Worms

*TW: Claustrophobia*

The first thing I taste is a worm.

Its thin, slick body writhes between my teeth. When I jerk my head away, the earth above me grinds against my cheek hard enough to tear skin. I choke. The small body wriggles, searching for a way out as it catches at the back of my throat, and I gag so violently that my forehead knocks against the ceiling. Something crumbles into my hair. I spit, and it burrows its way deeper into the dirt below me. Brown saliva strings between my lips, leaving behind remnants of the bitter, metallic taste.

I try to lift my head.

It immediately hits a ceiling. 

For several seconds, I do nothing but lie there and feel the world against me. Dirt presses along my stomach and spine. My knees are drawn up beneath me, though I have no memory of pulling them there. My left arm is bent awkwardly in front of my face, my right trapped beneath my ribs. When I try to spread my fingers, my knuckles scrape the walls. There is barely enough room to move my head from side to side. 

The smell comes next. It is thick enough to taste, a sour, waterlogged stench that coats the back of my throat. Wet clay. Rotting leaves. 

I am underground.

The thought arrives without ceremony, as though someone has just informed me of the weather. I am underground, and I cannot move. I begin to laugh. It is an involuntary, breathless sound, the kind that escapes when a situation is so terrible the mind mistakes it for a joke. I stop almost immediately. Laughing takes air. 

I have to breathe out to move forward. That is the first thing I learn. There's not enough room for me to force myself through the passage otherwise. I can draw a shallow breath, hold it, and inch my chest ahead. The packed soil presses into my sternum, my hips, the knobs of my spine. I feel every uneven stone through my clothes. I pull my left arm free and drag it forward. Soil crumbles beneath my palm, damp and cold, with the gritty texture of something ground between stones. I push. My legs follow behind me. It becomes a pattern: breathe in, move my chest forward, pull my arms and legs after me, then breathe out.

Behind me, something scrapes.

The sound is faint, almost delicate: a soft drag against the wall, followed by a pause. Then another drag. It is coming from the direction I have just crawled, and it sounds uncomfortably like someone shifting their weight on their elbows.

I hold my breath. The tunnel holds its breath with me.

Nothing happens.

My mind offers explanations in quick, frantic succession. Dirt settling. A small animal. Water moving through the soil. I have read enough about cave-ins to know that trapped people sometimes hear things that aren't there. I have read about miners who hallucinated voices, of the horrible reality of asphyxiation. 

I have read those accounts sitting upright in a warm room, with a window looking down on me, a cup of coffee beside me, and a phone in my hand. 

The scraping comes again.

Closer.

I try to look over my shoulder. My cheek grinds against the wall; my nail folds backwards painfully. I can see perhaps a foot of tunnel behind my hip, a narrow strip of darkness terminating in more darkness. 

A thin trickle of dirt runs over my ankle. I feel the individual grains slide beneath the edge of my sock, and then something brushes the sole of my foot. Not a root. Not a falling clump of soil. Something soft, followed by a pressure that withdraws almost as soon as I notice it.

I jerk my leg forward. My heel strikes the wall.

I wrench my body from side to side, gaining inches at a time. My breathing becomes erratic in the small space, and my vision tunnels as my thoughts begin to repeat themselves:

My name is Aphra Beck. I am twenty-seven years old. I have a small scar on my right knee, a mother who still calls me every Sunday, and a landlord who has been begging me to fix the leak above my kitchen window for three months. I have a half-finished cup of tea somewhere in my apartment. There are groceries in my refrigerator that will go bad if I don't get home.

I repeat these things because they belong to a world which is bigger than this. 

A world which I belong to. Not this universe of dirt and worms.

The tunnel catches at my clothes as I claw and cry. I am wearing a shirt, jeans, socks. I don't know where my shoes are. I thrash my body once more and the force drives my forehead into the ceiling.

For one bright, awful second, I see white.

Then I am back in the dark, gasping around a mouthful of grit.

I stop to spit. The sound behind me stops, too.

I press my face into the crook of my arm and try to make myself smaller, though there is nowhere for me to go. 

I am suddenly, absurdly conscious of my own heartbeat. It knocks against the ground beneath me, and I imagine the vibrations traveling through the soil, carrying the precise location of my body to whatever is following. I want to stop my heart. I want to climb out of myself and leave this warm, stupid thing behind.

"Aphra?"

My blood freezes. 

The voice comes from ahead of me. It sounds like a woman, low and familiar, softened by the earth between us. I know it. Something in it catches against a part of me I cannot reach. I can almost place it. I feel the answer hovering at the edge of my mind, and the harder I try to grasp it, the farther away it slips.

"Aphra, honey?"

My breath hitches on a sob.

I am frightened. I am so frightened that I would follow almost anything that sounded kind.

"W-who?" I try to say, but the words become jumbled in my mouth.

A pause.

"Come on," the voice says. "Just a little farther."

I almost sob with relief.

There’s someone else. Thank god, there's someone else. Someone who can dig, who can call for help, who can tell me how I got here. Someone who can tell me that this is happening, that I have not gone mad in the dark.

"Where are you?" I gasp out. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes, honey."

"Can you get out?"

Another pause. A small, muffled sound, as though the speaker has shifted against the wall.

"Not yet."

I begin to crawl toward the voice. 

Behind me, I suddenly feel a warm breath against the back of my neck.

I scream. The sound tears out of me before I can stop it, and I thrust myself forward so violently that my forehead strikes the ceiling. White light bursts behind my eyes. My hands scrabble at the floor. I feel something catch the back of my shirt, a gentle tug, as though someone has taken hold of the fabric between two fingers.

I twist as much as the tunnel allows.

My shirt is pulled taut against my back.

I drag myself forward so quickly that I barely feel the skin tearing from my knees. The fabric stretches, then releases. I hear the soft, patient drag again, and this time it is accompanied by a sound like fingernails being drawn along the walls.

"Aphra?" the voice calls from ahead.

I don't answer.

"You have to keep moving."

"Where are you?" I shout. My voice cracks. "Where are you? I can't see you!"

"You're nearly there."

"Nearly where?"

Something shifts behind me. I feel the movement before I hear it: a pressure against the soles of my feet, a soft compression of the earth, as though another body has settled into the passage and is preparing to move.

Cold fingers snare my ankle. 

I kick, striking something soft. A second hand closes around my heel, not hard enough to break anything, not even hard enough to hurt. It is the gentleness that undoes me. There is no struggle, no sudden violence. The hand simply rests there, with the quiet certainty of someone who has found what they came for.

I wrench my leg forward. The fingers slide away.

I don't look back. I can't. Every part of me wants to turn, to see the face attached to that hand, to put eyes and a mouth to the thing that is following me. But the tunnel is too narrow to turn my head far enough, and the thought of seeing something inches from my face makes my heart pound.

I crawl faster.

My shirt rides up, and the ground drags at the bare skin of my stomach. My fingernails catch on stones; one bends backward, and pain flashes hot through my hand. I bite down on a scream. 

I cannot afford the breath. I cannot afford to stop. Not with it behind me.

I imagine its face inches from my heels. I imagine its mouth opening and closing in the dark. I imagine it stretching an arm toward me, feeling along the tunnel until its fingertips find the back of my leg.

I crawl until my hands are shaking so badly that I can no longer tell whether I am moving them or the ground is moving beneath them.

The tunnel opens, without warning, into a space large enough for me to lift my head. I drag myself into it and collapse on my side. The sudden room around me is a shallow pocket of earth, perhaps six feet across, with a low ceiling and walls lined with tangled roots. I can draw my knees to my chest. I can raise one hand without scraping my knuckles. I can breathe.

The air is foul. It has the stale, sealed smell of a cellar that has flooded and never dried, with a sweetness underneath that makes my stomach turn. I can taste mold on my tongue. I laugh again, though this time the sound is closer to crying. My whole body shakes with the relief of having somewhere to put itself.

Then I notice the shoes.

They are sitting side by side against the far wall, a pair of small brown shoes, the kind a woman might wear to work. The leather is dark with moisture, but the soles are clean. They have been placed neatly, toes facing the tunnel, as if their owner has stepped out of them and intends to return.

Beside them, half pressed into the mud, is a gold wedding ring.

I stare at it for a long time. I don't know why. Perhaps because the ring is so ordinary. It is not a skull or a bloody hand or some other theatrical evidence of death. It is a thing that could have belonged to anyone. 

I reach toward it, then pull my hand back.

There are scratches on the wall above the shoes. Deep, parallel marks, gouged into the packed soil. I look around the chamber. The ceiling is too low for anyone to stand. Even kneeling would be difficult. The scratches continue across the wall, disappear behind a root, and begin again on the opposite side.

I imagine someone trying to climb out.

I imagine them using their fingernails until they split, digging into the walls while the earth falls back into the holes they have made. I imagine them calling for someone who is not coming.

My stomach contracts. I turn away and press my forehead against the cool ground.

Something shifts in the tunnel. The sound is no longer a scrape of fingernails. It is the heavy, slow movement of a body turning around in a space that does not allow it. There is a muffled thud, then another. I hear the fabric of a shirt dragging over dirt. I hear breathing, shallow and uneven.

The thing is coming closer.

I look for another way out. I dig at the wall. I tear at the roots. I press my ear against the earth and listen for the sound of traffic, of water, of anything that belongs to the world above. There is nothing. The soil absorbs every noise. The chamber might be at the bottom of the ocean for all I know. My hands are bleeding. My nails are packed with dirt. 

I have never wanted anything as much as I want to be somewhere else.

The thought is so complete that I almost miss the movement at the entrance.

A hand appears around the edge of the tunnel.

It is pale, with dirt packed beneath the fingernails. The fingers curl against the wall, searching for a grip. A shoulder follows, then the curve of a head. The person entering the chamber is moving backward, feet first, dragging themselves with careful, practiced movements.

I scramble away from them. There is nowhere to go. My back strikes the wall, and I press myself against it, trying to become part of the dirt.

Its hair is plastered to its forehead. Blood darkens the skin beneath its fingernails.

Then the creature lifts its head.

It's me.

Not a rotting corpse with hollow eyes and a mouth full of worms. Not the monstrous, distorted thing I have been imagining in the dark. It is simply me, wearing the same jeans and the same shirt, with the same short blonde hair falling across the forehead.

It reaches for me. Its fingers are worn bloody to the bone.

I shake my head.

"No. No, no, no."

I crawl sideways, trying to find space that isn't there. I strike the wall with my shoulder and feel the dirt give slightly beneath the impact. I claw at it, desperate for a way through, but the earth is packed solid. I cannot move past it. I cannot get back into the tunnel. I cannot even stand.

It crawls toward me.

I try to scream, but my throat has closed. I shove at its shoulder, striking hard enough that pain shoots through my wrist. It barely moves. The creature looks at me as I struggle, and for one horrible instant I see that it is crying. 

"I'm not ready," I plead. 

I make a sound I have never heard from myself before. It is not a word or a scream, but something torn from the place where fear becomes pain. I lunge for the tunnel, trying to crawl past her, but the passage has narrowed to a black seam in the wall. The earth presses against my shoulders. I reach into the opening and feel the soil moving beneath my fingers, folding inward like a closing hand.

Behind me, the other Aphra begins to back away.

Slowly, the creature uncurls its bloodied fingers. For a moment, it looks almost relieved.

Then it turns and crawls into the dark. The earth folds over her, leaving no trace that it was ever there.

I throw myself at where it left. I dig with both hands, tearing at the soil until my fingers bend backward and my nails split. The earth gives way in clumps, then in grains, then not at all. It is packed too tightly. It does not matter how hard I push. It does not matter that I scream until my voice breaks. The tunnel is gone.

The ceiling begins to descend, dirt raining down on my haven, the walls collapsing in on themselves.

I drop to my knees. I try to lie down, but there is not enough room to stretch my legs. The earth is closing around me with the slow, patient pressure of something that has all the time in the world.

The ground presses against my chest.

I cannot draw a full breath.

The earth presses harder. My ribs ache. I turn my face toward the ceiling, but there is no room to lift my head. Dirt trickles into my ear. I feel it against my eyelids, my lips, the soft hollow beneath my chin.

The soil fills my mouth.

The darkness closes, and I am left with the sound of my own breathing, growing shallower, smaller. I can no longer tell whether I am drawing air into my lungs or the earth is drawing me into itself.

I feel something move against my cheek.

A thin, pale body, wriggling softly across my flesh.

I cannot turn my head to see it. I cannot lift my hand to brush it away. I can only lie there, with my mouth full of dirt, while it passes over my skin and disappears into the dark.

Down here, the earth is full of us.

We press against one another in the dark, blind and writhing, each of us certain there must be a way out. Somewhere ahead, a voice calls a name. Somewhere behind, another body begins to crawl.

Another woman opens her mouth to scream, and a worm slips between her teeth.