Our team was a selection of four specialists assigned to a cave deep in the forests of Mexico, near a small village, the name of which I cannot disclose. There was me: Dr Close, specialist in archaeology from the University of New Mexico; Lalupa, a local guide in her sixties who’d retired after a series of incidents she either doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to (We had enough money to convince her to assist in a non-professional manner); and Jeremiah Haraway, a journalist from the UK who sniffed this story out and contacted me, swaggering into my office with a dusty volume he’d found in an attic of small town Cornwall. Ripped Levi’s and a moustache, he’d been living in the US for a couple years now and had developed a horrendous hybrid accent. Last there was Ninã, a twenty-something relation of one Carlos Slim, who’s money-pumping artery of the family empire got tangled up in all this mess. She had a thirst for adventure, and a fresh degree in anthropology from Oxford U. Whatever happened, she could count this adventure as work experience, and she took as many notes as Jeremiah with an old Parker Vacumatic in her own neat journals. The two of them refused to write on anything electronic.
The entrance to the cave was shrouded in an arras of vines and set into the base of a cliff. Green from the ambush of plants around us seeped into the atmosphere and stained the air like something toxic. Birds screeched above as if they had ceased flight, midair, to rip into each other with beak and claws. We were dressed like something you’d find on a postcard sent back from an Indiana Jones theme park, the only gear we could source locally being forty years out of date.
Jeremiah stopped to finger open a reproduction of the map-book, which was scanned onto bleached paper like a freshman’s homework assignment. Worms had eaten through the original, leaving black tunnels through the reprinted pages. One such blot was where we were now.
“This is the place,” Lalupa said as she peered over his shoulder. “I’m sure of it. But I believe the tunnels don’t run under us.”
“They don’t.” Jeremiah adjusted his glasses. “Or at least, they didn’t.”
I pulled the vines away with Ninã’s help. Our feet shuffled around in the dirt. Insects scattered off the loose bricks behind the leaves. The bricks were dark, coarse like pumice but much heavier. They crumbled away with a kick.
Dust fell from the ceiling of the exhumed tunnel. Motes floated in the air around us, sparks of dragon’s breath ready to catch fire. Each molecule either caught the sunlight, fragments of orange and green, or caught in the netting of our clothes. Colour faded as we walked inwards, dissolving as if to vanish forever. We didn’t light our torches until the dark had nearly consumed us. We allowed ourselves to float for a while in the luminous black, flowing through space before igniting each light like boats far out on an unlit sea. Any sense of immense space produced by the unechoing walls vanished at once, to be replaced by a sense of pressure. Reality became a distant speck no longer in our orbit. Breath caught like splinters in the throat.
And then, alive, the tunnel responded with its own display. A meteor shower streaked like burning titanium. Flares arced above us, more and more of them, lines of white burnt our retinas.
“Stand back,” Lalupa cautioned, scared. “What is this?”
“Just wait,” I say. I walk forward, but the lights are not in front of us, but rather in the walls. Chasing each other along the rock face, glowing, growing, to become one blinding whole.
Like something tunnelled, rather than a tunnel; eaten into, rather than discovered; there was a hive of life inside. The walls expanded and contracted with each of our sensitive motions, before blooming again with countless crystal anemones.
The tattooed scans of Jeremiah’s printer paper fluttered in a breeze.
“These are they,” he said. The paper fluttered again. “Larger versions of the forms described in the book.” Jeremiah took a sample container in a gloved hand, and reached out to touch the wall. Leather contacted fractal rock and sent ripples of colour out and over us like a rainbow in rewind. Crystals shifted and shifted again. “Whatever was found with the book,” he continued, “was dull. Not like this.”
It was like we had descended into an alien atmosphere. We were caught in a million-year sunrise, with reds and golds and ochres flashing once, twice, amongst the dust of a desert tribe worshipping the occasion.
Amnesia swept through us. Amnesia has a colour, can you imagine that? The colour of bliss. Of lowering oneself into a spa, or walking on a cold winter’s night with the warmth of life burning bright inside.
I opened my mouth and there was light. Light was me and flowed from me like liquid amber, ruby, opal. I was born of the caves and they were born of me.
2020