We are excited to announce the fiction winner of the February 2025 Chattanooga Writers’ Guild Monthly Contest is John C. Mannone with the submission “Cave Diving” and runner-up is Kate Landers with the submission “The Woods.” This month’s theme was “Cave / Cave-in.” Thanks to all who participated. And thank you to our fiction judge, Alexandria Kelly!
Cave Diving
Dawn scarlets the sky in the still air, but the merlot-tinged sea is boisterous. After a customary prayer, I slip into a quieter pool and navigate to the mouth of a sea cave. A thousand bubbles shimmer as pearls as they ascend to the ceiling of sea, and grow before disappearing into the tumult of waves above. Thirty feet down, I balance buoyancy, dangle from limestone rock. This isn’t a typical sea cave. It once was a freshwater pool harboring cenotes (cen-oh’-tays) before flooding several thousand years ago. And after that, an earthquake shook the ground and broke the faulted earth. The Pacific rushed in to expose and infuse its salty water to a labyrinth of passages, possibly branching across Mexico to the Caribbean. Shafts of growing morning-light pierce the darkness, exposing an eerie green. I am careful not to stir the silt with my fins, which would scatter the light and reduce visibility to nothing.
About two hundred feet in, the mouth of another cave—fanged with stalactites from the roof of the mouth and stalagmites from its lower jaw—opens into the throat of a dark chamber gradually sloping to fifty feet. After I pass through, a human skull, perfectly preserved, but deliberately deformed, rests at the bottom with other bones. I’ve read that high-ranking Maya people were buried like that. But this is far from the Yucatán. Waves of hot and cold flush through my body as a surge of adrenalin is secreted. I have disturbed a sacred burial. I didn’t know, I thought the warning sign was to protect the cave formations, which I didn’t plan to touch.
I turn and train my flashlight on the ominous spikes. The ghost of a Great White haunts my thoughts. The otherwise warm water takes on a chill; I try to shake off the feeling but find my breathing growing a bit frantic. I reason with myself that there’s no real danger from sharks, but my hyperventilation is not assuaged. I’m gulping pressurized air like double dry martinis. I am drunk with fear. Is it coming? I feel the rush of water. The closing in. The gnashing. No one can hear me scream. Caved-in, I rush toward the dim light in the opening to the sea; my air supply rapidly dwindling.
~~~
Two weeks later, the authorities find the abandoned jeep with a dive log on the leather seat. They quickly deduce the missing person is a diver who came to explore the restricted sea cave.
A team of divers trained on cave diving rescue and recovery, are mustered. It’s noon, and the tide is low. They use an underwater scooter to get to the cave and begin looking for the lost diver, but without losing time before the high tide comes in to make the operation more dangerous.
Their high-intensity lights cut through the water. The light catches a reflection from the shiny scuba tank valve in the near distance. They find the diver, his eyes wide open, and impaled by a fallen stalactite piercing his neck.
John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, New England Journal of Medicine, and others. He was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017), and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He has five full-length collections, the latest is his first short fiction collection, Dark Wind, Dark Water (Mind’s Eye Publishing, 2025). He’s a retired professor of physics teaching mathematics and creative writing whenever the opportunity arises.
THE WOODS
We’d only been moved into Section Three of Riata Estates for two days when Ricky and me met the neighborhood kids. And it was less than a week later that we learned about what happened in The Woods.
The Woods was just undeveloped, piney lots that backed up to our street and the only thing interesting about it was the waterlogged sign declaring Section Four coming Summer 1946! That was almost twenty years ago and there was no one around anymore who could say why they’d never finished clearing the land. One afternoon I went in looking for squirrels to shoot with my B.B. gun. When I came out at the edge of our yard, Ricky and the others – Charlie, his brother Buck, and Joey, Will, Bob, and Mikey – were sitting on the back porch playing cards. Buck and Charlie saw me first. They exchanged glances then Charlie said, “You oughta not wander around in there. Sometimes kids go in, but they don’t come back out.”
“Aw, shut up,” I said.
“It’s true, midget,” Joey said. “My older brother had a friend and they were playing baseball in that cul-de-sac at the end of your street. Someone hit a homerun into those trees, the kid went chasing after it, and he was never seen again.”
“Baloney,” I said, then forgot all about it until Mike went missing.
We’d been playing hide and seek around the neighborhood until the streetlamps came on and everyone went home. But at 9 o’clock that night, his mom called our house asking if Mike was with us and by 10:15 there was a search party scouring The Woods. A neighbor had seen him heading inside earlier that day. I wasn’t surprised. Mike was the type to jump off the diving board without looking down first; the one to blow through stop signs on his bike, ignoring the squealing of tires and honking that followed in his wake. It made sense to me that he’d also be the one to take a chance by hiding in The Woods.
But when no trace of Mike was found, rumors started spreading about a white van cruising the neighborhood. The general consensus became that he’d been kidnapped and the police started focusing their efforts on the interstates.
The next day, Ricky and I were awakened by someone tapping on our bedroom window. “Come on,” Charlie said. “We’re searching The Woods. The cops may have given up on finding Mikey there, but we know this shit has happened before, and we’re not going to let it happen again.”
“Grab your B.B. gun,” Buck said, pointing at me. “You got anything useful, Ricky?”
“Yeah.” Ricky grabbed his Boy Scout pack and started filling it with items from around our room. Then we climbed out our window and met up with Joey, Will, and Bob.
“To the cul-de-sac,” Joey said. We slipped into The Woods and walked parallel along our street past our neighbor’s backyards until we reached the spot where his brother’s friend had supposedly disappeared.
“Be careful,” Charlie said as we spread out. We hadn’t been searching two minutes when Bob screamed. “He’s gone!” He was pointing at a place on the ground forty feet away. “Will was right there. Then he just…”
Everyone ran to where Bob was pointing. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. A carpet of dried pine needles. A couple of small, table-shaped boulders that had fallen onto each other, creating a tent shape that looked like it could fall over at any second. A bunch of scraggly ferns, and–
“Holy shit,” Charlie whispered. “Look in there.” Ricky was the first to lean inside the rock tent. I had a terrible vision of the two boulders suddenly collapsing and decapitating my brother. “Watch out!” Charlie hissed, pointing not at the rocks, but to the ground.
What I thought was shadows underneath the rock tent was actually a void – a lack of any ground at all.
“Shine your light down there, Buck,” Charlie said.
Buck pulled a flashlight from his pocket, then army-crawled to the lip of the hole and shined his light inside. The light bounced off jagged slate-gray edges for about twenty feet before disappearing.
“Is that a cave, or an old well, or what?” Ricky asked.
“Dunno, man,” Buck said. He scooched forward a few more inches, until his face was right above the hole. “Will? Are you down there?”
His voice echoed back to us. “Will-ill-ill? Are you down there-ere-ere?”
Then all was silent. Buck backed away from the hole. “We should go down there.”
“I brought a rope,” Ricky volunteered and started rummaging through his pack.
“Since you’re the littlest, you go,” Charlie declared, pointing at me.
“No,” Ricky said. “I’ll do it.”
“You’re too heavy, man,” Charlie protested. “Let your little brother–”
Ricky glared at Charlie. “I’m not lowering my kid brother down there. I’m the second-smallest. I’ll go.”
We tied one end of the rope around Ricky’s waist, then gripped the other end of the rope tug-of-war style.
“I’m ready,” Ricky said as he sat down. He lowered his feet into the hole and just as we were about to give him a little slack we heard, “Will-ill-ill? Are you down there-ere-ere?”
Ricky screamed. I dropped the rope and ran to my brother, who was struggling to back up. “Something’s got me!”
He was bent forward with both hands around his ankle, trying to free his foot from whatever had ahold of him. I grabbed my rifle from where I had laid it against a tree and was squaring it up to my shoulder when I saw something hairy, wet, and black lurch up out of the hole, talons reaching toward my brother’s face.
My .177 caliber B.B.s ricocheted off the creature’s thick hide but I kept my finger on the trigger, blasting out dozens of rounds as I approached until I was close enough to aim the barrel straight into one of its eyes. I fired.
The creature released its grip on Ricky’s ankle, and with a squeal that sounded a lot like Mike, fell back into the hole. I looped my arms under Ricky’s armpits and dragged him backwards.
Charlie, Buck, and Joey were busy throwing everything they could get their hands on down the hole. Bob was nowhere to be found. I was about to ask if that thing had grabbed Bob, too, when Charlie yelled, “Come on, guys! Help!”
Ricky and I jumped up and started grabbing sticks, limbs, rocks, anything we could find. When we’d cleared a twenty-foot radius, we threw down our backpacks and covered those with soil. But we could tell we weren’t even close to filling up that hole.
“Help me push these over,” Charlie panted. He was leaning on one of the boulders balanced above the hole. It was wedged just under the other boulder, and he was trying to dislodge it. If it collapsed, it would completely cover the mouth in the ground. I rushed over and threw all my weight against the boulder. I felt it stir a little, like the first wiggling of a loose tooth. Ricky, Buck, and Joey fell in behind me.
“Push!” Charlie commanded and the five of us dug our feet into the soft earth and heaved as hard as we could. “PUSH!” But the boulder refused to fall over. From below our feet came a muffled, “Will-ill-ill?”
I dropped to my knees and started digging away at the soil. Dirt wedged itself so thick under my nails it felt like they might pop off. My shoulders and forearms ached but I kept digging. The moment I glimpsed the bottom of the boulder, I felt it start to tip. My friends leapt back just as it fell with a boom on top of the hole. The other boulder collapsed on top of it with a bang so loud, it sent a huge cloud of birds screeching from the trees. Something scratched furiously at the underside of the boulder for ten minutes, but the boulder remained in place.
***
It turned out Bob had skedaddled out of there as soon as Ricky started screaming. And, he later claimed, he wasn’t even that good of friends with Mike, so he shouldn’t have been out there looking for him anyway. Bob switched schools over the summer and we never talked to him again.
After Will went missing, everyone assumed a predator was operating in our neighborhood. It was a long time before anyone was allowed out on their own again. We never told the cops where we’d last seen Will. We knew no one would believe us about the thing living in that hole, and that all they’d do if we told them is lift up those boulders and let it out. Will and Mike were gone for good, and as long as we stayed out of The Woods and kept quiet, that monster would be, too.
Kate Landers is a writer and editor. She writes fiction, personal essays, poems, children’s literature, and humor. Occasionally she writes blogs, which can be found at KateLanders.com. She also teaches yoga and plays roller derby.
The Monthly Contests rotate through a pattern of Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction throughout the year, with a new theme each month. Go to the 2025 Monthly Contest Series Info page to view the genre and theme for each month. Next up: Non-fiction entries about “Drones” are due March 31.
This contest is free to enter for members of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild. To become a member, click HERE
You must be logged in to post a comment.