Digging Deep

"Mission log, day 27, around noon. Run out of other options, we decided yesterday to explore the cave. Gillian claimed she knew enough about speleology to make this sound like a piece of cake. The doc supported her, and so I didn't tell them about my claustrophobia. Anyway, we were in for a major surprise.

Tied together with a hose from the wreckage like a stem of red currants we clamoured into the mouth of hell and it swallowed us whole without even chewing. Instantly the oppressing darkness engulfed us as the walls tightened like a knot around my neck. My exosuit had built-in cooling units, yet sweat was already beading on my brow and running down my nose.

Gillian's voice excitedly boomed over the comm as she led the party, but I don't remember a single word she said about the alien geology, nor the doc's soothing murmur in my ear. I was too focussed on just breathing and setting one wobbly foot after the other.

It was my personal hell.

Yet the damnable hose tied myself to the others and tugged me forward, onward, downward. The path narrowed further as we stumbled deeper. Gillian wielded the only functioning torchlight like a stroboscope, and with every flash she strew around like confetti the walls seemed to have sneaked a little closer, clamping around my lungs; I couldn't breathe right and dizziness seeped into my mind. It was hard, so very hard. My hands were shaking, yet I didn't say anything.

I clutched the sliver of rock so hard I could feel its sharpness through the gloves of my suit, yet I had to pay attention where to mark the walls whenever we met a fork in the path. I more than once wished to cut myself loose with it and return to the wreckage instead.

Oh, how often did I curse Gillian in my mind when each and every time she chose the narrowest, lowest, darkest path available! As if she knew about my phobia and wanted to torture me further...

Yet she claimed she knew what she was doing. And the other oafs followed her, dewy-eyed.

My vision waned as I stumbled after them, the last in the line of fools, and my breaths came in pants that fogged up my helmet. It dawned on me then that we would simply die here and now; that we would die miserably in this hellhole and no one would ever find us. Tears were welling up in my eyes, yet doc's encouraging whisper nudged me gently to move on with the others.

Then a sudden surge went through my my body, the hose yanked me forward, over the edge and I fell. My body crashed onto rocks once, twice, thrice, then I impacted with the ground with a shattering sound. I'm not sure if I blacked out or not, but for a while I was just trying to breathe the panic away.

After a while, when I calmed down enough to perceive my surroundings, I noticed Gillian was silent, and the comm was filled with so much static that I couldn't even hear doc. And above all there was a faint wailing and the sound of dripping fluid.

I tried to move and found my body wasn't broken so scrambled to my feet. Fumbling around, my hands discovered the hose was severed. I could neither see nor hear the others in the dark so called out to them. No answer. The torchlight had fallen a little farther off and threw a pale cone of light onto... what exactly?

I stumbled closer and grabbed the torchlight, ran the light over the polished, wet surface of alien stone, my eyes glued to the intricate carvings and the narrow cleft between. A door. This had to be some kind of door. My gloved hands clawed at the cleft, tried to push or pull, as the wailing continued.

There was no complicated mechanism, no riddle and no trap. The door gave way eventually and I fell head first into the leaking liquid on the floor. Red staining my helmet and flowing inside where it was cracked from the impact, but I got back up and crawled into the chamber, through the liquid, towards the wailing.

And the closer I came to its source the more it grew on me until I flung my damaged helmet aside and cried as well. Because there in the faint light of the torchlight I saw a crying child. It cried so bitterly, and all of its sadness seeped into me, filled me, consumed me, shattered my heart until I couldn't breathe anymore.

For the child was me..."

The recording stopped with a static sound. Fingers clasped together, doctor Eliza Goodwill drew a deep breath as she thought about her last session with her dear patient of 27 days. Sorrow filled her heart as the neurologist pondered what she could have done differently to save Juliet Doubtfield – Gillian – from herself. Maybe she shouldn't have dug that deep. Maybe it was inevitable after all. But Eliza would never know.

And the next desperate patient was already waiting; Eliza was determined to not lose them as well.