Black Water

by Jon Fore

  “Yeah, okay. Really, Abby, I’m sorry about this.”

  “It’s alright, Madison. Let’s just get it cleaned up,” Abby said with a sigh.

  “What about the picture?” Ethan asked.

  “You tell me, you’re the computer guy,” Abby replied as she knelt to inspect one of the bricks.

  “Well, I guess it could have been an image at one point and it did not completely delete or something like that—sort of like double exposure with real film. I can reformat the card. That will make sure nothing hangs out. Do you remember taking a picture like that of a priest or something?”

  “No, I’m sure I didn’t,” Abby said, wiping the dust from her hands, her face a twist of worry.

  “Where did you get the memory card?”

  “Online.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it then, but it is still very strange—almost like he was looking at Madison.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that, too.”

  “I’ll go get some flashlights, see if we can find something to sweep this up a bit,” Ethan said.

  “Brighton is going to have my ass over this.”

  “No, he won’t,” Ethan said over his shoulder, “that’s already mine.” Ethan always seemed to make her smile just when she needed it most.

  Madison returned, fully clothed but still buttoning her jeans. “What should we do with these bricks? Take them outside?”

  “You know, maybe we should just wait till daylight to do this. I don’t want to damage the floor, especially the marble in front,” Abby sighed.

  “It will be okay, Abby, I promise. We can take the bricks to the woods and hide them, then close this door; could be years before farmer-dude down there even finds out,” Madison said cheerily.

  This piqued Abby’s interest. “That just might work, but we would have to clean all this up like it never happened.”

  “I promise not to leave until it’s done.” Madison smiled at her.

  Now that she was clothed again, Abby did not feel the same odd desire she had before. She was just the cute, little, silly-minded Madison again, but this time with a good idea.

  “Here are the flashlights.” Ethan said as he returned with arms full. “I brought the rain tarp to stack the bricks on.”

  “I think we are going to do it in the morning, when we can see what we’re doing. Madison thinks we can hide the bricks in the woods and just shut the door. Do you think Brighton would find out?”

  “I don’t see why that wouldn’t work. I really doubt he comes up here very often; he is too old, the hill too steep, the hike too long, you know?”

  “He didn’t seem very frail to me,” Abby said, looking more for an argument than an agreement.

  “He has arthritis in his hands; I could tell that when I shook it. If he has it there, it will also be in his knees or ankles or shoulders…”

  “Alright, I was just ready to leave, but we can hide the bricks tomorrow morning and clear this dust and make it all nice again. We can leave in the afternoon or the day after.”

  “You have all of your pictures for the book thing?” Madison asked.

  “Enough, I think. We will see. I just want to leave now.”

  “Where is Chris?” Ethan asked, suddenly aware one of them was missing.

  “He was right here a second ago,” Abby responded as she looked around.

  “Maybe he went outside to take a leak?” Madison offered.

  “I was just at the door,” Ethan countered.

  “Chris!” Madison shouted, but not very loud.

  There was no answer.

  “He’s like babysitting a—”

  A scream ripped through the house like a shot of lightening—not the scream of someone simply scared, but the scream of a soul tormented. If not for the missing Chris, Abby would have sworn at first it had been a woman. Madison screamed in response, shocked at the sudden sound of it, haunted by the anguish in it.

  “He’s in the cellar…” Ethan said. His voice staggered with fear and run dry. He ran back toward the door to grab his small backpack, the one with the gun.

  “Chris!” Madison screamed. “Where are you?” Her voice pierced the ear, but still so utterly feminine.

  “He is in the cellar, Ethan, hurry!”

  The scream came again, crawling up the stairs like some wounded animal, squeezing the hearts in their chests, driving icicles like nails into their spines.

  Ethan jammed a flashlight into Abby’s hand. “Why don’t you guys stay up here, I’ll go down—”

  “I’m going with you.” Abby said firmly, “There might be a real story in this.” She remembered her camera and rushed to retrieve it.

  “Here, Madison. Don’t drop this, we may need it. Did we bring a first aid kit?” he shouted toward Abby who skidded herself into a turn and rushed to get that as well.

  Ethan went to the cellar door and shined his flashlight along the steps. They were made of a thick wood, dry and dark with age, bits of mortar settling on them. They had been solid enough to hold Chris; he and the others should not be a problem.

  “Chris! Are you down there, Chris?” Ethan shouted down into the dark hole.

  No reply came.

  When Abby returned, Ethan started down the steps. They did not creak or give any sign of collapsing, but still he went slowly. A rush of dread and wrongfulness washed over him as if he were submerging himself in a pool of water gone wrong. This was a bad place, but not just in his mind. This was a real honest-to-God bad place, and he did not need a doctor or medication to help him understand this—he could feel it in his heart.

  The walls were layered stones, flat like river rocks and stacked to the wooden rafters above. The steps had no handrail, giving anyone attempting to descend a feeling of instability as though at any moment a light breeze may whisk them off and into the darkness below.

  “Chris!” Ethan shouted, but there was still no reply.

  He continued slowly down the steps, still nervous with the wrongness. Suddenly, the steps seemed to sag a bit.

  “Chris!” This time it was Abby’s voice which made Ethan jump. She had begun to come down the steps as well, placing each foot as gently as Ethan had.

  Ethan reached the dry dirt floor of the cellar and began to search the large chamber with his light. It was utterly empty, a void of stone-stacked walls and dirt flooring. The air stank of wet mold, and the temperature was noticeably cooler than it was above. It reminded Ethan of his grandmother’s basement, a desolate place of stacked memories and mold, magazines and forgotten times—that was except for the fact this basement was starkly empty, 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.”

  “Why… why did he do it?” Abby sobbed, no longer the calm and collected mother of the group.

  Ethan knew why. He had tried to take his own life when he was thirteen, haunted by that homeless man no one else could see. The terrible things the bum had told him, the horrible things he had shown him, it was more than any man should have to stand, less a child. However, to explain that to a normal person, one that had not seen it, was just not possible. “He was sick, Hon,” was all he could muster to say to Abby.

  Madison stood first, her face streaked in mascara and other photo-ready makeup. She helped pull Abby up to her feet. “I want out of this fucking place,” Madison said through clenched teeth. “Take us out of here, Ethan, right now.” Her voice was bitter with disgust, but not loss.

  “What would have made him do that? Really…” Abby pleaded for an answer.

  “Don’t worry about it now, Abby. Let’s just get out of here.”

  “He cut his own throat, for God’s sake! Who could do that?” Her voice was becoming stronger, angrier as she spoke. Ethan could tell she had met with a crossroads in her mind, one where three of the directions led to madness.

  “Abby, look at me,” Ethan said sternly. “It is what he felt he had to do, and it was nothing you did. There was no way to stop him; there was no indication he was going to kill himself. This is not your fault, not my fault, not Madison’s fault. He is dead, and that is what happened.”
r />   “Ethan, number one: do not talk to me like I’m a child. Number two: do you understand the determination you have to have before you can cut your own throat like that? Oh, and, three: he was covered in burns!”

  “Yes, Abby, I know, alright?” Ethan spat back. “Now, we have to leave.” Ethan tried to lead her away from the cell.

  “We can’t just leave him down here…” Abby pleaded as she craned her neck back to Chris.

  “Listen, Abby, how did he get burned like that? Answer that, then ask yourself if you are coming with me or not!” Madison’s voice was becoming hysterical.

  “I think it would be best if we all went,” Ethan added.

  “We’ll call the police as soon as we get a signal on the phone,” Madison said in an attempt to convince her friend.

  “Fine, it’s settled; now let’s get out of here,” Ethan said as he pulled her toward the end of the passage. It seemed much longer than it had when they came down, the end lost to the darkness.

  After many moments, Abby planted her feet firmly, stopping the others. “Were all these cells here before?”

  Ethan looked around like Madison was going. “I did not notice them before, but I was just trying to get to Chris.”

  “I don’t think they were here,” Madison said worriedly.

  “We should have reached the end,” Abby sent her flashlight’s beam down the passage, “and I don’t even see it.” The bite in her voice was beginning to mellow with fear again.

  Ethan turned back to where they had come from, and the flashlight, left with Chris in his barred tomb was no longer visible. “What the…?”

  “Alright, stop,” Abby commanded, once more in her mother’s voice, but clearly upset and afraid. “How the hell did we get lost in a straight passageway? We went back the way we came, right? Or did we go the wrong direction?”

  “We went the right way, I’m sure. Chris was on the right side as we were coming, and then on the left when we were leaving.”

  “I’m getting confused, guys,” Madison whined.