not just of boxed memorabilia, but of Chris as well.
“Chris!” Abby shouted again, this time as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
“I don’t see him, but I know the scream came from down here,” Ethan said, his voice a mixture of fear and apprehension.
“Christopher!” Madison shouted from the steps. To Ethan, she sounded like an overly concerned Smurf. Her voice was too small for the volume she gave it, too delicate for such worry.
Chris and Abby began to circle the room, going around either side of the steep wooden steps. They met on the other side having found no trace of Chris, just the stacked stones and hard earthen floor.
“Where are you guys? I’m scared,” Madison whined child-like.
“Right here, sweetie. See the lights?” Abby responded gently. She realized that if Chris was in any real trouble and this was not some form of prank, her little Madison might not be able to handle it, might crack herself and become a useless puddle of weeping emotions.
“He is not in here,” Ethan whispered.
“He has to be somewhere down here… Wait, do you hear that?” Abby asked in a hush.
Ethan strained to hear over the sound of Madison’s feet scuffing through the loose dirt floor. Faintly, from a corner, he could just hear a distant sobbing, a deep and emotional release—the crying of one mourning the loss of their soul…or perhaps their sanity.
“Over near that corner,” Ethan pointed as Abby turned and followed. He walked gingerly to the recess, sweeping the floor with his flashlight before seeing Chris’s footprints. “Chris! Where are you?” he shouted loudly. Urgency was building in him; he had a feeling, a premonition that something horrible was about to happen. He felt this way often enough to not be mastered by it, but here and now, it was different, oddly-flavored compared to the other times before.
The footsteps stopped at the wall, and beyond, he could hear the mournful sobbing. “He walked through a wall?” Ethan asked aloud, clearly in disbelief.
Abby reached up and touched the wall. It was stiff but most certainly fabric. She whisked it away with her hand, sending an explosion of dust into the room. Behind laid a dark passage, near the end of which a faint sobbing echoed about.
“Chris!” Abby shouted down the passage. “What’s wrong, Chris? Answer me!” Abby felt the foreboding pressure, the self-preserving need to stay out of the passage, and so her voice became frantic.
The sobbing was the only sound that drifted back.
Ethan worked his way around her and started down the passage. It had the same dirt floor of the cellar but the walls were not stacked stones or brick, just the naked walls of carved rock. It was moist enough to almost rain, and chilly enough to give rise to gooseflesh. Their steps were almost silent, the dirt of the floor as fine as chalk dust. The beams of their flashlight flitted chaotically around the passage as they went, giving the whole scene a nightmarish fervor with glimpses of stone and earth, aged dark iron and rust.
“Chris! Answer me, damn it!” Abby almost screamed down the corridor.
Her urgency and franticness became infectious and Ethan began to move faster, almost running. He was afraid something might happen if they went too quickly, but could not contain his own insistent need to see Chris safe. The feeling of impending doom fed the urgency, and so he allowed himself the hazardous pace. A building cloak of fear began to weigh upon him, prod him, and threaten his already fragile sanity.
Ethan came to a skidding stop before what he had just now realized was a cell, a prison cell, and found Chris sitting within, hugging his knees in one corner and sobbing horribly. Ethan found it rather unsettling finding the most egotistical, self-important, and masculine among them reduced to a lost and tormented child.
“Chris?” Abby whispered gently, using her mother-of-Madison voice. “What’s wrong?” She tugged on the cell door, but it refused to move. “How did you get in there?”
Madison began to whimper as though she were about to cry.
“Chris, come and open the door. Chris!” Abby sounded every bit the concerned mother.
Chris did not move to open the door or even raise his head. His back jerked with spasms of crying, the only sign he was still breathing.
Ethan began trying to figure out how to open the door. The darkness and rust lent very little aid to discovering what released the door and allowed it to swing open. There was a latch, but it did not move, frozen in layers of rust. He found a large keyhole, almost large enough for his finger, but he had no tools with which to try and pick a lock.
“Chris! Come to the door!” Abby shouted at him, and Madison finally burst into fearful tears.
“It’s too late…” Chris croaked. His voice sounded dry and torn. “The captain is here now, and he wants to know things…”
“Chris, stand up and come here,” Abby demanded, once more in her gentle, motherly tone.
“He wants to know things…but I didn’t tell him. No.”
“Chris, you’re starting to scare me and you’re making Madison cry now.”
“Captain Black wants to know things…”
“Chris!” Abby screamed.
“Come on, Chris; let’s get out of here, alright?” Ethan urged.
“He wants to know everything,” Chris said firmly as he stood, facing away from the others. “I didn’t tell him anything, though. Captain Black didn’t get anything from me. But now it’s too late…” Chris unsnapped the leather sheath that came with his simple wood-handled Buck knife, and withdrew it.
“Chris, come on!” Abby pleaded. She was becoming mastered by the dread about her, the insistent pressure that Chris was about to do something terrible.
“That’s enough, Chris; time to go, dude,” Ethan added.
Chris pulled on the blade until it clicked open. “The Captain got these sticks, they burn… He wants to know things…” Chris said as he turned suddenly.
His skin now crowded with burns not much bigger than a thumbprint, oozing blood softly. There had to be hundreds of them, but the most horrible were his eyes, now burnt to empty sockets. They stared hollowly, but still wept blood down among the pockmarks on his face.
“Oh my God…” Abby sobbed.
“Chris! What happened to you? Come to the door!” Ethan shouted at him.
“Captain Black wants to know things …but he ain’t gettin' nothin’ outta me…” Chris trailed off and suddenly drove the knife into the side of his neck and forced it through his throat.
Madison screamed brutally as Chris sputtered through a wet breath and fell to his knees.
“Chris!” Abby screamed as she began to cry.
Then the blood came. A torrent of crimson rushed across the beams of the flashlight and Ethan began to hammer on the latch of the cell with his bare hands, cursing his helplessness as the flesh tore from his fists. Chris fell to his face and began flooding the cell with an unimaginable amount of blood.
Abby grabbed onto Madison and they wept together, the horror of what just happened almost too much for them to hold onto as a concrete reality, and Ethan stopped pounding on the cell door. He spotlighted Chris once more and took a step back to be closer to the girls. As he did, the cell door eased open slowly, shrieking through the rust like a bad violinist. Ethan wrestled his mind to calm, as the doctors had taught him, and it suddenly filled with an old black woman, warning them out of the cellar.
Chapter 8
Ethan’s feeling of encroaching dread, the premonition of unstoppable doom, did not want to subside even with Chris’s act of violent suicide. It began to consume his thoughts, overwhelm his personal despair, and his shock at the violence he had just witnessed pushed slowly to the back of his mind.“You all keep out dat cellar, hear?” echoed through.
He took Abby by her shoulders, the girls having collapsed to their knees to weep. “We have to go, Abby. We need to make our way down the mountain, get to Brighton or to a cellular signal or whatever, and call for help.”
