Seed of Evil by Greig Beck (smart books to read TXT) 📗

took a seat on a boulder to the side. Without the sound of footfalls bouncing back off the walls, their breathing seemed unnaturally loud, silence weighing like an almost palpable force. For the first time on a caving expedition, Jim felt a niggle of claustrophobia. If he stuffed up and got them lost, the cave would become their tomb.

As he put the water bottle back in his pack, a new sound caught his attention. He touched Beth’s arm. “Do you hear that?”

A faint tapping came from somewhere up ahead, rhythmic in nature.

Beth paused to listen, her expression unconcerned. “Dripping water maybe?”

“Nah, I don’t think so.” He cocked his head to the side, trying to hear the sound more clearly. “More like footsteps. Weird.”

Beth’s eyes opened wide in mock astonishment. “Maybe it’s one of the creatures that barman was talking about. What was it called again?”

Jim smirked as he cast his mind back to the previous night. “I think he called it a ‘Miner’s Mother’?” The old guy had been up to his gills in whisky when he’d pointed out creepy pictures of the town’s mythical beast behind the bar and warned them off exploring the cave. The monster’s features had been indistinct in the paintings. With its body shrouded in shadow, it had been the creature’s malevolent green eyes that made his skin crawl.

“Didn’t it help miners find opal or something?”

“Nah, he said it was more likely to slit your throat than do anything friendly.”

“Well I prefer my version of the story better,” said Beth. She took a step further down the tunnel before looking back over her shoulder. “Why don’t we work out where the noise is coming from? If it is dripping water, it might lead us to a diveable watercourse.”

Jim shrugged. “Good idea as any, I guess.”

He glanced back over his shoulder, searching the tunnel with his light. For some irrational reason, he couldn’t shake the sensation they were being watched. Seeing nothing unusual, Jim clamped down on his growing unease and walked onward, the beam of his helmet torch a harsh white against the walls. Shadows cast by the rocks on the floor danced ahead, as the angle of their torches shifted.

After a short distance, the tunnel branched. The couple paused to listen for the sound, before hearing it clearly from one side. Beth moved forward eagerly, and the tapping noise escalated for a moment, as if applauding their decision to follow. The couple continued onwards as the maze deepened in complexity, turn after turn.

Beth stopped and touched a finger to one side of the tunnel. “It’s damp. We must be getting close to water.”

A clatter of small rocks echoed from behind. Intrigued, Jim left Beth for a moment and retraced his steps to find what had made the noise. At the last fork in the tunnel, he pulled up short. The small cairn of stones he’d built to mark the route home was now missing. He shone his torch down each option, searching for footprints or any other evidence of their passage, but both were swept clean, the dust smooth and undisturbed. Shit. Both options now looked the same to him, and unless his wife could remember which tunnel they’d come from, it would be a roll of the dice on their return.

Jim quickly walked back to his wife. “Babe, we have a problem,” he said, voice holding an edge of anxiety despite his best efforts to sound unconcerned. The last thing they needed was to panic and become further disorientated.

“That last cairn of rocks I placed is missing, the tunnel’s wiped clean.”

Beth raised an eyebrow at him, confused. “That’s not possible. We’re the only ones down here, how could they have moved?”

“I’ve got no idea, but doesn’t change the fact that they’re bloody gone.”

“Well, you’ve been keeping track of our turns and co-ordinates on paper like usual, haven’t you? We just go off them to find our way back. It’ll be fine.”

“Umm… yeah, should be okay,” said Jim, not having the guts to admit that he’d grown lax in his recording as they hurried after the sound, letting his usual procedures lapse.

They heard water movement close ahead, and Beth turned toward the noise. “That sounds like a proper body of water. It might be the lake we were hoping to find. Let’s do one more corner to check, and if there’s nothing there, we go back the way we came. What do you say?”

Jim felt powerless to disagree, and followed after his wife. She was being reasonable, not losing her shit at him, and one more turn in the labyrinth was hardly going to make the difference between life and death.

His jaw dropped as he rounded the corner and bumped into the back of his wife, heart leaping with excitement. Above them, the roof vaulted high, granting a cathedral dome to the underground room. Great stalactites reached down from the ceiling in clusters, white crystalline deposits shimmering like chandeliers in the torch light. In some areas, the stalagmites rising from the ground had met with descending stalactites to form great columns. They’d found something truly magnificent.

Twenty metres into the room, dry ground gave way to water. Jim paced forward, all thoughts of their predicament banished at the wonders ahead. He dipped a finger into the water then put it into his mouth – fresh. The lake was clear and still as glass, allowing him to view the bottom as it gently sloped away.

Beth looked about the massive space, lips parted in silent awe. “We did it, babe. We’ve found something beautiful.”

“And as its discoverers, we’ve got naming rights. What do you want to call it?”

Beth shined her beam slowly across the expanse of the cavern, her gaze lingering where huge stalactites hung, in some places kissing the surface of the water.

“It’s almost like a church, the way the ceiling peaks in the middle – and those columns at the side, it’s like they’re guarding the entrance to smaller, private chapels or alcoves,” she said.