A dull, heavy thud echoed up the stairway toward them.
“Jonathan?” Walter’s whisper was right in his ear. “I am really, really, really”—he paused—“hungry. When you’re done playing with the monsters, you can find me in the kitchen, eating sausage.”
“I’ll be with him,” Colin added.
“Thanks, guys,” Jonathan said, and his only answer was the sound of their footsteps retreating back up the spiral staircase.
He held the lantern in a shaking hand and shuffled to the end of the landing, to the very edge of the final staircase. This one was narrower than the other corridors; the walls weren’t much farther apart than Jonathan’s shoulders.
Jonathan took a deep breath. Before him, there was another loud clunk, and a snuffling sound like a huge hissing nose. When he blew his breath out, it came out shaky.
He took the first step down. The steps were bigger drops down than the other staircase. He had to fall the last couple of inches. He took the next step down. He almost turned and ran when an especially loud metal rattling rang up from the darkness below. But he licked his lips and took a breath and dropped down another step. And another.
The darkness before him growled and crunched. The walls seemed to close in around him. He felt with his foot for the next step and realized that he was at the bottom. And that somewhere along the line, he had squeezed his eyes shut.
He opened his eyes.
He was in a tiny square room with a stone ceiling so low he could’ve reached up and touched it. It was freezing, and the walls were covered in dripping moisture as if they were sweating.
In front of him was a huge, round, metal door. Heavy iron bolts circled its outer edge. It was rusty and grimy and covered in shiny, green slime. It looked ancient. The door was big enough that, if it had been open (and he was extremely thankful that it wasn’t), he could have stepped through it without ducking. It was a door like a submarine would have, with the large iron handle in the middle that Jonathan knew would open the door if he spun it around.
The door seemed to rattle rhythmically, like it was breathing.
“The Hatch,” Jonathan whispered. He stepped toward it. He reached out with his empty hand. He could see the trembling in his fingers. They closed around the iron handle in the center of the door.
As his fingers touched the metal, his eyes dropped down to a round shadow at the foot of the door. The wavering light from his lantern flashed across it.
A human skull, white bone spotted with green slime, propped against the grimy stone doorway, black eye sockets gaping right at him, toothy mouth frozen in a silent scream.
The door suddenly rocked and banged against his shaking hand. There was a tremendous crack and a wet, sloshing thud, and a freezing mist sprayed Jonathan in the face.
He screamed and fell back, slipping on the wet stone. The lantern dropped from his hand and landed on the hard floor with a shattering crash.
The light went out, plunging Jonathan into absolute, eye-choking darkness.
Jonathan crouched on his hands and knees, panting in the blackness. He’d never seen such darkness before, so total and suffocating. Down in the deepest dungeon, pinned beneath a prison of dark stone, there was hardly even the memory of light. His eyes gasped like the mouth of a fish yanked out of the water. They found no light to breathe.
He waited for arms to wrap around his waist, long scaly fingers to close around his throat, teeth to pierce his shaking flesh. But one panicked breath passed. Then another.
All there was was complete darkness and the sound of his fear-gasping lungs and the same rhythmic watery thuds and sloshes of the Hatch. The stone under his hands was moist and clammy. The frigid, hard floor began to hurt his knees. His racing heart began to slow down, just enough for him to start to think. He tried to slow his lungs down.
He felt with his hands and found the lantern. The glass was broken and he shook and tapped it, but he knew that restarting it in the dark was impossible.
He was lost. In the dungeon of an asylum. In total darkness. With a skull. He couldn’t help but wonder where the rest of the body was.
“Crap,” he whispered, and tried not to freak out. Still on his hands and knees, he turned around and started crawling up the stairs, away from the Hatch, his hands feeling through the inky black mystery in front of him.