The Cave Chapter 1

Shawn was tired of walking. He was tired of China. He had been tired of being back in China since he arrived at the airport two days prior. The stairs were a bit of a climb; he was almost done with Taiji Cave and he couldn’t wait to get back to Shanghai. In truth, he couldn’t wait to get back to the US. The cave was interesting to see, but he had seen it already and had gotten bored with the last little section. It was difficult to appreciate the natural structures with all the crazy, multi-colored lighting. Yeah, it looked cool, but after a while it was just boring. He felt that just bright white lights, in contrast to the dim colored ones, would allow people to appreciate the natural structures of the cave further.

 

Over a late breakfast he had finally realized that he truly had enough of this place. Vincent was about to leave the restaurant because they had dog meat on the menu, which would have been just fine with Shawn. He had argued with the waiter who had been attempting to assure him that they hadn’t served dog meat in many years and they just hadn’t changed the menu. Shawn couldn’t eat there anyway. Chicken feet had been sticking out of the dish, and there had even been a chicken head staring up at him. Good ol’ China. The meal was expensive as hell, but Tommy loved it. Tommy seemed to love everything about China.

 

Shawn had come to China to see Tommy. They had been friends for as long as he could remember and Tommy had even convinced him several years ago to come teach in China for a year. That was a big mistake. He hadn’t taken well to the country at all. He had barely finished a one-year contract and immediately went back to the States. He didn’t like the food. He didn’t like the pollution. He didn’t really like the culture. Shawn didn’t consider himself a racist, but he did have some prejudices about different cultures, primarily the one he found himself in at that moment.

 

“I think after this little climb, we will almost be out,” said Vincent. Vincent was much younger than Shawn and Tommy, and his English was very good, almost fluent, with a grammar mistake only every now and then. Shawn liked the kid, mostly because Vincent didn’t seem to have a high regard for his own culture and was very interested in moving abroad to any English-speaking country that would take him.

 

“Having fun yet, Shawn?” Tommy asked.

 

“I’ll be having fun when I can have a beer,” replied Shawn. He wondered why Tommy insisted on coming to see this cave. Surely there were better things they could have done with the day and he wasn’t really going to be in China very long.

 

 

*****

 

 

Zhang Long liked to consider himself to be The Dragon. Long…Dragon in Chinese. He was born in the year of the Dragon, which earned him his name. He had seen fit throughout his life to live up to it. He didn’t care for the mythical or spiritual aspects of Eastern dragons, but preferred the malevolent and violent connotations of more Western Dragons. Chinese dragons looked like worms with legs while European dragons were built of sturdier stuff, razing villages and belching fire, quite a force to be reckoned with, as he considered himself.

 

China taught him to distrust the Japanese but he taught himself to hate them. For no other reason than the propaganda he had been taught in school, the Japanese were to be despised. He didn’t limit his hatred to Japanese cars on the one night of the year that a small percentage of Chinese liked to vandalize them, but keyed or otherwise defaced them any time it suited him. Some Chinese were disgusting, supporting the purchasing of goods from a nation that had viciously attacked them, massacring hundreds of thousands. If someone had told him that the Chinese had later actually killed over twenty times more Chinese than the Japanese had, he would have been at a loss of how to react and probably would have disbelieved the person doing the telling. However, no one had bothered to tell him. Zhang Long was from Nanjing, the site of the Nanjing Massacre in December and January of 1937 and 1938.

 

Other laowai in China bothered him too, especially those from English speaking countries. He decided that they had come to his country to force others to learn their bullshit language. If he had ever been faced with the logic of there actually existing a market for learning the International language of trade, he might have been confounded. Again, nothing like that had ever happened. Those of European and African descent were only here to steal his women and get military secrets from his government. Whites were all American or British and blacks were all Africans. They wouldn’t be happy until there existed a KFC and a McDonald’s everywhere you looked in China. Because of his semi-reliance on laowai for his business, he tolerated them. However, beneath the surface, he seethed in resentment.

 

Long wasn’t overly interested in the Taiji Cave. He had promised one of his girls he would take her here, as she had pulled in an extremely wealthy client and he figured she could use a reward. It was incredibly boring to look at rocks. He didn’t care about the history of the cave or the formation of it. His patience was wearing thin and he wanted to leave.

 

“Isn’t this wonderful?” asked Candy. She was young, slim, and in Long’s opinion, not so bright. Her youth and slender figure were attractive, but her face left something to be desired. She had a thin scar running up her right cheek and some faint adolescent acne scars that were usually covered up with makeup when she was on the job. Her nose was flat, almost upturned, and Long disliked looking into her nostrils. She was plain at best in most people’s eyes, which made her ugly in Long’s opinion.

 

“No,” replied Long. It wasn’t wonderful. He didn’t like the way the weird lights reflected the embroidered dragon on his sweater. In natural, or white light, the threading was gold, something one wouldn’t know in shades of blue, red, and green lights. “How much longer do we have to be in here?” he asked, subconsciously running his fingers along the silken embroidery of his dragon sweater.

 

“Well, this is Peak Palace, we have a lot of ups and downs in this section of the cave, after the water.” Candy was her trade name, picked out by Long. Her real given was Duoduo, flower petal. He hadn’t bothered to remember her surname, and just referred to her as Candy. “If we hurry, we can be out of here in an hour, but I just love this so much. Can we take our time?”

 

“No, let’s move.” Long wanted to see his dragon golden and gleaming again, in real light.

 

 

*****

 

 

“You and your beer. Ya know…there is more to life than beer,” said Tommy to Shawn.

 

“Maybe, but beer is the only thing worth doing here.”

 

“We’re almost out. You can have your beer soon enough.” Tommy loved his friend, Shawn, but sometimes really felt exasperated by his negativity. He wasn’t a complete pessimist, but at times Tommy felt deflated by his friend’s personality.

 

Tommy had been in China, teaching English, for several years. The pay wasn’t much, but after seven years, Tommy still felt that China had a lot to offer him. While he had long ago lost his awe for the culture, he had never lost his curiosity or respect. He often wanted to get out and do more in this country. His most recent move had been to Shanghai. Tommy expected that he would love Shanghai, and he did to an extent, but he also felt that Shanghai, being a very international city by Chinese standards, didn’t have a lot to offer him in the way of new cultural experiences.

 

Judy liked Shanghai, and so he went there with her. They had been together for about five years now and he had every intention of asking her to marry him shortly after Shawn left the country. He appreciated his old friend coming to visit him, but Judy had never really cared for Shawn. She was quite busy with work, but seemed to have made herself even busier since Shawn’s arrival. Initially she was also supposed to go to the cave with them, but had begged off for work reasons two days prior. The caves had actually been her idea, out of town, at least one night away, but why not make things easier and spend two nights away? Then…she decided that she wasn’t even going.

 

It was good to have Vincent here. Vincent had been a former student of Tommy’s and they had developed a friendship that had lasted for five years thus far. Vincent also seemed to like Shawn. Vincent, while highly intelligent on one hand, often had a naïve side, a romanticized version of the Western world in his mind. He genuinely seemed to prefer it to his own culture, and primarily had an interest in English-speaking countries. The country he intended to move to and spend the rest of his life in was initially the US, but after spending some time in Australia he had changed his mind.

 

“I knew I should have brought some beer,” said Shawn. Tommy noticed that Shawn seemed to have let himself go some since their last encounter, a bigger belly, puffier, redder face. Tommy had also noticed some burst veins on his face that weren’t there the last time he had seen him.

 

“I think we’re almost there. Once you get to me, no more stairs. It’s level again. We’re almost out.” Vincent had been pretty far ahead, now Tommy saw him again, a couple dozen yards ahead, waiting.

 

 

*****

 

 

Wu Misaki was absolutely fascinated with the caves. This was her first trip to China and she was really enjoying being away from her husband’s friends and family. She did love her husband, but his friends and family were something different entirely. They either showed barely hidden scorn, or seemed to treat her as some sort of prize that he had received for his success.

 

“Isn’t his beautiful?” She asked. “This structure is called…Moonlight Treasure…I think.” When she said Moonlight Treasure she had reverted to English, as her Chinese language expertise was almost nonexistent. Her husband was fluent in English and Japanese, as well as his native Mandarin. They usually spoke in Japanese as Misaki’s English was very basic.

 

“Yes, it is, my darling,” He said, taking her hand, “But not as beautiful as my wife.” She did love him, for all his flaws, one of which was his overly romantic side that was usually combined with public displays of affection that made her uncomfortable. Every time he referred to her as My Darling, he always used English.

 

“I want to stay here forever,” she claimed. Misaki often didn’t know what to say to be romantic and reciprocate her husband’s words, and usually when she tried she often left him out of her own words and commented on their setting.

 

“With me, or by yourself?” Wu teased. She had met him in Japan, he was initially just visiting her company as a potential client. His first attempts to ask her out were rejected in the politest and most indirect ways possible. Before she knew it, his company had purchased hers. Wei had come into the board meeting and told everyone that they were to keep their jobs, even her, a receptionist, and everyone was to get a ten-percent increase in salary. She wondered whether he did that just to get her to date him. She eventually accepted an invitation to dinner and soon was no longer a receptionist.

 

“Thank you for bringing me here, it is truly wonderful.” When confronted with a question involving her feelings toward him, she often deflected.

 

“Anything for you, my darling.” Wei then kissed her, slowly, passionately. She resisted at first, but then gave in briefly until she heard others approaching.

 

“So…is this…Moonlight Treasure?” She felt uncomfortable as the strangers approached.

 

“Actually, according to the sign, it’s Fairies Light Candles.” The formation in question was a group of smaller stalactites and stalagmites that were almost touching. They were bathed in a light reddish, almost pink or purple soft light. “I do see why you think this cave is so beautiful.”

 

It was beautiful. However, just for a minute, they almost looked like jagged teeth in the mouth of a monster.

 

 

*****

 

 

Vincent had reached the top of the concrete stairs that had been roughly poured and then shaped into the cave years ago. He had been excited when Tommy invited him on this trip and had then looked up online to see exactly what the cave was about. There was the “dry” part that they had seen at the beginning, then the “wet” part that they were nearing the end of now. Overall, the cave had 5.4 kilometers for tourists to see. The “wet” section of the cave wasn’t entirely underwater, only about a kilometer of it was, and with their fee, had a ferry to carry them across that part. According to the map, they were almost out.

 

The place was called Taiji Dong, or Taiji Cave. It was the largest natural limestone cave in East China and was over 200 million years old. Vincent had read that there were over 160 features in the cave, primarily made of eroded limestone and that there were ten named “landscapes” that were named after things they resembled in ancient Chinese culture, such as the Capsized Boat of the Immortals and the Stalactite of Heaven’s Eye. Vincent found it all to be quite interesting and had thoroughly enjoyed the walk through it.

 

More than the cave, he enjoyed the company of Tommy. Vincent had been a student at an English training school several years prior and had been immediately drawn to Tommy. Other foreign teachers at the school acted with a sense of superiority and even arrogance at times, but Tommy Shane was always approachable. In fact, Tommy had invited Vincent out to the bar a few times after class. They soon became friends and had stayed in touch for the last five years because of it. Vincent had to admit that he also liked the fact that Tommy was American. Vincent loved English, and English-speaking cultures and wouldn’t even date a Chinese girl unless she spoke English. He really didn’t have much of a problem with his own culture, he just preferred more of an English-speaking one. Vincent often tried to force himself to think in English as well.

 

He had shouted back to Tommy a few moments prior that they were near the exit of the cave and he thought that he had heard a mention of drinking beer. Vincent enjoyed drinking beer and even occasionally getting a little drunk. Tommy did seem to be acting a bit strange lately and maybe having a few beers would lighten him up a little.

 

“I think a beer sounds—“ A loud cracking sound, as though the entire world was being ripped in half, cut him off.