The Descent

Sarah loses her husband and daughter in a car accident in Scotland, the deaths sudden and absolute while she sits in the passenger seat and watches. A year later she is surviving on medication and fragile sleep, the trauma unprocessed and close to the surface. Her friend Juno arranges a reunion of their climbing group — six women, a cave system in the Appalachian Mountains, the kind of physical challenge that is supposed to anchor a person back into their body.

The cave system collapses behind them early in the descent, sealing the entrance. Juno reveals that the system she chose is not the one she told the others she had filed permits for — it is unmapped and unregistered, a more challenging route she kept to herself rather than have anyone talk her out of it. No one knows where they are. They have one direction: forward.

In the deep dark, Sarah glimpses something pale moving. Then they find bones. Then the Crawlers find them — pale, eyeless, echolocating humanoids adapted entirely for underground life, fast and numerous. The cave becomes a killing ground. In the chaos, Juno drives a pickaxe into Beth's throat by accident and leaves her. Beth lives long enough to show Sarah a locket she found — Juno's, engraved with initials that confirm what Sarah has suspected: Juno was sleeping with her husband.

The group is picked off one by one. Sarah finds Juno, the last other survivor. She shows her the locket. Juno understands what Sarah knows and what that means. Sarah drives a pickaxe into Juno's leg and leaves her for the Crawlers.

Sarah finds a shaft upward, crawls through it, and claws her way out of the earth into a forest at night. She reaches her car. She drives. She pulls over, retching. She looks at the passenger seat. Her dead daughter Jessica sits there holding a birthday cake with lit candles, smiling at her. Sarah snaps back into her body. She is still in the cave. She is at the bottom of the shaft in the dark, a torch in her hand, alone. There was no exit. There is no exit.