“Look there.” Gavin pointed.
An opening lay shadowed against the relentless white. It appeared to be a cave of some kind. A fissure in the rock, heading into darkness. Snow whipped up again, the blizzard beginning to gain a second wind.
“It’s shelter, at least,” Michael said.
The two men headed into the cave, wincing against the renewed gale and blustering snow. Once they entered the blessed safety, still and quiet at last, Michael realized his exhaustion again. His legs ached, his toes burned with possible frostbite, his whole body trembled with fatigue. He sat down to rest, about to call his friend to rest beside him. But Gavin was clearly renewed, fueled by wonder at the bizarre discovery.
“This goes deeper,” he said, taking a few steps into the darkness. He pulled out a flashlight, the remarkable portable device invented by David Misell only a dozen or so years previously, and shined it down the length of the shadowed passage. “A long way deeper!”
Sighing, Michael hauled himself back to his feet and followed. The last thing they needed was for the two of them to become separated. “We’ll check a little way, but not too far,” he said. “We can come back properly equipped once we’ve rejoined the rest of the team.”
They wound deeper into the cave as it gradually sloped downward. As they descended, it grew warmer. At first Michael thought it was simply a matter of getting out of the wind, but the rise in temperature seemed greater than that would account for. Was it too much to hope that the theory about volcanic vents might hold true? That it might be this easy to prove?
“You feel that?” he asked. “The warmth?”
Gavin came to a sudden halt. “Look there.”
It took Michael a few seconds to accept what he was seeing. Lines had been carved into the frost-encrusted rock up ahead.
“It looks like cave paintings,” Gavin said.
“Pictographs,” Michael corrected, not sure he believed it even though he saw quite clearly the distinct designs. “It almost resembles language of some kind.”
They moved closer, Gavin playing his flashlight beam slowly left and right. “It’s remarkable. But who…?”
With a crack and a sudden, stomach-churning lurch, the floor gave way beneath them. They half-tumbled, half-slid in the darkness, Gavin’s flashlight flying free from his grasp and blinking out as it bounced end over end.
In the sudden blackness, Michael lost all sense of time and distance. He wondered briefly if perhaps they’d fall into darkness forever, then he slammed into something unforgiving and everything went black.
As consciousness slowly returned, bringing with it a pounding headache, Michael pulled himself into a sitting position. He swallowed down a wave of nausea. He scanned his surroundings and his eyes fell on Gavin.
His companion spun around, excitement clear in his wide eyes and eager grin. “You’re awake! Good to have you back.”
They were in a massive cavern, dark gray rock curving up and away from them. Michael realized he was seeing that without the aid of flashlights. “Why can I see?” His voice was a little slurred, as though he were drunk. His words blared in his ears like a trumpet. He pressed his fingers to his temples and let out a low groan. He felt hungover, and wished he were inebriated instead. He probably had a concussion. Not good. Not good at all.
“Yes, it’s this odd growth on the walls.”
Michael blinked, his vision slowly regaining a sharper focus. Glowing softly green, vein-like striations wound across the cavern like twisting vines. Michael almost imagined the weak light pulsing, as if blood pumped through from some distant, subterranean beating heart. Deposits of a strange, neon green crystalline substance punctuated the walls between the vines.
Michael pulled himself to his feet, ignoring the headache and nausea, the incredible sights before him taking over his thoughts. He looked closer, and saw the veins appeared to be organic, perhaps some kind of lichen or mold. It was pliant beneath his finger as he pressed it and his glove came away with a pale green luminescence that quickly faded. He broke off a small protuberance of rock containing a similarly-glowing piece of the crystal. It took some little effort, but snapped after he applied strong leverage with his gloved fingers. Using his teeth, he pulled the glove from his other hand and dug into the deep pocket of his jacket for a small sample jar no bigger than a standard test tube. He carried half a dozen, thankfully unbroken from the fall. He put the sliver of rock and crystal inside and screwed the lid back on tightly, then returned the slim jar to his pocket.
As he tugged his glove back on, they began to explore further. The space was huge, stalactites extending down from above, gently dripping, the water echoing quietly as it fell. They made their way around large stalagmites, stepped over small pools of gathered water that was not frozen. Realizing that, Michael checked and discovered no frosty patches on the walls. The temperature in the place obviously remained above freezing, much warmer than the many degrees below zero outside. He paused to take a sample of the water.
As they resumed their trek, a feeling of wrongness crept over him. He felt like an intruder in an alien world. Everything around him was gently lit by the glowing pale green of the viney growths, the shadows where the light didn’t reach inky black in contrast.
On the far side of the cavern, they found a strange door. It was a solid slab of shiny black rock, like a kind of obsidian, carved with a strange script unlike anything Michael had ever seen. No, scratch that. Unlike anything he had seen except the markings in the cave before they fell. He’d only had a brief look at the pictographs up above, but he was certain they strongly resembled the marks he now inspected. And it was far too neat to be anything but deliberately fashioned. It had to be language. “This isn’t possible,” he whispered.
“And yet here we are,” Gavin said. His excitement had given way to trepidation, the concern clear in his voice.
Michael was glad to hear the fear there, because he thought they should both be alarmed by these discoveries. As he stared at the door, the sense of wrongness, of alien-ness, grew stronger.
“How can there be a door down here, far beneath the surface of the Antarctic?” Michael asked. “How far did we fall? It seemed like a long way.”
Gavin didn’t answer, just ran his gloved fingers over the carved symbols.
“We should go back to where we fell in,” Michael said. “Try to climb our way back up and find the others. Then we can return and explore properly.”
Again, Gavin said nothing. Then he put both hands to the door and leaned his weight into it.
“What are you doing?”
But Gavin gave no indication he was even aware of Michael’s presence. He threw his shoulder against the door. With a loud scraping, it slid open. Gavin headed through. Michael called for him to come back, but was again ignored. Hardly any of the glowing crystal or vines lit the passage beyond, and Gavin slowly vanished into blackness.
Biting down his annoyance, Michael followed. Perhaps it was simple fear, or maybe the recent blow to the head, but the darkness seemed alive, as though it were squeezing him. “Gavin!” Michael called, but felt unable to raise his voice to a shout. He saw movement up ahead. “Gavin,” he said again, grabbing at his friend’s coat, but Gavin jerked his arm free and kept going.
“What’s got into you, man?” Michael said. He took a step to follow, then heard a soft whick. Warm wetness covered his face in a sudden spray and he tasted a metallic flavor that could only be blood. Bladder loosening, spreading warmth down his leg, he stumbled back, patting himself all over to be sure he wasn’t injured. As he moved quickly backward, returning to the low light of the glowing cavern, he saw a stone the size of a bowling ball bounding toward him from out of the darkness. As the stone rolled over, he saw it wore Gavin’s face. Not a stone at all, but Gavin’s head, neatly separated from the rest of him.