Labyrinth Caves

Greg Marks indulged in danger. His life was a catalogue of verticality and depth: rock climbing, roof-topping, marathon swimming, and the silent descent of free diving. Though he had been raised amidst the Canadian Shield of Northwestern Ontario—a terrain that offered summits to hike rather than true mountains to scale—he sought the sharpest edges wherever he could find them.

Of all his pursuits, free diving stirred the deepest consternation. Even Greg grew disturbed by the depths he reached and the unnatural stretches of time he spent suspended in the dark water. It was only when the physical toll became undeniable—when his gait began to stumble, his speech slurred into a thick lethargy, and a persistent brain fog clouded his thoughts—that he finally chose to stop. Only the fear of anoxia, of a brain starved of oxygen and permanently scarred, could temper his compulsions.

He told himself he didn't have a care in the world, yet that very vacuum of responsibility had begun to bother him. He believed he had successfully outrun the madness of his family and the ghost of his girlfriend, finally discovering a scenic pocket of the world where serenity seemed possible. And he felt a protective, nervous energy toward the novel he carried in his backpack: a thick leather-bound accounting journal, purchased in a dusty London stationer’s, now heavy with three hundred pages of his own compressed handwriting.

Ignoring the local warnings of a deluge that could swallow the cave systems whole, Greg had wandered miles along the shoreline. As the forecasted rain broke over the village, he sought shelter within the rock. His hosts at the bed and breakfast had been explicit about the meteorological dangers, but he hadn’t really been listening. Or perhaps, subconsciously, he was listening to a different call entirely.

The caves were a labyrinth of smooth stone. In a narrow passage, he settled onto a large, flat rock surrounded by the rising water, resting in the very place he had been told to avoid. He decided, at the very least, to indulge in the wine gifted to him by a fellow traveler on the train. He spread his blanket over the large, smooth surface of the rock, then sat amidst the slow encroaching of the flood. He ate simply: a slice of homemade bread, a few chunks of sharp cheese, and steady sips of the red wine.

From his pack, he pulled the leather-bound Bible a Bavarian priest had pressed into his hands during a long, soul-baring conversation on a train through Germany. The priest had listened to Greg’s stories and offered a quiet observation: it seemed he was on a spiritual quest, whether he chose to name it so or not.

As the natural light in the cave began to fail, dissolving into a bruised twilight, Greg set the physical Bible aside and reached for his Kindle. He found the King James Version in his library and returned to Genesis. Once again, he was struck by the archaic, propulsive cadence of its prose. It matched the ancient stone around him.

The water continued to rise, creeping up the sides of his stone island. Yet Greg remained suspended in a trance, the blue glow of the e-reader deepening the shadows of the cave, the sound of the prose blocking out the liquid sounds of the environment.

By the time he finally looked up, the reality of his predicament was absolute. The rising tide had choked the passageways; there was no longer enough clearance to walk, crawl, or even squeeze through. He stared at the dark channels, knowing he couldn't risk swimming through an unfamiliar subterranean network. He suspected there were already long stretches of the cave completely submerged, and despite his history as a free diver, his fear of anoxia held him back. He didn't trust his lungs—or his mind—to hold out long enough to find the surface.

There was also the matter of his backpack. Along with the ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin mushrooms he’d acquired from Saskia, a Dutch DJ in Amsterdam, he carried the only existing copy of his life’s work. The drugs were loosely packaged, unlikely to survive a soaking, but it was the manuscript that anchored him to the rock.

The novel had become the marrow of his travels—a consuming obsession. And yet he had no photocopies, no digital backups, no safety net. To swim was to drown the words, to turn three hundred pages of handwritten soul into a pulpy, illegible mass.

He decided to stay put. He watched the water with mounting anxiety, praying the tide would peak before it reached his head.

He frequently lectured himself on the necessity of duplication, reminding himself to photograph the manuscript’s pages with his digital SLR and store the images on an external hard drive or a thumb drive. But he had never quite reached that threshold of pragmatism. Now, as the floodwaters in the coastal cave continued their steady ascent, he realized he had become a captive of the very forces he once sought to master. There was no higher ground to claim, and the risk of drowning in the lightless, submerged channels made escape a fool’s errand. In the dim light, Greg reached into his pack and retrieved a plastic container. He selected a tablet that looked and was labeled like Xanax—part of the chemical care package Saskia gifted to him. She had pressed the package against his chest and expressed an unexpected desire to visit him in Canada, to perhaps even date him. She had tucked extra tablets into small, resealable bags, advising him to use them if the other substances—the mushrooms or the MDMA—put him into a "lurch" or a "tizzy." She had warned of a "greenout," a psychic spiraling he was now experiencing for entirely different reasons.

He swallowed the sedative; a chemical crutch was his only defense against the looming panic. What a strange development: the girl’s hedonistic gifts were now serving a purpose he had never anticipated.

Greg searched the walls for watermarks or some sign of the cave’s high-water history, but found only smooth, indifferent stone. He returned to the wine, savoring the flavor as the sedative worked its magic. In the burgeoning stillness of the drugs, a moment of sharp moral clarity pierced through. He felt a sudden impulse to write goodbye letters—to reach out toward the wreckage of his sisters and the ghost of his ex-girlfriend. His parents had already perished, leaving behind a legacy of bitter litigation.

His sisters had accused him of using his background in finance to embezzle funds from their mother’s estate—a stinging irony, given that his university education in economics and his years as a financial advisor had allowed him to generate handsome returns for his parents. They had never acknowledged how he had turned their pensions into compounding wealth; they saw only a thief where there was a steward. Greg opened his accounting journal to the blank back pages, then began to write to his twin sisters, his pen moving with a frantic honesty. Afterward he turned a page to write to his youngest sister, the family’s athlete, a competitive rower of international standing. In hindsight, the letter was a heavy vessel of disappointment. He couldn't help but remember the last time they spoke, in the kitchen of their mother’s house, when she had turned her physical strength against him, slapping him repeatedly with the rhythmic force of someone lifting weights, each strike landing harder than the last.

During that final altercation, his sister had struck him with such velocity that his jaw slammed shut, the force shattered his front teeth. Even as the copper taste of blood filled his mouth and the argument raged on, he never raised a hand against her.

The injury had occurred before they were scheduled to meet the funeral director to arrange their mother’s service. The family matriarch was no longer there to mediate, to arbitrate their bitter disputes, to exert the formidable authority that had once forced her offspring to maintain peace. In the aftermath, Greg had gone mute. He chose a self-imposed exile of speech to avoid the violent cycles that had already decimated what remained of their dysfunctional bond. But his silence had baffled his sister. This sentiment served as the coda to the letter he now wrote to her—a requiem and a goodbye scrawled in the back of his journal.

As the floodwaters rose, a dusty thirst settled in his throat.  He continued to sip the wine.

After a time he turned to a fresh page to compose an au revoir to his ex-girlfriend, the woman who had first introduced him to the pull of global travel. If this note survived his presumed drowning, he wanted her to know the truth.

He apologized for failing to be the provider she required, and for the fact that he was, at his core, a loner who preferred the company of his own shadows. He asked for her forgiveness for the way he had ended things—ghosting her after she had pleaded for one last meeting at the Eaton Centre food court in Toronto. “I didn’t mean to leave you alone in the mall that evening,” he began. He tried to offer her a strange kind of solace, reminding her that she was now unencumbered, free from the onerous ties that had bound them. He hoped she would find the fulfillment he couldn't provide and finally start the family she craved. He looked down; the black water was moving with a new, predatory speed.

Greg carefully closed the thick accounting journal. He tucked the goodbye letters and the manuscript into a resealable bag, then double-wrapped it in another layer of plastic. He worked with meticulous care, determined to ensure his words remained waterproof even if the cave claimed the man who wrote them.

His taste for danger had been his undoing, or so he had confessed in his letter to Julia. He apologized for walking away from his career as an investment advisor at the bank, a role she viewed as the foundation for the life she demanded. Julia had been insistent on an engagement, a wedding, and the construction of a traditional, mid-century domesticity that felt to Greg like a gilded cage. He hadn't left because he wanted to be a hipster, or a “hippie,” as she had mockingly claimed; he had left because he refused to be a “slave” (his word) to her expectations. Her last words to him: “You’re not the man I thought you were.”

Now, slightly drunk in the dark of the cave, Greg finally admitted the truth to himself: he did not want to be a vagabond. He craved only the fringes of the counterculture.

As the tidewater continued to claim the cavern, he finished the last of the bread and cheese, washing it down with the final dregs of the wine. A secular Last Supper. He returned to the beginning of Genesis on his Kindle. Who else had the luxury of such a pursuit in the final hours of their life? A chemical serenity settled over him.

Eventually, the flashlight he’d salvaged from his pack flickered and died. Bathed only in the cool blue glow of the e-reader, Greg felt a profound peace—a cocktail of the wine, the Xanax, and the weight of a full stomach. He lay back on the flat rock, just inches above the lapping water, and drifted into a heavy, vivid sleep.

When he awoke twelve hours later, he was bathed in blinding sunlight. He felt the throb of a hangover, eclipsed only by a surge of spontaneous relief: the tide had receded. Judging by the damp watermarks on the stone, the flood had stopped just short of the rim of his rock.

It took hours of backtracking through the limestone maze, but he eventually emerged onto the lakeshore. He walked the familiar trails back to the village, his boots heavy but his spirit jubilant. He headed straight to a local café and there indulged in coffee and fresh bread, lingering over newspapers until nearly midnight. The world felt remarkably fresh and vivid.

Returning to his lodgings, Greg decided to perform a final ritual of closure. He would burn the goodbye letters. He was alive. No need for a requiem.

Standing over the kitchen sink in a state of exhaustion, he struck a match. He held the journal over the basin, intending to burn only the back pages. But in his fatigued, clouded state, he hadn't torn the letters free. The flame caught the paper and climbed greedily. As the fire spread to the pages containing the only draft of his novel—his life’s work—he panicked and twisted the faucet.

Nothing happened. The landlord had shut off the main valve to conserve water during the drought.

Then the smoke detector went off—a spectacular shriek that shattered the midnight

quiet.

Panic surged through him, sharper than any fear he had felt in the cave. Greg lunged for the bathroom, grabbed a towel and a bucket he’d left beneath the shower drip. As a second alarm began its wail, the house stirred; the muffled groans and hurried footsteps of the other guests vibrated through the floorboards.

He threw the water and beat at the sink with the towel, but it was a desperate, losing battle. The ledger paper had caught with a hungry intensity. By the time the last spark died, his novel—all three hundred pages of his soul—was a black, curled mass of illegible ash.

At two in the morning, Greg stood in the kitchen smelling of smoke and defeat, a man who had survived the rising tide now drowning in the mundane embarrassment of a kitchen fire. The next morning offered no reprieve. His landlord appeared in the hallway wearing boxer shorts patterned with bright yellow pineapples. "I’ve had quite enough of your antics," he said. His words were as comically cliché as his boxers. Greg was told to pack his bags immediately.

He left the village as a ghost of the man who had entered it, his backpack three hundred pages lighter.

Weeks later, when he reached the gray, brutalist sprawl of Belgrade, the final cord of Greg’s old life was severed—and a new one was tied. A notification chimed on his phone: an email and a string of texts from Saskia. Her message was brief: “I’m pregnant.”

Greg stared at the screen, the Balkan wind biting at his face. He had spent his life chasing the edge of the abyss, convinced he was a solitary creature, a man of temporary connections and drifting smoke. He stood on the cracked pavement of a Belgrade street, the phone a cold weight in his palm. He realized he had never truly believed himself capable of leaving anything permanent behind—neither a book nor a legacy. Around him, the city moved with an indifferent bustle. People heading to work. Children being ushered to school. The foundations of duty he had spent a decade trying to outrun.

He had once joked to the Bavarian priest that he was on a spiritual quest, a seeker of heights and depths. He had been looking for the abyss underwater, on rooftops, in the glow of a Kindle. But now he understood that the true abyss wasn't a cave or a mountain; it was the undeniable presence of a person who needed him to stay on the ground.

He didn't reply yet.  He simply put the phone in his pocket and adjusted the straps of his lightened pack. For the first time in his life, he wasn't looking for a cliff to climb or a hole to dive into. He was rummaging through his backpack. When he found Saskia’s scored tablets, which he believed were stimulants, he swallowed them dry. He needed the boost, the initiative. He needed to keep moving. He was already marching, determinedly, toward his new home.

Born and raised in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, John Tavares is the son of Portuguese immigrants from Sao Miguel, Azores. After graduating from Humber College, in Etobicoke, he earned a journalism diploma from Centennial College, in East York, and then an Honors BA in English Literature from York University, in North York. His short fiction has been published in a variety of print and online journals, magazines, and anthologies, in the US, Canada, and internationally.