I couldn’t stand my house. Mom and dad constantly bickering back and forth. I had no escape but to sit up in my room and read for a living. But, that’s what they thought. I had plenty of other escapes and given that no one knew but me and maybe a couple friends of mine, they had no clue.
The night time was my time. Dad was always passed out drunk and mom was long gone asleep. Every night this was what I did and I loved the feeling it gave me. I’d creep down the stairs, make sure my dad wasn’t awake still and walk out the back door.
The air had a chill in it that night and of course it was a night I didn’t prepare completely for what was going to happen.
I ran a couple blocks to my friends house, climbed in his window and we waited. Finally, we could hear the loud, obnoxious snoring of his dad and we headed out for the night. Every night was new. Nothing ever felt the same. Not that I minded, because in all honesty is was great.
On that night we decided to head down to the river. It was quite the walk but the way it was during the night was worth it. Twenty minutes had passed before we reached the bridge. I heard the roughness of the water, although there was no wind. We trudged down the loose gravel trail that led down to the river bank itself.
Travis, my friend, pulled out his pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I denied. Me and him walked beneath the bridge and turned on our flashlights. The graffiti was great. Art intrigued me but there was of course the vandalism graffiti. Dicks and satanic symbols covered some of the great art there was. A faint drip of water caught my attention.
I waved the smoke from Travis’ cigarette out of my face and squinted my eyes to see where the water was coming from. I creeped closer so I could hear the water continually. I jerked my flashlight to where I thought the sound was coming from.
It was a small eroded hole in the concrete of the bridge. I took my camera out and wedged my hand through the crevice. The flash blinded us temporarily, but we recovered. I squinted at the picture and tried my best to make out what it was composed of. The flash slightly helped but the hole looked much deeper. Nothing was abnormal about it except not seeing the bottom. I clawed at the dirt and stone around the hole to try to get a better look. I made a hole just big enough to peer down into and I did so. It was far darker than before so I repeated to process. This time it was big enough to just peek the flashlight through and my head. This time the view was much more defined. There were iron bars bent and placed in the way of a ladder. Down at what appear to be the bottom there were two large puddles of very murky water. Water consistently dropped into these, hence the sound of an echoing dripping water.
I pulled my head back out of the now man-made decay and turned around. I told Travis what I had seen and what we should do.
I took my phone out of my pocket. The clock said it was 12:43 in the morning which gave us about eight or nine hours of whatever. I dug the hole larger and larger making it big enough for a human body to fit through. I went first and hoped that the stability of the iron bars, that I was about to put all 204 pounds of weight on, still existed. I tapped it with the tip of my foot and felt an easing feeling come over me.
Travis held on to my hand until I was able to grab one of the twelve or thirteen bars. He tossed my bookbag down afterwards and started his solo trek. With him being lighter and undoubtedly more flexible, I wasn’t worried. We both made it down and spun in a couple circles, we were halfway in awe of it and halfway terrorized of it. I took my flashlight back out and illuminated one of the three tunnels branched off from this cylinder room.
We played our chances and walked down the the one that looked more appealing to us. Water dripped down from the top of the hallway and landed all over our bodies. The passage seemed to go on forever before anything changed. Finally after this time spent walking we walked on top of a drain of some sort.
