A Cavern Most Verdant

“Ellis! Could you come here please?” his father cried from across the road. As soon as he appeared, he vanished back into the house.

Ellis cursed, hiding his carton of eggs deep in the bush. He wiggled out onto the grass and stooped low across the street, covertly one-finger saluting Bobby Wallace as his mottled face glared at him through the splatter of egg on his window. He crept through the front door as quietly as he could, listening to the sounds of his father and another man talking in the kitchen down the hallway. It seemed business-like in nature, but Ellis wasn’t one to understand much of any kind of business.

He padded silently to the doorway to listen in for a moment.

“He’s well-written, best of his class right now in fact, and he’s very artistic. I’m sure he could be of use, just tell him what to write down and draw and he’ll pick it up in no time!” His father was enthusiastically selling this man on somebody and their talents, and Ellis had a crawling suspicion he knew who.

“Well, Walter, it looks like he’s right around the corner there, why don’t we ask him ourselves?” the man said jovially, sending a shudder down Ellis’ spine. How did he know he was there?

His father peeked around the corner and caught his eye. “Ah, right on time! Come meet an old friend of mine!”

His father grasped his shoulder and tugged him around the corner, clasping both shoulders to hold him in place to face his friend. Ellis stood silently for a moment until his father patted his left arm. He took the hint and extended his hand in greeting.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr---”, he tentatively said.

The man gave a warm grin that didn’t reach his eyes. “Darvey. Corduroy Darvey, most people, your dad included, call me Cordy, but you can call me Mr. Darvey if you’d like.”

Mr. Darvey clasped his palm and firmly shook, large sandpapery fingers scratching his own. Ellis noted he seemed like a nice enough fellow, maybe his father’s age, with a crooked white-tooth smile and his near-bioluminescent green eyes.

“Here, take a seat Ellis, Cordy here has a little work opportunity I thought you’d make a great fit for. It’s just for a month until he can get a couple new people on his team.” His father guided him into a wooden seat at the dining table and scampered around the kitchen collecting mugs for coffee.

Mr. Darvey gave Ellis a thin-lipped smile, something reminiscent of a crack in the side of an egg. “Wally here was telling me you’re top of your class, is that correct?”

Ellis gave a nod. “My teacher says I’m “a natural talent”.” He made sure to enunciate the quotation with his fingers. Mr. Darvey chuckled.

“Well, I think you might be just the thing for my project.”

“What’s your project ?”

“You see, Ellis, I’m a cave surveyor. Do you know what that is?” Mr. Darvey asked. Ellis shook his head. “A cave surveyor helps to map out the inside of caves for people to use. By creating a good map, people interested in mining or spelunking or other purposes know what they’re going to see on the inside.”

“...spelunking?”

Another strange little smile. “Exploring caves as a hobby.”

Ellis was quiet for a moment. “And what would you need me for?”

“While I am surveying the cave, taking measurements and the like, I need a draftsman to record those measurements and help me make a map out of them.”

“...I don’t know how good I’d be at that, sir.”

Mr. Darvey seemed to intensify for a moment. “It’s just for a month until I can get a replacement draftsman flown in off another project. It’s a fairly small system by most recorded accounts and if we complete it quickly enough, I should only need you for the numbers. Do you think you could help me out?”

Ellis glanced at his father leaning against the counter behind Mr. Darvey. He smiled and gave him a double thumbs-up like Ellis would be approving an all-inclusive trip to an amusement park. He sighed and glanced back at Mr. Darvey.

“I guess, um, I could give it a try?”

The glow behind Darvey’s eyes seemed to go dead for a moment. “Perfect! I’ll come get you first thing on Monday morning, I’ll give you the weekend to read up on what we’ll be doing.”

Mr. Darvey grabbed a bag off the floor and laid it on the table. He fished through the worn brown satchel and extracted three faded tomes, sliding them across the table to Ellis.

“Light reading for natural talent, I’m sure.”

Ellis wanted to smack the little smirk off his face but refrained by grabbing the stack of books and holding them in his lap. They had a visceral smell like wet ash and left dust trails on his cargo shorts.

Ellis’ father and Mr. Darvey almost immediately stopped focusing on him, turning towards one another to discuss this friend or that place or whatever it was that connected the two. He headed for the hallway and crept up the stairs to his room, quietly shutting the door behind him. The books were unceremoniously dropped on his cluttered computer desk while he flopped atop his bed covers.

So much for the rest of his summer.

----------------------------------------

Most of the following week seemed fairly easy to Ellis. Mr. Darvey picked him up in a dusty little sedan bright and early every morning by 8 a.m. and drove him an hour out of town. After an eternity winding down unpaved dirt roads, they finally reached their destination: a clearing between the trees and the foothills. Just ahead was an ominous darkened doorway set into the face of the hillside. Mr. Darvey called it “Unnamed Cave System 6”, but Ellis named it Beasty after his late Jack Russell Terrier.

Mr. Darvey showed Ellis all his caving equipment: his large silver compass and his handheld clinometer and the gray journal and pencil Ellis would be using to take his notes. For distances he had a fancy modern rangefinder tucked into his tool belt. He talked meters and angles and caverns and pitfalls. Honestly, it was mostly in one ear and out the other until he mentioned one Jordan Portside.

“...and you really have to watch your step, Mr. Portside took a nasty spill when we first started out in UCS6 here and that’s why you’re here today.”

Ellis tuned back in. “What happened to Mr. Portside?”

Darvey glanced up from his reams of paper, sickening acidic eyes glowering at Ellis. “Jordan Portside was my former draftsman for this project but he wasn’t much for paying attention to where he stepped.”

Ellis squinted at him. “What does that mean? Did he die or what?”

Darvey gave him a blank look.

“...Wait, he did?”

“This business can be dangerous for some, unfortunately.”

Ellis’ mouth gaped like a fish for a moment. “And you brought a kid out here! Who’s to say I’m not clumsy like this Portside guy was?”

“Well, for starters, you’re already shorter and more nimble than he was but I would expect that of a middle-schooler,” Mr. Darvey sighed, pushing around the maps. “Anyway, it was a fluke what happened to Mr. Portside by all accounts. You and I won’t even be surveying that part of the system during your time with me.”

Ellis was not feeling especially good about this after hearing that but Darvey continued on with his informational talk like it hadn’t happened. By the end of that day, Ellis could write down measurements and angles at an alright pace. By the end of the week, he could move fast enough for Mr. Darvey’s standards. By Sunday morning the following week, they were ready to enter Beasty.

---------------------------------

Ellis had packed a backpack with all the essentials: change of clothes, matches, flashlight and batteries. Mr. Darvey had provided a helmet outfitted with a robust light attached, albeit a size too big. He planned the pair of them to be underground for a few hours at a time the first few days, gradually leading to spending the night or even several days at a time in the dark.

Those first few days were easy, a couple hours at a time jotting down the angles and measurements and helping mark the cave walls with points. Ellis would stand in position with his notebook and wait for Mr. Darvey’s calls out of the darkness with new numbers for him. Even with the headlamp, Darvey was prone to disappearing out of sight around tight corners entirely. The only giveaway where he might be seemed to be the flash of his eyes in the darkness.

They had reached a fork in the system by the beginning of the fourth week. Already they had been inside the cave for going on their third day, something that did not escape Ellis’ notice.

He kicked a rock down the left side of the fork. “I thought you said this was a small cave system.”

Darvey aimed the rangefinder down the right side of the fork. “It is by all historical accounts. However, most historical accounts don’t seem to get as far as this division.”

“So how big is Beasty then?”

Darvey started walking deeper down the right side into darkness. “That’s what we’re here to find out, isn’t it?”

Ellis felt the pit in his stomach get a little deeper. “Where did you say Mr. Portside fell?”

“I didn’t. But if you must know, it was off to the left side of the division. We’ll take the right another day before we turn back with our findings.”

Ellis scarcely had time to respond before Darvey disappeared from the headlamp’s path of light. He hesitated at the fork, glancing down the left side where Portside had fallen. The path looked flat and stable from where the light touched, compared to the stumbling walk of the rightmost path. He gulped and headed towards the right.

-----------------------------------

“Mr. Darvey?”

Ellis was met with silence once again. They’d made it another day in the cave slowly going down the right path, the way becoming smaller and more winding with each step. He’d stopped to take a drink from his canteen before realizing that Darvey had disappeared again.

“Mr. Darvey, where did you go? Are you alright?”

Ellis continued down the path, ducking under the low cave ceiling and squeezing past sharp facets of wall. Where the rest of the cave had been fairly accommodating of two people, this section could scarcely fit one. He pushed himself through an opening barely chest-wide in width and promptly lost his footing. A pit swallowed him whole before he could even scream.

He hit the base of the pit with a wheeze, the air knocked out of his lungs. His head was ringing and his helmet was gone. He lay there for a moment, disoriented in the dark, before he sat up. Maybe fifteen feet above him was the lip of the pit, his helmet lying against the wall illuminating the ceiling. When he glanced to his left, he saw a formless shape curled on its side. The only thing tipping Ellis off it was human was the emaciated hand flung to its side.

“Sorry, kid.”

Ellis glanced up towards the ceiling, the headlamp flashing in and out as it died. A pair of flowing green eyes stared down at him, perched above a horrid sharp-toothed maw.

“Mr. Darvey, please don’t hurt me.”

The headlamp gave out, leaving the dim glow of the eyes above him.

“No, no, I’d never hurt Wally’s kid. No, he’ll get you back at the end of the week, just like we discussed.”

The glowing went black before the pit filled with piercing green light.

Ellis could only scream as he was engulfed.