A fragment

I found the following in my files. I had completely forgotten that I had written it, and I have no memory of what it was for or where I was going to go with it. The date on the file is March 1, 2001. Seemed kinda like a potentially fun start to, well... something, so I thought I'd post it here:

It had stopped being fun a good half-hour ago. There was still no sign of Jolie, and his uncle had clearly been wrong about the two tunnels meeting up again “just around the bloody bend.” So now Evan was stuck by himself. The teen swung his flashlight around, but the monotonous scenery hadn’t changed. His tunnel continued to head in a straight line downhill at a forty-five-degree angle. The cylindrical walls were carved roughly out of the bedrock and covered here and there with green moss or grey fungus. Other than the mere odd fact of the tunnel’s existence, there was really nothing interesting about it.

How far down should he go? What if Dakota had already found Jolie in the other fork of the tunnel? At this rate, it’d take forever for the three of them to hook up again. Evan stopped walking. He turned around.

But what if Dakota hadn’t found her? Monotonous or not, this puppy was headed somewhere. There’d be something important at the bottom. And at any rate, he’d feel like a complete dope if he walked all the way back uphill only to immediately follow Dakota back down again. Evan rolled his eyes and turned around for a second time. He started off, doubling his pace.

Five more minutes passed. Ten minutes. Fifteen. He realized his flashlight was starting to dim. Okay, that changed things. If it got much worse, he’d have to head back. And just as that thought crossed his mind, the tunnel up ahead curved to the left. Excited, he raced for the bend.

He came around the corner and slowed to shine his waning light ahead of him. Another hundred yards of tunnel. But with a steeper descent. And beyond that, a flickering of light.

Again, he rushed forward. And immediately he realized that his eyes had fooled him. Not a hundred yards of the same old tunnel, but twenty yards of a tunnel that was rapidly shrinking in circumference (or whatever). By the time he reached the end of it, he was practically doubled over â€" and his spiky hair was still scraping the ceiling.

He poked his head through the mid-sized porthole that the tunnel’s mouth had become. On the other side was an immense cavern, lit by a lone torch burning from a sconce set into the far wall. He looked up. The stalactite-covered ceiling arced thirty feet above him. It was a ten-foot drop to the floor, and no Jolie. But he had come this far…

He turned off his flashlight and hooked it onto his belt. Then he squirmed out of the porthole, legs first. For a second, he thought he was going to be wedged in tight, but he managed to squeeze one shoulder through and then the other. Holding on with both hands, he lowered himself down the wall as far as he could. Still about a five-foot drop. He inhaled deeply and let go.

He landed hard on the rocky ground. He bent his knees and tried to roll on impact -- like Dakota had taught him -- but that didn’t save his crummy right ankle. It gave out again, like always, and he bit his lip to keep himself from yelling.

Now truly annoyed, he stood up and limped across the craggy bottom to explore the cavern. Maybe find another exit, as it only now occurred to him that he might have a little trouble climbing back out the way he’d come. He glanced up at a wall. It was covered with carved hieroglyphics â€" literally. Not that he was any kind of expert, but he’d seen enough Mummy movies to recognize the style. But what were Egyptian glyphs doing in a cave half a mile beneath the Australian outback?

Evan began to move along the wall. The glyphs gave way to Celtic Runes, then to what looked like Chinese calligraphy. Then Arabic. Hebrew. And finally, Latin. He couldn’t read any of it, yet he couldn’t help being disturbed by it. Suddenly, he knew why. The carvings reminded him of those multi-lingual warning signs he had seen at the airport in Sydney: “Employees only! Keep Out!” in seventeen languages.

Something moved behind him. He felt it more than saw it and turned quickly. But the only thing there was his own flickering shadow. He scanned the room again. There was something directly beneath the torch. Something black that the torchlight didn’t or couldn’t touch. He limped toward it.
Again, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Again, he whipped around. Again, nothing but his shadow â€" frozen, of course, into the same pose that Evan himself was holding.

He moved faster. As he drew nearer to the torch, his shadow grew behind him until it stretched up to the top of the cavern. A giant of liquid black. This time, when Evan turned around, his shadow didn’t bother to hold still. It swung at its former master with a huge black fist.
Evan barely had time to register what was happening. The black fist slammed into him like a tidal wave, knocking him right off his feet. He rolled to a stop against a stalagmite, took a second to shake off the pain and shock, then dodged quickly as the giant shadow took another swipe that just missed the top of Evan’s head and shattered the stalagmite into a couple thousand limestone fragments.

Evan scrambled to his feet. His ankle throbbed. The shadow hovered against the far wall, poised to strike. Evan struggled to clear his head. He had known his shadow a long time and had never noticed all this building resentment. What was causing this?

The shadow attacked. Evan pushed off his sore ankle and dived over the smashing black fists. The entire cavern shook. Evan rolled back onto his feet and found himself facing the torch. It burned with a strange blue-black fire that held his gaze.

For too long. The shadow slammed him back against a rune-covered wall and kept him pinned there. The pressure against his chest was terrific, but Evan forced his eyes open. The torch flared brighter. Blue-white with a coal-black core. That torch is a bad influence, he thought. He reached for his belt.

It took some effort, but he managed to free his flashlight and flick it on. For half a second, he worried that the batteries would already be too far gone. But the light cut across his shadow like, well, like a light-sabre right out of Star Wars. His shadow actually screamed (which was not a pleasant sound at all). The black hand pressing against him was severed from the giant and instantly melted away. Evan struggled to catch his breath while simultaneously advancing slowly along the wall. The torch flared angrily, but Evan kept the shadow at bay by swiping at it with his light.
“Let me knock that chip off your shoulder,” he said under his breath. He sliced the whole shoulder off for good measure. Then for fun, he cut it off at the knees too.

Finally, he reached the torch. It blazed with a cold black fire outlined by white tongues of flame that scorched his hand as he lifted it out of its sconce. The shadow screamed again and made one last desperate move toward the threat to its power, but Evan used his flashlight to cut off the shade’s head before smothering the torch against the rocky floor of the cavern.

It was suddenly much darker. Evan scanned the walls with his flashlight. No sign of the shadow. He turned the light on himself and looked back over his shoulder. There it was. Small, calm and very well behaved. Evan smiled wryly. Then waved at it. Right in synch, the shadow waved back. That’s more like it, he thought.

One last time, Evan tried to get his bearings. The flashlight beam passed over the empty wall sconce. Below it was a small iron door, painted black. Evan knelt down and put his ear against the cold metal. From the other side, he could here a girl crying.

Jolie!

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#9. Bio-Ship