This Was A Bad Idea

chapter 6 - all small towns have a story

His face takes on a look of dramatic concentration. He stands on the rim of the cover, perring down into the dimly lit darkness below.

"Remember when we went down there a year ago? How it felt like you could feel all the people that died down there pressing up against us?" My stomach gives a wild lurch and the world suddenly flickers in a series of dark spots that spread across my field of vision. I blink them away. He isn't talking about me

"Oh come on." I say, trying to keep my voice aloft. "Aren't you a little too old for ghost stories?" Xen, behind me, snickers. Elliot just scowls and taps a foot on the rough concrete.

"This thing has been around since the town was built. There used to be this weird dare in the 90s. Kids would get blackout drunk and go down there, then walk to the end of the tunnel, and come back. Then, people started leaving locks on a strip of wire fencing that someone wedged at the end of the tunnel. They wrote their initials on the back. People left locks there to prove they completed the dare." Elliot says, voice hollow. A slight shudder runs through me.

"Are you saying that we do that?" Sam says wearily.

"Hell no." Xen exclaims bluntly. "There's no way that I'm going to-"

"-Then something happened." Elliot starts up again, Ignoring the both of them.

"Around forty years ago. Supposedly it was some sort of chemical leak. Gasoline, maybe. Something. The pipes in this part of town weren't well made back then. They were always breaking. One night, a group of kids were down here, snapping more locks onto the fence. It became a rite of passage. They were hosting a party down in this very tunnel. But one of the nearby lines had broken and either gasoline or something else found the place, seeping in through the cracks in the poorly made foundation." The sunlight streaming through the trees feels very faint. Cold slithers around me, a thin breeze lightly touching the back of my neck.

A freezing shiver goes through all my snatches of exposed skin- my ankles, my hands, my face.

"Dude. you're freaking the new kid out," I hear Xen murmur, her voice sounding like it's underwater. Elliot looks straight at me.

"There was a fire."
No.

"A lighter slipped from someone's hand. The ground was coated in something flammable. A series of hollow indentations in the ground full of dark liquid that they thought was mildew or old water. It was too dark to see. But the fire started like that." Elliot snaps his fingers.

A thousand needle pricks of phantom pain suddenly shoot up my arms. I see him turn to address the group.

"Elliot, don't-" Xen breathes.

"They never made it out. A few days later, residents on that street swore they could smell charred bodies and the reek of gasoline down by the old creek."

I feel something acidic shift in my stomach, fear coiling underneath my skin. Elliot looks straight at me again.

"They closed off the tunnel after they cleaned it out. Blocked off all the other pipes that connected to it. Fixed the broken ones." Sam finally says, words spilling out of her lips in a tangent of reverence. I feel my pulse jump as my heart jackknifes in my chest for a few frantic beats before settling down again.

"It's just an old sewer drain," Xen says quietly, putting a hand on my shoulder. "The part about the leakage was true, there really was some sort of chemical spill. That's why they had to block it off from the main pipeline system. But no one was down there, no one actually died."

"You really think so?" Elliot says coolly.

"You've always been one for the supernatural. All those wierd-ass books you read about bombed-out cities and dead people?" He looks straight at her. Xen gives an annoyed sigh.

"I live vicariously through protagonists who I'll never be."

"Say we go in, then." Sam speaks over their heads.

"Into some nasty-ass sewer full of god knows what?" I exclaim, voice ringing out. It feels like it's not even coming from me. "Also that ladder is a full-scale invasion of tetanus waiting to happen."

"We did go in there, remember? A year ago?" Xen recounts. She speaks to the two other people who aren't me. As if trying to convince them that this is a bad idea. Which.....yeah, it probably is.

"We went five steps away from the ladder before scrambling back up," Elliot says darkly. "This time, I wanna go to the end. Where they put the locks-"

"There are no locks! There was no fire, there were no bodies!" Xen practically shouts.

"There were just a bunch of drunk kids who saw something down there and freaked out and made a whole story out of it!" An uncomfortable silence stretches past anyone's capacity to stay quiet after Elliot's chilling story.

I suddenly think of the kids who tormented me at my old school. Then my parents. My older brother. I was always the quiet, good kid. I got average grades, I slipped along without so much as a word. I blended in, unnoticed and unchanged for years. I was like a shadow, as mundane as a light switch. I think of all the people in my old life. How they'd never expect me to do anything like this.

To them, I was always curled up in a chair in some library. Seated at a wooden desk scrawling out pages of homework, in their room listening to music. Not the type of kid that meets up with friends at old ruins tucked away in a hidden creek. Or who climbs into a dark tunnel with a gruesome, chilling backstory. My heartbeat thrums loudly in my ears.

I can practically feel my fingers curling around the rusted rungs of the ladder, lowering myself down into the darkness. The sudden urge to do it is.....exhilarating. Overwhelming.

"Then let's prove it." Sam murmurs, her voice rising with each word. "Come on. It'll be fun! No one's been down here in years!"

"The cover's gone," I point out, peering into the murky darkness. It sends a sharp burst of fear coiling down my spine, despite the urge to launch myself down. "Obviously someone went down there."

"The cover's been off for the past five years. Come on, Orion. This place isn't all miles of suburbia and barren streets." Sam extends a hand towards me and takes a step forwards, toes hovering over the edge of the deep hole. Something flickers across her face. Determination? Defiance? "Oh come on. We have to! Don't you wanna have some fun around here?"

"Okay. fine." Xen scowls, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Let's do it." I say, voice steady. Heads snap towards me. I nod, eyes set in determination.

"You sure?" Xen's eyebrows slant upwards in confusion. I nod at her again.

I take a step forwards, toes on the rim of the dark abyss. Elliot crouches down and takes hold of the ladder, stepping on the first rung.

He stamps on it, testing its strength. The thing shudders from the impact but holds. He shakes the thing again with his hands, determining it to be safe.

"You think I'd go down here if I actually thought I was at risk of dying? It'll be fine." He calls out before starting to inch down the ladder into the murky twilight below.

For some reason, that doesn't make me feel better.