The cave mouth yawned like the entrance to another world — damp, silent, and cold enough to steal the breath from Emma Voss's lungs. She ducked beneath a slab of overhanging limestone and stepped into the shadows, her boots crunching on gravel that hadn't been disturbed in decades.
"Watch your head," called Officer Wren from behind her, his flashlight sweeping across jagged walls. "Locals say no one's been down here since the rockslide twenty years ago."
Emma nodded, already a few steps ahead. She wasn't here for ghost stories. She was here because a hiker had stumbled over something protruding from the collapsed passage last month — something that looked a hell of a lot like a human femur.
And now, thirty feet in, Emma saw the rest of it.
She knelt down and brushed her gloved fingers over a tangle of bones half-buried in sediment. A complete skeleton. Adult, mid-thirties, judging by the wear on the molars. But what caught her breath wasn't the age — it was the precision. This was no accident. The ribs had been severed cleanly, not broken. The kneecaps removed. The skull... hollowed.
Emma's mind began to spin, clinical and calm.
Cut marks — deliberate. Post-mortem.
Polished bone — exposed to heat, or chemicals.
Teeth — intact, but no tissue left. Not even cartilage.
This was not the work of time or nature. Someone had prepared this body.
She snapped photos, marking coordinates on her tablet. "This isn't prehistoric," she murmured to herself. "This is surgical."
Behind her, Officer Wren shifted uncomfortably. "You're saying murder?"
Emma stood slowly. "I'm saying this wasn't erosion or cave-in. Someone put this person here. Maybe more." Her eyes followed the curve of the tunnel, where the ground sloped downward into deeper shadow. "Do you smell that?"
Wren sniffed. "Smell what?"
"Copper. And smoke." She stepped forward, careful with every stride. "There's more down there. I'm sure of it."
"Miss Voss, I'm supposed to keep you above ground by sundown."
"You can go. I'll only be ten minutes."
He hesitated, shining his light after her, but said nothing. Emma didn't look back.
With each step, the smell thickened — metallic, almost sweet, like dried blood and burned meat. The walls closed in. The temperature shifted, no longer cold but strangely warm, like someone had lit a fire further in.
Then she saw it.
A wall — or what she thought was a wall — carved with shallow grooves. Symbols. Circles within circles. A long table etched into the rock. Ten empty chairs surrounding it.
She lifted her flashlight and froze.
On the far end of the stone table, tucked neatly against the wall, was a single object: a polished jawbone. Human. Propped upright like a trophy.
That's when she heard the first sound — not rock falling, not water dripping. But something deliberate.
A footstep.
Then another.
And another.
From behind her.
Emma turned, heart hammering.
No one was there.
Only darkness.
And the whisper of bone on stone.
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