Catastrophic

Chapter Fifteen

    Fear threatens to choke me and squeeze all valuable thoughts from my mind. I’ve only ventured about ten steps into complete blackness, but those steps have been torture. Dark nightmares threaten to overwhelm me, and in my journey, I see monsters that scare me beyond belief.

    A sane person would abort the mission and crawl back to safety. Teetering on the idea of sanity, I tip the scale by walking in further. Too bad I’m insane.

I really don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for, since shelter is out unless I find a match. There’s something drawing me to what I hope is the center of the cave, for no apparent reason at all.

My gut tells me to reach my right arm out to the side, and in the cave wall, my hand discovers a break in the rock. With no other objection, I walk into a straight passageway, according to my two outstretched hands. I feel my way as I walk more and more into the depths of this particular hall. When my left hand feels empty air all of a sudden once more, I veer to my left, and continue to walk towards nowhere.

A white light blinds me, and I don’t know that I’m seeing light until I witness a torch coming into view. There’s someone in here, even if they’re not holding that torch at the moment. The torch lays on its side, and through the candlelight, I see smudged dirt. Someone has definitely been here, and even better they’re from camp.

Silently, I grasp the light in my hand and cautiously make my way around the corner. Another long passageway, except that there is definitely something more to this particular tunnel. I can feel some kind of spell cast nearby, I just don’t know who, why, where, and when. As I continue to scuffle along, I kick up the dirt encrusted in the footprints as a way to pass the long time. I’m scuffling along, feeling destruction of the dirt, until there’s nothing. Surprised, I look down at my feet and see that the trace of soil stops behind me.

I know where the spell was cast, and with satisfactory pleasure, I find my center and whisk the platform away. A hole forms right in front of my feet, and I step back just as it threatened to consume me to my fall. The gap is big enough for me to fit through, and I start to venture down on the ladder hung below me. Thinking better of it, I extinguish the torch with a whiff of air, and drop it just outside the circle. Now that all of the world is gone of light, I blink a few times to gain my ultra nightvision that I wished I had.

With an acceptable view of outlines, I close my eyes and make my way down the ladder slowly. From the feel of the handles, I see they’re wood and have dirt on them, and from the feel of the string connecting them together, I see they’re vines. There must be a jungle up beyond the waterfalls.   

After sometime of grasping rung after rung, I hear whispers. While I originally think it’s inside my head, I’m delighted to hear that when I hum a note, the whispers are still there. That means there are two people down here, conversing. Delightful!

The thrill of adventure warms my eagerness, and I make my way down the ladder with speed I didn’t know I could manage. I risk a peek down below me, and see the ground itself rising up to meet with me. A sigh of relief overwhelms me as I touch land once more and see more torches lined against the walls. Through the light, I see different arches that lead off to nowhere. There must be eight of them, and I swing my head left and right in hopes of somehow figuring out a way to enter. I’m considering just winging it when I hear whispers coming from a tunnel behind me, and I glimpse the mysterious person’s dirty footprints.

With this newfound lead, I slink my way into the tunnel. Up ahead to my right, I spot light streaming out from another hole in the side. My suspicion grows as the whispers turn to shouts and the dirt increases on a “Welcome! But go away!” mat perched outside the entrance. I peek in through the doorway and smile with delight as Emilia faces a mirror. On the other side of the magic mirror is her mom, Wenona, and I can tell by the angry faces that they are not so loving right now.