A door appeared from the darkness, a wide, arched wooden slab beneath an ornately carved trim. Grabbing it by the handle, Scott swung the door inward, a cloud of dust kicking up from around his feet. Stepping through, he nearly knocked himself unconscious ramming into the brick wall that had been constructed right outside the doorway. The gray bricks, cemented with a sloppily laid lining of mortar, sealed the room off from the rest of the house.
Turning to Harry, Scott shrugged.
“Well,” Harry said, turning from the sealed doorway. “I guess this is as far as we go.”
Walking back through the darkened room, the glowing ball of light that surrounded them flickered off the walls. A long mantle ran the length of the room along the wall next to the door, dust-shrouded candlesticks lining the wooden beam. Pulling one of the half-melted candles out of its holder, Scott dipped it, wick first, into the lamp, the fuse crackling before finally glowing brightly with the bouncing flame. Pulling it out, he placed the flame atop the other wicks, the dust burning with a deep, thick black smoke. The flames slowly expanded from a small glow on the wicks.
With the flaming wax lining the wall, he turned back to the room, the glow dimly illuminating the small room. A yellowed atlas was nailed to the wall to the left, small, multicolored pushpins pressed through the map and into the wall in apparently random patterns across the continents. A series of black, metal filing cabinets lined the floor beneath the map. All of their drawers were closed tightly and each of them had an individual lock in the upper right corner. A handful of manila folders sat, stacked, atop one of them, buried beneath the years of the dusty accumulation.
A large bookcase sat in the doorway behind them, its shelves lined with books that appeared to be older than time, their splitting spines exposing the thick pages within. For whatever reason, it had been shoved against the door leading out into the tunnels within the hills, and judging from the enormous pile of dust against the bottom shelf from where they had pushed it into the room, it had been there for quite some time.
On the right side of the room there was a roll-top desk, a feather quill pen protruding from a small crystal cube filled with deep black ink. There was a cloth-bound book in the center, lying open, the writing on the pages buried beneath a layer of dust. A hand-crafted wooden chair lay on its back on the floor by the desk, the intricately-stitched seat cover, its loopholes still attached to the frame, sprawled over the back.
The cracked walls littered flakes of paint onto the wooden planks lining the floor, cobwebs stringing clear across the room. Water dripped from the ceiling in one of the corners of the room, splashing lightly into a small puddle of sloppy dust before flowing through the cracks in the floor, dampening the earth beneath.
Harry studied the map on the wall, his finger tracing a line between the numerous pinpoints. Scott walked over to the desk, setting the lantern down on the formerly highly-polished surface. Lifting up the book, he tapped the spine on the tabletop, the dust falling from the pages into a small pile. Holding it to the light in an attempt to read the handwritten words, he stared at the gracefully curving arcs of the ink on the page. The writing and strokes were exquisite.
“Check this out,” Harry said, holding up one of the folders that had been atop the filing cabinet. “These newspaper clippings are from 1889.”
Closing the book and tucking it beneath his left arm, he lifted the lamp from the table and carried it across the room to where Harry held up the file, his face buried within. He strained to read in the dim light.
Something moved in the shadow-filled corner of the room behind Harry. Unable to see much more than a tuft of dust glimmering at the edge of the thick darkness, Scott stopped dead in his tracks and watched, his breath freezing in his chest.
“Harry,” he whispered, the whites of his eyes expanding around his brown irises as his eyelids peeled back. “There’s something over there.”
Whirling, Harry stared deep into the shadows, his eyes trying to penetrate the veritable wall of black.
“I don’t see anything.”
The flames of the candles atop the mantle fluttered, the light flickering throughout the room, changing the shape of the shadows along the walls all around them.
“I think we need to go now,” Scott said, his eyes unable to turn from the corner of the room.
“But I just found these files from—”
“Take them with you.”
“We haven’t had a chance to—”
“Now,” Scott said, grabbing him by the arm and turning to guide him toward the bookcase that covered the entrance back into the tunnel.
A cold gust of wind swirled through the room, the candles flickering madly before fading into a smoke filled darkness. The flame within the glass shroud in Scott’s hand bounced mightily, the yellow flame blowing nearly straight sideways, but managing to stay lit.
There was another sound in the room, just beneath the whistling sound of the sudden and swirling gust of air. It was a dry, scraping sound, almost like the death rattle of the last gasp of air passing through the dry mouth into the lungs as they filled with fluid.
Quickening the pace, Scott pushed Harry in front of him and through the gap between the wall and the bookcase, out into the piled insulation on the damp stone floor. Glancing back, he could see a shape within the shadows, a deep black outline against the swirling, dust-filled shadows. The flame in his lamp flickered, the crackling yellow deepening to a dark red. His fingers burned, seeming to catch fire themselves as the metal handle on the lantern heated beneath his flesh, causing him to drop the lantern.
It shattered on the wooden floor, shards of glass bouncing in every direction. Kerosene splashed out in a large pool on the wooden planks of the floor. The deep red flame swelled like a wave atop the flammable liquid, spreading across the floor at an unheralded speed. Yet still, the shadow pressed further into the room, the flames lapping at its feet as it rapidly closed the gap between them.
Breaking his gaze from the room, Scott slipped past the bookcase and into the tunnel, Harry’s outline barely visible in the tunnel in front of him against the bouncing glow of his flashlight. Fighting for traction on the slick ground, Scott forced his legs to run. Panic began to settle into his chest, nearly causing his heart to pound right through his ribcage, his lungs refusing to draw any air. The red, flickering light from behind the bookcase lighted the thin channel around him, the shadows lengthening all around him momentarily, before the red glow finally dissipated, the flame burning itself out. Watching Harry’s light turn to the left into the main tunnel, he could suddenly feel the palpable darkness, pressing in tightly from the sides as it tried to squeeze the life from him, the sound of the heavy breathing echoing from all around him.
Tears swelled from the corners of his eyes, running in small streams down his dry skin, leaving a trail in the dust that had settled into his stubble. There was no feeling in any of his appendages as he sprinted, his own footsteps pounding the ground. He burst from beneath the stone archway into the main tunnel, the beam from Harry’s flashlight bounding up and down in the hallway ahead.
Following the light, he urged his legs on, faster and faster, sensing that whatever was behind him was gaining. His footsteps pounded on the thin layer of frozen ice in the center of the tunnel, snapping and popping. It was all he could hear as he just focused on Harry’s light ahead of him, slowly gaining in the blackness.
The light stopped ahead of him, fluttering for a moment before pointing straight at the ground. He could only barely make out the outline of Harry bending over, his hands on his knees, as he fought to regain his breath. Coming up fast, the blood in his veins burning as though it would eat straight through the vessels, spilling out beneath his flesh. He reached out, prepared to grab Harry and carry him out of the tunnel if that was his only option.
Stopping, his back leaning against Harry’s, he whirled, shining the light into the darkness behind him, but there was nothing there. He could feel an ice-cold breeze blowing straight into his face from the endless darkness. The frigidity stinging his tearing eyes, he batted his eyelids, fighting to see whatever had been following them before it was upon them. Visions of Brian being torn in half, and Tim liquefied on the path in the early morning sunlight, tore through his brain, his heart pounding in anticipation as he prepared to fight for his life should that be the only way out of the tunnel.
The wheezing sound that came in bursts from his own chest bounced off the walls around him. He tried, without even the slightest bit of success, to silence it long enough to try to listen. Stifling a cough, he flashed the light from one side to the next, over and over, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever was back there. And even though he couldn’t see anything, he knew, with ever fiber of his being, that they were not alone in that cavern.
