Sinkhole Chapter Nine

Linked to my Substack post entitled Finish This in My Style, AI.

Chapter Nineteen

The ladder into the sinkhole undulated along its entire length, but somehow Mark managed to keep his balance. Carefully he felt for the rung below, the rebreather and pack weighing him down like an anchor. He didn’t know how he was going to reach the bottom without slipping off, but somehow he had to. Rung by rung he descended, dropping below the layer of leaves to where he could see only bare earth and roots.

Funny, he felt like he was dangling over the jaws of a giant viper, willingly descending into its belly and providing it with its next lip-smacking meal. The snake pit in Snake City. Maybe this place was cursed. When he was almost halfway down to the water’s surface, an annoying buzz snipped at his ear. He shook his head, seeing some fuzzy black bodies streaking around him.

“Watch for the wasps,” said Jorge from above, chuckling.

“Thanks for the warning,” said Mark. He took a deep breath and plunged through the swarm that erupted from a globular clay nest at eye level. This time he didn’t wait to find the next rung but slid three meters down, feeling the rope burn into his palms. Now the swarm was above him, just about where Jorge was climbing. Whose turn was it to chuckle now?

He worked his way down another six meters. As he trod on the next rung, something lashed out, right at his waist. “Shit!” he screamed. “Damn! It’s another snake.” Luckily the fangs had missed his chest and merely nicked his drysuit. But the writhing green and black body recoiled into its niche and prepared to strike again.

Mark panicked. He let go of the ladder and fell the final six meters into the dark pool below. His body plunged underwater, the weight of his pack and rebreather tugging him under. He didn’t have the mask over his face, so he struggled upward, swimming with all his strength to regain the surface. The rebreather, buoyant with its mix of oxygen and helium, helped elevate him. Mark broke the surface and gasped. He was braced to come face to face with the snake again and started when he saw a man’s face instead. Jorge.

He rested, catching his breath. “Was that one poisonous?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Jorge. “A fer-de-lance—some call it the pit viper. Lethal poison in its fangs. It has killed more people in Central and South American than any other snake. You were wise to jump. Full of surprises you are, doctor.”

“Yeah, fear can make you wise sometimes,” said Mark.

Jorge grinned. He clapped Mark on the shoulder. “This is only the beginning, doctor. Enjoy the adventure.”

Adventure, hah! Now he sounded like Kat.

“Let’s get this over with.”

“Okay. We dive straight down for thirty meters, then you follow me to the right. Don’t stray. It gets dark quickly as you go deeper, and you wouldn’t want to miss the opening of the cave.”

Mark nodded, dread saturating his mind. Jorge slipped on his mask, activated the oxygen mix, donned his flippers, and dove under. Mark, reluctantly, began to do the same. The rebreathers were equipped with full face masks with built-in microphones and an underwater PA system so that divers could talk to each other, but that was small comfort to Mark. Although Jorge had come to his rescue once, he had hardly leaped to help him with the snake. If he ran into trouble underwater, it was anyone’s guess whether Jorge would turn around and save him. He flashed a last glance at the reptile, still writhing in its cleft on the cliff. He hoped there wouldn’t be snakes in the water. Headfirst, he ducked under and pumped toward the disappearing body of his guide.

The water was clear enough near the surface to see a few fish wriggling by, but soon the sinkhole became a murky twilight world with only a trickle of light. Mark flicked on his headlamp and paddled harder to keep up with Jorge as the light illuminated his receding flippers, but began falling helplessly behind. He couldn’t see the bottom of the sinkhole as he spiraled deeper, but just when he was starting to wonder if they were ever going to reach the opening to the cave, he saw the flicker of Jorge’s light to the side and not below him.

Relief flooded through Mark as he veered toward the limestone wall. Another meter and they would be in the cave.

In the cave. Not a moment for relief. He was journeying into the jaws of his worst nightmare. He stopped and hovered a few centimeters from the opening, trying to get a grip on nerves that were jangling like bells. He turned his head away, closed his eyes, then reluctantly opened them, prepared to plunge into hell itself. When he was still turned away, his light swept over what appeared to be the bottom of the sinkhole after all—a solid layer of mud and debris. Silt choked the water around him and he could just detect . . . oh no, not again.

A skull. Shifting in and out of view in the soup of silt their passage had stirred up on the bottom of the cenote. Staring up at him in hollow-eyed derision. Where one existed, inevitably . . . two, three . . . a dozen. Smooth or sloped foreheads, jaw bones detached and resting nearby. Mark sucked in some air from his tank, which made him lightheaded as well as terrified. What in heaven’s name was this? He aimed his light over the bottom of the sinkhole, taking in great heaps of bones, ribs poking out of the muck, humerus and finger bones, a spade-shaped scapula. The skulls lay slightly distant and dissociated from the majority of the skeletons. They didn’t appear to be in any way similar to the bodies in the temple. These people had been decapitated.

Some artifacts surrounded the bones: gold face ornaments, figurines made of copper, broken pottery, and obsidian and jade carvings. Insignificant compared to the mountain of corpses. Mark couldn’t take it anymore. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and turned away from the grisly sight. He had to escape this nightmare pit.

“Jorge,” he called hoarsely. But the guide had resumed his stony silence. The beam from his headlamp was getting dimmer by the minute, several meters up the cave.

“Jorge,” he called. “Answer me, dammit!”

He heard a light chuckle over the PA and scowled. Despite their descent into another graveyard, Jorge thought this was all a joke. The glow of his light was now barely visible at the fringes of complete darkness. In near panic, Mark followed, swimming under the ridges of karst embedded with sharp stalactites, kicking, kicking, trying to avoid getting impaled. He swam meter by meter, bubbles swirling around him. Still no end to this underwater burrow. It elbowed up, dipped steeply down again, widened into a gaping hole, then narrowed where cave breakdown had created rubble. He squeezed through the corkscrew passage with his bulky equipment, still dizzy from his fight-or-flight reaction to the corpses. He could feel the tightness of the quarters now. Tons of rock above his head, compacted over a fragile hollow space. Fear grabbed at his gut, wrung and nearly imploded his chest. He had to get out of here. He had to get out!

A juncture between water and air appeared above, a rippling distortion of cave features. He shivered in relief. Kicking upward, he reached the surface in seconds, ripped off his mask, and breathed. In and out. Slowly. You made it, Delaney. Through the Pit of the Damned and into the first passage of the Underworld. Now breathe.

“Well, it’s about time,” said Jorge.

Mark looked up and saw him perched on a ledge above the water’s surface.

“I thought you’d drowned already.”

“Would have . . . made you . . . happy, wouldn’t it?” Mark said between gasps.

“Not entirely,” said Jorge.

Mark swam over to the rock bank and crawled out of the water. He slumped on the ground and lay there, heart practically fibrillating. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” asked Jorge, but the smug look on his face said he knew exactly what.

“The bodies,” said Mark. “The skeletons. Where the hell did they come from?”

Jorge looked at the slimy walls of the cavern, his eyes traveling over daggers of white rock and spearheads of crystals. The light refracted and blinked on the spectacular natural formations. “Sacrifices,” he said matter-of-factly.

Mark struggled to sit up. “Like the decapitated bodies on the motifs?”

“Exactly,” said Jorge. “This was a sacrificial well—a portal to the Underworld, Xibalba, or so my ancestors thought. You saw the stepped platform on the border of the cenote. That was where the priests killed them, spilled their blood on the altar, ripped their hearts out, chopped off their heads, and then hurled them into the well. It was common practice, especially where cenotes pierced the water table. Edward Herbert Thompson, an amateur archaeologist, dredged and dove in a famous cenote at Chichén Itzá in the late 19th century and found it filled with bones and offerings. It’s nothing to get excited about.”

“Excited about! Are you kidding? First I nearly get gunned down by some paramilitary nuts, then you take me to a pyramid stacked with bodies, and now there’s some well filled with sacrificial victims!”

Jorge shrugged. “I told you there was a curse.”

Mark stared at him. The man would not blink.

“Are we ready to continue yet?” asked Jorge, standing and shrugging off the dive and the sacrificial burial ground as if they’d just gone out for a Sunday afternoon swim. “We have a long way to go.”

Mark eyed him suspiciously. “How much longer?”

Jorge gave him a blank stare again. “As long as it takes. There are rumors that the deepest cave is at two thousand meters or deeper.”

“Two thous—” Mark choked out. “That’s almost seven thousand feet. And how deep are we now?”

“Maybe a hundred and fifty. But the cave climbs and dips throughout. It isn’t straight down.”

“Great,” said Mark, feeling exhausted as much from the terror as the taxing dive. He hauled himself to his feet, searched through his waterproof pack for the Nalgene water bottle Jorge’s men had included, and slugged some life-restoring fluid from the lip.

“Eat one of your energy bars too,” said Jorge, pointing to the foil-wrapped food stocks in the backpack. “You’re going to need it.”

“No doubt,” Mark grumbled. He snapped up a bar and tore the wrapper off. He was about to let it flutter to the ground, hardly caring at this point about the pristine maintenance of the cave, but Jorge shot a severe look that stopped him cold. He crumpled the wrapper and slipped it ostentatiously into his pack. “All right. Let’s get this over with.”

Jorge nodded, slid out of his drysuit, and donned some coveralls from his pack. Mark sighed and followed his example. Then Jorge spun around on the very slick rock and strode toward a hole in the wall that was no larger than an air duct in an office building. He bent down, pushed his rebreather ahead of him, and crawled in.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Mark.

“Just a short crawl to the next cavern.”

“Short crawl. Crawl!” He’d known this wasn’t going to be a picnic, but he just hadn’t bargained on how difficult it would be. How excruciating with the tons of rock over his head and the dense darkness surrounding his feeble light. Now he would have to wriggle like a worm through a passage fit for nothing better.

Mark removed the rebreather from his back, shoved it into the hole as he’d seen Jorge do, dangled his pack behind him on a long feeder rope strapped to his belt, and thrust headfirst into the tiny aperture. The white rock loomed, smoothly carved by water, but with the occasional jagged knife edge from a stalactite, and a constant bleeding of moisture that drip, drip, dripped on his head. He felt the frantic energy build in him again, his breathing quicken, and his heart start to gallop. No! He wasn’t going to let it take hold this time. He had to do this.

 He pushed in the tank, elbowed forward, dragged his leg up, then thrust himself forward with his foot. It was a tedious method of propulsion and agonizingly slow. His heart still pounded a highland jig. All he could see was the silver metal of the tank and the rock surrounding him like the coils of a serpent. Push, elbow, thrust. On and on, until his joints screamed and he just wanted to raise his head. Of course he did a few times, cracking his helmet into the ceiling, but at least the vibrations in his brain were dampened by the protective foam of the headgear.

The crawl seemed to go on for miles, up and down, through spiral turns that nearly snagged Mark’s pack as he dragged it behind him. The only things he could hear were the scrape of the rebreather cylinders over the rock and his own harsh pant. Anything Jorge was doing up ahead was inaudible. Any view of the guide, blocked. It felt as though he was alone in a cocoon, wriggling to get out. Alone in the dank, fetid darkness . . .

Get hold of yourself, man. You can do this. No insects were crawling over him, no bats fluttering above his head. He hadn’t seen any life at all. Maybe they’d descended too deep already, past the zones of trogloxenes, cave visitors such as bats and spiders, or troglophiles, cave lovers like salamanders and cave crickets. This wasn’t his nightmare. Not the one he was used to, anyway.

A cramp seized Mark’s leg in a strangle hold. He screamed, his body trying to curl inward, which was impossible. It only resulted in bruised knees and battered elbows. The knifing continued for another minute as Mark tried to reach down with one hand and massage it away. When at last it eased, he collapsed on the floor of the tunnel.

“Doctor Mark?” Jorge’s voice sounded as if it was deep down a well, very faint and hollow.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” said Mark, gritting his teeth. “I’m not.”

“Well,” came the merciless reply. “I can’t help you. There is no way to turn around. You’re going to have to help yourself or you may be stuck for a long time.”

“Damn pitiless bastard,” Mark said.

“And that wouldn’t be good for me or your wife, since this is the only way out that I know of.”

Mark swallowed the remnants of pain and burrowed on. Push, elbow, thrust. The cramp tried to take hold again, but he ignored it. Tears streamed down his face, but he still ignored it. He had to get out of this godforsaken tunnel. He was still pushing, elbowing, and thrusting when he suddenly realized that space had opened above and beside him. He’d emerged like a baby from the womb, and it hadn’t even been that much farther on. In fact, Jorge could easily have crawled back in and helped him.

He gasped, sat up, and stretched the leg until the pain receded. Then he spun toward Jorge.

“You son of a bitch. You could have helped me.” He stood a little drunkenly and faced the guide, whose face was no longer bland. It appeared to be shining.

“Doctor,” he said, “you will never get down to your wife if you can’t crawl through a thirty-meter tunnel. This is only the beginning of a very long, very hard journey. Toughen up.”

Mark felt like throwing a fist in Jorge’s face, but he could still feel the steel nozzle of the man’s gun from their last standoff.

“Fine!” he said. “Fine. I’ll toughen up.” He limped over to a rock and sat down, massaging his calf. Only then did he notice the great cones of stalactites and the shimmery beads of slime hanging from them. One large dollop of what looked like snot dangled right above his head.

“I wouldn’t sit there,” said Jorge.

“Why not?”

He wasn’t about to move yet. His leg still ached. But as he spoke the slime elongated and began to drip from the cone. Jorge grabbed him and shoved him from the rock. The droplet landed right where he’d been sitting and sizzled as if it were bacon in a frying pan.

“Because you don’t want to die,” he said. “Yet.”