It Hides In The Mines

4

A light buzzing sound echoed inside of Robert's head, accentuating the pain he felt all around his body. He grunted and tried opening his eyes as the buzzing focused into a single voice.

"Robert!" James' voice cut through Robert's wooziness at the same time as the slap on his face.

Robert instantly sat up, nearly clashing heads with his friend.

"Kate?" He questioned, his eyes scanning his surroundings. He was laying down on the first level of the mine, near the elevator. The tunnel lights flashed above him brightly, and there was a small crowd gathered around him: James, Jen, the owner and his two workers.

Jen looked behind her, and then back at Robert.

"Kate was just here. You're lucky she had her radio by her bed, she's the one who heard you call for help!" Jen scolded. Robert frowned. How was the possible?
He could remember the previous day's events clearly. Someone took Kate, and he nearly died of suffocation. How could Kate have heard him from her bed?

"That's impossible, Kate was with me on the lower level!" Robert protested.

"Lower level? We found you right here, buddy. You sleepwalk?" Bill said, looking at Robert as if he were crazy, which only angered the man more.

"Yes, lower level! I wasn't sleepwalking! Someone was watching me in the middle of the night and I followed him into the tunnels, and Kate followed me inside so we went down with the elevator together. That's when something took her and I started suffocating!"

Everyone present shared concerned looks.

"Rob, Kate came to us early in the morning saying that she just heard you call for help through the radio, and that you weren't in your room. We found you here," James said. That was when Robert noticed everyone was wearing pajamas, and he was missing a shoe.

His mind was a mess. What the hell happened? Did what he thought happened actually happen?

"Alright. It's okay," he said, getting up despite the piercing pain in his back and head. "I'll just head off to breakfast and we can finish up with banishing the spirit today, eh?"

To Robert's great surprise, his crew didn't fuss over him and ask questions about his disappearance the other night. In fact, it bothered him a lot during breakfast.

"Don't you think something strange is going on?" He finally snapped after listening to Jen and James discuss sausage for fifteen minutes straight. Jen shot him a confused look.

"Why would you say so?"

"Did you forget what happened during the night already? Besides, where the hell is Kate?" He said, feeling more annoyed than usual.

"Oh, that. I think you were just sleepwalking. Kate is gluing together some of those charms she picked up from the gypsy, or something. We're doing the final scene tonight; we have to prepare everything during the day. I don't really like it here, I want us to be gone by morning," Jen said, and Robert almost spat out his food.

It was very unlike Jen to speed things up, which meant that she was genuinely afraid. Robert wasn't sure whether to feel relieved that he wasn't the only one, or to be even more terrified that the calm and composed Jen thought something was amiss.

Kate had managed to evade them most of the day. The events from the previous night and the fact that he wasn't sure what had actually happened kept bothering him, making him unable to concentrate on recording the other scenes and perfecting the costumes and the scares.

Kate decided to join them moments before they were ready to descend onto the lower level.

She looked the same as ever - same clothes, same hair, same face, same smile. Her eyes weren't shining in excitement like usual, so he assumed she was worried about him.