What Lies Inside
“Chapter One — The Awakening"
Drip.
A pause, long enough to be mistaken for silence.
Drip.
I wake up without waking. There’s no light to prove I exist, no outline of my own body, just the press of cold on every part of me that can still feel. I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed. The dark is perfect. It has no depth, no distance.
For a few seconds—maybe minutes—I think I’m dead.
The idea comes not as fear but as logic: if I were alive, there would be pain, there would be sound.
Then—
Drip.
The sound breaks everything. It’s small, specific. Real. It means there’s a world somewhere outside this skull. I latch onto it like a rope.
Drip … where? … drip.
My heart answers, stumbling into rhythm with it. I wait for the next one, terrified it won’t come. When it does, something in me unclenches. The repetition becomes proof: something continues, even if I don’t remember how.
The question forms: Where am I?
It doesn’t fit in my mouth. I try again, but the words feel too large, swollen with air. I whisper, “Hello?”
The sound comes back wrong—
“…lo…lo…”
and then again, faintly—
“Hello.”
A stranger’s version of my own voice, filtered through water, thinner and delayed.
My lungs start to work too fast. There’s not enough air here; the air tastes old, like paper left in the rain.
Drip.
I close my eyes against a darkness that doesn’t change and feel the panic arrive—quietly at first, like a small animal scratching inside my chest. I’m aware of my heartbeat, my trembling hands, the sound of something shifting when I move—pebbles maybe, or bone.
Then comes the thought that kills all others: I don’t know who I am.
The sentence lands heavy and cold. Not the kind of forgetting that has edges, the kind that happens after a long night. This is hollow. A hole where a self should be. No name. No face. No before.
Drip.
The sound repeats, steady, pitiless. It becomes the only anchor in the world—and a kind of torture. Each drop is a reminder that time is still happening, that something still exists, that I still exist. But if I exist, why can’t I remember what for?
I try to move. My arm doesn’t cooperate at first. The effort sends static through the muscles. My palm meets stone. It’s slick and cold. I press harder, needing the confirmation of friction. The surface gives nothing back but damp and gravity.
I try to sit. My back screams with effort. Gravel grinds beneath me. The sound echoes, ricocheting too long before dying in the distance. The cave is massive—or maybe the echo just lies.
I reach forward and find nothing. My other hand hits stone too close. A wall. I turn. Another wall.
Drip … trapped … drip.
The panic builds in layers: first the air, then the dark, then the thought that maybe there is no exit. No up, no down, no world at all—just this sound and this body. I scream before I know I’m going to.
“HELP!”
The echo doesn’t come back right. It comes back slower, as if traveling through another person first.
“Help…elp…elp…”
Then a whisper at the end: “Please.”
But I didn’t say please.
Silence afterward feels like punishment.
Drip.
I start to cry without sound. The tears cool my cheeks, vanish before reaching my jaw. There’s a moment when I think I might stay here forever—still, unseen, a sound that never finishes.
Then something shifts. Far away, a tick of metal on stone, so faint I think I imagined it. Hope is a cruel reflex; it makes me crawl.
The darkness moves differently now. The drip feels closer. The ground changes texture—fine sand at first, then larger grains, then something that feels like fabric torn and stiff with age.
My hand touches metal again, this time sharp-edged. I flinch, pull back, smell oil. The shape is familiar in a way nothing else is—a handle, a glass cage.
A lantern.
My throat tightens with gratitude. It’s absurd, immediate, holy. For the first time, the dark feels negotiable. I turn it in my hands until my fingers find the striker.
Spark. Nothing.
Spark again. Nothing.
On the third try—light.
A trembling, shivering filament of flame rises, no bigger than a breath. The sudden illumination is painful; it hits my eyes like heat. The cave exists after all.
Rough walls glisten with sweat. The ceiling stoops close. Dust dances like plankton. The floor slopes downward into a throat of deeper dark.
The light reveals more shapes—a coil of rope, a scattered harness, a dented canteen lying on its side. The gear is spread like breadcrumbs leading nowhere.
I whisper, “Someone was here.”
The words sound safer than I’m not alone.
Drip.
I move closer. The rope is thick, worn at the edges. The carabiners still glint. The canteen rattles when I shake it; there’s water inside. I drink before I can second-guess it. The taste is stale, ancient—but it’s real. The fear dulls just enough to make room for gratitude.
“I’ll give it back,” I promise to no one. Whoever left this must be close. Maybe they stepped away for a moment. Maybe they’re waiting.
The harness fits like it remembers me. The rope coils perfectly around my shoulder. The lantern’s handle fits my grip exactly.
Drip … lucky … drip.
A scrap of paper catches the edge of the lantern’s glow. Half-buried in mud.
Day 1 — Oil intact. Nerves intact. The light keeps me honest.
The handwriting is neat. Rational. Comforting. I read it again, and again, until the words stop meaning anything and become sound—Oil. Nerves. Light. Honest. The last one hurts the most.
I fold the paper, slide it into my pocket, and tell myself I’ll return it when I find them.
The lantern flickers once. Twice.
Drip.
I look into the black tunnel yawning ahead. The sound is louder now—closer, or clearer. I step toward it, because not moving feels worse.
Drip.
The echo follows, half a second late.
Drip.
And somewhere, far ahead, another drop answers that isn’t mine.
Drip.
I start counting without deciding to.
Drip. One.
Drip. Two.
Drip. Three.
The sound measures everything: distance, courage, time. Without it there would be nothing but thought, and thought is worse. If the water ever stops I will have to invent it.
The flame steadies now, loyal as a heartbeat. I move with the rhythm the way you walk to a song you didn’t know you knew.
Drip … step … drip … step.
Every third drop the echo hesitates, as though choosing between two throats before it falls. I tell myself the cave is large enough for confusion. The lie fits well; I wear it like the harness.
There are scratches along the wall—long, vertical, methodical. A tally, or a crawl mark. They end abruptly where the stone swells outward. I touch them anyway, because even damage feels like conversation.
Drip … listen … drip.
At one bend the sound of the drip moves. It had been ahead of me; now it stands somewhere behind, patient, repeating itself. I stop. The silence between drops is thick enough to lean on.
Then—two drops, close together. A stutter. I laugh nervously. “Make up your mind,” I tell it.
“...mind,” it replies.
Drip … you’re not funny … drip.
I talk anyway. The cave rewards conversation with repetition; that is almost companionship.
The floor descends into a basin where water has collected, shallow but enough to mirror light. The reflection of the lantern trembles like something alive and trying not to be. I kneel to fill the canteen again. The drip keeps time above me, every drop puncturing the surface in tiny explosions of light. It is hypnotic, mathematical, kind.
“Thank you,” I whisper. The words ripple through the pool, hit the walls, return softer, altered:
“...ank you…”
“…you…”
“…ink…”
Drip.
I freeze. The sound has changed pitch. It’s lower now, like a voice dropped into water.
Drip.
No—two drips at once, then one, then silence, then three in quick succession. A rhythm forming, breaking, forming again. The cave is learning syncopation.
I stand too fast, dizzy from belief. The light smears the world for a second. When it clears, something pale gleams on a shelf of rock at eye level—a piece of paper plastered flat by moisture.
Drip … find me … drip.
I pull it free carefully, afraid it will dissolve between fingers. Half the page is pulp. The surviving words swim in ink that has bled into veins like roots. I bring the lantern closer and read what’s left.
Day ?? — The sound lies. It moves when you do. It changes its skin. Don’t trust the drip.
The words tilt downhill. The line under them trails off into a single long stroke that bites into the page and stops.
I stare until the letters stop being letters. My stomach goes cold. The drip had been my metronome, my proof of sequence. Now it hisses behind me, irregular, smug.
Drip-drip-drip—pause—drip. It’s playing with me.
I clamp my hands over my ears. The sound doesn’t go away; it simply changes rooms inside my skull.
“Shut up!”
The echo does as it’s told—half a second too late, half a tone too low.
Shut up. Up. Up.
Then, a single drop falls exactly inside the space between my words, perfect as punctuation.
Drip.
The cave knows timing.
The page trembles in my hand. The lantern wobbles, spilling yellow across wet walls that seem to ripple, breathing. I want to move but I don’t know which direction is away. The drip has lost its coordinates; it falls from everywhere at once.
“Don’t trust the drip,” I repeat, the phrase a rope I don’t believe in. Every repetition makes it stranger.
Drip. Don’t.
Drip. Trust.
Drip. The.
Drip. Drip.
I back toward where I think I came from, one step, two, three—until the echo of my footfalls joins the rhythm and I can’t tell whose sound is whose.
The lantern’s flame bows suddenly, sucked inward. The light narrows, dies, and the world returns to its first truth: nothing but sound.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
I whisper, “Please don’t stop.”
And it answers,
“Stop.”