Foot-hand-foot-hand-foot-hand-foot-ha—
I touch ground. Or a very large overhanging rock. Can’t tell yet. “Wait,” I call softly to the others, who are slightly higher than me. “Let me feel around a bit. I think…” I extend my foot outwards. More rock. I tap it—solid. Gently lower my other foot, still holding tight to the wall. Gradually letting my full weight shift to my feet, I release my grip and stand unsupported. The ground holds and my stomach settles.
Bringing up my torch, I shine it around and gasp.
A cave. Not the largest I’ve ever been in, but a reasonable size. Lots of stalactites and stalagmites. A waterfall to my right. I should have heard the noise before now, except my breath and heartbeat were heavy, muffling my hearing.
“Grubbs,” Loch hisses. “Are you OK? What is it?”
“I’m fine,” I whisper, then raise my voice. “It’s a cave.” I shine the light on the floor around my feet, making sure I’ve truly struck bottom. I spot the shovel which Bill-E dropped. “It’s OK,” I tell my friends. “You can come down.”
They detach themselves from the wall and stand beside me. The light from Bill-E’s torches mingles and crosses with mine and we gaze around in awed wonder.
The formations are beautiful, some of the most incredible I’ve ever seen. Water drips slowly from the tips of many stalactites, so this is an active cave, still growing. I recall lectures from a couple of class trips to caves. It can take thousands of years for spikes to form. Thousands more for them to alter. If I lived to be a hundred and came back here just before my death, this cave would probably look no different than it does right now.
“It’s amazing,” I sigh, taking a step forward, head tilted back, looking up to where the roof stretches ahead high above us. “How can this have been here all this time… hidden away… nobody knowing?”
“The world’s full of places like this,” Bill-E answers even though I wasn’t really asking him. “We only see a fraction of what’s on offer. People find new caves, mountains, rivers, all the time.”
“OK,” Loch says loudly, shattering the mood. “It’s a lovely cave, beautiful, glorious, la-dee-da-dee-dum. But I don’t see any treasure.”
“Peasant!” Bill-E snarls.
“I don’t want to,” Loch says sourly. “What good’s a damp, dirty cave? I’ll settle for the gold and jewels.” He looks around and spits. “If there
Bill-E turns, temper fraying. I speak up quickly. “He’s right, Bill-E. Not about the cave not being worth anything—it’s amazing, beyond any price. But we came looking for a different sort of treasure. We should check to see if it’s here. If it isn’t, that doesn’t matter—we’ll still have found the cave. But if there’s treasure too, all the better.”
Bill-E relaxes. “Yeah, let’s look. The cave isn’t that big. If there’s treasure, it shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
We move forward, three explorers in wonderland. Even Loch looks impressed, although he isn’t blown away by the cave’s beauty in the same way as Bill-E and me. We stroke the rising pillars, fingers coming away damp. In certain places the stalactites and stalagmites have grown together to form giant, solid structures which join the floor and ceiling. One is wider than the three of us put together, a monster resembling a couple of massive chimneys.
“I’ve never been down a cave without a guide, or in such a small group,” Bill-E says after a while. “It’s strange. Quiet. Peaceful.”
“Hey,” Loch grins. “You know my favourite bit when I’m down a cave? It’s when they turn the lights out so you can see what it looks like pitch black.”
“No way!” I say quickly.
“Uh-uh!” Bill-E chimes in.
“What’s the matter, ladies?” Loch laughs. “Scared of the dark?”
Bill-E and I share a look. Neither of us wants to switch the torches off. But Loch’s smirking goadingly.
If we don’t meet his challenge, we’ll never hear the end of it.
“Go on,” I mutter to Bill-E. “You first.”
He gulps and turns one light out, then the other.
The cave feels much smaller now, more threatening. It’s probably my imagination but I believe I can sense shapes in the shadows, waiting to form fully in the darkness so they can leap forward and pounce on us unseen. My finger hovers over the switch on my torch. I’m torn between not wanting to look like a coward and not wanting to fall prey to forces of magical malevolence.
Before I can make a decision, Loch does it for me. “What a sissy,” he crows, then reaches over, jams my finger down hard and jerks it backwards, quenching the light.
My heart races. My breath stops. The walls seem to grind shut around me. In a panic I try to turn the torch on, but my finger’s numb from where Loch pressed down on it. I can’t find the switch! I can’t turn the light on! The shapes are coming! In a second or two they’ll be upon us, all claws, sharp teeth and…
Bill-E switches one of his torches on. He’s chuckling weakly. “That was cool.”
I look around—nothing. The cave looks exactly the same as it did before. I was imagining the danger. I force a short laugh and switch my torch on, then press ahead with Bill-E and Loch. We continue exploring.
After half an hour I don’t feel too hot. It’s nothing to do with the temperature of the cave—it’s warmer down here than it was on the surface—but with the time. I check my watch to confirm what I already know—it’s night. High above, hidden from sight by the layers of rock and earth, the moon’s rising, and tonight it’s as full as it’s ever going to be.
I get the same sick feeling as last night and the night before, only stronger, relentless. In horror movies, people sometimes don’t change into werewolves unless they sight the moon—if it’s hidden by clouds, or they’re locked away, it doesn’t affect them. But that’s rot. The moon’s a powerful mistress. She can reach through any wall or covering and work her wicked charms.
Bill-E and Loch are bickering about the treasure and whether or not it’s here. Loch doesn’t think it is—we’ve been around the cave a few times and found nothing—but Bill-E still insists it could be.
“You don’t think Lord Sheftree would have left it lying on the floor for anyone to stumble across and walk off with, do you?” he argues. “He’d have thought about somebody finding the cave, either by digging down like we have, or maybe through some other entrance he didn’t know about. He’d have hidden the treasure, stuck it out of sight, so that even if a stranger wandered in by accident, they wouldn’t find it, not unless they actively searched for it.”
“So where do you think it is, geniass?” Loch sneers. “We’ve looked everywhere. Unless it’s invisible treasure, I don’t think—”
“We’ve looked nowhere,” Bill-E shouts, and his voice echoes tinnily back at us. “Some of the larger stalagmites might be hollow,” he says, quieter this time. “The treasure might be buried in one of them.”
“There’s an awful lot of stalagmites,” Loch says dubiously.
“We have time,” Bill-E smiles. “And maybe it’s not down here at all.” He points up at the walls. “There are ledges, holes and tunnels, maybe smaller caves—or, for all we know,
“Let’s do it another time,” I mutter, head pounding, feeling as though I’m surrounded by a layer of fire. “It’s night. Time to go home.”
“Not yet,” Loch snaps. “I don’t have to be home for a few more hours.”
“Bill-E…” I groan.
“Well, Gran and Grandad will be expecting me back soon,” he says. “But it’s not like I’ve never been late before. I’ll tell them I was with you, that we lost track of time—which isn’t a total lie.”
I want to scream at them. The fools! Can’t they feel it? Even through my sickness, with a brain that’s being hammered to a pulp by a searing headache, I can sense danger. The throbbing’s back, stronger than ever. We need to get out now, quick, before…
Or am I imagining the danger, like I imagined the monsters in the dark? Maybe it’s just my sickness that we have to fear and this is only a beautiful, eerie cave.
Even so, if I turn into a werewolf here, that’s more than enough for any pair of humans to worry about.
