Madison had known fear in her life—had thrilled in it, paid for it in theaters and in amusement parks; however, this was beyond even her tastes. A graveyard could be scary enough, but in this pitch-blackness, it could still the heart, shorten the breath. Add to this the tapping. The ominous quality of this metal against stone sound would have been enough without the bone-dry voice calling out from the pitch. This was not scary, it was insanity incarnate, and more than she thought her mind could handle. All Madison could focus on that very moment was Ethan’s shirt. Over and again she told herself not to let go, to grip it like a lifeline, like the only thing left to her of reality and normalcy. Inside, her mind screamed and struggled against reason, writhing in the bounds of her clarity and threatening to push her beyond the extent of her own limit to reason.
“There is an archway ahead; I can just see it,” Abby huffed over her shoulder.
“Go!” Ethan whispered harshly.
They shuffled their way through the many headstones, trying their best to avoid them, tripping against many of them often. Their fear pushing them faster than common sense should have allowed. The faster they seemed to go, the quicker the dread grew within them, which drove them to greater speed. Just ahead, gawking blackly before them was the archway and their escape.
Abby grasped the edge with her hand as the tapping sound filled the room and heaved herself inside. She threw her back against the wall, her breath fighting for more than her throat would allow.
Before them sat row after row of small, simple wooden benches. On many were skeletons still sitting erect, held upright by chain bonds, each one bearing a wooden placard also on a chain, and like the grave markers, each was etched with the word Witch.
At the end of the chamber stood an altar of ashen wood, grainy and drawn, fibers of its former self were missing along the length. In the center stood a wooden cross, adorned in the same mocking fashion as the one holding Chris, but this one vacant of any corpse. The whole scene appeared as some grotesque congregation praying for the release of their very souls, holding silently in their shackled bonds.
“I don’t see an exit…” Abby fretted.
“Behind the pulpit, there has to be one,” Ethan urged as he went forward and in between the remains of many of those marked Witch. They sat fixed; their mouths hung open in a gruesome semblance of laughter. So many left to die, praying for their salvation, knowing nothing but this bitter cold place with its unending darkness.
Behind the pulpit was no door or passage, no means of escape, convicting the threesome back to the graves of witches.
“Shit!” Ethan shouted and he turned to leave.
There in the entrance of the chapel stood blackness, blackness deeper then the darkness around it. Ethan lifted his light to it, and found a thing, a thing of long hair and ashen skin and of burned priests’ clothing.
This creature had a face, a face of contempt and rage, of ash and scar, of pure hideous evil. In its hand was an ornate walking stick, black of shaft but silver at the very tip—the tapping sound on stone. The thing’s palm, gently trailing smoke into the air around it, hid the other end. Then the thing smiled.
“Witch…” it hissed in its arid voice and began to walk toward them. This one did not move with the same stilted sloppiness of the creature above, but stiffly in the manor imagined of those dead.
Madison screamed an atrocious scream driven with a stellar volume, and Ethan leveled the barrel of his revolver at it.
“We want out of here! Show us how to get out of here!” His voice was high pitched and urgent, tossing the girls as victims to their own fears.
“Witch…” was the only response.
Ethan fired. The bullet struck the thing in its chest, and it stumbled backwards, seemingly more affected by the gun than its kin above. He fired again, this time aiming a bit higher. The round struck the throat and laid it open in a wide hole.
The thing wrapped a tendril-like hand across its throat and shook its head side to side.
“Tell us the way out!” Ethan screamed.
“Kill it!” Madison screamed.
He fired again. The thing’s head fell open, a splash of fluid spraying backward and upward from the ruined scalp. The thing stumbled again and paused. It raised its head and locked its remaining eye with Ethan. It then inverted the cane to reveal a glowing ember, the size of Ethan’s fist, and began toward them.
“Kill it!” Madison screamed again.
“Take the legs!” Abby shouted. “You can’t kill it, cripple it!”
Ethan lowered the gun a bit and fired. The flash blinded him for a moment, but it was easy to see he had hit the upper leg. The thing collapsed to one side, his leg nearly in two. It continued its progress on one knee, dragging the damaged leg. Ethan squeezed the trigger again, but this time, the round glanced off the floor and hit the thing in the abdomen. Even with the explosion of flesh from the other side, it did nothing to slow the now dangerously-close monstrosity.
The three began to back themselves closer to the wall, trying in vain to shrink away from it.
Ethan fired again and struck the good leg in the knee. It shattered visibly, and the thing fell to its face.
“Go! Go!” Ethan shouted.
They ran along the wall, the light whisking this way and that across the ancient bricks. The thing tried to reach them with the glowing end of the cane, but it had fallen just out of reach. They made the exit of the chapel, and Abby turned right.
Ethan grabbed her quickly, “We’ve been down there! This way…” He headed off in the other direction, avoiding the tombstones as he went.
Madison began to cry loudly and clutched onto Abby as she followed.
The room continued in a slow curve for many feet before letting them out and into a wide corridor. The walls here were like the room, constructed of brick, but they appeared redder, wetter. The floor became a worn wood plank decking. It was the color of the deepest soil but dry and brittle, splintering along all of its edges. On both sides stood gloomy wood doors with large iron handles, all of them black as coal. The passage ended abruptly in a wall of iron bars, a black void agape on its other side.
They entered the passage slowly, flashlights trying to be everywhere at once, trying to illuminate every detail. Each of them was driven by urgency but moved to caution by their fright. Slowly, their shoes scuffed the sand along the uneven wood of the floor, softly.
Abby noticed an odd-looking moss had overtaken the upper edges of the walls and hung downward limply, but she said nothing, still unreasonably afraid.
The doors offered no windows, just blank, aged wood patterns and an iron handle. Everything seemed moist and humid, even in the chill air. When they reached the bars, they found no latch, hinge, or any other mechanism that would allow them to move. The other side offered a continuance of the passage, continuing onward to the extent of their lights. An odd wind-driven howl held steadily in their ears from deep down the passage, far beyond the bars.
“Do you hear that?” Ethan asked.
“Is that wind?” Madison wondered hopefully.
“It sounds like it, huh?” he replied.
Abby suddenly grabbed the bars and threw her weight back and forth trying in vain to work one of the bars free. When she realized she could not, she tried to squeeze herself through.
“Abby, let’s try these doors. Maybe they will get us around there,” Ethan said gently.
“If they wanted us to get there,” she said in a strained voice, still trying to fit between the bars, “they would not have put the bars here.”
“Abby…”
“Fine, alright. Which door?”
“I would guess all of them,” Madison said as she pulled the nearest one open. It was a small storage area still stacked with old wooden crates, some stamped with illegible text, some still holding the remains of hemp rope handles, all covered in that grayish-green plant.