait, let me tell you how we found it. We’d been walking with backpacks full of beer for the better part of an hour. We’d driven to Sonora to see Jerry’s girlfriend, Stacy. Once we picked her up, we were all looking for something to do. She mentioned there being a pretty bad ass lumber yard with a pretty low-tech fence we could get into and mess around. Well we took a wrong turn down a rocky road (you know, the white quartz rock shit?) and were about to turn around and find our way back. When Travis was backing the car up, he ran it a little too far and the back blew off the edge of a rain gulley. SLAM! Yeah, the three of us guys couldn’t lift the car back onto the grass. The damn thing was hanging out three feet over a big concrete ditch. It was only about a three-foot drop-off, but we were rendered useless.

Anyway, once the car was out of commission we grabbed our backpacks and stuffed as much beer as we could get from the cooler in them. Then we started walking. And I’m not sure what gave us the crazy idea that we should keep walking toward the direction we thought the lumber yard was instead of back toward civilization, but that’s what we did. So after about an hour, the girls started getting tired and bored and complainy. Yes that is an adjective. Suck it up. So we decided to sit. Well, Chris’s girlfriend, Jessie, sat on a log and fell backward. When she fell backward, to make a long story short, she landed on something other than hard dirt. It sounded like the top of a wooden box.

So after some careful inspection, we found it to be the top of a wooden box. It was a five-by-five boarded plank covering up something. Well, when we moved it aside and found that it was covering the entrance to a cave, I must tell you, we were all a little excited. Now I’ll go ahead and jump to the end and ruin it for you so you don’t get any wrong ideas about what did and did not happen. Number one, we did not find any monsters, ghosts or monster ghosts. Number B, no one got lost and died. Thirdly, we did not trek ten miles inside some undiscovered cave and pop out far in the desert somewhere. In fact, the cave was very discovered. The entrance itself, though it was almost straight vertical for about thirty feet, was almost entirely covered with grafitti. And the cave didn’t straighten out and go ten miles into the earth. However – and this is the important part – there were some odd quirks about the cave that were very attractive to wanna-be explorers. The skulls, obviously, but it did have a couple of other fascinating properties that made it worth going back and exploring it, and more importantly, worth writing about.

That first night, we had plenty of beer. That’s all we had though. A flashlight here, a cigarette lighter there, but almost nothing you’d find useful when you’re cave-diving into something you’ve never before seen. So that’s where it goes back to being prepared. We decided we’d cover it up, find our way back, and work on getting the car out of the gulley. It took us a long time to get back to the car, and we were pretty nervous about being able to find the cave again. But we did. In fact, we drove right up to it the next night. But this time we only had one chick with us. Cassie. Cassie was the only chick out of the three we actually trusted not to squeal and cry when she saw a rat, or if her rope broke and she fell through a murky gelatinous layer of water into a deadpool. We needed a chick who was one of the guys. And as it turns out, we were all glad she went with us.

So that second night, after tying a rope to the crash bars on my truck, we lowered ourselves down into the dark, musty well of the cave. Even with torches, I have to admit it was a little scary being the first one to go down. I couldn’t see anything below me, and it was cool. Like a breeze was blowing up from beneath us. I tried to light a cigarette just inside the rim of the cave, before I started my descent. But I couldn’t get it lit. Too much wind. Usually that means there’s a tunnel or a cave that leads back to surface somewhere. Also, it was moist. It felt like a musky crypt, with the smell to match. Something had either died down there long ago, or had been dragged and thrown in recently. But still, I went. I took my time and moved slowly, climbing down foot by foot on the rope, until I reached the last knot, which told me there was only ten feet of rope left. We had a twenty-five foot rope or something, but five or six was taken up by the knot and the overhead above the lip of the cave. So I knew I was going to be short a little. I figured I could drop off though, and it would only be a three- or four-foot fall. Well, it wasn’t.

I fell another eleven feet. And in the dark, when you’re not ready to land, or don’t know when you’re going to land, the abrupt slam of earth beneath your feet can kill you. Fortunately I landed flat on the rock, but I fell forward as soon as I hit, and my hands banged against irregular, uneven stone. It was very dangerous and I had gotten lucky. I should also mention that when my hands went forward and landed on the cold, wet stone, I immediately started feeling a tickling sensation from my fingers, knuckles, up my wrists and forearms, all the way up. And I figured it was from the shock of ramming my hands against the rocks. Until it started in on my neck and face. Then I realized pretty quickly I was covered from head to toe with daddy-longlegs. There must have been hundreds on me. Now I don’t freak out about shit like that, but it’s not comfortable, either. I was being swarmed and they were crawling up the short sleeves of my shirt, into my shirt, up my shorts legs…

So I go to start swatting, dropping my backpack and spinning around, knocking them all off me, slapping my legs and arms and face and chest, getting pissed off and yeah, starting to get a little freaked out. I just wanted it to stop, and being in a foreign location, I had no idea what was coming next. I wanted to be ready if something came bursting out of the solid darkness and howled in my face. So I was ready to be done with the spiders. All that slapping though, stirred up something else for which I had not accounted.

At first a low roar, a single shriek. Then a louder roar. Steadily, it grew louder still, and there was a lot more of the shrieking, like babies on fire. It got so loud and terrifying so fast that I thought I was about to explode with fear. I’d never heard anything like it. The roar seemed to rumble through the very earth upon which I stood, like a stampede of evil oxen charging up from the underworld. And faster than I could imagine, and louder than a thunderclap, there were ten million bats filling the cavern, making exodus. I ducked and slammed against the ground as fast as I could, and a few of them clung to me – their wiry little bodies and thin-skinned wings wrapping around my hands and clinging to my head as they shrieked and squealed like satan’s little angels. It was pretty magnificent, but I would have preferred they all spontaneously combusted and got the hell away from me. And it lasted a good five minutes.

After they were finally all gone, swooping out into the night sky, I started having second thoughts about going any further. I started yelling up at the crew above. “You okay?” they asked me. “Yeah, I’m fine. Someone needs to get down here pretty pronto though.” Chris yelled back, “Okay, Cassie’s coming dude. Hang tight.” Cassie was Travis’s girlfriend, and – like I said – could hold her own. I yelled back up to let her know that there’s a pretty good drop-off, and that I’d illuminate the ground for her. Within about a minute, she was there, feet dangling and kicking against the stone wall in front of her. I broke the darkness with my mag-lite and filled up the area with clean, white light for her, then tried to steady her as she dropped.

Now let me tell you a little bit about Cassie. She’s no looker. In fact, she looked like a mean version of Monica Potter. I know, I know, she’s hotter than Texas chili. But check it; try to imagine that picture with a brow furrowed in concentration and lines around her mouth, always set in a hard stance against smiling. She looked meaner than shit. Now she was quite the opposite, but she looked like she wanted to whip someone’s ass perpetually. Also, she had dark hair. She stood about five-eight, and was wiry with muscle. She wasn’t built like a weightlifter, but she was strong and hard. I don’t know, some guys think that’s hot as shit. Travis, namely. But I just wanted her to get my back for me down there in the darkness. I feel like if anyone ever tried anything untoward with her, she’d probably break his nose, blacken his eye and sock his ear so hard he couldn’t hear out of it – all before he knew what the hell was going on.

Now Travis, on the other hand, was mean. He liked her perhaps because she looked mean, but he was a mean mother effer. Not to his buddies, of course. But he was the type of guy who would start a fight with a guy on the street if said guy cracked his neck the wrong way. And he was also a joker. So when we saw the end of the rope drop onto the rock beside us, we could only look up dumbly, then look at each other. I took a deep breath, and Cassie made that face like someone was about to die and set her hands on her hips. I was about to yell something very clever, like, “Not funny, dipshits!” or “Hey, what the hell?” but she stopped me. She gave me a look and actually smiled, shaking her head and kind of covering my mouth with her hand. “Screw them, Spacey. Let’s go alone!” she said.

Now like I said, I was having second thoughts about going any further, because the bats had just left. All sixty billion of them. And I knew they’d have to come back eventually. I was still a little shaken by that, and didn’t really want to be in their lair when they decided to come back. Screw that. Bats and I don’t really mix well, I learned. Secondly, I was all gung-ho Billy Bad-ass when we were driving out to the cave, but once I started down the wall I lost my mojo rapidly. I was suddenly very irritable, edgy and in the mood to get the hell out of there. I was also in need of another beer. It was all up in the cooler above. And of course, now we were being quiet, so I wasn’t going to get one.

So Cassie wanted to go deeper. She wanted to see whence the bats had come. And I couldn’t change her mind. So when she nodded and picked her bag up off the ground, turning toward the darkness, I had no choice but to follow…

As we crept into the darkness, I could feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I wasn’t afraid. It was more apprehension than anything. At some point on the way down the rope I had changed my mind. I didn’t want to be there, I was irritable and hung-over, tired, and – I have to admit – a little pissed off that they had dropped the rope down on us. What the hell were they thinking? Were they not wanting to come down and explore with us? Everyone had been gung-ho the night before when we found the cave. Everyone except for Stacy and Jessie, that is. So why had they dropped the rope? Just for a good laugh? Ha ha, very funny, mother cobblers. You know how hard it’s going to be to get that rope back up there to you now? Yeah, they’d pretty much have to go into town and get another rope and drop it down to us. There was no real way for me to get it back up to them. And what if there was some kind of emergency down there in the cave? What if, God forbid, Cassie were to break her nose against a rock? What if a large rock rolled off and crushed my foot? What if we needed to get out in a hurry? It was just plain stupid and irresponsible, and – frankly – I really expected more from those guys. Well, Travis and Chris were military. Jerry had been booted out within his first twelve weeks on station. I found myself trusting him about as far as I could toss a handful of feathers. Still, the other guys should have hampered any dangerous efforts he might have brought up.

The air in the cave was cold and damp, but I was sweating like a whore in church. I could feel it pooling on my lower back and soaking the band of my boxers. Fortunately, there were no mosquitoes. As we reached what I thought of as the back of the cavern, the space started feeling more and more confined. It seemed to bottleneck, and large rocks covered the floor, making it difficult to traverse. We had to crawl through on hands and knees, and I had not brought kneepads. I figured I’d be realizing more and more equipment I hadn’t thought of when planning this trip as we got deeper into the musky darkness. After several minutes in the darkness, our flashlights illuminating the rocks on the ground but not much else, we came to a dead end.

The cavern at that point was only about four feet tall, and no more than five feet wide. We were squatting low, trying to keep from banging our heads on the magnificent stone above us. And the wind was stronger than ever. It seemed to be emanating from the ground right beneath us. I frowned in the darkness and asked Cass what the hell was going on. She shook her head, looking disappointed, and was about to speak when she was interrupted by the sound of something crushing. It sounded like someone had dropped a large leather suitcase onto the rocks, and it startled the hell out of us. I started back to assess the situation, wondering what they were throwing over now. As I reached the edge of the rocks, I saw a dark spot on the ground right in the middle of the open part of the cave. I squinted hard in the darkness and fumbled with my mag-lite, trying to get it to come on. It flickered and blinked, but the banging against the rocks as I crawled had pretty much rendered it useless. I sighed and crawled forward carefully, covering the last few feet of the overhang.

It was a dog. Or at least a canine-like creature, maybe a wolf or a coyote. It was hard to tell in the darkness. But as it lay there writhing in pain and taking extremely labored breaths, I thought their practical jokes were going too far now. A low guttural growl emanated from the dying beast, accompanied by near inaudible whimpers. I could see the whites of its eyes, and he wasn’t looking at me. Clearly he was in too much pain to care about anything going on around him. I knelt beside the creature and yelled back over my shoulder to Cassie. “Yo Cass, come check this shit out.”

Within a minute she was standing behind me, having crept up like a thief in the night. It startled me again when I realized she was already there. “That’s sick.” I looked up at her and nodded in agreement. Then she came around the front of me and knelt beside the animal. “Poor dog,” she added. I took a deep breath and readied myself. I was preparing to break its neck and send it on its way. Before I could reach out and take its head in my hands, she lifted a rock the size of a basketball and slammed it down on the dog’s head. I jumped back, startled once again by her actions and fell hard against the rocks. Blood and chunks of flesh, brain and bone had shot out like tiny rockets, spattering my leg with sticky warm residue.

“what the hell!” I think I was actually angry with her. “I was just gonna break its neck! Why’d you do that?” She looked at me through the darkness and said, “I wouldn’t touch that thing, Space. You don’t know where it’s been or what it’s got. Besides, this was more effective.” Right she was. I stood up and shouted up the wall at the guys waiting above us, telling them this shit was getting tired pretty quick and to knock it off. Cassie just stared at me as I shouted, as if she was wondering why I cared. I added that another rope wouldn’t hurt either. I was done though; ready to crawl out of the hellhole and get on with my life. I’d seen more than enough already, and had been startled white more times tonight than I usually experience in a typical year. And now I was getting angry.

“Come see what I found,” she said. After a minute or so standing there staring at the mess on the ground, I headed back into the cavern with her, wondering what could be great enough at this point to keep her from caring about getting out. When she rolled the rock to the side and showed me a hidden cove full of tiny skulls, I understood. Hard chills raced down my spine and through my thighs as the sight of them sunk in. There on the dirt beneath where the flat rock had been was a large pile of skulls, each being about the size of a woman’s fist. They had horrible large beaks and giant eye sockets, like some family of evil raptors. “what the hell are they?” I said.

Owl skulls.”

We counted forty-four of the skulls before she slid the rock back into place. She had asked me if I wanted to take one, but I didn’t even answer. I simply stared at her in the dark, hoping to convey my annoyance and anger with the situation in my glare. Apparently it worked, because she nodded and started gathering her stuff. But where was that wind coming from? I didn’t care enough to hang out and try to find its source, but I was a little mystified that we hadn’t even accidentally stumbled onto the answer, for we had come to a dead end. As I was thinking this, Cassie reached back to tie her hair back into a knot, flashlight still in hand, and sent bright white light up into the dark void above. I slowly raised my head and looked up into the darkness, feeling a sort of thick tension fall into my stomach. It was fear mixed with anxiety. Like I needed to move quickly, before something bad came dashing down out of the hole to eat my soul. Why had I not looked up earlier? I don’t know, but having inadvertently found the answer to our biggest riddle yet, Cassie was re-energized. And I have to admit, so was I.

We both stood up very slowly, trying to avoid cracking our skulls on some unseen rock, and realized quickly that the opening above was only about thirty inches in diameter. This put us in very close proximity – the space typically reserved for intimacy. She immediately noticed and turned around, putting her back toward me, then started looking for footing. Cassie was going in. And somewhere deep in my subconscious mind, maybe I realized that it might be the only way out. The cool wind felt good against my sweat-drenched clothing and forehead, and it felt good to stand again. I looked up into the blackness above again and tried to shake the chill that continued to come over me. Then I knelt and put my hands on Cassie’s hips. She stepped up onto my shoulders and found purchase somewhere in the thinning tunnel above, and within the minute, she had disappeared completely.

I’ve always had a little bit of explorer in me. I’ve always been more curious than I was scared, and was always looking for something to investigate. Abandoned hospitals, missile silos, unlocked basements and wine cellars… I’ve always yearned to find something just the other side of spooky, but not so far across the line that I’d lose my mind. I didn’t want to end up locked in the abandoned asylum, a victim of the fear my very presence in the place had caused, clinging to dreams and sweat-covered pillows trying to find a window with no bars in my mind. I was always willing to explore the cool places, but not at the expense of vision. I had to be able to see. I remember the first time I ever saw a cave, it was Carlsbad Caverns. We stood in there in a big crowd while some tour guide lectured us about stalactites and bat guano, and how if you were to lose your light in a cave you’d be completely blind within two weeks. Then he told everyone to find a handrail and they turned off the lights. You’ve never known true darkness until you’ve been inside a cave with no torch. And I can tell you that when Cassie disappeared above my head, I remembered instantly that my mag-lite was unserviceable. I now stood in that absolute darkness you only dream to achieve in the master bedroom. It was darker than death’s cape, and I began to feel claustrophobic.

I was standing at the bottom of a vertical passageway no bigger around than a hugging couple, and the only way out was either up it or crawling back through the pinch toward the large cavern in which we’d come originally. Where the dead dog lay with a rock in place of his head. I stood still for a long moment, wanting to call up into the crypt above – to check on Cassie’s progress – but more, to reassure myself that I wasn’t alone. How could she be so fearless? And as I stood there in the darkness, wondering what to do next, I began to close my eyes. Then I felt a very vivid presence behind me, blowing hot breath on the back of my neck. I threw myself forward, shouting out something intangible, and slammed my head against the rocks.

The warm darkness welcomed me in with loving arms and a wicked smile. I slipped easily into the murky waters of a light coma. Did the bats come back? Or had the ghosts of forty-four owls emerged, fluttering silently around my consciousness as I played hooky with reality? I’ll never know. I only know that for a time unmentionable, I knew nothing at all.

Scarcely do I remember my dreams. In fact, almost never. I’ll catch onto small details as they flutter by throughout the day, reminding me of the intensity of the otherworldly experience I had in the night. But never the full things. And never, seemingly, the important part. So it’s not surprising that I don’t remember every detail of the dreams I had while I slept so soundly at the bottom of that cave. I do, though, remember details of my dreams. And that’s what makes me think they’re important. You see, it seemed to me as if I had been lifted from my body, and was able to observe what happened while I was unconscious. And that is sketchy in my recollection, at best.

I saw myself being dragged bodily, arms above my head, stretched out into the darkness. I could not see the entity that held me by the wrists. I could only see its shadows in the dark. In an otherwise perfect void of light, there was a darker aura about my body down below, and it was taking me somewhere unknown. Let me emphasize that I don’t believe in ghosts, monsters, vampires or aliens. I’ve never seen them, so I’ve trouble latching onto them. So I don’t believe it was something other than my imagination. But when I woke, I was nowhere near where I had fallen.

In fact, I have no idea what the distance was between the two points. It could have been only ten feet. But I was in a different place. I could hear Cassie’s voice calling out from the far reaches of eternity, voice muddled by time and space. I knew it was her voice, and though she was but a stranger to me, it was comforting. When you’re all alone in the world, even your worst enemy makes good company. And I longed for some reality.

Later, perhaps she would explain to me that the others had not dropped the rope. Or the dog. They had mysteriously vanished. They did not disappear. They had just gone away. But they would have no recollection of the events up to and including the fall of the rope. They might not even remember the cave. How could that be possible? Could it be that I would have false recollections? Maybe I got drunk and wandered out to some cave and just put them there in my inebriated mind? I didn’t think so.

And upon closer inspection of the rope, it was cut neatly just below where it had been knotted. Someone had come and sabotaged our entire mission with cheap scare tactics and dangerous behavior. And there had been nothing we could do about it some forty feet below them. As I lay there trying to gather my thoughts and keep the walls of my head from collapsing in on themselves, I listened steadfastly to her voice. The headache I had was unlike any I had ever experienced, and I imagined there being a gigantic knot on my forehead. I found it harder and harder to separate her voice from the wind – ever-present and eerie, calling through the rocks. As I let myself drift in and out of consciousness, Cassie drifted farther and farther away, almost imperceptibly. She was looking for me like the old woman sought her poor lost child so many moons ago out in Anson. But she couldn’t find me. And I could not call out to her.

The haunting cry of the wind was growing louder, and its eerie foghorn-like quality sent chills down my spine. It sounded as though it were singing to me in some long lost sorrowful language, begging me to rise up and save her soul. But I could not. Was I dying? It was certainly not out of the realm of possibility. I didn’t want to let it happen, but I had to consider my options, which were very few. The wind was cool on my face, though it felt like I was buried under rock and dirt. I relaxed my neck, snubbing out my desire to try and raise my head, and let my eyes fall closed. I listened to the wind. The only thing I was now afraid of was that that lonesome wind would be what took me away. And in the far distance, I heard it thunder. I took deep breaths – as deep as one can take when confined in an earthly coffin – and tried to defeat my fear. It was not easy though. The rumble of the thunder grew louder. Many times as a child, I would lie awake in bed, covers pulled up over my head, praying that the thunder would go away. I was deathly afraid of it, being raised by a mother who took every storm seriously. She engrained in me the respect for weather and all its abstract components. The wind, now rising, frightened me even more though. It seemed to be raising its voice as if to warn me of the impending storm, and to hurry up and set myself free, lest I be trapped beneath its terrorizing reign. As the wind grew louder, so did the thunder. But they were not separate claps. It was one long rumble that seemed to shake the very ground upon which I lay. And the wind was now screaming. I was absolutely and utterly terrified. It was screaming at me, “WAKE UP, MOVE YOURSELF! SAVE YOUR SOUL, FOR HERE COMES DEATH BEHIND THE ROAR OF THE CLOUDS!” I started shaking violently and the rumble started shaking the rocks upon me. It was now so loud in my ears coupled with the wind that I literally felt myself going over the edge of insanity. I was peering precipitously over the cliff, down into the dark, murky cavern of fear below, and the wind, my shepherd, was now pushing me.

I slammed my arms forward, reaching out for anything, rocks falling away while the wind grabbed at the edges of my mind, pulled my head up as hard as I can, forging strength from my fear, terrified and strong, brushing away everything in my path to safety as the rumble reached its climax and I realized startled again it was not thunder at all; the bats were coming home. And as I broke free of the stone prison holding me down, I silenced the wind by sitting up and rocking forth, crumbling the fabric of fear that enveloped me. I bolted upright, realizing not my strength, but the unbelievable lightness of the boulders that had held me captive. For it was not their weight that made them strong. It was the spirit within them. The many, many spirits. Forty-four to be precise. The owl skulls fell away and I crushed them beneath my feet, swatting now at the bats – but the bats were nowhere near. The roar they sang as they thundered through the cavern was within inches of my touch, but just beyond. They swooped up directly in front of me, tearing the sky with their leathery little wings on their way upward into the well through which Cassie had disappeared before. Thousands and thousands of them. And beyond, a pale and flickering light tried its cards against the storm. Only the truest of optimists would believe it to be light. My eyes had grown so accustomed to the perfection of the cavernous dark that I could no longer discern true light from my dreams. But there it stood, calling me forth. And behind it, Cassie’s stern voice telling me to run. I could almost not make it out, but the light was now frantically waving back and forth, and tragically real, so I had to believe. I believed in her voice, and I listened as she screamed with everything she had, “Run, Brian! For god’s sake run!” So I did.

I tore forward with the force of a cannon, running headlong into a near solid wall of moving bats. Their shrieks got louder and their teeth tore into my skin. Their claws scraped every exposed inch of my flesh while their wings like black membrane flapped against my neck and face. But I ran. I had no way to judge how far away she was, or my progress through the storm of bats, but I ran. In near-perfect darkness with only a tiny flickering mag-lite calling me toward my new reality, on uneven and terribly dangerous terrain, I ran.

When I broke through the final layer of the bats, I ran headlong into Cassie, who quickly grabbed my arm and rushed me into the outer chamber of the cave, where there awaited a long knotted rope. It was long enough that the last few feet of it dragged the ground, and the dim ambient light of the stars so far above provided just enough light for me to see that Cassie was already ten feet up by the time I got my hands around it. I climbed ferociously against the burn of my muscles and the sting of the cuts the bats had left all over me. I climbed with my knees and elbows banging against the hard damp rock, tiny boulders pounding my head as they made their way down the wall. Cassie was kicking loose a seeming ton of debris that rained down upon my head but I ignored it and climbed like a fight for my life. It was only when I was about halfway up that I realized it was raining. The clouds so light still allowed for a soft blurred view of the stars, but the rain it fell. It was a light rain that under different circumstances I would have called refreshing and welcome. But tonight it was hauntingly appropriate.

I finally, after what seemed like years of struggle, came up over the edge of the cliff wall, and a large man’s hand was there waiting to help me over. It was Travis. “Come on, Space, you’re almost there!” he cried, and I could hear the fear in his voice too. Chris was there cutting the rope as I stumbled up onto the dirt and fell forward. Cassie and Travis and Jerry were pulling me up bodily and running me toward the truck. The rain was getting heavier, and the stars were now gone. And this time the thunder was a product of the weather storm that was now moving in quickly. I slipped in the mud and filled my cuts with cold stinging earth as we clambered across the dark ground toward our conveyance to safety. And as I finally reached the cold steel handle of the door, I heard the wind below call my name once more.

*  *  *

I have slept since that night. And none of my party seems apt or willing to talk about our venture into the depths of the earth. But perhaps we’d gotten too close to hell. Maybe we had walked upon unfertile ground – the domain of something more sinister than that for which I could ever have prepared. Or maybe the place was haunted. But the relief of reality had been incredible when I had seen my comrades still alive and, more precisely, present. An indelible line was crossed that night. I had ventured into territory for which I have no love to try and repeat. I know my limits as a human being, and I can take a message from whatever forces are trying to send it. Be it the bats, the owl skulls or the haunting wind they seemed to beckon, I learned that there are some places humans are not meant to tread. I was fortunate to make it out alive, and having not been able to separate reality from dream, scream from silence, and wind from the souls within the cave, I will remember that blessing. And from now on I’ll stay where I belong. From now on I’ll respect the haunted bearer’s message.

And from now on I shall fear the wind.

 

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