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Descent Into The Dark
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 2

He’d said nothing for a long moment, and then, slowly, reluctantly, he’d nodded.

"Good." She’d sat down and looked across the table at him, anger draining away and sorrow creeping in. "That still doesn’t solve our problem," she’d said at last. "We still have to find a way to stop the Change, at least for the present."

Instead of control, he’d been going the opposite way, she thought as she looked for a convenient spot to fix pitons in the rock before they descended the chimney. He had begun Changing unpredictably, whenever stressed, and this was becoming a major source of worry to her. He’d eventually obtain control, she was sure, when his surging hormones settled. But until then the only thing she could do was find ways to defeat the Change, even if it took effort, or danger.

She didn’t hide the truth from herself: what they were attempting was dangerous, and in normal circumstances she’d have called it insanely so. But, of course, these weren’t normal circumstances, and in her own mind she thought it akin to an emergency.

There was the very real possibility that someone had detected them, for instance. Her instincts screamed at her to drop everything and run, to relocate to some far off town at the other end of the country. But of course that wasn’t a solution. In the current economic climate she couldn’t ever depend on picking up a job elsewhere, not to speak of the dangers of Changing in a place she didn’t know and couldn’t predict. And then there was the Boy.

Sometimes, to herself, always late at night, she did resent him. She resented the fact that she needed him, to keep off the loneliness, to satisfy her maternal instincts, or for other, deeper subconscious urges she didn’t care to think about. She resented the increasing worry he put her through. But, above all, she knew that she needed him, and would not, could not, let him come to harm.

Before starting the descent, she silently checked the rope attachment to his harness belt, and then hers. She had caved before, though her experience was rather less than she’d let on to the Boy, and she thought the piton was secured well enough. She began to pay out the tough nylon rope.

"I’ll go down first," she said. "When I’m at the bottom, I’ll light the way for you to come down. Wait here."

The chimney was narrow; not so narrow that it was a squeeze to get down, but narrow enough that she cold brace her shoulders and feet easily on either side and get down without difficulty. She only had to drop the last bit of the way, hardly two metres, and landed lightly, taking up the impact on her bent knees. When she looked up, she could just see the pale blob of his face.

"Come down," she called. "Press your back against one side and your feet against the other, and you’ll be fine."

As he worked his way down the chimney, tiny pieces of friable rock heralding his descent, she took a quick look around in the light of her helmet lamp. The chimney had brought her to a roughly circular chamber, the floor of which was covered with spurs and humps of rock. On the far side of the chamber were two openings, one of which was very narrow and started a little way off the floor, and the other rather larger and going downwards.

The Boy landed beside her in a heap of limbs. "Whoof!"

"Are you hurt?" She reached out to help him to his feet, but he was already scrambling up.

"No, I’m all right. How do we get up again?"

"That." She pointed up at the dangling rope, and then turned towards the larger of the two openings, the one headed down into Stygian blackness.

"Let’s go down," she said.


The idea of spending the full moon night deep underground to see whether it slowed down the Change wasn’t new to her. She’d thought of it first several years ago, and it was because she’d been toying around with the idea that she’d joined a caving club and acquired some desultory experience underground. Not that she actually liked caves; she felt vaguely claustrophobic in them, closed in, trapped, as though she could feel the thousands of tons of rock overhead. Each time she’d gone down, she’d told herself that it didn’t really matter, because she would never have to do this for real.

[ Continue to page 3 ]

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Genre:General Horror
Type:Short story
Rating:7 / 10
Rated By:16 users
Comments: 1 user
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