Vicki sat up, damp and cold, confused and scanning the dark room for context clues as she peeled herself from the gray brick floor. The room was dark, say for the single bright-orange sodium lamp to her left, beaming straight down to the right side of a wooden door. The only other source of light was from the metal barred door far to her right, from the next room. Back to the wall, she stood up, feeling slightly sore like she has been slumped over for a long time. Her first instinct was to check for a flashlight or weapons, which were nowhere to be found on her person, as absent as her phone and keys. Aside from clothing and damp dew, she had nothing on her.
“This has to be a dream…” she muttered to herself. "Nicole just had a traumatic experience with the old mines, it makes sense I’d have a nightmare about it.” she rationalized as she tried the wooden door and realized there was no handle. Attempting to pry a seam proved pointless, giving her the logical incentive to try the barred door near the better lit room. It was locked, no handle or mechanism for opening it. She gave it a hefty kick and pushed herself back, almost falling over as she caught herself on the pool table. She sighed in annoyance and leaned over it, noticing the ornate wood and brass pool table seemed to be missing a lot of things: Pool balls, stick, pockets, or the soft felt top. This table was meant for something else. She went around it, checking the large wooden cabinet in the corner, locked as expected. She made her way to the last corner of the room, a 12 foot wide nook in the dark, occupied by 2 stacks of wooden boxes and another assumed locked cabinet. After checking the first stack of boxes, probably empty from the weight, and the unlocked cabinet void of any contents she could feel, she realized there was nothing helpful in the room.
“Well, fuck me.” She huffed. Starting to doubt if it was a dream and worry that somehow she ended up in the old Delmar mines as well. Suddenly the ideas of Nicole’s crazy story of being drawn to them and the strange contents of the rooms made more sense and seemed less crazy. She felt slightly hungry and instinctively reached for her inside jacket pocket, before remembering she had no jacket and wondering why it would be her first choice. Her next gut feeling was to take out her Beretta 9mm, which was missing, and she didn’t remember ever owning one. Vicki never remembered owning a gun in her life, only shot a few times in a country backyard range, yet her hand almost magnetized to the hip holster that wasn’t there, and she could almost feel the exact textured grip that she knew intimately as HER Beretta. The oddities just kept stacking up.
“The fuck am I?” she asked aloud, tracing the walls for a clue or a door release, stopping as she examined the corner most stack of boxes, and noticed the slightly blacker area behind them. Scooting her way past, she realized there was a Vicki-sized hole broken through the faded umber brick wall. She debated on whether to keep working the doors or venture through. The sound of footsteps from above made her decision easier, as they made they way in a downward direction, as if descending stairs towards the wooden door that only opened from one direction. Vicki squeezed through the hole, carefully blocking it with the boxes and making her way quietly into a strange corridor. She realized by the narrow 2 foot wide gap between the walls and the exposed metal conduit above, that this was either a maintenance tunnel or something nobody was supposed to find, rather than an intended corridor.
To the left was a fade to pure darkness, the right illuminated by the same orange/red sodium lamps that seemed obviously better, opening into another room. She went right, the dark room smaller than the first, but similarly decorated in the identical worn gray brick floor, cracked and uneven with age, the same bare tan brick walls and exposed steel supports. The center was darkest, oddly framing a table, as she somehow felt the lighting was oddly off. Something didn’t make sense. The wall nearest and furthest to the odd tunnel entrance both lit by the lamps, and to the right, an ambient glow from an open adjacent room, the light source illuminating the last side of the room virtually nonexistent. She passed the table, now noticing the next room was separated on both sides by a row of metal bars that divided in the middle with a sliver of light gap. She peered through the bars, yanking both to try and open them, while peering beyond the empty room to the second wall of bars, the brightly lit hallway visible beyond that. She felt targeted, toyed with. The very clear and well lit area just out of access by a 20 foot empty room, but gated off by two sturdy sets of bars that had no give to them. Maybe they didn’t even open. Did they just serve as a teaser, a window to the light? She gave both sides a hefty yanking and noticed there was slight play in one, a distinct gritty sound as if rollers in a track, worn by use, has accumulated grit and debris. The forward and back wiggle, millimeters at best, gave a false sense of hope, despite it having zero movement in the outward directions needed to open. She circled back around the table, checking empty drawers and debating on the color of the stains on its cold steel top. Was it rusty water or blood providing the red hue in the dark? She lifted the tray, getting the sense of it holding surgical tools rather than mechanics tools, checking the 2 metal lockers for weapons or a flashlight.
Footsteps again got her attention as she realized this was just another dead end without some way of activating the wall of bars. No switches in sight or controls, she decided to move, rather than wait for whoever was hunting her. She rushed back into the tunnel, past the hole and into the dark, one hand outstretched to hopefully feel any dead ends. She began to adjust to the dark, barely making out the border of the walls and eventually reaching a right turn. She accepted it, moving straight for some time, until the sheer length of distance made her worry that she was just going deeper into something wrong. Another right, a full U turn right looped her around, now realizing the brick wall on her right side she was touching for reference, was now just the same wall’s opposite side, and she was headed back almost exactly where she had been, stopping as the path turned left.
“Forty feet.” She exhaled, realizing it was the same distance from the U turn, so that ominous left turn in front of her, dimly glowing orange would lead her right past the same room with the surgical table. She felt very ratlike, looking up to see if there was anyone above looking down from some observer position, like watching her run a maze. She proceeded on, as some of the lamps flickered, and the detail of the filthy, damp tunnel became clearer. She felt her heart sink, staring at the brick pattern in front of her that was a sudden dead end. She accomplished nothing but burying herself 200 feet further into a narrow corridor no better than the place she started. And then she noticed the wall on the right. The conduit lead to 2 boxes with switches on them, and directly above them, 3 missing bricks in the wall. She hunkered down and peered through at the surgical table, now realizing where the light was coming from the whole time. She looked up at the orange lamp, beaming light indirectly into the surgical room. She nervously flipped one of the switches, expecting something dramatic and bracing for action. Nothing happened. There was a subtle click as the switch reset itself. She carefully flipped the second one, and the same events happened. The switch reset. She flipped both of the switches at once, and the light turned off. The hum of something mechanical like gears creaking to live faintly somewhere, and as she tried to see through the openings. She couldn’t tell for sure, but a glimmer of movement in the distance stopped and as the switches reset, then rumbled again as if undoing what was just done. The light came back on.
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“Are you serious?” She sighed. “A timed mechanism?” she grumbled, flipping the switches and darting frantically down the tunnel, barely making it to the first wall before the silence and the sound of it reversing, the light turning back on before she could even get back, let alone 4 more, longer corridors and through the room. She flipped them again for the attempt and made it just as pointlessly shy by 5 or 6 times the distance needed, and she slowed her pace to save energy, now just returning in defeat, and hoping the room was still empty when she got there.
After a long and tiring squeeze through a 2-foot path of pointlessness, she was back staring at the surgical table. She looked left at the missing brick and noticed not only the faint glow of the light, but the reason she didn’t notice before. 3 black picture frames subtly framed the openings with the hellish glow, almost diffusing them. She did some math in her head, unwilling to go all the way back to confirm, but she thought the switches may have been within arms reach of the openings. She stared at it. It called to her in an unsettling way, one opening perfectly on either side of the metal beams where the switches were, just big enough to get an arm through, and the middle one slightly higher, just barely big enough to fit her head. The solution seemed obvious, but something looked menacing about the way she would have to turn her head to fit in, and then rapidly get out before the door closed. The feeling of getting stuck made her nauseous, borderline déjà vu in the way she could picture her own head rotated just enough to not get back out.
There was no other solution and any second now, villainous footsteps in the dark would either hear the doors, or have likely heard them already and would return. She bent down and reached in, pausing as she turned her head to fit through, and just knowing when she did, someone would be on the other side. The fact that it was empty didn’t ease her tension at all. The fact that she couldn’t rotate her arms enough to go straight down to the switches made the puzzle seem impossible, even knowing it had to be the answer. She turned her head vertical, now locking her own head in, trying to see where the switches were, knowing they have to be within reach, and nobody could rotate their shoulders out of socket to go down any further. She felt the wall vibrate with a strange click, wondering if she hit a switch by mistake while feeling around, and deciding to pull back and re-asses options. She turned her head and felt her chin bump metal that she didn’t remember brushing past.
The ten inch wide by 6 inch tall frame that seemed plenty wide a moment ago, seemed slimmer. She reached around her neck and felt the metal bars as her soul left her body, and she realized those weren’t there a moment ago. Her body went into an automatic motion, pulling and struggling to get out, her skull now larger than the gap around her neck, and her arms unable to retract with her head locked in place. She twisted and struggled to find the position she just knew would contort her way back out, as the metal bars refused to even wiggle slightly, as if welded the whole time.
“This has to be a dream…” she whispered, desperation and doubt in her shaky voice as the lights above her went out, nobody in the corridor to flip the switches, and the faint sound of the creaking gates opening anyway, locking her body in place more solidly than the metal bars, purely in fear.
Footsteps, metal being placed down on the tray, and silence filled the space behind her, now beaming the dim light in from her arm-holes as the now lightless corridor in front of her seemed like the safer place to be. She held perfectly still, trying to stay silent as if it would matter, while reaching for anything switch-like at all. She jumped as the sensation of a hand patting her back between the shoulders let her know it was either about to end or begin, and she didn’t know what was a worse fear. The strange, almost metallic coldness of long manicured fingernails rested on the back of her neck as the hand lifted and drug them slightly. An oddly large hand. The more she thought about it, the larger the hand must have been. Thumbnail and pinky nail almost making it to each shoulder socket.
“Let me out and let me fight back at least, you fucking COWARD!” she screamed, the sound of a ratcheting mechanism the only response, as she realized it was the same click of the metal bars from before, and then she felt them both converge on the sides of her neck, slowly narrowing and pinching tightly with no sign of bogging down as she felt her blood flow come to a halt. The crunching sound that followed echoed in the dark as she tried to scream.
Vicki sat up in bed, gasping for air and swiping at nothing in the open air around her. Realizing it was only a dream, only made her more worried, for some reason. Feeling the dampness of her shirt and the tacky feel of her hands., she rushed to the bathroom and turned on the light, staring at her reflection, blood painted down her arms and face, her mouth the most heavily stained part, eyes red and fangs lowered.
“Oh my god, not again… CALL AN AMBULANCE!” she screamed, grabbing her hair and collapsing on the floor in sobs of sheer panic, as the sound of rushing footsteps approached from multiple directions. Vicki closed her eyes and curled up, trying to wake again and feeling the sharply vivid feeling that she was very much awake.
