Dark Lord Rob's DarkForce

Crawling Through the Mud

     Nathan tossed the flash down to me, then slid his manly physique down the tunnel feet first, landing on bent knees and with nary a splotch of mud upon him. I resisted the temptation to simply push him over; mud never clings to him anyway.
     I, however, might well have looked like "Clayface".
     I handed the light back to him and he took it, pausing to clean it off on his pant-leg. I wasn't offended; I was positively oozing mud at that point. He clicked it on and shone it about the tunnel. "Hmmm." He said. "This is odd."
     "No duh."
     "I mean, I'm no geologist, but this doesn't seem natural. That is, it's naturally formed... you can see where running water carved these tunnels out of the soft earth. It just doesn't seem to be like anything I've ever heard of..." then he snapped his fingers. "Sinkhole! That's what this is!"
     "What!?!" This didn't sound good.
     "Sinkholes form when underground water eats away at the earth beneath the surface. Everything seems all kosher up top, then one day... bloop! There's a big hole on Highway 61 and Bob Smith and his Volvo are gone. Just like that."
     "So you're saying that we could find ourselves wearing the house for a hat at any time?"
     "Yeah, kinda."
     "Good-bye." I turned to hustle my way back up the mud-chute to the comforting solidity of the brick tunnel, but Nathan grabbed my collar. "Don't bother. If this goes, I'm betting the whole house'll go with it."
     "Oh." I relaxed. Not much point in rushing from being crushed by a house to being drowned in mud... the former at least had the advantage of being sorta quick.
     So I fell in behind Nathan as he poked around. "It seems to me," he said, "That there should be a way to get beyond that guard post, and come out beyond that door. It seems like it should be over here."
     He cast the flashlight beam across the catacomb. Several hundred feet away a bit of stonework could be seen... we hobbled our way over to it, pausing to brush moss and cobwebs from our eyes.It was rough going; the mud tugged at our shoes and knees, and every now and then there would be a soft scuttling sound as some small odd creature darted away into the shadows.
     Suddenly we both heard something that stopped us in our tracks. It was a long, low moaning, just like you would hear on some cheesy kids' spooky sound effects record. Nathan looked at me and grinned. "Can't beat this place for atmosphere."
     "Or special effects," I agreed, teeth chattering. "What the hell is it?"
     "Could be the souls of the damned. Or the slow settling of the house's foundation, amplified by the natural resonance of this underground formation. What do you think?"
     The last part was hypothetical, but I'd have said my money was on the damned.

Next: The Realm of the Damned