Chapter 6

By the time we woke up the next day the college team was already hard at work decrypting and cataloging our discoveries from the previous night. I asked professor Kent to brief me on their progress after breakfast. Professor Kent explained that while some segments of the carvings remained untranslated they had cracked the code for at least some of the writing. He told me that there were at least two different languages used in the writing, and that based on natural weathering the carvings were done over a long time period, with the most recent being at the mouth of the tunnel. The writings told the story of some sort of religion, or perhaps cult would be a more apt description. Based on the style of the writing this cult had roots around the time of the pyramids, and the founders had traveled from there to here. What made them settle here was still unclear. It also appeared that the same writer was at work for what must have been several hundred years, though the writer rarely talks about himself. It still remained unclear what the meaning of their beliefs was, but it seemed to center on receiving a more clear understanding but of what it doesn't say. The problem of translation was that the writing wasn't intended for outsiders, it is merely a chronicle so that other members of the cult could understand. They also spoke of vibrations, and they seemed to dance around what it was that they worshiped, only that it was much older.
One member of the team had spent some time testing bone samples in a lab they set up at the base. The bone samples were humans, some dating back several decades.
The recording devices had picked up more rumbling and noises as we slept, but no movement.
Finally, he had saved the best news for last, they had unlocked the secret behind one of the doors in the chamber. They had spent the past few hours documenting the door because all doors were designed to slide back into the wall, and we still didn't know how to close them again once opened.
I gathered our exploration team and hiked down into the chamber.
As we reached the alter chamber we prepared to explore beyond the door that our team had been working on unlocking.
The door slid aside effortlessly, despite it's size it moved as noiselessly and gracefully as if it weighed nothing. The tunnel revealed behind the door sloped gently up. The walls were smooth and glassy, as was the floor and ceiling. The shape of the tunnel changed as we moved along, from having a squared off floor and an arch above to completely round. After gently sloping up for a few feet the tunnel leveled off and continued straight for several hundred feet. I was leading the group, as my curiosity got the better of me. we had difficulty setting up lights, the glassy smooth surface of the tunnel was much too hard to chip with our chisels. We still dragged a wire behind to keep communication with our team who had set up a temporary camp at the mouth of the tunnel we continued to delve into. After leveling off for a time, the tunnel began to slant downwards and curve to the right. It became obvious after the tunnel had been curving for awhile that it formed a spiral, spiraling deeper and deeper into the rock. I still marvel at how we reached that conclusion however. It became apparent when we looked at the side of the tunnel on the right, the side that curved. We discovered that the sides of the tunnel were semi transparent, and that some sort of space existed past that wall. As we looked through the side of the tunnel we saw the lights both in the tunnel over our head, and across an expanse on the other side of the spiral. We stopped in admiration of this effect once or twice in the beginning, then for a long time we walked. Level stacking upon level, we must have been 10 stories below the level that we had started into the spiral. Suddenly a movement seemed to catch our eyes. This movement was on the other side of the tunnel wall, in the expanse in the center of the spiral. It looked like, some sort of swimming thing, or was it flying? It's hard to tell what this, thing was moving through.  We hadn't really thought about the expanse that much up until that point, but now it seemed to be all that we could think about. we sat on the floor of the tunnel to take a rest, and to watch the expanse to see if the movement repeated itself. After what seemed like an hour of tense waiting, it did. None of us could pinpoint where the mass came from, but suddenly it fell down the expanse, as gracefully as something moving through water, which supported the theory that the expanse was filled with water. This thing, it wasn't human, and it didn't look like any creature of the air or water that I was familiar with. I wished we had a closer ability to study it, it was frightening and horrible, yet so beautiful, perhaps because of the way it gracefully flew through the expanse. It had six appendages that moved in a sort of boneless dance. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared it was gone. We determined it was time to keep moving. A couple hundred feet ahead we found a branch off the main tunnel to the left. We felt that we could always get deeper into the the main tunnel, but now was as good a time as any to explore this new tunnel, we felt like this would be a good area to finish off and return to base after we finished exploring this new area. The new tunnel was more of the stone we had seen in the upper areas. The carvings in the side were closer to hieroglyphics, illustrating some sort of creature similar to what we had seen in the expanse. It showed some sort of manlike creatures bowing to them. Perhaps this was the object of the mysterious cult's worship. We discussed what the purpose of this branch of tunnels might be, tomb or temple. The tunnel opened up into a large hall, two stories tall with massive stone pillars. The hall was decorated evenly with more pictures and ancient writing. The hall was perhaps a hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long. At the end of the hall a wide set of steps led up to a  balcony overlooking the room. We climbed the stairs and behind the balcony found a doorway. Beyond the doorway we found a large room. I didn't see the room for myself, one of our surveyors was the first into the room.  His scream came suddenly with pain and alarm. He appeared to be trying to remove himself from the room he had just entered. He managed to remove himself, but at the cost of a good portion of his upper arm and shoulder. The source of his loss didn't remain a mystery for long as the strange thing chased him into the hall. It was one of the mysterious creatures described on the walls of the hall. It pushed him back, and he lost his balanced and tumbled over the railing of the balcony. He landed on top of one of the survival experts, just behind me. The injured man was completely incapacitated, but the survival expert recovered. My attention however was on the creature. I pulled out my gun and cocked it, as did the undowned survival expert. The creature floated to the center of the room, and attempted to dive down on me. I dodged it, but I felt it's dry appendage brush me as I rolled away. I fired into the center of the thing's body. It seemed disoriented as the echo of my shot rang through the chamber. That was the upshot of the situation, the only problem? My shots woke more of these things. There were at least 10 of them that streamed out, writhing in the air, searching using their blind tentacles. By the time the others had finished entering the chamber the downed survival expert had recovered his feet and prepared his gun. They seemed to be focused on me at first, then as the two survival experts opened fire they split their attentions between the three of us. We systematically dispatched several of them in a row, then had to reload. This was the most frightening of all, it left us no defense but running and hiding behind the pillars. There seemed to be no escape, I was caught by one of them just as I finished reloading, it tore a gash down my side. I twisted away from this thing, pushed my gun against it's flesh and fired at point blank range. The thing was down for the count, leaving half their number. Something came over me, I started screaming in rage at them,  I ran after them, got as close as I could and fired into the center mass of their bodies. One shot per creature dispatched them all. After the battle we paused to regroup before returning to base. We recovered our dropped equipment and used the radio to communicate our situation to the team at the mouth of the tunnel. They offered to send down help, but we refused, as it would take too much time and we didn't want to wait more than we had to. We determined that the injured surveyor would have to be carried by his fellow surveyor and the survival expert who had not had a body dropped on top of him. We were all injured to some extent, from minor scratches on the survival experts to the missing chunks of the first surveyor's arm. The second surveyor was the exception. He had no weapon and had not taken part in the battle. In fact the creatures had ignored him completely, and he had been wise to not try and attract their attention. We decided there would be plenty of time to recap after returning to base camp and tending our wounds. We prepared to move up the tunnel as quickly as we could, leaving our lights in place for future exploration, which though far from our mind, did save us the trouble of toting it all back up the tunnel. As we made the best speed we could up the tunnel we couldn't help but notice one more unsettling thing. The center of the expanse was writhing with what appeared to be hundreds of the unsettling creatures we had dispatched in the hall below. They made horrible clicking sounds, now I finally knew the source and it gave me no comfort knowing that. Every once and awhile one would propel itself against the tunnel wall, bounce off and reunite with the center mass of writhing creatures. The tunnel was made of stronger stuff however and didn't show any sign of cracking. As we neared the top however I heard a number of noises behind me, and I saw two of the things chasing us, gliding along the tunnels making horrible clicking noises, letting the sharp talons at the end of their appendages scratch the walls, which though it left no mark made a horrible scratching noise. I had taken the precaution of loading my gun before we had started moving and I dispatched them with two shots each. When we reentered the stone chamber, we told everyone there to pack up and be ready to move up the tunnel to base camp. They took a little over 15 minutes, in that time two of the creatures drifted up to the mouth of the tunnel, as they moved within five feet of the mouth I dispatched them. This seemed to put some motivation in the team to get moving, we moved even quicker up the tunnel to our base in the cellar. When we got to base those of us who were wounded had our wounds dressed. A duty roster was made up so that one man would always sit beside the tunnel entrance near the base. I don't think any of us slept well that night.