Liz stepped into the
house, and was quickly hit with a blast of musty, humid air. She sneezed, her nose overtaken by the dust
that her feet had kicked up. The outside
had looked fairly well maintained, but the inside looked exactly as she had
hoped.
As she glanced around she
saw uncovered furniture, layers of dust resting atop the simple
structures. While the house was large,
the inside was sparsely furnished, and what was there looked fairly poor, even
before the moths and age had gotten to it.
She walked farther in,
towards the rickety staircase that led up to the second floor. To her right was what appeared to be a living
room, with a long, rotted couch and two high backed chairs. To her left was a dining room, with a simple
wooden table, and four simple wooden chairs lining its sides. One of the chairs had toppled over, its leg
eaten away by termites.
“Great, who knows what
those little bastards have done to the floor.”
She glanced down, testing the floor with her feet. It seemed sturdy enough, but she couldn’t be
too sure.
“Wow, this place is a
wreck.”
Liz turned just as Ashtyn
stepped into the house. Liz wasn’t sure
how she felt about the young woman yet.
Her gut instinct was that she didn’t like her, but she wasn’t sure if
that was more because this girl was a friend of Max than anything about her
actual character.
Try and play nice, she
reminded herself. She didn’t think she
was all that bad, but if Max was complaining, then that could spell trouble,
and she didn’t want trouble. Wanted she
wanted was to keep her job.
“I’ve seen worse.” Liz
did her best to smile, but she doubted it was all that convincing.
“Oh, me too, but from the
outside I was expecting something very different.” Ashtyn’s eyes wandered over the dusty rooms,
her eyes seeming to stop at every shadowed corner for just a few seconds too long.
“So, Ashtyn, right?” Liz
took a step towards the girl. “How do
you know Max?”
“I work with the Demon
Slayers. A case of ours overlapped with
his show, and before you knew it we were friends.” Ashtyn shrugged, as if her
job description wasn’t at all weird.
“Ever been in a witch
house before?”
“No.” Ashtyn shook her
head. “I tend to work in research, but
on the few ground missions I’ve done its mostly been in mental landscapes, or
labs… there was also Fantasy Land.” She
cringed at the mention of the amusement park.
So this is one of the people who had been there. Liz wondered to herself if Ashtyn’s story would match of with Max. She could still remember the crazy shit that man had been spouting when he had gotten back from that episode. His recount of his ride through the Tunnel of Love was so over the top that she had almost believed him. Who could have made that stuff up? Then she remembered that the supernatural was a bunch of bullshit, and went back to thinking Max was just crazy.
“Listen, we should be
careful walking around in here.” Liz
started to guide Ashtyn back towards the door.
“Who knows how bad these floors are.
Let me check it out, and then…”
It was when she was
standing next to Ashtyn that she heard the loud groan. Ashtyn had heard it, too. The girl’s eyes went wide.
The next few moments were
a blur. The groan turned into a cracking
sound, and then the floor gave way.
Quickly, the light from the doorway seemed to fade away, and both Liz
and Ashtyn were plunged into darkness.
She couldn’t have been sure how far they had actually fallen, but when
she made contact with solid ground again, she hit it hard.
She tried to breathe but
the wind had been knocked out of her.
She lay there for a moment, the inky blackness blotting out her
vision.
“You okay?” Ashtyn’s
voice sounded pained, but fairly calm.
Liz sat up, and while her
back ached, and her body absolutely hated her at that very moment, nothing
seemed to be broken. “Yeah…”
“I think we fell into the
cellar.” Ashtyn’s voice seemed to be
getting stronger.
Liz could feel cold, wet
packed dirt under her hands, and she could smell mold and stagnant water. The cellar?
None of the details she had been given had mentioned a cellar. Most of the buildings on the island didn’t
have cellars. There was too great a risk
for floods. And yet, there they both
were.
A light came on overhead,
and shown down towards them.
“You guys okay?” It was
Max’s voice.
“Yeah, we’re…” Ashtyn
froze.
Liz followed her gaze,
and she suddenly felt her heart skip a beat.
A few feet away from them
was a large, black pool of water. The sides were raised, and made of an odd,
black stone, and there, sitting in the middle of the pool was a large
statue. It was tall, its raised hands
nearly touching the ceiling. Its body
was that of a nude woman, but its face looked demonic, with its mouth contorted
into a sick, toothy grin. Sticking from its back were two large, skeletal wings. It was horrifying.
“What the fuck is that?”
Liz hopped to her feet, doing her best to get as far away from that… that thing
as possible.
“I think we just found
the witch’s chapel.” Ashtyn never took
her eyes off of the black pool.
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