Afraid of the Dark

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The basement of this house did not make sense. There were too many doors that led into the same room, and too many corridors that turned in too many places. It was hard to keep your sense of direction when trying to traverse through a maze of halls that looped and twisted, especially when a lot of those areas were near enough pitch-black. At one point, everyone was in the basement together, however none of them wanted to make any noise in fear of alerting others, so each person walked around in silence, quickly getting lost.

Another issue inside of the house was that it was very sound-proof. Despite the immense amount of noise which was made on the ground floor, with the grandfather clock smashing and the demented Irish man screaming with rage, neither Mark or Ethan were aware of the events going on upstairs. And in the same sense, Tyler could not hear Ethan's screaming or panicked voice after... whatever the hell happened to him.

As Mark was trying to comfort the youngest man, Tyler had been investigating the bathroom. By the time Mark had helped Ethan to calm down and had begun to lead him through the basement to try and find the exit but had gone to the wrong stair case, Tyler was walking into the basement. Mark and Ethan eventually got out of the basement and had gone upstairs to look for Tyler, who was in fact still inside of the basement trying to look for his friends. It was like a cat and mouse game which no one knew they were playing.

The thing which Tyler had feared while moving through the basement had inevitably happened. He knew that once Anti had finished searching the upper floor and the ground floor without locating anyone, he was undoubtedly going to go to the basement to finish his rage fuelled investigation to locate those who wanted to make his targets - or more precisely, his victims. The eldest American man would be completely lying if he said that he could remain calm in this situation. If the fact that he wasn't being hunted was bad enough, the fact that he was being hunted through a dark basement which he hardly recognised was making it worse.

He didn't know the difference between natural ambient sounds within the house and man-made ones. A creaking floorboard could have been caused by pipes beneath the floor or the sound of someone stalking towards him. The flickering lights above his head might have been faulty electrics or the effect of Anti's unnatural powers. The echo of footsteps could have been his own or someone else's. With no way of being able to distinguish between a passive or a dangerous noise, it was only a matter of time before Tyler made a mistake.

Holding back the temptation to try and call for his friends to prevent himself from getting caught, the American man attempted to sneak through the labyrinth like area, lightly placing each step as he moved. His head would turn in all directions with his eyes darting around, as he tried his hardest to keep track of any flicker of movement or spec of scattering light. Tyler's heart hammered in his ears each time he had to open a door, the metallic groan of the handle and the sharp squeak of the rusted hinges feeling like they were going to deafen him. Each time, his mind would convince him that the door he was slowly opening was about to be kicked down with a manic man behind it to pounce on him, but that luckily never happened.

Tyler would look inside with fear, glancing about the room until he found the light switch and turning it on as quick as possible to let himself observe the surroundings. He would walk inside a few paces before checking each corner of the room, as well as the areas behind the doors. If nothing was found, he would depart the room swiftly while keeping the light on and closing the door as softly as he possibly could behind him.

It was on his way out of one of the rooms that disaster struck.

Tyler exited a room which had a door that opened outwards, glancing down the corridor from which he had first came, before closing the door and turning back around to continue his way towards the final areas of the basement which he had not checked. But as he turned, he froze in his tracks like a deer in headlights. The floorboards beneath him creaked very loudly as he had walked out, making the other person at the end of the hall freeze too.