Cave Dogs (Pachacuta Book 1) Read online

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here now.’

  I had heard that so many times over the last half a day that it had ceased to have much of an impact. But Fizzer pointed down the valley and the sight I saw, that we all saw, had an effect on me that I’ll remember the rest of my life.

  The cavern walls and roof, weakened by the earthquake, were caving in on themselves. At the end of the cavern, the tomo end, we could actually see bush-land. The ground above the cavern was now lying on the floor of the cavern. The effect was moving. As the ceiling caved in further down the valley, so it weakened the roof further up, and a few seconds later that would give way too. It was like a tidal wave in the ceiling, travelling towards us at speed. The Mangapu caves were about to become the Mangapu canyon.

  ‘There’s nowhere to go!’ Jenny screamed, but it wasn’t a panicked kind of a scream. She wasn’t like that.

  We all looked at the rock-fall that blocked the path out of the cavern, then back at the approaching disaster. In just a few moments the entire ceiling was going to fall on our heads.

  ‘The steps,’ I said without thinking. ‘The steps down. Below the Jesus Rock.’

  ‘They’re not steps,’ Flea was doubtful, surprisingly calm too, considering the circumstances.

  ‘Yes they are. Dennis Sensei was wrong. And they must go somewhere.’

  ‘If they don’t?’

  Fizzer laughed, incongruously in the face of approaching oblivion, ‘If they don’t, we won’t be any worse off than if we stay here!’

  Tupai was already moving, carefully picking up Phil in a fireman’s lift. More thunder from the valley, drawing closer now.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ I said, as if somehow I could protect my friends better by doing that.

  ‘It’s alright Jason,’ It was Flea. Flea my most loyal friend. ‘I’ll go. If it’s nasty then just take what shelter you can get beside the Jesus Rock and pray.

  Half the hillside crashed into the cavern at that point and conversation was impossible over the noise, so I just followed Flea as he scrabbled under the Jesus Rock and found a foothold on the first carved rung. He looked down, his lamp disappearing down into the shaft.

  ‘They are steps alright,’ he said. The shaft is deep, very deep. I can’t see the bottom. But the steps go as far as I can see.

  Tupai was behind me, carrying Phil. That was going to be a problem, I realised. I turned to him. A long jagged strip of his wetsuit was dangling from his leg where his calf was bleeding. I grabbed it and wrenched it off.

  ‘Put his arms around your neck.’ I said.

  Fizzer said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, hurry!’ The falling earth was barely twenty metres away and already parts of the ceiling above us were starting to crash down.

  I tied Phil’s hands together in front of Tupai’s chest and helped him ease the unconscious body over the lip of the shaft. Tupai carried him, seemingly effortlessly, on his back. Jenny followed without hesitation, and with no urging from me. Fizzer clambered after her and as I felt for the first foothold there was a roar as of angry gods and the entire world fell to pieces around me.

  Shattered rock thrust its way into the tiny shelter and I had to duck below it to get my hands onto the ladder and scramble my way down. The noise above was suddenly diminished, muffled by the rock that now covered us.

  Oddly, it was at that moment that I found myself thinking of Reiko. How close had she been to the tomo when the roof had given way? I hoped she had had some warning and had got herself clear. Somehow worrying about Reiko stopped me worrying about me, and Jenny and Phil and Tupai and Fizzer and Flea, climbing down an unknown shaft with half of the countryside fallen down above us.

  Who owed whose life to whom, in the rough and tumble of the Mangapu earthquake? I certainly don’t know. Did I save Phil’s life? Did Fizzer save mine, or I his? Would any of us survive long enough to care?

  Flea’s voice echoed up the shaft. ‘There’s a small ledge here, I can’t see if the … hold on.’ Silence for a moment and then, ‘It’s OK. The ladder continues on the other side of the shaft. Just be careful, it’s a big step across.’

  The lights of the others bobbed around in the darkness below me, occasionally flicking up the shaft above me, but there was nothing there to see.

  My feet struck something solid and I realised I was standing on the ledge Flea had warned us about. I turned and saw the ladder cut into the opposite face of the shaft, as Flea had said. I was just stretching out for it when I heard a thud below me, followed by a low whistle of amazement.

  Flea said, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

  There were more noises from below me, the sounds of Tupai, with Flea’s help, climbing down out of the shaft. Then Jenny’s voice, ‘Oh my God.’

  It took me a few more minutes to reach the bottom of the shaft, then my foot reached down into space, I searched around for a foothold and a strong hand grasped my boot and Fizzer said ‘Keep coming, I’ll help you down.’

  I lowered myself, with a little help from Fizzer, into a cave at the bottom of the shaft and the first thing I saw was myself.

  4. The Gates of Hell

  By Jason Kirk

  Imagine a mouse, trapped in a huge, flat maze. There are doorways and passageways and the mouse has the freedom to go where and when it chooses. But only within the maze. Now consider a fish, even the most basic plankton. That simple fish has a deeper understanding of the universe that the mouse will ever have, for the fish understands up and down. The fish lives in a three-dimensional world. The mouse, however, is limited to just two.

  Mankind thinks it is the fish, able to roam the world at will, but really Mankind is the mouse, stuck in a narrow plane on the surface of the thin crust of a massive planet that it knows much less about than it thinks.

  Mankind has stared outwards into space for centuries, spent years searching for other civilisations from other worlds, yet with the most myopic of vision has never turned that eye inwards. We are too concerned with what is over our heads to consider what might exist beneath our feet.

  I’m not going to try and claim that great revelations seized me, or any of us for that matter, as we stood and stared in that small cave at the base of that long black shaft. But it was the first inkling. The first glimmering of an understanding that life on the outermost surface of this planet might be merely the tip of the iceberg.

  The mouse had just learned about up and down.

  I lowered myself into the cave and stared at myself. Admittedly I didn’t recognise myself at first, this dust-covered apparition with a bright light shining out of his head, blood streaked down his face. Blood! I gingerly felt along my forehead, noticing for the first time the pain from a deep cut. I had no idea how it happened but guessed that it had come from one of the razor sharp slivers of broken rock that had been flying everywhere.

  Every surface in the cave, except the floor, was covered with mirrors. Some concave, some convex, some just flat. I had once been to the hall of mirrors at the Easter Show and the effect was pretty much the same. Some of the mirrors made your head swell like a balloon, others made you thin as a stick.

  ‘Ye gods!’ Said an unexpected voice, ‘It’s like Disneyland!’

  It was Phil, sitting up now, with Jenny untying his hands. She laughed, a little too loudly, and Flea joined her. So did the rest of us, the laughter more a reaction to the terror than an appreciation of Phil’s wit.

  The laughter shimmered off the silvered surfaces of the mirrors, filling the small cave with a desperately needed lightness.

  Fizzer said, ‘Let Dennis try and explain this as a natural rock formation.’

  There was more laughter, a little muted this time. I think all of us had realised by then that our Sensei had not made it.

  The laughter died quickly, and there was silence. Each of us with private thoughts, or prayers, I suppose, for a man that we had admired, respected, depended on, even loved.

  Flea said ‘I hope Reiko got away from the tomo in
time.’

  I said, a little too quickly, ‘I’m sure she did.’ And there was a general murmur of assent. Whatever else we had to face, we didn’t want to consider the possibility that Reiko had crashed into the cavern with the wreckage of the platform.

  ‘How’s the leg, Phil?’ Fizzer asked.

  ‘Hurts like jiggery-flick,’ Phil said. Actually that’s not quite what he said, but close enough.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Tupai rumbled. There was silence again for a moment.

  I have never thought of myself as a leader. Certainly at school, if anything, it was the opposite, and it never occurred to me that I could be. But it did seem that someone needed to take charge, at least for a little while, or we were just going to sit here until the food, and the water, or the air, ran out.

  ‘I think we should all turn our lamps off.’ I said, flicking mine off. ‘Conserve the batteries. Just use one at a time, or when we absolutely have to.’

  ‘Good idea.’ It was Fizzer, who followed my action.

  ‘Flea, leave yours on,’ I said as the lights winked out around me. ‘Have a walk around the perimeter of the cave. See if there’s a way out.’ Flea started to do it and I mused, ‘There was a way in, there must be a route back to the surface.’

  ‘Unless this is the route to the surface,’ Fizzer said presciently.

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ Phil snapped, partly from frustration, partly from pain.

  Fizzer looked blank, ‘I don’t really know.’

  It gave me pause though. Fizzer had an uncanny intuition about things sometimes, and I’m not talking about a psychic ability or anything preposterous like that. Intuition is simply the ability of the human brain to make subconscious connections between seemingly unrelated facts to form a conclusion which has no apparent basis in logic.

  I had learned over the years to trust Fizzer’s intuitions, but I have to admit that at that moment, what he said made no sense.

  ‘Found it.’ Flea’s voice was unemotional. Calming. Deliberately so. Like me I think he recognised the potential for panic in that enclosed space.

  The exit was a narrow slit in the wall, over the top of one of the mirrors.

  ‘What are we waiting for,’ Jenny said and switched on her helmet lamp. One by one we clambered over the low mirror into the passage beyond and it occurred to me that no-one had actually asked why there might be a cave filled with mirrors, hundreds of metres under the ground.

  The passage turned out to be a staircase, a giant, crazy, curving staircase. Surely not man-made. This one I would believe was a natural formation of the rock.

  Each level was a meter or so wide, dropping down to the next level or ‘step’. Sometimes the drop was a mere step down, other times it was necessary to lower yourself carefully over the edge, feeling for the rocky platform below with your toes.

  We all had our lamps on for the descent; too dangerous otherwise. The lights splayed around the walls and low ceiling of the ‘staircase’. The rocks here were smooth, but strangely ridged, almost like a series of spines and ribs. The art director of the place had had a palette of rich yellows, golds, and ochres, and had painted vividly before blurring and muddying the tones together to bring a deep warmth and translucence to the tumbling rock faces.

  After ten or twelve such drops, Phil seized the opportunity to complain. ‘Maybe we should have stayed.’

  We all stopped, and I had the horrible feeling that maybe I had led my friends into harm’s way. It had been my idea to hide in the hole underneath the Jesus Rock. It had been my idea to leave the mirror cave and start this bizarre descent deep into the Earth. Help, if it came, would come from above us, in the shape of diggers and dog teams, trained rescuers. We were moving further and further away from the possibility of salvation from this huge rocky tomb.

  Flea jumped to my rescue, as he always did, ‘Shut up Phil. Jason just saved your life. All of our lives.’

  Phil’s voice came sullenly from below me where Tupai and Fizzer were helping him down one of the larger drops. ‘They’ll be looking for us. Searching the cavern. They won’t bloody well find us down here, will they.’

  I realised then that Phil had been unconscious when the roof of the cavern had collapsed. He had not seen the devastation when untold tonnes of rock had created a huge trench in the floor of the Mangapu valley. I started to try to explain it to him, but Tupai cut in and basically said all that needed to be said, in his simple and direct way.

  ‘If we’d stayed in the cavern we’d be road-kill now. And nobody was ever going to find us in the mirror cave.’

  I added, rather lamely, ‘Maybe we’ll find an underground river and be able to follow it back to the surface. Or something.’

  ‘What the hell was that cave full of mirrors anyway?’ It was Jenny that finally asked that question, but nobody answered her.

  I edged my way cautiously over the lip of the largest ‘step’ I had yet encountered and scrabbled for the floor below with the toe of my boot. I couldn’t feel anything, so slowly lowered myself with my arms. I wasn’t very good at this kind of stuff. I wasn’t actually very good at anything sporting. Compared to people like Flea and Fizzer who had a fluidity and economy of movement, my body just seemed to be a series of disconnected statements, combining in a paragraph which didn’t make much sense.

  At school, physical education was the class I detested most, and to be honest, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at any of my classes. I have this small problem reading and writing, nothing major, but it took all the fun out of schoolwork. PE though, was the bane of my week. Whatever activity was scheduled I’d be useless at it. My friends would always pick me for their teams, out of friendship, but nobody else would. At some of the gymnastic activities like the wooden horse – I’m not sure what you call it, the one where you bounce up from a little trampoline in front, and vault over it – the teacher asked me to avoid that activity after my first few attempts, for fear I would damage myself.

  True to form, my arm slipped as I tried to slide down the coarse face of the giant step and I dropped, landing and rolling at the bottom, collecting Flea around the knees and knocking him forward, both of us teetering on the edge of the next step, which in the light from my lamp I could see was even higher than the last.

  I started to cry out. Then a sudden grip on the shoulder strap of my wetsuit and on Flea’s arm. Fizzer, imperturbable Fizzer, his knee wedged against a rocky mound for support.

  ‘Get back in line soldier,’ he said, a smile playing around the corner of his lips.

  I exhaled slowly. ‘Thanks, Fizzer.’

  Flea just grinned and saluted Fizzer, then helped me over the next step.

  Oddly enough, in that perverse way that nature is, the one sport I had enjoyed was Bojutsu. I had joined the Karate club because my gang, my mates, all joined up. Well actually let’s step back a bit.

  Fizzer had taken up Karate as part of his “Eastern Mysticism” phase. The phase hadn’t lasted but the Karate had. Jenny had joined for self-defence, more and more necessary for teenage girls nowadays unfortunately. Flea had joined because Jenny had joined, I am pretty sure that he still holds a candle for her, even though it’s been more than three years, and I don’t think they were ever properly going-out in the first place. Anyway, Phil joined, mainly to keep an eye on Jenny and Flea, I think. Tupai, because the rest of the gang were doing it, and then they dragged me along.

  I wasn’t much chop at it, if you’ll excuse the pun, but that was not unusual. Dennis worked hard on me though, and I found that my reflexes were quite good. Constant repetition of the moves gradually saw a reasonable improvement, and Karate training is all about constant repetition of the moves.

  But it was the day that Dennis put a bo in my hands that I surprised everyone, especially myself. A bo is an ancient Japanese weapon, just a staff, or stave really. The art is in the moves, twisting, thrusting, spinning the staff. The bo and I just seemed to like each other, and in its innocent seemed
strength I found the fluidity and beauty of movement that eluded me in all other sports.

  Dennis was a highly regarded Bojutsu instructor, and had himself been trained in Japan by the best instructors there. He had a small bojutsu class running at the karate dojo on a Wednesday night, which we all had started going to.

  Where I enjoyed the flicking, darting moves of the bo, Daniel, Flea, revelled in it. Where I was competent, Flea was brilliant, but I didn’t resent him for that. He was my friend. And besides, it was such a boost for me to be actually competent at a sport that I was quite happy anyway.

  I don’t think Tupai enjoyed the bojutsu quite as much, he had built up his upper body for strength, and it didn’t seem to suit the finesse required for the use of the bo. The others all liked it though.

  A small laugh escaped from my lips involuntarily and I quickly turned it into a cough in case the others thought I was mad. It was just the utter ridiculousness of the situation. How simply bizarre it was for us to be clambered down some mad giant’s staircase in seemingly the centre of the Earth (not according to Phil). Turn a different corner, they say. Make a different decision and the rest of your life can dramatically change.

  If Fizzer had never taken up karate, none of us would be here now. Not that I was blaming him, that would have been silly. But you could trace a series of events and decisions all the way back to that one point. If Fizzer had gone for Taekwondo or Aikido, we would be doing something very different right now.

  The staircase turned a corner and the steps became much flatter. More like a real staircase, although much wider.

  Tupai began to sing, an off-colour marching song about some German soldiers and a rickety old inn. Phil and Flea joined in, and Fizzer accompanied them on his harmonica. The sheer lunacy of the situation just kept increasing, I thought, and joined in as well. Only Jenny didn’t sing, I think because she didn’t know the words. Some girls would have been offended by the lyrics, but not Jenny, she had a good sense of humour and a deep understanding that ‘boys will be boys.’