Slattery Falls

by Brennan LaFaro

  We had no choice but to go on, so that’s what we did. While this tunnel looked to have approximately the same dimensions as the first when we entered, it now seemed smaller. Four feet instead of five at the sides, with the ceiling a little closer to the tops of our heads. The acoustics of the reduced space amplified the sounds coming from our breathing and footsteps. The initial illusion was of too many footsteps, but the longer we heard it, the more I suspected the additional noise might not stem from echoes.

  I grabbed at Josh and Elsie, holding my flashlight to my face and a finger to my lips. We all came to a stop. The footsteps did not. It’s possible that my perception was off, but it sounded like at least two pairs, and not the heavy footfalls that would come from a man of Weeks’ size and stature. Instinctively, we started trying to locate the source of the footsteps, but the flashlights revealed nothing. Then the footsteps halted.

  We waited in silence for them to begin again, but after a minute or two, it became clear they wouldn’t. Almost as soon as we started moving again, all three flashlights went out and the footsteps returned. Now it sounded as though there were at least four or five different people to account for all the noise—too small to be adults, too big to be animals. What’s worse is I started feeling tugs at different places on my clothes, sensing the movement of air as the owners of those footsteps moved past me.

  These were children.

  Likely these were children that had died in this house.

  As though in tune with that realization, the scurrying stopped, and our flashlights lit up again. A young boy, no more than six or seven, materialized in front of us, pale as the moon with dry blood caked on the corner of his mouth. His wide eyes and quivering lips showed a fear no child that young should have to contend with. This day held a lot of unforgettable events, but the look of that child is something I expect will come to me in dreams for the rest of my life.

  “What’s your name?” said Elsie, crouching down to meet the child’s eye level, but keeping her distance. The waver in her voice suggested she was holding back tears. “What can we do to help you?”

  In response, the boy shook his head, backing slowly beyond the reach of our flashlights.

  “Shit,” said Josh. “Guys, what time would you guess it is?”

  “Can’t be past three, right?” I said, looking down at my watch. It read 12:43. “Fuck, that can’t be right. We would’ve been upstairs then.”

  “Mine says 6:10,” said Josh.

  “I’ve got 10:07 on my phone,” said Elsie.

  Josh and I checked our phones. They were way off, too.

  “I think we just have to count on our internal sense of time, and hope Tedeschi doesn’t lock us in here. What else can we do? We’ve got five separate times, and I doubt any of them are right.”

  “My phone just rolled back to 8:29, so yeah, I don’t trust it.”

  “Do you see that light up ahead?” asked Josh.

  I had to squint. But yes, a glowing pinprick in the distance. “Yeah, let’s go.”

  As we moved closer, it became clear the luminescence wasn’t an illusion, but in fact appeared to be coming from a room off the main tunnel.

  “It’s… water,” said Elsie as we approached the doorway. “Like an underground grotto or something. It looks like it’s lit from beneath.”

  “I can’t tell how deep it is,” said Josh. He was right, too. It would have been useful to know the depth, what was on the other side, and if there were other ways across. Not to mention what the fuck a grotto was doing in this guy’s basement.

  “I don’t want to just pass this by,” I said. “What if it seals itself behind us like before?”

  “Seems extremely likely,” said Elsie. “Can you guys see anything further down the tunnel? Josh!”

  He had moved away from us, a little way down the tunnel. “We don’t split up, dude.”

  “I’m staying within your sightline. There’s something here.” He took another step forward, fading into shadow. “It’s stairs.”

  “Another way out?” I asked.

  “They don’t go up,” said Josh.

  Chapter Thirty

  “If I’m honest, I don’t like either choice,” I said. “I don’t see a way across the pool that doesn’t involve swimming, and going down a set of stairs when you’re already in a basement strikes me as a bad idea. What do you guys think?”

  Elsie thought for a moment. “Since we’re being guided along, we want to choose the way that makes the least sense. Does that make sense?”

  “Oddly enough, it does. So which way is the way we’re not supposed to choose?”

  “The water. What self-respecting nitwit would wade through water when they could stay dry?” asked Josh. He sat and rifled through his messenger bag, pulling out a couple of plastic grocery bags. “It’s not perfect, but I think we can put some stuff in here to keep it from getting wet. Ideally, we would take off our shoes but, uh, we don’t exactly know what’s in there, do we?”

  I hadn’t even considered that aspect. We were making an unappealing choice between wet mystery and dry mystery, and opting for what we hoped was the lesser of two evils. “Good point. Think I’ll leave the shoes on.”

  Josh went first. The water looked unnatural. An ethereal glow emanated from beneath, but it was no help in establishing the depth. Josh waded in gingerly, taking a step at a time, the bag slung over his shoulder. He kept to the edge, claiming that if a variety of depth existed here, the middle would be the deepest part. Elsie and I followed, staying a few feet away so if something happened to one of us, the other two would have time to react. The water was just above room temperature and had a dirty, almost viscous, feeling to it. Not exactly inviting.

  As we suspected, the water level dipped down as we went, performing a crescendo from ankle to waist to shoulder height. Josh pushed on; bag perched on top of his head. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to get any deeper from there. I turned to check on Elsie and froze.

  Blood.

  She was covered from chest to the bottom of her chin in blood. The entire pool had turned crimson. How had none of us noticed this? And the accompanying smell? Like a slaughterhouse in the middle of summer, clawing at my nostrils. My stomach dropped nearly to my toes.

  “ELSIE” I screamed. It cut through the silence, and Josh almost lost his balance. I rushed to close the five-foot gap between us, and when I got there… nothing. Not a trace of red on her. The water surrounding us returned to normal. I wrapped my arms around her, noting a look of sincere panic in her eyes.

  “What? Travis, what’s wrong?”

  What could I tell her? This place was getting to me. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s, uh, nothing. I thought I saw something, but the light... Must be playing tricks on me.”

  “You’re scaring me,” she said, eyes darting around the cavern. “You sure it’s alright?”

  “Yeah, let’s just get out of here.”

  As we pushed on, I kept expecting the water to turn to blood again, and the notion made me more vigilant. The light coming from beneath the water threw strange patterns and shadows across the wall, complete with spots of light ebbing and flowing, mimicking the interior of a lava lamp. Some shadows made their way to the surface of the water, sinking beneath and calling to mind a creature prowling beneath the calm exterior. I couldn’t help thinking of the Hale House; feeling like the shadows were reaching out, coming to life. The total effect made the walls feel less like a solid slab of concrete, more like a forest at night. The walls had eyes. The illusion held the entirety of my attention when I bumped into Josh, who had come to an abrupt stop.

  “What’s up?” I said, no longer trying to disguise the panic in my voice. “Did you feel something?”

  “Something like that,” he answered. “There’s a wall.”

  It didn’t take long to figure out that the wall ran the entire length of the room. We had traversed the blood-water for nothing, and now had to retrace ou
r steps and try our luck with the stairway to hell.

  “There’s got to be more here, a hidden passageway or something,” said Josh. “Just give me a couple minutes.” He started tracing the wall with open palms. I mirrored his movements, not entirely sure what I was looking for, but thinking I’d know it if I found it.

  “Over here!” Elsie cried.

  I trudged through the water, but failed to see what had caught Elsie’s eye. “What are we looking at?”

  “There’s a hole in the wall, under the surface. Feel here,” she said, pointing to a spot below the surface.

  I swung my foot into the space she’d indicated and felt it go further than expected, the surprise almost causing me to topple over. “How does that help us?”

  “We’ve come this far,” said Josh. “We swim through it. The path continues on the other side.” Whether for show or not, he sounded considerably more confident than I felt.

  “I’ll do it,” said Elsie. “Scope it out.”

  “The hell you will,” I said. “We don’t know how long it is. You could drown. We don’t even know if it comes out on the other side. It could be a dead end. Oh, and best-case scenario, you pop up on the other side of the wall, and we don’t know what’s there. It could be dangerous.”

  She stood, arms crossed, looking at me with a stare I knew well. The kind that said you’re not winning this. “You finished?”

  I stayed silent. There wasn’t anything I could say to come out on top here. Even in the dim light, I could see Josh had a smirk on his face.

  “I said I’ll scope it out. Go in a little ways and come back out if it’s a dead end. Thirty seconds, tops. If there’s nothing, we’ll go back and take the stairs. Assuming they’re still there, that is. The alternate path has a tendency to disappear.”

  I held her face in my hands. “There’s no way I can talk you out of this, is there?”

  “Not a one.” She smiled, pulled in a deep breath, and disappeared under the water. I thought the fear brought on by seeing Weeks, or the ghost children, wrecked me. It was nothing compared to the wait for Elsie to come back up. Every second felt like a lifetime. Thirty seconds went by.

  Forty-five.

  Sixty.

  “I’m going in after her,” I said. I dove under the water and went to enter the underwater tunnel when Elsie appeared. We came back up together, greedily sucking the stagnant air from the cavern.

  “Jesus Christ. Thank God you’re okay,” I said. “I was freaking out.” I grabbed her face and kissed her.

  “It’s not far,” she said. “It comes up into another room with only about ten feet of water, then it leads back up onto the floor like a boat ramp. You won’t love what’s on the other side, though.”

  “Oh shit, It’s fucking stairs again, isn’t it?” She answered with a small nod.

  One at a time, with Elsie leading the way, we entered the underwater tunnel and continued on our way.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The area underneath the Weeks House—it got harder by the minute to call it a basement—didn’t fit the size and shape of the structure above. This struck me as the reason the workers never left, even after the house seemed to be completed. It would’ve taken years hollowing out the area beneath the hill. Who knew how many rooms or caverns were down there? Even though the setup of the basement didn’t make a ton of sense, the ability to change its nature had us baffled, as well as nervous. Almost every new location we stumbled upon came with a choice. Once we had decided, the alternative disappeared. Even the way we had come from occasionally vanished, typically turning to solid rock or concrete.

  The journey through the underwater tunnel gave us no issues, just as Elsie promised. When we came out the other side, a slight incline led us to another downward staircase, which appeared identical to the first one. Stone steps brought us further into the heart of the hill, looking every bit as old as the house should have, perhaps even more ancient. Almost as if the stairs had been here long before they laid the first bit of foundation.

  With no other choice apparent, we descended the stairs, not too slow but with a sense of caution held close.

  The staircase brought us to what looked like a ballroom. The ceiling loomed as high as a cathedral overhead, and the interior spread out expansively in every direction. Light shone from the ceiling, though I couldn’t identify the source. Tapestries hung from the walls, and a large wooden table surrounded by chairs took center stage in an otherwise empty room. Ten chairs on the sides plus one at the head of the table.

  Josh examined the tapestry closest to us.

  “Friendly reminder, we don’t have all day before that guy locks us in here,” I said.

  “I’d rather not be the one bringing this up, but we’ve got no plan. It’s possible that there might be some relevant information somewhere, and it’s probably worth the extra few minutes to check it out.”

  “And whose fault…”

  “Don’t,” said Elsie. “Later.”

  Point taken.

  We moved around the room, studying each piece of fabric. About half were the same - a deer skull, a buck actually, complete with antlers; a crossed pair of swords passing behind it. I’m no sword expert, but they looked more like the type you might duel with rather than something heavier or medieval. A family crest, maybe?

  The other six tapestries told a story in sequential order. The first had a ship sailing across an ocean, a man standing at the prow, gaze fixed on the horizon. The man was too small, the detail not quite fine enough, but I had no doubts who it represented. Number two showed a simplified, yet recognizable, version of the house’s exterior. It set at the top, the hill it rested upon taking up most of the negative space. At the bottom, Weeks leaned on a shovel. The third shared some similarities with the second. Again the house on top of the hill and Weeks at the base, only this time he held a flute to his lips. Off to the side, three children were pictured listening to the music. It made my blood boil and the hair on my arms stand up.

  We crossed to the other side of the room to view the rest. The next one had removed Weeks from the bottom of the picture and replaced him with a gallows tree, two nooses dangling from a bare branch. One for Robert, and one for Tabitha. The first four were relatively straightforward, telling the same story we’d uncovered in not so many words. The last two made no sense, and that was the worst part—the attempt at prophecy. Number five repeated the same outlay of the house on the hill, this time Weeks standing next to it, either taking up the foreground or every bit as big as the hill. No, definitely larger than before. In his right hand, he held the gallows tree, and it looked no bigger than a drumstick. A smile stitched onto his face. It didn’t look happy; it looked… knowing.

  The final hanging showed no trace of Weeks. The house on the hill had returned, but this time the hill shared the features of a skull, caved in as though someone had taken a bat to it. I leaned in to study it further when the interruption came.

  “I’m so glad you could join me.” A booming voice, with a British accent. No, not quite, but similar. We’d heard the man laugh, but never speak. Still, no doubt lingered about who the voice belonged to.

  We remained quiet, attempting to communicate with eye contact as we narrowed the distance between us. A passing silence filled the room, followed by all eleven chairs shooting back at once, inviting us to sit. The sound of wood scraping stone reverberated, piercing through the peace in the large room.

  Weeks continued. “Rest yourselves and have a seat. You are my guests, after all.” Definitely not British, but sounding more and more like an accent one might hear on Game of Thrones or some other fantasy influenced by medieval England.

  “I’ll stand, thanks,” I said, mentally reprimanding myself for thanking the malevolent spirit we came to stop. The fear of being in the same room as Weeks caused my adrenaline to surge.

  When he spoke again, the initial tone of welcome was absent.

  “Why are y
ou here?”

  Leave it to Elsie to decide that powerful spirit or not, she’s had it with your bullshit. “What do you mean, why are we here? You were pretty demanding of our attention last time we saw you, and you’ve obviously been getting your jollies on leading us around your fucking maze like a rat to a piece of cheese.”

  A soft chuckle, but one that brought to mind the image of boulders rolling. “I like her. It’s a shame I’ll have to kill her and leave her to rot down here.”

  “Hate to break it to you, but we’re not children you can control like some pied piper,” I said, gesturing to the third tapestry.

  Another chuckle. This time it sounded more like a thunderstorm rumbling underground and shook the entire room. “I’ve already done just that. You’re here, aren’t you?”

  He paused a moment to let the last part sink in. The room ceased shaking after the last laugh, but still pulsed as though in time with a heartbeat.

  “You’ve come to kill me, but you’re not the first and you won’t be the last.” His voice softened, but still resonated throughout the room.

  Of all the things I expected to encounter here, a supervillain monologue wasn’t one of them.

  The voice continued. “You’re right. I’ve been watching you for a long time now. Perhaps longer than you realize.”

  “What’s so special about us?” said Elsie.

  “I’m not sure, that’s what intrigues me. The first time you saw me was a few short years ago. I watched you flee from a house in Connecticut, but I’ve been with you much longer than that.”

  Before our eyes, he materialized, more substantial in form, like when we first entered the basement. He towered over us, easily a few inches over seven feet now, and turned his gaze toward me. I froze when those icy, sea-green eyes met mine.