The Maw

by Taylor Zajonc

  Bridget closed her eyes and turned from him, hiding her face. “Yes,” she finally said in a very small voice. “I’d turn around if it meant I could keep you this time.”

  Milo grasped Bridget with both arms, rocking her, holding her so tightly he thought they might both burst. “Never again,” he swore. “I’ll never take another step into the unknown without you—we have to see this through together.”

  Dale cleared his throat, tears in his eyes as he stood on the edge of the island. He hadn’t so much as unbuttoned his shirt.

  “You’re not coming?” asked Bridget.

  Dale just shook his head. “I don’t have a chance at surviving that swim, not with the busted wrist. I’ll wait for you as long as I can, and then I’m going to push for the surface, alone if I have to. All I can do is wish you both Godspeed. Please don’t make me leave without you.”

  Bridget nodded, her face buried in Milo’s chest. Together, the pair began to breathe faster and faster, hyper-oxygenating their blood in preparation for the final dive. Pulling away, they abandoned the last of their clothes as Milo counted down.

  “On three,” he whispered. “One . . . two . . . three.”

  Milo and Bridget leapt from the rocks and into the water, Dale’s still figure disappearing into the froth of bubbles behind them. Kicking hard, Milo passed ten feet, twenty, pinching his nose to equalize his ears. By thirty feet, his lungs were bursting within his pain-wracked chest, his pulse pounding in his ears like hammer.

  Forty feet under the surface of the black lake, Milo’s fingers touched the bottom. He pulled himself across the broken, jagged rocks, wriggling into the biggest gap between them, his body scratched and dragging against the stones, the golden light now blinding.

  Palm grasping for a handhold, Milo felt a sudden slick softness. He yanked back a fistful of the strange texture. Silhouetted by the light, the dark shape before him suddenly twitched, blocking his path as it rotated to reveal a thick human body. Milo panicked, irreplaceable bubbles running from his mouth as Dr. Logan Flowers’s swollen, wide-eyed face turned toward him.

  Desperate hands clawed across his back—Bridget had made her way into the passage behind him. Unable to turn around, he shoved himself further forward, toward the dead man. He’d read drowned cavers were always stuck in the tightest, worst sections, impossible to extract. Trapped, Logan’s corpse now blocked the only path.

  Summoning all his strength, Milo grasped Logan’s torso underneath the armpits, pulling with all his might. He could see it now—the geologist’s limp arm caught between two rocks, rending his entire body immovable. Bracing his legs, Milo bubbled in frustration as he pulled again, air streaming between gritted teeth, joints popping, spine exploding in pain. With a dull pop, Logan’s bloated arm separated at the shoulder, ripping free in a brown gout of liquid decomposition. The path unblocked, Milo slithered through, Bridget close behind.

  The pair burst into a flooded corridor, finally free of the rocky debris pile. Clinging to the ceiling, they pushed themselves along the hundred-foot length, gaining speed with every desperate thrust.

  And then they were clear of the rocks and into open waters, the blinding illumination their only guide. The last of his dark vision closing, Milo involuntarily sucked in little gasps of water as he kicked and clawed for air, making for the surface.

  With one final push, Milo broke the waters, emerging into a world of pure golden light.

  PART 4:

  GENESIS

  And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkness was upon the face of the deepe.

  —GENESIS 1:2 (KJV, 1611)

  CHAPTER 37:

  EGO DEATH

  Depth unknown

  Milo burst through the glassy surface and into a world of golden light, his convulsing lungs sucking air in ragged gulps. He dug his fingers into the nearest muddy wall but was ripped away, a roaring current dragging his struggling body deeper into the cave. Gritty, sulfuric droplets burned in his eyes as the blinding cavern around him slowly came into focus. But he understood nothing of what he saw—the insanity had taken hold, no mere giddiness but an explosion of unquantifiable ecstasy and the joyful annihilation of his consciousness. The river and tunnel swirled in a kaleidoscope, the lenses of his eyes focusing, irises contracting, retinal cells capturing photons, optic nerve dancing with electrical impulse, brain awash with neurochemicals, but his cognitive ability to perceive had evaporated.

  Vanishing into his own mind, Milo struggled to tread water against the current. His pulse pounded as he fought to maintain control, the golden light penetrating his mind like a thousand jagged needles. A smothering blackness erupted from within, paralyzing his limbs and tearing away all sensation. Unable to see Bridget or process the avalanche of psychedelia, Milo’s eyes rolled up into his head as his skin erupted in fiery pain. Throat closing, he could not even scream as he lost his final connection to thrashing arms and twitching legs, the fast-moving waters pulling him beneath the surface once more.

  It was as though he’d pulled a giant red lever that caused the entire universe to wink out all at once, a Star Trek transporter beam pulling him apart cell by cell, every neuron in his brain firing independently of the whole, his mind’s eye obscured within a surging gray-matter electrical storm.

  Convulsed in seizure, Milo rocketed over the crest of a massive subterranean waterfall and plummeted into the churning froth below.

  CHAPTER 38:

  REBIRTH

  Milo’s mind slowly stirred within his motionless body. He was no longer drifting in a fever-dream of formless void; he was underwater, trapped beneath the outwash of the churning underground waterfall. Panic gripped him—he couldn’t move his paralyzed arms and legs. Pressure crushed his chest as he struggled to swim for the surface, only managing shuddering twitches. Screaming within the confines of his own skull, Milo forced nerve signals to his useless limbs, begging them to obey his command. His body jolted at first, then thrashed, muscles and mind joining to fight the paralysis. One hand responded, then the other, his arms and legs haltingly falling to his will.

  Swimming upward through the froth of bubbles, Milo slipped past a dark human form suspended in the white, swirling waters. Bridget’s unresponsive body floated facedown, still lost within her unconsciousness. He wrapped his numb arms around her waist as he kicked hard, desperately pushing the pair toward the surface. They burst free of the waters, and Milo dragged her limp body from the underground river and onto a low, sandy shore.

  Bending down, he pressed his ear against her mouth, listening for breath, but heard nothing.

  He drew himself to his knees and pounded the doctor’s chest with both fists until she finally gasped, tilted her head to one side, and threw up into the sand.

  Milo and Bridget lay on the low shoreline, staring at the white calcite walls of an immense limestone cavern as gentle waves lapped their feet. The waterfall they’d fallen over cascaded off a thirty-foot ledge and into the pool beside them. Time passed like a dream as Milo and Bridget rested, their sinewy, muscled forms glowing under the illumination of gathering golden ropes.

  The curving walls above them were a rainbow of fossil layers, the light playing against stony Cambrian trilobites—horseshoe crabs—that had scuttled the ocean floor a half-billion years previous. Above the crabs were beautiful spiral-shelled nautilus, Silurian-period sea scorpions, primordial fish, and brachiopods, the final ceiling layer impregnated with the primitive four-footed amphibious reptiles of the late Paleozoic era.

  The source of the light was a curious thing indeed, a soft emanation from wet, flowing tentacles that clung to the rocky ceiling like leafless vines. The mold-like growths followed the highest arcs of the chambers, extruding in every direction like a fibrous root system, splitting and forking over and over again until the spreading fingers were no thicker than threads.

  Milo and Bridget had surfaced not into another chamber, but another world. In proportionality, the expanse perhaps resembled the altar-
room, wide and circular with an island at the center, waters lapping at the sides. But the scale was not the same by any measure, stretching more than a mile in each direction, the outer perimeter lost to a low, distant haze. The waters held within the chamber were not a pond or even a lake, but a veritable sea. Thick golden ropes emerged from every feeding tributary, clinging to the ceiling as they met at the highest point above the central island, binding together to become a massive, drooping nuclei a hundred and fifty feet across, the heart of gold illuminating the subterranean world like a newborn sun.

  Though three thousand feet below grassy savanna and a dozen horizontal miles from the entrance, the world around them was profoundly, inescapably thick with life. Smelling the slight tinge of sulfur in the air, Milo could feel the warmth of heat-bearing geothermal vents from deep below the enclosed sea, feeding the cavern with warmth. Long, translucent tubeworms gently danced in the flow of the gritty, mineral-rich waters alongside thick-shelled white clams, the organisms clinging to the surface of every submerged rock. Pale snails climbed waving tubeworms as ancient shrimp and primitive, translucent octopi darted to shelter before every footfall. On the walls and ceiling, colonies of flightless albino locusts crawled in swarms, feeding upon the glowing molds. Milo concentrated, turning his focused gaze to one new species at a time, using the fleeting moments to memorize their alien features.

  Bridget and Milo watched the teeming life for what felt like hours, their bodies slowly recovering from near-drowning. Milo looked to Bridget and then himself. They’d become their most ancient human forms, at least in a sense. Unclothed, the two had shed everything but the most necessary physiology, their bodies honed and hardened into lean, natural muscle.

  Bridget sat up and reached over, gently plucking one of the flightless locusts from the wall. The doctor turned the insect over in her fingers, considering the organism before carefully placing it into her mouth, crunching it beneath her teeth, and swallowing. She selected a second locust from the wall and handed it to Milo. Trapped between thumb and forefinger, the insect squirmed to escape his grasp. He bit the locust in half, the sweet, bitter innards bursting as he crushed the hard outer shell. The taste was mild and the texture ultimately palatable; and soon he found himself harvesting a second and a third, his contracted stomach slowly filling with still-twitching proteins.

  Milo asked Bridget how long they’d rested upon the shores. The words came out as a jumble of languages and equations.

  But Bridget understood him. And she answered in her own string of elegant numbers, her dynamic, living cipher beautiful in its simplicity. Naked of equipment and without the stellar sky as timekeeper, she’d kept track of the interminable hours by heartbeat alone. But what other chronometer could there be in this lost world? Milo instinctually knew that within the chamber they could eat when hungry, sleep when tired, make love upon mutual desire, beholden only to ancient rhythms. Even his memories were no longer a flood; they were now crystalized, organized, each at easy and immediate reach, as though he could pluck and examine a single remembrance like a shell from the sand.

  Milo spoke about the golden arachnocampa luminosa glowworms, a form of gnat found within the caves of New Zealand and Australia. Their tiny, pinpricked bioluminescence turned ceilings into starry blue constellations within the deep. He asked Bridget, “could the root-like formations be some distant, primordial relative of the glowworm?”

  Bridget contradicted him in a flowing, elegant thesis derived from a dozen tongues and pure mathematics. The golden ropes above them were no scattered insects; they were long, branching filamentous structures of colonized organisms, perhaps like the bioluminescent foxfire of ancient European forests. The strange, sunless ecosystem was a sort of subterranean refuge, a relic population left behind by the epochal retreat of the seas and the changing climate above. As mountaintops above desert plains become “sky islands,” preserving colonies of tall trees and alpine flowers from ages past, the cave sheltered the remnants of a distant era, a clockwork ecosystem set into motion tens of millions of years before a single tumbling meteor changed the planet forever. So too had the endless network of golden roots once spread throughout the cave, perhaps once kissing the shadow of the distant entrance before its long retreat into the deep.

  Together, Bridget and Milo stood and walked the first stretch of the immense shoreline of the great chamber, their bodies bathed in the light of the second sun. The ecstasy threatened to take hold again, their minds pulsating with new intensity as they came across the scattered bones of two dozen men amid the fragments of a makeshift camp. Flesh stripped from skeleton, tools and fabrics reduced to nothing, Milo saw little more among the many bones than the shards of broken eyeglasses, the rusted imprint of an iron spike, and the decaying leather of a hobnail boot—at long last, the remains of Lord Riley DeWar’s lost expedition.

  Milo turned to Bridget and—in the bath of light and ecstasy, and without words—begged her for logic, for answers among the mystery.

  In response, Bridget silently extended a single finger toward the lonely subterranean island below the second sun.

  With the pulsing, swirling ecstasy once more growing within him, Milo could no longer see the golden underground world nor Bridget beside him; he could only feel the cool water against his naked skin as existence itself heaved and cracked. And yet he swam, each moment threatening to tear him from the waters and cast him again into the universe-before, the realm of pure void.

  His senses fading into the disintegrating reality, Milo’s fingers brushed sand once more. Trembling, he realized he’d reached the shore of the tiny island.

  Milo slowly drew himself to his feet in the ankle-deep waters surrounding the archipelago. His perception had shrunk to virtually nothing, seeing neither the distant chamber walls nor the iridescent globe above. All he could see was Bridget and a single calcified human skeleton slumped within a throne of hand-hewed stone—Lord Riley DeWar.

  Bridget spoke first, struggling to speak with simplicity. “He looks so lonely.”

  “The last living member of his expedition,” said Milo. “The loneliest man on earth.”

  The doctor looked to the stone island, to the crude rocky seat, to the skeleton. “I don’t see any broken bones, no obvious trauma. There’s enough food and water in this chamber to last lifetimes. Why did he die down here? Why didn’t he just . . . go home?”

  “I don’t know,” said Milo, his mind already soaking in clues from his surroundings, subconscious churning as it evaluated every inch of the throne and body from a thousand perspectives, ringing voices and images erupting in beautiful symphony within his mind. He dropped to his knees and brushed away at the tips of DeWar’s skeletonized fingers, revealing faint lines of the explorer’s careful script scratched into the stone itself.

  AND THE EYES OF THEM BOTH WERE OPENED.

  “Both?” asked Bridget. “There’s only one body here.”

  “He’s not speaking about himself,” said Milo. “It’s from Genesis. Chapter Three, the story of Eve and the tree of knowledge. She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened.”

  “It’s reductive,” asserted Bridget, narrowing her eyes. “He encountered something he couldn’t possibly understand, so he retreats to religious allegory?”

  “Nothing DeWar did in his final hours was reductive,” whispered Milo. “We know this from his journal. I think the inscription is the same shorthand he used for everything—finding expedient language for the grandest of concepts. Nothing we’ve seen is an accident, is it? The cave paintings—the elephant graveyard—the ancient mausoleum—every human-made marking, every artifact. We’re just miles from Olduvai Gorge of the Great Rift Valley—”

  “The Cradle of Humankind,” Bridget confirmed. “The greatest paleoanthropological site on the planet. DeWar had the chance to scrawl one final insight into the stone—and he chose this. Why?”

  Milo ope
ned his mind, the sudden onslaught of imagery driving him to his knees once more, ears ringing and vision overwhelmed with subconscious deduction. He struggled to maintain hold of the pictures rushing through his mind, the flashes of the hilltop grasses over the vast Tanzanian savanna and oasis from his dreams.

  “Milo!” exclaimed Bridget.

  “I can almost see it,” gasped Milo, holding his face in his hands. “The moment DeWar discovered—the moment when she found the fruit.”

  “She?”

  “Eve—but not our Eve, not the religious construct. The Eve, the early hominid that found this cavern. That’s what DeWar wanted us to know. This cave isn’t the cradle of humanity—it’s the womb.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Imagine—the first woman standing transfixed before a long, branching golden tendril clinging to the ceiling.”

  “Back when the golden organism claimed the entire cavern,” said Bridget. “When it reached all the way to the original entrance.”

  “She reaches up to the stone ceiling and plucks a glowing nodule from the vine. She holds it to her face as a mist of spores drift from the globe, entering her mouth and nose. She collapses, eyes dilated, trembling in ecstasy.”

  “The psychedelia would have been overwhelming,”

  “But only at first. The neural pathways of her mind struggle to rewrite themselves, somehow cope with the sensory overload—just as ours have. Her gifts were the same as ours—memory, deduction, even mental mastery of the physical self. Only hers were given to an ancient mind.”

  “An ancient mind now capable of abstract thought—of language, of medicine. And thus homo became homo sapiens, ape becoming thinking ape,” whispered Bridget. “Apex predator of every ecosystem on the planet.”