I Fell

09:45

Despite telling herself not to rush, she had done just that. She was sure she'd broken more than a handful of traffic laws on her way back to the place she and her friend now called their own. She was sure she had put her life in danger with the recklessness of her driving, and she was sure she...No, she wasn't really sure about her bad feeling being just anxiety; it wasn't confidence. To prove her total lack of surety on that matter, as soon as she'd came to a screeching halt on the driveway, Corrina had thundered up the stone steps slimy with the morning's dew, slipping a couple of times before making it onto the porch. She had nearly kicked the door open and made a staggering run around the foyer while screaming for Selene like someone possessed. But then, the younger woman poked her head around the intricately carved dark walnut door frame of the sitting room, scared out of her wits from her friend's screeching and apparently, nothing other than that.

Selene rushed over to the blonde freaking out, almost mirroring her actions of confusion and panic. "What the fuck's wrong? Did something happen to you?" The younger woman grabbed either side of Corrina's face as she flapped with anxiety, sweat racing down inked skin and bust heaving from laboured breath.

Fate was not content with mere panic, no. The sound of heavy footsteps clomped quickly up the porch steps in time for Selene's company to show himself. Then, and only then, did things get set into motion.

By the parlour door frame, a short blond peeked his head out at the commotion and noticed Chase storming up the porch and into the foyer through the front door left open. The much shorter man crossed his arms across his chest, his brows furrowing deeper the longer he stared at the intruder. "Ah, fuck…”

Corrina peered back to the man she'd left back in town without an explanation, and then to the stranger with smeared eye-liner using the door frame as a leaning post. "Who the fuck are you?" She made an attempt to drive towards the slim man in a raggedy black hoodie glowering daggers at Chase.

Selene opened her mouth to answer the blonde who had clearly lost the plot, but Chase beat her to it. “That’s Finn,” he spoke to back of Corrina’s head before his attention shot to the named male. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

Tonguing the inside of his cheek, pale eyes surrounded in black glowered at the man by the door. Finn pushed himself up off the frame and stepped forward. “I can tell you that it's not chasing down girls who tell me 'no', unlike some people.” Before he’d even finished his sentence, Chase marched towards the man who could always get under his skin with a single remark.

Head snapping around, Selene barked at the pair not helping matters. “Can you not?” Returning her attention to her friend, the redhead smoothed down Corrina’s hair and tried to soothe her. “What happened?”

Corrina shook her head, appearing to calm down. "I was with Alex," she started to explain. Although, at that moment, she didn't know exactly why she was wasting time with that kind of small talk.

Chase yipped with the wobble of his head, as if his intention was to bring a lie to light. "I didn't see Alex."

Steadying her breathing, the blonde waved him off. She turned to look at him but changed her mind halfway through the action. "I left before him." Her eyes fluttered as her thoughts crashed into one another.

Finn advanced for the two females. "Why?"

"He felt ill and I-" Mouth ajar as a fragment of remembrance shone through the confusion, Corrina's eyes shot to redhead still holding onto her as she stared. "I got a message from Selene. It said ‘Help’." The blonde grabbed Selene's shoulders to make sure she actually there but rather than the smile she'd expected, or at least a punch in the arm for being a retard, she was met by a frown.

The younger woman tilted her head, not quite understanding. "I didn't text you."

Corrina snapped. "Yes you did; I got the message."

"Cory..." Selene started slowly, the look of concern growing by the second. "I haven't seen my phone since the party."

Corrina's throat became dry as if she'd been choking down sand and a fierce heat rapidly spread up from her chest, crossing her face. A tremble started and she could feel her pulse pushing through her veins faster than it should, echoing in her ears, forcing her breathing to shallow. At that moment, she felt all the eyes on her, she was being judged. Just when her mind was beginning to shut down, a spark of hope flickered in the back of her brain. "Wait." She reached inside her pocket hastily. Retrieving her phone and pressing a few buttons, the blonde sighed in utter relief that she wasn't tripping balls from a bad pill, or worse, losing her mind. "Look." She turned the phone around so the others could see the screen clearly showing the message.

"But that doesn't explain why anyone would send that."

Corrina glowered at Chase, just now realizing what his presence meant. "Did you follow me?" She didn't even give him a chance to answer when she looked back at Selene. "Where's Leon?"

"He left about half an hour ago," Selene told, not sure where this was going.

The blonde immediately turned to the stranger with suspicion in her eyes. "When did you get here? And why? Your friends were looking for you last night but you didn’t show your face. I didn’t see you at all and I was wandering around."

Taken aback by the harsh tone she was using and the barrage of questions, Finn shrugged with his answer. "About ten minutes ago. I came to see if anyone had found my pendant."

“Sure you did. You were probably-”

“Shut your fuckin’ mouth, Chase!” Each word drew out as the shorter man prodded the air between them with violent force.

Much to the surprise of Selene, the addressee stepped onto his back foot and kept tight-lipped, making sure to avoid eye-contact.

Corrina's anxiety fizzled out as a nagging - and it was nagging - feeling scratching at the back of her brain. She wasn't sure what it was but it was pissing her off. Someone was messing with her. The last person to do that found out the hard way that it was a bad idea on their part, and now, whoever was fucking around with her friend’s phone was going to meet the same trouble. Ignoring the debate that had started up between the trio, the blonde stabbed the number one on her screen with her thumb and then held the phone to her ear. She hunched and shuffled a few paces down the hallway, waiting and listening to the dial tone. Soon, the conversation in the foyer faded out.

Chase was the first to notice the blonde behaving oddly and nudged Selene without saying anything. Not a minute passed when the three of them were all staring at the blonde almost bent double as she zig-zagged down the hallway towards the hallway between the staircase and kitchen which led to the basement, and then rounded back around.

Selene's brows pinched as her mouth opened. "Cory, what are you doing?"

"Sh, I-" the older woman cut herself off as she caught the sound of her friend's ringtone. "I hear it," came out as a whisper.

There was no doubt that the blonde looked completely off her rocker as she dashed up the first flight of stairs with her phone stuck to her ear. The others couldn't just stand there. Instead, they followed, concerned by the way the blonde was acting. They followed her up the first flight and then down to the end of the hallway; to the right and then left, down a narrower corridor that neither girl had dared to explore yet. And as they followed Corrina with her phone still glued to her ear and her rage noises becoming more apparent, the other three kept up with jogs and sometimes sprints down the ever confining passages with less and less windows as they pursued whatever was at the end of half-flights of stairs and old doors. After what could be put at around twenty minutes of goose chasing, the blonde stopped, sweating and red in the face as she huffed for a decent breath.

They had made it to a part of the house they didn't even know existed. Its ceilings were lower than the rest around of the building and from the number of stairs, they were somewhere between the second floor and the attic, if that was even possible. Wherever it was, it was lined with untouched dust and the smell of must, a lightless passage barely big enough for them to fit down in single file. Corrina had her hand down by her side and left her phone on loud-speaker for everyone to hear that Selene's own phone was indeed ringing. Ringing, ringing, just a constant stream of that insanity-inducing repetition that the older female thought everyone should suffer through. But not only that, there was an echo in the passage - one from Corrina's phone and the other was Selene's straight from the source. And then the dulled tone from the abyss stopped mid-ring as if it had been answered.

Ktch.

The four in the confined space froze as they listened to the crackle of static coming from Corrina's cell. Breathing thinned out and heartbeats quickened to the point of almost being able to hear that of the next person along. It was only now that reality had begun to set in. The four of them were crammed down a pitch-black space, in a horror house that eats phones with only one cell flashlight for assistance. It may have been one thing to follow the junkie on her search through a maze of potential death traps, but now, as their bodies were squashed between the peeling walls and each other, as rationality crept up and poked them with the obvious, something of interest came to mind.

How did the phone get here?

Finn, who had been at the front, shuffled further down the narrow corridor, his right hand blindly feeling along the crusty walls. "I think there's a door."

Selene was third in the line behind her friend and in front of Chase. "This just keeps getting better." She tilted her head back against the peeling paint crispy with solidified dust only to shudder. Trying to take a decent breath not laden with whatever bugs could be hiding down there,the redhead squirmed at the nastiness of it all.

"Maybe we should come back with actual flashlights?" Chase kept checking the back of the line and the sparse sepia light a good fifty yards away at the end of the tunnel, as it was.

Fumbling blindly, Finn's hand caught what could only be the handle to the door a few inches away. He twisted the metal knob but nothing happened besides the jangle of loose metal, and grunts growing even more agitated by the conditions. He turned it again, jiggling and pulling at it as his temper flared until he was overtaken by the tension that had bothered him since he'd entered the space that felt like it was constricting around him. Flailing his body as his hand kept a grip on the door knob, his shoulder repetitively banging into the barrier in his attack, the shortest growled and hacked for a breath as blistering heat seared his skin

Corrina reached out to calm the man she could feel thrashing around beside her. "Fuckin’ stop-"

With a final thud, a rotten crunch, and then a sound that none of them were all too familiar with, Finn had stopped his manic flapping. Instead, there was a yelp from Corrina as she felt her hoodie get snatched and pulled briefly in what could only be Finn trying to stop himself from falling. But it did not stop him. He had not bust the door open, but rather smashed straight though one of the panels of the old wooden barrier and down onto the floor of the room behind it. Darkness beside Corrina grew like it was trying to swallow her just like it did the man who had been beside her. Those thoughts were put on hold when the rotten boards gave way beneath the fallen man and more crashing came from the blackness.

"Finn!?" Corrina, now on her hands and knees, crawled over to the hole in the door. "Finn, can you hear me? Hey!" Her heart had thrust its way into her throat as her pulse sped. Her nails clawed at the floor beneath her as she felt around. Her stomach was churning from the adrenaline and a sour updraft of rot. "G-get a proper light." She her hand behind her blindly, smacking Selene’s shins, urging the other two to do something without removing her eyes from the abyss ahead of her. “G-go. And rope!”

Chase pulled at Selene's arm, restarting her senses. "Hurry up," he pulled the redhead glued to her spot again and this time, she budged. "We'll be right back; don't move!" He told while they sprinted out towards the exit, leaving Corrina by herself.

 

10:07

Chase and Selene had backtracked through the maze as fast as they could, racing down the stairs and dodging around corners until they were back in the foyer.

"Where are your flashlights?"

"In the kitchen, under the sink - get the first aid box that’s in there too. I'll get the rope." Selene shouted back and dashed around the corner to the basement entrance, recalling that the blonde had bundled up the scraps and hung them up at the foot of the stairs leading to a different kind of Hell.  A few minutes passed when they'd met back up in the foyer, panting and panicked. "Oh, God, I hope they're okay." The redhead mumbled more to herself than the man sprinting up the stairs beside her. “Please don’t be dead. Oh, fuck…”

"I can understand your friend, but what about him?" Chase glanced at the female from the corner of his eye.

"Wha-"

"Don't you find him strange?"

Selene thought about what Chase was saying. Of course, the man was a little odd, but she couldn't see anything wrong with him - Not strange enough to be left to die in a hole, no matter the circumstance. The redhead kept quiet, not humouring the man she knew for a fact didn't like Finn. He had shown it only before when they had met after Corrina arrived; it was that look he gave the younger man. Selene had seen that look somewhere else - in a different time and a different place - but she had seen it all the same. She knew all too well what could come of it, too. Because of it, at that moment, she brought her guard up and no amount of charm and good looks on his part would bring those walls back down again. Especially if they happened to be alone and there was a probability he could distract her to hinder somebody he found a hindrance.

 

10:20

Selene dashed around the corner, almost skidding as she turned to go down the passageway where she'd left her friend to wait. The yellowish-white beam jumped and jittered in rhythm with the younger woman's stampeding footsteps as she ran. Or rather, staggered down the tunnel-like space, the edges of her shoulders scraped by peeling paint on both sides. "Cory?" She moved the flashlight around until it had landed on the back of the blonde hunching over on her knees. "Corrina!" Selene called out again when her friend didn't answer.

Slowly, the blonde turned her head. Her skin had taken on a greyish tone and glistened sickly, her line of sight barely able to focus on the redhead bounding for her. Corrina looked at Selene with a dazed expression without saying anything for a few seconds. The blonde's eyes shifted to the redhead's hand. "You brought a rope..." Her eyes flickered back up to meet her friend's.

"What happened?"

Corrina would like to know that too. Just after being left alone, Selene's phone had been thrown out at her knees. There had been no scuffling or rustling before it, certainly no sign of life from Finn - It had just been chucked out to her, like a gentle underarm throw. By that point, Finn still hadn’t replied and even stranger still, she thought she had seen something on her crouched eye-level shift past the floor of the level she was on. Something with bare limbs, twisted and jittering before it vanished just as quickly. It was impossible: she knew it and they definitely wouldn't believe it. The floor had caved in along with Finn and it was even darker in the room than it was out there with her. It was ridiculous and impossible, something conjured by sitting in the dark for too long and her fix wearing off.

"Corrina?" Selene slapped her friend on the top of her shoulder when she spoke out. Her tone was sharper than usual, like she hadn’t stopped calling the older female. "Are you okay?"

The blonde's hand tightened around the slim metallic device in her left hand, discreetly sliding it into her pocket and out of view from the others looming over her with worried expressions. "Here's my phone." She shoved her own cell into Selene's hand in exchange for the rope she took without permission. "Pass me a light." She held out her hand.

Selene hunched and shrugged in an attempt to rid herself of the tension building in her shoulders and neck but to no avail. "You're going in there?" She scrunched her face and pointed a little, daring not to extend her arm too far towards the hole. "I don't want you to."

Corrina slid one end of the rope under the door and back through the hole, looping it before looking up and handing the excess to her friend. "I'm sure you don't want to do it and we can't just leave him down there."

Selene thought about telling Chase to take over from her friend but quickly came to the realisation that Hell would freeze over before he went out of his way for the blond. "I really don't want you to go down there."

"I really don't want to go down there either." The blonde mumbled as flashes of minutes before prickled her vision. More than climbing into the unseeable pit, the mere thought of climbing into that room past the broken door gave her reflux.

Chase elongated his neck and nudged Selene on the side of the arm. “Maybe we should just call the fire brigade.”

“That will take too long. He’s already been down there more than twenty minutes and he could have busted his gourd open or broke his neck.” Taking a deep breath to calm her trembling, the older female lined the light through the trashed door. She could see a carpet of thick dust surrounding the splintered hole in the floor on the other side, and what appeared to be the legs of a desk and wooden chair at the back of the room. Moving the beam of light straight down through the hole as not to land on anything unexpected that could put her off and turn her into a pussy, Corrina steeled herself. Crouching through the gap and being careful of her footing, she tried to hold what she’d eaten of the bacon and cheese sub down in her gut as she mumbled curses to herself. Selene shuffled quickly behind her friend and stopped at the threshold, her knuckles white around the sliver of scratchy rope.

“I-I got a pocket, got a poc-pocket full of sunshine…I got a love-”

Selene glared back over her shoulder at the under-the-breath yammering coming from Chase. “What the actual fuck are you doing?”

“Shut up, it relaxes me.” The man at the back snapped, his face scrunched up as he clung to the redhead’s shoulders in her hunched position. “Oh, oh whoa~a~ Do what you want, but you're never gonna break me…”

“I will not just break you, I will throw you down there with them if you don’t stop hissing down my goddamn ear. Get off me!” She shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes at the man who’d just lost all of his street credit with her for warbling A Pocket Full of Sunshine as his happy song.

Scrambling around to get into a position that wouldn't cause her to topple, the blonde slid her legs around and sat at the edge of the splintered hole in the floor. Again, she took three shaky breaths as if she was in labour and the contractions were coming way too quick for her liking. Peering down into the darkness, she used the light to look for the man who had fallen. She spotted him on his side, laying on the floor and assumed he was unconscious - It's not like he'd just decided to take a nap down in a place like that, after all. Now knowing where he was and where she definitely shouldn't fall, Corrina put the handle of the flashlight in her mouth and rested her sweating palms on the cold wood making her itch as bad as that time she touched broken fibre-glass.

"Keep talking to me, okay?" Selene waited just behind the door, not quite brave enough to stick her head through the hole in the door.

"Just tell me if it looks like the door frame is going to break," said the blonde before taking the plunge. Slipping off the ledge and scraping the back of her thighs on the rotten floorboards, she dropped down into God knows where. With a crunching thud and a grunt, Corrina found herself in the unknown space packed with dense dust and a putrid stench. Like the iconic scene when Light got his powers back in Death Note, flashing images from the movies she'd seen of the terror, torment and suffering that could happen in places like this flooded through her head. Finn stirred by her feet and she crouched down to inspect his state.

Palms pressed against either side of the hole in the door, Selene called down curiously. "What's down there?"

"I'm not down here to do a re-con, Len." Shaking her head as she hissed, Corrina patted Finn on the top of his arm when she found that he wasn't mangled or bleeding to death. "Hey." She whispered as she applied more force. "Finn!" With a firm whack, the blonde hit the man in the top of his arm.

Groaning as he caught his bearings, his eyes fluttered open. "I fell." His speech was slurred as he rubbed his eyes, wincing.

"No shit." The female huffed a thankful sigh that her guest hadn't been brain-damaged in the fall. The last thing she and Selene needed was a lawsuit.

Sitting up amongst the broken floorboards and strewn papers that had been there since before the collapse, Finn peered up with widening eyes. "And you came to get me."

Bother by the innocent remark in such a situation, Corrina turned away. Nose in the air only to instantly regret it when the stink burnt her nostril hairs off, she held back a gag. "I couldn't very well leave you to rot in my walls."

"That sounds disgusting." Selene, now in higher spirits upon hearing the accidental victim speak, shouted down to them with a cough of disbelief.

Shaking her head, Corrina helped the shorter male up to his feet. He stumbled briefly, but soon got his footing  the debris. Holding his head which probably hurt like a motherfucker, he squinted around the room packed with draft. "What is this place?" He asked and the female used the flashlight to scan the perimeter.

The walls were made from what looked like bare concrete - and shabbily done, at that - and the upwind gust she'd felt from the other side of the door was magnified at least ten-fold along with the smell that was now a god-awful stench causing her stomach muscles to contract. Corrina felt two taps on her arm and looked up to see Finn staring at the wall to his right. She followed his line of sight, the flashlight following, and came to realise what was so interesting. Preservation jars - at least six dozen of them - were lined up on haphazard shelving units at the far end of the room. She wondered how she could have failed to recognize that stink. She had smelt it once before during a field trip to some science thing on one of the rare occasions she had gone to school. Once was enough while they were in gleaming display cases at a museum. When they were rank, and tar-brown, and gloopy-looking, and hidden in the walls of her house evoked a new kind of emotion she didn’t plan on chasing after for a second time.

Up in the tiny hallway, Selene twitched and fidgeted. How long could it possibly take them? “You two better not be banging down there! You’ll catch something.”

Behind her, Chase had his right side to the opening which led into the hallway they'd come from. His eyes were partially closed due to the irritation from mildew and particles. On the fourth recital of his happy song, a shroud passed in his right peripheral. Blinking to clean his eyeballs, the tallest focused on the spot where he thought he had seen something move by the only exit into freedom. The temperature dropped and the air pressure had grown tense, as if charged with electricity. It had been a fraction of a second from the corner of his eye but that didn’t stop his left hand from subconsciously grabbing the closest thing to him. Snaking his fingers over Selene’s hand, he swallowed hard.

“I told you not to t-” Selene looked up in order to scold the oaf but she was cut off by the look on Chase’s profile. “Okay, it really is too good of an opportunity to pass up saying this no matter how cliche but, you look like you’re just seen a ghost.” Selene’s eyes turned up into crescents as she chuckled. She was enjoying seeing him shook up. Serves him righ…Leaning a little to her left to share his line of sight, she looked past his head and towards the end of the corridor that they were trapped in.

The shape and angles of the hallway at the end of the glorified crawlspace was pretty much an L-shape with its only turn going off to the left once at the end of where they were, a slim rectangle window to the right. So how, in all that was holy, did a shadow on the left wall facing a window in the middle of the day slink around the corner?

Selene’s mocking quickly turned to her squeezing Chase’s hand out of instant reaction. “Hurry up. Hurry the hell up. Get out of there now.” The words flew from her mouth as she tore her hand back and crouched down to shout through the hole in the door.

“Alright, keep your wig on.” Resting her hand on Finn's back, she gave him a gentle push. "Let's get out of here. It’s gonna take more than a single wash to get the smell out of my hair as it is." He peered up at her and she smiled reassuringly. "You go first."

The expression on his face twisted in a way she'd never seen on anyone before. She thought about asking what it meant, but the saying 'now isn't the time or place' was made for this specific situation. Like he'd been told, the man began climbing out of the pit that sure as hell shouldn't be there. Corrina was taking a last peek around while waiting for her turn when something caught her eye. In between two of the pickling jars, paper poked out a smidge. It was really a wonder she'd noticed it at all with the way her eyes were darting around. She heard Finn clamber up to the level of the passage and without thinking, snatched what turned out to be a ledger around A5 in size. Shoving it under her hoodie and zipping it up, the blonde made haste for the rope dangling down, the face of the man she’d saved peering down at her as he held the rope for support. She had got only two feet up and then remembered those couple of seconds from earlier when she'd imagined something lurking on the upper platform.

"Pull me up." She tried not to sound like she was losing her bottle but when they didn't help her as quickly as she'd wished, she repeated herself with more vigour. “Pull me the fuck up, now, please.” Shimmying up the rope as it was being pulled by Finn and Selene, the bottom corner of Corrina's t-shirt snagged on something sharp. "Motherfucker," ignoring the sting over the front of her hip and the sharp floorboards scraping over her chest and stomach when she flopped along the floor like a beached whale, the woman shoved her rescuee with more oomph than intended. "Move it or lose it-Go-Now-I wanna get out of here." She gave another wack and the smaller man went head-first through the gap in the door.

Clambering to her hands and knees in order to speed-crawl out of the hell hole, rustling behind her forced her body to halt. Icy sweat squeezed from her pores and her hair stood on end. She could hear Chase shouting and Finn cursing him out, Selene telling them to move so she could see if she was okay. Corrina was not okay.

Lungs rattled behind her and the intimidation of a sure presence behind her caused her muscles to tighten and her jaw to clench. Eyes wide and brow twitching, she felt her neck begin to twist without her consent. 'Do not fuckin' look behind you-' Gentle breeze barely brushed the back of her hair, the strands tickling her. The sickly breathing was close. Donkey kicking manically, the blonde released inhuman sounds from the bottom of her soul and rolled through the gap as if she was powered by the full furies of hell. Springing to her feet with her arms out, fingertips brushing either wall of the narrow corridor, she scooped up her company and bulldozed them out to the opening at the end.

Updated: 1st January 2020 - 18:00