her tight jeans. “Let me see the burn…”
Abby dropped the side of her flannel then skinned her t-shirt over her arm. There, but thankfully small, was a length of seared flesh. It was cauterized and dry, but clearly painful. Ethan knew that if it had been worse, it would not have hurt as much. That was the merciful thing about burns, if there was such a thing: the worse they were, the less nerve there was to tell you about it.
“It’s pretty much a clean wound, Abby. I can use some of this cream stuff to make it softer and not crack open, but that’s about it.”
“Have at, Dr. Phillips,” she replied dryly.
As Ethan dressed the burn as best he could, Madison approached the flashlight Ethan had dropped and searched upward. “I think he’s gone.” She retrieved the loose flashlight and pistol and brought them back to Ethan.
Ethan began to look around the room with his light while Abby pulled her shirt back on. The space was so large that no walls could be seen around them, just scattered bones and endless brick flooring. “Well, someone has to pick a direction.”
Abby stood and pointed in a direction, wincing at the pain biting into her shoulder. “Let’s go that way.”
Ethan stood slowly, testing his feet. He found them sore and knew there would most likely be bruising later on, but he could walk. “Let’s go,” he said and began leading them in the direction Abby had chosen.
Before they could take their first step, a tapping sound came to them from many directions—a single tap of metal against stone, just once, but enough to freeze them in their tracks.
“What was that?” Madison whispered, and it sounded again.
Chapter 10
The sound echoed back to them over and again, its source still unclear, their direction now a question. The tapping sound was somewhat mechanical, but still something they immediately dreaded, not for the burning thing above, but of its own evil merit. Whatever the source, it was clear it was of ill intent.
“Which way is that coming from?” Abby whispered, straining to hear the sound again.
Before anyone could answer, the sound drifted through the darkness of the room.
“I don’t know…” Ethan whispered as he fumbled bullets into the spent chambers of the revolver.
“Witch…” The word groaned from every direction, a hideously dry voice, but wet in its consonants, then the tapping sound again.
Chills rose upon three necks and fear bloomed among them as an ugly flower.
“We can’t just sit here, we have to go,” Abby hissed as she pulled Ethan in a random direction.
Madison came as well, clinging to Ethan’s shirt like a lost child. Within a few paces, they came to the first gravestone. It was simple and arched across the top, pitted gray stone bearing no cross. Inscribed in the stone was a single word, WITCH.
Within a few steps, the three found countless more head stones, rotating outward in a spiral fashion, all etched with the word WITCH. There was barely enough space between them to place a body, if a body actually hid beneath the brick flooring. Abby reasoned that if any remains did exist below these bricks, they would have to be as ashes, a common end to a witch.
The tapping sound came again, this time not near them but to one side. The deceptive echoes had been overcome with what they hoped was a wall close by. They tried to quicken their pace, but the small headstones slowed their progression, the spiral staggered and careless in its construction. The darkness around them was perfect, with the exception of their flashlights, but they finally came to a curved wall. It was not the stacked shale stone of the other rooms or the large stone blocks, but the same small bricks of the floor. They stacked one atop the other with gritty cement and gave no clue as to the direction they should go.
The three paused briefly until the tapping sound echoed to them from the other side of the room. “Witch…”
Abby chose once more and made a right in search of a door or arch, a ladder or rope, some form of escape from the dreadful presence. Their lights seemed inadequate, too weak to guide them through a room of this size, but they continued heedlessly, spurred on by the continued metallic tapping.
Madison had known fear in her life—had thrilled in it, paid for it in theaters and in amusement parks; however, this was beyond even her tastes. A graveyard could be scary enough, but in this pitch-blackness, it could still the heart, shorten the breath. Add to this the tapping. The ominous quality of this metal against stone sound would have been enough without the bone-dry voice calling out from the pitch. This was not scary, it was insanity incarnate, and more than she thought her mind could handle. All Madison could focus on that very moment was Ethan’s shirt. Over and again she told herself not to let go, to grip it like a lifeline, like the only thing left to her of reality and normalcy. Inside, her mind screamed and struggled against reason, writhing in the bounds of her clarity and threatening to push her beyond the extent of her own limit to reason.
“There is an archway ahead; I can just see it,” Abby huffed over her shoulder.
“Go!” Ethan whispered harshly.
They shuffled their way through the many headstones, trying their best to avoid them, tripping against many of them often. Their fear pushing them faster than common sense should have allowed. The faster they seemed to go, the quicker the dread grew within them, which drove them to greater speed. Just ahead, gawking blackly before them was the archway and their escape.
Abby grasped the edge with her hand as the tapping sound filled the room and heaved herself inside. She threw her back against the wall, her breath fighting for more than her throat would allow.
Before them sat row after row of small, simple wooden benches. On many were skeletons still sitting erect, held upright by chain bonds, each one bearing a wooden placard also on a chain, and like the grave markers, each was etched with the word Witch.
At the end of the chamber stood an altar of ashen wood, grainy and drawn, fibers of its former self were missing along the length. In the center stood a wooden cross, adorned in the same mocking fashion as the one holding Chris, but this one vacant of any corpse. The whole scene appeared as some grotesque congregation praying for the release of their very souls, holding silently in their shackled bonds.
“I don’t see an exit…” Abby fretted.
“Behind the pulpit, there has to be one,” Ethan urged as he went forward and in between the remains of many of those marked Witch. They sat fixed; their mouths hung open in a gruesome semblance of laughter. So many left to die, praying for their salvation, knowing nothing but this bitter cold place with its unending darkness.
Behind the pulpit was no door or passage, no means of escape, convicting the threesome back to the graves of witches.
“Shit!” Ethan shouted and he turned to leave.
There in the entrance of the chapel stood blackness, blackness deeper then the darkness around it. Ethan lifted his light to it, and found a thing, a thing of long hair and ashen skin and of burned priests’ clothing.
This creature had a face, a face of contempt and rage, of ash and scar, of pure hideous evil. In its hand was an ornate walking stick, black of shaft but silver at the very tip—the tapping sound on stone. The thing’s palm, gently trailing smoke into the air around it, hid the other end. Then the thing smiled.
“Witch…” it hissed in its arid voice and began to walk toward them. This one did not move with the same stilted sloppiness of the creature above, but stiffly in the manor imagined of those dead.
Madison screamed an atrocious scream driven with a stellar volume, and Ethan leveled the barrel of his revolver at it.
“We want out of here! Show us how to get out of here!” His voice was high pitched and urgent, tossing the girls as victims to their own fears.
“Witch…” was the only response.
Ethan fired. The bullet struck the thing in its chest, and it stumbled backwards, seemingly more affected by the gun than its kin above. He fired again, this time aiming a bit higher. The round struck the throat and laid it open in a wide hole.
