The Serpent Passage

William took off his fins and made his way to Betty, holding her shirt out in front of him, cringing as he stepped on some jagged rocks. “Here,” he said, tossing the shirt to her when he got close, being polite to look the other way while she put it on, but unable to resist catching a peek when she lifted the shirt over her head. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Well, you know… I feel pretty good as a matter of fact. Some ride, huh? Invigorating!” she said, and then looked up, trying to recall the events. “I don’t know what happened. We were having a nice little chat at the restaurant, and then… kerplop! I thought I was falling off a cliff. How the heck did you end up here?”

“I went looking for you and got pulled in just the same,” William said.

Betty smiled with a big creepy grin. “That was awfully kind of you to come for me… though you probably should’ve stayed put. The bad news is that we’re both gonna die and rot here. Don’t mean to be crude, but that’s how I see it.”

A long pause followed as Betty’s last words crawled through William’s mind. He shook his head. “No, there must be a way out,” he said.

“I’ve been swimming in that cenote for years,” Betty said. “The locals told me there were dangerous undertows, but I never felt anything in all that time… up until now, of course.”

William looked around the chamber’s perimeter, searching for an escape route.

“No sense in looking…. uh… what’s your name again?”

“It’s William. William Spalding.”

Betty laughed, slapping her hand to her forehead. “Like the balls?” she asked.

“What?”

“You know… the balls? Spalding. It’s a brand,” she said, and laughed again. “Get it? Because you sure got balls to come after me.”

William wondered how she could be cracking jokes in their predicament.

“Anyhow, you might as well get comfortable,” she said, becoming serious, “because there’s no way out of this mess. I figure this is where they all ended up.”

William glared at Betty. “Where who all ended up?” he asked.

“All the others that disappeared in the Cenote Azul,” she said. Betty tiptoed over the sharp rocks and stopped beside a large stalagmite. “Their bodies were never found, you know.”

“That doesn’t mean they ended up here,” William said.

“Tell them that,” she said, pointing her bony index finger-like the grim reaper- beyond the stalagmite.

William lurched back in horror. Human remains were strewn all about the cavern, like someone had kicked the bones around and smashed the skulls into pieces.

Chapter Two

Bones littered the hellish chamber. Thirteen skulls-some intact, some smashed-provided a possible indication of the head count. There were likely many more skeletons, William considered-from those who never made it to the shore, resting on the bottom of the underground lake. He cringed at the sight of what appeared to be a child’s femur; its attached foot-bone still wore a decayed sneaker. It was horrible enough for parents to think they had lost their child to drowning, yet it was better than knowing the truth of the situation-that their child died of starvation in an underground cavern, with the remains stirred about.

“I’m guessing he did this,” Betty said with conviction, pointing at the only completely intact skeleton-a man who appeared to have hung himself with shreds of fabric fashioned into a noose and looped around an outcropped rock along the cavern wall. “He probably went nuts, made all this mess, and then found his own way out.”

A wave of fear took grip, inspiring William to search under every outcropping in the cavern for an exit. Yet there were no visible tunnels anywhere, except for the large opening of the waterfall that had brought them in. Small spots of light entered the cavern from the center of the ceiling, some fifty feet above, through tiny cracks and fissures in the earth. “Look, the surface is right there,” he said, pointing up, while surveying the area for the best way to reach the top.

Betty watched with an amused smirk as William made several attempts to climb the cavern walls. He strained to grip the rocks, but the sides sloped inward-like a dome-so he couldn’t get more than ten feet up before stumbling back down.

Giant stalactites and stalagmites met each other in several places along the shore, providing the only smooth surfaces, which Betty took advantage of to rest upon. William, on the other hand, tried to scale several of the slippery stalagmites with even less success than he had with the cavern walls. He groaned as he slid onto the jagged rocks, swearing from the added cuts inflicted on his bare feet.

“If there was really a way out, there wouldn’t be so many folks who died down here,” Betty said, with her last words echoing, as if the chamber was confirming their fate. “But at least we have each other for company.”

William tuned Betty out, focusing his concentration on the waterfall. His gaze shifted to the underground cenote as an idea began to take shape. “Maybe there is a way out!” he said.

Betty looked his way with a raised eyebrow.

“The waterfall keeps dumping water in here. So why doesn’t it fill up this entire chamber?” he asked.

“Do I look like a geologist?” she asked, standing up. She moved near William by the shore.

William pointed at the cenote. “The water is draining off down there. There has to be another tunnel that continues out.”

“How does that help us exactly?” she asked.

“Because we have something that no one else ever had,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Scuba gear,” he said with a proud grin. William rushed over to his equipment and checked the pressure gauge, cursing at it. “Look Betty, there’s only about four hundred pounds of air left in this tank. That may not be enough to get us through, but I’d rather die trying to get out of here than to sit here and die of starvation in this messed up place. There’s not enough air for me to check it out first by myself. We have to both go together… now.”

“Oh, I don’t know about this,” she said.

William pulled his scuba gear back on, manually inflated his vest, secured his mask to his face, and entered the water of the underground cenote. He clenched his teeth from the pain of the jagged rocks further digging into his injured feet. “Well, come on,” he hollered.

Betty just stood there like a statue, with a worried look carved into her face.

“Or what, you’d rather stay here with these skeletons?” William asked, as he slipped on his fins.

Her eyes opened wide. “Okay, let’s do this,” she said, and jumped into the lake.

William floated over to Betty and handed her his alternate regulator. “When you’re ready, bite down on this mouthpiece and just breathe. We’re low on air, so try to breathe as slow as you can. But don’t hold your breath. When you feel pain in your ears, just pop them… the same way you do on an airplane. Are you cool?”

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” Betty asked.

William removed his mask that had begun to fog over. He spit on the lens, wiped it with his fingers, sloshed it around in the water, and put it back on. “Yeah Betty, my dad taught me to dive when I was ten. Now hang on to these straps on my vest and don’t let go. Just keep breathing, okay?”

Betty nodded, already breathing from the regulator.

William popped the primary regulator into his mouth and released the air from his vest. As the two began to sink, William spotted the skeleton hanging by its neck. It appeared to be staring right at him, giving him the chills just as they slipped underwater.

Beneath the surface, he jerked a glow-stick from a pocket on his buoyancy vest and cracked it between his hands, illuminating the area around them with its green fluorescent light. The sediment stirred up from the waterfall made it difficult to see very far ahead. He touched bottom at about thirty feet. He controlled his breath until