Do Not Enter, Part 2
She slammed the heel of her hand into her mouth to stop the scream that surged to her lips. Her heart spiked. She stepped up, turned back to the night-curtain below her. She felt it follow her, swore she heard it moving on the concrete sand encrusted steps. She faced the shaft opening.
Her head poked above the floor to her chin. She surveyed the gutted building around her, heart fluttering, pulse jangling.
A jittering gasp escaped her. “But … I was so far down … how …?”
She looked back into the stairwell, and something winked in the beam. Metallic, rusty, mineral-coated. She panned the light, and a snap of white snaked at her from the murky dark.
“How?” Her heart hammered in her chest. She reached out of the hole and dug into her purse. She pulled out her cell phone, snapped it open, and stared into the staircase. She took another step toward the top.
Rose thumbed through the phone’s contact list until she found Butch’s number, hit the SEND button. A moment of hiss, then a ring. Two. Butch answered on the third.
“Hey, Rose,” he said. She wondered if his voice held an edge of irritation.
“Butch, sorry to bother you,” she said. “I’m here in the staircase, and I–”
“You’re in the staircase? In it?”
“Well … yeah. I wanted to see what was down there, and I … didn’t have anything else to do.”
“Listen, that staircase didn’t exactly look code to me, you know? You need to not go in that shaft. You could get hurt. I mean, really hurt.”
“Okay, fine, but I was in here anyway, all right? So I wanted to see what was at the bottom. I got a flashlight and went down there, and …”
Hiss and noise on the line, the wind blowing into the speaker on Butch’s end. “And?”
RSS - Posts
Recent Comments