This cave killed his sister. An outgoing adventurous spirit, she had gone down and never come out. Search and rescue spent days delving into the darkness to no avail. The weather was notorious for rain, and this cave especially susceptible to flooding. The authorities sealed the entrance and turned their backs. But ${name} couldn't let it rest. He couldn't dispel the images of her trapped, floundering in the confines of some crevice; her bones abandoned to the deep. Determined to put an end to waking up in a cold sweat, he devoted every spare moment to learning how to spelunk himself, and scuba as well. He would put her to rest.
He ducked under the yellow tape, faded from years of exposure, and stepped into the gloom. He had studied every scrap of information about the rescue effort, watched hours of footage from the divers. It was an eerie feeling, going over steps he knew so intimately, treading in real life where he had gone so often through restless dreams. He followed the path his sister had tread, diverging quickly from the casual route suitable for the casual caver to the cramped passages which only became even more restrictive the further in one went. The ceiling lowered, rapidly enclosing into a muddy crawlway, barely wide enough for him to move with his body at an unnatural angle, squeezing him into a space just large enough to fit his shoulders. The air grew stale, filled with moisture, stagnant, laced with minerals as he shuffled along, his kit dragging along in a bag attached by cord to his ankle. This shaft continued for hundreds of meters and thankfully was only partially flooded. Emerging at the far end into a chamber blissfully large enough to allow him to stand and stretch, his relief was spoiled by two facts: firstly, this room was the limit of the officially explored cavern— beyond this point he had only his memory of rescue footage to rely on, but that was a scant resource as, at the time, the majority of the warrens branching off from this hub had been flooded, leaving most of the recordings a useless brown murk. The second thing was more personal: one of his sister's spare flashlights, aimed at the ceiling and tied to a stake driven into the silt. Long since burned out, it had been meant to be her beacon to guide a return journey. One breadcrumb leftover among many, as the rescue divers made a hurried retreat of their own, leaving their share of debris. He chocked back his emotions, and did his best to remain resolute, setting off in a direction the search party hadn't covered, determined to find her remains, at all cost.
Hours of exploration left him tired, caked in mud, and frustrated as he discovered the end of each new blind alley. The cavern was labyrinthine, branching into twisting, turning tunnels, descending ever deeper into the earth, some left dry enough for easy passage while others were choked with water. His headlamp cast wild shadows around every corner, making the walls seem alive, as he searched for even the faintest sign of her having come this way. As he shuffled on hands and knees down yet another path, he watched as a droplet of moisture formed on the ceiling inches in front of him. A portent of rain. Soon the craggy gullies would be awash and the chambers would flood. It would take hours to retrace his arduously made steps and make an ascent. To stay was madness, but the thought of leaving, even with every intention to return, repulsed him. He pressed on into the depths.
Pulling himself through the apex of a nearly vertical shaft, ${name} emerged into a larger grotto and retched at the dank, overwhelming stench of fetid rot. A strange mixture of revulsion and hope welled inside of him. This was the moment he had been anticipating, the closure he had been longing for. He was already running through the difficult realities of the actual retrieval of whatever remained of her in his mind when his light caught sight of the first evidence of decomposition. A yellowed pustule, its original form indecipherable, clung to the rock. The sour odor of decay and putrefaction grew stronger as he drew closer. He braced himself for the sight as he panned his light up, but doubt his own vision as the lantern revealed more and more flesh in various states of decay. Too much for a single woman. Reeling with confusion, he fetched a more powerful flashlight from his bag.
It looked like a tumor, a bulbous, viscous sprawl of tissue coated in a glistening ooze of pus, blood, and fluids. Through the jaundiced, gnarled skin he could see a senseless mangle of muscle, sinew, bone and organs writhing within. ${name}, stupefied, and questioning his own sanity, couldn't help but run his eyes across the slowly undulating mass of gore. Horrified, he was able to distinguish a face amid the matted, tangled mess. His older sister's unforgettable face.
He took a step on quivering legs. Could she be alive somehow, as a part of this wretched, grotesque monstrosity? As he drew closer, the thing seemed to respond, swelling and bulging, a wet popping sound resounding off the cave walls as a section approximately twice his size sloughed off, forming a misshapen, vaguely humanoid tangle. His heart thundered in his chest as it lumbered towards him, his sister's desperate eyes the centerpiece.
Adrenaline and instinct overwhelmed any conscious thought. He fled, heedless of all caution, into the first cranny in the rock he spied, jamming himself into the extremely narrow cleft. It was soon too tight even to inhale fully, desperately kicking and cloying within the limits of his mobility, willing himself forward through the dark, water cascading down around him.
The crack widened abruptly, as the path ahead shifted from lifeless stone to an opening he could only compared to a vulva, secretions flowing down the engorged, pulsating walls of musculature. He hesitated, but the water about his chest demanded a decision. The cavern was puckered, formed of tense folds constricting around him as he shuffled through it, becoming coated in the thick fluids. It was as if he were inside an enormous bowel, or birth canal. From the walls around him, arms emerged, flailing wildly, thrashing against him, grasping with outrageous strength,