The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  Bridget stopped, flopping onto her back to catch her breath as she clung to a smooth, knobbed stalagmite like a hand railing. “We should have caught up to her by now,” she wheezed, eyes darting for the next clue. “Charlie—how long were you out? How much of a head start did she have?”

  “I don’t know!” said Charlie, slowing to let the rest catch up again. “A few minutes maybe, a couple hours at most? Can you keep track of time down here? I sure fucking can’t!”

  “Think, Charlie,” ordered Joanne, her voice low and gravelly. “How long?”

  “I seriously don’t know,” answered Charlie, raising both arms in protest. “Two hours, max?”

  “Did she take a light with her?” asked Joanne. “A lantern, a headlamp, anything?”

  Charlie shook his head. “Shit,” he said, “I didn’t even think to check. She could have grabbed one, I guess.”

  Joanne sighed angrily and X’d a large chalk mark on the wall next to a forking tunnel, a smeared splatter of blood on the ground clearly indicating Isabelle’s route.

  “How is this my goddamn fault?” demanded Charlie. “I didn’t hear a thing, slept right through it. I ran out to tell you guys as soon as I came to, nearly knocked myself out in the process.”

  “You’re saying there were no signs whatsoever?” asked Joanne, making no effort to conceal her complete disbelief. “One minute she’s in a coma, the next she’s vanished?”

  “What, am I not allowed to sleep?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Joanne, raising her eyebrows. Whatever her assumption, she clearly now thought it confirmed.

  “She probably linked up with Logan,” muttered Charlie. “I bet they’re having a good laugh at all of us right now.”

  “Isabelle isn’t having a laugh,” said Bridget, almost shouting as she smacked the knobby stalagmite with her palm in frustration. “She has internal bleeding, broken bones, brain trauma, to say nothing of the infection that’s in the process of killing her. The very idea that she is even up and crawling is antithetical to everything I’ve ever been taught as a medical doctor.”

  Milo turned and reached to adjust the crusted, bloody sock Charlie had been holding up to his scalp. Charlie’s perfectly curated four days’ beard was now two weeks long, his $300 haircut caked with scabs and mud, faded tribal tattoo encircling a still-powerful bicep. Though the filthy sock was a poor choice of wound dressing, all of their clothing was now in an equal or worse state, the last of their bandages long since lost or discarded.

  “I think I have a concussion,” complained Charlie. “Everything hurts and I can’t think clearly.”

  “Could also be the hunger. Any nausea?” asked Bridget.

  “I guess,” admitted Charlie. “But there’s, like, nothing left to throw up.”

  “As much as I would like to chalk this up to Charlie’s normal grousing,” interrupted Joanne, “should we consider stopping to deal with his possible concussion?”

  “I’ll check him when we get back to camp,” grumbled the doctor. “Odds are he’s fine.”

  “I don’t feel fine,” Charlie complained. “Isn’t there some kind of treatment for this? Medical advice? Anything?”

  “You’re in luck,” said Bridget, turning from Charlie to track Isabelle’s trail down the next empty passageway. “At-home treatment for mild concussions means no food or water for twelve hours while you stay within a dark room. Also, Charlie shouldn’t think too hard about anything, but I can’t imagine that’s ever been a problem.”

  Joanne thought about that statement for a moment, genuine amusement spreading across her face. “If I may be so bold,” she said. “In terms of Charlie’s knock about the head, one might even describe our current predicament as somewhat . . . ideal.”

  Milo broke out into chuckles despite himself, as did Bridget. Joanne joined in, laughing much harder and longer than the other two.

  “It’s seriously not that funny, guys,” Charlie protested, rubbing his forehead. “This really hurts.”

  Joanne’s raucous, croaking laughter gained manic volume and intensity with every moment, continuing even after Milo and Bridget had fallen to worried silence. Milo stooped down, his light revealing Joanne’s tear-streaked face. Her laughter turned abruptly to choking, uncontrollable sobbing. But the tears weren’t wet saline—they were streaked with dark blood. She rubbed her face with her hands, staring at her red-stained fingers with horror. Fear turning to fury, she yanked her headlamp off her head and slammed it into the ground, hitting it again and again until the waning light flickered and died for the last time.

  “Oh shit,” said Bridget, eyes widening. “She’s infected!”

  “Just a second—” began Milo, but he was cut off by a wave of Joanne’s hand as she composed herself once again. Collapsing, the guide pointed at the passageway, wordlessly insisting the rest of the party continue without her. Unresponsive to Milo’s questions, Joanne buried her face between her knees and sobbed.

  “We’ve got to quarantine her, help her, something!” Milo said.

  “One problem at a time—we need to move now,” repeated Bridget, her voice harsh with urgency. “She’s not going anywhere without a light. Joanne—stay here, do not move. We will be back for you shortly.”

  As Bridget stood up, Joanne switched off her own lamp, conserving its precious battery power. The trio abandoned Joanne to the darkness, her eerie sobs echoing through the tunnels as they trudged ever deeper.

  Bridget had taken over the chalking regimen, the two men now trailing as she led. The clues grew fainter with every step, now little more than smudged bloody drag marks every dozen feet or the nearly imperceptible stain of unwashed fingers as they brushed against a white calcite wall. Their pace had long since slowed from the initial dogged sprint; Bridget and Milo no longer expecting to find Isabelle’s ghostly form around the next constricted passage or crawlway.

  They slowed their approach as the tunnel opened up, the trio sensing the vast void long before their flashlights first fell across the flooded grotto. The undiscovered antechamber resembled an ancient throne room, a hundred feet between encircling walls, the high ceiling rendered invisible by a clinging mist. Large enough for its own weather system, the cave’s trapped, stagnant humidity had condensed into wispy subterranean clouds.

  “What’s that sound?” asked Charlie. Straining his ears to listen, Milo soon heard it too—a distant dripping into hollow calcite flutes, the tinkling notes like music.

  “Anyone else feel like we’re intruding?” asked Bridget with a whisper.

  A chill went down Milo’s spine. “One can hardly blame the peoples who believed in the supernatural power of these caves.”

  “Like, cave spirits?” whispered Charlie, his eyes darting around.

  “Not spirits,” corrected Milo in a murmur. “Not even a spirit. More like . . . The Spirit.”

  “I think I found Isabelle,” Bridget whispered, her steady flashlight aimed squarely at a flowstone pedestal in the center of the chamber.

  Milo aimed his lamp in line with Bridget’s. What had first appeared to be a natural formation was instead a low stone platform supporting a crouched figure. Milo and Bridget tiptoed through the reflective, ankle-deep grotto waters, flanking from either side. Charlie hung back, still holding the dirty sock to his head as he stumbled forward.

  Milo forced himself to hold the flashlight steady as Bridget gingerly approached Isabelle’s motionless form. The producer sat in an upright position, her naked body a head-to-toe blotting of ugly bruises across pale, fragile skin. Knees to chest, her head was angled, eyes shut tight, mouth yawning like a silent scream.

  Bridget extended her fingers to check for a pulse. She barely needed to bother—Milo’s heightened senses detected no movement or heat radiating from Isabelle’s lifeless body.

  “She’s dead,” confirmed Bridget in a gravelly voice, withdrawing the two fingers from Isabelle’s carotid artery.

  “Why is she sitting like that?” whispered Charlie, ba
rely able to speak through his horror.

  Neither Bridget or Milo answered, instead panning their lights around Isabelle’s remains in search of any additional clues.

  “No headlamps or flashlight,” said Bridget. “She must have found her way here in the dark. We’ll do an inventory back at camp to be sure.”

  Milo shivered. To him, Isabelle’s nude body resembled a Buddhist mummy, a flesh-body bodhisattva, the incorrupt human form. Facing the end of their lives, devoted monks trained to die in meditation, frozen forever in lotus position as their followers preserved their bodies with clay, salt, and gold. Their uninterred remains would be publicly displayed as the ultimate expression of faith—or, to some, religious suicide.

  “She can’t be dead,” whispered Charlie, unable to tear his eyes away from her body. He collapsed to his knees in the water surrounding the pedestal, prostate before Isabelle.

  Bridget gently clasped Milo by the arm, pulling him aside. She spoke to him in low tones, shielding their conversation from Charlie.

  “This isn’t a coincidence,” she muttered. “We know where we’ve seen this exact pose before.”

  “The mummy of the Japanese caver,” confirmed Milo. “Why would they die in the same way?”

  “I know she’s alone in the dark, but Joanne is going to need to wait,” said Bridget. “We need to go back to the Japanese mummy, take a closer look. Something connects their two deaths—something we missed the first time.”

  CHAPTER 31:

  SECOND OPINION

  Bridget and Milo retreated from the grotto with solemn, deliberate steps. She stopped at every intersecting passageway, rubbing her own chalk marks into nothing with a chafed palm. She didn’t have to explain why, not to Milo. Unlike Duck, they’d left Isabelle’s body untouched, respecting her final gesture. But all the same, it was best to conceal the path to her remains.

  They’d left Charlie kneeling in the reflective waters at the edge of the natural pedestal. Milo had asked Charlie if he could find his own way back, if he had enough batteries, enough water. Milo didn’t ask him the only thing that really mattered—whether or not Charlie had enough strength left, if he cared enough to save himself, even if only for a few hours longer. Grief-stricken, Charlie didn’t answer, not even with a ghost of a nod. But Milo and Bridget couldn’t force him to come, nor could they stay.

  Joanne was gone by the time they reached the passageway where they’d abandoned her. There was no way to tell how long she’d sat and laughed or cried before vanishing, only a single bloody handprint remaining. Despite the darkness and her sickness, her steps still led in the direction of their emergency camp. She’d somehow found her way back without any light.

  Bridget and Milo soon found themselves within familiar passageways, their footsteps echoing as they ascended the anthill. Hours into the trek, they approached a section of incline coated with a thin layer of slippery flowstone. Milo recognized the pattern of fragile calcium clinging to the ceiling. A bit of additional crawling and he was once again suspended atop a land bridge, seeing again the muddy slide.

  Milo rolled and dropped over the side, enjoying the fraction of a second of freefall before his boots caught the sharply angled mud below. He slid down the slick surface through the field of broken calcite straws before skidding to a stop at the bottom.

  “Slow down,” ordered Bridget, easing down the same route after him on her butt. “You’ll break an ankle or worse.”

  “Sorry,” said Milo. He hadn’t even thought about the little stunt. Dropping off the side and sliding down felt so intuitive, as though he’d done it a thousand times before.

  Angling their twin headlamps downward, the pair again illuminated the hollow-eyed mummy in harsh yellow light. Milo felt almost amused at the fear he’d first felt staring at the shrunken, gray corpse.

  “I’m glad we didn’t bury him like Dale wanted,” said Bridget, scowling as she examined the body. “Digging him up again would have been a giant pain in the ass.”

  Milo looked over the mummy, then slowly scanned the length of the room. “So we made it back,” he finally said. “What are we missing?”

  “I don’t know,” Bridget answered, crossing her arms and pursing her lips. “I thought we searched the room pretty thoroughly the first time.”

  “Maybe an autopsy?” suggested Milo. “Could you do one if you had to?”

  Bridget thought for a few moments before answering him. “I could, but it wouldn’t be pretty,” she said. “Not sure what we’d learn given the advanced state of decay.”

  “How would we start?” asked Milo. “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  “Internal examination,” stated Bridget without hesitating. “Dissection of the chest, abdominal and pelvic organs. Maybe the skull as well.”

  Milo gave the doctor an apologetic smile. Horrified, Bridget glanced between him and the mummified corpse.

  “We weren’t speaking hypothetically, were we?” asked Bridget. “Because I’d really rather not.”

  Shrugging in resignation, Milo pulled a black garbage bag out of his pack. He used his knife to slice along the seams, spreading the full length of the plastic onto the cave floor like a thin, shimmery blanket before handing the blade to Bridget.

  “At least we’ll have a clean place to work.”

  “Nothing about this process will be clean,” responded Bridget. “But I’m not walking out of here empty-handed.”

  Sighing, Bridget squinted at the body before using both hands to lance the knife into the mummy’s left shoulder joint, severing tendons and fibrous muscle until the entire length of the arm fell free, the limb unclenching from the corpse’s knees for the first time in nearly eighty years. She repeated the action with the other arm before turning her attention to the bare pelvis. Grunting, she held the body for stability as she sawed through the thick groin tendons until the legs popped free with a sickening crack, exposing the pale, sunken abdomen.

  Milo and Bridget lowered the body face-up onto the plastic sheet, its arms and legs attached only by a few cracking sections of dry, leathery strips.

  “Don’t forget—this was your idea,” said Bridget, pointing to the now broken joints with Milo’s knife. He realized she’d noticed his uncomfortable expression.

  “I thought it’d be more . . . precise,” admitted Milo.

  “Anyone recovering his body would have chopped it up into pieces anyway,” explained Bridget. “So take comfort wherever you can get it. And believe me, I am not enjoying this either.”

  Steeling herself, Bridget carved a Y-shaped incision into the chest, beginning high on each shoulder, meeting just below the sternum and dragging the cut all the way down to the pubic bone.

  “They never do this right in the movies,” Bridget muttered. “Have to start the dissection above the armpits, or else the chest won’t open up properly.”

  Milo stifled a retch and turned away briefly.

  “You and me both,” agreed Bridget. “And by the way, my anatomy professor would freak if she saw the mess we’re making of this poor guy.”

  “I suppose we’re doing the best we can under the circumstances,” Milo responded between gags.

  Bridget just nodded as she peeled back the skin, revealing the yellowing, discolored ribs below. The sternum cartilage was almost completely gone, and the soft lower organs underneath were decayed to unrecognizability. Milo helped hold the body in place as Bridget individually broke the ribs on either side, yanking them back to expose the mummified internal organs of the upper torso.

  “I really wish I had gloves for this,” she complained as she wiped bone fragments off her hands onto her thick pants. “In fact—I wish I had an X-ray machine right now. Or better yet, an MRI. And a shower for afterward.”

  Milo winced as he examined the desecrated body. “The anthropologists are going to throw a shit fit when they see this,” he said. “I’m investing in pitchfork polish when we hit topside—those stocks are going to hit the roof.”

&n
bsp; Ignoring him, Bridget carefully prodded the body’s shriveled, blackened heart and collapsed lungs. She gently pulled back the paper-thin liver, exposing the stomach and withered intestines below.

  “I’m not seeing anything obvious,” said Bridget with another sigh. “We may not learn anything else without medical instrumentation and diagnostic tools.”

  “Was he starving?” asked Milo. “Could you tell us that, at least?”

  “Probably not,” admitted Bridget. “But I can tell you if he died with anything in his stomach.”

  Bridget reached into the mummy’s thorax, knuckles bumping against the sharp-ridged interior of the spinal cord, cradling the stomach in her hand from underneath. Holding the knife like a delicate paintbrush, she gently ran the blade down the length of the stomach twice, drawing an intersecting X. The flaps opened easily, the lining still flexible and pliant despite the many decades of decay.

  The headlamps couldn’t quite reach the interior of the organ, leaving Bridget to scrunch her face as she fished inside with bare fingertips. She withdrew two long, slender objects that almost resembled withered, jointed sticks.

  “What are those?” asked Milo, thoroughly mystified.

  Bridget tilted the find so Milo could see the instantly recognizable nailbeds at the ends—they were severed fingers.

  “Are those . . . ?” asked Milo, concern in his voice.

  “They are indeed,” Bridget confirmed. “His last meal was two human digits. Not his own of course; he wasn’t missing any.”

  “Holy shit,” whispered Milo, grimacing as his eyes took in the blackened skin, the ridged, yellowing nails still held tight within their beds.

  “They’re partially digested,” added Bridget. “Whoever killed him didn’t catch him in the act. At least a few hours transpired . . . between the . . . the, uh—”