Lamont found himself now fighting back the same sense of panicked revulsion. “We don’t belong here,” He heard himself saying. His mouth was dry. “What do these things have to do with us?” He asked. “What do we have to do with them?”
Lamont wasn’t entirely sure that he agreed with the captain’s assessment. He lifted his recorder and peered through the eyepiece, then shook his head. Instead, he pressed the tape recording key and began to narrate breathlessly, in a voice hardly above a whisper, into the device’s microphone.
“We’ve entered what appears to be a cavernous space, possibly a hundred meters or more beneath the mountains. It’s impossible to tell the size of it, because light appears to be unnecessary for the creatures that occupy it. What illumination there is may well be incidental—a vague luminescence coming from a sort of waterfall perhaps ten meters distant, extending to a glowing mist that is clinging to columns covered in what might be fungus. This is not a natural cave; perhaps it began that way, but it has been engineered. Tall, straight columns rise at regular intervals into the blackness above us. Ramps ascend into symmetrical archways that have been carved or molded into the rock. The space seems to be divided into shelves or platforms, accessed by ramps, some connected by bridges that are clearly artificial in construction. Everywhere, in the ghostly patches of light and in the deep shadows beyond it, my eyes detect movement, activity, the gliding locomotion of speckled masses.”
He swallowed, feeling overwhelmed. The constant movement in the periphery of his vision reminded him of a time when he had ventured into the ruins at the outskirts of London. He had found his way into the remains of a church, where a staircase in what had once been the nave led down beneath the rubble into the basement. He followed the steps down, hoping to find some novel artifact of pre-Epiphenal life, but never made it to the bottom. As the yellow beam of his lamp reached the floor, the silent stillness was filled with a flurry of activity: A writhing mass of cockroaches that had been seamlessly covering the floor parted from the center of the beam, scrambling over each other to form a sort of living crater around its edges.
Lamont found himself now fighting back the same sense of panicked revulsion. “We don’t belong here,” He heard himself saying.
He felt Carter’s hand on his shoulder, squeezing firmly. “Are you alright, Lamont?”
Lamont’s mouth was dry. “What do these things have to do with us?” He asked. “What do we have to do with them?”
“We’re looking for Rosemary,” The captain reminded him.
“As far as that goes, you’ve succeeded,” Said a small voice, closeby.
Next: A Harrowing Tale