The Dark Tribe

The oppression of a mile's worth of rock was an inescapable weight in Bradley Montague's mind as he belly-crawled through the narrow tunnel–though calling it a tunnel was overly generous. It was more a crack, really; barely large enough to wriggle through. If the rock decided to shift even the slightest bit, he would be crushed in the cold, dark womb of the earth until his fossilized remains were discovered by some future paleontologist.

The thought made him smile.

"How much further?" Ray's voice squeezed its way up the flue to him. Bradley shook his head even though his younger brother couldn't see the gesture.

"I don't know, but if it gets any narrower, we're going to have to go back."

"Balls to that," Ray snorted. "We've been in the Ass Crack for an hour already and I am not slithering ass-backwards for another one with you backing your ass up in my face!"

Bad jokes and toilet humor were invaluable tools for surviving underground without losing their minds: they helped the brothers forget the endless darkness, the claustrophobic tunnels, the fact that if anything went wrong the chances of anybody finding them in time to effect a rescue were about as good as Ray discovering the Missing Link.

They'd already had one mishap earlier in the day when Ray's expanding piton had decided to let go. He'd only dropped a couple feet before his belay line caught him, but it was enough to pucker both their sphincters.

The piton broke away a chunk of wall that turned out to be the nearly covered opening of the tunnel they had been crawling through for the last hour–a tunnel Ray had immediately dubbed Ass Crack. It was exactly the kind of thing for which the Brothers Montague lived: uncharted depths to explore, undiscovered tunnel systems and caverns whose sanctity had not been violated by humans in the aeons since their formation, and the opportunity to name them. Kentucky had the Mammoth Caves, New Mexico had Carlsbad Caverns; thanks to the Brothers Montague, Montana had the Devil's Sphincter, The Grand Cavern of Grabass, and the newly dubbed Ass Crack.

Bradley shoved his beat up old backpack ahead of him. In the cramped space the scrape of its buckles against the limestone were knives in his ears. He inched forward, his headlamp unable to illuminate past the faded red pack in which was stored the difference between surviving their latest cave-crawling adventure and ignominious death in the endless darkness beneath the world.

"Wait," Bradley sniffed the air. "I think I smell something." There had been a shift in the stale air, a cool draw of dampness that hadn't been there minutes ago. "Ray, there's an opening ahead!"

"Stop shouting!" Ray snapped. "I've literally got my head up your ass; I'd hear you if you whispered–making me deaf isn't going to help anything."

Bradley wished he had to fart, that he could rip off a real stinker right in his brother's face. Since he couldn't, he stifled a chuckle and quickened his pace instead.

It wasn't long before his backpack fetched up against something. Bradley gave the pack a tentative push and felt it give. Another push, more give. Years of experience told Bradley they'd finally reached the end of Ass Crack. A virgin cavern lay just beyond, waiting to be deflowered.

"Ray, there's an opening here, but it's going to be tight."

"How tight?" Ray's voice was thick with apprehension. The Ass Crack was already tight enough to give Dracula claustrophobia.

"At a guess? I'd say about as tight as Angela's grip on your nuts."

"C'mon, man," Ray protested, "she's not that bad."

"Dude, you have to get her permission to piss standing up."

"Whatever, man, just move your ass. You just reminded me how bad I gotta piss."

Grinning, Bradley gave his backpack a final shove. It popped through the opening and disappeared. He held onto its shoulder strap so as to not lose their supplies if Ass Crack opened up in the middle of a cliff face–a very real possibility. It had happened before.

Luckily, there was ground a couple feet down from the opening. Bradley let the pack drop. Then, he exhaled all the air from his lungs, reached forward and hauled himself through.

The Ass Crack emerged into a wide alcove fifteen feet across and ten feet deep. Beyond it, the yawning darkness swallowed the feeble thrust of his headlamp and refused to surrender its secrets.

"Holy shit, Brad," Ray whispered behind him. His awestruck voice was smothered by the infinite blackness, not even returning an echo.

"It's like we found the end of... of everything." Bradley whispered back. He'd never felt so tiny, never faced such an immense nothingness. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled uncomfortably. Being constantly surrounded by rock was part of spelunking. The cramped spaces and the cloying air, the claustrophobia ever present like a clingy girlfriend, all of it was second nature to cave lizards like he and his brother. But this... this great wide space filled with nothing... it was unnatural. It inspired the notion that they'd discovered a part of the world that God had decided not to bother filling in. An abortion of God's Creation.

If there's anything beyond the edge of the universe, Bradley thought, it probably looks like this.

The emptiness wasn't just surrounding him, it was invading him. It was an ancient, angry thing that refused to tolerate the blasphemy of his presence. Before its divine immensity, the emptiness seemed to seethe, how dare a speck of something like he violate its sacred nothing?

The emptiness expanded, jealously displacing everything else within him–including the air in his lungs. No matter how fast Bradley gulped, it wasn't enough. The emptiness was punishing him for trespassing upon its solitude; it would leave room only for itself, room only for its nothing. Once it filled him, he would be nothing. Nothing forever and ever...

Light! He must have light! He had to–had to!–dispel the darkness, disprove the dread that he had stumbled upon God's abortion, the growing certainty that there existed nothing beyond his little shelf of rock–there, deep in the earth where the cold emptiness seethed with malevolence. He needed light!

Heart hammering in his ears, Bradley dropped to his knees and frantically clawed through his pack until he found the emergency flare gun. By God, this was an emergency!

Panting, he pointed the stubby gun at the center of the vast black nothingness and pulled the trigger.

A white star blossomed from the gun and raced off into the subterranean night. The sudden, sacred light exorcised the hateful emptiness from Bradley and drove it back to the furthest reaches of the flare's radiance.

The blinding star arced high into the air, soaring through a space that had never seen such light; but even at its apex the light could not reach the ceiling of the cavern, could not even brush the tips of its stalactites.

As the flare began its graceful descent, its defiant light shattered the illusion that Bradley had stumbled into God's abortion.

"Well, fuck." Ray whispered.

It was God's graveyard.

A hundred feet below the alcove and stretching beyond the light's reach was a madman's take on the French Catacombs writ large. Every available inch of the vast cavern had been clad in bones, millions of them. The few columns revealed by the sputtering flare were festooned with them, the floor was carpeted with them, and the wall–the walls.

Lining the walls in great ranks, extending from the floor and disappearing into the shadows high above, were row upon row of human skulls. The sheer number of corpses it would require to fill even the portion of the cavern's walls Bradley could see made his brain stutter.

The falling star, nearing the end of its lifespan, cast its dying light upon the crown jewel of that cyclopean cathedral: an ancient revenant of bygone eras, an enormous piscine skull set at the base of the chamber's central pillar. A serpentine skeleton, its scale dwarfing anything Bradley had seen in a museum, coiled upward around the column like a spiral staircase. The revenant surveyed the surrounding midden like a medieval dragon crouched upon its macabre treasure hoard.

The star drifted behind the column and guttered out. The emptiness eagerly rushed back in, but the flare's revelation had robbed it of power, rendering it mere darkness once more.

Bradley took a knee and played the beam of his headlamp across the darkness, trying in vain to reveal the central column and its insane accoutrement.

"This is a joke," he said. "Right? I mean, there's no way this can be real."

"Yeah, it's definitely a joke," Ray replied, his voice a ghost in the darkness. "Because that definitely wasn't a giant skull and we're definitely not standing in a chamber full of bones."

"Not funny."

"Okay then, two questions: one, what the fuck? And, coming in at a close second: what. The. Fuck?"

"I don't know, but we're getting out of here." Bradley stood and backed away. He did not want to turn his back on the cavern until he absolutely had to.

"What?" Ray demanded, "Are you out of your fucking mind? We can't go back!"

"Ray! We have got to get out of here. We need to go back and report this to someone qualified to–"

"To what?" Ray demanded at his back, "What qualification would anybody have for this? We can't go back! We've just stumbled on the archeological Holy Grail! This place didn't happen by accident, someone built it! By God, man, fuck Tutankhamen–this is it!"

Bradley stared into the darkness, thinking. He couldn't formulate a counterargument, and as much as he hated to admit it his brother was right: it was undeniably the find of the century. The Brothers Montague were going to be famous! He took a deep, steadying breath.

"I dub thee the Bone Cathedral." he pronounced. There. They'd named it, it was theirs forever no matter who came after. He stood up and began extracting ropes and caver slings from his pack.

"Fuckin' A!" exclaimed Ray.

While setting his line, Bradley's eyes lingered on his climbing harness. Something tickled the back of his mind, the memory of a sound he couldn't place.

tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg...

"You okay up there, Brad?" Ray's voice drifted up from below, the younger sibling having already descended.

Bradley shook his head. "Yeah, all good, bro," he called down. Still, the phantom of half-remembered sound gnawed at the back of his mind as he began his descent: tchiiiinggg... tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg...

Halfway down the wall, he paused to examine the skulls. He was pretty certain they were human, but it was hard to tell: each of them had been thickly coated in some kind of hard, clear lacquer that gave off a tangy, organic odor. It reminded Bradley of salt water and infected wounds. The lacquer refracted the light from his headlamp in rainbow prisms the same way sunlight sparkled off oil-slicked water.

The bones covering the Cathedral floor weren't just scattered across the stone; they had been laid like cobblestones and lacquered into place. There wasn't a single square inch of visible stone anywhere. Even the few stalagmites Bradley could see were plastered in bone from base to tip; even molded around the curve of the stone. Where so many bones had come from, how the bones were softened enough to be so shaped, or who had executed the macabre task, was anybody's guess.

Bradley completely forgot about the floor when he reached the chamber's central column and the massive skull resting at its base. It was something straight out of a monster movie: either a prehistoric moray eel or a mutant coelacanth with a sea serpent's body, possessed of a skull twice as large as that of tyrannosaurus rex. A large discoloration marred its snout, like a dark water stain. Like old blood.

Unlike everything else Bradley had seen so far the coiling, serpentine skeleton was free of lacquer. It was as if the monstrous thing had coiled itself around the column and died there, its death grip defying the march of uncountable centuries.

"Dude," Ray said, "I'd love to have seen this thing in Jurassic Park."

The skull rested on a waist high dais of green stone. It wasn't limestone–wasn't, in fact, any igneous or sedimentary rock Bradley had ever seen. Its shape was roughly hexagonal; but its geometry defied the laws of perspective. Its planes appeared smooth and flat in one instant; then textured and whorled with alien glyphs in the next; then simultaneously convex and concave in the instant after that. Bradley leaned closer; the dais' surface seemed to bloom under his gaze like an eldritch lotus, unfolding layer upon impossible layer without ever moving at all.

Distantly, he heard it again, tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg...

A light flickered in the darkness beyond the column.

Bradley started. "Did you see that?"

"See what?"

"A light!" he hissed back.

"Bullshi–" Ray interrupted himself with a sharp gasp as he saw it, too.

The darkness was coming alive around them with quick flashes of light. On the other side of the column, a soft blue light pulsed; flickering once, twice, three times in rapid succession. Off to the right, pulses of green and yellow answered. Bradley turned in a slow circle, seeing with disbelieving eyes the source of the light as they gathered around him, surrounding him. Faced with the impossibility of what he was seeing, his mind simply rejected it out of hand.

Nope. There's no way I'm seeing what I'm seeing.

Their form was related to homo sapien, but evolution had definitely taken a left turn somewhere. They were short and slender, with spindly, long-fingered limbs and sloped, hairless heads. Huge, white eyes twice the size of a human's stared at him above wide lantern-jawed mouths–a familial resemblance to the giant skull that was impossible to miss.

Like deep-dwelling sea life that had developed bioluminescence, the light came from their flesh. In bright, colourful patterns, electric blues and vibrant crimsons dueled with glow-in-the-dark greens, Day-Glo yellows and bright safety oranges in a kaleidoscopic display that left splotches of afterimage on Bradley's retina.

There were easily more than a hundred of the creatures surrounding him, swaying gently side to side as they watched with their huge eyes, the only part of their naked anatomy that didn't emit light. Bradley wondered how so many had converged on him and his brother without being noticed. Then one of them unwrapped itself from a nearby stalagmite.

The creature's camouflage was uncannily like that of an octopus: its skin had taken not only the color and pattern of the surface upon which it hid, but also mimicked the texture and protrusions of the bones themselves. There could have been thousands more in the Bone Cathedral and Bradley would never have seen them.

They've been here the entire time, he thought as he watched the creature's skin soften from the ridges of bone on the stalagmite and fade into a uniform matte grey. We walked right past them.

The creature flickered its lights at Bradley. He got the sense that it was trying to communicate with him. When Bradley lifted his open hands in an I don't understand you gesture, the creature moved toward him. It had an odd, swaying gait: its limbs moved sinuously, like its bones were more suggestion than substance.

Bradley was scared shitless, his heart a triphammer in his chest, but his excitement overrode it. Whatever was happening, whatever these creatures were, he and Ray were the first people ever to make contact with them. If only he had a camera!

"Uh, hi!" he said, "My name is Bradley Montague and this is my brother Ray."

At the sound of his voice, the creature jerked back as though it had been slapped. The congregation froze, their light show dimming to a dull glimmer. Bradley tensed. He thought of the lost in translation gag that always happened in the movies, where the well-meaning explorer attempted to communicate with the primitives and accidentally insulted their mothers. He hoped he and his brother weren't about to become the newest additions to the Bone Cathedral. Or get eaten.

The creature leaned closer, peering up into his eyes. Its uplifted chin nearly rested on his sternum. A vague scent of saltwater stung Bradley's nostrils. In such close proximity he discovered that its eyes were not blank as they first appeared; there was a filmy membrane over them. Beneath it, its pupils reached to the outer edges of the eyeball. Then the creature's eyes flared with white light and everything changed.

Though the light from the creature's eyes was brighter than anything Bradley had ever seen, it wasn't painful. It was a light of illumination in the purest sense of the word: it allowed the creature to see Bradley in his entirety, allowed it to know him. No friend, no lover, no one would ever know Bradley as completely as it did in that moment.

It was not a one-sided exchange, taking and giving nothing in return–in the same moment it came to know Bradley, it itself was known by him in a moment of pure, sublime unity. It was an instantaneous and total exchange of knowledge and self.

The creature was a member of a nameless species whose lineage reached back to a time when creatures the size of mountains swam the seas of the world. Its people had been ushered into deep suboceanic caves by their god before a great calamity had split the world. For time unmeasurable they had dwelt in their deep caves while the world burned and froze and thawed again, living in communion with their god.

Before their god could raise them up from beneath the ocean floor, a mighty quake had thrown the seas into chaos. The waves were pulled back like a blanket and their caves thrust far inland. The water had drained away into the thirsty earth, leaving their god bereft of the seas over which it had been given dominion.

Their god slept, now, had slept through the ages since the upheaval. But their god slept only; gods did not die. One day the earth would shake again and the seas would rage. One day the oceans would reclaim the land for themselves and flood the cavern in which their god slept. On that day, it would shake off the shackles of slumber and once more ascend to its ancient sovereignty.

Until that time they tended it and guarded its sleep. When their god awoke, they would know its favour and swim the endless seas at its side forever.

Bradley had arrived at a time of great auspice: one of their females was about to give birth. Their god blessed all their offspring, and Bradley would bear witness.

The exchange of knowledge between Bradley and the creature took no more time than it took him to blink from the sudden glare. But on the other side of that moment Bradley found his fear dispelled. In its place: an all-encompassing sense of awe. These creatures were living testaments to ancient gods that defied everything mankind thought it knew.

The congregation began flashing their lights again. Bradley could discern a rhythm to it, now, a song in the light that he could hear as well as feel. The lightsong–their name for it–pulsed over his skin, caressed his ears, whispered to his soul. His body began to sway to the rhythm.

Distantly, he thought he heard the sound again, but he ignored it, absorbed as he was by the ineffable beauty of the lightsong.

A woman came forward–at least, Bradley assumed it was a woman; the only thing that differentiated her from the others was her distended, pregnant belly. Her skin was luminous, glowing in shades of shimmering lavender and azure. As she came, two others separated themselves from the crowd and helped her climb atop the skull. She lay against the broad snout, spreading her legs and setting her feet upon the fangs jutting up from the lower jaw as if they were stirrups. Unable to tear his gaze away, Bradley stared between her legs. She had no sex, the space between her legs was completely smooth.

The lightsong subsided as the woman arched her back, opened her mouth, and let flow a single note. The sound was liquid harmony, the kind that had bewitched sailors and led their ships to rocky deaths for centuries. The note filled the air, crashed against distant walls and rolled back upon the congregation.

The lightsong surged behind her siren song, rippling across the congregation in gently undulating waves of green and blue. For a moment, Bradley had a mental image of a bed of kelp in an undersea current.

The dais beneath the woman glowed, the green stone turning translucent as it answered the lightsong. The skull's empty eye sockets lit up: first with pinpoints, then filling the gaping cavities with bright green radiance as the god awoke.

With the cracking of fossilized bone separating itself from ancient stone, the displaced god uncoiled from the column. Balancing the woman on its nose, it lifted its skeletal head from the altar upon which it had rested and surveyed its children.

The woman's song never wavered.

Through the blessing of the union, Bradley knew that their god would not fully awaken until the seas filled the Bone Cathedral. What he was witnessing was a bare sliver of their god's consciousness, akin to rolling over in one's sleep. It was just enough to bless the new offspring and receive the repast necessary to sustain itself until the next time it was called upon by its people. Then it would settle back into deeper sleep. In this way their god had passed through the centuries.

The god took the congregation's lightsong for its flesh, cladding its ancient bones in the shimmering spectrum and making glorious substance of light. The god's majestic form was not that of a giant eel or a coelacanth or a serpent, but something of each–and more. Tentacles stretched from the side of its head, pulsing with light. They reached out as though to embrace the entire congregation, its glorious lightsong reverberating the entirety of its Cathedral.

WoOOom, WoOOom, WoOOom

If the congregation's lightsong was beauty, then the ancient god's was a genuine religious experience. Bradley had never given thought to spirituality before; in that instant he was a zealot.

WoOOom, WoOOom, WoOOom

The lightsong caressed him, filled him, infused him. Unbidden, his pants tightened as his manhood rose prouder and harder than it ever had and spurted in ecstasy. He barely noticed–the best orgasm of his life was a minor footnote in the ecstasy of the lightsong. The lightsong was all.

A pair of tentacles curled inward, stroking the woman's thighs. The congregation lifted their voices to their god, their siren song deeper and more resonant than the female's. The acoustics of the Bone Cathedral amplified the vibrating harmony, weaving it into the pulsing lightsong to create an ocean of physical sound. Bradley let himself be borne away on those waves. Such heartbreaking beauty in those sounds!

Sounds... Like a broken carabineer swinging on a safety line, knocking against rock: tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg...tchiiinggg...

Gently, the tentacles slid along the woman's full, pregnant belly. She arched her back further, lifting her buttocks up, heedless of her feet impaling themselves on the needle sharp fangs.

The god's eyes blazed, filling the Bone Cathedral with their light. As harmony rose another octave, it tore the woman's pregnant belly open, spraying Bradley and the congregation with blood and amniotic fluid.

The woman's song did not falter, even as the tentacles deftly opened the flaps of her belly, exposing a clutch of gelatinous amber pearls. The other tentacles reached in and gently scooped them out. Each pearl was the size of a grapefruit, tethered to its mother by a long umbilical cord. To Bradley's horror, inside each pearl–no, each egg!–was a shape all too easily recognizably as fetal.

The mother's body degenerated into convulsive fits, choking off her song. The two rending tentacles coiled around the shuddering mother and lifted, pulling her pierced feet free from its fangs in the process. They deposited her into the god's mouth, and it closed tenderly, careful not to damage the umbilicals.

The ancient god's congregation reached a crescendo, shaking the walls of the Bone Cathedral. Their god's lightsong intensified, each quickening pulse sending shockwaves through the spectrum of the congregation.

With every pulse of the lightsong bright flashes of multicolored light raced from the god's mouth, traversing the conduits connecting sacrificed mother with blessed children and infusing them with its lightsong. The pearls split, spilling amber fluids over lightsong tentacles and adding the first trembling cries of hybrid children to the symphony.

The newborn closest to Bradley turned its glowing face to him, opened its lantern-jawed mouth and screamed. The unhinged, misshapen maw filled with so many teeth summoned Bradley's fear back with a vengeance. He turned and fled, his scream adding a shrill counterpoint to the congregation's jubilation.

How he got through the throng, or where the opening in the far end of the Bone Cathedral led, Bradley had no clue. But escape he did, only realizing some time later that Ray was nowhere to be seen. His brother must have been incapacitated as he had been, pacified by that strange flashing light from their eyes. It was only the horror of seeing the birth of the god's newest progeny that broke the spell and allowed him to escape.

He had to go back. He couldn't leave Ray with those things. He needed to move quickly, but he couldn't go unarmed. From the bottom of his pack he took one of his spare crampons. He secured the footgear's straps to his hand and forearm with rope, fashioning a crude spiked gauntlet. It might not be of much use against their god, but Bradley was pretty confident he could bust a few heads with it before they overwhelmed him.

He didn't know how long he had run, having dashed in a mad panic away from the Cathedral, but he was lucky: there weren't any other tunnels on the way back for him to get lost in.

When he reached the Cathedral of Bones he did not hesitate to fire another flare. Before the star had reached its apex, he reloaded and fired another one. If any of those bastards wanted to sneak up on him, he wasn't going to make it easy for them.

"Ray! Where are you?" Bradley shouted. There was no answer nor, for that matter, was there any sign of the congregation. Had they all scattered to look for him?

Their god was no longer coiled around the central column. Had it gone in search of him as well? Bradley swept his headlamp over the ground where the god's skull had rested. The strange dais was missing, too. There was no sign of his brother. He was gone.

tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg...

The sound came from the alcove. The Ass Crack.

Bradley sprinted across the floor, forcing speed from tired limbs. He found his solitary climbing line still waiting for him and scrambled up the wall as fast as he could.

He glanced over his shoulder, where the vast emptiness once again reigned in the darkness. Where was the congregation? Where was their god?

"You know what? Balls to that!" he snorted. His life had turned into a horror movie, he was not going to be the jackass who went looking for the bad guy after they disappeared. No, he was the guy who did the smart thing and got the hell out as soon as the moment presented itself. If he came back at all it would be with the military. All of it.

Bradley shook his head and shimmied his way back into the Ass Crack.

He was halfway back the way they'd come when his light went out. There was nothing for it, the spares were in his pack and he couldn't reach it in the cramped confines of the Ass Crack. All he could do was crawl.

Fortunately, the light was mostly for his peace of mind. The Ass Crack was pretty much a straight shot, no turnoff or dropouts. Bradley lost track of time as he crawled in the black, ears straining to hear the sound of pursuit behind or the sound of approaching danger ahead.

tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg...

The source of the sound was close by, no longer memory but actual sound. It was coming from right in front of him.

tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg... tchiiinggg...

Blindly he reached out; his hand closed around the rope they'd secured down the shaft before discovering the Ass Crack. The rope felt odd, grimy in his hand like it had been left outside for a week.

The carabineer at the end had been making the sound, knocking against the rock at the rim of the Ass Crack , but it felt off. The oblong ring should have had a hinged mouth locking against its loop, but it was broken. How'd that happen?

"Braaadley!" Ray's voice floated down to him. There was fear in his voice.

Bradley looked up. He saw flashes of white lights a dozen feet above him. The creatures had found Ray. His brother needed him.

Moving as fast as he could, Bradley scrambled out of the Ass Crack and onto the wall using the pitons and lines they'd secured down the wall on their initial descent. Without those lines to guide him Bradley could never have been able to make the climb in the dark. But his brother needed him, was still calling his name, and Bradley could not fail him.

As he neared the summit Bradley saw the lights again. Bright, like the one that had incapacitated him in the Bone Cathedral. The thought of creatures from the dim reaches of the antiquated past harming Ray boiled his blood. Bradley thrust himself over the lip and charged.

"Bradley!" Ray called, but Bradley could not see him. The creatures turned their bright gaze upon him, blinding him in the searing whiteness of their glare. Roaring in fury, he reached out blindly with one hand, found purchase, and drove his crampon-mounted arm into the center of that whiteness.

The creature screamed in pain. Ray screamed his name. Bradley would not stop until these things were dead, until he and his brother were safe and back in the sunlight.

The creatures brought their lights to bear upon him, but his rage immunized him to the insidious lightsong. He lashed out wildly, felt the crampon's teeth bite into flesh again and again. But there were too many of them–their hands took hold of him, overpowered him by force of sheer numbers, overwhelmed him. Bradley was lifted off his feet and then thrown over the edge, back into the darkness.

Twisting in the air, he looked down and saw the displaced god rising up to meet him, its yawning maw a brilliant tunnel of lightsong.

The ancient, displaced god received Bradley Montague and ushered him into oblivion.

Angela Madison stared at the officers, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"There was nothing they could do," Officer Ramirez was saying. "Apparently Mr. Montague had a psychotic break and attacked the rescue workers. He hurt one of them pretty badly, and in the scuffle he tripped and fell over the edge."

Angela shook her head. "He was crazy before he went back out there," she said.

Ramirez frowned. "Ma'am?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Don't you know?"

Officer Magellan placed a hand on hers. "I'm sorry, Angela," she said, "He was brought in after Bradley went missing; he wasn't here for what happened... before."

Angela sighed. "A little over a month ago, Ray and Brad went on one of their little expeditions. Always looking for new systems they can put those stupid names to." She shook her head. "Do you know they actually named one of them the Grand Cavern of Grabass?" she scoffed. "Those two..."

"What happened?" asked Ramirez.

"I'm their safety net. When they didn't report in at the appointed time I called it in. They eventually found Bradley wandering in the caves. He had no light; their best guess was that he'd been lost in the dark for almost a week. There was no sign of Ray.

"When they got Brad to the hospital he began raving about fish people taking his brother. Something about ancient gods of the sea sleeping under the mountain. As you can guess, they put him under observation and started pumping him with meds.

"They found a place in the caves where Brad and Ray's ropes were still secured. One of the belay lines had a broken carabineer at the end. As near as they could tell, Ray's piton had broken from the wall and the carabineer sheared through when the rope took his weight. It happens sometimes. Brad probably saw his brother fall to his death."

Fresh tears streamed down Angela's cheeks. Magellan handed her a tissue.

"Did they find Ray's body?" Ramirez asked, the color having drained from his face.

"No," Magellan said, "Some of those caves have crevasses that go down hundreds of feet. They looked, of course, but there's only so far they can go."

"How'd he end up back in the caves?" Ramirez asked.

"He was under medical observation, but he wasn't under guard." Magellan replied. "It probably wasn't hard for him to sneak out. One of the teams was sent back to where Ray had fallen and that's where Bradley attacked them."

Ramirez was silent, his mouth hanging loosely. Finally, he found his voice.

"So, you're saying that after Bradley saw his brother fall to his death, he wandered around the caves in the dark for a week, looking for his brother; and after he's rescued he goes back, and wanders around for another week before attacking the people sent to rescue him, and ends up falling to his death in the same place his brother died?!"

Angela nodded. "I told Ray many times it's not natural to spend so much time underground, away from the light. I never understood it–I would lose my mind."