Episode 09 Cavern of Skulls

  Colonel Preston Lost stood on a bloodstained wooden platform. This, and the platforms and shelves above and below, were affixed to the walls of a recessed chimney of rock behind a waterfall. Pickaxes had laboriously chipped away the rockface to expose a smooth, white substance beneath, something not of glass or metal or stone.

  Now that substance was altering, changing, and the image of a face, a head, a body, and then an array of arms and legs emerged from the depth of the substance, and became visible.

  Preston at first thought a living man was walking through the white material toward him, and he raised his Mauser pistol with its single remaining bullet. But no: his weary eyes and brain had fooled him. It was merely an image, a drawing, a representation of a man, fading into view.

  To his shock, it was a drawing he recognized: an image called the Vitruvian Man, drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. This was a stern-faced man, shown nude and spread-eagled, with two pairs of arms reaching out from his shoulders, two pair of legs from his hips. A square about the figure showed his outspread arms were equal to his height. A circle showed his arms and legs were equidistant from his navel. Other lines showed the proper proportions of the joints, shoulders, crotch. Ratios on the figure displayed the Golden Mean, where the whole was to the part as that part was to the remainder, as seen in Greek architecture, Renaissance painting, and everything in nature from spiral galaxies to seashells, sheephorns to sunflower seeds.

  The white panel holding the image vanished like a dream. Preston scowled, half in wonder, half in fear. He swept his hand through the empty air where once the white panel had been. There was no ash, no sign of debris, no heat, nothing.

  Beyond was a rough floor sloping upward. Damp and irregular walls, coated with a stubble of stalactites crowded either side. Gloom defeated eyesight.

  It did not look inviting.

  Of course, the scene outside here with him looked even less inviting.

  He drew his knife and eyed the ladders leading here. The ladders were sturdy enough to hold gargantuans, and affixed to the cliff by many wooden dowels sunk into sockets carved into the rockface. Cutting the knots lashing the ladders to the platform would do nothing. He saw the top of the lower ladder was vibrating. Men were climbing from below. Any one of the gigantic men approaching could break his bones as easily as a grown man could a child.

  He looked up. He saw why the waterfall was apart from the cliff face: a previous lava flow, following the same contours as the water, had left a beetling deposit, hung with stalactites, at the lip of the cliff when the molten rock cooled. This deflected the course of the water. It was almost as if the lava malevolently had attempted to wash the ladders and platforms of the miners away.

  Preston wished he had such a power to aid him now. Little red figures were swarming down the ladders from above. They were quick as squirrels, and descended headfirst. Many carried the black seashell-shaped wasp-throwers.

  "Who are those little red monkey-men? Your cousins? They look just like you…" But Smiley was no longer there to answer Preston's demand. Preston turned, darting his gaze in every direction. The simian was gone.

  He had no other idea, and no time to come up with one. So, in he went.

  After only a footstep, his foot fell on something that rustled and cracked. He pulled out his compact LED headlamp and switched it on. A gasp of horror escaped him. In the bright beam, he saw the floor was strewn with bones, rib cages, and human skulls of various sizes. He tilted the beam.

  The corridor led a few paces and opened into a wide cavern. As far as his beam could reach, this cavern floor was piled thick with human bones. Also, here were helmets of bone, buckles of shell or horn, glass buttons, flint spearheads and discolored wands of amber dropped among the remains. The cavern floor sloped upward, so the bones and debris was gathered near his feet.

  "This does not look good…" muttered Preston. His experience spelunking told him to avoid corpses found in caves. It either meant a large predator or a toxic vapor. He had no fancy deep-caving breathing gear with him here, and only one flashlight, two glowsticks, and no map to tell him whether this cavern had any other exit. Caving in an active volcanic region was madness. Was there any other escape route? Whichever way Smiley went might be safe.

  He turned. Outside, in the sunlight, stepping through the curtain of the waterfall that bisected the large platform, now came a gargantuan man some fifteen feet tall. His helm was made of many tusks fitted together, adorned with wide elk antlers. A vest of teeth tightly thonged together protected his broad chest. Other gargantuan men were behind him, carrying amber wands whose touch was death. The leader in the elk helm was a head taller than his followers. He carried a flint-headed tomahawk in one hand and seashell-shaped wasp-gun in the other.

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  The gargantuan raised his weapon and fired first. Preston leaped backward with agility, drawing his Mauser pistol, and steadying it with both hands. A trio of wasps zoomed into the cave, turned, and darted toward Preston. Two were unable to make the turn tightly enough and missed. One struck him in the glove, penetrated the leather, and a sharp pain like a hot needle entered his flesh.

  He fired. His aim was off. The final, irreplaceable pistol round struck glancingly against the helmet of teeth and shattered part of it, also smashing the huge man's cheek. A fragment of bone put out his right eye. The socket was a pool of blood and vitreous humor. He stumbled back, roaring, out of Preston's line of sight.

  Preston scurried backward, up the sloped floor, and deeper into the cave. The sunlight falling into the entry corridor was too weak to penetrate here. And the wide bodies of the gargantuans blocked the light as they entered.

  Huge and angry faces appeared at the opening. The beam from Preston's headlamp fell into their eyes, dazzling and angering them. Both roared a battle cry in an unknown tongue, and both leaped forward.

  He ran backward. There was no time to reload. He had nothing but a knife. His head was only as high as the waistline of one of these giants. In a single stride, they covered two fathoms, and were almost upon him.

  A skull was under Preston's foot. His ankle turned. He fell. He was lucky he did. From the corner of his eye, he saw a black pit behind him, straight and deep as a well. He turned his head. The bottom was beyond the reach of his lamp's bright beam. He saw cuts in the wall of the well, like the steps of a ladder.

  He put his hand on the handhold, turned his head, and shined his lamp's beam into the eyes of the oncoming gargantuans. The one in the front blinked, blinded, as he rushed forward and reached his massive hand down toward the dazzling source of the light. Preston swung his legs over the edge. A sharp pain pass through his chest, but his feet found a lower foothold of the carved ladder. The huge man missed his footing, and jerked, arms windmilling.

  In that same moment, Preston mentally apologized to the beautifully crafted Holland & Holland, swung it in one hand by the barrel, and caught the overbalanced giant neatly in the temple of his skull with the butt of the stock. The was a crack Preston hoped was skullbone, not wood. The gargantuan toppled over the edge. He groped for Preston as fell, but missed his grasp. He vanished into darkness.

  Preston switched off the light and ducked his head. The gloom here was total. Not enough light could reach through waterfall, corridor, and cavern to reach this far. He heard a whisper of motion above his head. The second gargantuan was slashing through the air with his amber wand.

  Preston ignored his chest pains and scurried down the line of handholds. He stopped, shouldered his rifle. Should he draw his knife? Perhaps he could hamstring the giant man as he came over the edge, while he was offbalance. On the other hand, as best he could tell, the slightest touch of the gargantuan man's amber wand brought convulsions and death.

  He heard noises above. Instead of his knife, Preston drew out his emergency strobelight meant to attract the attention of passing airplanes, and one of the slender whistles. He held it up and switched it on.

  Not one but several of the gargantuan men had their huge, dark faces hanging over the edge. The leader with the ruined eye was not there. When the intensely bright, flashing light, stuck their faces, the giants cried out in anger and alarm. He blew the whistle. Ear splitting noises, shrill and strange, filled the cave and echoed from the walls.

  But the gargantuans were not so easily deterred. One of them hooted a command. A trio of red furred simians in dark jackets swarmed over the lip of the well. They did not go to the ladder. Perhaps they did not see it, or perhaps they did not need it. The wall was rough, with enough projections and knobs for the skinny and nimble monkey-men to pick their way.

  He tried to stuff the strobelight down the collar of his flightsuit to free both his hands for climbing. The sudden motion sent a pain through his chest, and he swayed. The whistle fell from his lips during his cry of pain. With both hands he clung to the handholds.

  The flickering strobelight, blindingly bright, spun its beam as it fell. It struck bottom thirty or forty feet below, and went dark.

  From the noise, he could tell the gargantuans were heaving the large loose stones of the cavern floor aloft to cast down after him. Also, he could hear the little red simians approaching. They were moving faster than he, with the sprained bones in his chest, could manage.

  The fiery sensation in his hand increased, and his fingers went numb. The wasps evidently carried a poison in their sting.

  He gritted his teeth, ignoring pain. He was not about to quit. He would fight until he died, taking as many with him as he could. He drew his knife and clenched it between his teeth, pirate-style, and began climbing down.

  He felt the wake of the wind, and heard the deadly whisper, as some dark mass passed by, missing him by inches. There came other sharp snaps of noise. Wasps moving at the speed of a slingstone struck his cheeks and brow, and hundred bounced from his leather flight jacket. His wasp-stung face felt like a mass of fire. Numbness spread along his face and skull. His lips were rubbery. His eyelids were swelling.

  He rubbed his numb hand along his numb face. It was coated with blood from a dozen tiny punctures. He wiped the blood on the his flightsuit, then on the wall, hoping to keep his weakening grip firm.

  The cave walls to the left and right turned white and lit up. Preston, although his eyes were blurry in the strange light, could see the roof of the cave and the upper part of the walls through the circular mouth of the well above him. Images of the stern-faced Vitruvian Man, showing him in all his perfect proportion, appeared, one in the lefthand wall, and one in the right. The wall itself was glowing with an eerie, colorless light. Preston hoped this was not a sign of radioactivity.

  The simians disintegrated. Flesh vanished. Blood spread like a red cloud and evaporated. Only the bones were left. The giant faces staring down over the sides of the well opened their jaws to scream. Fleshless bony skulls opened their jaws even wider, then the jaws fell away. Spinal vertebrae clattered like a stack of coins, scattering.

  A large skull hit Preston in the shoulder. His numb hand left the handhold. He remembered soaring through the air, with the strange, pale light all about him.

  Then, nothing.