The Cave - part 2
by Jeff S. Gibbs




Despite our initial reaction to run in fear, there was something about the
man that made us stay, something non-threatening and almost peaceful.  As he
approached us slowly, we heard the screaming entity quickly returning as if
it had simply burst through the exit, completed a small loop around the
woods and was returning to finish us off.  We could hear trees snapping in
the distance, as that thing was bulldozing anything in its path.  Again,
strangely frozen in fear, Paul and I stood nearly frozen, powerless to stop
the thing rushing towards us and powerless to move.  The old man stopped his
approach towards us and his concerned face transformed into one of steeled
determination. He raised his arms into the air as if he was reaching for the
clouds and began sternly chanting some language I did not recognize or
understand.

The howling scream crested the hill and we could finally see a dark shape,
almost like a black cloud of soot without just enough form to be called
solid.  It flew down the hill, toppling the small trees that stood between
it and the old man like matchsticks.  The haggard old man blocked the
entity's path towards us and chanted those strange words again.  This time,
they seem to echo and reverberate through the woods like a howl of a wolf. 

The creature slowed, and as if it had legs, seemed to take a step back.
Then a light again began to emanate from the entrance to the cave.  But it
was not the sickly blood red light that was there previously, but a white
light, almost too bright to look at directly.  The creature appeared to
struggle against it, but fruitlessly, and it was literally dragged back down
the hole, letting loose a deafening scream in protest.  The light seemed to
envelope the creature as it reached its grasp.  The screaming wail was
silenced and the light retreated back down deep into the cave with its
prisoner as quickly as it appeared.

Stunned with disbelief and shock, Paul and I just stared at the old man.  He
walked over to the hole and with a wave of his hand, the broken covering was
once again made whole.  The markings that we had seen earlier gradually
reappeared and looked freshly carven into the wood.  Once he felt his task
completed, the old man again took notice of us and asked if we were okay.
Paul and I both looked at our bodies as if we were checking for any number
of untold wounds.  Outside of skinned knees and elbows, we were both just
dirty and dripping with sweat, so we merely nodded.

"You two nearly met your end there," said the old man.

"Who... I mean ... What was that?" Paul stammered.

"It was evil ... cruel and eternal.  You could call it a demon or you could
call it the devil." He paused for a second and then continued. "It is both
... and it is neither," said the old man as his voice trailed off.  "What's
important is that it didn't get to ... feed ... again. It grows much more
powerful if it gets to feed." 
 
With that, the man grew a sad look on his face and stepped back towards the
shack.  He crossed in front of us and walked to the rear wall facing the
cave entrance.  He chanted a few more lines of that strange language and the
marks on that wall seemed to disappear and reappear again, only looking
freshened and newly carven.  He then walked around the shed and out of view.
Paul and I again glanced at each other and for the first time, seemed to
have full use of our bodies back.  Full of questions, we raced around the
half-collapsed shed to get some more answers.  

We were more than stunned to discover nothing but emptiness.  Only a few
seconds behind him, there was no way he could have walked out of view and he
certainly wasn't inside the shack either.  We called out to him, ran clear
around the shed, even ran up the hill to see if he had tried to run away.
No sign of him anywhere.  No footprints and no sounds.  It was like he had
disappeared into thin air.  

Now thoroughly baffled and confused, we re-entered the shed to verify he
wasn't hiding in there and this time we even pushed our way through the
collapsed part of the roof.  Behind the sunken barrier we found what we were
looking for.  A dilapidated and almost completely decomposed corpse of a man
wearing identical clothes to the old man who had helped us just a few
minutes before.  He was holding an old black and white photograph in a dingy
and broken frame.  Paul slid it from under the man's hand and held it up to
the light.  It appeared to be a much younger version of him, along with what
appeared to be his wife and a daughter.  They were standing in front of a
nice farmhouse and looked genuinely happy together.  

Paul gently slipped the photo back under his hand. Then, I noticed something
else near the foot of the so-called bed he was lying in.  I bent over and
brushed off the dust and could tell it was a book.  I opened it up and
flipped through the pages.  It was a journal or diary of some kind.  

"I'll bet we'll find some answers here," I said as I slipped it under my
arm.  "Let's get out of here."

"I couldn't agree more," Paul said.  And with that we pushed our way back
out of the shed and made a beeline for his grandmother's farm, which seemed
an eternity away.  We hardly spoke on the entire trip back there, each of us
reflecting on what had happened and reevaluating many of the thing we had
previously believed and held true and how those ideas had been shattered by
what we just experienced.  When we got there we quickly cleaned ourselves up
with the garden hose out in the backyard and went inside. Paul and I each
drank several glasses of water after noticing neither one of us had returned
with the canteen.  To this day I have no idea what happened to it or the
rope!  They simply must have been lost in the struggle somewhere.

Once we felt refreshed and comparatively safe, we took the old tattered
journal up to the spare bedroom and began to pour over the pages.  Most of
the stuff we read concerning the cave and what was down there we didn't
understand at the time.  Most of the pages were littered with
discombobulated thoughts and gibberish, and his handwriting was difficult to
read. It wasn't until revisiting the journal several times over the years
later that I was finally able to make some kind of sense of what had
happened around that cave.

From what I could tell, the man, his wife and daughter moved into the area
and built a nice house while farming the land they owned.  This dates back
to the late 1890s.  Then one day, the daughter went out exploring the woods
with a friend who lived near by.  This was a regular occurrence because
according to her father, she was rather adventurous and was always traipsing
out in the woods in one direction or the other.  After spraining her knee in
a fall and having to be found after she couldn't make her way home, her
mother and father always made her go with someone else. Anyway, her and her
friend went out one fall day, and neither of them was ever seen again.

The man and his wife, along with the friend's family, searched the woods
that night and all the next day.  The local sheriff and his deputies, along
with other concerned families from around the area joined the search as
well.  Despite all those people's efforts, the girl and her friend were
never found.  Two weeks or so later, refusing to give up, the man and his
wife were still canvassing the woods around their property.  During the
search, the man and his wife discovered the entrance to a cave that no one
knew existed.  Fearing their daughter made the same discovery, they decided
to enter and look around. 

The journal then describes a horrifying scene.  Just a few feet into the
cave, the mother apparently found a ribbon that their daughter frequently
wore in her hair.  It was covered with dried blood.  Distraught and overcome
with grief, the mother began running down deeper into the cave.  The man,
slowed by a limp from a recent ankle sprain of his own, was unable to
convince her to wait for him or come back later with help.  He begged her to
return, but she just ignored him and ran down the same dark tunnel that Paul
and I explored, yelling for her daughter.  Knowing his ankle would prevent
him from delving too far into the cave, he decided to remain near the
entrance and wait to hear his wife beckon him or return with whatever she
found.  He would never see his wife alive again.  

He could hear her screaming out their daughter's name, Emily, over and over
again, despite the fact it was getting fainter and fainter as she descended
further into the cave.  Then, without any prior indication something was
wrong, he heard his wife let out a blood-curdling scream. Closing his eyes
in sadness and despair, thinking his wife had just discovered their
daughter's body he yelled out to her, but never received a response. What he
got instead was a taste of what Paul and I endured.

He described a very similar event to the one we experienced, starting with
the earthquake-like tremors deep in the cave, except from his perspective
from near the entrance, it was much more subdued.  He yelled down to his
wife for her to return, fearing a cave-in as we did, but again, he heard no
answer.  Then he described hearing a high-pitch wail coming up the tunnel,
an inhuman sound he knew couldn't be human.  Fearing it was some kind of
wild animal; he pulled himself out of the cave and scuttled quickly over the
nearby hill, crouching behind a stump to see if anything exited the cave
from a hidden perspective.  He heard the wail growing louder and louder and
described seeing a sickly red light emanating from the cave, and as it
faded, a black shape shot out of the cave like a cannonball.

The shape shot up in the air at least 50 feet and then glided back down to
earth, holding something in its appendages.  It was the one-armed torso of
his wife. He recognized the torn, bloodstained blue dress that draped off of
it.  The man described the horror of seeing this as being all most too much
to bear, but something beyond his control forced him to look on. The shadow
creature continued to feed on his wife's body, slashing it into pieces, as
it seemed to swim in the blood.  It was if the creature needed blood instead
of meat.  The man also described the creature becoming more "solid" as it
writhed in the blood, consuming what it could.

Realizing that this creature had just murdered his wife, and recently his
daughter and her friend, he quietly turned and slinked down the backside of
the hill and broke into a dead run back to his homestead, ignoring his
swollen and sore ankle.  Enraged with anger and grief, the man burst into
his house and grabbed his shotgun.  He stuffed as many shells as he could
into his jacket and loaded the gun.  Bent on revenge, he began the long run
back to the where he left the creature, still devouring the remains of his
wife.  When he finally arrived back at his hidden vantage point he could
tell the creature was no longer around.  He carefully inched down the hill
towards the grisly scene just outside the cave's entrance.  Blood stained
the grass and leaves, his wife's tattered dress was shredded into
unrecognizable threads.  There were small pieces of entrails and flesh
scattered about, but nothing big enough to be recognizable as human.

Overcome with grief, he fell to his knees and began to sob uncontrollably.
He stayed there for several minutes, just running his fingers through the
blood-red material, occasionally finding something recognizable like a hair
from her missing head stuck to a piece of tattered fabric.  Images of his
wife and daughter flooded his mind and again he became enraged with a primal
anger.  He stood up, raised his gun into the air and yelled out to the beast
for it to come for him.  He yelled down into the cave, he yelled up into the
air, he yelled at the top of his lungs for it to come.  It didn't take long
for it to answer his call.

Screaming over the hill behind him tore the creature, now almost entirely
solid.  He described it as a thick-skinned, black beast, trailed by a wispy,
dark mist that seemed to roll off it like steam rolls off campfire doused
with water.  It eyes burned a deep red and pierced his glaze like two hot
pokers.  The beast plunged towards him, it arms extended with giant
scythe-like appendages ready to slice him in half.  He calmly leveled his
shotgun and waited until the last second, when he could feel the beast's hot
breath on his face until he pulled the trigger.  The creature's upper body
exploded into a cloud of black dust.  The creature's lower body, separated
from the upper half continued on, slamming into the man and pinning him to
the ground, knocking the wind out of him.  It writhed and convulsed on top
of him as he struggled beneath its weight.  Slowly, it too turned to
weightless black dust, falling off of the man in chunks of dried ash.  

He was eventually able to stand up and brush himself off.  As he gathered
his breath back and looked around, he felt a strong breeze materialize out
of nowhere.  It wasn't so much a wind blowing him in the face, as it was a
force of suction behind him, pulling the air around and past him.  He braced
himself against a small tree and watched as the dusty remains of the
creature gathered once again into a faint shadow and dragged itself back
into the hole.  He shot at it right before it left his sight, but his shot
simply blew through the dust cloud and struck the cave entrance's wall
instead.  It was no longer solid, just a dark cloud as he explained it.  The
man ran to the entrance and looked down into the darkness, and he heard a
faint wail and then silence.  With that, he turned and limped home.  

According to the journal, he then visited the family of his daughter's
friend and tried to explain what happened.  Saddened by the news that their
child was likely dead as well, the friend's mother and father returned to
the site with him.  They saw the blood and tattered remains of his wife.
The friends' father, referred to as William, kept insisting that it must
have been a bear of some kind, and that the event that followed was merely a
figment of the man's enraged grief.  Unable to convince him otherwise, he
did get him to help cover the cave's entrance with logs and dead tree
branches that they collected.  They piled it deep enough over the hole to
prevent anything from getting in or out until a more permanent structure
could be built.

Details followed about the funerals, about building a solid and permanent
covering to the cave entrance hole, about how no one would believe him about
the shadow creature.  Everyone in the county thought he had lost his mind
upon seeing the death of his wife, and he drew more and more withdrawn from
his surrounding townsfolk until he was essentially a recluse.  However, he
remained determined to find out what it was down in that cave.  He searched
through the town's library, through medieval reference books, to the bible,
to even mythology books.  Nothing was ever found to describe what he had
seen and experienced.  

It wasn't until one winter day, some months later, when he heard a knock at
the door that he got his answer.  His journal explains that a local Native
American, whose parents had stayed behind when their Arapaho tribe was
forced out of the land on onto a reservation in Oklahoma, had heard of his
story.  He claimed to know the origin of such a creature; that it was an old
tale passed down through his tribe, which had lived on the surrounding land
for thousands of years.  They referred to it as a Gros'lor (at least that is
how it was pronounced according the man).  It was a "soul eater", a creature
of untold origin and power that hibernated for decades and came out to feed
on people or their "souls"... only to return to a long slumber shortly after
terrorizing nearby humans and animals.  

His tribe's shamans had long held incantations and spells that kept the soul
eater in check, limiting its power and forcing it to remain dormant for
hundreds of years.  Unfortunately, the removal of the Arapaho tribe and its
power against the beast allowed for it's awakening by the man's daughter and
her friend as they entered its lair.  

With that knowledge in hand, the man collected his things and left for
Oklahoma to hopefully talk with someone who still knew what to do to contain
the creature.  His journal describes very little about the trip and what he
discovered in Oklahoma, but he referred to an Arapaho reservation and a
shaman named Hache-hi who was able to recount the tale and knew the spells
that had been passed down from his grandfather.  Apparently, these
incantations bound the person to the creature in a way that it, even after
death the two would struggle against one another.  The spirit of the
spell-giver would even remain after death to contain the beast as long as
the line of living shamans kept up with the frequent spells and incantations
needed to keep the spirit alive and on this plane of existence.  Without
maintenance, the spirit would eventually fade and cross over to the next
plane, and nothing would remain to contain the soul eater.

Knowing his family was gone and no one in town believed his story he decided
to build a small one-room house, letting his original house fall into ruin.
He built it out near the hole in order to perform the ritual on a regular
basis, and to prevent anyone from trying to enter the cave again.  He
basically decided to dedicate the rest of his life from protecting the area
from any further attacks from the creature.  Since no one would be following
his watch after his death, he had hoped that carving the symbols that
translated into the spell on the cave's covering platform and again on the
wall of his house that faced the hole would keep his spirit around after his
death, as well as the creature contained in its lair.  

Apparently it had worked.  Although Paul and I had destroyed the covering to
the cave and the incantations engraved into it, there was enough power left
for the man to return to our plane of existence long enough to contain the
creature once again.  After his "battle" the markings returned fresh and
renewed, giving his spirit a recharge in the battle of containing the beast.

After reading his journal and understanding what had happened, Paul and I
felt safe to return to the area and explore a little more. We found two
unmarked gravestones on what must have been the site of his original home
about a mile past the cave.  Only a few blocks of foundation brick remained.
The shack and new cave covering, however, remained intact for all the years
we occasionally revisited the site.  We never told anyone about our
experience.  Who would believe us?  

Many questions go unanswered till this day.  Where did that thing come from?
Is it a natural creature of earth, a demon, an alien, or some other ancient
creature?  Are there any more of them out there, still living its cycle of
feeding and hibernating? Who or what recovered the hole while we were in the
cave?  Was it the spell trying to contain the beast or was it some other
force trying to keep us in there for the creature to feed on?  Why didn't
the beast kill us while it had us trapped instead of breaking through the
barrier and coming back for us then?  Maybe it wasn't strong enough yet ...
who knows.  All I know is that there are things on this earth still left for
us to discover and understand.  The paranormal exists, for good and for
evil.  Most importantly, I know I'm lucky to be alive and I thank that old
man each day I continue on due to his eternal vigilance.