Abyss

Camryn Costello

“We aren’t getting out of here, are we?” Allen sighed greatly, then deflated and slumped against the craggy rock wall like an old helium balloon. The headlamp’s beam reflected off the damp rock in front of him, giving his skin an unnatural yellow glow. His tired face, streaked with mud, grime, blood, and desolation probably would have been pale without it.

“No, no we ain’t, kid,” Woodrow replied. Between his busted leg, the deep cuts on Allen’s hands, and the blood lost between them, they were good and trapped. “Surprised it took you this long to figure that out.”

Allen glared at him. “Excuse me for not wanting to give up.” The spurt of anger livened him again. “You expected me just to sit down and take it like you did?”

“I expected you to be realistic. Ain’t that supposed to be your whole deal? Telling the truth about whatever’s going on? The truth is we ain’t going anywhere.”

“I don’t want to die down here.”

“And I don’t wanna go out listening to your whining anymore, but it looks like neither of us is getting what we want.”

Allen’s head fell, the light now pointed at the ruddy stains on the torn-up thighs of his khaki cargo pants. They were more like shorts now. The bottoms were torn up too, made into bandages to wrap around his hands after the walls sliced them up. The damn tour guide was the one who kept the first aid supplies. A wise idea for sure.

The yellow beam lifted to shine on the slick wall again, jittering as Allen shivered. “You think they’re still looking for us?”

“No.”

“They have to still be looking. They wouldn’t give up after just a day, that’s crazy.” 

“It’s bad publicity,” Woodrow said. “Maybe you’re onto something. If word gets out that they lost some old bastard and a young, upstarting college journalist, the press’ll be on ‘em like the bloodhounds they are.” He huffed, amused, though the motion jostled him more than the tremors from the cold, and a fresh pain spiked through his broken leg. “This ain’t exactly how you thought you’d end up on the news, is it?”

Allen went quiet again. The quiet was deafening. Woodrow shifted where he was laid out, half propped up on the narrow crevasse floor. The craggy surface was hell on his old bones, poking and prodding no matter how he adjusted. 

“You’d best start thinking of some sorta way to document what’s happening down here. That way if they pull us out in a decade, or maybe even a hundred years from now, you’ll finally get yourself a story.”

“I read a story once about a guy who got stuck in a cave he was digging out. A long, long time ago,” Allen began. He acted as if he hadn’t heard a word Woodrow said. “He got pinned beneath a rock that fell on him while he was shimmying through a little gap. Pinned his leg so he couldn’t move, and the gap was so narrow he couldn’t bend over or move his arms enough to try and move it.” Shadows flitted on the rock wall opposite him as he illustrated with his bandaged hands, the wide beam narrowed to a sliver of light as he measured out the distance. “He was stuck there for two days before anyone even noticed he was missing.”

The arms of Woodrow’s watch had lost their glow only a few hours after they’d fallen, but the dim lighting was just enough to let him see where they were in their revolutions. Five thirty-six. About twenty-six hours had passed since the crevasse claimed them, and another four since they’d gotten separated from their little tour group.

“They got him out though,” Allen continued. “This was almost a hundred years ago, so it took them a couple weeks to do it, but they got him out. The story spread through the newspapers and people from all over the country came to help. They had to send people down to feed him and help keep him warm and had to come up with all sorts of crazy solutions to get him out.”

“All’s well that ends well I s’pose. That story’s true?”

Allen nodded. The yellow beam bobbed with his helmet.

“Hmph,” Woodrow grunted. “Bastard’s lucky anyone cared enough to spend that kind of time on him.”

Allen looked at him, and Woodrow raised a shaking hand to block the light. It was harsh against the blackness he’d been staring into. The beam moved away shortly, as did the note of warmth that Allen’s voice took on while telling his story. “People care more than you think.”

“People don’t give a damn,” Woodrow scoffed. “Not unless they get something out of it.”

“That’s not true.”

“Sure as hell is.”

“The world wouldn’t be half—”

“You think the world cares about you?” Woodrow pushed himself up to glower at Allen properly, heedless of how the stone bit into his palms. “It doesn’t. Nobody’s gonna give a rat’s ass about two nobodies stuck in a goddamn cave out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe your mama’s crying over you right now, maybe you’ve got some college buddies wondering where you are, but even if there is somebody up there coming to rescue us, they ain’t gonna get here in time. The only thing anyone is gonna care about by the time somebody stumbles onto our moldy corpses is how much money they’re in for if they tell your damn story later.”

“What is your problem?” Allen was yelling now. “All you’ve done is talk about how we’re going to die down here! I don’t care what you think!” The yellow beam shook, casting dramatic shadows on his angry face. “I don’t want it to end here!”

“I already told you, it don’t matter what you—”

The light swung wildly, and Allen’s helmet hit the wall with a resounding crack. It bounced back, nearly into his lap, but he paid it no mind.

“I don’t want to die!” he repeated. “What is wrong with you!? You might be fine with being stuck here, but I’m not! I—” Allen panted, “I have things I want to do, places I want to see, people I love that I want to see again! Maybe you don’t care if you rot in this hellhole, but I do!” His pitch rose until his voice cracked. “I don’t want to die!”

Allen’s final word echoed up through the crevasse, and once that echo faded, it was silent.

Lots of people said they heard the caves humming when they went spelunking. Reported that their journey was accompanied by the noises made by the caves themselves or the xylophonic dripping off the stalactites strewn across the ceilings. Here, there wasn’t any rushing water or melodic tinkling. Even with the damp wall to the one side, the only sound that didn’t come from the two of them was the occasional wet pap of a rogue droplet finally gathering enough of itself to fall between them.

One of them fell just then, passing through the errant beam of light as it went. The tiny beads that ricocheted off the stone floor wet the sole of Woodrow’s boot. His foot was numb now, though his leg still throbbed agonizingly every time he moved. The bleeding had stopped, but there was nothing they could do about the bones jutting out from his skin. Woodrow never considered himself a weak-stomached man, but he was glad the headlamp didn’t let him see much of the white fragments beneath the dark-soaked fabric of his jeans.

Allen was staring at his hands, limp in his lap—blankly, though, like his eyes saw through the ripped flesh and damning rock and peered into hell where the countdown to their arrival was slowly nearing its end. When he looked up at the steep wall across from him, that distant glaze in his eyes didn’t fade. Woodrow supposed that made sense. To the young man and his wavering denial of the truth, his goals, dreams, and family, this was hell.

Pap.

The headlamp was dim. Much dimmer now than it was thirty hours ago. The time spent lost in the dark was taking its toll. Even if they continued with their battery conservation pattern of on-again off-again, the light would go out soon enough, and that would be it.

Allen must have been thinking the same thing. He stared up at the ledge well beyond their reach with that same blank affect, and for a moment, Woodrow thought he might get up again, to try once more like he had been since the fall, but with his face still turned toward the vaulted cave ceiling, he reached out to grab the helmet. He clicked the light off with a damning finality.

Once more, they were bathed in complete darkness. No glimmer of light off the wet rock. No glow from the watch face on his wrist. If he didn’t know Allen was only three feet in front of him, Woodrow could easily have convinced himself he was alone. The headlamp didn’t give off any warmth, but the illusion that it did was destroyed. The blackness settled in with a chill that soaked in even more deeply than the cave’s ungodly temperatures.

Pap.

There was no difference between closing his eyes and opening them. When he closed them, if he squeezed them shut tight, little swathes of color danced in front of them, dull but present. When he opened his eyes, he could still see them. The colors danced and danced, and Woodrow wondered if they would still be there if he drifted off to sleep. If the darkness in this cave was as heavy as the lack of dreams in the night, or as heavy as the darkness that settled over the dying and dead. He wasn’t sure if he would even know when it came for him. He wasn’t sure if he believed in the afterlife, but any version of it seemed better than spending the rest of eternity lost in the dancing black.

“God damn it.”

The curse came unexpectedly from the darkness, somehow banishing the colors. Woodrow was surprised to hear it. Even when Allen had ribboned his hands trying to climb back up, not a single curse had escaped his lips. He’d come to think the boy wasn’t capable of it and would have told him as much if the tremble in Allen’s voice hadn’t brought the words to a halt.

“Sure seems like He did,” Woodrow replied quietly. “You a praying man, Allen?”

“No.” A slight shuffle indicated he might be shaking his head. “My mom prays, though.”

“My wife used to, too.”

Silence. He wondered if Allen was looking his way, fruitless though it might be. Woodrow doubted he was.

“Yep,” he continued, sighing, “she prayed all the way up until He took her away from me.”

Silence. Another little shuffle.

“I’m sorry.” 

“It ain’t your fault.”

“Still.”

Woodrow shivered. His leg throbbed. The foot he could still feel was freezing in its boot, as were his fingers, his face.

“I never prayed ‘til that day, not once, but she asked me to do it with her then. I held her hand and she repeated it over and over and over again until I knew all the words, and then until finally…” he paused, but the silence began to press in on him. “Finally, I was the only one saying it. Never said a damn one since.”

Pap…

“You think your mama’s up there praying for you right now?” 

“Yeah. She’s probably even got my dad doing it by now.” Allen’s voice was ragged. “Too bad it won’t matter.”

Woodrow nodded despite the futility. “For better or worse, I ain’t got nobody up there to pray for me. All I got left is…waiting to move on to something else. Whether I do that alone in my home or here in this damn cave, it don’t make a difference to me. That said…” he looked toward Allen, even as the colors began to dance again, “I’m sorry you’re stuck down here.”

Woodrow heard a sniffle.

“Me too.”

He settled back against the rock again, numb even to the cold now. Seemed he’d stopped shivering, and if his recollection was to be trusted, that was a bad sign.

Another sniffle echoed, and Allen’s voice was thick when he spoke. 

  “Maybe you can tell me what that prayer was. You know, so…” Allen swallowed hard. “My mom’s been trying to get me to pray for a long time, but I never wanted to. Never cared to, so I never learned. Maybe…” his breath stuttered, a staccato up through the crevasse walls. “You said there’s nobody up there praying for you, so if you teach it to me right here, maybe when the time comes…”

Pap…

“Alright,” Woodrow nodded. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were closed, but the colors were getting brighter anyway, so he supposed it didn’t matter anymore. “Alright, repeat after me…”

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