Written for jmo's Halloween challenge. I decided to use
the photo I just posted to my urbex tumblr as inspiration, because thinking of things is hard?
? ideas are hard?
? i did this instead of grocery shopping or performing any adult tasks at all this afternoon
When they had originally planned the hike, weeks before, they’d envisioned it much differently. Then, the only hint at the onset of Fall was the change in the quality of light, going amber and rich for several hours at the end of each day. It was a welcome change after a long summer of pale, high, hot sun. In Evelyn’s mind’s eye, autumn foliage and perfectly brisk air scrolled before her like a slideshow. The sky had been unquestioningly blue and bright, but invisible and safely tucked away behind a canopy of reds and yellows. Vic had gotten a little closer, imagining dew and recent raindrops glistening on browning leaves, and a deep blue movie set fog rolling in off the coast.
But October scurried in and out like a frantic mouse, and when they finally loaded up their car and drove out into the woods it was the first of November. At noon the sky was gray all over, like dawn filtering in through a white linen sheet.
They made the best of it. Evelyn had worked Halloween night, and Vic had stayed home hoping for trick-or-treaters that had never come. They ate leftover peanut butter cups on the two hour drive, and at the trailhead neither of them mentioned their queasy stomachs.
“It’s like Halloween Part Two,” said Evelyn, reassuring herself even as raindrops dripped down the collar of her polar fleece. “Son of Halloween.”
“Halloween: the Reckoning,” Vic agreed, and they locked the car and set off into the woods, going slow, avoiding places where the mud seemed especially unapologetic.
It was still nice, in a bleak, desperate kind of way. The rain wasn’t too hard, just persistent, like a stranger tapping your shoulder over and over again. The leaves were beautiful, when you could see them, but Evelyn hadn’t realized that most of the trees would be evergreens, tall and slim like telephone poles. The fog Vic had hoped for was out in fine form, no heel-nipping Hollywood fabrication but the real deal, slowly stealing any trees more than twenty yards away. Less than thirty minutes into the trail and they were offered a view of the Pacific, choppy even from this distance, a solid white wall of deeper fog or maybe hard rain a half mile out.
This was their first real indication that something might really be wrong. They laughed it off, because horror movies aren’t real. “There’s something out there!” Vic intoned to Evelyn, pitching their voice low for effect. “Something… in the mist!” They drank water from Evelyn’s nalgene bottle and kept going.
“And then the fog rolls in,” Vic supplied. “And the hikers can’t find their way back to the trail.”
“And they get more and more frantic,” Evelyn added. “Their water runs out and one of them goes missing, just walks off on their own like an idiot. And then something starts chasing them.”
(The fog is stealing the tops of the trees too, now, and it makes the forest feel a little like a high-ceilinged cathedral.)
“And they run, and they can’t see anything because of the fog,” Vic continued. “And they run right off the cliff--”
“But it was only their friend chasing them the entire time,” Evelyn finished. “That’s a good one. We should really write that.”
“We could make it a movie,” Vic said, pulling their phone out of their pocket. The phone had a little warning that they weren’t getting any service, which shouldn’t have been surprising but somehow was. Vic held their phone horizontally and poked the screen to get the camera to focus on Evelyn’s face, water drops suspended in her hair like sequins and backpack straps cutting into her windbreaker.
“Oh god, put that way,” Evelyn said, putting her hand over her face. She hadn’t put on makeup that morning.
“No, no, this is good,” Vic said. “The fog looks really cool behind you, like a green screen thing. We can just do a short thing, put it on YouTube. My followers will love it. Quick, look out into the mist and say the thing. Say, ‘I think there’s something in the mist.’”
Evelyn had turned fully away from them, to hide herself, but now she looked out into the woods and said, “Something is out there.”
“Perfect,” Vic said. They turned to point their phone down the hill, squatting down a little to get a good angle of the grayness leeching up after them. Everything looked primordial here, like a forgotten Jurassic Park sequel.
When Vic looked up, Evelyn had gone off the path. “You’re breaking horror movie rule number one,” Vic called after her. The mist was already taking pieces of her, like a Photoshop layer with the opacity turned down.
“There’s something here,” she called back to them. “I’m not fucking with you.”
She had only barely noticed it, in the haze, nothing that would register as an actual thing but only noticeable because it offered a few straight, perfect lines in the jumble of chaos that was the forest. As she got closer the straight lines resolved themselves into an actual shape, a dark gray barely detectable in the swimming atmosphere she and Vic had ascended into. Only when she had reached her own body’s length from it did all of the details start to come through: the curling moss, some of it verdant green and some of it a cold winter gray like the rest of the world, and curious geometric grooves along cement edges, some corners crumbling and some still sharp. A couple more decades in the woods, she thought, and it wouldn’t even be visible from the trail anymore. Nature would eat its clean lines into submission and it would be hidden forever.
A hand touched her shoulder and she jumped. It was just Vic, who had come up behind her very suddenly, as if the fog had started swallowing sounds as well as shapes.
“This is it!” they said, excited. “Holy shit, this is it!”
It took a few moments to find what they were looking for, what they’d come out into the woods for, partially because there were a lot of slick, damp fallen trees blocking their progress and partially because Vic kept stopping now periodically to record 360 degree shots and video clips of Evelyn scrambling over things. When they found the entrance it was very abrupt. One moment they were thick in mystery and the next they were standing just out of frame of the photo they had both examined so many weeks ago, six tabs open on Vic’s browser, all of them about the same place. The photo had been posted to reddit, and it had been taken in winter, with snow cresting the top like cake frosting. There was also a blurb about it on a hiker’s blog, who had come across it but not gone in, and a forum post from 2006 where someone claiming to be a park ranger described the interior. Wikipedia had an article about what the place had been at its inception, although it only went so far as to say the year operations had ceased and mentioned nothing of remaining structures. And then maps: state forest maps and a trail guide for the area, and Google satellite images. Vic had been the one to reverse image search the reddit photo and find the original photographer’s Flickr account, and then trawl through grandchildren’s birthday parties and macro shots of mushrooms to find more photos of the same state park, and match up photos of the coastline to likely areas on Google earth. After that it was Evelyn’s sharp line-spotting eyes that had finally pinpointed their target.
If they had been on-point, they should have had another two miles to walk. But here it was, a mouth coming up out of the damp earth and heavy moss, a basement smell coming out in a long, continuous sigh.
“Maybe it hooks up with the structure we saw?” Vic said, resting their palms on the metal grate wedged over the entrance like an afterthought. The metal was ice cold, and their hands stuck to it strangely.
“That’s miles of underground tunnels,” Evelyn said. “I mean, that would be amazing, but I think it’s more likely that I was just wrong.” She turned her face up and away from the bunker entrance, looking up to where the tops of the trees should have been, if the fog smothering them had been off somewhere else, making someone else feel uneasy. (A beach-visiting tourist, maybe, or a hangover-nursing Halloween partier. Someone who wasn’t already walking willingly into a scenario right out of a Goosebumps episode.) “I don’t think this would even be visible on satellite; the trees are too dense here and they’re all pine trees.”
“So you were wrong, but really, really close to not being wrong? That seems more likely to you?” Vic asked, hauling themselves up the grate now, one metal strat at a time. “All the miles of coastline we looked at, and we’re totally off, but we just luck out and stumble on the place anyway? What are the odds?”
And Evelyn had to give them that, but she didn’t have to concede the point out loud, because something about this was making her really feel all the candy she’d been eating, no longer in a sick-stomach sense but the way a sugar rush would feel, like everything was hitting her all at once and trying to send her limbs into a frenzy when the rest of her was still stuck in the mud. Literally. So she scraped her heels on the concrete walls that sloped out from the entrance to their little find and joined Vic, who had already reached the top of the grate and was shimmying in through the ever-widening gap at the top, where gravity was peeling the grate back like skin from a wound.
The darkness inside the mouth of the bunker was as thorough as the mist they had waded through to get here. Waiting for Evelyn to get over the barrier, Vic stood with their back to the light and stared into the darkness. In a way, this was their favorite thing about these little adventures: the moment before knowing you were safe. Waiting to let your eyes adjust and savoring the uncertainty, the ripeness of the moment, one thousand horrors waiting just at the barrier of vision, staring back at you, waiting to be seen, waiting to be known. Vic swallowed, and their hands twitched around the grip of their flashlight, but they resisted for just a second longer, feeling the cool air on their face, waiting for their eyes to adjust, splotches of color and light now coming out of the darkness that they knew from experience were only figments of their imagination, their brain putting things in the places it expected the eyes to see things, filling in the gaps even when one hundred percent of its field of vision was All Gap.
The color and light made a face. Vic stared at the face, and watched its features shift.
“Shit,” said Evelyn.
The spell was broken, and Vic turned to her perhaps a little too quickly. She was crouching at the bottom of the grate now, her arm reaching out between slats of metal, grasping for something outside in the damp grass and mud.
“My fucking keys dropped out of my pocket,” she said.
Vic looked outside. The glimmer of Evelyn’s car keys and the black fob were just barely visible, the fog somehow now pressing down on the old remains of this radar observation base even more thickly than it had before. Vic thought about scrambling back up and over for her, getting the keys. It seemed all too appealing. The two of them stood at the mouth of darkness and looked outside into the damp, white world.
“You can leave them,” Vic said. “We haven’t seen anyone else since we left the trailhead. They’ll be here when we get back.”
“Right,” said Evelyn grimly, reassuring herself again. “When we get back.”
And that was their last chance, right there. Their last warning. Standing there at the entrance, if they had acted quickly, they might have made it back out.
They turned into the darkness, both flashlights coming on quickly now. For the barest, briefest moment, Vic almost thought they saw the face again, the same face that had been shifting into solidness in the absolute darkness moments before. But then it was gone, just a ghost image, like the sun on the backs of your eyelids when you look for just a second too long. In its place, the walls of the bunker revealed themselves, first tucked neatly into the circles of light cast by their flashlights and then, as they walked deeper in, the entire first chamber came into view. It was what they had expected, from previous visits to other old forts and small abandoned military outposts. Gray, industrial paint, as featureless as the fog that had ushered them inside. At first the plainness seemed complete, but soon red rust and streaks of green moss began bleeding into the picture from the edges. Mysterious grooves in the cement divided the floor into quadrants, and ran through the walls. Two twin holes, like fireplaces, sat recessed into the wall, detritus collected at the bottom and rain dripping in steadily. Vic put their hand under the hole. The raindrop that fell into their outstretched palm was warm and slick, and at first some wild gut instinct told them it was blood, and their imagination raced to fill in the gaps again, and it was blood dripping from a severed head lodged in this hole--
-- but when they removed their hand, the dampness there was clear and featureless. They wiped their palm on their jeans.
Evelyn was already into the second chamber, leaving what little ambient light the entrance had provided behind, not out of braveness but out of eagerness to canvas the entirety of the structure and know for certain what it held. An invisible fist was gripping her heart, and she wanted very much to get back to her keys, to have them in her right hip pocket where they belonged. Something about this bunker made her very, very nervous now, even though the second room was as featureless as the first, and it really all looked a lot like every other place they had ever been before, all melted together into some uncanny-valley-inducing medium, like the computer generated faces of the average man or woman that went around on the internet periodically.
The third chamber was a hall, with two smaller chambers off to either side. Vic pulled out their phone again and held it in one hand, awkwardly tucking their flashlight under their armpit to free up both hands, the better to film Evelyn swinging her flashlight methodically side to side, checking each corner, checking the ceiling.
At the fourth chamber they thought for a moment they had reached the end, but around the right corner they found themselves in a chamber identical to the first, a gentle slope introducing itself now, taking them farther underground.
“Two miles,” whispered Vic, feeling silly for whispering but still reluctant to make any noise that might echo.
Evelyn gave them a look.
At the end of the eighth chamber there was a left turn, and the pattern repeated itself again. The dripping noises of water were becoming less frequent, but the walls were becoming slicker. Vic pressed a hand against the wall of the fourteenth chamber and found that the water here was warm and slick, like the drop that had fallen on their hand in the first chamber. It was less of a shock now, though, and it took a moment for them to reason out why.
The chambers were getting warmer.
In fact the continual sighing breeze they had been walking against was now near balmy, and humid in a way the fog outside had not been. It was like a dog panting.
And the near-scentless basement smell had warped itself into something murkier, also not unlike a dog panting, or like the inside of a raw steak going bad, or the smell of a used tampon left in a hot trashcan.
And it was just as Vic was coming to this realization that Evelyn was beginning to realize that the straight, eye-catching lines that had built this place at the entrance were crumbling, now, in slow motion, like the crumbling cement on the outside, even without the constant erosion of the harsh outside world. Every chamber deeper into the earth they went, the walls bowed a little more, until they were no longer like manmade walls but like the walls of a cave, rounded and worn away by some long-gone subterranean tributary. The grooves that had been so straight and mechanical-seeming and familiar now wandered and wavered, like veins inversed. And the twin holes in the start of every chamber repetition now seemed less carved or built but grown, and when she wasn’t looking at them dead-on sometimes she could swear they were moving, in and out, in and out, like small lungs, or like nostrils.
“This is definitely way scarier than Halloween Part One was,” Vic finally joked. Their voice sounded like it was being pressed through something, like they were being choked by an unseen force. “Someone should film a movie here. Like, a real one.”
“Two hikers find an abandoned bunker in the woods,” Evelyn said. “They think they know what they’re getting into, they think they’ve researched everything.”
“But they went into the wrong bunker. They got lost in the mist.”
“The mist led them astray on purpose.”
“The mist was actually a terrible creature,” Vic decided. “A supernatural predator, like one of those weird deep-sea fish.”
“An anglerfish. Like a psychedelic anglerfish,” Evelyn said. “It entrances its prey, and then, when it’s too late--”
“Gulp,” Vic said, grinning now. It was a bad kind of grin, forced and with too many teeth, like a hiss of pain.
“And it tricks them into going into what they think is the bunker,” continued Evelyn, pointing her flashlight around another corner. She had lost count, finally. “But it’s actually its mouth. And they go deeper and deeper, not realizing that they’re serving themselves up to this monster.”
“That’d be really good,” said Vic. “I’d watch that. I’d watch the shit out of that.”
The walls of the bunker were completely cavelike now, ridged and almost certainly trembling, or breathing, inhaling. The strange slick water was dripping now, and Vic realized now that what it really felt like was spit.
Like a creature salivating.
“We should go back,” they finally said.
“I think you’re right,” said Evelyn, relieved that she wasn’t the one who would have to say it.
They both turned to go back the way they came, and that was when the chamber finally slammed floor and ceiling together, crushing both of them instantly. The death was quick; their brains were pulverized before either of them had really accepted what was happening. The long, long sections of cavern convulsed, beginning the slow and tedious process of swallowing.
Outside, the fog began to evaporate. The crumbling entrance to the false bunker receded into the moss and the mud and the dead leaves; when it emerged again it would bear a different form altogether.
Whatever it took to get its next meal.
? ideas are hard?
