There's a whole other world down there. There's more than I ever could have imagined. [Update #4]
In the predawn dark of May 12th, I paid a visit to my faceless friend. In what has almost become ritual now, I entered through Lucy's farm, headlamp cutting the familiar path through the dark. I made it to First Date in just under forty minutes and crouched at its mouth, listening to nothing, before I slipped inside and tossed a folded-up piece of paper through the pinch point. It was a simple message this time, containing only a map of my side of Needle Caves. I'd drawn it as carefully as I could—our survey route, the main chambers, the tobacco farm entrance marked with an X. Everything I knew. Beyond First Date I'd left the page blank except for a question mark. I stayed a few minutes longer than I needed to, my cheek against the cold rock, before I made my way back out into the sunrise.
Back on the surface, I started planning in earnest. The first thing I did was bring my younger sister Kaylee into the fold. She's not one for caving, but she's a smart and reliable kid, and once Jacob and I had worn down her initial disbelief, she agreed to help. I gave her two tasks. The first was to dig up whatever she could find on Mr. Ward, especially regarding property in his name aside from the mansion on Meadow Lane. The second task was being our insurance policy on the day of our expedition. If she hadn't heard from me by an agreed upon time, she was to go directly to Lucy and tell her everything. Lucy and her two adult sons, both of whom live and work the farm full time, are the kind of people who have always been deeply suspicious of authority. They're good people, if not a little tinfoil-hat-wearing, and there was no doubt in my mind that they'd rush to our aid, guns blazing, so long as Kaylee mentioned the words "government conspiracy".
The other person Jacob and I brought in was Noah. Noah and I go way back, further back than any of this. He's the one I have to blame for the whole mess, in a way, because he's the one who got me into caving. The two of us and a third friend we had back then spent most of our childhood in a loose rotation between climbing trees, swimming in the town river, and wriggling into every dark hole in the ground we could find. It was Noah who helped me install the rope in the passage above First Date. He's athletic and level-headed, and he owns a firearm he actually knows how to use. At this particular juncture in my life, that last part felt like the most important qualification of all.
For our first run, we weren't planning anything meticulous: just a preliminary look at whatever was down there so we could plan properly afterward. We gave ourselves three hours total. I'd wanted to go earlier in the week but I was still waiting on a response from Tsövel, and I kept putting it off by another day, and then another. By Sunday night I'd accepted that I wasn't going to hear back before we went in. I prayed that my correspondent was alright, and then I gave Jacob and Noah the green light.
We arrived at the tobacco farm just after noon on Monday. I went through the warped plywood gap first, the same way I had before, feeding my pack through ahead of me and pulling myself in after it. Noah and Jacob came through behind me. I double checked that my watch was running, then crossed to the far corner and hauled the trapdoor open. When I turned around, my two companions were standing at the edge of the opening, staring down into the cellar with an expression I recognized as the particular discomfort of seeing something you'd been told about but hadn't quite believed. I went down the stone steps first, testing each one before committing my weight. They held. Jacob followed, one careful step at a time. Noah, surprisingly, hesitated at the top.
I asked him, "You forget something?", and he gave me an incredulous look.
"Hey man, you sure about this?"
He was afraid, I realized. My friend could handle a tight squeeze, he could handle the dark, but a man-made passage carried the implicit threat of running into an unfriendly stranger. It was a fair concern. It was probably enough reason to call it quits on our whole operation. But Noah hadn't seen the body in First Date. He hadn't seen the way it folded and split apart on the sharp rock or the way its eyes had seemed to beg for help. And he hadn't seen the letters, hadn't felt the weight of their words, didn't—couldn't—comprehend the urgency of getting below, of rescuing my correspondent, of finding the truth.
Of course he didn't get it, and I wasn't sure I had the words to make him get it, so instead I told him something simpler. I reminded him that we had people on the surface watching our back, that we were both armed, and that I was nearly certain the place was long abandoned anyway. I promised him we'd be careful, more careful than he and I had been in expeditions past, and that placated him enough to reluctantly descend. The three of us turned on our lights, then began walking down the gently sloping passage.
While the mouth might have been artificially widened, the passage quickly fed into what seemed like a natural cave system. For the better part of an hour we moved through it methodically. The passages were navigable enough, the ceilings fairly high, but the system branched constantly and most branches led nowhere. We backtracked more than we moved forward. There were no signs of habitation, and I was beginning to wonder if I'd led my friends on an elaborate detour to absolutely nothing when the passage opened without warning. One minute I was hunched over, back scraping the ceiling as I shuffled forward, and then the walls fell back and the three of us were standing on a shelf at the edge of a chamber so large that our headlamps could barely find the far wall. I swept my beam left, then right, and found dark water stretching out in every direction.
We had stumbled upon a subterranean lake.
"Gorgeous," Noah said. It wasn't the word I would've used. The water was perfectly still, the surface so undisturbed that it gave back a flattened mirror image of the three of us, our headlamps like stars in the night sky. Jacob crouched down by the water's edge, his lamp angling into the surface. The beam entered the water cleanly at first, then diffused into a haze of suspended sediment until the light dissolved completely.
"How deep do you think it goes?"
I pointed my light straight down. Below the surface, the limestone floor of the chamber sloped gradually away from the shelf before dropping off into a deeper basin at the center. In the shallower section near our feet the rock was visible, maybe eight or ten feet down. A few yards out, the bottom was still present but softening, and beyond that, it was impossible to tell. Could've been twenty feet, could've been a hundred.
"Deep enough," I said, and told him to step back from the edge.
I didn't like the implications of such a vast, static sump. Beyond the structural concerns, the lake was a dead end in the most absolute sense; if there were passages continuing on the other side, submerged doorways somewhere, we were never going to find them without equipment none of us owned. At least we had the other half of the fork that had led us there. If this passage had taken us to the East, maybe the other would curve West in the general direction of First Date. There was still something more to explore.
"What are those?" Jacob asked suddenly.
I followed his gaze. At the edges of our lights' authority, there were shapes near what I thought was the ground. Several of them, distributed in no particular arrangement that I could identify. They were pale, paler than the surrounding rock, and irregular in outline. By my estimation they were about five feet in length. They were very, very still.
"Fish?"
"Maybe." Jacob tilted his headlamp to try to sharpen the angle. It didn't help.
"Big fish."
"Not unheard of. Mammoth has fish."
"Yeah, little ones. Blindfish the size of your finger. Nothing like that."
"They're not moving," Noah stated.
The three of us stared into the lake a little longer, and then I said we were wasting our time gawking at what were very likely just rocks. I exited the cavern and headed back in the direction of the fork. I did not tell my companions that, when examining the nearest shape, I could have sworn I saw two limbs extending from it, reaching up towards the surface as though asking to be lifted out of all that still water.
Jacob and Noah caught up with me at the fork without a word. We took the western branch and walked in near silence for several minutes, the passage twisting gradually, the ceiling varying between generous and punishing. Every now and then I caught a faint metallic smell beneath the limestone and damp earth. I was mentally calculating our remaining time when the floor beneath my boots changed, the uneven cave floor replaced by something oddly level. I stopped and looked down. Concrete, cracked and stained but unmistakably concrete. I followed it forward with my light and the walls around us, once again, fell away.
But this was different from our previous discovery. The lake, while eerie in its vastness, had clearly been naturally formed. This chamber was anything but natural. Its circular floor was flat throughout, the same poured concrete extending wall to wall. The ceiling soared above us and culminated, maybe twenty feet up, in a dome that had been smoothed and shaped. Along the interior of the dome, someone had carved an intricate pattern of repeating shapes that spiraled upward toward the apex.
Around the perimeter of the room, evenly spaced, were low arched openings. I counted sixteen. The two largest were directly opposite one another: the one we'd come through, and the one directly across the rotunda from us. Along the upper curve of the walls, metal conduit ran in bracketed lines between the openings, disappearing into bored holes at the threshold of each alcove. Several sections had pulled away from the wall and hung loose. At intervals, junction boxes were mounted to the rock, their covers missing, the interiors black with corrosion. I thought I heard a low buzzing sound, so faint it was almost imperceptible, but if there was some kind of generator nearby, it certainly wasn't powering anything in that room.
After a moment of stunned silence, Noah fidgeted with his GoPro, making sure it was still recording, and headed toward the small opening immediately to the right of the entryway. I headed for the one immediately to the left.
Jacob followed me into the first alcove. The room was small: the floor was maybe 11 x 8 feet, and the ceiling was horribly low. Couldn't possibly have been more than five feet tall. The walls had been shaped in the same way as the rotunda, the chisel marks running in long deliberate lines through the limestone. I ran my flashlight along the door frame on my way in, taking note of how there were remnants of hinges on the outside.
The room itself was completely empty. Jacob and I gave it a thorough sweep, hoping to find some long-forgotten personal effect tucked into a crevice somewhere, but we found nothing. There were, however, two interesting indentations in the back wall, about three feet off of the floor. They were about a foot apart and a few inches deep, and gave the impression that something had been bolted into the wall there. Some kind of shelf maybe.
Back in the rotunda, Noah was visible through one of the openings on the far side, his GoPro light sweeping the walls of another alcove. He was talking quietly to the camera, narrating what he was seeing. He spotted us and raised a hand before ducking into the next room.
I remembered checking my watch and seeing that we had under an hour remaining for our ascent. Our descent had been slowed by a copious amount of backtracking, but I thought we would make it back to the surface in time as long as we left soon.
Jacob and I picked up the pace, working our way around the left side of the large center room. The second alcove was identical to the first—same dimensions, same exterior hinges, same holes in the far wall. So was the third. The fourth alcove had a drain set into the center of the concrete floor, the grate gone, the pipe below it long since silted over. The fifth had a dark stain spreading from the base of the back wall across roughly a third of the floor, soaked deep into the concrete. The sixth had what I assumed to be tally marks scratched into the wall, a few hundred in total.
Jacob suggested it had probably been some kind of prepper bunker. I had no better explanation to offer, but something about the architecture of the place didn't sit well with me. The cells, the concrete, the conduit—all of that fit the bunker theory well enough. The rotunda didn't. What kind of survivalist is going through the effort of shaping out a dome in the limestone? The carvings on the ceiling alone made me feel like I was inside of a church. I opened my mouth to ask Jacob how many people he thought had lived there when Noah's voice cut through the quiet, echoing so loudly it made me cringe.
"Holy shit you guys, there's a—"
Before Noah could finish, his voice was drowned out by a much louder sound. It came from somewhere beyond the large opening on the far side of the rotunda, a tremendous metallic clang that resonated through the stone. It sounded like a very large iron gate swinging shut.
Nobody said anything. Noah emerged from his alcove at the same moment Jacob and I came out of ours, and the three of us met in the center of the rotunda and looked at each other for about half a second before we moved.
We went back the way we came, fast. Being chased through a cave is nothing like being chased anywhere else. There was no open ground to sprint across, no straight shot to a door or a fence line. We were forty minutes from the surface on a good run, through passages that required us to turn sideways, drop to our knees, squeeze and duck and climb. We moved as quickly as the cave allowed, which was not quickly enough. Somewhere behind us, I could hear not just one, but several sets of footsteps.
At every fork we had to slow down and scan for the markers we'd left on our way in, small flags of tape pressed into crevices at eye level. Without them we'd have been hopelessly lost, but with them we had no hope of shaking our pursuers. I caught up to Noah at one of the wider sections and hissed at him, asking what he'd found in the last alcove before we'd been interrupted.
A jawbone. He'd found a human jawbone wedged into a crack in the floor.
The footsteps behind us were inconsistent. Sometimes they seemed to fall back until I couldn't hear them at all. Other times they were close enough that I was sure we were about to be overrun. The few times I turned my headlamp back down the passage though, there was nothing in the light.
When at last the cellar was in sight, I felt my heart drop into my stomach. The lighting was all wrong. When we'd descended, the trapdoor had been open, and the ambient light from the stripping room above had illuminated the stairs. Now there was no light in the cellar at all; the trapdoor had been shut. By the time I'd processed that, Noah was already on the stairs, ramming the trapdoor as hard as he could. It didn't move. He turned around and told me something was blocking it from above.
I looked at my watch. We had missed our check-in time by five minutes. Kaylee would have called Lucy by then, or should've. But how long would it take for help to arrive? Ten minutes? Twenty? With shaking hands I took out my gun and pointed it down the passage. Noah came off the stairs and drew his alongside me. Behind us, Jacob kept trying the trapdoor. I called out into the dark, as loud and as steady as I could manage, that we were armed. My voice went down the passage and the cave swallowed it.
Nothing came back. Not a voice, not a footstep. Just silence and the absolute certainty that there were people standing beyond the reach of our lights.
After what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, I again heard footsteps, but this time from overhead, moving across the floor of the stripping room. Jacob started banging on the trapdoor and yelling. I had a brief, unpleasant thought that whoever was up there might be the same person who'd blocked it in the first place, but we did not have the option to hide from potential rescue. Noah and I joined in, and a few seconds later there was a heavy click and the trapdoor swung open.
I have never climbed a staircase so fast in my life. I was already talking when I cleared the top step, thanking Lucy and her sons before I'd even seen their faces. They were there, rifles in hand and sour expressions on their faces, but they weren't alone. Two officers I recognized from around town were standing inside the stripping room.
The cops ushered us outside quickly and gave us their version of events. Apparently we had tripped some kind of alarm on the old farm when we'd first entered. An abandoned farm wasn't exactly high priority, and so the officers waited until they had a spare moment to check in. They'd arrived not long before Lucy's family, and when they found them heading onto the property and learned we might be stuck underground, they'd come in together and found the trapdoor latched from their side. It was a nice story, and I didn't believe a word of it. We had gone underground three hours ago. If whatever "alarm" we'd set off was truly so low priority that it could wait three hours, then why come at all?
I didn't get a chance to ask. Noah had barely started telling the officers what we'd found when the taller of the two put a hand up and redirected the conversation entirely. He wanted to know about the gun on my hip. I told him it was my father's, gave them his name and number, and watched the officer write it down without any particular urgency. The shorter one asked Noah to hand over the GoPro, framing it as routine, telling him they'd need to review the footage in connection with our trespassing charge. Noah put up a good rhetorical fight but we had been caught red-handed, and ultimately he didn't have much choice but to give in.
They separated us after that, which I'd expected. Asked us all kinds of questions about what we'd been looking for, why we'd come armed, and so on. Afterwards, we were told that we were free to go but that we should expect a citation in the mail and might be asked to come in for further questions.
After that, everyone dispersed. I made a point of thanking Lucy before she left, but she waved away my gratitude. Any inconvenience to law enforcement was its own reward as far as she was concerned. I tried to apologize to Noah before he hopped onto his bike but he wasn't interested in hearing it, and I didn't blame him. I'd cost him an expensive piece of equipment and whatever peace of mind he'd had before I'd brought him into this. I think it's going to be a while before he's up for any kind of spelunking with me again.
Jacob and I walked home together. The kid's hard to read. He brushed off every apology I offered, which was either grace or stoicism. Either way, I feel awful about getting him into so much trouble, not just down in the caves but also on the surface with the police. He didn't deserve any of that, and I'll have to think seriously about whether I want to involve him in the next part of this investigation, whatever that's going to look like.
Kaylee was happy to see us at home. I made sure to thank her too, as it was her call that likely saved us from meeting some grim end down in that cellar. She told me that, by leveraging some realty websites and her innate teenage-girl superpower of being a complete stalker, she had found the last owner of the abandoned tobacco farm. As I'm sure you've already guessed, it belonged to a man with the last name "Ward", though a different first name this time. That's two properties now, two expensive properties, registered to a family in our town that I have never heard of.
There's one more thing that happened in the days following our expedition: the city closed Needle. Both of the main public entrances, the ones with the iron gates fitted to their mouths, were padlocked and posted with notices citing a gas leak somewhere in the system. Public safety concern, they said. Indefinite closure. It wasn't like I'd been using those entrances anyway, but the timing sure was convenient for the town authorities. The day after we come up from the underground with a crazy story, suddenly there's a hallucination-inducing gas leak in Needle.
I went back to First Date on the night of May 20th. I didn't want to go at night, but I couldn't risk being seen near Lucy's farm in broad daylight, not with a trespass citation pending and the cops watching my ass. So I went at night, alone, and I moved quickly, and I tried not to think about the swinging rope from a few weeks back.
There was a letter waiting for me at the mouth of First Date. It was sitting on the cave floor, all folded up and tied with thread, like usual. The sight put an odd lightness in my chest. I realized I'd been worried about him, or her, or whoever is on the other side of that passage.
I unwrapped the letter at my desk at two in the morning while the rest of the house slept around me. It was heavier than the others. Thicker. The outer sheet fell away and revealed more paper beneath it, old and yellowed and stitched together at the edges with small, careful seams, and I kept unfolding and it kept going, panel after panel of hand-drawn lines and symbols and markings I didn't have the vocabulary for, passages branching into passages, chambers rendered in shapes I didn't have names for, whole neighborhoods unfurling before me. The map covered my entire desk and then some, and I was pushing things off the edges to make room and still it seemed to go on, corridor after corridor, level after level, notation after notation in that script I'd been staring at for weeks without being able to read a word of it. I don't know how long I sat there. I don't know how many people had lived in those passages, or how many still did, or what had been built down there over however many years it had taken to build something like this. I couldn't begin to calculate it. I just kept staring at the map, and all I could think was that I had been wrong about the scale of the situation, wrong about all of it.
There's a whole other world down there. There's more than I ever could have imagined.