by Kaz Morran
A few steps farther, and the textures were more diverse: ropy, clamshell, wavy, tiered, grooved, bubbly, smooth. Porous, blood-red rock fragments ranged in size from flecks to knee-high and scattered the terrain, adding credence to the alien world analogy. Craters carved by ancient cascades of lava hosted pools of water where drips from a ceiling too high to see plunged like clockwork, accumulating at the speed of geological change.
The plain flat-floored, straight-walled shoebox portrayed by the map may have been broadly right but was a gross simplification.
“Incredible,” he whispered out loud to no one but himself. Seven days might not be enough to take it all in.
“Look up,” said Nel, from close behind him.
He titled his head back and widened his eyes. The sight surrounded him, forcing him to stagger backward and turn one way and then another, then back again, all while keeping his head craned and eyes fixed on the spectacle above. He opened his mouth to speak, but the weight of jaw wouldn’t let him. The reaction could only be internal.
They all shut off their lights and gazed. A galaxy of points of soft light spanned and speckled the ceiling, bathing the rugged scape of lavacicles in midnight blue.
The same feelings that had overcome Taiyo as a boy when he’d first descended into a cave swept over him now. How could it be that such a grand alien world went, for the most part, unnoticed right beneath the world of everyday experience? And it was alien in far more than appearance. The very nature of a silent cave forced the explorer to recognize the role of the human heart, clenching and unclenching; and the work of the lungs, ballooning and deflating. It demanded a strong mind when one could not help but confront the body’s fragility. Perhaps that was the reason for the underworld’s dark place in the zeitgeist, and the reason it remained so unexplored.
Walter said, rather loudly, “Okay so, I’m thinking either T3 lured us into a uranium mine, or the roof has eyes.”
A third of the lights flickered or went out.
Taiyo made a low whistle and triggered the same effect.
“Bioluminescence,” whispered Kristen. “Some kind of glow-worm, probably.” Half the lights had now extinguished.
The noise of the AsCans entering the Asylum must have made the place go dark. Only now, with the return of silence, were the insects rekindling. For several minutes, not a whisper or rustle of a backpack broke the awe-inspired silence. Not even Ronin wanted to interrupt the spectacle.
But after giving peace its due, Taiyo ventured a whisper: “It looks like the planetarium.”
“It looks like the winter sky,” Nel whispered back.
“A planetarium with a million sharpened stone spears dangling over the audience,” said Ronin in his normal voice. Though the beams of their lights could barely reach the ceiling, Ronin was probably right about the ceiling being lined with lavacicles.
The ceiling went dark.
“4-D theatre,” said Ronin. The blurred halo of a headlamp swung about as he took off his backpack and dropped it on the ground. “Experience falling stars as triceratops did. The asteroid hits. Debris sprays the herd. And the triceratops is impaled by three horn-like knives of hardened lava. T-Rex chuckles at the irony, and then he too is struck dead. Tragic. Mesmerizing. Twelve bucks for adults, seven for kids and seniors.”
The ceiling stayed dark, hiding all trace that anything other than six astronaut candidates lived in the Asylum.
Kristen had finally caught her breath after the long crawl through the Wormhole. She said, “Back home we used to ride bikes up around Wildcat Canyon and play a game in one of the caves.” She zipped something up. “We’d go in until there wasn’t a speck of sunlight, then stop and walk twenty paces apart and take turns trying to sneak up on each other. If you got lucky, you’d hear the other one nudge a little rock, or stub her toe or something. Waiting there like that—just eaten up by the dark and the stillness … You really start to imagine stuff. Depending on where you let your imagination go, it can really be mind opening.”
“Or?” said Anton.
“Or terrifying.”
Taiyo smiled to himself. “Dark is just the absence of light. Silence is the absence of pressure waves,” he said. Feeling pretty smart, he added, “There’s no such substance in physics as silence.”
“But there is in psychology,” said Nel.
***
Anton swept his light across the contours of the ceiling and stopped on a clearing and depression in the field of upside down spikes. “Guys, I think I found the chimney,” he said.
There would be several discoveries that day, some more unnerving than others.
Taiyo walked forward, careful not to trip, to get under the opening in the ceiling for a better look but found his path blocked by what he first thought was a normal stalagmite. Instead of the expected mound made by dripping lava, his flashlight revealed a fat, waist-high cone of dried mud. The layers were of different shades of red, brown, black, or grey—a reflection of the Asylum’s geological history. The latest event, the mudslide that had swept through the forest above, had percolated down into the Asylum as if the chimney were a coffee maker.
That analogy didn’t quite work, though; as Taiyo found out when he knelt down to see if the layers stacked up at regular intervals. He felt and heard a crunch beneath the toe of his boot. He lit the area with his headlamp. A splash of adrenaline fluttered through his body when he bent forward to examine the find. He stood, backed up a step, and tilted his head to take it in from a different angle. “Hey, guys,” he said. “Everyone. You might want to come have a look at this.”
“Wait, don’t touch—” Walter called, but he was too late. Ronin had already swooped in and picked it up.
Ronin examined the artifact in front of his face. Like a ghostly apparition, his headlamp illuminated his own eyes and the empty sockets of the skull in his hand. Two sets of eyes appeared to be staring at one another.
Having a prominent head crest and long narrow beak, it could only be the skull of a cassowary. Ronin worked the jaw, flapping its mouth open and closed in an attempt to terrify Kristen, but the jaw broke off, and she told him not to tamper with it.
Taiyo surveyed the ground with his flashlight. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“Here’s a piece of the spine,” said Anton. He pointed with the toe of his boot.
“Could be from the tail of something else,” said Nel. She looked up, no doubt contemplating the animal’s death—a plummet from the chimney. A good ten paces away, Taiyo found a crushed ribcage and pelvis. The head must have flown off on impact.
“I got more bones over here,” Walter said flatly. He’d found the intact skeleton of some unfortunate little rodent poking out from the foot of the mound. Then Kristen stifled a throaty yelp and pointed out the skeleton of a meter-long reptile, its spine bent in several places at sharp angles.
Walter made a low whistle. “That’s one heck of an iguana,” he said.
“Monitor lizard,” Taiyo corrected. He didn’t mention his encounter back in the ladies’ room across the clearing from the bungalow.
Kristen took notes and photos of the remains to document the findings.
***
Taiyo wrapped his fingers around the textured grip of his flashlight and swept the beam side to side, slicing the darkness as he strayed into the void, alone, away from the others. They wanted to rest. He wanted to explore. Even on high power, the light only revealed a patch of black slightly farther away than the patch of black right in front of him.
After a minute of vigilant footfalls, he sped his pace, but to no faster than browsing speed. Though the Asylum had its hazards, it was no doubt safer to venture off on his own down there than it would’ve been up above in the rainforest. With a wall never more than a few hundred meters away, he couldn’t get lost. It didn’t feel that way, of course. In fact, he wasn’t sure his trajectory hadn’t begun to curve back around on itself.
He’d taken a wilderness survival course, and other clas
ses to aid his chances of clearing the initial astronaut selection screening, and learned people had a bias to curve right when they thought they were heading straight. If a lost person in the woods felt like they were going around in circles, they probably were. Now, with that in mind, he wondered if he was overcompensating. Curiosity got the best of him, and he checked his phone.
Yep. Too far to the left.
He shut off the flashlight and plugged it into his belt to refresh the battery. He’d use the headlamp instead.
The moments of silence between each trodden step were as stifling as the darkness. It was in those intermittent moments that Taiyo could hear his pulse cycling blood from his core to his extremities and reaching a bottleneck at his brainstem. The sounds of his inner gears grew as he ventured farther from the safety of the group.
He straightened his route and kept shuffling the treads of his boots across the pockmarked floor. The periphery of the light cone tunneled like headlights down a country road. Outside that periphery, so complete was the night, and so abrupt was the contrast between light and dark that Taiyo stopped and spent a long moment moving his hand in and out of the beam and marveling at its appearance and disappearance.
“Get a job, stoner,” he said to himself and chuckled. But the darkness and silence—though he could hear the others chatting in the distance—did have a way with the senses not unlike a mild psychedelic.
Another few steps and a chill washed over him; a gentle updraft, like the backs of fingernails across his neck. The breeze must have pinched through the Wormhole, some hundred meters to his back, and dissipated up to the ceiling to swirl and get lost among the stalactites. It made him notice how stagnant and dank the air in the Asylum felt and smelled. The atmosphere had been crawling on his skin since they arrived, greasing his neckline but failing to lubricate the chafing collar of the jumpsuit.
He lowered the zipper on the front, and then wiped his clammy hands on his sides and immediately wished he hadn’t. He’d have to wear the same outer jumpsuit another six nights and seven days. No laundry. No shower. The laundry from the ISS astronauts got so rank that they stuffed it into its own spacecraft along with the garbage and burned the whole thing up on reentry. Maybe BO was why space agencies didn’t worry about their coed crews getting frisky.
On this solo endeavor, Taiyo had remembered to plug the little sniffer device into the headphone jack of his phone. Aware of lurking tripping hazards, he stopped walking before opening the app for a look. He wondered how big a cloud of BO he’d have to cultivate before it affected the readings.
The app graphed a whole suite of atmospheric gasses, plus temperature, air pressure, humidity, and more. Now, the fluctuating bars and pie charts showed slightly higher concentrations of carbon dioxide, and a bit lower oxygen, compared with outside. This was to be expected in a barometric breather like the Asylum. Since the Kambi lava tube system had only two small entrances—the Wormhole and the chimney—the air pressure determined the bulk of the airflow and thermals. At 70 percent humidity and 27°C, the Asylum was cooler than the forest.
28°C had been the fixed summer room temperature in his office at Mitsubishi. 28°C was “eco-friendly,” they said, but it certainly had not been employee-friendly. If he hadn’t needed two years of industry experience to apply to be an astronaut, he would’ve walked off the job on day one.
A dozen meters before the wall, Taiyo shut off his light. He approached with sneaking steps like a kid playing ninja, and a spattering of soft blue lights greeted him at the base. The higher up, the more glow-worms there were, with the bulk of the colony painted across the ceiling. He leaned in close to one, just below eye level. Its glow divulged that it clung upside down to a knobby outcrop of rock. From the outcrop hung six or seven silky threads, each as long as Taiyo’s forearm, dotted with beads of moisture, and glistening blue in the light of the glow-worm’s backside.
He took a step back, cupped his elbow with one hand, and tapped his lips while he thought. Then he reached out with a finger. The glow-worm extinguished. He snuck farther down the wall and tried another glow-worm, which shut off before he even got to it. He put his palm over the bulb end of his flashlight, and under the gentle pink glow coming through his hand, he examined the threads. He touched one, and it stuck to his finger. He supposed they were a trap, like a spider web, but with the light acting as a lure.
He took more pictures and made notes, and it struck him that he might be the first to document the species. He noted some question: What do they eat? Any predators? Why bioluminescence? Can they fly? Are they edible? He deleted this last one. Not every thought needed to be reflected in the record.
As soon as he began to clear his throat, a blackness radiated out across the colony. For a second he felt guilty, as if he’d wiped them out, then he laughed at himself for being childish.
The headlamp now off, he took several steps away from the slick, uneven ground around the base of the wall, and he held out his phone for a pic to document the broader location. He stood there examining and enhancing the view through the screen until a contrast adjustment revealed something odd. He took the flashlight off his belt and shone it on the wall.
He approached with tentative steps, this time not for fear he’d disturb the object of his inquiry, but for fear the object might disturb him. Blurred against the contours of the wall were broad black and earthen outlines filled with blood-orange and tawny hues. The patterns and elongated shapes left no doubt the rock face had been somebody’s canvass.
What had the artists used for pigment?
Reluctantly, he moved closer, cringing at the noise made by loose rock beneath his footsteps as if the custodians of the site were there in the shadows, scowling at the arrogant foreigner making a tourist attraction of their inner sanctum. But he could not ignore such a find.
Atop the black sheen of the rock, a rust-colored outline bled into the pale-white hand. Taiyo dragged the light beam down the tips of the fingers, which were almost life-size but elongated compared to the open palm. Downward from the palm, the wrist ended abruptly at the crown of a skull. Unlike the hand, the skull had been cast in stark black and white. It’s oversized haunting black eye sockets stared back at Taiyo like a post-mortem portrait. He swallowed the lump at the back of his pallet and panned to his right. He landed on another skull sprouting another elongated hand, and then another and another. They were clustered, piled on top and in front of one another. Dozens of them. Both adult and child-size: a mound of hands reaching up and out through the tops of skulls.
He stood back, heart racing, and swept the light higher, across the fingers. He saw now, the tips were not stretched, but endowed with fingernails.
A deep crack scathed the wall, like a slash brought down from the midnight sky and halted by the floor. It bisected and skewed the heap of skulls and hands, meaning a seismic event had left its mark more recently than the artist.
To the right of the crack, the painting grew more chilling. Red extended from the fingernails, reaching higher up the wall than Taiyo’s light could reveal. He swept the beam sporadically, faster, like his pulse, and he found rows of handprints like ghostly people pushing from inside the bodies of others, from inside the rock, to get out. Some were with missing fingers, and some were only a wrist with a stub. They were overlapping, clawing at the wall, clambering over each other, and reaching to be free from the pit of skulls.
At the bottom, near the slime-coated buildup of rock at the base of the wall, the hands and skulls intermingled with the prints of nonhuman animals: hooves, paws, the daggered three-toed feet of cassowaries, and the webbed and clawed prints of crocodiles.
He shut off the flashlight and stuck it on his belt to recharge. For the moment, at least, he welcomed the darkness for cloaking the artwork, though he knew they would not vanish from his mind. Each breath he exhaled curled off the wall and back into his face. He took several steps backward before feeling composed enough to turn his back on the painting, switch on the flash
light, and head back to the others, thankful on the way for the sound of his own steps in his ears.
***
Taiyo returned to the others and found them in the southeast quadrant of the Asylum, opposite the cave art, scanning QR codes off the sides of NASA supply crates.
“Where the shit were you?” Ronin said to Taiyo, who’d jumped in to help inventory the supply cache.
Each of the 24 crates was stenciled with a reference number and its contents—food, water, toiletries, hammocks, batteries, tools, fresh underwear, a hand-cranked battery recharger, and more.
“Cartography,” he replied. That was technically true. An app T3 had installed used the sensors in his phone to take measurements as he walked—azimuth, inclination, and distance. Although, without the drone’s laser scanner he wasn’t likely to add much nuance to the 900 x 330 x 25 m already charted.
“Why’d they give us all this kerosene?” Anton asked.
“For something to numb the boredom with,” said Ronin. “I bet you find paper bags in the next crate.”
“No paper bags, but I found coffee,” Kristen called, her head half inside a crate. “It’s not instant, either.”
In spite of humankind’s modern advances, it still amused prison wardens and psych professors to strip their subjects of all sensory input. While decades of such institutional practices had proven effective in inducing a relentless cascade of agony and despair, and reducing people to fleshy puddles of mentally disintegrated goo, space agencies did not generally recognize the psychological entombment of would-be space travelers as a helpful training device. Sensory deprivation didn’t actually replicate the conditions of space travel, anyway. A long-duration mission would no doubt be cramped and monotonous, but unless something went catastrophically wrong, the astronauts would always have windows, lights, social interaction, exercise, communication with home, and some measure of Earthly comfort.
