THE CHURCH: PART 2

Sorry this took so long to post. I actually finished it quite a while ago and just never got around to posting it. If you need to reread the first part to reacquaint yourself with the story click HERE.

So there's good news and bad news. The good news: there's going to be a third part to this story. The bad news: it's not finished yet. I don't know if any of you read my 'About Me' section, but in it I admit that everything always ends up longer than I intend. That holds true for this story. I'd like to have the third part done before Christmas, but again, I'm not making any promises.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy.

 

After only a few feet down I lost nearly all of my sight. My hands became small white ghosts in the darkness as they felt their way along the length of the ladder and then disappeared altogether, but I kept moving. I understood on some level that if I were a character in a movie, I’d be the first one to die, but that wasn’t going to stop me.

I couldn’t get away from the feeling of endlessness that was the darkness, so imagine my surprise when I stepped onto solid ground only nine feet or so beneath the hole. I had anticipated another rung about a foot down from the last and nearly stumbled off the ladder when my foot hit dirt and rocks only a few inches later. The ground crunched and snapped beneath my feet as I caught my balance. I couldn’t see anything.

“Elia!” I heard Ruth whisper down in a worried voice.

“Are you dead?” Charlotte asked.

I could imagine them peering into the hole, looking for some sign of me: a flash of movement, the soft white of my face, the slight rattle of the ladder…

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m at the bottom. It’s dark as hell down here though.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. A basement maybe, or a cellar… or a cave,” I added a moment later.

I stood facing the ladder as I spoke, or at least where I thought it should be. My eyes were wide and struggling to adjust to the darkness.

“What’s down there?” Charlotte asked.

I took a few steps back and slowly looked to my left. I could see nothing, but had a feeling that a wall of some kind was there—that had I reached out with my hand, it would have hit a barrier. I then looked to my right and was suddenly blinded by daylight. I squinted and held up my arm as a shield against it as it vulgarly assaulted my pupils. Confusion overtook me. How had I not already seen this?

“I can see light,” I said. “We can get outside from down here.”

“Sweeet!” I heard Ruth say.

My pupils began to contract and I was able to lower my arm. It took a moment, but I was eventually able to focus on what I was seeing. There was a cavity in the outer wall of the church big enough to walk through in a crouch in front of me. It puzzled me for a moment because I would have guessed the side of the church to be another fifteen to twenty feet away, but I set the thought aside.

Beyond the opening was a small grass and dirt incline that led up and away from the church. It explained why none of the light was able to infiltrate the hole I’d descended into, but it still seemed strange.

I held my forearm  through it. The contrast between light and dark on my skin was startling. It was like night and day without any dawn or dusk to connect them. The darkness was so great that what portion of my arm was in the light seemed suspended in midair, a phantom limb severed from it’s body. I rotated my arm, palm up, then palm down, enthralled with the way the light and dark fought against each other, neither willing to relinquish their hold.

I turned back to face the hole, which now appeared even darker before me. I looked over my shoulder at the light and already my eyes were stinging from the change. Both were equally blinding. I planted my back to it. If you want to see in the dark, you have to turn your back on the light.

I searched the emptiness before me for anything I could grasp: a shape, an outline, a shadow, anything that would help define the room I was in. All the while something unconsciously kept pulling my attention farther and farther to my left. I was nearly facing the light again when I saw it: a shadow within the darkness as though the darkness was purposefully lingering there.  It gave me the chills. I didn’t want to look at it, but I didn’t want to turn my back on it either. At the same time, I was completely enthralled with the mystery of it.

When most people would have taken a step back, I took a step forward

I didn’t just feel blind as I stared into it, I felt like I’d never been able to see to begin with. It was this spot that I chose to concentrate on. If my eyes could conquer this spot then the rest of the room would be a walk in the park. And so I stared and did my best to ignore the light to my left.

But the darkness never gave way. It stubbornly held its ground against my probing eyes. Frustrated, I glanced away and was stunned to see an old wall made out of wood planks and mortar before me. It was bowed from the weight of the years bearing down on it. The rest of the area was in roughly the same condition. This was no basement or cellar. This was exactly what we had been referring to it as the whole time: a hole.

“I can see now,” I told them. “You can come down. The ladder’s fine. It’ll hold your weight.”

I could hear them talking above me, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

My eyes fell to the floor as I continued to look around and my heart skipped a beat. “Oh my God,” I said. What I had thought to be dirt and rocks snapping beneath my feet hadn’t been dirt and rocks at all. It had been bones—hundreds of animal bones piled just deep enough to completely obscure the ground.

Embarrassed as I am to admit it, I was excited; this was going to make for a great story one day.

“There’s like a million dead animal bones down here! I can’t even see the ground.” Most of them were from smaller animals like squirrels, raccoons and possums—I nudged a fox skull over with the toe of my shoe—but there were larger ones too—huge femurs and parts of a pelvic that looked like it belonged to a deer or possibly a cow. Thankfully, none of them looked human.

“They’re dead—really?” Ruth said. “There’s no live bones?”

“Ha. Ha,” I said. “Actually, there might be.” I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if they decided to suddenly rise from the dirt and take form.

I eyed the ladder as I spoke. I could see quite clearly now. “Well, are you coming down or what? It’s safe.”

Ruth and Charlotte started bickering above me. With a sigh, I turned back to the only spot in the room still shrouded in shadow and willed my eyes to open to wider, to see more, to reveal what was hidden there. I held my hand to the side of my face to block the light intent on causing me so much blindness in the dark and slowly and almost deliberately the darkness seemed to give way to the faint outline of a circle.

“Hey, guys! There’s another hole down here!”

I continued to stare and eventually the ribbed form of an old, metal pipe appeared—a pipe big enough for an adult to crawl through on their hands and knees. I thought perhaps it was for sewage—it was certainly large enough—or to drain away water from the foundation, but it was dry and free of any kind of debris.

“Come on! You gotta see this!”

“Hold on, lady!” Ruth answered

Now that I could see every inch of the room I had descended into, my mind immediately began trying to puzzle everything together: the ladder, the hole, the pipe, the cavity, the darkness, the church, but especially the bones. How did they all get down here?

Did the animals come through the pipe and then get stuck down here and starve to death? Did someone kill them and dump their bodies here? Was the dark cavity just a convenient, safe place for them to die? How long had the gap in the side of the church been there? They couldn’t have been trapped with an opening that large to escape through. And what about the larger bones? A deer could have gotten into the hole through the opening, but I couldn’t imagine a cow getting through.

The sound of movement suddenly dissolved my thoughts. Ruth was slowly working her way down the ladder, one rung at a time. She stopped about three rungs from the bottom and clung to it as if she were afraid she would somehow lose it in the dark.

“Elia, where are you? I can’t see anything.”

“I’m right here. I can see you,” I said. Not only could I see her, I could see every detail of her, right down to her khaki pants, fake Birkenstocks and Bob Marley T-Shirt.

She hooked her elbow around the rung directly in front of her to keep from slipping off and then swiveled around to look behind her. Her eyes were wide and black and by the way they swiveled back and forth I knew she was trying to find me.

“Elia? Are you there?” Her eyes flickered towards the light and immediately scrunched up in protest.

“Don’t look at the light,” I said. “Just focus on the dark. Your eyes will adjust eventually.”

As she waited for sight, I continued studying the pipe. It looked like it went straight for seven or eight feet and then turned and started to veer up. From what little I could see of the incline, it didn’t look too steep to crawl up; especially with the helpful, deep ribs to brace our feet on.

Excitement started to pulse through me. We had to see where this thing went. I had to know what it was for and why it ended in this cavity so deep within the bowels of the church.

I turned back to Ruth. “Can you see me yet?” I asked. She was hanging off the ladder by one arm, looking around.

“Kinda. You look like a big blob.”

We talked for a while and after another minute or so, her vision was finally at par with mine. She seemed fascinated by the bones and looked curiously over them all.

“Well, are you gonna come down?” I asked.

She slowly finished her descent and walked lightly around the small area carefully avoiding the bones. I walked to the ladder and let them crunch and snap under my feet.

“Charlotte, are you still up there?” I called.

There was no answer. Ruth looked over her shoulder, eyebrows raised.

“Charlotte?” I repeated.

“Where else am I gonna go?” she said from somewhere above us.

At the sound of her voice, Ruth went back to her exploration of the hole. She still had her camera with her, but hadn’t yet taken any pictures. It was probably a good thing. The flash would likely blind us and we’d have to let our eyes adjust to the dark all over again.

“You gotta come down! There’s this hole we gotta go into! We gotta see where it goes!” I said excitedly.

Ruth looked in the pipe and while she didn’t voice any protest against my idea, she didn’t look thrilled by it either. The pipe probably freaked her out too. But that was the difference between me and most people. It wasn’t the fear that held me back, it was the fear that drove me.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait… wait, wait,” Charlotte said. “Let me get this straight. You want me to go down the creepy, old ladder, into the creepy, dark hole, into a room full of dead things, into an even creepier and darker hole?”

I mulled it over a moment. “Yea.”

“Uuuuuhhh…” she trailed off.

“Come on! We have to go in there! It’ll be like one of those things we remember when we’re eighty-five, have Alzheimer’s and can’t remember our own children’s names! Oh, your name’s Joe? I gave birth to you? Well, that’s something. Now let me tell you about this really-fucking-super-cool hole my friends and I went into when we were kids!”

She didn’t say anything.

I groaned at her lack of response; this was going to be tricky.

Ruth climbed a couple feet up the ladder and settled back into her one-arm hang. I had a feeling that she didn’t like stepping on the bones. We goofed around with her camera for a while and continued trying to coax Charlotte down the ladder, but she wouldn’t have it.

“Will you just come down here!” I finally snapped at her. We had tried everything including bribery, logic, lies and a multitude of threats that mainly involved throwing her into the hole—if she cooperated and didn’t fight us there was a good chance that her legs wouldn’t break—but she remained stubbornly in the church.

“Hey, guys,” she suddenly hissed. “I think someone’s here.”

I let out an aggravated sigh.

“Just ignore her,” Ruth said.

“Someone is definitely here,” she continued, her voice carrying a wary edge.

“She’s just trying to get us to go back up there because she’s freaked out,” I said to Ruth.

“You guys! Oh my God! Come on! There’s someone here!”

Ruth shook her head.

“She’s just scared,” I said.

“What are you doing!? Hurry!”

Ruth sighed.

“Don’t do it,” I said, but she had already started to climb.

I watched her disappear and then listened as she and Charlotte started fighting above me. By the sound of their voices I would have bet good money that Ruth was trying to manually force her down the ladder. I listened harder, but couldn’t make out much of what they were saying until they were suddenly hushing me.

What is it?” I asked.

They’re voices slowly began to fade away. I was able to make out only a whispered, “Elia, be quiet,” before they disappeared completely.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Silence.

I stepped back, away from the opening in the floor and towards the pipe. My eyes were fixed on the top of the ladder. Was someone up there? Would they come down? Did they exist at all?

The only thing I was certain of was that Charlotte and Ruth were safe. I would have been graced by the piercing shriek of Charlotte’s screams had they not been. That meant that they had either snuck out of the church or were hiding.

I waited alone in the dark, hyperaware of the ladder before me, the opening to my side and the dark shadow of the pipe behind me.

I have to admit, this part of this story was a bit harder for me to write. My memories of what happened are fractured and some are fuzzy. While I can distinctly remember some moments, other's are unclear or even missing. For example: I have a fuzzy memory of Charlotte snapping the last rung of the ladder. In half. But I can't remember her coming down into the hole or leaving it. I'm not even sure it's a real memory. I did my best to subtly work in or work around memories like this. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to work this one in and had to leave it out, which killed me to do because it's so amusing. Failing memories aside, I did honestly try my best to stay as true to the story & circumstances as I possibly could.

Copyright © 2012 by E.B. Mazza

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No part of this written work may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations for articles or reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.