Dex turned around to see then quickly scooped the camera back off the ground. With vague curiosity I noticed he hit record and started filming, which meant he’d turned off the camera just seconds earlier. He cleared his throat a few times and then said for the sake of the recording, “We were just standing here talking when that light down there suddenly came on. We don’t know what it is since we haven’t explored that end of the second floor. From here it appears that the light is coming from one of the rooms. The odd thing is, I’m pretty sure there is no electricity up here.”
“The other odd thing is that lights just don’t turn on by themselves,” I added. “Electricity or not.”
“Could be a motion detector,” he said. “Solar paneled.”
“Now you’re pushing it.”
“Well then, why don’t we go down there and see?”
“Because…a million reasons,” I said. My eyes were glued to the light, the way it splayed out from the room with a chilling white glow, illuminating the area around it and deepening the shadows. “Because I don’t want to know what turned it on.”
“I do,” he said, staring at it before looking back at me. “Come on. You’ll never sleep not knowing what it was.”
He was right about that, but I figured I wouldn’t sleep either way now. He walked a few steps then stopped to look at me expectantly. I knew if I told him I wasn’t ready or felt…at risk, we’d head right back downstairs. But the thing was, some sick part of me wanted to know what was down there. That sick side always popped up at the worst times.
But curiosity hadn’t killed me yet.
I adjusted the light and joined him. He shot me this wicked, adrenaline-fueled grin.
“Now, if you think I’m going first, you’re crazy,” I told him.
He grabbed my free hand and held it with a vice-like grip. We were going like this, as if we were carefree young lovers out for a midnight stroll.
We walked down the hall, my eyes trained on the light ahead. Each step we took, I felt my pulse racing faster, my heart beating louder. The air grew colder, each inhale burning down into my lungs like I swallowed dry ice, until it felt like I couldn’t breathe at all. We didn’t even dare utter a word. The only sound other than the dull patter of our footsteps was the rustling of leaves blown in through open windows or the distant scurrying of a rat.
We crossed the center of the building, where we both looked over to the staircase that led to the first floor. I had to remind myself to breathe and then I almost had to laugh. It was funny how easy it was to just get to this floor via the grand staircase instead of the body chute. If we weren’t on a mission, I would have popped my head over the edge and called out to Rebecca.
And that’s when it happened.
We both looked back down the hallway, making our way to that eerie white light, when something moved in the shadows between us and the lit room.
It was a shadow.
At first.
Where the black inky space began to move, my eyes suddenly focused on a large, long-limbed creature, like a skinny human on all fours, crawling down the wall.
It paused—long enough for me to see an oblong head and stark white eyes, long enough for me to feel the life being sucked out of me—and quickly scampered across the hall, disappearing into another room.
The scream ripped out of my throat, leaving me raw. Dex cried out, “Holy fuck, did you see that, did you see that?”
And yes, I saw that, but oh god I wish I hadn’t.
Oh god, we had to get out of there.
But Dex wasn’t moving, stuck as if in mud, and he kept mumbling, “What the hell was that, what the hell was that?” He was losing his mind. My mind was already trucking it down the stairs; it was just waiting for me to catch up.
Whatever the hell that thing was, it crawled across the hall and was in some other room, waiting for us. And that’s when I knew it was the thing in the darkness, the thing I always felt watching me when I couldn’t see it.
The bad thing.
Brenna had some explaining to do.
With a blast, Dex’s phone went off with his X-Files theme song ringtone which sounded like death. I cried out, tears springing to my eyes from so much fear, my body assaulted by nerves that would not let me be. Dex quickly pulled out the phone and put it to his ear, his eyes still trained on the doorway where the bad thing disappeared.
“Rebecca,” Dex shouted into the phone, “you need to fucking come up here.” He paused. “Rebecca, are you okay?”
“She’s not there,” said a boy’s voice from behind us.
We whirled around, my hands shaking uncontrollably as I shined the light forward. There was nothing in front of us but the swirl of dust motes.
“It’s not her,” the young voice said again, even though we couldn’t see where it was coming from. “Don’t leave her alone.”
“E-Elliot?” I whispered, my voice breaking.
“We have to go,” Dex said. He pulled at my arm and I snapped to attention. We ran to the staircase and went racing down it, two steps at a time, not caring if we tripped the motion detector cameras or not when we reached the first floor.
I slid on the shiny marble floors, almost falling over, but Dex held me up, and we scampered down the hall, nearly colliding with Rebecca as she stepped out of the nurse’s office.
“I was just about to call you,” she said. She frowned at us, stepping closer. The lights on the first floor were working again, giving off a warm glow. “What’s wrong? What is it?”
Dex waved his phone at her. “You called. You were…I heard you crying.”
I shuddered. Crying?
She shook her head, her face paling. “No, my alarm went off just now. I hadn’t had the time to call you yet.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dex said, even though I thought mystery phone calls from people who weren’t Rebecca did matter. He shot me an agitated glance. “We saw something up there.”
She pushed her hair back behind her ear. “What?”
“I don’t know. A light in one of the rooms went on.”
At that her eyes grew to be saucers. “What? Where? How?”
“I don’t know. It was down the other wing. We headed over there to check it out and then some black…form, like a black dog or something, it ran across the hall.”
I gave him an odd look. “Dog? It was definitely a person…or something like it.”
I didn’t want to say the bad thing; I didn’t want to acknowledge its name. “It crawled down the walls,” I added to quell his dubious expression.
He rubbed at his chin. “No, it went across from the room with the light to the room across the hall.” I stared at him and he shrugged uneasily. “What? That’s what I saw.”
“But you heard the voice, the little boy.”
“That I did, kiddo.”
“All right, hold on,” Rebecca said. “You said a light turned on upstairs and there might be a dog loose, and you heard the voice of a young boy but you didn’t see him.”
“More or less,” I conceded, even though it sounded a lot tamer than it was.
“Well, bloody hell,” she said, hugging herself. She looked down the hallway to the staircase. “I don’t exactly feel safe staying here if there’s someone else in the building with us.”
“Are you talking ghosts now or people?” I asked carefully.