The Cave: Prologue

The Cave

Prologue

 

I scream

You scream

We all scream

For ice cream

 

She had seen a little boy, maybe several years younger than herself, enjoying an ice cream cone a short time before she entered the cave. It had looked good and now Jia Ya Wen had decided she really wanted an ice cream. The more she thought about it the more she desired it. Ice cream; delicious, cold, sugary, creamy greatness.

 

The lights in this section of the cave were strange. Multiple colors reflected here and there with vivid alacrity. They seemed to slowly take on unusual forms and shift into different shapes for a few seconds, a star here, a diamond a bit farther off, and there was something that was starting to resemble a wolf. When she blinked her eyes they were stationary again, then they slowly started to move and morph into a variety of shapes. She saw the wolf, a pleasant creature, she speculated as it sat on its blue and red haunches and began to open its maw. For a second, she thought she actually heard it howl.

 

She was feeling great. Only a few hours before she had felt the mental burden of her studies weighing her down, but no longer. Ya Wen was a typical Chinese middle school student and that meant that she, like many others all over China, spent most hours of the day studying in school or doing massive amounts of homework for each subject with seemingly almost no time to eat or sleep. That no longer mattered. School no longer mattered. Maybe the wolf mattered. Ice cream certainly mattered.

 

She truly felt wonderful, giddy, excited. She began to smile. Why shouldn’t she smile? Life was suddenly a wonderful experience to treasure. She had never experienced a physical feeling like this before, so mellow and pleasant, as if all stressors had turned into some slightly lingering aftermath of a distant nightmare that had long ago ceased to be a threat. School didn’t matter. That boy who had pulled her hair a week prior didn’t matter. Her parents didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Well…ice cream mattered. It certainly did. The wolf smiled at her and then started dancing on its hind legs. Ya Wen laughed. So did the wolf, anthropomorphizing into some semblance of a human to do so.

 

She wanted to run and hug the wolf, but when she started to move, the wolf, really made entirely of light, began to blur and shift. Fearing its demise she remained still, and the wolf returned, taking on even more of a human appearance. She beckoned the wolf forward and it came to her, smiling. The wolf now had an almost entirely human shape, save its head, which was still wolf-like.

 

Then, the most wonderful thing happened, the creature was holding out an ice cream cone to her. The cone was made entirely of light: purple, orange, pink, and green swirled together in a magnificent ball on top of a red cone. She found that if she concentrated hard enough, the ice cream could take on a solid brown color, her favorite color of ice cream, chocolate color.

 

Ya Wen reached for the cone and the wolf obliged her, handing it over and half howling, half laughing, scampered away in full wolf form. She quickly started to move the cone to her mouth and as she did so it swirled and faded and almost completely disappeared. She slowed down and concentrated harder. The ice cream cone immediately came back into existence, perfect temperature, cold enough to maintain its shape, but melting slightly so that it was easier to consume.

 

She began to tentatively lick it. It was fantastically yummy, absolutely by far the best tasting ice cream that she had ever had. She started licking it and licking it, faster and faster, her tongue rapidly darting in and out of her mouth, supplying freshly melted deliciousness to her insatiable little soul. She wasn’t able to get enough. It was so good…too good. She needed more.

 

She took her first bite, it was tough, much tougher than ice cream should be. She also felt a brief pain in her index finger. She concentrated harder and the pain disappeared and the ice cream was easier to eat. She had to slowly eat it now. The bites took longer than they should and she really had to put an effort into eating it, but it was so good, the most miraculous tasting ice cream ever. She continued her slow consumption of the ice cream for several minutes. At one point, only briefly, it ceased to taste like cold chocolate and instead tasted salty and metallic, and felt not cold, but warm. Concentration drove away the salty warmth. Then, at another point she had a peculiar tactile sensation in her mouth as the ice cream felt more solid than it should. Once again concentration proved to reduce the solid to a semi-solid state and the lump of ice cream melted in her mouth.

 

The girl’s concentration was broken when she heard her name called. “Ya Wen,” echoed distantly through the cave. She looked down and the ice cream was gone and she momentarily saw shiny crimson, before that too disappeared. She concentrated hard, so hard, but the ice cream would not return to her hand. She still had some in her mouth and chewed it vigorously, not realizing that she shouldn’t need to chew ice cream as her jaw clamped down and her teeth tore at the contents of her mouth.

 

“Ya Wen!” The sound was closer. It felt more real than other sensations she had recently experienced. Then a movement caught her eye and she looked to her left. Something was moving toward her. Expecting to see the lovely wolf, she was slightly disappointed to see that it was a brown blob about one and a half meters tall.

 

“Ya Wen!” the blob yelled at her. Suddenly she realized that it was a huge mound of chocolate ice cream! It was magnificent to behold, melted exterior portions were oozing down the solid mass of ice cream, sometimes glistening in the strangely colored lights. So much ice cream, and it was all for her. The form seemed to bubble and froth on top, beckoning her to come and enjoy its chocolaty goodness.

 

She just knew that the huge mound of chocolate ice cream wanted her to eat it and she was more than happy to do so. She got to her feet and began to run toward the delicious dessert with only one thing on her mind and a drug-induced glee in her heart.

 

“Ya Wen!”

 

*****

 

The woman had momentarily lost her daughter. She had also started to smell…shit. It smelled like shit. The very walls of the cave seemed to exude a strong fecal odor. She couldn’t understand why. As the minutes ticked by it seemed to matter less. Part of her mind was becoming very relaxed, but there was another part urging her onward in search of her daughter. She thought she saw her father for a moment, and it didn’t seem odd to see her father at all, even though he had died three years prior. It was okay, and… somehow normal…to see her father and she never gave a second thought to the impossibility of the situation. Before she could say anything to him, he had wandered off down a corridor and into the darkness.

 

“Ya Wen!” she shouted.

 

As she rounded a bend in the cave, she came upon her daughter and a sight that would make anyone in his or her right mind cringe in horror. Chun Xiu wasn’t in her right mind.

 

She saw what she perceived to be a wondrous sight. Her daughter, Ya Wen, was chewing on her own thumb, the nail having dislodged itself from the rest of the digit, was limply hanging from her lower lip. The girl was smiling as blood dripped down her cheeks and when Chun Xiu looked at her daughter’s hand she noticed that three fingers were missing a chunk of flesh was gone from the back of her hand, revealing the tendon and bone beneath. Her wrist had also been gnawed upon. Instead of being horrified, Chun Xiu only felt a slight sympathy and an overwhelming love for her daughter.

 

The little girl jumped to her feet and ran toward her mother. “Ya Wen!” her mother screamed in joy.

 

As the little girl ripped off her mother’s blouse and brassiere, Chun Xiu reached out to her. As Ya Wen dug her teeth into her left breast, Chun Xiu laughed. As the girl voraciously tore open her throat, the mother smiled and cradled her daughter in a loving embrace.