Black Water

by Jon Fore

  “Ethan!” Abby screamed down to him.

  “It’s not that far, just try to roll when you land!”

  Madison landed hard, but instead of rolling, she sat smashing a skull beneath her. She shrieked in pain and rolled to her side.

  “Is she alright?” Abby shouted down. Before anyone could answer, a tangle of long hair oozed over the edge of the hole.

  “Abby! He’s there, above you!”

  Abby looked up and screamed in pure terror. The thing pulled an ember from the side of its neck and dropped it over the side, right at Abby’s open mouth. She tried to squirm away from it, but it glanced off her shoulder and she screamed again, this time in pain. She did not wait for another pelting, and let go of the chain.

  “Roll!” Ethan shouted to her as she landed, and she managed to do just that, scattering bones as she went.

  Another cinder came down and landed close to Madison who began to squirm out of the way on her side, much like a snake trying to escape that which had wounded it. Ethan crawled away from the opening as well, not ready to put weight on his feet quit yet. From above, a screech—more iron across stone—lanced down, sending waves of nausea through them.

  “I don’t think he can reach us here,” Ethan spoke his hope aloud.

  “I think I hurt myself,” Madison said matter-of-factly. She lifted herself up and threw her bottom out at Ethan. In two places, bone had pierced her jeans and stabbed into the meat.

  “That doesn’t look too bad, Madison—could have been much worse. I don’t think I have any permanent injury. How about you, Abby?”

  “My feet are ringing like bells.”

  “That will pass. I need the first aid kit; we got to patch Madison up.”

  “So much for the website, huh?” Madison asked sarcastically.

  “You’ll be fine. You could always get a tattoo to cover these if they scar.” He gently removed the bone fragments and was pleased to see they had not gone in very deep. “These look superficial, but I want to scrub them out a bit. These bones don’t look very clean.”

  Madison said nothing and just rose to her knees and dropped her pants. Ethan began rubbing the cuts with small peroxide pads, cleaning out the bits of debris.

  “Anything for a burn in there?” Abby asked. “That fucker got me in the shoulder.”

  Ethan used a few stretchy bandages on Madison before condemning her wonderful flesh to the confines of 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.

  The thing wrapped a tendril-like hand across its throat and shook its head side to side.

  “Tell us the way out!” Ethan screamed.

  “Kill it!” Madison screamed.

  He fired again. The thing’s head fell open, a splash of fluid spraying backward and upward from the ruined scalp. The thing stumbled again and paused. It raised its head and locked its remaining eye with Ethan. It then inverted the cane to reveal a glowing ember, the size of Ethan’s fist, and began toward them.

  “Kill it!” Madison screamed again.

  “Take the legs!” Abby shouted. “You can’t kill it, cripple it!”

  Ethan lowered the gun a bit and fired. The flash blinded him for a moment, but it was easy to see he had hit the upper leg. The thing collapsed to one side, his leg nearly in two. It continued its progress on one knee, dragging the damaged leg. Ethan squeezed the trigger again, but this time, the round glanced off the floor and hit the thing in the abdomen. Even with the explosion of flesh from the other side, it did nothing to slow the now dangerously-close monstrosity.

  The three began to back themselves closer to the wall, trying in vain to shrink away from it.

  Ethan fired again and struck the good leg in the knee. It shattered visibly, and the thing fell to its face.

  “Go! Go!” Ethan shouted.

  They ran along the wall, the light whisking this way and that across the ancient bricks. The thing tried to reach them with the glowing end of the cane, but it had fallen just out of reach. They made the exit of the chapel, and Abby turned right.

  Ethan grabbed her quickly, “We’ve been down there! This way…” He headed off in the other direction, avoiding the tombstones as he went.

  Madison began to cry loudly and clutched onto Abby as she followed.

  The room continued in a slow curve for many feet before letting them out and into a wide corridor. The walls here were like the room, constructed of brick, but they appeared redder, wetter. The floor became a worn wood plank decking. It was the color of the deepest soil but dry and brittle, splintering along all of its edges. On both sides stood gloomy wood doors with large iron handles, all of them black as coal. The passage ended abruptly in a wall of iron bars, a black void agape on its other side.

  They entered the passage slowly, flashlights trying to be everywhere at once, trying to illuminate every detail. Each of them was driven by urgency but moved to caution by their fright. Slowly, their shoes scuffed the sand along the uneven wood of the floor, softly.

  Abby noticed an odd-looking moss had overtaken the upper edges of the walls and hung downward limply, but she said nothing, still unreasonably afraid.

  The doors offered no windows, just blank, aged wood patterns and an iron handle. Everything seemed moist and humid, even in the chill air. When they reached the bars, they found no latch, hinge, or any other mechanism that would allow them to move. The other side offered a continuance of the passage, continuing onward to the extent of their lights. An odd wind-driven howl held steadily in their ears from deep down the passage, far beyond the bars.

  “Do you hear that?” Ethan asked.

  “Is that wind?” Madison wondered hopefully.

  “It sounds like it, huh?” he replied.

  Abby suddenly grabbed the bars and threw her weight back and forth trying in vain to work one of the bars free. When she realized she could not, she tried to squeeze herself through.

  “Abby, let’s try these doors. Maybe they will get us around there,” Ethan said gently.

  “If they wanted us to get there,” she said in a strained voice, still trying to fit between the bars, “they would not have put the bars here.”

  “Abby…”

  “Fine, alright. Which door?”

  “I would guess all of them,” Madison said as she pulled the nearest one open. It was a small storage area still stacked with old wooden crates, some stamped with illegible text, some still holding the remains of hemp rope handles, all covered in that grayish-green plant.

  Ethan turned and opened another to find much the same thing, this room not quite as full as the other. There were some hides of some sort piled to one side, now almost completely gone to soil, and a small collection of iron cinder sticks leaning in one corner. They moved on to the next.

  Each room had some quantity of crates stored within and a number of artifacts. There were colonial uniforms and insignia, black powder muskets, black powder horns, shot, utensils, and old fragments of clothing. In one, there was even an extensive collection of oil paintings now given to the mold that grew there.

  Nearest the entrance of the large corridor, the door hid no room but another passage; this one filled with the stench of rot and wet, so much so the three where loath to enter. It appeared to slope downward and turned to the right near the end. The horrible looking plant had found purchase here as well and grew stagnantly along the walls and hung as snotty filaments from the ceiling.

  They paused at the entrance until the sound of dragging and scraping came to them from the large graveyard. The priest-thing had worked its way from the chapel and was now dragging itself toward them. They took a moment to look at each other then entered the moist passage to escape the abomination drawing near.

  Chapter 11

  Ethan closed the door behind them, hoping their pursuer would be unable to reach the door’s rusted handle. The moisture had collected on the floor, pooling in some areas, making their footsteps sound hideous, like hissing whispers of wet sand against the ancient wood planking. Droplets of icy wat
er fell from the stone ceiling and randomly pelted them, adding to the chill of the air.

  Misery began to mix with their constant nagging fear, the pain of wounds and burns, the bone-chilling splash of water droplets, the unending suffocating darkness, and the constant nagging feeling of something watching.

  Ethan, considering his past, was more capable of handling these feelings. The dirty bum that had stalked him as a preteen taught him how to cope with these feelings. Years of the bum’s torments handled by his adolescent mind produced calluses that remained even now. There were places within himself where the child-like fear could go and hide, lock itself behind a door, and cut itself off from the oppressive fright.

  Abby clung to her stone-like common sense, her rock solid belief in normalcy. This all, to her, could not actually be happening, and in some small way, it provided her a shield, a lanyard to grasp instead of slipping into an infinite madness. This protection had begun to weaken, the reality of what had happened too harsh and perfectly real. It shook her bastion of beliefs and drove her to her faith for reassurance. It was weak shoring but the last of the remaining tools she could use to cope.

  Madison had no such defenses, her life a script of manufactured thrills joined later by sexual frenzy. The unbridled exhilaration of roller coasters and horror movies, the timid and raw vulnerability she felt during her sexual exploits with multiple men and women was the sum of her experience and wisdom. None of what was happening now fit into any of this. She knew that no matter how terrifying a movie was, it was always hers to stop. She was free to select her own partners for her exploration of sexuality, and her no had always been no. What was happening to her now was beyond her control and something she was not ready to handle. The numbing effect of horror movies actually proved to be fragile, and this stark reality had penetrated her soul, which in turn began to change her perceptions of reality. The shift was not subtle, but an almost violent rending of her sanity.