Title.

Cave Story 


     We live in the cave. I don’t mind it. It’s a big cave. There are lots of other caves connected to it. The other ones I’ve seen are nice too. I don’t mind them. I don’t mind any of it. My sister Ray does. She doesn’t like the cave. She says to everyone, “We need to go above ground. We need to get out.” No one knows what she’s talking about. She’s a crazy person. We don’t know what above ground means. It’s some gibberish. That’s what Dad says. Mom says above ground might be another cave. That could be right. Mom is usually right.

     Ray got the way she is now a few months ago. It was bad. I was scooping blindfish from the stream, and someone came running. They said, “Oel, your sister Ray is missing.” We looked around the cave for her for a long while. We even went to some of the other big caves where people don’t live. She wasn’t there. Mom was sad, she said a monster got her. One of the big ones that the older men kill when they come near. Dad was sad too. We were all sad. People usually die when they get old, not from the monsters. That would have been bad.

    One day I was sad and sitting outside the house near a cluster of mushrooms, when someone ran by and said, “She came back.” We were all very happy that she came back. But Ray was not ok. She came back to the cave but was not ok.  

    She couldn’t see right. Her eyes should be all the color black, but hers weren’t right like they should have been, all black like everybody else’s. They had white spots on them. She said everything was a little hazy. Her skin was baddened too, skin should be purple like some of the kinds of fungus, but hers was reddish and peeling. It hurt her to touch anything. It wasn’t right, not right.

    She was crazy then, "gone all crazy," the old people said. She started talking about above ground. No one could understand her. She said we needed to get to the son. Lots of people have sons, why is one special?

    She hated everyone. When we’re in our room at night, she muttes things I don’t understand. She says we need to get out when there are other people not around. Why would we want to go to another cave? There aren’t any people in the other caves. There are monsters, not people.

    Everyone else says she’ll get better, but she isn’t getting better. Isn’t getting any better. She’s like a stranger now. I don’t know what she’ll do.  

    I am worried. I try to go scoop some blindfish for a snack, but my hands are shaking. I can’t catch too well today. Someone pushes my shoulder. “Hi Ray,” I say.

    She stares at me and pushes on my head. She looks mad. “We need to go,” she says. Her head is shaking. Most of her hair is gone now. Most people don’t lose all their hair until they’re at least 20, but hers is already gone. Most of mine is too, but I got a bad hit on the head when I was younger and Dad says that made my hair fall out sooner than it should have. “We need to go,” she says. Angry. She’s angry.

    “Ray, we don’t need to go anywhere, nothing is wrong,” I say.

    “Everything is wrong you shit!” she screams. I don’t know what the last word means. She says lots of weird words now.

    “We don’t need to go anywhere. Ray, you should go back into the house and have Mom make you some food.” I just want her to listen. She’s frightening now. Frightening me. She grits her teeth and slaps me across the shoulder. It stings but I just say again, “Go inside Ray.”

    Ray grabs me. She’s a lot stronger than I remember. “We’re going, we have to get out,” she says. She says it like she isn’t asking me. She grabs me by the hand and nearly breaks my fingers. She drags me off toward the nearest tunnel. She’s gone crazy. They were right. I wish they weren’t right. Ray, what happened to you? I tug back, but she’s too strong. We go into the closest tunnel. The town is behind us. The windows look like hollow eyes. Like all our eyes. Except for Ray’s. 

    We get to the closest cave. Ray lets go. I want to run back, but we’ve been walking for a long time and I’m tired. Very tired. Ray knows I won’t run back. I don’t know how she knows this.

    This cave is different from ours. There are many more mushrooms here than ours. The ones here are bigger, because they aren’t cut down to make room for houses. There is a stream here with blindfish. Ray doesn’t care though. She’s looking at the other tunnels. She picks one and drags me again. It’s a tunnel we usually don’t go down, not even in groups. It leads to a cave where there are monsters sometimes. I tell Ray, I say, “Ray, there are monsters there.” She tells me to shut up.

    I wonder what made Ray so crazy. No one in town wanted to talk about what might have happened to her. I don’t think they know what happened. I don’t either, but I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.  

    We’ve been walking for an hour now. It’s late; we should be going to bed. Ray doesn’t look tired. Her eyes look the same. She scratches at her skin alot. I want to go back. I don’t like this cave. There aren’t a lot of mushrooms here, so it’s dark in here. Dark is bad. Dark brings bad things. A bad thing comes. 

    It’s a big one. Its mouth is full of teeth. There are teeth behind the teeth and those teeth are even bigger. They look like they could chew up the whole cave if they wanted to. Its eyes are big and glow like red mushrooms, and it has many legs.

    Ray isn’t scared. Ray was always the brave one, but she isn’t even scared now, when she should be. She pulls up a mushroom by the stem, and then she takes out a little shiny thing from her pocket. She moves her hand and some stuff that looks like the light of an orange mushroom comes out, except it is moving around quick like air or water. It jumps onto the mushroom and the whole mushroom is covered in it. I can feel it on my face, it feels like when you plunge your hands into the cold part of a stream, it hurts like that, but it feels different. It makes my eyes feel pain very badly. I have to close my eyes. Ray waves the mushroom at the monster. It is frightened. I am frightened too. The orange stuff like mushrooms light jumps at the monster. It runs away. Ray throws the mushroom into a pond. The orange stuff goes away. I want to go away too.  

    We go into another tunnel. It’s a tunnel we haven’t been in before. We walk for a very long time. We go through other caves. They are different then ours. They don’t look right. Ray seems to know where she is going. I don’t know where we're going. Everything is going wrong right now. I’d like to go home, but I don’t know the way back. The tunnels we walk in slope up now, into caves higher up than ours. I wonder if we go into caves up high enough, we’ll get back to the bottom of our cave. I hope so. I want to go home. Home. 

    It has been at least a day. There were more monsters, but they’re different than the ones we see near our cave. Ray frightens them like the first. I’m hungry and tired. We keep following tunnels, but there is more light now. It is not coming from mushrooms. It might be from mushrooms, but they must be very big. They must be up in a cave above us. Is that the above ground cave? A cave with big bright mushrooms? It must be that.  

    The light is very bright now. I don’t like it. It is sharper in my eyes than normal fungus light. I want to go back. This light seems worse than the monsters. Ray grabs me and pulls me up through the tunnel. It is very steep. I almost fall. I have to close my eyes. The light hurts too much. The air in this cave hurts my lungs. It tastes different then all the other caves. Ray lets go of me. The floor of the cave feels different here. I cover my eyes; the mushrooms here must be gigantic. Too much light. Too much light. “We’re above ground,” she says. My skin itches like it’s covered in cuts. Water pours from my eyes. Ray waits while I lie there.

    My eyes start to hurt less after a while. I open them. “They’re like mine now,” she says. I don’t know what she means. It is still very bright, but I can see better.  

    This cave is not like the others. It is bigger than any cave I’ve ever seen. It isn’t right. The floor is very flat and goes in every direction. The walls and the ceiling are blue, bright, bright blue, and they are far away from us, the walls and the ceiling. I don’t think I could ever walk to them. There are brown shapes on the bottoms of the walls. They are spiky-looking, like monster teeth. I wonder if someone painted them there.

    The worst thing is the big thing in the sky that I can’t look at for long or my eyes hurt even more. It looks like the orange thing Ray had in her pocket that ate the mushroom and scared the monsters. It isn’t very big but it hurts. “That is warmth your feeling. Hot.” Ray says. I don’t understand.  

    She keeps talking. “That is the son. It is made of the thing you saw me make down below. That little thing was called fire. It hurts. That thing up in the sky is called the son. It is like our word for son, the male offspring of a coupling, but it is spelled with a u instead of an o. It is like a million of those fires you saw me make put together.”

    I don’t understand it. I don’t understand. What is this? What? What is this? My heart races. Ray picks me up and drags me towards some houses I hadn’t noticed before. They look lonely without anything else around. They look like ours, but they’re shiny. It doesn’t look like anyone has lived in them for a long time.

    “That is the sky,” she says, pointing at the ceiling and walls. “It looks like the ceiling and walls of the cave, but this is not a cave. Those are not the ceiling and walls. There is no border there. The open space just keeps going and going. There is no ceiling up there, or walls out there. Those things are mountains. They are like giant bumps on the ground, that are bigger than any cave. Beyond them is more above ground like this, with more endless sky above it that does not have a boundary. There is nothing above us. Our world, the cave world, was below us, in the ground. There are no more caves above us. This is not even a cave. We are above ground.” Above ground. Above ground. Above ground. 

    Ray lets go of me and walks around the corner of the house. I try to understand. It is like a cave, but not a cave. What is not a cave? How can something be not a cave? How can the blue not be walls and ceiling? It must end somewhere, otherwise it would just keep going. Just keep going. I don’t understand. The son is made out of fire. The sun is made out of fire. Fire is hot. It hurts like cold but it is different from cold. Therefore, it is called hot. The sun is like a mushroom in the sky. I don’t understand. I hear Ray scream.  

    I run around the corner of the building. Ray is on the ground. She is no longer moving. Her head is opened. Red. A monster is there. It is not like any other monster I’ve ever seen. It is wrong. It has a big mouth, with more teeth than any other monster ever. Its eyes aren’t like mine, or Ray’s, or like a monster’s from the other caves. They’re white with a black spot in the middle. The black spots are pointing at me. Its skin is rotting. It looks like its falling apart, and it smells like a million dead blindfish. It is moving and it is rotting. I start running. 

    This is a cave, but not a cave, Ray said. It is not a cave. There is a great thing in the sky made out of air which hurts us with warmth like cold does but it is different. It lights the cave like a mushroom but it is much brighter. My legs are hot from running. The rotting monster is chasing me. The ground is open in every direction. The houses must look little behind me now. The son is in the sky. The sun is in the sky. The blue thing called sky is not the walls or the ceiling. There is no cave here. I smell the rotting smell. This is not a cave. It is above ground. I lived under ground. This place is bright but it is darker than the darkest cave. The sun is in the sky. Sun. Sky. I fall over. Rotting smell. Sun. Sky. Ray. Run. Ray. Son. Sun. Sky. Ray. Ruin. Ruin. Ruin.