Do Not Enter, Part 2
She stood immersed in the dark, deep in the shaft.
She backpedaled up the stairs, but her feet skidded on the loose debris and gray-black sandy grit. She slammed on her backside and yelped as the air squeezed from her lungs.
She gasped and gulped air, and held the flashlight up to ward off the dark.
And that flash, that brief glint of metal, nipped the dark.
She tried to steady the light, panting. Her hand shook, bounced the light in the shaft, but she managed to hold the reflection this time.
Rose stared, sat forward, squinted through clouds of billowy dust wafting from her sudden frantic outburst.
A door. A metal door, aged to a mosaic, blotched pattern of rust, verdigris and brown. Huge, patina-clad bolts fixed the seams. A massive lock squatted above a curved handle, carved with intricate designs of sinister gargoyles and smiling demonic countenances.
She followed the beam up the door, to a sign. It froze her. A homemade sign, not manufactured but painted, and affixed to the grimy metal surface by newer, shiner and less aged bolts, similar to those pinning the rails and stiles of the door.
She sat in dumbfounded silence as the sign screamed at her. The lettering dripped runners, down the sign, down the door, swallowed at the base of the entryway in thick dusty piles of crumbling shaft.
Three words scrawled across the sign, and Rose couldn’t tear her eyes from them.
It read, DO NOT ENTER.
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