The cave was covered in the
same slimy kind of substance we had seen in the trail going up the mountain. It
was very sticky and had a dark color to it, which we had identified as a very
deep green. Someone argued that, maybe, the creatures inside the mountain used
that goo to attack predators and be able to escape. Another person said it was
very likely that they were the predators and that they used the substance to
actively hunt for food. The third opinion was simpler but more confusing: the
substance could be blood.
In trees, sap is green and it
acts, in a very basic way, as the blood of a tree. But it never gets that thick
or dark. Susan, who was the botanist in the expedition, analyzed a sample and
assured everyone that green thing was not sap from any tree she had ever seen
or that had ever been recorded by any human being. It did pass some of the
tests that Marcus, a biologist, did for several other animals we had found
earlier in our journey through the mountains. So it was blood but it was impossible
to know why it was all over the place.
Maybe they did use it as a
weapon, like those lizards in the desert that squirt blood in order to scare
their enemies. Something like that could be at play with these creatures, which
we hadn’t had the opportunity to actually see with our own two eyes. Some of
the tribes living around the mountains talked to us about creatures living
under the mountains, creatures that would come at night into the town and
kidnap children. We didn’t believe that story but it was repeated to us in
various occasions.
Alex and Richard stood at the
entrance of the cave. They were geologists and wanted to have time to analyze
the mountain itself so they asked to stay there as lookouts if anything went
wrong. It wouldn’t have been a very smart idea if we would all enter the cave
at the same time. Samantha and Sergei were the last two to enter the cave, just
after I get stepped on a rather large mound of the gooey substance. I had to be
helped by Sergei and Marcus in order to get my foot out of there. It was very
scary for a minute.
The cave was rather large and our
voices seemed to run wild inside, so we decided to stop talking in order not to
scare any potential new findings. We had helmets with soft lights on them and
all the equipment necessary if we had needed to go down a very dangerous wall
or even jump over a crevasse. It was normal for such cavernous systems to have
different features that would play as obstacles for groups of people such as
ourselves. But, strangely, after walking for twenty minutes, we realized that
the cave wasn’t shrinking in any way, rather it was descending gently but
steadily.
I think we all thought the exact
same thing at the same time: whatever creatures inhabited this world; they had
modeled the cave in order to accommodate them and not the other way around.
What that meant was that the creatures had to be able to use tools of some sort
and had various abilities to carve stone. They would even be able to do a
certain degree of calculations, which was only possible if they’re brain was
evolved enough. We weren’t looking for some little creatures in the dark.
After another twenty minutes, we
finally arrived at a larger chamber. The ceiling on it was huge, covered in
what seemed to be bats in a deep slumber. We fixed our lights in order not to
disturb them and kept on walking until we weren’t able to. The ground stopped
dead in the middle of the room to give way to a rather large body of water. The
liquid look as gooey as the green substance in the entrance. We actually looked
around for it but realized there were no traces of it in that chamber. There
had to be a reason why.
Samantha and Marcus walked and
kneeled in front of the body of water, as Susan walked closer to me. It was
obvious that, as a botanist, she had not being in such a situation before. She
wasn’t hyperventilating or anything, but she was clearly not comfortable being
in the underside of a mountain. Sergei stood right behind us, looking at the
path we had used to come down to the chamber. It looked like he had heard
something but, when I asked, he said it was nothing and tried to seem
unperturbed, which he failed at.
Samantha filled three large syringes with water from the pond and Marcus
grabbed some in his hands. He first smelled it, very thoroughly, and then drank
some, to everyone’s amazement. But none of us said a single word, because we
didn’t want to wake up the whole bat infested roof. When Marcus stood up, we
asked in a whisper if there was anything wrong with it and he just did a
negative movement of his head to answer. We all went back to breathing normally
then. For a second, it had been very scary.
However, we had failed to notice
that Sergei was looking at the path we had come down through and there was
something wrong with it. Sergei did not answer so I turned him around with one
hand. His face was livid, whiter than ever, blood completely drained from his
features. He was breathing heavily and it was only when I saw what he had seen
that I realized why he was behaving in such a strange way. Out of nowhere, a
rock had been put to block the path. We were trapped in the chamber. It was a
trap and we had fallen into it without even a glimpse of doubt.
I wanted to tell them what was going on but then the water from the pond
started making sounds, as if it was boiling. But that did not make sense. We
only had time to look at each other once more before we saw something coming
out of the water and then our lights failed and the bats flew over our heads,
filling the place with confusion. Then, we felt them and it all went black.
