She walked about 50 yards in a straight line before reaching a branching point, a staircase to the left going up and one forward and down. She snapped one of the glow bands and placed it on the ground before going up and reaching a dead end heavy steel door. Not even a latch to open from her side. She scoffed, going back down and grabbing her glowband, following the stairs down.
The stairs opened into a room with dim lighting, a sickly orange like old sodium lamps, and a number of ways to go. She decided to follow the copper pipes that lead from the wall, ignoring the one leading down to another level and choosing the other. She tossed her glow band in the center of the room so she would know when she was back at the stairs. Something in her was drawn to the pipes. She knelt down and felt it, water running through it, leading down.
The dim tunnel was dusty, warm to the touch clearly damp and riddled with cobwebs. On the right side a natural stone wall carved out of the rock, and on the left, one made of brick and mortar, with a copper water line following it, and what looked like possibly electrical lines in rubberize plastic conduit. They branched down and left randomly, presumably going to whatever was behind the brick wall and whatever was in the tunnel below her. Now she questioned if she should have gone lower, but more so…what was behind the brick? Why divide a tunnel and spend so much effort just to make two narrower paths for the same utility lines? She followed the tunnel that snaked around in random jogs, as if going around something in the solid rock, going in the same direction but dodging an unknown obstacle now and then. Surface vents maybe?
She reached a T in the path, the strange brick and utility tunnel going left and a dugout hole going right. She broke another glow band, peering right. It dropped off into a large empty room, with stairs down and too many paths to keep track of. A junction room of some kind, a chance to maybe check the tunnel below her, but maybe later, she put the glow band on her arm and turned to the familiar tunnel that now took a very straight shot for a very long way. The lights flickered and dimmed randomly as she peered into the nothing, her flash light beam failing to find and end to the tunnel. She turned the lens and focused it, but the results were the same. Brick wall, pipes and what felt like an endless mile of straight line, tiny orange dots turning on and off down the walls leading to a point like it just beckoned her. The flickering almost seemed to start behind her and run down the tunnel like a little fairy of doom, racing it’s way to the abyss as if to say “follow me.” So she did.
She felt the slight sensation of leaning, realizing the path was ever so sloped downward, subtle but detectable to someone thinking about it.
“If I’m going down…I may as well go as down as I can.” She reasoned, turning back and taking the stairs to the lower path leading the same direction, but with less flickering lights. The same brick and pipes, of slightly different size and height, much of the same pointless direction until she noticed the pipes at one point diverted down and up, unto the floors and ceiling and then right back down again just a few feet further, as if there should have been a door there. The old faded red brick wall abruptly became grey and mossy brick of a different kind, conveniently in the shape of a door where the pipes went around… With a hole in the middle, just above eye level.
“You aren’t supposed to be there, are you?” she said, tip-toeing for elevation and trying to see through. Not enough room to crawl through or even stick her head in, just enough to reach in and shine a light around. On the other side, just more natural stone, separated by an endless wall and utility lines, for no reason. She pressed her face to the stone, trying to see anything else through the tiny gap where her arm was almost completely filling. She felt her skirt lift and flutter slightly, jumping and almost losing her flashlight as she turned to defend herself against… the wind.
“Good grief you are paranoid.” She huffed, as her heart rate lowered and she noticed the occasional in and out flow of air from the tunnel. Just beyond that was a path to the right, barred off by a grid of rebar and thick bolts in the rock. She peered inside, part of the floor missing, a room of emptiness and grey brick with a slight bit of light at the very end as if there was a doorway and the path on the other side was well lit. She wanted to see but the bars were clearly not going anywhere.
Further down another doorway on her right, open to another empty grey room. Drains in the floor, and a large wooden door on the left with no handles. She assumed it was walled off for some reason but a light nudge of her boot revealed that it did in fact swing inwards just a little, but with no knobs or levers to open it.
“Why am I on the wrong side of every door that only opens one way?” She asked noticing another little hole in the wall. They weren’t accidental. The sizes varied but they were crisp and carved, not broken. She ran her hand along the opening, mossy to the touch.
Quite a ways down the brick wall to nowhere, she noticed a similar walled off cubby like the one with the peep-hole, except the slab with the hole in it had crumbled out, leaving a much bigger opening. Almost big enough to squeeze through. Something was over there. She couldn’t resist. She knew she wouldn’t get through entirely, her skinny arms and chest probably could but her slightly wider hips surely wouldn’t, but with the wall being only about 2 feet thick, surely she could see something, in fact it was already lit with the same orange lighting as the main tunnel. She stuck the flashlight in her mouth, biting it to one side like a stogy, and she hopped up, shimmying through just until her hips stopped her.
“Shtupid wide ash.” She muttered with the flashlight cigar like some 20’s gangster. She could see about ten feet either way. Nothing much different than the side her ass was on, except the lack of utility lines and the drip of leaky water fittings, except a sound she could hear very clearly to the right. She held her breath listening to the click and noticing it was very repeatable, almost like it was counting down. She almost missed it but for a second she could have sworn the lights behind her dimmed just as the click on the other side happened.
“You’re not random at all, are you?” she smirked. Suddenly she heard footsteps and decided to get out of the wall and she realized to her alarm, she was slightly stuck. She almost yelled for help, but if the help was on the wrong side of that wall, she would have to drop her flashlight, and be stuck in a rather compromised way. She began wiggling, getting genuinely nervous now as the footsteps approached and in a moment of panic she jerked her body harshly and flopped out, into the hall, fumbling her flashlight, as the footsteps seemed to pass her by in the same tunnel. She turned the light on and pointed it around, looking for whoever it was while fumbling in her bag for the knife.
There was nobody, 30 yards of empty path nobody could have casually vanished into and no more footsteps.
“What the hell am I doing in here? This is insane. Am I tripping out?” she asked aloud, sniffing the air to see of she smelled gas or anything that would make her less oxygenated and rational. She could smell the salt water. It dawned on her that she might be below the lake at this point, and her fear began to creep up her back. But she kept going forward, past another barred off room, and into an open one as empty as the others, again with a single heavy wooden door that didn’t open from her side, and a very large chalkboard that looked oddly clean. The walls everywhere were dusty and damp as if abandoned for months or years, and yet the chalkboard was almost perfectly wiped clean. She turned to exit the room and noticed this wooden door had light under it, but just long enough to turn off and stay off. She tried to peer through the gaps but the door was tight and strangely, the seam in the middle covered in cobwebs was broken. The door had been opened sometime after the webs accumulated. The door had been opened while she was down there. She looked down and noticed she was standing in a little puddle, expanding from the doorway.
“I’m so out of here.” She huffed, heading back the way she came and briskly, knife in hand and flashlight up and ready. She marched adorably onward with her pigtails bouncing from the speed of her steps until she looked down at one of the floor grates. It was longer than before. She didn’t remember seeing any that spanned the entire tunnel floor. Brick wall and utilities on the left, solid stone and empty rooms on the right. She wasn’t going back the way she came. She knew she turned left exiting the room, which would send her back home, and yet she had just gone significantly further away, and she was unsure where the confusion was.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Doubt set in, endless tunnel and flickering both directions, the brick wall that was always on her left no longer felt like it was always there. Did it switch at some point in the monotone jogs around nothing, or did she exit a room into a different side entirely where the scenario was reversed? Why was she so sure she was still going further from home, and yet determined to go that same way? Why did she need to go further? She slowly went along, now her curiosity turned to absolute confusion, and came across another familiar doorway into the stone side, but this time there was a narrow hallway, oddly tall and lit at the end by those same stupid orange lights. She could see the doorways that were roughly chiseled square were now very classically arched like an old sewer system.
The last room was, yet another hallway, even narrower, but with a darker floor. She walked through and let out a scream as she realized the floor was not just dark, but much lower than before and as she caught herself, she realized she was thigh-deep in water.
“Are you kidding me? 40 floor drain grates, and this is the one place that could have really used a floor grate for a change? Who designed this shithole?” she said, angrily kicking and sloshing her way along. She was already drenched, so why not? She trudged along now more angry than scared, flashlighting each of the empty rooms she passed of varying size and varying degrees of nothing. Feeling the drip of water from the stone above. The droplets passed her flashlight as the white streaks of reflective water dropped in front of her until she paused, noticing one of them wasn’t white. She pointed the light up and stared at the dozens of mossy fissures that were dripping water and noticed one was a rusty red, dripping a single red drop now and then. Her heart fluttered a little.
She was a rational girl, it wasn’t even the right shade of red for blood, more of a rusty orange than red. She watched the drops each time, debating on her ability to judge color. She looked down, still in water past her knees and the water seemed surprisingly clear and clean looking, no bloody rings and shimmer, just the ripples of what she now realized was alarmingly warm water. She hadn’t noticed till that moment that instead of shivering cold, not only was the room comfortably warm but warmer than the tunnel she started in, and the water was actually warmer then the room. She then froze, looking at the lines on the brick wall, and realized something startling. The water was slightly higher. For some reason this nonsense sent her into a flight. She rushed quickly past the “rusty” drips and down the rest of the tunnel to the room at the end that to her disappointment was just a dead end.
“Shit…There’s nothing here. There’s nothing anywhere. It’s just nothing and paths to more nothing. What the fuck is this place?” she barked loudly, almost drowning out the sound of something splashing through the tunnel she was just in. She readied her knife and went for it, sprinting as much as anyone can sprint in nearly crotch deep water, chasing the sound and ready to face her opponent but the sloshing turned to footsteps and the footsteps faded to silence as she reached the main utility tunnel again, soaking wet and confused. The lower holes in the wall now had water pouring through them and the dry tunnel she was just in now had an inch of warm water in it as well. She bolted onward, no idea why, determined to find answers and cutting hard right through the next room expecting nothing or some maintenance asshole chuckling and getting their jollies out of scaring her but she stumbled down several unexpected steps into a room that was far more lit than expected and instead of the dim orange glow, it was toasty and warm with the bright light and crackle of a fireplace.
She got up and circled the room to check for anyone else, and found nobody, but far from nothing. The room was clean, furnished, hotel-esque even if you were going for medieval king’s chambers. A bed with clean sheets, a glistening fountain like the kind rich people would have in their living room, shelves of white stone, 2 carved pillars, a wooden bench, a table missing it’s top, a roaring fireplace, and on the far wall a large modern flatscreen TV, not a speck of dust on it.
“I’m, losing my mind.” She said, nearly sobbing, the stared into the fire to dry off, spotting the wall switch that she immediately flipped on and off to light and unlight the gas fireplace. She broke into subtle tears, wondering if it was all a dream she couldn’t wake from, and why didn’t it at lest have Vinn. At that moment she imagined the sound of his hooves and stared at the tv, flipping the fire on a off for no reason, and as she gradually leaned closer she realized for a split second when the light shifted, she could almost see through the flat screen into the room behind it. She flipped the light on and left it there. Now wondering if she imagined the hoofsteps to comfort herself or of she actually heard them, and she was too afraid to flick the light off and on to confirm weather or not the TV was a 2 way mirror. she touched the glass and it felt wet.
“It’s gotta be a dream. It has to be. I need to wake up.” She panted, now in full panic mode. She sprinted to the endless tunnel, now ankle deep, still for some unknown reason draw to keep going, almost beyond her will to fight it, but she turned the other way and ran, passing room after room, u-shaped path jog after another, holes in the brick wall between two tunnels that had no reason to be separated except to be followed or follow someone. She fought through the tears and dismissed the brief flashes of figures through the holes in the brick wall that could have easily been her flashlight shifting the shadows. Her feet and knees burned as she maintained a dead full sprint for what felt like hours. She slowed as the water reached mid calf.
She slid her way into the 2 story transition room, now not really sure which way she started from or where her glow-band was, because it either had washed away or it was the wrong room.
“FUCK!” she screamed, trying every combination of path for about 15 indecisive long steps until she collapsed in the middle of the room from exhaustion, both emotionally and physically and lying on her side. She didn’t have the energy to get up and the water was almost to her nostrils. As the water covered her eyes and she arched her back to move her mouth just a little higher, she sniffed in one frantic breath to exhale the word HELP!” and as she did she was pulled up by a pair of large hands.
She swung the knife to defend herself and her empty fist just bounced off a furry bicep as she realized she was in her cave, home, the fireplace burning and Vinn picking her up.
“It’s okay, you’re okay. You’re safe.”
“I don’t understand.” She sobbed.
“You had a nightmare, Nicole. I don’t know why you’re on the floor but you were asleep and you screamed HELP so I woke you. That’s all I know. Why are you scratched up and soaking wet?” he asked. She looked down and realized she had a few minor scrapes on her elbows and knees and she was wearing her hiking boots and in fact head to toe soaked in water. It wasn’t a dream. Not all of it.
“I’m sorry, I’m so stupid. I went into the tunnel.” She cried.
“What? Why? Why in general, but why alone and when I was gone?”
“I don’t know.” She sobbed. “I needed to know, I took everything I needed, I marked my way back I had my knife and my backpack and everything and then…everything stopped making sense and I woke up her and almost stabbed you.” She said hugging his arm.
“Well apparently you got scared and ran back and collapsed when you got home, probably from exhaustion, and luckily without your knife in your hand…in my case.”
“I didn’t make it back Vinn. I fell and couldn’t get up and I never made it out.”
“Well, you clearly did, that sounds like a bad dream you had after venturing into a dark scary tunnel you shouldn’t have been in and then passing out from exhaustion running back. Honey you went into a scary dangerous place and got confused and lost, freaked out, thankfully found your way home and then fell asleep, and dreamed the last part. That’s the only logical explanation aside from the part where you decided to go into the damn creepy tunnel alone without even telling me. I know you like adventures and exploring but damnit, you gotta plan that better. Bring a friend, tell people you’re going, or like…don’t go into endless mining tunnels at all. Have you considered a walk in the woods…above ground with supervision?”
“I’m sorry, I’m just…I needed to know what it was.”
“Then you should have waited for Jack. He could have gone down there either with you, or preferably just himself and another big guy with mining experience, and solved the mystery. What was even down there?” he asked.
“Nothing…just tunnels and tunnels and empty rooms and then one big fully furnished room with a 2-way mirror like some kind of medieval sex dungeon. And it was all filling with water.”
“Yea I’m guessing that part was after you blacked out. You think maybe you have some…like repressed thoughts about…sexy scary underground adventures that you feel lost in and needed to escape? Just hypothetically? No reason at all, totally random scenario for example?”
“I can still hear the water.”
“Honey there’s no water, except what you wicked up from down there. We need to get you out of this cold soggy outfit and warmed up.
“I am warm…”
“You’re drenched and freezing, honey.”
“I’m just glad to be home. You need to lock that door.”
“It only opens from one side…THIS side. Nobody can get in.”
“You need to lock it from this side too.” She said looking alarmingly serious. “You need to lock ME out of it.”