So for some context, this was a short piece of fiction written for a writing course at university. We had a limited selection of prompts to work with, some narrative requirements and a hard word count.
So I banged this out and from what I recall it got an 'okay' mark, which I thought was overgenerous frankly. I figured I should christen this blog, article, what-have-you section with something, and this piece of fiction was on hand, so read it and enjoy (if you can).
‘In retrospect’, Cal thought, ‘perhaps cracking a window would’ve been a good idea.’ The smothering musk of hot car was still clinging to him as they climbed the densely wooded embankment. The heat was unbearable, the light blinding. ‘Hold up!’ Mika wheezed, ‘I can’t- just…’ he bent double and caught his breath, ‘I’m supposed to be avoiding strenuous activity, can we just take it a little slower?’
‘Since when was walking up a slight incline “strenuous activity”?’ prodded Cal. He leant down and yanked Mika up. Mika let out a hiss of pain as Cal had grabbed his sweaty, newly tattooed forearm.
‘Since I tried doing it with you!’ he spat. He delicately lifted his sleeve to check it, ‘well it hasn’t re-bled at least.’ Cal clicked his teeth testily and resumed his ascent.
‘Come on, we need to do this quickly, otherwise we’ll be traipsing back in the dark.’
After what felt like hours of wandering though gradually darkening forest, they finally reached their objective: a colossal Bloc era façade, imposing with its large domineering columns and blood red Cyrillic lettering. The brutalist mass of concrete stood in stilted contradiction to its surroundings, despite nature’s admirable attempt to correct this.
Ascending the steps revealed a small non-descript maintenance door, sheltered in a small indentation. Pathetically obscured by a temporary fence panel, the two slipped past the feeble barrier and pried open the door.
The interior was deafeningly black, save for a paltry sliver from the newly opened door. The fading light outside dazzling compared to the utter darkness.
Cal turned to address what he discovered was an absent Mika. After a brief panic, he caught a snippet of what he suspected to be his missing partner outside the door, performing one of his idiotic rituals. Cal grumbled. ‘Just wrap it up will you, I’m sure your ancestors will understand, they’re probably getting sick of how often they have to hear you grovel.’
A moment passed and with a jittery shuffle, Mika slinked in, squinting in adjustment to the light.
‘Damn, and I thought it was dark outside,’ Mika remarked.
‘We are where light fears to tread,’ taunts Cal, ‘luckily, we’ve brought plenty with us.’ Suddenly business-like, he pulled out two large torches and a pair of handheld radios.
‘Did you remember to bring your camcorder this time?’
‘Course,’ replies Mika, ducking to retrieve it from his bag.
‘Right, the plan: we’ve just got to get some decent b-roll, some good atmospheric shots. The script’s already typed up so don’t worry about filming anything specific. We have at least an hours’ worth of tape, use it all if you can. Oh, and Mika?’
Mika looked up from his search as Cal tossed him one of the radios.
‘We’re on frequency five today; this place goes pretty deep underground, so our signal will likely drop on occasion, just talk clearly and use the proper etiquette and we should be fine.’
Mika eyed the radio suspiciously, ‘Where on earth did you get this?’
‘Work,’ barked Cal, ‘so don’t lose it!’
Armed with his camcorder, Cal strutted off into the depths, his form swallowed instantly by the maddening blackness. Mika stood hesitantly within the last light of the door before gulping a deep breath and surrendering to the dark.
Cal had been walking for some time: the large chamber seemed to stretch for miles. An army of columns, like modern megaliths, expanded far into the dank void. The rebounding echo of his own footsteps permeated the expanse, the splashing of inch-deep murky fluid harmonising with a distant rushing of water.
He thumbed on the radio, “Hey Mika, can you hear me? Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Over.’
‘Y-yeah Cal, it’s freaky, what even was this place? Over.’
‘Apparently it was supposed to be a reservoir of some kind, for dealing with overflow from the nearby cities. They started building it in the fifties, but a few years into construction there was a horrific accident. The government tried to cover it up, they’d failed several safety assessments and couldn’t afford something like this to leak to the press, but eventually the story slipped out and they were forced to shut the place down.’
‘Hold on, is this that story where scaffolding gave away over one of the outflow pipes and all the workers on it plummeted to their deaths?’
‘Yep, only not all of them died from the fall. Apparently, some survived but were trapped under rubble at the bottom of the pipe. The foreman panicked; it couldn’t get out that such an accident had happened under his watch, not to the public and especially not the party. So him and a few lackeys conspired to bury this incident… literally.’
‘You don’t mean…’
‘Oh yes. They started dumping rubble down the shaft to drown out the screams, then hurriedly began pouring cement into the pipe. Supposedly the rubble had managed to knock a few out of their misery, but some still cried out, cursing the foreman as they were buried alive. After the deed was done, the foreman made the rest of the men swear to never share what had happened that day, to say the missing men had failed to show up for work and that none of them knew what became of them.
‘H-how did he think that would even fly? Over.’
‘I guess he feared being carted off to the work camps, but someone there must’ve had a conscience as only a few days later the place was stormed by authorities, the conspirators arrested, and the doors barred shut. The complex has sat abandoned now for nearly forty years. Though it does still play host to the occasional visitor.’
‘Huh, now I understand why you always insist on writing the scripts.’
‘Hey, doing all the research is a pain, let me have some fun. Over’
After a laborious trek, Cal finally ran up to the back wall of the chamber.
‘Alright, I’ve hit the wall. I’m gonna see if I can find the generator room. Can you see if you can make your way to the pumps? They should be somewhere near the centre.’
‘I-I dunno,’ Mika quivered, ‘from all I can see, the whole place is nothing but miles of stone. I’m not liking this Cal, I keep thinking I can see things in the corner of my eye. My sight’s shot in this place.’
Cal let out an exasperated sigh, ‘Come on man, we’ve just got to fill these tapes, that should give us enough to work with back home.’
‘I’m not sure it was worth bringing an hour’s tape, this place all looks the same anyway.’ Mika paused briefly, ‘Could you talk to me some more, I’d rather hear you harp on than trudge through the dark in silence.’
Cal laughed, ‘Sure buddy. So during the late sixties, the height of the hippie trail, the place started seeing use as a rest stop between Arad and Deva. I think they got a kick out of using an establishment building as a beatnik hive. It was a regular stop for a few years until one night in seventy-one when a man snuck in an automatic rifle and around midnight, proceeded to open fire on the gathering of almost two hundred people.’
‘God damn, seems someone wasn’t down with all the free love.’ Mika remarked, his signal laden with static crackling.
‘Apparently he was some right-wing nut, had a history of assault and harassment. He only managed to kill eighteen people, but tens of others, terrified and drunk, fled into the depths of the complex. It’s possible he chased after them as neither he nor those who fled were ever seen again. I think he-‘
Cal stopped dead in his tracks. His attention stolen. In a far corner, obscured by mist and dark, he saw a small pale blue light.
‘Hey, is that you over there? Over.’
‘Over where? Over.’ Mika asked, confused.
‘There in the- oh never mind where exactly! Can you see that blue light? Over.’
‘Uhh, no?’ Mika responded, weak static noise drowning him out.
‘Hm, maybe it’s your torch? Can you see my light? Blink yours. Over.’
‘What are y-‘
‘Just blink the torch Mika! Over!’
‘I can’t see you, all I can see is stone and-’
‘Just blink the fucking torch Mika!’
For a few moments, nothing happened. The light sat there, staring at Cal. He began to sweat, a sickening weight forming in his stomach.
‘D-did you blink it? Over.’ Cal pressed.
Silence. Light still staring.
‘Mika?’
The light blinked. Cal breathed a sigh of relief.
‘See? Was that so hard?’
Mika had still not spoken, though Cal could hear the crackle of an open channel.
‘Fine, pout all you want. Just make sure you film the pumps. Don’t want you wasting an hour’s tape on these stupid columns. Over.’
After tracing along what felt like endless wall, Cal finally found an opening.
‘Aha, I think I found it.’ He announced over the radio. Cautiously, he inched his way inside. Nearby, lying in the water were the soggy remains of bunting, all colour drained after years of submersion.
‘Jackpot.’ Cal though as he eagerly recorded his find.
‘Hey, I think I found some leftovers from that graduation party.’
‘You mean the class of ninety-seven?’ Mika responded clearly.
Cal jumped at the sudden response.
‘Ah, done sulking are we? Yeah, they held a party here to celebrate, but by the next morning seven students had vanished without a trace. It wasn’t until six months later they finally found the bodies.’
‘A volunteer party found their remains scattered at the basin of one of the wells. Most were heavily decomposed; some were crawling with rats. But a few had managed to rot down to the bone entirely, almost as if they were older than the others. Stranger still, the remains didn’t account for all of the missing students, though it was thought they’d met a similar fate somewhere else in the complex.’
‘You think those bones were the hippies?’ queried Mika.
‘I’d imagine so,’ Cal mused.
The forgotten party favours sufficiently documented, Cal tentatively crept his way down the hall to the generator room.
‘So why’s this room so important to you anyway?’ enquired Mika.
‘Well this is where it’s supposed to have happened,’ answered Cal, ‘the accident.’
As he entered the large chamber, he felt the air thicken; every step feeling like wading through chest high quag. He knew instinctively he’d wandered into somewhere forbidden, every primal corner of his brain begging him to turn back.
In the centre of the room stood a large turbine. It spun lethargically, emitting the occasional whale-like moan. Cal reached for his camera and began to film the titanic structure: he swore he could make out strange inky shapes between the blades of the turbine. It was as if someone or something was stalking him, peeking out from behind the turbine. It creeped him out, and just as he began to leave, the strange light reappeared, looming in the distance, faint and flickering.
‘Cal, it’s that thing again!’ Mika screeched.
Before he could even ponder how Mika could see the light, it began making its way towards him. A faint clicking clung on the edge of his hearing growing louder as the beacon approached. Reflexively, Cal hid behind the camera, peeking through the viewfinder. Nothing was there. Confused and terrified, Cal lowered the camera, prepared to run.
But before he could, a man appeared before him, hairy and gaunt and staring deep into him with sunken yellowed eyes. Cal shrieked and sprinted from the room. His heart pounding in his throat, his lungs feeling as though they would burst, he ran as hard and fast as he could. He shot out from the opening in the wall and darted blindly into the dark, weaving between the columns to lose the stranger.
He scrambled for the radio. ‘Mika! Mika! Where the hell are you?’
‘The pump, in the centre why-’
Cal could see the faint outline of a pump in the distance. He hurtled towards it, desperately crying out for his friend.
‘Calm down! I’m right here.’ Mika answered over the radio.
‘But I can’t-‘ Cal started.
‘I’m right here.’
He looked and saw ‘something’ leaning against the pump. It looked like a pile of stained rags with weird, twisted limbs jutting out from underneath. He couldn’t comprehend what he was even looking at. Until he saw the tattoo.
‘I’m right here.’ Said the voice from the radio.
‘I’m right here.’ Echoed the voice from behind.
Ahhh it's me again!
Whew, well that was spooky. Whatever happened to poor old Cal? Was he slain by whatever force lurked in the shadows of that old ruin? Did he make a thrilling escape? Did Mika just spill ketchup on his clothes and threw them on the floor and resumed his search arse-naked? As terrifying as the thought of that may be, I fear the real killer in this story was the word count. Because by Jove I didn't even have a single word left by the end of this.
Anyways, hope to post some actual articles next time, until then...Cheerio!