Newshawk’s Crawl
by Ollie Swasey
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
“Seizing my window of opportunity. You should try it some time.” Marlin lit the lamp clipped to the bill of the cap. A little flame oozed out of the pinhole in the center of the brass reflector, faintly illuminating the mouth of the cave. He put the cap on and glanced back at Glen over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll be back before anyone even has a chance to get mad. Thank me later.”
“Marlin—” Glen started, but his protestations were silenced almost immediately as Marlin lay down on his belly and began to crawl headfirst into the cave.
With his arms up near his ears, he pulled himself forward on his chest into the sooty dark. His body blocked out most of the sunlight from outside, and the carbide lamp cast a radius of light scarcely larger than a candle, dim and yellow as it flicked against the stones.
When the texture beneath the toes of his boots turned from grass to stone, he knew he was within the cave entirely. Jagged rock bit into his skin from every angle, the tunnel so narrow that every breath expanded his chest until it filled the space completely. With stone pressing in on him from above and beneath, it gave the impression of being chewed very slowly by the mountain itself.
After what felt like several minutes, Marlin saw ahead of him a huge darkness at the end of the passage and knew he had reached the room the rescuer described. The end of the squeeze turned out to be a few feet off the floor of the cave, so he inched out as far as he could, caught himself on his hands and carefully lowered the rest of his body to the floor. He was sweating hard, shirt sticking to his back even in the relative cool.
“But the hard part’s through with,” he thought, examining his palms in the dim light of his headlamp. They were scraped and bloodied already, dust settling into the grooves of his knuckles fine as flour. “Funny,” he thought, “I guess I was so caught up, I barely felt a thing.”
He stood up. Thick, tar-like darkness swallowed up the meager light of his lamp. For a few minutes, Marlin stayed where he was, letting his eyes adjust until out of the scintillating half-hallucinations projected by his optic nerves, an image of the cave emerged. His next breath caught in his throat.
Weeping limestone dripped down the walls like candle wax and rose up from the floor in distorted mounds, glistening wetly in the mute acetylene glow. There appeared to be no ceiling, its zenith rising up into a bank of darkness, hidden from view. Odd shapes, crevices and columns and shelves of stone coalesced into a space more alien to him than anything he had ever seen.
Even crawling down a mineshaft had not prepared him for this. A mineshaft felt real — humanity had been there, carved it out and made it theirs. This place was not the work of man, or any living thing. This cavern and the darkness that filled it had taken shape beneath the notice of the sun and stars, formed on a timescale so massive and by forces so minute that he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. Maybe it was something he wasn’t meant to comprehend.
Marlin swallowed drily and looked down at his hands again. They were shaking. “Okay, get it together,” he whispered to himself. His voice sounded strange, sliding and bouncing against the walls of the cave before returning to his ears. When the echo faded, he could hear with alarming clarity his stampeding heart, pounding in the utter silence.
He shut his eyes, gave his head a good shake as if to dispel the bizarre fear that gripped him, and thought, “Goddamn it, Marlin, you’re on a mission. Screw your damn head on, get the story, get out, and buy Glen dinner as recompense for shaving another year off his life. After a round of drinks, it’ll all be like a bad dream.”
Across the room, Marlin’s light caught the edge of a black hole in the stone. At first he hesitated, unsure it was the right opening — in the deep shadows, almost everything registered as a hole — but he picked his way across the uneven stone, crouched down and looked inside. The tunnel stretched deep into the rock, far beyond the reach of his lamp’s radius. But even without the light, he could hear slow, ragged breathing issuing from the darkness. This was the right tunnel, after all.
“Hello in there,” he called, flinching at the echo. At the sound of his voice, the breathing changed, and there was a grunt, a scrape of leather against stone. Marlin took another breath. “My name is Marlin Fletcher,” he said, “and I’m a journalist. I’d like to share your story. Can you hear me?”
When the echo died, a voice called back, but the words were muddled, looping in on themselves until they were just noise. Even poking his head into the darkness didn’t seem to help. It quickly became clear that if Marlin wanted this story, he was going to need to crawl in there himself. He’d come too far to turn back now. Marlin got down on his stomach again and began to worm his way inside.
This tunnel was smaller than the one he’d entered through, barely wide enough to fit his shoulders. With his arms stretched forward, his shoulders were pinned into flexion like a diver, biceps grazing his ears as he slithered his hips through the opening. The walls of the passage were wet with groundwater seeping through the porous rock, and quickly his clothes grew damp and cold.
Movement through the tunnel was painstaking. What had that caver said out there, he thought, sixty feet in? Ten lengths of a man didn’t seem long standing up — but down here, creeping on his belly, pushing himself forward an inch at a time with the tips of his toes, it may as well have been sixty miles. The walls of the cave were very close around him, scratching him, tearing at his skin and clothes. A jagged little knob of stone cut his chin as he passed over it, and then Marlin felt it slowly carve a seam down the length of him as he moved.
His experiences, he came to realize, meant nothing here. This cave was a different beast altogether. That was the word for it: beast. Even demolished beyond recognition, a building or a mine retained traces of humanity and the hands that built it. But not here. Up close in the lamplight, the walls of the cave were nauseatingly organic, warped stone giving an impression of crawling through the bowels of a massive animal.
If he thought about it, he could feel the weight of the mountain bearing down on his back, untold tons of stone poised to claim him so quickly he might not even feel it. Or maybe he would. Marlin’s stomach clenched at the thought, and he swallowed an involuntary gush of saliva.
Glen was up there waiting for him. It was a comforting image: old Glen, fat and graying, standing there in the dying light, smoking nervous cigarette after nervous cigarette while he waited for his star reporter to emerge from the depths. And he would wait. That, Marlin was sure of. “So don’t lose your nerve, Fletcher,” he thought, “push through it.” He could not let fear overcome him; not when Glen was waiting, and certainly not when the news was at stake.
* * *
Well after Marlin had lost track of time, a pair of boots came into view, their soles illuminated so suddenly by his light that it startled him.
“Ah — hello!” he said. His voice sounded muted in his ears, silenced by the close quarters. “I... I wasn’t able to hear you before. My name is Marlin Fletcher, and I’m a reporter.”
The air here was moist and dank, reeking of excrement and fear. Ahead of him, the trapped man’s breathing was quiet and thready. His ankle shifted, toe scraping a pebble back towards Marlin’s face.
“This poor fellow,” Marlin thought and, without meaning to, he began to visualize the diagram he would draw to accompany his article. “I’m here to document your story and share it with the world.”
“Help...” the man groaned. “Are they... coming?”
“Help is coming, yes. I’m told there are plans to dig a parallel shaft — the quarters in here are too — too tight, as I can see now.” Unable to access his notepad, Marlin hoped he could remember everything that was said. What a shame that would be, to come all this way and forget it all on the way back out. “Can you tell me your name?”
There was a long silence as the man caught his breath, seemingly exhausted by the effort of speech. Then, he wheezed: “Ernest... Hardy.”
“How did you come to be here, Mr. Hardy?”
He grunted. “Been mapping... this system... stupid...” Another pause as he drew breath. “Came early... alone...” Then, a snarl of frustration crawled up from his throat. “Didn’t want... this.”
“I understand.” Marlin inhaled and found he was a little short of breath himself. Maybe it was the position he was in, the extension of his shoulders or the compression of the cave against his ribcage, but even the deepest breath seemed only to allow a trickle of air into his lungs. His chest burned; he couldn’t stay for much longer. “Do you have a message you would like me to share, while you wait for rescue?”
Another rasping inhalation, and then Hardy’s voice broke into a sob. “Alma,” he wept. “Alma, Alma...”
Worn boots scraped at the stone as Ernest Hardy struggled fruitlessly in his captivity.
“We’re going to get you out of here, Mr. Hardy,” Marlin said weakly, wracking his mind for whatever platitudes could possibly be comforting in a situation like this. “Someone will return to you soon. Don’t lose hope.” He squirmed his hips against the stone, experimenting with the best way to move himself backwards. “We are all with you.”
Scarcely had Marlin finished his sentence when a wordless moan took shape. Marlin froze. Hardy wheezed in pain, his breath losing its rhythm. The faceless voice bounced back through the passage, filling the tiny space, wordless attempts at language squeezing Marlin’s chest with dread.
“Mr. Hardy?”
The other man’s breathing was so shallow, slowing and slowing. Then Ernest Hardy took one deep, shuddering gasp, exhaled, and did not draw another.
Icy terror pierced the heart of Marlin Fletcher. He reached for the boot nearest his hand and shook it. “Mr. Hardy? Are you alright?” His own voice sounded close and loud, pitchy with fear and the sudden urge to cry. Hardy made no response; he never would again.
All at once, the walls of the cave seemed to close in. With sudden haste, Marlin began to push himself backwards through the passage. His chest constricted, breath coming fast and hard as his heart hammered at his ribs. “What’s sixty feet?” he thought frantically. “Sixty feet back, and then you’re in the room again, and then Glen is barely an arm’s length away. You can make it, Marlin. You’ll be home before you know it, out of this tunnel and home free—”
A horrible rumbling sound overtook him. Tremendously loud, rattling his bones beneath his skin. Marlin tucked his face down into the floor of the tunnel as a roar like a beast the size of a mountain shook the cavern around him. A creeping warmth puddled beneath his pinned hips.
Then, as quickly as the noise began, it stopped. Stillness and stone enveloped him.
No time to wonder. Marlin made a break for it. Barely able to bend his arms, he moved as quickly as his body would allow, overlooking every scrape and bump in the pursuit of freedom. Inches moved like miles, his shirt torn to tatters against the tunnel’s floor, but what did a shirt matter with his life at stake. He forgot about Glen. He forgot about Hardy. His only thought, the only one that managed to breach the surface of a mind flooded with terror, was of sun, and of air, and of a train ride home.
And then his boots hit solid stone.
Marlin shoved his leg backwards, working his sole against the obstacle. “Only a little fallen rock,” he thought, “nothing I can’t get out of the way myself.” But it didn’t move. He kicked again, harder, with both feet, kicking again and again, desperation building with every jolt. “Move, goddamn it, move!” But each thrust only pushed him farther into the tunnel.
Marlin began to shake. “Oh, God.” The voice in his ears was distant and strange. “Oh, God, oh God, I’m— ” He did not finish the thought. Pressing in on him above and below, the mountain held Marlin in its ancient embrace and finished it for him.
* * *
Dusk was falling over Manassas by the time Marlin Fletcher made it home without his shoes. Brown mud was drying clay-gray around the cuffs of his trousers, flaking off his toes like lizard scales. With a disapproving thumb, his mother wiped a smudge off his freckled face and said, “Darlin’, where’d you get off to today?”
“Cindy Perkins got stuck in the mud by the swimming hole,” he said plainly, swinging his feet as his legs hung from the kitchen chair. “No one else wanted to help her.”
“That’s where your shoes went?”
“Uh-huh. I tried to get ’em out, but they got sucked in pretty deep.” He looked at his hands, at his stubby fingers, the nail beds caked with dirt.
His mother sighed. “Well, you’ll have to wear your church shoes till your daddy gets paid.” Then she wiped her hands on a dish towel and knelt down to come level with his face. Her eyes were warm and brown, just like Marlin’s. “Did you get her out?”
He nodded emphatically. “Took me a whole hour — I tried a branch, and an old fence post Billy found by the pasture, and a rope from the tire swing that broke, but she was in there good.” He hesitated, then added, “Guess I shoulda taken my shoes off before I went in.”
“Guess so.”
“Are you mad at me?”
Marlin’s mother cocked her head, a little smile crossing her face. “Of course not, darlin’. How can I be mad, knowing that my baby saved the day?”
Copyright © 2025 by Ollie Swasey
