Unconvinced, Jason kept moving down into darkness, barely able to make out his hand on the rung in front of him. He discovered he had reached the bottom when his foot met water instead of the next rung. Some experimental probing revealed it was ankle deep, enough to submerge his sandals in the icy cold. The bottom of the well was flat but, as it turned out, just as slippery as the walls. His feet slid out from under him and only his hands still gripping the rungs saved him from bashing his head against the side of the well. He ended up sprawled at the bottom of the well, dank water joining the blood and ointment in staining his new pants.

“Lovely.”

The advantage of his low perspective was that he found himself looking directly at a slightly darker circle in the wall of what was already a very dark well. He reached out tentatively and found it was a hole, large enough to crawl through. He didn’t know if it was the source of the well’s water or some kind of drainage tunnel.

“No,” Jason said. “I’m definitely not interested in crawling in there.”

Reject quest [Secrets of the Well]?

“Sod off.”

Jason looked up again at the bright circle of sky, then the dark circle of the tunnel. With a groan, he started probing the pitch-black hole with his hands.

4. Cannibals and Spelunking

4

Cannibals and Spelunking

Jason slowly crawled his way into the dank tunnel, a circular pipe of wet and slimy brickwork. It was wide enough to push himself along, but tight enough that he was pressed against the clammy sides. The darkness engulfed him as he moved away from what meagre light reached the bottom of the well. Edging down the tunnel, touch was the only sense with which he could navigate. With the ubiquitous smell of wet rot, he wished his nose was as useless as his eyes.

“This is not what I planned to do with my day.”

If it turned out to be a dead end, he would be forced to shimmy backwards, the tunnel far too tight to turn around.

“Admittedly, my plans for the day were fairly loose, but cannibals and spelunking aren’t things you just casually slide into the schedule.”

Talking to himself didn’t help much, but any distraction was a welcome bulwark against the encroaching claustrophobia. The gloom of the well had seemed stifling, but the dark of the tunnel was much deeper. He felt panic’s icy fingers crawl over his flesh as the tunnel closed in on him. He knew it wasn’t actually getting smaller, but his rationality seemed powerless in the cold, wet oblivion.