The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  “Logan. He got pretty excited, said he had to zip out for a few minutes and that he’d be back shortly. Tried to take the book from me. I wouldn’t let him. At this point I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “I’ll read it,” said Milo as he reached out to take the book. Dale didn’t let it go, leaving Milo to struggle in an awkward tug-of-war until he finally looked up and locked eyes with Dale.

  “I’m not goddamn stupid,” said Dale, holding Milo’s attention hostage. “Should I think it’s just a coincidence that suddenly all of us have developed photographic memories at the same time? DeWar went on and on about memory anomalies too, at least until he stopped making any goddamn sense whatsoever. There’s something happening to us down here. Duck suddenly remembers the name of every one of his childhood classmates. Charlie looks like he’s quiet, but if you look closely you can see his lips moving. I caught him whispering—the man is going through every Godfather movie line by line. And did you see him move that boulder off Isabelle? It must have been eight hundred pounds if it was an ounce; I’ve never seen anything like that before. I don’t know Bridget as well as I’d like, but Joanne’s a million miles away and as quiet as I’ve ever seen her.”

  “And what do you remember?” whispered Milo. “Do you have it too?”

  Dale nodded as he let go of the journal, allowing Milo to take it and hold it close to his chest.

  “Yeah,” said Dale. “I have it too.”

  Milo sat in silence, watching Dale’s impassive face break down, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. Whatever he remembered affected him deeply.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” said Dale. “But what I do know is that there are things down here I’ve never seen before. Including ourselves. Three well-equipped expeditions went into this cavern, and as far as anybody knows, nobody made it back out. If Logan and Joanne are right, it’s now twice that somebody has tried to permanently seal up the entrance.”

  A chill went down Milo’s spine.

  “Whatever we’re up against, I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse,” continued Dale. “DeWar may have left the only warning of what’s to come.”

  Milo gingerly opened the front cover of the leather journal. He’d done well with the formerly waterlogged tome—the rough hemp pages opened easily, barely sticking to one another. He ran his fingers down the elegant insoluble inking of the interior inscription.

  JOURNAL OF LD. RILEY DEWAR

  SUBTERRANE EXPEDITION 1901

  Again, Milo shivered; he bridged the distance of more than a century with the simple brush of a finger, his mind swimming with the secrets that might lie within.

  “I’ll read it,” promised Milo.

  “Good man,” repeated Dale. “Read fast. I don’t know how much time we have left.”

  CHAPTER 26:

  REVELATIONS

  2,475 feet below the surface

  Milo carefully walked to the edge of the camp. Sitting down, he leaned against the stone cavern wall, again marveling at the great rock wedged between two chasm walls as though suspended between the pillars of the earth itself. He dangled one leg over the infinite black nothingness, headlamp tilted down toward the journal in his lap.

  Lord Riley DeWar was an engaging writer, comfortable in his trademark style of charming affability and genuine wonderment at the natural world. He and his twenty men began with a wagon train from the German-controlled colonial port of Dar es Salaam before journeying up the coast of Tanzania by local steamship. The young lord felt buoyed by both good luck and providence, his promised funding having materialized when needed, his men and horses vigorous and healthy. Arriving in the township of Tanga, DeWar directed his men inland toward Mount Kilimanjaro, the convoy trekking across the rolling Tanzanian plains.

  Milo read DeWar’s account of the cave for the first time, confirming Dale’s theory. Having learned about the remote cavern entrance several years prior from German ivory hunters, DeWar came to believe it was part of the extensive Amboni cave system, theorizing an underground highway hundreds of miles in length, and quite possibly a source of vast, untapped mineral wealth.

  The large party soon fell in with elephants, which DeWar described as “prodigious grey beasts who moved atop the savanna.” He and his men shot a great many for sport, abandoning their bodies to scavengers but burying their sawed-off ivory tusks in a hidden cache. Attempting to cook one of the smaller pachyderms, he reported finding the meat “most disagreeable” when compared to the abundant antelope. Despite his hunting habits, DeWar had a naturalist’s eye for animal life, describing and drawing multitudes of giraffe, ostrich, rhino, zebra, lion, and hyena. Often awestruck, DeWar would lapse into flowery biblical prose, describing the animal stocks as “King Solomon’s Menagerie,” an unspoiled Garden of Eden.

  After days of steady travel, DeWar arrived at the entrance of the cavern, a green, fertile opening surrounded by a massive confluence of elephant herds. There were too many to hunt; DeWar hid his men in trees and had them shoot off their rifles in quick succession. The frightened masses retreated, eventually allowing the explorers to approach the vast, yawning entrance.

  Milo smiled as he read the description of air movements at the cavern mouth; DeWar compared the gentle winds to the soft breath of a lover. But the lord was considerably less impressed with the aboriginal artworks along the gallery, describing “lowly, savage depictions of carnal knowledge, the natural beauty therein despoiled,” though he did begrudgingly admit to admiring the “properly bloody hunts.”

  The lord’s spelunking party soon reached the elephant graveyard. The earlier gunshots had startled one of the calves into the pit, where it “cried most piteously atop a pile of long-dead young” until cleanly speared through the heart by a porter.

  Overall, DeWar’s writings were a picture of barely restrained jubilance. As the rest of his party worked out a solution to reach the bottom of the main shaft, he patiently described a multitude of stalagmites, columns, and fossils, complete with hand-drawn images and cross-sections of crystals and calcite straws. He took a particular interest in the great colony of bats, remarking on their fine quality and the potential for lucrative guano mining.

  Milo couldn’t help but admire the long-lost lord. Like so many cavers, he too was a consummate equipment geek, devoting many pages to the impressive performance of his then-cutting-edge carbide headlamp and its gentle acetylene glow, though suggesting a multitude of improvements for future development.

  Drawings revealed how DeWar had devised his descent down the shaft, though his descriptions strangely omitted any mention of a cascading, thunderous waterfall. He’d ordered a wooden lowering platform built, with long ropes and winch measured precisely to the plumbed and surveyed depths and a counterweight made from net-suspended rocks. To DeWar, the machine was a “picture of efficiency,” allowing virtually every member of the party to reach the bottom save the three porters manning the station from up top.

  Observations dwindled as DeWar slowly normalized to the subterranean environment. Finding fewer and fewer novel geological features to comment upon, the journal lapsed into food consumption tables and the sort of petty grievances that plagued any expedition. As DeWar began the painfully slow exploration of the anthill, it became increasingly clear to Milo that the water level was much lower a century ago. Though DeWar’s servants found a natural spring from which to provision and wash, the diary described almost none of the pools or rivers that now snaked many sections of the cave.

  Writing less and less, DeWar would occasionally describe a fossil or a unique formation, sometimes wishing for a Darwin to accompany him or, as he put it, a “true scientific mind, for I am but a humble explorer.”

  Abruptly, there were no entries for three whole days, until DeWar picked up his journal again and began to scribble with the same vigorous, hurried style that characterized so much of his correspondence.

  “I have found it,” he wrote. “A great room in the furthest depths, beyond
the termination of a long, twisting passage. I found the most monumental of natural cathedrals, within which resides a glittering stone formation, a guardian with crystal sword carved by nature herself. Beneath this majestic wonder is a narrow tunnel from which emits the most magnificent golden light. Below a pagan altar is the aura of angels, buried under an avalanche of broken stone. I will not rest until I have seen the source and laid my eyes upon this lost golden room.”

  Milo realized he was breathing hard, nearly skipping over words in his haste to read further. He took a deep, long sigh, steeling himself as he rubbed his eyes to continue. There were no more entries for another week, then another explosion of ink-splattered, manic enthusiasm upon the page.

  “My men work in a joyous state of exaltation,” read the journal. “We are like madmen in our efforts to clear this damnable rubble. No sooner do we make progress than the stones shift, risking the burial of my servants and porters. You will not believe me, good reader, but I labor beside them untiringly. We have required no sleep, nor lantern, nor food, nor water, we are sustained by the ethereal manna of this golden light. With great ecstasy, we are all lost within our fondest memories; cleaved betwixt two worlds, one of goodly labor and the other of remembered pleasures.”

  Blinking his eyes, Milo read the final lines.

  “Perhaps the oracles of old have mistaken the word of God; whereas the heavenly kingdom slumbers in the cool earth beneath us; and the tortured souls of hell, should there be such a thing, tumble in the abyss of the black sky above. I think we break through tomorrow. I shall be the first man through the passage.”

  Excited, Milo quickly flipped to the next pages, but found only gibberish. DeWar had entirely changed his writing style, packing four times as many now-tiny words into the same page, every scrap and margin of the fragile paper written over twice, three times with splattered ink.

  Milo scratched his head, trying to come up with an explanation for the sudden turn to illegibility. His first thought was that he’d ruined the journal when trying to save it, that the ink had transferred from page to page. But the closer he looked, the more he could see the pattern—it was manic, yes, but intentional. Patterns slowly emerged; a kind of strange, brilliant logic and symmetry—

  “How are you doing?” Bridget spoke softly as she sat down on the ledge, dangling her legs beside his own.

  “I’m okay,” said Milo. His voice felt hoarse, his eyes irritated and tired. Even his neck hurt from cocking his head over the pages.

  “You’ve been here for hours,” said Bridget. “You make any progress?”

  Milo started to say something like no, it hasn’t been that long but checked his watch instead. Bridget was right—he’d been reading the journal for nearly four hours, though it felt like mere moments.

  “What’d you find?” asked Bridget. “Can I see?”

  “Sure,” said Milo, flipping the journal to one of the better drawings and passing it to her. Bridget admired the inked rendering of the giraffe, running her fingers down the corners of the page, careful not to smudge the antique image.

  “Any clues as to what happened to our predecessors?”

  Milo shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “DeWar made it a lot further into the cave than I would have thought. He and his men explored the main routes in the anthill all the way down to the cathedral chamber. The water levels were lower then—they didn’t have to swim, they just walked into the glowing room. They were trying to dig through the breakdown pile to the source of the light—but then the narrative abruptly ends.”

  “Ends?” said Bridget. “So what happened? Maybe a cave-in while they were digging?”

  “I misspoke,” said Milo, flipping to the gibberish pages and turning to show Bridget. “It doesn’t exactly end. The rest of the journal is completely filled with this stuff. Dale couldn’t figure it out either.”

  “That’s a little disconcerting,” said Bridget, sucking in a sharp breath. “Did DeWar go nuts?”

  “Maybe,” said Milo. “That’s what Dale wants to know. But I’m not so sure—I’m starting to see the underlying order to everything he wrote. At first, none of the scribblings made sense; but the longer I look, the more I can pick out.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like only a fraction of it is in English. The rest is a complete hodgepodge of at least six languages that I recognize, maybe more. The sentence structure is completely experimental; he used whatever convention or word suited him at the moment. It’s as though he picked the best word or taxonomy for each concept he’s trying to relate.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Bridget. “Six languages? But why?”

  “Let me put it another way,” said Milo. “You know how some words simply don’t translate to any other language? Like schadenfreude, German for taking pleasure in another’s pain. No other language possesses the term, they only borrow it.”

  “Oh,” said Bridget. “Like je ne sais quoi in French.”

  “Exactly,” said Milo. “But the same goes for entire academic fields . . . chemistry, biology, physics, history, linguistics, and so forth. There are always words originating from a particular language or discipline that address a concept better than any others. And then on top of that, DeWar has reverted to a totally nonlinear sentence structure and whole sections with only mathematical formulas. I can’t even get the gist of it.”

  “It sounds as though he were trying to rewrite the English language,” said Bridget, confusion filling her voice.

  “Not just the English language,” said Milo, closing the journal to put it away. “All languages. And it wasn’t a rewriting. It was almost more like a . . . grand unification.”

  “Is this what’s next for us?” asked Bridget. “Are we going to start speaking in formulas? Lose our minds?”

  Milo looked down past his feet, into the dark. Only the echoing nothingness below. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’ll have to ask Logan what he thinks. He’s better with languages than me . . . maybe he has some insight. Is he back yet?”

  “No,” said Bridget, swiveling around to double check. “He’s still gone. Everybody else too; they’re probably all sulking in their respective corners.”

  “I guess we’ll see what they look like when they come back,” said Milo. “Joanne was pretty pissed.”

  “Well, I hardly blame her,” said Bridget with a shrug. “On a separate note, have you seen the blood pressure cuff? It’s about time for another reading.”

  “No,” said Milo. “But I can look around. Any idea where it ended up?”

  “Couldn’t say,” said Bridget. “But Logan’s stuff might be a good place to start.”

  Spontaneously, Milo leaned over and kissed Bridget directly on the top of her head, giving her shoulders a tiny reassuring squeeze. She felt thinner than he remembered, her muscles tense and knotted, betraying the stress behind her smile. Embarrassed, Bridget snuck a look over one shoulder to make sure nobody had seen the gesture.

  Without another moment wasted, Milo stood up and walked over to Logan’s area, not much more than an open backpack with a thin sleeping pad beside it. The search of the backpack revealed little more than still-soggy socks, a few pieces of climbing equipment, and a Tupperware container full of individually bagged rock samples.

  Sighing, Milo sat down heavily on the sleeping pad, almost losing his balance as the camping mat slid backward. He saw a flash of smudged white chalk out of the corner of his eye. When he looked down, he saw part of the letter “D” peeking out from behind the pad. Drawing himself up to his knees, Milo lifted it up to see the rest of Logan’s hidden message.

  PART 3:

  SYNTHESIS

  Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.

  —GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL (1770–1831)

  CHAPTER 27:

  SEARCH

  Depth unknown

  Milo pressed his face against the cool cavern wall, ope
n mouth seeking a thin trickle of water as it dripped down the eroded stones. His mud-encrusted scalp brushed against the crumbling rocks; he’d abandoned his helmet days ago. He tasted bitter clay as the water ran across his chapped lips and dry tongue, slowly filling his mouth. Milo forced himself to swallow, his throat tight against the gritty liquid. A second sip, and Milo swished and spat a few sandy particles onto the passage floor.

  The tunnel was squat and winding, white calcite cracking beneath his feet. A low ceiling with bulging stalactites hung inches above his head. He could only see a few dozen feet in each direction before the next tight turn erased his sightline. Altogether, it would have been quite forgettable if not for Milo’s maddeningly unshakable memory.

  Swaying from side to side with exhaustion, Milo allowed himself to consider the tiny divot his mouth left in the muddy wall. His lips had irreparably altered the course of the drip, and now a single teardrop of moisture collected grains of dust as it traced a new line for the first time in a hundred thousand years or more. Perhaps an eon from now, or ten, or a hundred, a vast new void would be born from the newly eroding earth, unimaginable in dimension.

  A young professor drinks from a crack in a subterranean wall.

  A butterfly flaps its wings.

  A woman is slowly dying.

  Nothing changed. Or everything did. Who could say anymore?

  Bridget snuck a glance at Milo before mimicking the action, the surgeon pressing her soft lips against the wall to drink. Milo’s attention drifted, his mind unable to focus. It’d been so many days since he’d eaten that he no longer felt hungry, just lightheaded and listless, every footstep requiring total force of will, every breath a conscious directive barked at his atrophied body. The search party had abandoned their backpacks and water bottles, no longer able to trek under even the slightest weight. They were now nomads, reliant on the scarce oases of the cavern.

  “I’d do anything for a Corona right now,” said Duck. He’d stopped to watched Bridget sip at the trickle of water. “I’d literally drink that sweet amber nectar out of a hobo’s ass crack.”