Dark Lord Rob's DarkForce

Beyond the Door in the Worst Way

     You'll remember how Brother Woodbine initially found this little secret passage in the first place... he leaned on a wall and fell through into it. Well, we had a similar experience, though I guess we were asking for it, in a way, so it served us right.
     Of course, when I say "we" I really should split it off; "Nathan" was looking, "I" fell through the wall.
     As I said before, to me the idea of finding a second entrance to, well, "Hell", was in the first place unlikely and in the second place undesirable. So I was just kind of pretending to poke around while Nathan was tapping the walls of the tunnel that led to the antechamber with his closed pocketknife.
     "Sounds pretty solid," I said, though of course I had no idea.
     "Mmmp." Nathan was concentrating. You could see it in the way his face skwunched up. Tap tap tap. I wandered around, studying bricks with the flashlight beam.
     "Hmm. Got a bit of a leak here," I said, noting a trickle of water seeping from between two bricks at about knee level. "Better call a contractor... one of the ones on this side of The Door, I should say."
     "Let me look at that," Nathan said, swivelling his light over to scrutinize the brick.
     "Suit yourself," I said, and stepped back. Unfortunately, my feet landed on a patch of moss, which was slick from the seeping water, and I felt the floor take a leap at my head, so I twisted my body in mid-plummet so that I struck the wall instead of the floor.
     Well, the seeping water had done a trick on the bricks after so many years, and they were fragile as putty teeth; it was like falling against a wall made out of Crunch Berries, it caved in so fast. Next thing I knew I was tumbling on down into the darkness.
     And not a dry sort of dusty stone darkness, either. This was a wet, muddy, mooshy darkness; "like tumbling into the cold womb of Death" is how I'd put it if I was writing this up for poetry class, but since I'm not I'll just say that it was plain icky.
     Nathan rushed over to my defense, of course, and his first thoughts were naturally toward my welfare: "You found it! Great work, Twonky!" Pause. "Oh, are you okay?"
     "I'm hysterical, and I'm wet," I croaked, quoting Gene Wilder in "The Producers" for some reason.
     Nathan laughed, shining his light down on me. I'd only fallen a few feet, as it turned out, and I was inside some sort of natural formation, a sort of Carlsbad Caverns for leprechauns... never more than three feet high, it spread out in all directions, mostly comprised of earth and mud, with mossy stalactites hanging down. It was like crawing under someone's barn, if the barn was all burnt-out and rotted... it made me feel claustophobic and apprehensive.
     "Take my light, I'm coming down," Nathan said.
     "It's your funeral," I replied, knowing full well it might be a two-coffin affair.

Next: Crawling Through the Mud