Brandon Oto
degreesofclarity.com

If our eye could penetrate the earth and see its interior from pole to pole, from where we stand to the antipodes, we would glimpse with horror a mass terrifyingly riddled with fissures and caverns.

— Thomas Burnet, Telluris Theoria Sacra, Amsterdam, Wolters, 1694, p. 38. Quoted in Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco, p. 105.

Today, for you to live, something had to die. Were you worth it?
— Drew Anderson, referencing Tom Brown

1
The metal grate rattled against the cement as I jostled it accidentally. I tensed at the sound.
“Careful,” muttered Oliver from beside me.
I bit off a rejoinder and concentrated on the lock. A five-pin American discus, it was a solid piece of hardware—tough to break, challenging to pick. Luckily, it had a known weakness, and if you knew what you were doing, you could pass a wire right through the back of the cylinder and access the workings. After our scouting run the previous night, I’d dug through my pile of bypass tools and found just the thing. But I’d never pulled this particular trick before, so it was taking longer than I’d have liked.
The little rubber-handled tool snaked back through the keyway, and I focused on feeling its “finger” engage with the right cog. It was there—but it slipped and slipped again. Everything was wet from the drizzling rain that had stopped a few hours earlier. I glanced around uneasily.
We were crouched at the base of a looming gray edifice, boxy and nondescript, surrounded by oak trees; the usual Santa Cruz mist enclosed us, cool and white, and the woods were echoingly silent. Oliver was at my back, supposedly on lookout but repeatedly turning to watch my progress. Both of us were obviously nervous.
Back to the lock. Click, click, slip. The grating banged again in its frame, and I gritted my teeth. Click, click, click. As my mind began to wander, the lock seemed to relax in my hands, and suddenly the tooth of my tool caught the metal tailpiece, pulling it around. I looked at my hands in surprise. The curve of the padlock’s hasp had rotated, exposing a quarter-inch gap. I quickly widened the space with my thumb, leaving it slightly short of fully open, to keep the plug from reengaging and requiring another bypass to close it. “I got it,” I hissed back to Oliver.
He appeared at my side as I pulled the chain from the lock and carefully eased it out of the grating, trying to avoid making any more noise. After some unavoidable clinking, we had it loose, and hoisted the grate upward on side-mounted hinges. Below us beckoned a ladder and darkness.
“Go,” I told him. “I’ll hold it.”
I supported the grate overhead. As I looked around, Oliver immediately lowered himself, setting his foot onto the third rung of the slippery metal ladder. In a few moments he had disappeared. I spent a moment deciding how to finesse my own descent, finally managing to mount the ladder one-handed, lowering the grate behind me; as I clung to the ladder just below the entrance, I pulled the chain from around my neck, and fed it back around the gate. After some awkward manipulation I’d managed to replace the chain and the lock, then paused to consider whether to refasten the shackle. A closed lock would be less obvious to any passers-by, but would take longer to reopen on our way out. Eventually my mind was made up for me when I discovered that the round hasp of the American lock wouldn’t even stay affixed to the chain when open. I snapped it shut and climbed downward into the dark.

Oliver and I had spent the better part of our senior year performing increasingly daring capers that anyone else would call breaking and entering. A horrendous housing market had forced us back into campus dorms for our final year at UC Santa Cruz, leaving us without easy access to our cars, the downtown area, even most of our friends. Burdened with coursework and chafing at our new confinement, we’d turned to a new outlet: making our way, by hook or by crook, into the various basements, roofs, utility rooms, and generally behind-the-curtain spaces of our school grounds. According to the internet, this was called “urban exploration”; all I knew was that as two bored, active students living on a frequently bizarre and enigmatic college campus, we were perfectly situated to seize some cheap thrills by going where we shouldn’t. And as something of a self-taught locksmith, who ran an on-again off-again self-owned business doing lockouts for drunk college kids, I could put us in more than enough places with more than enough finesse to satisfy anyone’s sense of intrigue and James Bondian cachet.
The height of our adventures had come two weeks ago, when we’d made an unprotected ascent of external scaffolding onto a high dining hall roof, unbolted a metal skylight, and rappeled down into the industrial kitchen during the dark of night. After an extended tour of locked rooms and closed drawers, we’d walked out the front doors (unlocked from the inside, in accordance with fire code) and returned to the roof, barely covering our tracks before the janitorial crew turned up unexpectedly. After safely reaching our dorm and some congratulatory drinks, it was mutually agreed that there was no topping that effort, and that in any case we’d come about as close to serious reprisal as cared to (at least before receiving our diplomas). In a few months, we’d be done here anyway, so we willingly knuckled down on our finals and theses—philosophy for me, poly-sci for him.
This caper was an unexpected but low-key afterparty, one last hurrah. I’d been walking back from class several days before when I decided to take a shortcut, and ended up passing through a section of campus I rarely visited, mostly engineering and applied sciences. Hurrying through, I’d found myself behind one of the buildings, and walked right over what amounted to a hole in the ground. At least six feet on each side and covered by a metal grate, it was secured by a heavy chain and padlock, but I could see to the bottom, which was nothing more than a concrete-lined chamber, accessible via a ladder, with a door in one wall and—inexplicably—a single plastic lawn chair. Although dark, utilitarian, and damp with standing water, it was an appealing target, mostly for the mystery of the thing; what was this an entrance for, and where did that door lead? These sorts of questions were, without exception, always less interesting to answer than to ask, but it seemed like an easy exploration, remote enough that we were unlikely to be caught, and a nice way to wrap up a year of more wildcat shenanigans. I’d returned with Oliver the next day, to scope out the task and gauge nighttime activity in the area; with everything set, we’d scheduled the attempt for midnight, and here we were.
I climbed downward with utmost caution, making sure each hand and foot was seated completely upon its rung before moving to the next. The metal was smooth and wet, and the farther I climbed, the darker it got. But a moment latery, I found myself spotlighted in a powerful circle of luminescence; Oliver must have reached the bottom and aimed his flashlight at me. I blinked in annoyance and hurried down.
Reaching the bottom, I stepped onto the gray foundation and looked around, wiping my hands on the seat of my pants. Oliver was there with his little black LED torch, bright as hell and very expensive; a couple months ago, he’d dropped his previous adventure light three stories off a dormitory roof, and instead of being sensible about its replacement had simply upgraded to an even pricier, uber-tactical death beam. We’d each developed our little idiosyncrasies on these excursions, most of all in what we liked to bring—adventure shoes, adventure hats, adventure bottle openers. I even had an adventure flask—currently stowed in my backpack, filled with non-adventure Captain Morgan’s.
Oliver flicked a setting, and his torch dimmed to a lower level. I started to check out the confines of the chamber.
“You fucking blinded me.”
He grinned, unrepentant. “Sorry.”
Asshole. As I’d thought, there was literally nothing in this little underground room except four stone walls, a couple puddles, a little white patio-style chair—cracked—and a door set in one wall. I headed to the door to check it out. It was metal-sheathed, painted gray, the kind of thing you’d find on a storage facility or generator room. There were no markings, but it presented with a dented round knob that looked at least thirty years old—and somewhat incongruously, no fewer than three shiny new deadbolts stacked atop it: high-end, industrial-quality cylinders. I pushed gently at the door. It was seated as solidly as a bank vault.
Intrigued, I examined the door for a few minutes more, but there was nothing to find. The deadbolts were obviously a recent addition, the door itself much older. But it was cold and wet and I wanted to get inside, so I stopped fiddling and started pulling out tools. A low-cut “L” keyblank fit all three Schlage deadbolts, and a few taps from my bump hammer—really a metal ruler with a wooden block duct-taped to the end—opened them easily. The knob lock looked more difficult, not from security so much as from age; I flooded it with a can of silicon lubricant, then worked the pins with a small pick until they moved freely. A dozen clicks from my snap gun let the plug rotate, then I used a flathead screwdriver to crank it the rest of the way. Begrudgingly, the latch worked clear of the strike plate, the knob turned, and I put my shoulder into the door, knocking it a half-inch awry. A solid push swung it fully open.
Oliver’s light played through the opening. More concrete, a high ceiling and broad walls; a huff of air played past us, drier than the fog outside. A tunnel. We hurried in, and I noted the pie-shaped wedge the door had cleared in the mud and dirt of the floor. Nobody had used this entrance in a while.
As we stood just inside, Oliver turned to me, face serious now, peering at his wrist. “Pretty quick. I have... 11:58. Let’s synch up.”
I shrugged up the sleeve on my sweatshirt, freeing my own watch. “I have 11:59. Let’s call it midnight.” I squeezed buttons until the display showed 12:00.
“Three... two... one... mark.”
I pressed a button, and my watch—my adventure watch—locked in the time at exactly midnight, then began to count seconds again, incrementing upward from zero. Oliver did the same. This was our official mission time; we’d use it to coordinate actions if we ended up working separately, or just to get a sense of how long we’d been in here. But it was also our lifeline, the only real allowance we ever made for safety’s sake if we ran into trouble, got trapped or hurt. Our friend and roommate Dan was our home base, not quite daring (or dumb) enough to partake in our outings, but willing to assist in a remote capacity. He was back at the dorms, and by tradition now, every time we went out we arranged with him a deadline to turn back up—or he’d send help, damn the consequences. It was a backup we’d started using several months before, after a rotten floor in an abandoned building almost collapsed and dropped us twenty feet onto cement.
Oliver had his cell phone in hand and was tapping off a quick text message, then holding it out in the underground shaft for a few moments until he found a signal and sent it off.
“Just confirming for Dan. 8 o’clock. No way this takes that long.”
We’d already given him the drop-dead time, but it was worth double-checking, since we’d certainly lose the cell signal if we were going to be underground. A few seconds later his phone buzzed.
“‘Good luck,’ he says.” He looked at me and I nodded.
Glancing outside for a final time, we pulled our heads in and with some effort pushed the door closed, shutting the latch but leaving the deadbolts unlocked. The low glow of Oliver’s flashlight was the only illumination now. He turned it back up, and cast the beam ahead of us, where it lit a long, open tunnel, lined with concrete and continuing as far as we could make it out. We’d been expecting something more like the radiator room for a nearby building; this open expanse was uncanny.
We trudged forward, following the light.

We’d been moving through the underground tunnel for fifteen minutes when the sense of incongruity really hit me. First of all, where the hell were we? At first I’d assumed we were merely in a short connecting passage to the basement of the building overhead; then I’d thought we were traversing to another building, then perhaps across the whole of the Science and Engineering complex. But we must have covered over a mile now; horizontally, at least, we were in an entirely different part of campus.
Second of all, we were heading, slightly but perceptibly, not just forward but down.
The tunnel was arrow-straight, at least a dozen feet across and more than that in height, ground converging to a center funnel where some stagnant water sat, and although it took me ten minutes to realize, the entire thing was situated on a mild downward slope. Eventually, I decided that we must be in a storm drain of some sort, although I didn’t see any inlets; perhaps it was a conduit between different segments of the drainage system.
A storm drain. We’d tried exploring those before, but made little headway; Santa Cruz wasn’t a major city and the drains weren’t very large, most of them too tight to comfortably fit a person. I didn’t mind walking around one now, but I was a little worried about where we were going to end up; already, we were considerably farther from our origin than we’d planned, and if experience had taught us anything, planning was the difference between a safe jaunt and an unpredictable catastrophe. I also knew that the two basic rules of “draining” safety were to walk upstream rather than down, and to head topside immediately at the first sign of rain; neither of those seemed possible here. On the other hand, this portion of the tunnel didn’t seem the least bit active; the little water we could see was probably from general subterranean seepage. If we started seeing cross-passages or inlets, we’d have to start thinking about turning around before we got so far that we couldn’t escape a deluge.
Still, this was exciting, an interesting twist on what could have been a ten-minute caper. Odds are we’d find nothing of any real interest down here, but it was still a pleasantly unusual experience, plodding along an underground passage, lit only by a flashlight, walking ten steps on one side of the slope, then ten steps on the other, to avoid stepping in the water or tweaking our ankles by walking constantly at the same sideways angle. It was a better way to spend the night than lost in textbooks or mindlessly pounding medicinal whiskey. Admittedly we didn’t know where we were going to end up, for better or for worse—but then, that was part of the fun.
We continued on. The walk had us sweating slightly, but it was no real challenge; both of us were in good shape and it was, after all, downhill. I carried only a small, climber-type backpack cinched tight to my back, with my locksmithing tools and some other adventure gear, including snacks. Oliver just had a few things squirreled away in his pockets. Both of us had our phones, but obviously there was no signal; we’d turned them off.
Some time later, I checked my watch. 12:47. That seemed impossible.
“We’ve been down here over forty-five minutes,” I told Oliver, who was walking ahead with his light.
“... really?”
“Yeah. Call it four miles an hour, maybe, that’s about three miles. Where are we?”
He thought for a minute. “Three miles... that’s pretty much off the grounds, isn’t it? We started right around the middle of campus, and headed east... but even if we’ve changed direction, we’ve got to be clear past the perimeter by now, unless we’ve really been walking in circles.”
“No chance. Not with this slope.” Even if the seeming geometric straightness of the tunnel might hide subtle deviations, the grade beneath our feet was as familiar as an old glove now, and as long as it were there we knew we were making some sort of progress—vertically if nothing else.
So if we hadn’t done quite a bit of invisible meandering, we were beneath the open woods now. The ocean was west rather than east, but I knew very little about drains, so I assumed the campus system probably had a conduit into town, and we were in it. It seemed a little odd, but the fact that this whole apparatus—which with every step gave further testament to its size and scope—appeared totally unused was another wrench altogether in our reasoning, so I gave up. Once we got where we were going, even if it were only a drainage pipe overlooking the bluffs, we’d have some more information. I hoped it would be something like that, or even a manhole in a little-trafficked part of town, anything we could use to get out; at this point I was disinclined to retrace our steps if we couldn’t find another exit.
I stopped, a little abruptly, and called to Oliver, “Hold up a sec.”
He turned back to me, and I said, “We need to make a decision now. We’ve done three miles in forty-five minutes. Odds are we’re in the middle of nowhere by now, so if I had to bet on it, I’d guess we won’t see an exit until we reach town at least, which will be a couple more miles if we’re going straight. But that’s all just guesswork. If we’re going to turn back, we should do it now, because it’s already going to be an hour or so just to get our heads aboveground. We go any farther and we’re pretty committed to looking for another way out unless we want to do a seriously long trek back on ground we’ve already covered.”
He nodded.
“One more thing—the safety piece. We’re in a storm drain, and it doesn’t look like it’s functional, but we may come into an active portion before long. If we’re somewhere that the water collects, and we haven’t hit an egress, we’re basically going to have to haul ass back up the slope until we get above the flow. We’ll be running a small but an increasing amount of danger, basically, the longer we head in this direction.”
“What do you figure the odds are that we find a ladder to a street drain or something?” he asked.
“There’s sure to be something, even if it’s just the outlet pipe. Well, actually, even that might end up being covered, but if it comes to that we’ll get through there if we have to smash it with a rock. So eventually there’s going to be an exit, I just don’t know when.”
Oliver checked his watch, paused for a few beats, and shrugged. “Okay. I’m for it. No class tomorrow for me, nothing scheduled before noon. All we really have to do is make sure to reach Dan by morning, and that’s a gimme, we could walk to Capitola by then. What do you think?”
Truth be told, I was a little uneasy, less from the known dangers and the definite bother of a long walk in a dank tunnel than from the factors we still didn’t know about. But—fuck it. We were seniors and it was one in the morning. There wasn’t much I’d say “no” to.
“Let’s do it.”
I tightened up my bag and wiped a little sweat from my face; Oliver checked his light. Picking up the pace, we started walking once more.

2
We were standing on the lip of a stone cavern, peering futilely down the sunken shaft.
“This is fucking bizarre,” Oliver grumbled, and I had to agree.
Ninety minutes in the tunnel had taken us farther and farther into who-knew-where, but more significantly, had brought with it an increasing sense of depth. It was colder now, and moister, almost dank. (Supulchrous, Oliver had provided helpfully.) The sensation of following a set path, but having absolutely no idea where we were—or where we were going—was an unusual one, like walking with a blindfold.
In the past, we’d dabbled with exploring the forest, hiking through the tangled trails of Pogonip and the other state parks in the hills over the campus, but eventually stopped bothering; neither of us were tree-hugger enough to get much out of it, at least when compared to urban heists like this. But during that time, Oliver had bought a portable GPS unit, and on those trips we’d gotten in the habit of watching its tiny screen like a television. It actually told us little of use, since we were rarely trying to get anywhere in particular. Rather, what it had given us was a feeling that we knew where we were, that we weren’t lost or adrift; it was a safety blanket, though honestly a little deflating, since we quickly discovered that without that feeling the whole experience seemed a little pointless.
But that same reassurance was what we lacked now; we literally had no grasp on where in the world we could be, and without context for our actions we were reduced to repetition, mindlessly continuing for lack of anything better to do. We could have pulled out a map—I sometimes carried one—and tried to estimate our position given our pace and direction, but it seemed sure that we’d made some deviations in our course by now, and in any case the vertical differential would make dead reckoning a trigonometric exercise.
It was with this sense of uncertainty that we’d stumbled quite suddenly upon the end of the tunnel. Or the end of one tunnel and the beginning of another—the passage continued, but our cement environment was no more.
It was inexplicable. At our feet was the lip of the cement floor, a foot and a half thick with rebar protruding at regular intervals. Past that was a drop to a surface of wet, dirty stone, which wrapped around into the walls and ceiling of a new cavern—a cave, a passage, whatever it ought to be called, its ragged appearance marked it as natural, but it emerged unexpectedly and parasitically from our cement storm drain like the one was aimed at the other.
“About all I can say,” I finally hazarded, “is that they were digging this drain... and for some reason it never got finished. So they have more tunnel, but they never got around to reinforcing it, which is why it doesn’t go anywhere and can’t actually be used.”
We were silent. It was theoretically possible, but made almost no sense.
“Well, I don’t have anything smarter to say,” Oliver replied. “So I guess the only question is the practical one. Do we stop?”
I thought about the matter. On the surface, it seemed clear that continuing past this point would be risky, if not dangerous. Up until now we could at least be secure in the knowledge that we were moving through a man-made structure engineered for its safety; beyond here it was little more than a large underground hollow, and we’d be banking that the whims of nature wouldn’t flatten us in a cave-in, or some similar turn. My mind went suddenly to Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. We didn’t even have any water, although our rum was an improvement over Professor Lidenbrock’s gin.
But there was also the fact that we had never before turned back on one of our adventures, had never voluntarily surrendered. We’d been temporarily stymied by unforeseen circumstances, but always eventually bore through. In this case I doubted we’d ever want to trek back this way, even if it were possible—so if we didn’t finish the job now, it was going to remain a mystery forever. And that was something I couldn’t stomach.
Oliver must have had similar thoughts going through his head, or maybe something else; I didn’t know. But after a few minutes, we shared a glance, and then together started to lower ourselves over the edge of the shaft.
A quick drop brought us to our new home—similar to before, but rougher, unpaved, and far more irregular. It was larger too, a real cavern, and significantly steeper, and I couldn’t help but feel like we were walking into a dungeon. We started to make our way down the rocky path.
After a few minutes, we encountered another aberration, an opening in the ground several feet across. Past it we could see a dead-end, so we carefully hung down and jumped from outstretched arms. The new path continued at right angles to the last.
For the next ten minutes we followed more twists, drops, and turns, then an extensive slip-stumble down a very steep slope riddled with rocks and broken ledges. I was just starting to seriously consider turning back—if the going got any worse, we’d have real trouble getting out again—when it bottomed out into another flat road.
We were following this, a much easier passage (I wanted to say “better maintained,” but of course it wasn’t), for only a few minutes when I saw Oliver turn a corner and freeze.
“What—”
In a moment I was beside him, and at a similar loss for words. For in front of us, around an abrupt bend, the passage ended, and there was a door.
 Rotten and warped, stained almost black with what appeared to oil, and hanging from two huge iron hinges, it was obviously a door, set into the surrounding stone. No explanation was apparent, or forthcoming; we simply stared. After a while, I dumbly reached out a hand and touch the face of it. Cold hard wood. It was real.
I was interrupted by a sound from Oliver, and I turned to see him looking from the door to me and back again. He was giggling, then actually laughing, a low, continuous cackle, full of manic amusement. After a bewildering moment, he stopped himself long enough to say—
“We’ve got to go in.”
—and before I could respond, he grasped the metal handle and pulled open the door. Stunned, I jerked forward to stop him—I didn’t know why, but something this out-of-place seemed to deserve caution—but he darted inside. A second later I followed.
Entering the door, I barely had time to see his back before I was brought up short by noise, a piercing, flesh-tingling outburst that was something between a shriek and a snarl. It was far from human and completely terrifying, and I stood stunned as I watched Oliver stumble, then start to backpedal while flailing his arms. By the oscillation of the light in his hand I could see a thing, an unfamiliar form, something clutching to his chest—some sort of animal? I couldn’t make it out—before he dropped the light, which rolled across the floor to shine uselessly along the wall.
In almost total darkness, all I perceived was the sound of scuffling, and a very faint blur of motion to my left. Without having to be told, my body was moving away from it, and my hands digging frantically in my pockets; all I could think of was to see again. Finally I found my own light, and yanked it out as I fumbled for the switch.
Just as I clicked it on, I heard Oliver bellow like he’d been cut—
“Gyaaaa FUCK—”
—and then a clattering like claws striking stone, and the beam lit up.
Oliver was against the wall beside the door, both hands on his face; I could see thick lines of blood scoring his flesh, and his jacket was torn and gouged. Just though the door, in the tunnel, a huddled mass of fur was splayed against the wall. I watched it pick itself up onto four legs, a little wobbly, claws or talons tapping audibly against the ground. As it turned, I could see it clearly: a small head with beady black eyes; a powerful, cylindrical torso with relatively short legs, catlike, but with no tail; and most strikingly, a body entirely covered in long, snow-white hair.
As it faced me, it seemed to gather itself up in a coil of tension, and I reacted instinctively. Just as it flung itself forward, so fast it seemed to bleed away from the light, I leapt in the same direction and caught the half-open door in one hand, pivoted my body, and slammed it shut, putting my shoulder against it and all my weight.
I made it, but barely; the creature was already in the doorway as I forced it shut, and it was caught between door and wall. It yielded a little from the impact, and automatically I anchored my feet to the ground and drove forward with as much force as I could, keeping it pinned. My head was down as I pressed, and I gratefully avoided looking at the thing while it struggled, mere inches away.
As I pushed, I could feel the door losing purchase, and the creature starting to slip past. With my left shoulder against the door, only my right arm was free; running on adrenaline, I swung my right hand blindly in a long upward arc, striking the thing with a glancing blow from the head of my small flashlight. It slipped farther, and I could tell it was almost loose. In a burst of fear and desperation, I moved the metal cylinder in my hand so that it protruded from my fingers, butt against my palm, and started to pump it straight into the thing’s face, looking up so I could see—short, pistonlike punches, driving the lens forward like the blade of a knife. As I hammered with all my strength, the creature’s impetus seemed to slack, and I redoubled my effort on the door, driving my right foot sideways against the hard ground.
Suddenly, I heard a noise beside me, and turned just in time to see Oliver power past, actually leaping forward and hitting the white beast with both feet. The force of the kick knocked it out of the door and sent it rolling backward, skittering on four sets of claws. As soon as it was clear, I slammed the door shut, and seeing a heavy wooden spar on one side, tipped it into place across the door to fall upon cross-bars. Almost immediately, the door shook from an impact, and then started to tremble under repeated pounding. Sharing a wordless glance, Oliver and I turned, stumbling, and fled down the passage.
My light had suffered from its use as an impact weapon, and now it was flickering randomly, turning off and coming back on, giving off a chaotic strobe as we raced down the new tunnel. Understanding was on hold, and even the new danger of charging through unexplored terrain was ignored; all we wanted was to put distance between ourselves and the monstrosity behind. Its white, almost incandescent image was burned into my eyes, and every time my flashlight flicked out, I saw its silhouette against the darkness.
Panting, we darted around a corner, and then almost fell back arresting our momentum. Before us was a sharp cliff’s edge; below us was a vast, tree-filled valley; and we were surrounded by light.

We gazed over the edge of a cliff wall at an enormous underground chamber.
From everywhere around us came a dim, even light. It seemed to radiate from nowhere in particular. But from where we stood I could see the nearest sections of the cavern’s walls—they were completely covered in a softly glowing gray moss.
Looking down, we observed a fifty-foot drop, beneath which opened what could only be called a valley. It was dense with foliage—real trees, as far as I could tell, a thick canopy that completely obscured the view beneath, except in a few places where the terrain jutted up in rocky prominences. The walls to our left and right had over a mile between them, and ahead the valley stretched as far as the low light would show.
We were standing in a small gap at the tunnel’s exit, high on one featureless wall of the cavern. Directly in front of us the ground dropped away, and two wooden struts peeked over the top.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, walking to the edge and peering down.
A ladder was affixed to the wall with metal bolts. Like a spider’s thread, it trailed away in a thin line, all the way past the canopy below.
I started to think about our situation, stopped, turned to Oliver, then without a word, without even glancing over the edge, I grasped the bars of the ladder and found the rungs with my feet, and started to descend. The wooden slats felt solid. After a few moments, I felt the ladder shake as Oliver followed. I think he understood me. Whatever was ahead, it was better than the thing we had just struggled with.
Surely it could not climb ladders.
We moved quickly but carefully, acutely aware of the long fall below. With my eyes on the wall before me, the air cool and fresh, I could easily imagine we were on the backside of some unused academic building, coming down in early dusk after a casual exploration across rooftops.  Some small part of awareness nudged at me, tried to remind me that I was instead deep below the earth; but then I reached the bottom of the cliff, stepped onto soft dirt, and looked around.
We were on the floor of a wide, even forest. Here at the edges, the canopy dropped away, averted by the nearness of the walls, but only a few feet ahead, graceful trunks sprouted up, spreading into an organic ceiling thick enough to blot the light. It was less than a jungle but more than any humble nursery, and had the distinct feel of primary growth, untouched by the hand of man.
The trees were unusual: not overly tall, perhaps fifteen feet at the highest, but spreading quickly from their base into very wide circles of intricately-developed foliage. The trunks were slender, light gray and smooth, and they stood close, dense enough to prevent seeing more than a short distance past. I was reminded of a plate I’d seen in an encyclopedia depicting Yggdrasil, the Norse worldtree, supporting the heavens atop its boughs.
Oliver stepped down beside me, falling heavily the last foot. He was breathing hard and I turned to look at him, and felt immediately guilty—I had completely forgotten about his injuries. Bright on his face was a double track of lacerations, still seeping blood; he had obviously wiped at it several times and the resulting crimson smear covered his face, making him look slightly insane.
“I need a second,” he said bluntly. I was already nodding and motioned towards the trees, where I felt that we would have some cover from the mysteries surrounding us. We sat at the base of one of the trunks, and I shrugged off my backpack.
I had some very basic first aid equipment, just a small baggie filled with Band-Aids and gauze dressings—the sort of thing that was nice to have for scraped knuckles and accidental brushes with barbed wire. I had a coil of nylon rope, as well, and had always imagined in a real emergency I might use a loop of it as a tourniquet, but I wasn’t going to tourniquet Oliver’s head. I handed him the bandages and he started dabbing at the cuts, soaking up blood and cleaning them a little with an antiseptic wipe.
“Is it just your face?” I asked, unsure. His denim jacket was torn and holed in several places.
He nodded. “It... I just lost some fabric. I was struggling, kind of flailing, and it couldn’t seem to get a good purchase on me, until it got its claws into my face. That’s when I tore it off and threw it; I got gouged as it came loose.” The lines of red ran in matching sets, three parallel cuts each, from just below his jawline diagonally to the top of his forehead. He was lucky. A little deeper and they would have run through his eyes.
He did what he could on the cuts, grimacing. I tried to fill the silence with some insight into our situation, but realized immediately that I had none, and the sensation of being adrift nearly overwhelmed me. Looking at my bag as if for ideas, I suddenly reached down and emptied it; taking stock seemed like a logical course.
It was our usual equipment. Early in our adventures we tended to bring very little, and always found ourselves needing one thing or another; gradually, we started to carry more and more, always trying to match our supplies to the environment. But eventually we’d found that we could never really anticipate what would come in handy, and settled on a standard collection of useful gear, versatile items that could handle most tasks.
I still had my light, a cheap little penlight-style torch; Oliver’s, much brighter, was lost back in the cave. But I had a handful of lightsticks, crack-to-use chemical cyalumes, good for certain situations. There was the first-aid kit, a bundle of nylon paracord, a leather pouch with my lockpicks, and a Gerber multitool. A couple of energy bars and the metal flask of rum seemed to be our provisions.
The rest of the bag was filled with a bulky and relatively heavy coil of half-inch static climbing rope. Oliver was a climber, though I knew little about it, and we’d started carrying the cord—50 feet, black—to use for short rappels, opening up courtyards and other areas below our ability to jump or climb. We had no harnesses to belay with, but had become adept at fast-roping short distances with the line between our feet, then either climbing back up or pulling it down after us, if we’d doubled rather than knotted it at the top. It was easily the biggest thing I had to carry, and had weighed me down on the long hike through the tunnels; it was tempting to get rid of it, but that would be stupid for sure, not knowing what lay ahead.
In our pockets, we had wallets, keys, useless phones. In addition, I knew that Oliver carried a folding knife. I wished irrationally for a bazooka.
As I contemplated the little pile in front of me, I heard a noise from nearby, like someone clearing their throat. “Pardon?” I asked.
Oliver sounded puzzled. “Huh?”
I started to look up. As I did, I heard the sound again, bass and rattling, and I knew it hadn’t been Oliver.
In the dim, silvery light, the figure was hard to isolate, even though it was mere feet away. But it was coming fast straight at me and my mammalian instincts prevailed; I flinched, turned stumbling away, hunching as I threw my arms up over my head.
There was the faintest of whooshes; I felt something pass by me, fast. My stumble became a backpedal as I found my balance, and I uncovered my face to see the threat.
A slight little figure, like a man but small—more like a boy, but strangely shaped for that, too—very pale, hairless, clothed in dark fabric, was coming after me, and my attention focused immediately onto his left hand, which held a long glimmer: a blade. He raised it and I reacted, bolting to the side, into the treeline.
Instantly, the darkness of the forest weighed onto me like a stifling cloud. I actually tripped, then caught myself against a low branch. Although intensely aware of the danger behind me, I couldn’t force myself to penetrate the depths of those trees any further; my feet wouldn’t carry me. Instead I dashed along the treeline, the swordsman barely behind.
After half a dozen paces I emerged again near where we’d been sitting. Oliver was gone, but I had no time to wonder about it. The pile of our gear was still on the ground, and hearing my attacker moments from my heels, I went for it without thought. As I passed, I scooped up the coiled rope with one hand, turned in one motion and flung it towards my assailant.
He was less than a yard away and although I hadn’t known it, I was barely in time, for his weapon was already raised for a stroke. The heavy wad of rope hit him in the face and caught him short. His vision momentarily blocked and his weight off-balance, his arms flew spastically upward to claw at the object in surprise. I saw his sword-arm bent, the tip pointing behind him, and reacted automatically—lunging forward, I seized his wrist and the weapon, bearing down on him with my mass like a body-check.
I outweighed him significantly, and he fell back. But he clutched at the weapon with the strength of a python. My grip was good and I’d never come out the worse in a handshake, but the wiry hand beneath my own clutched like an angry vine. Taking a step back and pivoting, I jerked at the hilt of the blade with one hand, trying to tear it free, but he held fast, and after a moment had found his feet again. I was looking down at the sword when his free hand came whipping around like a flail and hit me behind the left ear.
I recoiled from the impact, suddenly weak; my one thought was to hold onto the weapon, and I barely held maintained my grip. I was almost falling, dazed, when I saw him step in for another blow. But then from my left, a larger body entered my vision: Oliver. He seized my opponent by the jaw and back of the head, twisted, and flung him over one hip to the ground.
His grip on the sword didn’t slack, however, and the violence of the throw tore the hilt from my hands. The blade whipped away from me and glanced across the bottom of my left wrist. I felt a hot shock radiate up my arm and the hand went immediately limp.
Oliver cocked a foot to kick the creature at his feet, but it crabbed to the side, avoiding the blow, and then rolled back into Oliver’s leg, knocking him down. But he didn’t topple stiff like his opponent had; Oliver’s sport of choice was Brazilian Jujitsu, and I knew the ground was where he loved to be. He spun as he fell, executing a staccato breakfall, and then with a nimble twist and a move too fast to see was on top of his small attacker.
I wasn’t watching. Oliver had landed initially on the sword-arm, pinning it, but now that he had moved away the arm was loose, and I jumped forward before it could move, stomping on the outstretched wrist. With one foot I pinned the blade to the ground; with the other I drove my heel into the small bones of the hand and fingers, trying to crush them.
I could hear sodden pounding noises. Oliver was driving his fists into the creature’s face, long, piston-like blows, left then right, winding up well past his head and dropping his weight into each punch. All of a sudden, the arm beneath me seemed to relax, and I watched the fingers go limp. I immediately kicked the sword away.
After several more hits, Oliver stopped, gasping, covered in sweat. The figure beneath him was motionless.

For a few minutes, we stood in silence. My body seemed unconvinced that we’d escaped danger, and trembled like an electric wire. Then at last I said—
“It’s... I don’t think it’s dead. We should tie it up.”
Oliver looked tight, still flush with energy; he got to his feet and beckoned me over to where we’d left our things. He showed me the ground behind the tree he’d sat against. Another small human-like form, identical to the one we’d fought, was layed out at its base, hand closed on a  heavy wooden club. An area of dark wetness surrounded him. Oliver’s knife was buried in his side.
“Came at me from behind just as the other one went for you,” he said ruefully. “I managed to dodge him on the ground, tripped him up. Got lucky.”
I stared downward. The same form that had seemed so threatening and alien in combat now looked uncannily human.
“There’s probably more,” said Oliver. “If there’s two, there’s more. Look at how they’re dressed. We need to get out of here.”
At last, I understood what he meant. The character beneath us was garbed exactly the same as the first—a thin, dark-green shirt (I saw now that it was made of beaten plant matter), a sort of skirt of the same material, an oddly pointed hood, and identical markings sewn on both shoulders. It was obviously some sort of uniform, and with growing awareness, the idea of an organized force of these things started to dawn on me.
“Grab the gear”—I pointed a finger at him—“I’ll handle the other one.” I ran back to the scene of the fight, where my attacker was still lying motionless. I flipped him face-down with one foot. The bundle of rope was beside him, and I quickly uncoiled a long loop of it. Oliver came over to cut it with his knife; I and set about cinching the line as tightly as I could around the creature’s wrists and ankles, then connected the two, hog-tying him mercilessly, fumbling a little to tie the knot with my uninjured hand. I remembered the cold strength and cranked at the rope until it dug into the bony limbs.
Oliver came over with the bag. We stood for a while looking down, then I rolled the small form over with my shoe. For the first time, I examined it closely.
I’d thought of them as basically human, if borderline, and that seemed right. The pale shape had the general form we were familiar with, although small—five feet perhaps—and slight of build. But if homo sapiens was his family, then he was a distant cousin. For one thing, he seemed completely hairless; I wasn’t going to dig under the clothing to check lower, but the face and head were smooth and unmarred. In fact, the skin seemed not just wan, but actually luminous. I bent closer and tried to decide whether it was only a reflection of the glow around us, but couldn’t tell.
The most prominent feature was the eyes. They were far larger than those of any human I’d ever seen, dwarfing the other features—especially the ears, which were disproportionately little, mere wrinkles on the sides of its head. The eyes were open, and I was startled to see that rather than whites, as I’d expect with an unconscious human, two huge, iridescent irises gleamed up at me, nearly filling the orbs with a silvery shine.
I shivered and looked further down the body. The clothing was organic, but obviously well-made, carefully cut and sewn. The shirt had a hood that was thrown back. The only markings were on the cloth of the shoulders, each of which showed an identical patch with a white device—an unfamiliar ideogram, like the letter H turned on its side, ornately done up with icons.
Somehow, the sight of what was unmistakably a written character was even more disturbing than the earlier violence. So far I was drifting along comfortably on a tide of mystery, just as if I were dreaming—but writing was concrete, and meaningful, and only the fact that I couldn’t understand it let me maintain my fragile insouciance. You didn’t dream of writing.
Oliver nudged me. “Time to go.”
I realized I had no interest—indeed a real terror—of watching this creature wake up. I turned away quickly.
He was wearing my backpack. “I’ll carry the bag,” he told me; “you’d better take this,” and held out his hand. It was the sword.
I took it numbly. Of course. I’d fenced for nearly six years, for the school and for a local salle, saber and épeé. Now I was wielding a captured weapon to defend myself from weird humanoids in an underground cavern lit by glowing moss. It was all very natural.
My mind was running on autopilot, narrating on the absurdity of it all, staying above water with the power of mockery. But my arm was already hefting the blade, shifting between guards and testing the balance. It was very much like a cavalry saber, curved just slightly, moreso near the point but still with plenty of tip and spine to thrust with; the hilt was straight and swept into a wire guard. Heavy enough to hack and slash but light enough for quick tip-work, and the handle was smooth wood and felt good. It was a somewhat crude tool, had maybe never been polished, but it felt like a working weapon, and I reminded myself that I’d almost died at the point of it.
As I held the sword blandly in my right hand—my left still felt numb below the wrist, and I could barely clench it shut—I belatedly realized where our path would inevitably lead us. I gazed up at the trees. It seemed absurd that such stunted woods could loom so large.
“I guess we’ve got no choice,” I intoned grimly. But Oliver’s presence helped, and we approached the treeline together, wary but willing. There was no point in discussion. Literally the only other path we could follow was back up the ladder, and I would rather do almost anything than face that pale monster again, which still filled me with a nameless fear.
We reached the edge of the trees, hesitated for a moment, and then stepped past, into the gloom.

The forest—could I call it that?—was only marginally darker than the surrounding valley, but it seemed much more oppressive. I saw Oliver shudder as he encountered the same weight of foreboding that I’d felt before.
There were no paths, but no need for them; the ground was mostly level and there seemed to be little flora except for the trees themselves, whose branches and foliage was mostly high enough from the ground to obstruct us little. We had to weave around the trunks and duck under occasional low-hanging branches, but it was relatively easy walking. The air was cold and odorless.
After a while, I felt the need to speak, or at least hear words in the silence, and the elephant in the room had reached the point where it had to be addressed. “So,” I said quietly, “here’s how it seems to me.
“I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re... well, it seems like it’s obvious that there’s only one way we can eventually go, and that’s up. I think we’re a good ways under the surface, but we can’t have come more than several hundred feet... the only question is whether there’s another way up, or not. There haven’t been any real choices, it’s not like we picked the wrong path, so if there’s a way out, it’s this way...”
Oliver said nothing, so I continued.
“But... well, here’s what I’m thinking. When we came down here, that had to be a storm drain—had to. Nothing else is built like that, with that type of access, cement tunneling, the cambered floor. Obviously... something else happened at some point, but—initially it was a drain. So wherever we are now, as long as we’re not too deep, and I don’t think we are... we can still get back to the drain system, if there’s a way.”
The big if wasn’t pretty. We ducked around some trees and Oliver asked the obvious: “What if there isn’t?”
I didn’t reply. There was nothing to say.

3
We moved through the forest at an increasing pace as we became more and more adept at navigating the woods, and grew more accustomed to the dense chill around us. Through windows in the canopy, I could catch glimpses of the cavern’s walls, and saw that they were not altogether straight, weaving and curving. We stayed away from the edges and followed the general path of the valley.
My ears were hyper-alert for noises nearby, and I watched with paranoid anxiety for movement among the trees. But there seemed to be no life; the only sounds were our own feet mucking through the leaves, and a low, dull echo that seemed to hum from the walls themselves.
Time passed. The light was unchanging, but my body was beating its own metronome, and the accumulated fatigue of our travel, along with a delayed adrenaline crash, eventually caught up with me; my legs felt like they were full of cement. When I finally checked my watch, it was almost 4 o’clock.
We discussed stopping, if only for a quick rest. I was dragging ass; Oliver was in better shape, but I worried about his injuries. The cuts on his face seemed to have stopped bleeding, but looked bright and angry, shamanic. We agreed that we’d stop for a few hours at the best shelter we could find.
We pressed on, speaking little. The sword hung heavily from my right hand, swinging. My left was tucked into my waistband, nerveless.

At 4:33 by my watch, trudging over thick-rooted soil, we looked up to find ourselves moving through lights.
We were still among the graceful gray trees, but between them had started to intersperse larger trunks, silky and night-black, like charcoal. They shot up only a little higher than their gray neighbors, but when their branches tapered away, they burst not into leaves but into voluminous clusters of glowing spheres of light.
Filled with wonder, I approached the nearest branch and leaned in. The bough hung low, and at least a dozen little orbs, in colors ranging from aquamarine to pale umber, dangled lazily around my head. They were perfect spheres, the smallest like marbles and the largest nearly the size of ripe melon, but most approximating the volume of a closed fist. Hesitantly, I reached up to touch one, and felt a taut skin, smooth as the surface of a pool of water, but elastic, rebounding against my finger.
“Christmas lights,” Oliver whispered in awe.
The globes weren’t bright, but they were everywhere, from far over our heads to hanging amongst us on heavy and drooping shoots. We moved through them delicately, feeling like the forest had changed into something far less primal and more mystical.
Eventually, we came upon a particularly large black trunk, over six feet in diameter with an elaborate fountain of multi-colored fruit. Just above head height, its central trunk split into three smaller parts, shooting upward at angles, and at their junction was a flat area wide enough to walk upon.
We hoisted ourselves up, bringing our gear, and decided it was a near-perfect spot to rest. The elevation gave us protection and a little visibility, and the thick diagonal branches sheltered us from the surrounding forest.
“We should keep a lookout,” Oliver said, yawning. “A guard.”
I volunteered, cheered and invigorated by our new environment. He would stay up top, and sleep if he could; I’d post watch at the base of the trunk, and wake him to switch once I could no longer stay awake.
I climbed back down and sat against the tree, sword across my lap, flashlight on the ground beside me. Above, I could hear Oliver move restlessly for some time, then at last fall silent, overcome by weariness. I gazed through the trees and wondered.

I awoke to the blast of horns.
Instantly I was on my feet, bewildered. Lights were everywhere, and noise; the forest was alive with activity. In my hands was a sword.
Ahead, some of the movement started to resolve, and I caught glimpses of low, hooded figures. All at once, my eyes seemed to adjust to the confused darkness, and I realized belatedly that we were surrounded.
“Oliver,” I said, and then another horn blew, low and droning like a didgeridoo, and the attack began.
From my front came two, moving fast, and I saw the huge eyes shining pale beneath their hoods. But in my peripheral vision I caught movement from my right, much closer, so I darted around the tree to put it between the first two and myself.
Another hooded cave dweller was here, just strides away, and I barely had time to acknowledge his presence before an immense blade was hurtling towards my head. Still moving roughly, disoriented, I tried to raise my own sword, but its balance surprised me—far more tip-heavy than the practice weapons I was used to—and it barely moved. Only a panic dodge to the side kept me from eating the downward cut.
Missing me by inches, the big two-handed weapon actually hit the ground, propelled by inertia. The creature wielding it—taller and thicker than the others we’d seen but still small—heaved it back into another swing, and in that time, I lifted my own blade and stepped into a simple lunge, putting my point through his chest.
It ran him through with ease, a peculiar feeling like cutting into butter. I withdrew automatically and the blade slipped back out, followed by a rush of blood, far more than the thin fabric of his shirt could absorb. He fell back.
I was charged now, flush with battle-lust and adrenaline, and the weapon in my hand felt familiar once more. I wheeled around the tree, not left but right, coming back upon my original attackers from the opposite side. They were looking the other way and I seized the brief moment of surprise, hacking at the side of a visible neck. That one cried and went down; his partner turned immediately and thrust at me with a long spear. He was quick, but I saw it coming, and parried it aside with a vicious thwack, sending it up and out, then closing behind it and cutting down, burying my sword in his forehead deep enough that he dragged me with him when he fell. I planted a foot on his chest and yanked it free while calling—“Oliver?”
From above came noises of a struggle, but then his voice, strained, floated down: “Over here, get the other side, they’re coming up—”
I dashed around the tree again, and saw a force of three enemies clustered at one of the gaps in the branches. At that moment a body flew down, nearly landing on them, and my heart skipped a beat until I saw the hood and small form.
But then I had my hands full as all three turned on me. Two wielded swords, shorter than mine but fast and deadly, and the third swung a thick club tipped with steel. I backpedalled, parrying one blow and dodging another, then ran sideways, diagonal to their line, trying to stack them. Just out of reach of the two on my left, with my sword on the wrong side of my body, I seized the opportunity to move in at the nearest one, getting inside the arc when he swung his club and only receiving a weak impact from his arm. I ran into him hard and then clamped my left hand onto his right to trap it for my own strike—but my numb fingers barely closed, caressing the pale flesh without strength.
Furious, I planted a leg in his stomach and kicked off as hard as I could, shoving him back into his compatriots, who were coming around again. He was stunned enough that his guard stayed down, and I lunged in immediately after the kick, stabbing into his chest, advancing, stabbing again, closing in with a stomping right foot all the way up to his falling body and then turning into the next threat, who by sheer luck had missed with a slash from behind. For a moment I was able to shield myself behind his stabbed friend, but he was already collapsing, and I had to block a couple of fast strikes, missing a clumsy riposte. My blade hissed past him and struck a dark red sphere, bursting it open. Fluorescent liquid flooded out, its luminescence immediately fading, dark by the time it hit the ground.
His sword was smaller than mine, quicker and lighter, and now it was he who tried to get close, while I kept stepping away and to the side, using the tree to obstruct him. Finally, after backtracking halfway around, I stepped back from an attack and planted my foot, then immediately rebounded forward in a long lunge. He was ready for the block, but before it could make contact I’d withdrawn my blade, and as my front leg hit the ground I exploded off it as well, launching myself forward in a near-sprint.
He didn’t expect me to close, and I easily got through his guard. As I passed on his left my sword came around with a whipping strike, and the tip slide across his throat. I stumbled away, regaining my balance in time to see him fall, neck gaping open like a gushing mouth.
Then a crumpling sound from my right, and I turned. It was Oliver, who’d just landed on top of my forgotten third attacker. He fell to one side, rolling, as the hooded creature stumbled in my direction, and I unceremoniously draw a long diagonal slash from shoulder to hip, nearly bisecting him.
Oliver was already up, saying—“Come on, there’s more already, I can see,” and in a moment he’d pulled himself back into the tree. I followed wordlessly.
Now I understood what he meant. From the height of the elevated trunk, I could see movement amidst the darkness in multiple directions, flashes of pale foes closing fast. Oliver scooped up the backpack—I saw him close the little knife, which I hadn’t noticed naked in his hand—and immediately set his hands and knees onto one of the uprising trunks, and began to crawl.
I followed. We scampered along the arching girder of thick wood as fast as our balance allowed, soon finding ourselves a dozen feet from the ground, and as I looked down I saw swarms of the pale men closing on the base of the tree. I realized, too late, that I’d forgotten my flashlight.
We hurried onward, for the moment unnoticed, until one of them happened to look up, catching our movement among the glowing baubles, and raised a cry. But we were already past the mass of them and Oliver led us in a controlled fall through the branches of one of the gray trees. We hit the ground and immediately started to run, chased by dozens.
Fatigue was forgotten in our flight. Our longer legs gave us an advantage, although the cave creatures moved with surprising speed; there were obviously more and more of them with each passing moment, and we had no hope now except to escape.
Onward we ran, arms pumping and breath gasping, tripping, recovering again, chancing occasional glances back to our pursuers. My vision began to gray over from the exertion, and I ignored creeping threads of apparent movement all throughout the dark, hallucinations, artifacts of fatigue.
Blood molten, nearly dead with exhaustion, we burst out of the trees. A steep uphill grade was ahead, leading to a wall of the canyon, in which we could see a dark opening, perhaps a cave. The hill was barely twenty yards but strewn with gravel, and we slipped, grasping at the ground in our fatigue, clambering on all fours. The sound of our pursuers was almost upon us. I lost my footing and face-planted, starting to slide, unable to get ahold of anything with my left hand. With only a moment’s thought, I let the sword slip away and dug in with the fingers of my right. It slithered down the slope in a trail of pebbles and dirt.
At last we reached the top and stumbled into the cave, no thought but to find shelter. It was a tight tunnel, large enough to walk single-file only, and we ducked through as quickly as our battered bodies would move. I heard cries from outside, then heard them change and begin to echo as they too entered the passage; after a brief moment, lights kindled behind us from small torches among their ranks, just enough to follow the passage by.
I couldn’t understand how we hadn’t yet been caught; I felt our pursuers had been mere inches from our backs for eons. The shouts rose louder and louder, and then all of a sudden came a different sound from one side—“In here!”
Seeing a new passageway cut in from the left, with the mute faith of the condemned man I followed it. A dark shape was ahead, taller than the cave creatures, beckoning.
But from barely behind us came the glow of the torches, and I turned to look—and was suddenly blinded as the tunnel erupted with incendiary brightness. A stunning point of impossibly white light was shining just ahead, pouring down the tunnel to set off every rock and figure in spectral relief. I saw an endless tide of pale shapes, saw them duck away with screeches of pain, and then stumbled away, down the tunnel.
With Oliver beside me I passed through an archway, and found myself in a larger cavern. I heard a slamming from behind, and turned.
A heavy wooden door had closed upon the passage. Before it was a dark-haired figure in a UCSC sweatshirt, holding a million-candlepower searchlight. My eyes bugged.
“Dan?”
Oliver’s jaw hung open as we stared. Our dorm-mate Dan gave an awkward smile and said, “Hey guys,” then hearing a noise in the passage, immediately leaned forward, grabbing the iron handle and planting his feet. The next moment, a huge blow shook the wood, forcing it outward before he could push it back to the jam.
There was no bar or latch. We ran up and joined him at the door, putting our weight against it to hold it fast. A cacophany of growling, grumbling voices clambered from the other side.
“What are you doing here?!” I asked dumbly, leaning in on the rough wood with my left shoulder.
Dan cleared his throat and shrugged, as if we’d simply run into him at the library. “You guys missed your deadline.”
I frowned, not understanding, then with a flash of awareness lifted a wrist to view my watch. I realized it was after ten in the morning.
“Okay, guys, here’s the plan,” he told us while I digested this uselessly. “Down this passage is a tunnel. It goes a while and it forks, but it’s easy to find the way—just keep going upward. Then we’re going to have to climb. Do you have your rope?”
Oliver, who still wore the backpack, nodded.
“Great. There was an easier route, but when I came down, part of it crumbled and it’s impassable now. But I left a rope and an ascender, so we can run right up it if we self-belay.”
With a dull splintering, a boulder-like force smote the door, and the three of us fell back. Using our feet, Dan and I managed to block it from opening more than a small ways. Through the gap we heard a roar and saw a surge of motion.
We made it to our feet and heaved the door shut together. “Come on!” Dan cried. “There’s another door at the other side of this room, and we can bar it—on three—”
He counted to three, and in unison we broke and ran, barreling through the open chamber. Dan pointed his searchlight ahead and the beam showed another door much like the one we’d just left. With a surge of speed, we fell through, and Oliver slammed it shut; a wooden slat stood ready to brace it closed. After a moment we were again headed down the tunnel.
“Not too much farther,” panted Dan. Short and stocky, running wasn’t his best activity, but we let him lead, afraid of becoming lost.
He turned a tight corner and started to forge ahead, but then pulled up with a yelp and a start. As we came after, we saw in the flare of his torch a file of cave dwellers, weapons and banners at the ready. We fell back to the corner and shared wild-eyed expressions.
Dan was digging in his pockets. “We’ve got to go this way, we have to get past,” and then in one hand he was holding up a little black cylinder. My mind blanked, then familiarity asserted itself: it was my own pepper spray, last seen in my desk back at the dorms.
The growling of the approaching group was nearly upon us. Dan fiddled with the cylinder and then pointed, shouting, “When I say go, get your heads down, close your eyes, and run!”
He wheeled around the corner before we could react, the million-candlepower torch blazing in one hand, and a long cone of mist spraying forth from the other. “Go!”
Without thought, we ran. Turning the corner we ducked and squeezed our eyes as tightly as we could, then simply dashed forward like linebackers. I felt the light around me and almost immediately the sensation of brushing past bodies—but it was quickly overwhelmed by a red-hot wave of liquid fire that seared our flesh, seeping past our eyelids, igniting our lips and nostrils, turning the air around us into a crematorium. Like corpses stumbling through the gates of the damned, we barreled blindly onward, running full into several unseen shapes and heaving them madly aside.
After what seemed like hours, and miles, I perceived that we were clear of the mass of bodies, and the fire had somewhat lessened. Opening my eyes made them instantly burst forth with a flood of tears, but I squinted and looked back at the gauntlet we’d just fought through.
The column of cave dwellers was in shambles, the diamond-bright beam of light targeting them like a laser, and all around them was a haze of airborne capsaicin. They thrashed and screamed, many already having dropped their weapons, and all of them blind.
Dan was behind them, and as I watched, he moved forward, and as he reached their perimeter he started to bolt across.
Two things happened then. As he pushed through the first of the crazed monstrosities, trying wildly to point the cone of pepper spray in every direction, the little cylinder visibly guttered to a halt, pressureless and dead. And as soon as he began to move, arms pumping, the spotlight in his hand went haywire, slicing around the tunnel in flickering patterns, turning everything into a dark-again, light-again patchwork of chaos.
He made it to the middle of the pack before he ran directly into one of the creatures. Dan was a dense little man, built like a rugby flanker, and his impact blew the cave-dweller clear to the ground. But with his eyes shut the collision turned him, and after recovering, he ran sideways, almost straight into a cluster of enemies.
He thrashed and twisted, pulling free and knocking down a few of them, but ran again in the wrong direction, and now I noticed that the troops had begun to recover from the effects of the burning mist. Some of them were moving more purposefully, and one managed to stretch out a leg, tripping Dan as he passed.
It happened almost too quickly to see. As Dan went down, a wave of the creatures surrounded him, still moving haphazardly but now with a clear purpose—and some still held their weapons. There was a long struggle on the floor, impossible to make out, and then with the sound of breaking glass, the light was suddenly extinguished.
A long silence followed, interrupted only by the sounds of the cave creatures. Then there was a slight crack, and a dim green glow surrounded us; Oliver was holding one of the lightsticks. In the tiny bubble of space it illuminated, we exchanged looks through swollen eyes, and then fled down the passage.

4
It seemed to me now that we’d been under the surface of the earth for millenia, engaged forever in a primal struggle with the darkest and truest forces of nature. By impulse I ran, but the thought of escape had become illusory; I couldn’t fathom that the bright world above, only dimly available to my memory, might really still be waiting for us.
Farther and farther we flew, our world reduced to the green expanse created by one small stick of light. We encountered turns and forks, always seeking altitude, always following the road that brought us higher.
Oliver had begun to move erratically, failing to respond to my voice, sometimes distractedly seeming to forget where we were. After a while I took the pack and the light from him and led us, making certain he followed closely. I knew that pursuit was somewhere behind; but that too seemed like a permanent part of our new life, and I gave it little thought. To run, to follow this little spark of light through an ocean of void, was all I knew.
After some time I could not measure, we came to a fork in the tunnel far larger than any so far. Now I hesitated, for each path seemed to run equally flat. I held up the light in my hand, but it was too weak to show very far either way.
So with an underhand toss, I lobbed the green stick down the left tunnel. It landed upright along a sandy path, and its glow showed a plain route running arrow-straight with dry granite walls.
Digging into the pack, I found the bundle of lightsticks, and—thrusting the rest into my pocket—cracked a fresh one, which I sent arcing down the right tunnel.
It flew through the air, mute and delicate—and then all at once seemed to explode like a firework. As it hit the ground, all around it glimmered sparkles, millions of tiny facets that shone like stars. I stared in wonder, for the entire tunnel—emerging from the floor and ceiling, jutting out of the walls—was made up of craggy growths of shining, iridescent crystal.
Cool air washed over us from ahead. The weak green glow of the lightstick was multiplied a thousandfold in the crystalline chamber, each geometric facade reflecting and refracting until the chemical burn had become a pure white glimmer, clearer than moonshine.
For long minutes I was held entranced. The crystal tunnel seemed to promise much more than words could say, and my night-benumbed mind believed it implicitly. But finally, my thoughts returned to the surface, and a brighter world—and Dan. As well as I knew anything, I knew that the magic of this road led not upward, out of mystery, but down, to another world I had only started to glimpse.
I cracked a new glowstick and started down the left passage. After a few paces, I turned and saw Oliver still at the crossroad, a shadowed and distant look on his face. “Come on!” I implored, pulling at his arm. He came, wordless and unreachable, with the eyes of a man lost.

Not long after, we exited the long tunnel into a larger chamber, which rang with hollow echoes. The ground was sandy and the air seemed fresh. Looking up, the walls rose out of sight.
We found the end of a 10mm kernmantle rope on the wall before us, hanging vertical as a frozen waterfall. Near the bottom was a Petzl jumar-type ascender. In a few moments, prodding Oliver to assist, we were able to figure out what Dan’s intentions had been.
Unpacking our own rope, we cut two lengths from it, one short and one long, then tied both securely to the handle of the ascender. The other ends of the lines were ours: Oliver, moving like a zombie, showed me how to run the shorter rope around my hips, between my legs, and around my shoulders, tightening it into a makeshift harness. I helped him fasten the longer rope to his body in the same way. If we fell, the ratcheted device would arrest us, although the thin nylon would make it painful.
Finally, we took short hanks of paracord and tied them around the main line with prusik friction knots: two for each of us. With tension on these loops, they would cinch down and support the weight of our feet; then each could alternately be loosened and slid upward, and the process repeated, allowing us to slowly “walk” up the rope on moving stairs. I would use the mechanical jumar itself as a handhold, as I was unable to grip the line with my left hand; and while we climbed, I would slide it upward to act as a safety anchor, belaying us both.
We finished the arrangements within a few minutes. I’d done this type of ascent before, but not for very far, and at the time we’d used two ascenders and real harnesses. Rather than belabor the challenge, I inserted my feet into the loops and draped my weight onto the rope, then—for lack of anywhere better—stuck the lightstick between my teeth and began to climb. After a while I felt Oliver follow suit below.
Progress was very slow. Drag one footloop up the line, place my weight upon it; repeat for the other foot and stand on that; slide the jumar up the line, then repeat. The small loops of rope were floppy and rolled under the soles of my shoes, and every time I moved them I had to fumble at the knot with my left hand, using fingers that could extend but barely bend.
We’d climbed twenty feet when the sound of pursuit joined us from below. I looked down and saw only inky blackness, but the shifting-gravel voices of the pale creatures drifted up distinct and unmistakable. We climbed faster, ignoring the complaints of aching forearms and biceps—just more additions to the tall list of insults our bodies had recorded over the past twelve hours.
It wasn’t long until I felt our rope moving erratically under new weight. Our enemies had joined the climb. Suddenly, I was glad for the darkness.
Slide, push; slide, push; slide, pull. I settled into the routine and concentrated on making it as efficient as possible, moving as far as I could with each “step,” losing no time loosening and repositioning each prusik. The plastic glowstick was still between my teeth; unable to close my lips, saliva was accumulating constantly and running down my chin to dribble onto my shirt.
After many minutes, my forearms and shoulders had begun to cramp and seize. I shook them out and forced my way upward, sure that the noises below had grown closer. Finally, just as I was wondering if the wall would ever end, the glow from my mouth revealed a break in the stone  face above. Two more pulls brought it within reach, and at last I sprawled my chest laboriously over the top, pulled up my legs, and lay panting on cold, flat rock.
I started to disconnect myself from the rope, which I saw now had been anchored around a sturdy upthrust stalagmite nearby. My harness came off first, untied from the ascender, and I was pulling my feet out of the prusik loops when I heard Oliver’s voice down the wall: “Shit!”
Alarmed, I leaned over, lightstick in one hand. He was too far down to make out. “Oliver?”
I heard him swearing and fumbling with something. “I lost... god damn... give me some light!”
I thought for a moment, then simply dropped the glowstick.
It fell like a lead weight, no air resistance at all, plunging straight down the chimney. After about ten feet, it whipped past Oliver, fast as a camera flash, but it was enough for me to see: he was flailing with one foot on the rope and the other loose. One of his prusiks had come free and slipped down the line.
The light-stick kept falling, and my heart quickened as I saw in its glow many hooded figures on the rope, attached I couldn’t see how, only a few yards below Oliver’s feet.
Immersed in darkness again, I heard him struggling. I pulled out another light and cracked it, using it to find Oliver’s anchor line still attached to the ascender. I seized it, planted my feet and pulled—but with only my right hand able to apply a grip, it remained taut and unmoving, heavy with Oliver’s weight and friction from the rough stone where it bent over the corner of the wall.
I scrambled back to the edge and dropped the light again, watching it tumble downward. Now in its brief glimpse I saw Oliver trying to hold the rope itself and scoot upward on his single remaining prusik—but the rope was thin and slick, demanding two hands to support his weight, and that left no way for him to slide the knot. He swung and kicked, trying to move it with his feet alone, but it was tightened too firmly, and he nearly lost his grip. And the figures were now only a few feet below.
So close—so close to the top—but well beyond my reach. Calling down to him, I said, “Listen, I’ll drop you more cord, you can tie another foothold,” and turned to open the bag.
But his voice floated back up after a brief moment, sounding thin and emotionless. “No... no.” A pause, unusually long. Then: “Listen... can you give some light?”
I turned back, cracked a glowstick—two more left—and dropped it over the edge.
It fell. As its sphere of illumination sank, I saw Oliver with the knife in his hand, and when the light hit him he located the static rope—his anchor line—and started to saw at it.
The dark shapes were almost at his heels, and I froze in fear. “What—wait! No, don’t—cut it below, below!”
In a frenzy I snapped another light and flung it down.
It dropped in a bubble of clear fire, agonizingly slow, seeming to float forever. I peered into the night, waiting, waiting, and at last Oliver entered its small circle of reality. He was looking up at me, with a pale figure already pulling at his leg, and the edge of his knife was on the main line. The light seemed to penetrate deep into his eyes, and I saw nothing—just a distance like uncounted miles.
“It’s best this way,” he said, and his blade parted the rope, and he disappeared into darkness amidst the scream of monsters.

Forty-five minutes later, by the light of the last glowstick, I emerged from a manhole at the north end of campus, under a bright mid-day sun.

5
I learned more much later, although in the end many mysteries remained unsolved.
No real search-and-rescue attempt had been made for us, no public manhunt, but in the days that followed a large number of unmarked vans could be seen about campus, mainly near drains and access hatches. I couldn’t conceal my own return and didn’t try; when I showed up at the university health center to have the cut on my hand treated (shallow, but with damage to the ulnar nerve), I was taken aside by administration staff, and eventually subjected to extensive questioning by men from “the public works authority.” I woodenly repeated the same story—that the three of us had gone exploring in the storm drains, and fallen down a steep tunnel where I’d been knocked unconscious; when I awoke, the others were gone. Probably washed down the current to the sea. The men knew I was lying; I knew they were, too. In the end I was released, and I never heard anything from the police. Officially, my friends were listed as missing, presumed dead.
I later found out from others at the dorm that Dan had reported our situation to the campus switchboard—a call that was apparently routed to authorities about which I know little. But he must have sensed that official rescue would be long in coming, because he’d shortly thereafter gathered some of our unused gear and set out to find us on his own. I still don’t know how he managed to pinpoint our location so accurately, but when I returned to the dorms I accessed his computer, and in his browser history was a Santa Cruz County topographic watershed map. He must have guessed where our entrance would lead and came at it from the nearest access—and then simply had the good fortune to meet us in those tunnels at the right time. He was smarter than we were.
I never learned more about the pale men of the caves, and I never wanted to. And I try not to think at all of the creature with the monkey face.
As for Oliver, for a long time his sacrifice mystified me, and I spent weeks wandering about in a daze, wondering what had passed through his head in those last moments on the rope. But I think I understand now, because those same thoughts are now my own.
Dan had given his life for ours, clear and unambiguous. It was a debt Oliver couldn’t understand, didn’t know how to pay—until the chance arose to pay it forward in the same coin. He had been given the burden of a life; he could break even by saving another.
For almost a year, we’d adventured in the quiet places of our campus, manufacturing excitement, sipping at artificial adrenaline, all in a futile effort to stave off the sense that our lives had no purpose or direction. That night in the caves, we found more fear and wonder than we’d ever hoped for, but it didn’t heal what was missing. In the end, I still chose to return to the surface, to my daily cups of coffee and walks to class, checking and rechecking my email, the faces of the same old crowd.
I love Oliver for his sacrifice, for the gift he gave me, but I hate him too, because it was cruel. He paid his debt and I hope—I hope with every fiber of my being—that he died with peace of mind, free from obligation, content in having done a noble deed. But he transferred that debt to me, and now I have no means to settle it. Oliver died to save my life, whether he did voluntarily or no; and my debt is even greater, for I killed many in those caves. But there is nobody I can die for. And my life itself is far from worthy.
I sleep with the lights on now, and wait out my days.