Practice Makes Perfect
“Come on, don’t be such a chicken!” she cajoled her boyfriend as they walked beneath the streetlights.
“What if we get caught?” he asked, worried.
She stopped walking, and turned to face him. “Nobody even watches the old graveyard anymore, we’ll be fine.”
He paused for a moment, thinking. “Alright, alright, we’ll go.”
They’d snuck out to hang out with each earlier that night; a new experience for both of them. After they’d met, though, they realised that there wasn’t much to do at eleven p.m. for fifteen year-olds, so she decided that they should go to the graveyard and make out. She chose it because she’d always wanted to go to a graveyard at night, and because she wanted to find out if he was brave enough to go there.
He was certainly afraid, but he wasn’t going to show it. The promised reward had him more than happy to come along. When they reached the graveyard he raked his hand through his hair, straightened up, and pushed the gate gently open.
He would’ve been happy out in the open, but -
“It’s cold”
- she said, and so they went into one of the open crypts. He led the way, her hand in his, less fearful as he took action and with his reward so near, taking a walk and look around the crypt. She followed, with a giggle.
Then with a gentle tug as his grip on her hand was broken, he was gone. He yelled out in fear, his voice becoming distant to her before there came a thud and a groan. She carefully moved to the side to let the moonlight shine past her to where she thought the hole was, and then carefully a step towards, and then she too was falling, falling…
She woke up, and it was dark, and cold. Her head hurt and she felt a little sick as she got to her knees. She stood up and then walked, hands outstretched, searching for a wall. Before she found one, she stood on something that rolled beneath her foot and she fell over. She reached out and found a torch?! She flicked it on and found herself in a small, dug out chamber. There was only one entrance, and in the dirt from there to where she’d awoken was a long drag mark.
She brushed the dirt off her back, and went out the entrance, the torch lighting the way ahead.
The cave passages were strange; they were rounded and smooth and supported with wooden beams – but were walled with stone and dirt. Stranger still was the fact that the dirt trail led her from the chamber she had been in (and a few similar chambers connected to the same passage) to a junction of five passages, where it stopped – and there was no hole for her to have fallen from in the ceiling. She leaned against the wall, and tried to calm herself down.
She was getting worried; dying alone, underground and lost was scared her far more than silly things like graveyards. And whoever had dragged her into that room – even if it was her boyfriend, where had the torch come from? Where was he now? She had no idea what was going on, or what her situation really was, no clue as to the right direction… So she picked the middle one, and strode onwards.
She walked for what felt like hours, but a look at her watch told her – told her that it was about one a.m. She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, or what time it had been when they got to the grave yard either and –
- There was a trail of blood on the ground. She bent down to look at it, to check if she was right, and she was. It looked like it was fresh, like someone had been bleeding freely, constantly down the passage. Her boyfriend? If he was hurt worse than she was – she started running down the corridor, following the trail, turning into a room on the side of the passage, and seeing a bowl, still half full of blood, a trail running down its side, sitting in the middle of the room.
She stumbled backwards, to side of the passage opposite the room, and looked fearfully left and right with her torch. A quick shine of the torch confirmed that there was nothing else in the room, just a large glass bowl with fresh blood in it. Who’s blood? Even if it wasn’t her boyfriend’s, that meant that there was someone else down here. And he wouldn’t do something like this anyway. At best it was some freak who thought that it was funny to do that with animal blood, at worst… She pushed the possibilities from her mind.
She started walking again in the direction she had already been following, her nerves jangled, jumping at shadows, as the tunnel slowly turned.
And then she came back to the junction room. She’d walked for about half an hour, been scared out of her wits, and was back where she had started. Worse, she didn’t know which tunnel she had taken, and then she noticed something.
The drag marks that should lead into one of the tunnels led straight into the wall. She ran over, pushed at the wall, shoved, dragged – and managed to make it rock a little when she tried as hard as she could. It blended in seamlessly mostly due to the beams on both sides of the hidden entrance – any joins in the top and sides were concealed, and the crack between the door and floor was hidden by the dirt.
And then she realised that there had still been five doorways; that a new one was open directly opposite her. She turned around to shine the torch into it, and saw that it opened up into another chamber.
She also saw that the other four paths had been closed while she was distracted. Her nerves broke; she screamed, and she ran the only way she could, right into the other chamber.
And then stopped when she saw what was in there. Her boyfriend, his arms and legs torn off had a giant nail through his throat, pinning him to the far wall. Blood was splattered all around him; some was still dripping into another bowl. His limbs were piled on both sides of him. She dropped to her knees, and vomited on the ground. Then she looked again, and saw another body, and another, and more as she swung the torch around. Some more recent, some old, some that were just bones.
She screamed again, got to her feet, and turned around to run out again, anywhere but this horrible chamber – and between her and the now closed door stood a corpse. No, worse – she looked pale, grey, she had claws and her jaw was wrong, huge and she smiled and opened her mouth and her teeth were pointed and long and her mouth kept opening wider and there was laughter that sounded like a predator who had caught her prey and screaming and then nothing anymore.
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