Tom Pawlik - Beckon

“Do you guys see what I’m seeing?”

As Jack’s eyes adjusted, he saw that the entire chamber glowed with a pale light that seemed to come from all around them. It had been nearly imperceptible in the glow of their flashlights.

A sinewy network of glowing tendrils shrouded the cave floor and walls. Jack could even make out Rudy and Ben in the light.

“Whoa,” Ben whispered.

“Glow-in-the-dark slime?” Jack quipped.

“Bioluminescence,” Rudy said. “This stuff just keeps getting more impressive.”

The light was nearly hypnotic as Jack found himself staring at the substance. For a moment he felt oddly detached, like he was far off somewhere, watching himself from the outside.

Then he shook himself out of his trance. This discovery—as awesome as it was—didn’t change the fact that they were still lost. More than that, he had yet to find evidence of the N’watu. Despite their circumstances, he needed to find some answers. He wasn’t about to leave these caves empty-handed. “So which passage do we take?”

Ben stood, hands on hips, surveying their surroundings. After a minute he pointed up ahead. “That looks like a way out.”

The fibrous growth clung to the floor and crawled up the walls like a network of glowing veins and arteries. Ahead of them appeared to be a small opening, as if the luminous tendrils had grown around the mouth of another tunnel.

They found a tunnel about five feet wide, though less than four feet high. The slime continued far down the passage but became less dense the farther they got from the springs.

They found they could navigate the passage by the light of the microorganisms alone. It reminded Jack of a carnival fun house he’d been to once as a kid where the trail was marked by phosphorescent paint on the floors.

“This is a little psychedelic,” he said.

Ben stopped abruptly and held up a hand. Jack and Rudy froze in their tracks.

“What is it?” Rudy whispered.

“Something’s moving up ahead.”

Jack drew up beside Ben, who was pointing down the passage. He saw an elongated black shape detach itself from the wall and glide across the ground maybe twenty feet away. It almost seemed like a hallucination—just a long shadow that flitted across the glowing veins on the cave floor.

In the dim light, Jack saw Ben slowly remove his flashlight and point at the switch. “Watch your eyes,” Ben whispered.

Jack winced as the light flicked on, and he felt Ben move away quickly. In the commotion, Jack found himself momentarily stunned, surprised by how bright it seemed. He shielded his eyes and spotted Ben ahead of him, shining the flashlight around the passage. Then Jack felt Rudy brush past him and heard their voices elevated in excitement.

“Did you see it? Did you see that thing?” Ben was saying.

“I—I didn’t get a good look.”

“It was huge!”

“What was it?” Jack stumbled up to where they were standing.

Ben climbed onto a jagged rock formation along the side of the tunnel and shone his light into the cracks behind it. “I don’t know. It was… like a centipede or something. But I mean, the thing was huge !”

“A centipede?”

Rudy shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”

“It crawled back behind this rock,” Ben said.

Jack crouched beside the rock to inspect the opening. It was far too narrow to crawl through—not that he would’ve gone into it even if it were big enough.

“Shut your lamps off,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s obviously trying to avoid the light. Let’s wait a minute and see if it comes back.”

Ben switched off the light again, and in several seconds Jack’s eyes readjusted to the lower luminosity inside the tunnel. They moved away from the wall and waited.

Jack bit his cheek absently. He’d only seen a shadowy shape with no real detail. But it was far too big to be a centipede.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. Ben motioned for him to keep quiet, then pointed at something moving farther down the tunnel. Jack spotted a second shadow as it crept out from the side and paused in the middle of the passage.

Jack inched closer. It was definitely some type of elongated creature—as Ben had described. And it was enormous—he estimated its length at roughly five feet. He also heard a gentle scraping sound, like a mouse scurrying across linoleum.

Ben pulled a bandanna out of his pocket and wrapped it over the lens of his flashlight. Pointing it away from the creature, he flipped it on. Jack could see the light was dimmed considerably but still bright enough to illuminate the area around them. Then Ben turned the light toward the animal in front of them.

Jack suppressed a gasp. “Whoa.”

The creature had a solid black body five or six inches thick that looked more like a section of segmented industrial tubing than a living animal. It didn’t flee but instead turned toward the light, lifting the front portion of its body. Its legs—dozens of red, fingerlike claws—wriggled in the air, and a pair of long antennae snaked forward from its bulbous head. It had no eyes that Jack could see, and only a small, horizontal opening for a mouth that munched on a glowing wad of the yellow slime.

Its antennae groped about in the air as if trying to determine where the light was coming from. Then after a moment it settled down and resumed feeding.

Jack whispered, “What is it?”

Rudy had his video camera rolling again. “It looks like some kind of… millipede. A very large millipede.”

“Yeah, but how’d it get this big?” Jack said.

Rudy shook his head as if at a loss for words. “I have no idea.”

“It looks like it’s eating the slime. Do you think it has some kind of supernutrients or something?”

“Possibly.” Rudy seemed mesmerized by the creature. “There… there are some pretty big insect specimens in the fossil record—centipedes and dragonflies. But there’s no record of anything this big living today. This thing shouldn’t be alive at all.”

“Why not?”

“Well, there’s not enough oxygen, for one thing,” Rudy said. “The oxygen levels in the atmosphere were a lot higher in the past. But they’re too low today to support the respiration of an insect this size—especially at this elevation. And on top of all that, we’re underground, where the oxygen content is even lower.”

“Right.” Jack gestured toward the millipede. “But there it is.”

Rudy rubbed his eyes. “Y’know, we might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg. There could be a whole separate ecosystem thriving down here, completely cut off from the rest of the world for ages.”

Jack noticed the millipede raise its head and turn toward them, wiggling its antennae. Then it beat a hasty, zigzag retreat down the tunnel and disappeared behind another rock.

“Where’s he going?” Jack said.

Ben snorted. “Maybe he got tired of listening to you guys yak.”

But Jack wasn’t quite so amused. He flicked on his light and swept it around the passage but saw no trace of the millipede. They stood in silence for a moment. Jack could hear the faint echo of water dripping somewhere off in the darkness. Then something caught Jack’s attention. Another sound. Faint, almost imperceptible at first. But within a few seconds he could hear it clearly.

A sharp tapping sound echoed in the tunnel, like someone knocking two rocks together. Jack couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from.

Only that it was getting closer.

They stood in the tunnel listening to the tapping noise getting louder. Jack felt himself holding his breath.

At length Ben said, “I don’t mean to be a killjoy or anything, but maybe that millipede knows something we don’t.”