The Secret of Mantis Cave

Just outside of my hometown, there’s a small limestone cave called Mantis Cave. At the end of spring every year, hundreds of praying mantises go into the cave and never come out. Even stranger still, the bodies of the mantises are never found. Despite this, Mantis Cave is still a popular place for teenagers to hang out and explore themselves, as well as for amateur cave divers to cut their teeth and learn the basics. Littered among the various slick columns, slimy stalagmites, and wet stalactites of the first chamber in the cave is the trappings of uncouth youth – empty and crushed cans of beer swiped from parents’ fridge, more than a few pairs of panties, and of course, discarded condoms of all brands floating in the cave pool.

My friend Sarah and I were picking our way through this mess and around various stalagmites and columns, helmet lights ablaze and spelunking gear tied to our waists and between us a chest full of power drills and pick axes. Sarah also wore a backpack with some disposable cameras and some vials and storage containers – she wanted some samples from the cave to study. Aside from our helmet lamps we also brought several dozen glow sticks and batteries, as well as extra helmet lamps. She had recruited me to help her with her thesis project. She wanted to see if there mantises really are migrating to the cave, and if so, why.

“Did you ever come here as a teen, Sarah?” I asked.

“Nah, I didn’t,” she replied, ducking under a particularly low hanging stalactite. “I was too busy studying entomology. How about you, Kelly?”

“Once or twice,” I replied, “With Sandy. I think we both left a pair of our underwear here.” I pointed to a column off to the left. “Somewhere around that one, I think.”

Sarah made a wolf whistle and winked at me. “Sounds like you had a fun time.”

“Something like that,” I said, “But we’re not here to discuss my exes and poor choice in women.”

“I’ll make sure to tell your wife you said that when we get back,” Sarah teased.

“She’s the one with poor choice in women,” I fired back. “Watch out, there’s the drop off into the second chamber.” Mantis Cave is broken up into three accessible chambers, each time going deeper into the earth. The second chamber started at the foot of a cliff at the end of the first and was about twenty feet wide and thirty feet deep. On our third day, we had set up a pully system to lower the chest of tools down the cliff. In the middle of the second chamber is a five-foot wide hole that lead to the third chamber some fifty feet below. I had gone through this hole to the final, tight chamber many times myself, and the passage there was more of a slope than a drop. The thing that had always interested me was the possibility that there was a fourth, unexplored chamber. I had noticed a small opening a few inches across in the back of the third chamber, and while it could be a dead end just outside the light… That made for a boring cave diving story. I hadn’t the time or funds to explore that possibility until Sarah came along a few weeks ago to ask me to help her explore the cave. When I had told her about the possibility of an unexplored fourth chamber, she was ecstatic.

“Maybe that’s where the mantises go,” she suggested.

“It’s a possibility,” I agreed, “But it’s also likely they don’t go in there. It just doesn’t make any sense. Why would they all go into the cave? And why hasn’t anybody seen it?”

Sarah didn’t have an answer to that, and neither did I.

This was our tenth expedition into the cave. Sarah and I used the first two to set up pitons down to the second chamber and familiarize Sarah with the tight crawl down to the third chamber. The rest were spent widening that hole. It was tough work, but I was confident we were about to break through today. The hole was now almost wide enough Sarah could crawl into it. She was a bit bigger than I was. After a few more minutes of navigating to the third chamber, we were ready to begin work on widening the hole.

After a few hours of work with our pick axes and power tools, we had eventually widened the mouth of the hole enough so that Sarah could climb inside.

“Do you want to go first, or should I?” I asked, setting my pick down and leaning on it.

“You’re the expert,” she said gesturing towards the hole. “So, it’s probably safer if you do it.”

I nodded and set the pick axe down against the wall of the cave and began to climb into the hole we made. I was glad I had chosen to wear durable jeans and a long-sleeved shirt as I was forced to army crawl through the tunnel. Jagged rocks grazed against my skin and I could feel the weight of the whole cave above me pressing down on my back as I wriggled through.

It seemed to get tighter the farther along I went, so I twisted a little and called back to Sarah, “Careful, it’s getting tighter the farther I go.” The cave started to get slicker, and my pants and shirt were soaked completely. However, the pressure of the cramped tunnel vanished, and I could feel the cave roof raising. I could breathe better, and eventually I was able to crouch, then stand. I was able to turn around to look at Sarah.

“You alright, Sarah?” I asked. She was covered in water and on her bare arms I could see some bloody scrapes.

“Yeah,” she said, wincing as she gingerly rubbed her wounds. “Why didn’t I listen to you and wear long sleeves?”

“Arrogance?” I replied with a chuckle.

She shook her head and smiled. “Come on, let’s go on. It looks like we’re about to enter your fabled fourth chamber.”

“Not necessarily,” I said, “This tunnel could end at any moment just beyond the beams of our helmet lamps.”

She thought about it for a moment. “There’s still no mantis yet, either.”

“Come on, let’s keep going,” I turned and began to walk on. I cracked a glow stick every five yards or so and dropped it. Besides giving off light, they were also great markers in case we got lost. The best thing about cave diving is the absolute serene stillness of the cave. It’s not necessarily silent, especially not in limestone caves. The steady drip, drip, drip of water echoing throughout, and this mysterious tunnel was no different. There is nothing better than a dark, dank cave.

My meditation was interrupted by a sickening crunch beneath my black hiking boots. I lifted my boot and let out a grunt of disgust. On the sole of my boot, there was a large bright green dead mantis. I could pick out its twin scythe like forelegs, and a strange black goop forming their own little columns and dripping stalactites.

“Shit,” I said. “Sarah, I’ve found a mantis.”

“Really?” Sarah rushed over to me excitedly and checked out the insect. “Holy shit.” She crouched down and took out a small disposable camera and took a photo, the automatic flash illuminating the cave walls briefly. She took a pair of tweezers and picked the remains of the mantis off my boot and into one of the storage containers. “I don’t see a head on your boot.”

“Maybe it was a male mantis?” I suggested.

“Well, maybe. But mantises really only express sexual cannibalism when the female isn’t well fed,” Sarah explained. She pulled out a small scalpel and carefully ushered some of the black goo into a vial, “it’s less common in the wild than in captivity for that reason.”

“But it does happen?”

Sarah nodded. “Yeah, it does happen. What interests me more is the black goop. That’s not normal.”

“It’s definitely stickier than when I squish a bug outside,” I commented. “Can I wash my boot off?”

Sarah nodded. “Yeah I’ve got plenty of it.” I headed back to one of the puddles and scrubbed my boot clean.

“Let’s go,” I said as I took the lead, keeping my eyes sharp for any more surprises.

About one hundred feet later, we came to a bend in the tunnel. I gestured for Sarah to wait and I poked my head around the corner, my head lamp sweeping the floor first. I was glad I did.

“Sarah, there’s a cliff a few yards out,” I warned. Near the edge of the cliff I could also see a sturdy column of stone. “Pass me a glow stick, I want to see how far down that cliff goes.”

Sarah handed me the glow stick and I walked around the corner. I cracked the glow stick and dropped it over the edge of the cliff and watched as it fell about twenty feet before landing with a splash in a puddle down below.

“How far down does it go?” Sarah asked as she stepped around the corner.

“About twenty feet,” I replied as I pointed at the column. “Let’s tie a rope around that column and rappel down.” Sarah tied the rope to the column and I checked the knot. It seemed secure enough, so I went down first, followed by Sarah. Once Sarah was on solid ground, I looked down the path and noticed the tunnel led to another hole in the wall. It looked just big enough for Sarah to squeeze through. I noticed a few mantises on the floor, all of them missing their heads. I also noticed around each mantis small patches of a thick black moss.

“Looks like we’ve got one more hole to go through,” Sarah commented.

I nodded “Did you see all the mantises here?”

“Yeah, I think we’re getting close to finding the secret of Mantis Cave,” Sarah knelt next to them and began filling up containers with mantis bodies. She carefully squeezed a few of them too, and more of that sticky, black substance oozed from the necks.

“That is so gross,” I gagged.

“You eat live mealworms for shits and giggles, and you’re grossed out by black goop coming out of a mantis’s head?” Sarah asked incredulously as she scooped up a bit of the moss and shoveled it into a separate container.

“It’s like popping a zit,” I fired back. “Only instead of a white goo, it’s black.”

“When you put it that way…” Sarah shook her head. “Yuck.” She dropped the mantis into the container and put her equipment away. I noticed that the cave floor where Sarah scooped the moss from was covered in the thick black slime.

“Sarah, look at that,” I said, pointing at her samples.

Sarah nodded. “That’s why I wanted to collect the samples – I figured they were related in some way. I’ll need to run some tests back at the lab.”

“Ready to dive deeper?” I asked.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Sarah zipped her equipment up and we made our way over to the hole. I poked my head into it and saw that the hole opened just a few more feet ahead. What caught my attention however, was the sound of skittering that echoed through the narrow tunnel. I shivered involuntarily and pulled my head out.

“The tunnel goes about five feet before it opens again. It also sounds like there’s something up ahead. Maybe the mantises,” I said as I dusted my hands off.

“More crawling?” Sarah groaned. I nodded and she rolled her eyes. “Alright, I think I can lead.”

“Just be careful,” I warned her.

She climbed into the hole with a nod and I watched as she crawled through it. I heard a grunt as she climbed out the other side.

“Oh, wow!” She exclaimed, “Kelly, there’s so many mantises lining the walls of this chamber, and the floor has a thick carpet of some sort of sticky, black moss. They’re just sitting here, until I shine my light on them, then they try to scuttle away.”

“Clear the way, I’m coming in,” I said as I begin to climb through the opening, doing my best to ignore the constant skittering at the other end of the tunnel. I was about halfway through when I saw the flash of the camera go off.

Everything went silent, save for the constant drip, drip, drip.

Suddenly, an earsplitting shriek filled the air. The skittering noises turned instantly to hisses and the sounds of ripping flesh. Sarah continued screaming and I heard a dull thud as she scrabbled to get into the hole. I could see her helmet lamp bouncing around wildly, shadows darting across it, and I noticed a loud buzzing noise. Then, her helmet lamp went out. A gigantic swarm of praying mantises poured out of the cave mouth and I flattened myself against the tunnel floor as they flew over me. I looked up and screamed in absolute horror as I saw each and every single mantis in the swarm had huge, horribly swollen heads. One of the mantises landed on me and screeched at me. It raised one of its terrible scythed legs and slashed me across the nose. I let out a yelp of pain and slapped the bugger away. Its head exploded with a sickening squelch. A fountain of black goo covered my hand and face.

It tasted foul, like a motor oil and vodka cocktail. I immediately spit it out in disgust. I looked to the mouth of the tunnel and saw Sarah trying to crawl towards me, covered in red blood and that foul black goo. I reached for her and for one brief moment her slick, wet finger tips touched mine. Through the weak beam of my helmet lamp I saw a great, fuzzy black shape welling up behind Sarah. It fell upon her ankles and dragged her kicking and screaming form back into the fourth chamber, leaving a black and red streak smeared across the tunnel’s floor. I quickly scrambled and scooted out of the tunnel and back to the entrance. I did not want to deal with whatever it was that had dragged Sarah back into the fourth chamber.

I spun around and saw the cloud of mantises swarming around angrily at the end of the base of the cliff before turning around and flying back towards the hole. I fell on my ass and covered myself as they flew above me. They seemed to be ignoring my quivering form. I laid there on the floor in terror until the sounds of the mantises skittering stopped echoing from the tunnel. I was too terrified to move. That probably saved my life.

I got up and ran back to the cliff – I could come back for Sarah later. I climbed back up the cliff face, crawled through the tunnel and scrambled up into the third chamber. I ran into the light of day and covered my eyes at the sudden burst of sunlight. I didn’t stop running until I arrived at Sarah’s truck and drove off. That wasn’t the end of things though. When I got home that night, I made some phone calls, first to Sarah’s family, then the police, then my wife. I returned with two of my spelunking friends Ted and Will, as well as a group of paramedics to recover Sarah’s body the very next day. When we arrived at the cave, we were greeted by a tall, pale man in a black suit and a large plastic dome at the mouth of the cave.

“My name is Dale Smith,” he said. “I’m from the CDC.” I took the badge from him and passed it to Will, who passed it to Ted.

“What’s the CDC doing out here?” Ted asked as he passed the badge back to Dale.

“We’ve been notified of a biohazard within this cave and we’ve come to make sure nobody gets sick,” Smith replied. He gestured to the plastic dome. “You can’t go inside.”

“My friend died in there,” I shouted, my hand balling up in a fist. “I need to get her body back.”

Dale looked at me for a moment and asked, “Are you Kelly Jordan?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“We were expecting you – we need you to lead us to the chamber,” he said.

“Alright,” I said as I made my way towards the plastic dome.

He held up a hand and pointed at a separate dome. “You need to put on a hazmat suit first.” I grunted and headed into the second dome. “We’ve encountered this before. Have any of you been exposed to the material?”

“They haven’t,” I replied, “But I was, yesterday.”

Dale nodded solemnly. “I was afraid of that. We’ll have to prescribe you some antibiotics, but since we caught it early you should be alright.” Inside, men dressed in blue scrubs helped us put on hazmat suits, before putting their own on. They grabbed several plastic boxes and one of them put on a flamethrower. We were finally ready. We headed out to the second dome I led them through the tunnel Sarah and I had widened, down the cliff and to the final tunnel. The first thing I noticed was the lack of mantis bodies anywhere within the tunnel preceding the fourth chamber. There were however, patches of black moss that oozed that sticky black slime when stepped on. We crawled through the tunnel and I noted that there were several long streaks of black moss at the end, roughly where Sarah had been yanked from my grip. We had no choice but to crawl through the moss, the black sludge oozing out onto us. We arrived within the fourth chamber to discover the entire chamber was covered in that inky, black moss. One of the men wandered around and accidentally kicked a large lump of the moss. It came free with a sound not unlike the tearing of cloth. Underneath the mossy carpet was a human skull, covered in the black slime of the moss.

“Is that Sarah?” exclaimed a shocked Will.

“I think so,” I replied as I crouched down. I began to rip the awful moss up, shuddering each time I heard it tear apart. Ted and Will joined me, as did some of the paramedics, and soon we uncovered the whole skeleton, wearing the tattered remains of Sarah’s clothes and backpack.

“Holy shit…” Ted muttered. We silently collected the bones of our friend and her bag. We carried her out of the tunnel in the boxes as the men from the CDC collected samples of the moss and the ooze. The last guy to leave was the man with the flamethrower. He lit it up and fired at the moss. The moss began to wail in agony as it crackled and burned. Ted, Will, and myself looked at each other in absolute horror as we listened to the shrieks of pain. The men from the CDC simply waited, glassy eyed and bored. We were escorted back out. The CDC confiscated Sarah’s samples as well as her bones for a few weeks while they ran some tests on it. It turns out, the moss was related to a fungus in the South American rainforest. You see, in the rainforests of South America, there is a fungus that hijacks the bodies of ants and spiders. For the gestation period of the fungus, the host goes about doing its normal thing. When the fungus is ready to reproduce, it hijacks the host’s body and forces it to hang just above the forest floor where it rains its spores down on passing insects below, further spreading its spores. So maybe that’s what happened to the mantises. Maybe that’s what’s happening to me. I woke up last night just outside the mouth of the cave, with a small, soft lump on top of my head.