The expedition was going well to start with. Yourself and four others had entered the site through what was seemed to just be a well originally. A logging company surveyor had seen that it opened up at the bottom; they hired a small group of cavers to see roughly where the underground chambers went, who then discovered that it led into a system of tunnels. They had apparently explored a little, found that the structure was pretty stable, and exited. Then, you and your team were called, considering the possibility of discovering some significant archeological finds in the rainforest.
The entrance posed a couple of challenges, for one you couldn’t bring any bulky equipment or tents, meaning you wouldn’t be able to sleep inside the site -normally not a consideration for preservations sake, but the unique method of entry meant it would have been preferred. The rope ladder used to enter was awkward and swung too much for your taste, but it meant everyone could get down.
The first chamber was a huge dome, roughly the size of a small house, with rough black stone making up the majority of the walls. There were carvings all over, but a significant amount of them were concentrated around the east side. There, a section of the stone had been ground down and polished, possibly over generations, forming a near-perfect mirror. The mirror was set into the wall, flat instead of conforming to the dome. You took photos; your purpose for coming here was to take images and any easily transportable important artefacts back for study. The geologist on the team said that they were unfamiliar with the stone, but it may have been some form of granite.
The second chamber was similar, but instead of a dome, it was a full sphere, with a small bridge across it. The purpose for the room was unclear, but the fact that the lower half of the sphere had been polished roughly half as much as the mirror in the room before -more than enough to make climbing out from the bottom impossible- left some to think it was for sacrifices of some kind. Using your torch that flickered some times and very carefully leaning over the edge of the stone bridge, you saw what looked like sharp rubble collected at the bottom, though it didn’t seem to have broken off from somewhere in this room.
The next corridor was long, a cylinder with a flat base to walk on, connected to several small domes that seemed to each serve a different purpose as rooms. You avoided making any proper assumptions or assessments -you were just here for photos after all- but you recognised a few of them from similar locations elsewhere. An area for meal preparation complete with a small fireplace and a selection of stone tools, a room containing a great many carved tablets akin to a library, some kind of lecture area, with several carved sitting stones facing one wall. Several others though seemed different, unique. A room containing stone boxes filled with bones of different animals, a room with a huge mound of clay in the middle and some kinds of sculpting implements, a room with what seemed to be sealed wooden boxes. You didn’t have permission nor the tools to open something like that, but it was exciting nonetheless.
Your team found the end of the corridor led to a set of stairs that descended deeper, but the caving team hadn’t gone that low and hadn’t verified the structural integrity down there. You collectively agreed to stay away until that had been done, and divided yourselves amongst the rooms for detail photography and flexing your specific fields. Jane, your geologist, went back to the first room to try to identify the specific mineral most of this place was mined and made out of.
You were in the room with the wooden chests, each one seemed well preserved and finely crafted. There wasn’t much precipitation down here, and you were careful to avoid breathing too heavily in order to keep that true. The chests rattled slightly if moved, but you could identify a few of the materials inside based on that. Metal, glass, cloth. Some broken, others whole. Eventually you found one of the surely hundreds of boxes in this small warehouse of a room which seemed unsealed. At that moment, you were called away by Onito, your team’s eldest member. They said that they had heard a shout from the entrance and were worried Jane may need help. You both rushed down the corridor, but treaded carefully and slowly over the bridge in the second room.
Arriving in the first chamber, you found Jane next to the mirror, kneeling and staring at several of the symbols carved into the walls. Odd, considering her focus here was the mineral and not the carvings, but not wholly unusual. She had taken her watch off and placed it in her pocket, and her graphic tee was now covered by a jumper she had in her bag for whatever reason.
You both checked to see if she was alright, asking her why she shouted, and received minimal response. She had apparently tripped, though the floor here was smooth, and she didn’t break eye contact with the symbols, at which point you noted that she wasn’t lingering on each one as you would to decipher them, but instead glancing over them as if reading naturally.
She seemed alright though, and despite the oddness, you had more pressing and exciting things to return to, and walked back towards the corridor and the chamber you had been in. Though, you were still unnerved. Something had certainly been off with Jane, and the longer you had spent in the room with the mirror, the more off you felt.
A couple of hours passed, and it had been all quiet. You had managed to open the unsealed box to find what seemed like tribal clothing, but the symbols were all backwards. You were familiar with the groups living around this area, and each had markings that tended to adorn their clothes for various purposes, but again on these they were backwards. Perhaps the symbology had changed over time, but you were still confused.
You continued with this chamber for some time, counting well over two hundred boxes, all roughly the size of a watermelon, with several empty ones stacked to one side. While doing this, you could hear the footsteps of the five members of your team going about. Onito was in the room with the clay, Jasper had gone into the room with the food preparation, Halga was in the room with the tablets, and Jane was still in the first chamber. You considered wrapping up, it was beginning to get late, when you heard Jane walking on the stone. She seemed to turn and head towards Jasper, where the footsteps faded. Not unusual, she had been making eyes at him since the team first met.
Then you heard her again. More footsteps, coming from the same direction, this time turning and entering Halga’s chamber. You hadn’t heard anyone else move, and you were certain everyone was accounted for. You now realised you weren’t certain it was Jane that went to Jasper. But all in all you had heard -including yourself- six sets of footsteps on a five-person team. Now seven, as an additional set made its way down the corridor, turned, and went to Onito.
The silence aside from the footsteps was horrible. Not only did it mean that you were absolutely certain in your assessment that there were too many people, but also that you could hear with perfect clarity your own heartbeat picking up. There was more silence, not a sound made from anywhere, until it came. One more set of footsteps.
They made their way slowly down the corridor, tip tap clack, tip tap clack. You froze entirely. Those footsteps weren’t as indistinguishable as the others. These were specific, unique. These were footsteps you heard often, and you glanced to one side at your cane. Tip tap clack, tip tap clack. It was at the entrance to this room now, and you were pressed against a shelf of boxes, waiting as the glow of a torch -one that flicked at times- entered the room. An identical silhouette, but holding the cane in its right hand, where you held it in your left. It just stood in the doorway after stepping in, not moving. The torch swung lazily from side to side, as if barely searching for you. You figured if it was some kind of trick, or a strange animal, you’d be able to escape since it wasn’t showing much intelligence, but you found your hopeful assumptions were wrong as footsteps exited the other rooms. First from the room with Jasper, then Halga, then Onito. Agonizing minutes of staring at your strange copy standing in the doorway, just waiting for the others to arrive.
The copy of you stepped further into the room as your friends, their watches on the wrong hand or their shirts reading in reverse, entered. Jasper looked at the copy of you and it pointed towards you. You hadn’t even seen its eyes flick towards you until this point. He didn’t nod, didn’t acknowledge it in any way before striding through the stacks of boxes towards you. You didn’t have a chance to scream before a cold hand was pressed against your chin, the other against the side of your skull, and with a single expert motion, your neck was snapped and you fell as the horrid cracking sound still echoed.
Paralyzed, you could only watch as each of the copies took a wooden box and placed inside it their mirrored clothing and items, sealed it, and placed it on a shelf. Two of them, Onito and Jasper, gripped your ankles and dragged your limp body out of the room. You saw with a sickening glance that there were the rest of your team’s bodies here in the corridor as well. Each one dragged by their counterpart -though both you and Jasper were pulled by Jaspers copy- down the corridor and slowly into the second chamber where Jane stood waiting. For a moment hope flared in you to see her with her watch on its correct wrist and her graphic tee legible, but soon that hope faded too as you watched Onito be dragged to the centre of the bridge, have any clothes that weren’t symmetrical stripped, and be tossed down. They landed with a thud onto something soft that you could only assume was the real Jane. Halga followed, then Jasper, then you.
The copies made their way to the rope ladder, and you were all left in still silence. You could feel blood dripping from someone who landed on a sharp piece of rock, the rubble at the bottom of the room jutting into you and the others at uncomfortable angles. But you were alone. The copies had left and you were with your friends, but you were all still, all silent. None of you could move, and the sight of your fingers curling and melting into smooth, sharp rock that began travelling up your arm was more of a relief than anything.
