Jon Fore - Black Water

His skin now crowded with burns not much bigger than a thumbprint, oozing blood softly. There had to be hundreds of them, but the most horrible were his eyes, now burnt to empty sockets. They stared hollowly, but still wept blood down among the pockmarks on his face.

“Oh my God…” Abby sobbed.

“Chris! What happened to you? Come to the door!” Ethan shouted at him.

“Captain Black wants to know things …but he ain’t gettin' nothin’ outta me…” Chris trailed off and suddenly drove the knife into the side of his neck and forced it through his throat.

Madison screamed brutally as Chris sputtered through a wet breath and fell to his knees.

“Chris!” Abby screamed as she began to cry.

Then the blood came. A torrent of crimson rushed across the beams of the flashlight and Ethan began to hammer on the latch of the cell with his bare hands, cursing his helplessness as the flesh tore from his fists. Chris fell to his face and began flooding the cell with an unimaginable amount of blood.

Abby grabbed onto Madison and they wept together, the horror of what just happened almost too much for them to hold onto as a concrete reality, and Ethan stopped pounding on the cell door. He spotlighted Chris once more and took a step back to be closer to the girls. As he did, the cell door eased open slowly, shrieking through the rust like a bad violinist. Ethan wrestled his mind to calm, as the doctors had taught him, and it suddenly filled with an old black woman, warning them out of the cellar.

Ethan’s feeling of encroaching dread, the premonition of unstoppable doom, did not want to subside even with Chris’s act of violent suicide. It began to consume his thoughts, overwhelm his personal despair, and his shock at the violence he had just witnessed pushed slowly to the back of his mind.“You all keep out dat cellar, hear?” echoed through.

He took Abby by her shoulders, the girls having collapsed to their knees to weep. “We have to go, Abby. We need to make our way down the mountain, get to Brighton or to a cellular signal or whatever, and call for help.”

“Why… why did he do it?” Abby sobbed, no longer the calm and collected mother of the group.

Ethan knew why. He had tried to take his own life when he was thirteen, haunted by that homeless man no one else could see. The terrible things the bum had told him, the horrible things he had shown him, it was more than any man should have to stand, less a child. However, to explain that to a normal person, one that had not seen it, was just not possible. “He was sick, Hon,” was all he could muster to say to Abby.

Madison stood first, her face streaked in mascara and other photo-ready makeup. She helped pull Abby up to her feet. “I want out of this fucking place,” Madison said through clenched teeth. “Take us out of here, Ethan, right now.” Her voice was bitter with disgust, but not loss.

“What would have made him do that? Really…” Abby pleaded for an answer.

“Don’t worry about it now, Abby. Let’s just get out of here.”

“He cut his own throat, for God’s sake! Who could do that?” Her voice was becoming stronger, angrier as she spoke. Ethan could tell she had met with a crossroads in her mind, one where three of the directions led to madness.

“Abby, look at me,” Ethan said sternly. “It is what he felt he had to do, and it was nothing you did. There was no way to stop him; there was no indication he was going to kill himself. This is not your fault, not my fault, not Madison’s fault. He is dead, and that is what happened.”

“Ethan, number one: do not talk to me like I’m a child. Number two: do you understand the determination you have to have before you can cut your own throat like that? Oh, and, three: he was covered in burns!”

“Yes, Abby, I know, alright?” Ethan spat back. “Now, we have to leave.” Ethan tried to lead her away from the cell.

“We can’t just leave him down here…” Abby pleaded as she craned her neck back to Chris.

“Listen, Abby, how did he get burned like that? Answer that, then ask yourself if you are coming with me or not!” Madison’s voice was becoming hysterical.

“I think it would be best if we all went,” Ethan added.

“We’ll call the police as soon as we get a signal on the phone,” Madison said in an attempt to convince her friend.

“Fine, it’s settled; now let’s get out of here,” Ethan said as he pulled her toward the end of the passage. It seemed much longer than it had when they came down, the end lost to the darkness.

After many moments, Abby planted her feet firmly, stopping the others. “Were all these cells here before?”

Ethan looked around like Madison was going. “I did not notice them before, but I was just trying to get to Chris.”

“I don’t think they were here,” Madison said worriedly.

“We should have reached the end,” Abby sent her flashlight’s beam down the passage, “and I don’t even see it.” The bite in her voice was beginning to mellow with fear again.

Ethan turned back to where they had come from, and the flashlight, left with Chris in his barred tomb was no longer visible. “What the…?”

“Alright, stop,” Abby commanded, once more in her mother’s voice, but clearly upset and afraid. “How the hell did we get lost in a straight passageway? We went back the way we came, right? Or did we go the wrong direction?”

“We went the right way, I’m sure. Chris was on the right side as we were coming, and then on the left when we were leaving.”

“I’m getting confused, guys,” Madison whined.

“Let’s go back the other way. How we went the wrong way, I’ll never know.” Abby turned and started out on her own.

“Abby! I know we went the right way. We had to!” Ethan shouted as he began to follow her, more important to keep everyone together then back tracking. “Abby, wait!”

In a few short steps, they came to a hole, a large hole with an iron rung ladder fixed into the stone, rusted and gritty looking. There was no way around it but to try to leap over, which was not an attractive idea considering the drop.

“This is just fucking peachy,” Abby said. “Have I gone insane or something?”

“Maybe,” Ethan said just under his breath. “But if you have, you are not alone.”

“How did we get lost? Guys, really, I want to get out of here,” Madison whimpered.

“Back the other way. This is really sick,” Abby said.

They did not make it back more than a few yards before another of the holes presented itself, the top rusted rung bent slightly. “I’m getting really scared now,” Abby whispered to Ethan.

“Yeah, me, too,” Ethan agreed. He dropped his pack and drew out a length of orange rope and the nickel-plated revolver. He shoved the revolver in his waistband and offered one end of the rope to Abby.

“What’s this for?”

“If we tie ourselves together, we won’t become separated. Either of you two have a cell phone?”

“Mine’s with my stuff,” Madison said.

“No,” Abby replied simply.

“Well, let’s just stay close together and find our way out. How big is this prison, Abby?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know anything about it until Brighton told us.”

“It appears to be huge. I can see sixteen cells in either direction, and I know there are more, and there is another floor beneath us with more cells maybe. It’s just seems like a lot of prison space for captured troops.”

“I really don’t know,” Abby responded weakly. “Maybe they surrendered in battalions back then or something.”

“Alright. I’ll go down first, since it’s the only direction we seem to be able to go in, and I’ll let you know if it is safe.”