Great story, but it did reveal one thing about myself that is probably very disturbing...
As I was reading what happened to them, I wanted more and more to go to that cave and confront whatever they had run into. Find out for myself what was happening, and then, if it was evil, put it to rest. As it is, I'm considering writing a sequal to it, where a group of amateur cavers find the cave and investigate.
Either way, I think it says quite a bit about myself that I'd willingly put myself in that position, against an unknown being in the depths of the earth, perhaps battling against the fates to simply survive.
"What had begun as a case of morbid curiosity has turned, inevitably, into something more. We have found something lying in the deepest bowels of the earth, something that we cannot risk running loose on humanity. And so we return, to the place known as the Mysterious Cave, to end the evil once and for all... or die trying..."
And so, it begins...
Magius out.
Any easily-packaged tidbits of knowledge like that goes a long way towards giving people a sense of 'you are there'.
