The Cavern Read online

  “Think I need a beer after that. Do you want one?”

  Ellie’s eyes were already half closed, footsteps leaden as she walked across the bar from the front door. She shook her head in the negative. “Nah, all I want is a shower then I’m calling it a night.” She made a bee-line for the stairs. “Try not to wake me when you come up.”

  With approval finally gained to access the cave site, the group had used the remainder of the afternoon to prepare for a descent the following day. They’d hit the job at full pace, completing what would have usually taken a full day in less than four hours. After losing so much time already, each of the crew was desperate to begin the exploration. Sam had helped to cart gear out to the farm and set up a base of operation near the sink hole, happy to take direction on what needed to be done. They’d left the majority of their gear on site, stored inside a large canvas tent. As the sun started to set, Aaron had eventually called a stop.

  The plan was to be on site again at first light, and that meant Ellie would have her alarm set for 4.30AM. With such an early start, Sam wanted to get as many hours of sleep as possible. But, despite exhaustion, he was wide awake. The thought of going deep underground on his first caving expedition had left a slight buzz of anxiety, mixed with excitement. In his current state, he knew he’d be wide awake for hours while Ellie slept like the dead. What he needed was a night-cap to help slow him down a little. But Jack was nowhere to be seen.

  Sam leant forward, craning his neck each way to see behind the bar.

  “I’m over here,” said a low voice from behind. Sam turned towards the sound, and spotted the barman slouched on a chair in the far corner. With few lights on, Sam had missed where he sat in the shadows.

  “Grab yourself a glass,” he said, holding up a bottle of whisky by the neck. “You can join me in a drink.”

  Sam leant over the bar and nabbed a tumbler from one of the wire trays, then wandered over to Jack and took a seat at the table opposite. The barman sloshed him a few fingers of amber liquid, leaving a small puddle that soaked into the cardboard coaster.

  “I hate drinking alone. Silence lets the memories crowd in.”

  Sam realised that the barman was staring at the different photos from the Vietnam War as he drank. Jack was starting to slur his words and looked a little worse for wear, hair unkempt and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. The bottle of Johnnie Walker Black was half empty, with the missing volume more likely than not in the barman’s stomach. Sam took a sip, rolling the neat spirit around his mouth.

  “I heard you lot went down one of the mines today,” said Jack, shaking his head in disappointment. “When are you going to stop mucking around underground and just get out of town?”

  Sam paused before answering. He knew his mates had no intention of leaving before the cave was mapped, but he also didn’t want to offend the old barman. “We’ll be gone soon enough,” he said. “We’ve only got a week or so left until we’re all due back at work.”

  Jack pulled himself up straight in his chair and grabbed hold of Sam’s wrist, greasy fingers clamped like a circlet of steel. He stared at him, reddened eyes unblinking and intense. “I told you it’s dangerous down there, for fuck’s sake.” He held onto his arm for a second longer, then let it go again, slumping back in his chair in resignation. “But you won’t listen. They never do.”

  Jack upended his glass in his mouth before pouring himself another. A man trying to drown his thoughts. “Most of the town thinks the Miner’s Mother is a myth,” he started hesitantly. “Shit, even I feel like I must be going mad to think she’s real.”

  “We saw one of the shrines today. I’ll admit, it’s pretty freaky to think miners actually used to give blood offerings – but that doesn’t make a fairy-tale monster real.”

  “I’d think the same if I didn’t know better.”

  “So, convince me then,” said Sam, starting to wish he’d gone straight to bed. Humouring a drunk had not been part of his evening plans.

  “My grandfather owned the last operating opal mine in town back in the 1950s, worked it with my father and uncle. The old man was superstitious, sticking to the rules of sacrifice to the Mother. He always left a freshly killed rabbit or opened a vein to ensure she never went hungry.” Jack was no longer making eye contact as he talked, his unfocused gaze staring straight through Sam.

  “But that all stopped when he died of a heart attack, and my father and his brother took over the mine. They thought the myth was ridiculous, and by offering rabbits and blood, they were doing nothing more than feeding the local snakes. And that’s when things started to go wrong.

  “One morning, they were working separate sections of the mine. Dad heard his brother scream, a sound of pure agony and terror. Thinking that there had been a machinery accident, he dropped what he was doing and sprinted to help. But when he got there, my Uncle Dave was gone. Nothing but a puddle of blood around a crack in the rock, like his body had been crushed and somehow dragged into the space.

  “Unsure how to explain his death in a way that people would believe, my father kept quiet, saying Dave had gone on a trip out of town. He had to keep working the mine though, as he’d hit a seam of opal that he refused to leave in the ground.

  “And that was when he saw his brother again. Always just at the light’s limit, hugging the shadows, beckoning him to come deeper into the mine. When he got up the courage to follow and investigate, he realised it wasn’t him. The eyes were dead, limb movements different, with needle-like teeth protruding slightly past the lips.

  “My father bolted, sealed the mine and never again set foot underground.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Sam. “Are you saying his brother was the creature?”

  Jack’s lips narrowed with irritation, bleary eyes refocusing on him. “No. It’s thought that the Mother has the ability to camouflage its skin, change colour like a cuttlefish or chameleon. But instead of hiding, it copies the appearance of prey that it has eaten, then uses the image to entice others within striking distance.”

  An image of the child’s face flashed before Sam’s eyes, and his gut clenched, goosebumps puckering the backs of his arms. No, it couldn’t be possible.

  “I… I thought I saw a young boy down the mine yesterday. But when I looked again, it was gone. And Ellie swore she saw a kid near the main shaft of the cave the other day. I didn’t say anything to her about what I saw, because I thought it was my imagination getting away from me after McClean’s tour. It couldn’t have been real though – there hasn’t been a child go missing any time recently that would fit the description.”

  Jack gave him a hard look, as if trying to work out if Sam was taking the piss. “Shit, the thing’s already stalking you,” he muttered under his breath. “You didn’t see an actual kid, just the beast’s copy.” He sighed. “How old did it look, the boy, I mean?”

  Sam closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember. “He had white blond hair, looked young, maybe around five or six years old?”

  Jack stood and walked over to one of the photos on the wall, a black and white image amongst the Vietnam collection. “Is this him?” he asked, pointing to a small figure. Sam got up, walked over for a closer look and found himself staring at a photo of two families. The men in the photo both wore army uniforms, Sam recognising one of them to be Jack as a younger man. The other had an arm around the shoulders of a woman, and three children at his waist. Two boys, and a girl.

  Jack tapped the photo again, his fingertip hitting on the chest of one of the children, a little boy with white blond hair. “This one?”

  As Sam studied the boy’s face, the hairs on the back of his neck rose, a shiver working up his spine like his grave had been trampled. The similarity between the photo and his memory were striking. He nodded, “Sort of, but this photo has to be around forty years old?”

  The barman wandered back to his chair, weariness etched into every movement as he sat down and reclaimed his whisky. “I think you saw the
beast’s impersonation of Dean’s kid, Archie. We served together in ‘Nam, and when we got back, the town was going through a rough patch. A number of kids missing. We…” Jack stopped and chewed his lip for a moment. “Short story, Dean and his boy also disappeared.

  “With him gone, his daughter Karen was left to raise her little brother alone.”

  “What about the mother in the photo?”

  “Couldn’t accept that her youngest boy and husband were gone.” Jack looked down at his glass, expression morose. “She hung herself in the backyard before the year was out.”

  The barman fell silent as Sam turned back to the photo. As he went to take another drink from his glass, he found it empty. A light buzz filled his head, the whisky already having an effect after such a long day. The child’s face seemed to stand out, white-blond hair and cheeky grin still clear despite the passage of decades.

  Sam shook his head, trying to clear the barman’s influence. No. He refused to get drawn into the old man’s story. He wasn’t a fool. He was a paramedic who made decisions based on scientific evidence, not myth and folklore. If he started to buy into this crap, he’d be no better than a quack who tricked people out of their money to treat illness by ‘fixing their aura’ or some equally ludicrous method.

  There would be a logical reason for it all. The boy Archie and his father had probably become lost in the warren of tunnels under the area before dying of exposure or starvation. His own sighting was nothing more than a trick of the light influenced by McClean’s stories on the ghost tour. The bloody carcass in the mine was from a fox as the Sergeant suggested, or some local sadist. But it was most definitely not due to a shape changing beast that had fed on generations of miners. Sam firmed his jaw, finally becoming angry at being repeatedly fed the same bullshit story. The old man obviously found enjoyment in making a fool of tourists.

  He turned back to the barman, ready to give him a mouthful, then pulled up short. Jack had passed out. Slumped in his chair, eyes closed, lips slightly puckering with each exhalation. A clunk of glass on wood sounded as the now empty bottle of Johnnie Walker slipped from Jack’s outstretched hand.

  Sam walked to the front of the hotel and locked the door, then found a blanket to cover the barman in his sleep. He flicked off the last light in the downstairs area, plunging it into darkness, the only sound a light snore emanating from the owner.

  Sam padded quietly up the stairs to his room. This was a story he’d be keeping to himself until after the expedition had concluded. Given Ellie’s reaction on the ghost tour, he didn’t want to be responsible for unnecessarily scaring her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ellie stabbed a fingertip against the map. “This is the property with the mine that we entered yesterday.”

  The group stood in their base camp tent on site, the map spread across the top of a card table. It was early, the last vestiges of sunrise lending an orange tint to the horizon. A clear sky promised a baking hot day to come, but the night’s chill still lingered, and Sam was glad of his thick jumper. The others wore all-in-one coveralls over their clothes, crimson coloured, water resistant but breathable. They were designed to keep cavers dry and warm, while double thickness material over elbows and knees provided protection from sharp surfaces. Over these, they wore harnesses, ready for the descent.

  Sam stood back from the table, allowing the core members of the expedition a better view of the map as they formed a plan of attack for the day.

  “You said there was a floor collapse in one of the tunnels, dropping into open space, yeah?” said Aaron.

  “And it’s not all that far from here,” said Max. “I agree with Ellie, there’s a good chance our cave and the one beneath the mine belong to the same system.”

  Aaron grabbed a pencil and ruler and drew a line between the two locations on the map. “By the map’s scale, there’s only about three kilometres between them as the crow flies. It’s more than feasible that they would connect somewhere.”

  “When Max and I were out here the other day, I saw two different tunnels branching off the main shaft. The one headed further south was quite narrow and low, while the other looked easier to traverse. And it also headed in the direction of that mine,” said Ellie. She crossed her arms over her chest and chewed her lip for a moment in thought. “I know we never plan on anything going wrong, but if it did, that mine may provide a second exit point if our retreat to the sink hole gets blocked somehow. What do you think, Aaron?”

  He nodded. “Yep, sounds sensible. Also, should Anastas decide to block our entry to the cave system via his property, we can access it via a different point. It may just cut our costs on a return in the future.”

  Aaron glanced up at Frida. “And what about that leech that you took from the mine? You said there was something odd about it?”

  The biologist pulled a piece of paper from her backpack and flattened it over the map. Her fingers shook slightly, voice husky with excitement. “It wasn’t a leech - at least not like any I’ve seen.” The piece of paper had a pencil sketch on it of the small creature’s head. “Leeches usually have three blade-like teeth in the mouth, used to carve a Y-shaped wound through the skin of its host. The one I pulled off my finger yesterday is remarkably different.”

  Sam stared over Frida’s shoulder at her sketch and felt his stomach squirm slightly at the depiction of the creature’s mouth. He disliked leeches at the best of times, having pulled more than his fair share from different parts of his body while camping. This one, however, looked like something truly special.

  “Instead of three blades, our ‘leech’ has a concentric ring of needle-like teeth. Obviously, my examination was fairly crude given the location, but,” she paused, skin flushed with excitement, “I think we may have actually discovered a new species. I freeze dried the specimen and left it with Jack to have couriered back to my lab at Sydney Uni.”

  “He’s seemed a bit weird about our expedition. Do you reckon he’ll actually send it?” asked Sam.

  “Yeah, it should be fine. I just said it was paperwork that my Uni needed pronto. He didn’t know it was an organic specimen.”

  Sam nodded, glad the barman hadn’t tried any further bullshit.

  Ellie slapped a hand onto her friend’s shoulder. “That’s awesome, Frida. Fingers crossed it’s a new species – maybe you’ll get a chance to name it?”

  Ellie leant down, grabbed her helmet off the ground and tested the light. “How about we get this show on the road?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “We got your message. What did you want to discuss that couldn’t be said over the phone?”

  Jack was kneeling, loading a crate of coke bottles into a fridge. He glanced up to see both Kaz and her brother Trevor staring at him over the edge of the bar. She wore a crisp white business shirt while Trevor was in uniform, his expression more severe than the starched collar about his neck. Jack put a hand on the bench to steady himself, then slowly got to his feet, arthritic knees complaining like a pair of old hags.

  “You know exactly what I want to talk about.”

  A quick scan of the room found a handful of hotel guests still finishing their breakfast. Although it was unlikely any would pay attention to their conversation, he wouldn’t take the chance.

  “We’ll speak out the back.”

  He turned on his heel and walked to the end of the bar where a door exited to a staff only area. Jack waited until both crossed the threshold, then led them down a short hallway to a back office. Early morning light filtered through a curtained window, dust motes drifting in the air. Jack pulled a chair out from behind a small desk where he usually did paperwork and indicated for the siblings to take a seat on the couch resting along the opposite wall.

  Jack paused for a moment, trying to think of a way to begin.

  “This has to stop. Now,” he said, voice firm. “If you don’t immediately close access to the cave, there are five young men and women that will be eaten alive. The answer to this si
tuation is simple - revoke their license, and they’ll have to abandon the expedition.”

  “And then what?” asked Kaz. “The Mother will start feeding on locals. Let her feed on scum from Sydney, then she’ll go back into hibernation. Sacrifice and blood tithes kept her at bay before the mines closed, it can work again. But this time it won’t be my family paying the price.”

  “You have no idea what really happened back then, do you?” muttered Jack.

  Her eyes flicked over him, head to toe as her lip curled in disgust. “Yes, I do. While you sat above ground whimpering in your hotel, my father presented himself to the Mother as a sacrifice so that she would leave the town’s children in peace. But Archie didn’t want him to go, so he followed him into the mine and didn’t come back either.”

  “Bullshit, that was just a lie your mother spun to spare you the truth,” said Jack. “I was with your father underground, and we sure as hell weren’t going in there to make a sacrifice. We went there to kill the bitch.”

  He turned to the side, feeling like he wanted to spit a foul taste from his mouth. “You want to know what really happened that day, well I’ll fucking tell you.”

  ***

  Jack tipped the handgun to the side, ejecting the magazine for a moment to double check it was fully loaded, before ramming it home. He ensured the safety was on, then holstered the Colt M1911 and scooped a sawn-off shotgun from the floor to pass back to his mate. Jack squatted in the dark of the opal mine’s tunnel in a uniform and webbing he’d thought to never wear again, and yet here he was, home less than a month from Vietnam, fighting a different battle. A familiar feeling thrummed in his chest, a mix of excitement and terror. He needed to piss.

  “Had to be fucking underground, didn’t it?” muttered Dean.

  In the meagre light of his torch, Jack glanced at his friend, another Vietnam veteran. The two of them had enlisted together years before, and managed to survive long enough to make it home.