Continuing his trek with a certain amount of trepidation and cracking of bones underfoot, Robert quickly noticed shelves carved into the walls on either side. He moved to his left to examine one niche finding what looked to be human bones resting upon stone, but the artifacts were so old that the cave itself grew over them, adding a layer of stone across many of the bones.
“Is this some kind of tomb?” He wondered aloud, then moved across the small room to the other alcove. Here, Robert stopped in wonderment. Buried under the living rock of the cave was a sword. Despite the rust, he could clearly see a three-foot blade with an iron pommel and deteriorated leather grip.
This was a cave in a lake in the middle of a country undiscovered when something this old was last used. Robert had seen drawings of swords like this in stories centered on medieval Europe, tales of King Arthur and his knights. Yet once again rock had grown over the artifact, centuries of deposited minerals that told of how long the sword had lain on the shelf.
“This isn’t right,” Robert oriented on the passage and took a few more steps away from Corporal Anders and his men.
The cavern moved close again; the walls forming an arched door with stairs leading down into the darkness.
Peering down, Robert examined the steps carved into the stone. These had been here a long time, so long that the tread of feet upon the steps had worn indentations. This had been a path well used, and still perhaps.
The stairs led down the confines of a tunnel clearly carved into the rock. Hammer marks were visible in the moving light of the torch. As he descended, the smell increased and Robert knew he had not reached the worst of what was in store for his review.
Movement at the top of the stairs told Robert that Corporal Anders and several men were also journeying to the next discovery.
Once more, the tunnel opened into a large space, too large for Robert to guess at the size of the room. The sound of water cascading somewhere in the distance gave noise to mask the silence. Yet as Robert stepped further into the mysterious chamber, he could hear something below the sound of the water, a deep rumbling rasp of breath so long in drawing as to be inhuman. It was a sound so low that he doubted he even heard of it all.
A path through the bones led forward, and in the dim light of the torches, Robert could see a rectangular pedestal ahead.
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He knew he was looking at an altar, something old that cut from the living rock. As Robert and the men move closer, more detail grew on the altar until finally it stood in undisguised glory as a revolting homage to something none of them could understand.
Carved skulls in the stone, a mass of them that seem to support the capstone of the altar. This one piece of stone was of red granite, the red seeming to be blood forever fresh, covering the skulls. Lying atop the altar were more bones and tattered rags.
Littering the floor close by the altar were the remnants of supplies used by men contemporary to Robert. All the men of moved up next to Robert by now, one of them kneeled and picked up what looked like a piece of wood from the floor and studied it, then handed it to Corporal Anders. The corporal glanced at the wood, then handed it to Robert.
It was a flintlock pistol with the grip broken off as if in a violent fight.
“Those men in the story.” Robert studied the pistol. “The kinds of weapons they would have brought into this cave would have been just like this gun. That I understand, what I do not understand is, an old sword. What I do not understand are the victims that have been here so long they’re covered by stone.”
He looked at the men and shook his head, biting his lip as his beard bristled. “And I don’t understand why this altar looks like unaffected by the ages.”
The men fanned out with their torches, searching the floor of the cavern for more traces of victims beyond the animal bones that littered the floor, as Robert touched the altar and ran his hand across the cool stone.
None of this was right, none of this made any sense, but this was something solid.
“Major,” one man called softly; perhaps spooked by the cave.
Robert moved to the man, avoiding the bones on the floor while briefly wondering who had pushed a path through them to the altar. He paused, gazing at the sharp edge of the cliff upon which they stood.
They were standing upon a landing hung high up a cliff. The sheer size of the cavern that his mind could imagine almost overwhelmed Robert. To him, they could have been standing at the entryway to the Shenandoah Valley, or there could be a wall twenty feet away and they could never see it in the dark. But he had a sense of vast emptiness, a sense that there was a huge cavern underneath Lake Superior, a void the water wanted to fill.
One man picked up a rock, preparing to heave it into the darkness.
“Don’t,” Corporal Anders stared into the darkness.
The man set in rock back down quietly. He stayed kneeling for a moment, then looked at Robert. “Can you hear that?”
“I hear it,” came from one of the other men.
Robert hushed the men and cocked his head, listening to the echoing chamber. Water still flowed somewhere unseen in the cavern and the low rumble of air moving, a sibilant breathing, hung just at the edge of perception.
Robert ordered softly. “Let’s leave. This is not a place for men.”
Quickly, the men made their way back to the caves proper and to what seemed normal on such a strange island.
Unseen by the men as they departed the ritual area were two silver eyes opening and blinking, then closing again as if the owner fell asleep.