Far Too Far Down

Aubrey’s first thought upon seeing the house was how desperately lonely it was, like desert rain. There was nothing else as far as she could see between the mountains on each side of the valley, and even the mountains seemed to be trying to lean away from the house. Four people, a house, and a nervous moon peeking out from behind its dark cloud quilt.

Her second thought was how small it was. She watched it approach for miles, waiting for it to grow into one of the large, foreboding manors that she had come to expect from these yearly trips. But as they drew closer to the dot on the horizon, she eventually realized that that was all of it. It was a tiny speck of a house, weighing heavy on the vast sandy expanse.

“No,” she said.

“What?” Chloe asked from the driver’s seat.

“We’re not going in there,” Aubrey said.

“What’s the problem?” Dom asked from the back seat.

“Is it one of those underground houses? The bunkers?” Aubrey asked.

“Yes,” Chloe answered.

“There’s no way—”

“I know. I know. I know how you feel, and that’s why I didn’t tell you first because you’d say—”

“I’m not going in there.”

“Exactly. Aubrey, when have I ever let you down? Trust me, this is going to be great.”

Aubrey shook her head.

“Try it out for a bit. If you really can’t stay the night, you and Ryan can take my car back to that motel we saw.”

“Yeah, no worries,” Ryan said. He placed a comforting hand on Aubrey’s shoulder.

The exterior looked like a concrete shed with a single steel door fit with a tiny window.

“It looks so inviting,” Aubrey said.

“Oh, stop,” Chloe said. She tried to turn the doorknob. “Hey, can one of you big, strong men come open this for me?” She winked at Aubrey.

“Never fear, little lady,” Dom announced.

After some grunting and sweating, Dom stepped back to rethink his approach.

“It’s really rusted shut.”

“Or maybe it’s locked?” Ryan asked.

They turned over the welcome mat and found a key.

Through the door was nothing but a single light and a commerical stairwell that looked like it belonged in a hotel or an office building. At the bottom of the stairs, a door opened, revealing the first story of the home.

A ring of perforated metal platforms and iron railings surrounded an open hole in the center of the room. Rough tunnels led away from the central room to each of the hand-dug, pod-shaped rooms of the home. The kitchen was the only exception to this design. Its entire width was carved out, giving it an open feeling.

With a white-knuckled grip on her flashlight and backpack strap, Aubrey walked carefully through the maze of items scattered across the floor to look through the hole in the center of the room. There was another level to the house twenty feet below them and one more below that, each with the same layout.

“Wow, this looks like Dom’s apartment,” Chloe said, picking a sock off of the rail next to Aubrey.

“Yeah, it smells like it too,” Ryan chimed in. “How did you find the one place in the desert that smells like mildew?”

“This is so cool, though,” Dom said, shining his light on a carved portion of the wall. “Look at this. They wanted a shelf, so they just dug one out. All you need is a shovel, and you can make any furniture you want. No trips to Lowe’s or watching how-to videos on Youtube.”

“So what were these people? Doomsday preppers?” Aubrey asked.

“Maybe religious nuts who thought they were sneaking microchips into vaccines,” Chloe said.

“Hey, that’s a real thing,” Ryan said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I saw it in a Tiktok.”

They all laughed together.

They wandered into each room, looked around briefly, and came back out.

“Found the stairs to the other levels,” Dom reported. The others followed him into one of the round rooms and down the stairs.

They explored another ring of rooms, mostly bedrooms and a living room this time. They navigated past more items scattered about the floor, hanging on rails or up on shelves, or, somehow strangest of all, sitting exactly where they should be.

Aubrey leaned over the rail again. One more floor to go.

“What happened to the people that lived here?” Ryan asked.

Chloe shrugged. “Rumors say that they just stopped coming back to town. People started asking each other if they’d seen the Woods—”

“Wait, what woods?”

“That was their name. They were the Woods family. Anyway, the people asking around kept getting the same response, and eventually they decided they had better go check on ‘em. When they got here, it was empty. They say it’s been empty ever since.”

“You guys ready to check out the next floor?” Dom asked, already at the stairs. Aubrey ran to catch up.

On the next floor, Aubrey went back to the center of the room and leaned carefully over the rail. The hole in the center continued down further.

“Are there any more stairs going down?” she asked.

“No, this is the bottom,” Chloe said.

They walked into each of the rooms, leaving Aubrey by herself.

She couldn’t take her eyes off the hole. She shone her flashlight around its sides, traced it slowly down fifty feet, a hundred, even further still, until the light could no longer make the trip back up. The darkness seemed to be alive and chasing away the light as it moved.

She could feel a pull from something deep inside, far too far down, something that wanted to be with her. She knew that if she didn’t go to it, it would try to come to her. There was something lonely in the great empty chasm, as lonely as the only house in a valley, and it didn’t want to be lonely any longer. She moved her flashlight again, almost convinced that she could make out some dark shape trying to form.

“Hey—” Chloe said.

Aubrey screamed and slapped her mouth.

“Sorry. You okay?” Chloe asked.

Aubrey nodded.

“You good to stay for story time?”

“Yeah, let’s do it. Only…”

“What?”

“Can we do it on the top level?” Aubrey eyed the hole nervously.

Chloe saw what was worrying her and was a good enough friend to not tease her about it. “You got it. C’mon boys, heading upstairs.”

“You know this stuff is heavy, right?” Dom asked.

“Oh, is the poor football player getting tired?” Chloe teased and pulled Aubrey to the stairs.

Back at the top level, they picked a bedroom to set up in. As was their custom, they all sat in a circle on the floor around a Coleman gas lamp. Chloe pulled a bag of fun-sized candy bars out of her backpack and passed it around.

“Welcome one and all to our fifth annual Halloween haunt,” Chloe announced once they were all settled.

“Our first tale—” Thunder tumbled down the stairwell. Chloe laughed at its timing. “Our first tale begins on a dark and stormy night, just like this one,” she continued.

With the lantern’s flickering light shining up onto her face, she was the first to take a turn telling a spooky story she had prepared over the year. Once she was finished, Dom took a turn, then Ryan, and finally Aubrey.

When the stories were finished, Dom brought the Ouija board out of his backpack and laid it on the ground. Chloe led the group, asking the poor, tragic souls that could hear her calls if they would kindly respond with any sign, any sign at all. They all watched with eager fingertips on the planchette as nothing happened.

Satisfied that they had again failed to reach the supernatural, they unofficially segued into joke topics: hypothetical marriages, the number of kids they would each have, who would survive longer in Friday The 13th. Each answer was carefully nudged into place by four competing hands that were each trying not to give it away that they were also nudging, and the whole time, all of them knew that the others were nudging as well but obeyed the rule that you can’t admit that you know everyone is doing it.

At some point during their yearly traditions, Aubrey forgot all about the hole in the center of the house that led deep into the earth. It wasn’t until they were wrapping things up and discussing sleeping plans that she finally remembered it and the fact that she may have to see it once more, if only when leaving.

“Are you staying or going?” Chloe asked.

“Staying,” Aubrey said, trying to sound casual.

“Atta girl. You can stay in this room,” Chloe said, reading her mind as always.

“You’re missing out,” Dom said. “If I’m sleeping in an underground bunker, I’m sleeping as far down as I can get. You in?” he asked Ryan.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

“Chloe?” Dom asked.

Chloe looked at Aubrey.

Aubrey wanted to ask if Chloe would stay with her so they could stay up late like they did when they were younger and let their minds wander and conversation drift like a feather in the wind, but she knew Chloe wanted a chance to sneak off with Dom and let her go.

“You can go. I’ll be fine,” Aubrey said.

“If you need me, just yell. No doors!” Chloe said, and she slipped out of the lantern’s light.

Aubrey laid down on a sleeping bag and stared through the carved stone hallway into the eye of the house, and felt it staring back.

Aubrey dreamed that she was in the Friday The 13th movie on Crystal Lake, floating along in a canoe that was taking on water and unable to steer back toward her friends at the dock. The sides of the canoe dipped under and left her floating in the dark green water. Cold waves splashed her face as she was carried further from shore, helpless to get back to her friends.

She woke up in a sleeping bag that was soaking wet. She unzipped it, tossed the flap aside, and heard the splash of water as it slapped onto the wet floor.

The gas lamp threw her reflection onto the dark water that was filling the room.

She finally realized that the house was flooding.

She leaped to her feet and sprinted toward the door, then stopped and went back for a flashlight, then started again. The water was rising fast. It snuffed out the gas lamp before she was across the room again.

Her beam lit the hallway and the rising water. The hole in the center of the room was gone, or it was expanding to swallow the entire place.

She couldn’t move closer.

“Chloe! Chloe!” she yelled.

“Dom!” she tried.

“Ryan! Anyone?” she pleaded.

The water was at her waist. They had all gone lower, down into rooms that were now 20 or 40 feet under the surface of the rising water.

It didn’t make sense. They wouldn’t have left her. Her mind couldn’t let the only other explanation make sense.

The water was at her chest.

She held her flashlight high and started to move, but something else moved too. She jumped backward and swung the light around, trying to find whatever had moved. There was nothing.

Aubrey watched the hallway fill with water, telling herself as it raised each inch that it couldn’t possibly raise another. Not one more. It couldn’t raise one more. Still six inches left, it would stop there with enough room to breathe.

It didn’t.

Aubrey floated in the room, safe in a pocket of air formed by the arched ceiling of the room. The water seemed to have stopped rising.

She stared at the level. It still rose, but very slowly now. The air must have been escaping through pores in the rocks or natural cracks.

She tried to gauge how much time she had left. She held a thumb sideways to the wall, just above the water, and started counting. She counted a minute before her thumb went under. Maybe 40 or 50 thumbs to the ceiling. Less than an hour until the water squeezed all of the air out of the room. She knew she couldn’t wait for help.

Which way was the stairwell? It was one hallway to her left. No, that was the way down. The way up was two hallways to her right. Or was it three? It was hours ago when they explored the house.

She didn’t have time to get it wrong. She didn’t even have time to consider her plan. If the water was still rising, it might be all the way up the stairwell now, spilling out onto the desert.

Then something brushed against her leg, and she screamed and thrashed in the water.

Aubrey sucked in a huge breath and shoved off the wall. Her shoulder scraped against the rough tunnel as she swam through it.

The flashlight died in the water, leaving her completely blind.

She followed the wall with her right hand, found the end, and turned right.

She swam past the first doorway. Her lungs ached.

The next doorway was too wide; it had to be the kitchen. She used its wall to kick off again. Her chest heaved, trying to pull in air.

The third doorway had to be it. She went in, ten feet in, and found the stairs. She pulled on the rails to help propel her up the center of it and finally broke water.

She weakly dragged herself over the rail and onto the stairs, taking in great breaths to satisfy her burning chest. The water was still rising. If she had waited any longer, she may not have made it out.

One step at a time, staying just above the water, she slowly climbed the stairs. When she was ready, she stood and started walking.

She was on the last landing; another twelve stairs, and she would be at the top. She let the flashlight fall and saw the wet footprints in front of her, leading up each step.

At the top, lit by the glow of moonlight dampened by clouds, was something moving, writhing, coalescing, trying to take form but not yet sure which form to take.

It was something from far too far down in the hole, and it wasn’t lonely any longer.