In the Cave of the Delicate Singers Read online

  She was talking about a story that ran in Scientific American (June 2008), in which I was tested along with a number of other more “traditional” synesthetes. Some heard colors; others tasted or smelled numbers and words. An anomaly even among anomalies, I was the only one who could pick up tactile sensations and images via sound waves, even when I didn’t understand the language. “Aural imagism,” the writer of the article called it.

  I sat with my eyes closed and listened to a woman recite the same passage in a foreign language over and over. Later, I learned it was Finnish. Her vocal tones prickled the soles of my feet; it felt like dancing on tiny ball bearings. The vibrations of her voice formed images like patterns in a turned kaleidoscope. I described a dark red cup, a yellow rose, a strange bird on the wing. The man doing the testing glanced at his notes and paled. The speaker had read a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and I’d just described the primary imagery.

  Pree laid a hand on my biceps, but I flinched, holding on to my indignation like it was a winning lottery ticket.

  I said sullenly, “Boone’s screwing up not to send me down with you. I’d be able to feel the singing before the rest of you even heard it.”

  She sighed and fell into step with me.

  “Look, Karyn, you’ve been inside plenty of caves. You know what the silence is like down there. Gigantic. A void you don’t want to fall into. Then all of a sudden, you hear something so spooky and so unexpected, you just about crap in your pants. If you heard it topside, you’d know it was nothing, maybe the caver in front of you farted or dropped a carabiner, but underground, it’s terrifying. Most cavers shrug that stuff off, but some people can’t. They have panic attacks; they hallucinate. For all we know, what Hargrave heard was a colony of bats or maybe a few million cave cockroaches.”

  When I didn’t answer, she snapped, “Dammit, Karyn, are you even listening?”

  (More intently than you can imagine.)

  “Maybe Hargrave went crazy because the singing he heard was too beautiful,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s a line in the Duino Elegies by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s something to the effect that beauty is the beginning of terror we can just still stand. Maybe that’s the deal with the singing. It triggers a level of terror humans aren’t meant to endure. It’s too beautiful.”

  Her mouth set in a pinched line. I thought she was going to slap me. “Nothing’s too beautiful. That isn’t possible.” Then before I could argue, she gave me a punch on the arm that was too hard to be play. “Don’t worry, Karyn; it’s gonna be fine.” She looked back toward the motel as though somebody there had just called her name, although nobody had. She said, “See you on the surface, babe,” and hurried away.

  *

  Right now, as the sound energy of the singing floods into me and Starkeweather charges, that surface Pree spoke of might as well be on one of Jupiter’s moons.

  Starkeweather halts just short of the sump. He spits out a lump of gum, bares his teeth in a cannibal grin, and takes a few warm-up swings with the club. I think he’s going to pound me to mud, but to any real caver, what he does next is unimaginably worse: he starts attacking the cave itself, swinging viciously, destroying elaborate lacework and yards of dripstone that have grown at a rate of a half inch per century. Clusters of wedge-shaped helictites explode overhead; stalagmites as tall as a man shatter and crash into the sump. The destruction sickens and horrifies me.

  Within seconds, something sublime and ethereal has been reduced to an empty mouth full of snaggled teeth. Starkeweather, surveying the rubble, cocks his head and does a bizarre little jig, like he’s shaking off a swarm of cave spiders. He shimmies and scrapes at his face while his lips form the words Shut up! Make it stop!

  When his eyes refocus, his red gaze finds me again. I switch off my headlamp, and the world floods away in a torrent of black. I drop to the ground and start inching along the cave floor. The headphones are a real hindrance now; they prevent me from hearing which way Starkeweather’s moving. The only sound I can feel is the singing, and that has receded to a shivery caress, a centipede skittering over my eyelashes, a salamander disturbing the roots of my hair.

  A hail of stones peppers my back and pings off my helmet. Suddenly, Starkeweather’s big hands paw at my legs. I kick out blindly. My boot thuds meaty groin. Then he’s on top of me, spearmint breath hot in my face, mud-slick fingers fumbling for my jugular. A blacker, thicker shade of night starts shutting down synapses, accompanied by a dazzle of sizzling white stars expiring behind my retinas.

  Under my hand I clutch a slab of smashed dripstone and heave it in the general direction of his head. He releases my throat but then latches on to either side of my mouth and tries to unsocket my jaw. I bite down on a finger until my teeth close on a nugget of bone, then roll away as blood fills my mouth. Next thing I know, I’m underwater. The sump’s frigid and inky, and—

  Starkeweather be damned—I switch my headlamp back on. I’m inside a flooded tunnel where so much silt has been stirred up, it’s like swimming through horse piss. I look for an air pocket overhead but can make out only jutting mineral walls and the segmented bodies of albino worms ghosting behind swirls of particled water.

  My lungs bleed for air. The sump narrows into a long, jagged throat, where beyond, water splashes over a pale, fluted ledge. Between me and the air glitters a gauntlet of stone cudgels and knives. My cave pack rips off and my oversuit’s torn. Dark red snakes squiggling too close alarm me until I realize I’m batting away my own blood. My head punches the surface, and I heave myself onto a milk-white dome of flowstone, then collapse across it, teeth wildly clattering.

  Eventually, I rally enough to fill my hands with rocks and wait to see if Starkeweather follows me.

  A short time later, he pops to the surface floating facedown. I let him stay like that for five minutes before I grab his belt and haul him up next to me. His neck and cheeks are grotesquely ballooned. When I turn him over, jagged pebbles and mineral chips mixed with shattered enamel gush out of his mouth in a torrent of red. I want to think Starkeweather was already dangerously unstable and would have acted out sooner or later, but I don’t really believe it. I know the singing has unhinged him to the point of attacking the cave with his teeth—the same sounds Mamoudi and Hargrave must have heard, and that Pree, if she’s still alive, is hearing right now.

  It feels stronger and a helluva lot closer than it did before I passed through the sump. Those previously faint waves of energy are now sharp and urgent, a persistent scratching at various parts of my body, like a frantic child seeking entry to a house at one door and one window after another.

  But the images accompanying the sensations aren’t so innocuous: a debased horde of humanity crammed into a stadium of bleeding, cruelly crushed bodies, on their knees weeping and howling. Heads thrown back, ready for the knife, keening mad invocations to an obscene deity. Their blood soaks the earth, out of which bloom stone flowers brimming with nectar and death. The vision claws at my heart and I hear my own voice telling me to get moving, to find Hargrave and Pree and get out.

  It’s hard to obey. I go on.

  The next chamber confounds me: a sprawling catacomb dripping with soda-straw stalactites and mounded with nodular masses of calcite popcorn. Crystals of moonmilk, a carbonate material the texture of cream cheese, festoon the floor. None of it corresponds to any maps I’ve seen. Even worse are the braided mazes of lava tubes offering a bewildering array of possible paths deeper into the cave’s interior.

  But the cave, in its infernal sentience, appears to respond. The energy of the singing amplifies, the frequencies becoming imperative, like the head of a silky mallet pinging a flesh xylophone. Letting it guide me, I scramble up a succession of ledges to access a passageway midway up the wall. Its coiled path empties into an angular chamber that resembles a vandalized ossuary: stone pillars surrounding a scattering of femurs, ribs, clavicles, and fragment
s of skull. That the bones have lain here since long before cavers first discovered the Brotterling is made clear by the centuries-old webs of calcite deposits that veil them.

  I pick my way through the boneyard as quickly as possible. Beyond it, my headlamp illuminates the area from where the sound energy seems to emanate—a lavish display of boxwork about four feet overhead, where calcite blades project at angles from the cave walls, creating a dense and elaborate honeycomb.

  Between the mineral blades gleam dark seams, fistulas of ebony pulsing like fat heaps of caviar that vibrate with an avid, luminescent life. Fine, blood-red webbing threads through the black, a network of alien capillaries that carries not blood but warm, coppery sound—it seeps under my scalp and teases behind my ears, seeking to peel back and penetrate the soft, vulnerable creases of brain.

  If I get out of here alive, I know what I’ll tell Boone: the singing’s not random or chaotic; it has distinct meters and color tones, and it pulses with dark languor underlaid with vicious intent.

  I will tell him the creators of this song are not human, but not unsentient, either. And if the term life-form applies to them at all, it’s a life in service only to the obliteration of all others.

  Long stretches of spellbound time pass as I stand here, watching the tiny caviar mouths pulse and burble out a black saliva of sound that feels ripe and almost sexually decadent.

  Avid and succulent and, yes—Mathew Hargrave nailed it—delicate, too.

  I want to slather my hands in the mineral meat between those basalt blades, squeeze up fistfuls of its alien iridescence and lather it into my pores, let it replace all the blood in my body with its unholy wails.

  I take off my helmet and hurl it away. Then I reach up to remove the headphones.

  And stop. Above me, imbedded into the hivework, loom strange columns worked into the stone, skeletal formations lifting toward the obsidian sky. Sections are patterned with ovoids and creases of lighter stone, the pale areas inlaid with vertical striations of crimson. The sight wallops the breath from my chest.

  One of the columns is watching me.

  Basalt doesn’t bleed, but burst eyeballs and lacerated skin weep red down the sides of the dripstone cloaking two human forms in their mineral shrouds. Mathew Hargrave has been almost entirely consumed. Crusts of muscle and gashed bone jut out from his stone sarcophagus. Only his upper chest, the arms tucked into his torso like folded wings, and his slack, swollen face are still recognizably human. His remains are being played like a bone flute as torturesong rasps from his mouth.

  But Pree, oh Pree, is another matter. Her time inside the Brotterling has been briefer than Hargrave’s; less of her has been entombed. Rigid and ashen-faced, she balances on a narrow outcrop a few feet above, tarry squiggles of hair falling over the rags of her clothing. Her mouth convulses in torment. Skeins of sound tangle in her teeth and snake from her lips. Tendrils of it adhere to her face. The frequency of the vibrations chugs to the lowest registers, rich and mellow, bassoon-like, the notes unspooling in hypnotic spirals, so that each births the next lower note on the scale, and all the while, Pree’s terrified eyes tell me the truth: it’s a death song and she can’t help but sing it.

  Black rings frame the edge of my vision as Pree’s silent screams flail me. Her body spasms. A rent opens under her breast as the slender spear she’s impaled on exits her chest in a gleaming red fist. Behind two snapped ribs, I glimpse a gray, pulpy thing beating feebly.

  The ledge is slick and cushiony, weirdly flesh-like, when I climb up, wrap my arms around her, and try to lift her free from the stone. Crimson bubbles erupt from her mouth. She tries to form words. I put my face close to hers as she exhales. Her death-rattle breath goes into me like an intubation tube, rancid and chokingly floral. There are no last words, no blessing, just a sob that’s a truncated ode to damnation as she bleeds and convulses in front of me.

  And I leave her. God help me, I abandon her there and begin the torturous trek to the surface, a wet, nasty, soul-crushing ordeal, while with every step, I expect the cave to crush or consume me. Most of the way, when I’m not using my hands to climb or to crawl, I clutch at the headphones, terrified they’ll fall off and the singing will overpower and annihilate me.

  Yet despite hours of exhaustion and terror, somehow I prevail. The passages, in fact, seem to widen as I pass through, the skin-you-alive cold of the sump is less heart-stoppingly frigid, the waypoints more easily spotted. Even the terrifying Bypass, outside of which Mamoudi’s body still sprawls, feels smooth as a tube and excretes me effortlessly.

  When I finally reach the surface, blinking and bedazzled by the afternoon light, a small army of cavers, media, and National Guard are assembled, as another team of cavers prepares to go down. Boone’s there among them. Seeing me alive, his eyes well, as do mine. I tear off the headphones and sweet sound rushes in, the wind whistling, a truck backfiring, the crowd erupting into ecstatic cheers to see someone come out alive.

  Then they get a good look at me and my appearance—soaked, shivering, smeared with cave dirt and blood—shocks them silent. As one, they reel back. Finally the braver ones gather their wits and being firing off questions.

  What happened?

  What’s down there?

  Is anyone else still alive?

  But these are not words the way I remember them. What I hear is a saw-toothed cacophony, an unwholesome chorale—discordant, repellant, impure.

  I want to rush back inside the cave to get away from their cawing, but I remember that first, I have something important to do. I must warn them of the terrible danger, so I focus my mind and conjure the sounds I will need. When I know what I must say, I run toward Boone, who is already beckoning me. I scream, Get back! Get away from the cave! Everyone inside is dead!

  But that’s not what comes out.

  An excruciating hitch unlocks in my chest as an arcane melody, a kind of cryptic trilling, slithers free and soars to the winds—the feral and wondrous, delicate song birthed from the mouths of monsters, from Pree’s mouth into mine—into theirs.

  Madness made tangible.

  Contagion by sound.

  It spews from my lips—a song of such deadly beauty and unholy allure that I experience only the briefest frisson of horror—an emotion something inside me instantly quells—when their mouths fall open, songstruck, enthralled, and they begin to rend their own flesh and tear each other apart.

  I understand this is how it must be. I go on, unfazed by the carnage, undeterred by the din.

  For I am the throat of the Delicate Singers.

  In the cities, the towns, in the streets, and beyond, I know others are waiting to hear me.

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  Copyright © 2015 by Lucy Taylor

  Art copyright © 2015 by Ellen Barkin

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