Bats, man.

“C’mon,” my husband said. My husband. The word felt foreign, like I’d borrowed it from my parents’ generation. We’d been married for three whole days, and here we were walking into the bowels of a cave as Orpheus ventured to save Eurydice. If I died in this cave, Mike had better jump in to save me.

I stood at the entrance to the cave watching the nocturnal hellions swoop in and out of the mouth. The stalactites resembled fangs; I knew the bats were raring to sink theirs into my soft flesh. My feet stood rooted to ground, my only movement was my trembling limbs.

“It’s just a few bats. Nothing to worry about.” Mike put a supportive arm around my shoulder, which he promptly removed to smack at a mosquito. The cave, the bats, the mosquitoes—I was surrounded by blood suckers.

Was it too early in the marriage to tell Mike to shut the fuck up? In all seriousness, I adored him, but at this current moment in time, I just didn’t like him very much. And in all fairness, the excursion to snorkel in the cenote had been my idea. It hadn’t even dawned on me that a cenote was a cave and caves equaled bats.

Bats, man. Bats had always been my number one fear ever since my freshman year in college when a bat had wormed its way through the drafty window frame into our dorm room, and both me and Janelle, my roommate, had to endure a very painful series of rabies shots. Thus began my irrational fear that had me trembling in my flippers and mask standing at the edge of a Mexican cave becoming a tasty snack for dozens of mosquitoes rather than descending into the waters of the underground river. Like the River Styx, I thought. Where dead people go.

I watched as all the other flippered-and-masked-up couples who were also on their honeymoons ventured without fear into the cave. I could see red and blue and green butts bobbing along the surface of the water.

Mike grabbed my hand, ever the supportive and loving partner. He tugged gently, but my flippers didn’t budge. They were cemented to the platform of rock at the cave’s mouth.

“You can do this,” he said. “Once you’re in the water, you won’t even know they are there.”

“I- I can’t,” I stammered.

“Yes, you can, Jess. And we paid $250 a person to do this. You’ve gotta give it a shot.” Mike was always so pragmatic when it came to money, and it was true. I was the one who pushed hard for this excursion.

I stared into the cenote and crouched down as bats swooped over our heads through the ingress of the cave. The ceiling was alive with the squirming movement of bats hanging from the ceiling. I could hear their little chirps and squeaks as they spoke to each other. They were probably saying, Bite her. The brunette in the blue bikini. She tastes like pina coladas.

Mike smacked his arm combatting the mosquitoes’ assault. “Look, Jess, you can stand here and have bats swoop over your head while you’re getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, or you can take three more steps and be in the water where the bats and the mosquitoes can’t get to you.”

His logic did make sense. Mike was always very sensible. I took a deep breath. “Ok,” I said. “I can do this.”

“You’ve got this,” Mike coaxed. “I’ll hold your hand. We can do this together.”

“Let’s do this fast, okay?”

“We can go as fast as you want.”

I lowered my mask over my face, squashed it against my skin with a satisfying shlorp, and put the snorkel in my mouth.

“One, two, three—go!” Mike said. Holding my hand, we both waddled as quickly as our fins allowed us over the rocky, uneven terrain until we plunged into the chilly depths of the underwater cave. The water, which had never seen the light of day, was bracing.

I did it! I was in! I clung to Mike’s hand until he pried it free to adjust his own snorkel gear. I quickly grabbed it back after he had secured his mask and snorkel. I inhaled and exhaled rapidly. Between the cold water and hyperventilating, I felt like I was dying. Maybe this really was the waterway to hell.

Mike made gentle, slow in-and-out movements with his hands to slow my breathing. Eventually, it calmed, and we set out with gentle kicks. I couldn’t bring myself to leave my back vulnerable to the bloodthirsty vampires hanging above me, so I kept half my mask below the waterline and half above where I could see the winged rodents. I could even hear the whisper of their wings as a few left their lofty perch and skimmed over the water.

Mike brought his head up and spit out his snorkel. “Jess, you’re never going to see anything unless you put your whole face in the water. Trust me. You’re going to want to see this. You love snorkeling.”

He was right. I’d been snorkeling every year of my life since I was four. I lived for the water like some mermaid out of myth or fairytale. Mike had been the one who’d originally been nervous about snorkeling. The first year we dated, he and I took a trip down to Key West. It was the first time he’d ever told me he loved me. Because of this new love, he’d agreed to go snorkeling. It wasn’t until we were on a boat in the middle of the ocean about to jump in that he’d revealed how terrified he was. And despite his terror, his love for me won out—or maybe he was just terrified about looking like a chicken in front of his new girlfriend—and he took the plunge. Since then, we’d had many plunges together. He’d even taken me back to Key West to propose on a sunset snorkeling trip. If he could do that for me, I could do this for him.

“You’re right. You’re right.” I put the snorkel back in my mouth, released the death grip on his hand, and put my whole face in the water. He was right. The view was spectacular. The bottom of the cenote had to be more than a hundred feet below, and incredible rock formations decorated the bottom. The water was incredibly clear. Hundreds of little fish ate microscopic algae off the cavern formations. They didn’t have eyes. Apparently, fish who lived in caves had no need for eyes.

Hundreds of coins littered the bottom of the cave. Perhaps it was payment for Charon that he’d accidentally dropped escorting bodies to the underworld. Maybe the bats had bitten them, bringing companions for Hades and Persephone.

After a few minutes, my breathing relaxed, and I became more at ease, almost forgetting my winged foes. Almost.

I heard girlish shrieking from several feet away and immediately brought my head above the surface. It caused my mask to fog, so I ripped it off to see what the commotion was. It most certainly had to be from a pair of fangs sinking into the flesh of someone’s back. It wasn’t.

“Turtles!” screeched a woman in a tiny string bikini. “There’s turtles over here!”

I spit in my mask and swished it around to try and clear the fog and then placed it back over my head. I love turtles. I had to get a better look. I left Mike and took off in the direction of the shrieks where all the people on our excursion were now gathering.

A small cluster of four turtles were swimming a few feet below the surface completely unbothered by their human interlopers. I could see them so much more clearly in the crystal underground waters instead of the brackish waters above.

I felt a tug on my hand. Mike signaled to come above the surface. I lifted my head bringing my feet underneath me to tread water as I removed my mask.

“Aren’t you glad you finally came in?” he asked. I grinned and nodded.

“This is pretty great.”

“Look over there.” He pointed a few hundred feet into the cavern. The ceiling of the cave had collapsed leaving a sunny skylight to the world above. Sunlight streamed through the hole, and sunbeams refracted through the water. A tangle of green vines plunged downward from the opening. “Let’s swim over and see what’s around it.”

We held hands as we swam toward the opening until we were directly under the hole. I could see rock piles on the floor where the ceiling had collapsed. We looked up into the sunlight. The surrounding rock was textured and weathered, with moss and greenery clinging to the edges. Lush vegetation crowned the opening above, framing the opening with vibrant green. The light illuminated the water into a vivid turquoise. It was breathtaking. I was so glad I hadn’t chickened out.

There was a staircase carved in the rock leading up to the opening in the cenote. We followed some of our fellow travelers up the stairs. One by one, they jumped through the opening to the water below.

“You wanna?” Mike asked.

I nodded. “Of course.”

He grabbed my hand. “On the count of three. One, two, three!”

We both leapt together through the opening plunging into the cool depths of the water. The cold and sudden shock nearly took my breath away. We surfaced, both grinning like idiots.

“That was awesome!” I said sputtering water out of my mouth.

After several more minutes of snorkeling, during which I’d completely forgotten about the bats, we heard the call of our excursion guides to come back and get on the tour bus. We reluctantly swam back to the mouth of the cave, removed our gear, and emerged from the underworld.

As we walked to the bus, a young honeymooner tapped Mike on his shoulder. “What happened to your back, dude?”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Your back is bleeding.”

“Turn around, honey,” I told him. He spun. There on his back were two thin trickles of blood streaming from two tiny puncture marks. Orpheus had looked back; Mike, apparently, had been bitten.