WHERE IN THE WORLD IS IT DARK CONSTANTLY?
During my high school years, I was an Explorer Scout. My troopmates were spelunkers.
On weekends the guys drove from Arlington, Virginia into the hills of West Virginia to look for hollows where the presence of solitary trees sometimes signaled the openings to caves. We off-roaded from whatever lonely lane we were on at the time to navigate through wild terrain where we parked our vehicles and equipment as close to the cave entrances as possible.
We used gray powder to light our headlamps. A water drip made the powder give off gas that burned bright, clean, and complete—no noxious residue.
After an hour or so the powder turned into lumpy, useless ash. To keep lamps burning while remaining oriented, every caver dumped their used-up powder on cave floors exactly where they stood before measuring a new charge.
We always looked for virgin caves that had never been explored. Little gray clumps of depleted calcium carbide cast onto floors created dead giveaways that someone had explored the cave before us.
A clean cave meant we were first; we were going to see things below that no humans had ever seen.
The risk of course was getting disoriented in a labyrinth that only we knew existed. In those days, cell phones were not invented. Calling 911 was not a thing. Should we get turned around—if we exhausted the calcium carbide supply—no outsider would learn we were lost, maybe for days.
Without the aid of an unseemly mix of water and gray powder to produce acetylene light, we risked being entombed alongside stalactites and stalagmites deep inside corridors of ruthless darkness that robbed the senses of time and place. No one would be alerting anyone at all about our predicament.
Families would have no idea where to start a rescue. West Virginia was a big place.
Think about it.
Until a search party discovers their cars, isn’t it reasonable to assume that the lost will quickly abandon hope that anyone will find the entrance to the labyrinth that ensnared them? If searchers got lucky and stumbled onto the hole, without lamps and experience how would they navigate a maze that might zig-zag for miles beneath the earth?
Only luck provides any chance at all that the lost will one day reunite with families and loved ones. The risk of dying—forever un-located within a chartless tangle of passages and dead-ends—is real.
The room was gargantuan.
Perhaps intimidated by its immensity, the scoutmaster decided it might be getting close to the time when the troop should pull back. The clock was ticking, after all.
We had explored a long time; the trek back to the entrance promised challenges. It is easier for a cavern to seduce a caver into its depths than for a caver to retrace their steps to make a happy extraction. For one thing, caves look different on the way out than they look on the way in. It is not unusual to become directionally untethered.
When the scoutmaster groped to locate the path we used to enter the orifice, he couldn’t find it. It turned out that dozens of unnoticed openings beckoned in the expanse of walls all around.
In the glare of dancing headlamps, the array of passages became tangled knots that no one could untie. The openings looked the same but each passage searched became disturbingly unfamiliar and unnavigable.
I began to panic.
The scoutmaster ordered everyone to return to the center of the chamber; to extinguish our headlamps to conserve carbide. He ordered everyone to calm down. He would pick a route at random to find the way out himself.
A lengthy search for the entrance might become necessary—I won’t be gone long, don’t worry, the scoutmaster said. …lots of unknowns…makes it hard to know exactly how long….
He clutched the troop’s bag of calcium carbide. He always carried it. It was his responsibility to keep the powder dry and safe; to prevent someone less careful, less experienced, from losing it.
With any luck at all he would return to rescue everyone before nightfall, he promised. The carbide in our lamps would last until he returned. Conserve it, he warned. Emergencies only!
The scoutmaster hugged me and a few others. He hurried some goodbyes and vanished—into the abyss.
He needn’t have worried. I was nearly out of carbide; we all were. The gray powder would become gold to be hoarded.
Darkness in a cave hundreds of feet below ground is nothing like what people experience above. My mother had read somewhere that spelunkers wear watches with radium dials that glow in the dark. I was wearing one she bought me as a gift for my trip.
“You will always know what time it is no matter how dark it gets in those cold caves,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me and rubbed my face with her cheek.
After the scoutmaster left and we extinguished all our lamps, I discovered that my timepiece didn’t work like it should. No one’s did. Not one scout could make out even the faintest trace of a glow on their dials.
An older guy said that caves suck light out of darkness like drains suck water out of bathtubs. He didn’t explain. We waved our hands before our faces but couldn’t see them.
Like an ocean wave, panic struck again; it almost knocked me off my feet.
I decided that the best way to escape fear was to sleep. I dropped to my hands and knees and slithered through the dark until I found folds in a wall. I curled my body like a snake against the hard surface.
The cave’s silence roared in my ears like a pounding train that quieted only when I started shaking like a branch in a storm and dropped somehow into a darker place.
My bones filled with ice; I slipped deeper. I wrapped myself in my arms as the floor of the cave pushed its full weight into me and in time crushed my soul.
My season stranded in hell lasted a year, it seems. The search crew didn’t find the scoutmaster. A few others were missing. Everyone must have died, they said, except me.
I was the last.
No one survived.
“A cave rat ate a few, bones and all,” one guy said.
Rescuers said terrible things. They sent me home to be with mother for what turned out to be a few days. I don’t remember any of it.
I don’t mind solitary confinement. I’ve been caged for 48 years.
I’m used to it. Somehow it doesn’t seem that long. Besides, food tastes better here than the rotten mess I ate in the cave to stay alive. It’s a taste and smell I don’t forget.
Someone put a bulb in the cell that can’t be switched off. It’s bright. The light drives me insane. It really does.
It’s protected by a metal cage. I feel its heat but can’t touch it because the sadistic bastards chained me to the floor—for screaming constantly, they said.
I so want to be with mother to tell her how enraged I am about the watch she gave that didn’t work. When I inform the staff, they refuse to look at me. For a year I didn’t know what time it was. I told them. I told them all. They know about it but don’t care. They say I’m crazy because of her.
Mother doesn’t visit. She never did. The staff said she died. They convinced me to believe unspeakable things.
“He did something wicked,” prosecutors said. “He used a bone-saw, for the love of God.”
Nothing they say is true. I know that now.
Not one word!
Who does bad things they don’t remember?
NO ONE!!!
Who believes it?
They make you hate. I see it on their faces.
I will snap these chains someday, I know it.
I have a plan.
A wonderful plan.
Guards help.
It happens on Halloween night.
They break the chains.
Put your light on.
Listen carefully….
Boots are shuffling on lawns like dead leaves falling on the wind…
studying doors…
searching for final solutions.
Smash the bulb!
You’ll see.
It hurts in the dark and the cold. People do things—terrible things—to make it stop.
They shake like branches in a storm. They fill bones with ice and push down to the darkest places.
They control what’s true.
They understand everything.
Soon, so will you.
Truth becomes the trap…
Spells enchant…
fragile hopes collapse…
They watch you rot in that cave where everyone dies but one…
…and laugh.
HaHahahaha…!
Slither to the walls like snakes and find the hard folds.
Pray for sleep that cannot come.
Control truth.
You’re one of us, now.
The truth couldn’t be more clear.
Hell is forever.
Billy Lee
NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: The essay, Halloween Revision, is a fictional work based on events experienced by Billy Lee—an Explorer Scout in a troop of spelunkers who got lost in a cave in West Virginia during the 1960s. The rescue is based on other events about which Billy Lee may or may not have direct knowledge. Billy Lee published a version of this story to answer the Quora question: Where in the world is it dark constantly?
