“The spot where we’re standing,” said the spunky little guide with her dimples and green eyes and perky tits, “is ten million years old! Can you believe it? That’s millions of years before human beings even existed!”
“When there were dinosaurs?” called out a third grader.
“The dinosaurs were gone before this particular chamber was formed,” the guide answered brightly, waving her arm theatrically at the vast stone cathedral above them all, “but the limestone around us was formed so long ago that even the dinosaurs hadn’t yet shown up!”
Arthur Pelk scratched his nose and surveyed the crowd. About twenty-five tourists, including himself and Doris and the third grader, stared at the grand ceiling and drippy-candle stalactites and shadowy walls of the vast cave. Carefully-planted lights, strategically positioned to throw ominous shadow across the orange-tan womb through which they were wandering, kept Arthur centered; the presence of modern technology held his claustrophobia at bay.
Doris smacked him on the back of the neck with her usual reproof.
“Keep moving!” she stage-whispered, following up with a not-so-gentle shove. The tourists immediately adjacent politely failed to notice, but he blushed, embarrassed, all the same. He realized he’d paused at the rail to his left, his eyes on the green river flowing through this awesome chamber.
He stumbled forward, focusing on the guide’s athletic buns to restore his balance. His thighs itched in his oversized Bermuda shorts and his shoelaces were too tight. Behind him, Doris’s chest heaved like a small bellows, or possibly a winded Labrador Retriever. He imagined her pacing in a kennel. The thought made him smile.
“The cave’s ecosystem includes a surprising variety of wildlife,” Perky continued, “with six different species of bats. In the past, the bat population went as high as 12 million – more than twice the population of Kentucky!”
She already had his attention, of course, but the guide’s dive into numbers aroused Arthur, who had recently retired after almost four decades as an accountant.
“There are also a number of species of crickets and salamanders,” she continued, “and the river to our left contains several species of eyeless fish – evolved in the cave’s natural state of total darkness! They can’t tell we’ve got the lights on in here.”
It was only in looking down into the glowing green waters of the river that Arthur didn’t feel diminutive; he barely matched Doris’s height of five-foot-one, and weighed a good twenty pounds less. Being in this damn cave made him feel... puny, a piddling Barney Fife of a man. And that, dammit, was Doris’s job.
His plaid, short-sleeve summer shirt was a bit baggy on his thin frame, but pockets of sweat had erupted, despite the deep cool of the cave. He chalked it up to anxiety.
Doris with her big klunky feet surged ahead of him, flipping furiously at her tourist booklet as she raced to verify something Perky had just said. Arthur, tuning both of them out, found himself at the tail end of the entourage, noticing a flickering in the shadows at the far right of the cave wall.
Forty feet or so from the walkway, behind a couple of tall stalagmites, there was a blue flickering in the shadows. It was like the foxfire he’d relished in his Eastern Kentucky boyhood, only the wrong color. Curious, he stared.
“Arthur! Get up here!” called Doris over the voice of the guide.
Ignoring her – itself an act of uncommon rebellion – Arthur left the walkway, breaking their guide’s quarantine, and stepped over moist, mossy rock toward the shadowy crevasse behind the phallic pillars.
The blue light was coming from within what seemed to be a tunnel.
Arthur was both a claustrophobe and afraid of the dark, but the blue light had hypnotized him – he had to press on.
The tunnel was just big enough to accommodate him – which is to say, not very big at all, as Arthur was slight-of-stature and quite thin. On his hands and knees he proceeded, though the rock floor of the tunnel – while smooth! - was exceptionally hard and unpleasant to the knee. The air turned stale, and Arthur’s breathing rapidly became labored, but the blue light beckoned.
He distantly heard Doris shouting. He tuned her out.
As sweat dripped off his beaky nose, his glasses slipped away, and he paused in his crawling to fumble about in the dark until his fingers found the cold plastic frame. Putting them back on, he immediately fogged them up. But he pressed on.
Suddenly the light surged and the world fell out from under him and he found himself tumbling down a hard, slippery incline, about the length of a small children’s slide.
Once again he lost his glasses, as harsh sunlight stunned his eyes. Grasping desperately at the ground, he found them again, wiping them on his shirt this time before putting them back on.
Only as he surveyed the impossible landscape around him did it begin to creep into his awareness that he could not possibly have emerged from Mammoth Cave so quickly from such a short tunnel. He’d only crawled thirty or forty feet, best estimate, and he’d have gone deeper into the rock, in the opposite direction of the entrance.
Yet here he was.
And before him stretched a rugged, seemingly endless vista, with a sky as orange-and-tan as the cave ceiling walls had been. The reddish sun was horizon-bound; somehow, it was suddenly late in the day, whereas he and Doris had started the cave tour just half an hour ago, at 10 a.m.
It was considerably warmer and more humid than before, and the air smelled... wrong.
Arthur Pelk suddenly felt an ominous surge of dread. Something was terribly wrong.
A throaty moan split the sky, reverberating in Arthur’s ribs as he whirled toward the hillside from which he’d just emerged. Not one hundred yards away, a long, leathery gray tube with thin eyes and bulging nostrils rose into the air, swaying upward gently.
Arthur’s jaw fell.
No... such a creature is impossible!
Accountant or no, Arthur was college-educated – University of Kentucky, Class of ‘38. He’d been forced to sit through anthropology. He knew what he was looking at.
Apatosaur...
But he didn’t have time to dwell on the immense, cow-like beast behind him, whose notice he was beneath. A new, more terrifying sound interrupted his awe; a shriek from above.
A brown missile dove toward the earth ahead of him, throwing out Batman-like wings just in time to sweep into a curved trajectory, skimming into a small running something-or-other that went back into the sky in its beak. Despite himself, Arthur cried out in terror.
Pterodactyl...
He looked around frantically, spotted a stand of funny-looking trees a few dozen years to his left. He’d be safe there; the winged terror couldn’t get to him in that dense little thicket!
He ran for all he was worth over the moist, loomy soil, into the safety of the trees.
He let the relative coolness of the shade calm him as he caught his breath, scanning first the sky and then the horizon for new terrors. He could still see the long neck of the apatosaur to the east; he realized, with relief, that it was no more dangerous than an actual cow.
Despite himself, he felt exhilarated.
A sharp hiss crept around his neck. He froze. Snake???
Perched on a limb behind him was a small, lizardy creature, leathery and bluish, with sharp, jagged teeth. It screeched at him, folds of skin with rusty splotch stains flaring out as it bared its grin. Arthur screamed; but as he felt his muscles freezing into betrayal, a small, brown, hoppy mammal leapt away below, distracting the blue monster. It pounced toward the smaller, more manageable prey, belching a toxic, paralyzing spray over it.
Dilophosaur...
Arthur felt his limbs returning, bolting into the open.
Above the hole in the hill from which he’d tumbled was a nested rock ledge. If he could make it there, he could recede into the rock, from where he’d have a full survey of the entire landscape, while being too far in for the dark dive-bomber to get at him.
The minutes seemed eternal as he climbed upward, fearing he’d be attacked from any direction at any moment. But he made it.
He scanned the world before him. He could hear the gentle behemoth nearby, gently munching the leaves off something; he could see an occasional mammal scurrying over the plain beyond him. There was no sign of the avian.
In the far distance, too far for him to see clearly, there was a blood-curdling roar, and a pounding earthen thunder of disturbing moment. A beast the size of a Mack truck bolted across the ground, pursing several ostrich-like snacks. Its jaw snapped the neck of one of them in mid-roar, and he stopped to devour it where it fell.
Tyrannosaur...
A trickling sound intruded, and he realized there was water tumbling out of a rock and into a crack in the rock floor of the shelter. With gratitude, he cupped his hands and filled them, sipping the cool water as though it were the finest Chardonnay. He then splashed some on his sweaty face, thrilling at the sensation.
He picked up a fragment of rock and scratched AP into a nearby wall. His initials. The world’s first graffiti.
Kill or be killed... predator/prey... hide in plain sight...
It was all, he realized, very much like the office he’d worked in for forty years.
And the marriage he’d lived in even longer.
Doris...
For the first time, it dawned on him that the tunnel might be two-way. He waited until he felt fairly certain the dactyl wasn’t still in the neighborhood, then emerged from his rocky shelter and made his way down to the ground, and to the hole he’d fallen out of.
There, in the tunnel’s entrance, sat the dilophosaur.
This time, he didn’t panic. His eyes met the small predator’s beady ones, and he wondered if his glasses would protect him from its spitty venom. He didn’t wait to find out; still clutching the rock, he deftly cast it to one side, and the angry lizard leapt after it.
He scrambled into the tunnel.
“Arthur! Goddammit, Arthur!”
Doris’s shrill appellation.
He shook his aching head and realized he’d fallen and hit something. Getting his bearings, he realized he was leaning against one of the stone pillars near the tunnel entrance. He looked behind him; there was only shadow. The tunnel was surely there, but the tell-tale blue light wasn’t to be seen.
Doris and the guide and two security guards rounded the corner of the walkway ahead. Doris marched in front like a boot camp drill sergeant, nominally the boss of everyone, and when her eyes fell on him her expression darkened to the color of hellish storm clouds.
“Where the hell have you been?" she barked in her whiny, abrasive contralto. "Don’t you know you’ve ruined the tour? What’s wrong with you? You’ve inconvenienced everyone!”
“Sir, are you all right? It looks like you’re bleeding...” One of the security guards reached out with a handkerchief and gingerly swabbed Arthur’s forehead. The other reported into a walkie-talkie.
“We need to get you some medical attention,” said Perky, taking his arm.
Doris knocked her arm away ungently.
“Don’t coddle him! He’s a grown man and he needs to start acting like one! He’s gotten what he deserves! Arthur Pelk, you’ve ruined my vacation once again, and you can bet we’ll be having words!”
A deep calm descended on Arthur Pelk as blue light glowed into his mind, bringing unprecedented satisfaction. He took a deep, cleansing breath, savoring its flavor, and smiled at his ghastly better half.
“Ha! Fat chance!” he cried with glee. With a whoop, he turned to the guide, squeezed her ass, and, fleeing the consequences, cackled as he turned and bolted back into the shadows, where his tunnel home awaited...
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