Dark Lord Rob's DarkForce

Stairway to Hell

     Nathan, rude dude that he can be, burst out laughing. "I'm sorry," he said between snickers, "I don't mean to be... hahaha... it's just that it's so absurd..."
     Woodbine looked a bit perturbed, but not actually angry. "What's so absurd? It's the Gateway to Hell. Simple as that." He grinned a lit at the last.
     Nathan was still having trouble talking so I took over. "Look, we don't want to disrespect anyone's religion and all, but..."
     "But you don't believe this is the Gate to Hell. I have no problem with that, you know. It's not an easy thing to believe, I'll grant you. I probably wouldn't have believed it myself, except... well, let me tell you the story."
     He leaned against the huge door, arms crossed. If I had the Door to Hell in my basement, I probably wouldn't deal with it so nonchalantly, but hey, that's me. "When I came to this town, boys, I wasn't much older than you are now. But I wasn't the type to work on the school paper, no sirree. I was a wild child, a rocker, a heavy metal music dude. Ozzy rules!" He made a Devil Sign, a fist with his pinky and forefinger extended, and winked. We laughed.
     "Back then this house was empty; no one had lived here for years. Rumor was, it was haunted. Same as every deserted house in the world, if you ask a kid! But, of course, that only made it all the more attractive to try to sneak in.
     "So some of my buddies and I decided that it would be cool to check out the ol' haunted mansion. We planned it all out like some sort of secret mission; snuck out of our homes in the dead of night, rafted down the river for about a quarter mile so we could approach the building unseen; ran across the grounds from cover to cover, clad in camouflage, illuminated only by the thin crescent moon above us.
     "We couldn't get close enough to the building during daylight to check for an easy entrance, of course, but we had done reconnaissance with a telescope - I told you, we treated this like a secret mission, like we were commandos or something - and we decided that the safest place to make an entrance was through a window on the side of the house facing the river. We planned on waiting 'til we were out there and picking the likeliest window on the spot, 'cause there was no way to judge properly through a telescope.
     "Once we got to the house we were pleasantly surprised to find that there was a ground floor window already broken. All we had to do was to pull out the stray shards of glass with pliers, reach through and flip the latch. These were the days before everyone had these massive alarm systems; back then most people just kept dogs if they wanted someone to let them know that a burglar was coming.
     "It wasn't until much, much later that I realized that the shards of glass from this open window were scattered beneath it... on the outside.
     " Whoever had broken that window wasn't breaking in... they were breaking out."

Next: The Secret of the House