The nightmares continue just like they always have. Not always. There was a time when I didn’t have them. That was before the summer of 1986. I never used to have them then. They are becoming more lucid now. Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m awake or dreaming. That’s OK. I won’t have them much longer. By tomorrow, they’ll be gone. I hope.
The summer of 1986 was pretty lazy. Me and Mac drank gin and tonics that summer by the pool. School was out and the coeds were scantily clad. We shared our pitchers of sweet pleasure with them. But that’s another story for another time.
I guess college guys get bored pretty easy. We were Juniors at the University of Texas and bored. It was Mac who found the UT Spelunkers guide in the library. Hundreds of caverns and caves were diagramed completely. What the heck, we thought we’d go caving.
It’s called Airman’s Cave. Two Air Force Airman found it in 1951. They found some pretty weird stuff there. You can only go there in the late summer because the entry is in the creek bed of Barton Creek. It’s just a big hole that drops for about fifteen feet to an open room. Most people stop there. Mac had the map and we decided to explore. The caverns are in the Edward’s Aquifer. There are honeycombs of passages going in all directions.
We decided to see the Aggie Artroom. That’s what it was called on the map. To get there we had to go through some tight passages. There was The Birth Canal. That’s one tight passage to squeeze through. There was One Legged Skater which was a passage where you had one leg hanging down and one leg straight back like an ice skater. That one was tight too.
Then it was the honeycombs. I’m not one for claustrophobia, but these were long passages, maybe two or three hundred yards where the roof of the cavern scraped your back the whole way. You had to have both your arms stretched out before you and wiggle the whole way before it opened up again.
Some of the passages go back more than six miles. The Aggie Artroom was about five miles back. It took almost five hours to get back there. I still remember it clearly coming into that room. There’s an entry about twelve feet up a ledge in the room before it. You crawl through it with wonder. It’s no more than fifteen inches tall and filled with water like a small lake. You get soaked.
All these small straw-like formations are everywhere as you crawl through it. We thought it was the water that gave us the chills. But as we got closer, the chills went deeper. Until that point, I wasn’t scared. Scared isn’t even the right word. Terrified is better. But college guys don’t know any better. We pushed on.
When you first enter the room, it surprises you. It’s about thirty feet long, ten feet wide, and six feet tall. It’s all wet. There aren’t any formations anymore. It’s like a clay room. The walls are soft and the floor is slimy. All around the room are ledges filled with figurines, thus the name Aggie Artroom. But it wasn’t the Aggie’s who made them.
They were weird. I mean scary weird. Other people had made new figurines and they were normal. You could tell the originals. What ever made them was evil. You almost got the feeling that it wasn’t human. The faces were distorted but perfectly made. It wasn’t sloppy work, they were works of art. Evil works of art.
Creatures leering at you while they ate their young. There was a satisfaction in their eyes. They weren’t male or female. Whatever they were, they didn’t have a gender. They were repulsive, yet I took one with me anyway. I never should have done it, I knew it at the time, but me and Mac were stupid back then. We each took one. Or should I say, and I mean this, they took us. They wanted to get out of there.
We got out way past dark. We didn’t even drink that night. I know now that Mac did the same thing that I did that night. I stayed up all night staring at it. That’s when the nightmares began. Years later, after all this time, it’s still wet. It’s still warm. Sometimes I find it in a different room from where I left it.
Last night I found it on my forehead when I woke up. It was looking at me. I swear to God. That’s when I called Mac. Same thing for him too. Me and Mac are meeting tomorrow at the cave. We don’t have the map anymore. Funny thing, we know how to get there.