The darkness of the cave loomed in front of us. There wasn’t much to set up, just a field telephone and a radio to stay in contact with the base station by the house, but it was the only lifeline for the group of three preparing to enter the cave.

  “Any idea what we’re up against?” John (or is it Gabe?) asked. He was gazing into the darkness in front of them, carrying a short-barreled AR-15.

  “Nope,” was the terse reply from our boss on this trip.

  “Not to seem too nervous, but can’t you like, check it out with a crystal ball or something?”

  She reached into a pocket in her gear, pulling out a cloudy crystal ball. It glittered, the scattered moonlight making it glow in the palm of her hand. She rolled it around idly before putting it away.

  “I could, and I probably could get away with it. But you remember the initial briefing, right? In case it’s something that would notice it’s better not to give up the element of surprise. Whatever it is might notice it’s being watched.”

  “Sorry, what?” I really shouldn’t ask questions, but I just had to know. There was clearly a lot they weren’t telling me, but this level of talking around it all was starting to get on my nerves.

  “Don’t worry, if it becomes relevant, I’ll let you know. But if not, you’re better off not knowing.” She pressed a button on the side of her gun, and the magazine slid out with a “chunk” sort of noise. The rounds glimmered as she held them up to the light, then with another scrape of pstic against metal she smmed the mag back home.

  “Liah, lead the way. You have the best night vision after all.”

  “You know night-vision doesn’t do anything in caves. You need some level of light for that to work.” Yet she walked towards the cave, completely unarmed. I blinked, and she disappeared. In her pce a bck shadow darted into the abyss, followed by Mrs. Everly and John (Gabe?) trailing wire from a spool.

  Me and Gabe’s tall friend were left in the chirping, noisy silence of the woods. Seemingly unable to take the silence, he started chucking rocks at a stone sticking out of the spring. The chink of rocks hitting home was occasionally interspersed by the “kerpsh” of his misses. This went on for a while, until he spoke.

  “They have IR lights, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “For their nvg’s. They won’t work in a cave on their own, but with their own light source they should work just fine.” Interesting?

  “I don’t really know about any of this kind of thing. I never thought that’d be an issue.” The throwing rocks thing seemed kind of fun. We were on a mountain so there were rocks everywhere so, when in Rome. The first of my handful of pebbles went wide, skittering off into the darkness. It was rather noisy.

  “They seem rather concerned about there being… something… in there. Should be really be making so much noise?” I looked over at him, his face silhouetted by the moonlight.

  “Nah, it’s fine. You hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Everything. Nothing. Nature? That’s probably the best way to describe it.”

  “It sounds like woods.”

  “Exactly. Things are fine, at least out here. You don’t particurly hear anything, but it’s not the same as hearing nothing. It’s practically common knowledge at this point. When things go quiet, that’s when you need to be concerned.” He tossed another rock, and another cttering noise echoed through the night.

  None of it dissuaded the breath of the woods from being heard. I had heard people talk about that phenomenon before, and I wasn’t exactly a stranger to the outdoors, but as they say context is everything. Coming from a creepypasta it just sounds quaint, but from someone dressed like a paramilitary member carrying a huge-ass rifle with a massive scope… As they say, context is everything.

  God, the silence is so awkward. Nothing but the slight sound of breezes through the new growth, the chirping of insects, and the cck of rock against rock. The spring babbling down into the valley should be soothing, but knowing there’s something sinister at its origin has a tendency to grate at a listener.

  “So… his real name is Gabe?”

  “I was wondering how long it’d take Amy to slip up, but I’m rather surprised she managed to keep it up for so long.

  “Then why even bother?”

  “She’s new to this position, and to being in-charge. Considering when we first met, I really couldn’t have imagined she’d one day end up being higher up on the pay-scale than me. She hasn’t even graduated college yet. And she sure as hell doesn’t have any decent experience working undercover. But she feels the need to try.”

  “When you first met? Based on my experience just with her trying to act professionally, I can hardly imagine what she must have been like in a less structured position.” Kerplunk. This was weirdly fun.

  “Her agency lent her to the ATF to go undercover with what they thought might be a radical militia. Part of her boss trading favors. If anything, she was far better at being subtle with that role, mostly because we were already in the same friend group and she had no intention of actually doing her job. Meanwhile we- Gabe and I- were there to investigate her.” That was odd.

  “I just have to know what she was being investigated for.”

  “Maleficium, mostly.” What. What is that? It sounds like it’d get her name on the sex-offender list. “We barely even got to do our investigation before things went south. Way south.”

  “How south?”

  “If I told you that,” He said in his best imitation of Pierce Brosnan, “then I’d have to kill you.” He ughed. “But no, I doubt you’d believe it if I told you. Thank God the culprit is under close observation.”

  I was prepared to ask more, about this incident and this culprit, when I was startled by the ringing of the field telephone echoing in the night. Jeff reached it first, his rexed demeanor gone.

  “What is it?” He listened for a moment, then hung up. “We’re going in. They need help carrying stuff.”

  “Carrying what?”

  “I couldn’t say, unless she was being literal when she said, “we need help carrying this shit.”

  “I sure as hell hope not.”

  “She has some weird hobbies. I wouldn’t be surprised if she found the motherload of bat guano to make potassium nitrate out of.” He said with a smile.

  “She does seem to act a bit batshit at times.”

  “She wouldn’t actually ask for help on that. Whatever it is, it’s probably important. Oh, and she said using regur lights should be okay. Should we go?”

  He flipped up his night-vision goggles as he turned towards the cave. After fumbling on his vest for a bit, a light flipped on. Not wanting to be alone, I hurried along into the cave.

  The cave was cool, it was damp, it was dark, but it was not unwalkable. There was even a path next to the stream, clearly hand-cut. At intervals of maybe 100 feet or so there’d be a glow-stick marking the way, of which I counted six before the cavern opened up into a chamber where the three assigned to the “cave exploration team” stood working at a table covered in papers and… were those stone tablets?

  “Any of you ever see Evil Dead?” Mrs. Everly asked upon our arrival. I hadn’t, but what a peculiar thing to say.

  “Did you find a grimoire bound in human skin and written in blood?” Jeff asked. “That’d be right up your alley.”

  “If only. It’d be a hell of a lot easier to carry. Besides, most books bound in human skin were made by 19th century doctors. They were a bunch of weird fucks. You know, if we really wanted to after this the rgest collection of them is in Philly. And as far as books written in human blood are concerned, I’m pretty sure the only known book like that is Saddam’s Quran. So technically Mesopotamian? But noooooo, we can’t ever get anything easy. Thank the Goddess the shipping crates the guy used are still here.

  Most of the table, it turned out, was covered in cy tablets. Dozens of them, inscribed with wedge-shaped lines and baked to rock hardness. There were other documents, mostly in mani folders with “Top Secret” written on them, but that seemed trivial compared to the tablets.

  “I hate being right.” Mrs. Everly continued. “But this is absolutely our kind of case now. We’re going to need to set up a t-scif as well, for both the documents and the tablets. We’re going to need to make a few calls to get these tablets transted. And on our career day outing at that. Why couldn’t it just be normal ghosts?”

  “A boat?” I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure a skiff is a kind of small sailboat.

  “Nothing of the sort. And don’t just stand around. Help Gabe get the tablets packed. Wait, no, hold on.” She took out a small digital camera and snapped a few pictures. “All good now. Get packing. I need to look through these next. She grabbed the pile of folders and went off into a corner to read, far from the bustle the tables and crates.”

  The tablets seemed normal. At least, they seemed as normal as ancient Sumerian tablets found in a cave underneath a Northern Pennsylvania farmhouse can be. There was no dark aura or anything, no ominous noises emanating from them. Just rough, fired cy.

  “Good thing we have that cart, huh.” Gabe said. The crates were full of some sort of fur batting, and we carefully nestled each one in as Mrs. Everly continued to sit in the corner and read.

  “Is she going to help at all?” This wasn’t the hardest work, but this is nothing like what I had expected this afternoon when I first walked into that coffee shop.

  “She has her job to do, and since this is reted to documents she’s going to have even more of it when we get back to the base camp. Just be gd a bit of grunt work is all you have to deal with.”

  From the corner of my eye I could see her gesture over to the woman formerly known as Cat, “Liah.” When the woman got to her, she showed her a page from one of the folders. The woman hissed. Honest to goodness hissed, at whatever she saw.

  “That’s not a good sign.” Jeff muttered.

  “Demons maybe?” Gabe asked. “Liah absolutely hates them.”

  “As long as it’s not Deadites.”

  “Don’t say that. You remember the movie? Anything you can beat with a K-mart double-barrel has to be easier than demons.”

  “S-mart.”

  “What?”

  “In the movie it was ‘S-mart.’ ‘Shop smart, shop S-mart.’”

  “’This, is my boomstick!’” Jeff touched the rifle slung behind his back, chuckling while Gabe recited. I guess the movie references will continue until morale improves.

  “Oh, fuck.” Gabe said, the smile disappearing from his face.

  “What?”

  “You don’t suppose we’ll end up in another world again, do you?”

  “What?!” They had to be messing with me, but it seemed like Gabe hadn’t even remembered I was there listening when he spoke.

  Liah and Mrs. Everly looked over at my shout, then turned back to the files.

  “Well, in Army of Darkness he ends up going back to the middle ages…” Gabe expined, trying poorly to deflect from the rather troubling statement he had made.

  “What do you mean ‘another world?’ Is this some video-game bullshit?” Gabe jerked back, his brow furrowing at my outburst. But he wasn’t the one who answered.

  “I’m assuming you’ve heard,” the voice answered, “Of Rip Van Winkle, the man who pyed bowls with little folk and woke up to find seventeen years had passed? Or Urashima Taro, who went down in the ocean to the Dragon Pace for a few days to find a century had passed on the surface? There are plenty of other stories and fairy tales.”

  “Those are just fairy tales.” I said. Liah smiled, and I could swear I saw the glimmer of a fang in her mouth.

  “They are. Just fairy tales. But you came here hunting ghosts, didn’t you? Those are just spooky stories. If ghost stories are enough to drag you out of your comfort zone, then why not fairy tales?”

  I had no answer.