You Scared?

Chapter 8

"Why are we moving?" Cami shouts. Her voice echoes throughout the descending room. She bolts to where the hallway used to be and starts banging on the ugly pink wall.

Shadows dance on every surface as the dim light continues to shine through the vents around the room. With the room slowly going down, it causes the light to flicker constantly as it must get blocked by the building structure outside of the room every so often.

"How far down is it taking us?" Lincoln questions with a worried voice.

"How are we supposed to know? There are no windows or any way to tell how far we are going," I answer. All of us are becoming more and more on edge as the room creeps farther and farther down.

"How did Quinn manage to get down here already is what I'm confused about. We weren't that far behind him so what room did he go in to get down here before us?" Thomas asks with uncertainty. I can see the gears working in his head as he tries to figure it out.

All of a sudden the room comes to a jolting stop. All of us lose our balance and nearly fall over. Lincoln, however, did fall over. It was the similar feeling as an actual elevator coming to a stop; the feeling where your stomach rises and drops ever so slightly. It's enough to leave you disoriented.

We all grab our heads as we try to steady ourselves and Lincoln picks himself back up from tipping over. We all start to look around the room to see if anything has changed. From the looks of it, nothing has.

"Now what is going to happen?" Autumn says with fright. She starts chewing on her finger nails nervously.

"I don't really want to find out. That was already enough for me. I want to go back," Jarret replies.

"We can't just leave without Quinn. In fact we can't leave anyway if we wanted to," Thomas shoots back as he motions around the room. "We can't exactly open a door and leave."

To the left of Thomas, the walls open to reveal another room. A much bigger room that is lined with metal with concrete floors. This room looks like it almost goes on forever. It has storage shelves scattered all around, reaching up to the obnoxiously large ceiling. Strange, abandoned boxes are thrown everywhere on them as well as on the floors around them. The same vents as the elevator room we were in are also lining the tops of the ceilings in this room too. The same amount of light floods through them to light up the room, but also with the help of very, very dim industrial lights.

"I digress. Apparently we don't open a door and leave, the wall opens and then we leave," Thomas said defeatedly. The timing of this happening was almost humorous. If only we weren't in some strange, underground building.

We all slowly make our way out of the elevator room into the storage-like facility.

"Should we open the boxes?" Jarret asks as he eyes a box on a shelf at his eye height. He begins reaching for it but Cami pulls his hand back.

"I wouldn't touch that. We don't know what's in there," objects Cami.

"That's all the more reason to open it, darling," Jarret snickered. He pulled the box off the shelf and stared at it. We all huddled around it to get a good look at what will be inside.

"Why would you ask then if you were just going to open it anyway," Cami shakes her head as she crosses her arms. She does peek this way even though she is turned slightly away from us.

Autumn starts reading the labels that are plastered all over the box. There are stickers with words such as "CAUTION: Helium" and "Latex Allergy Warning".

"I am going to make a bold guess here and say it's only balloons in here. There is nothing to worry about, Cami," Jarret reassures.

"What if that is just a disguise. What if that is what drug smugglers use as a cover up to hide their stash. We are messing with the wrong stuff in the wrong area and I don't want to get caught," she says in distress.

Jarret makes direct eye contact with her and starts prying open the box. Sure enough, a pile of deflated balloons litter the bottom of the large box. We start pulling them all out to look at the different shapes. There is one in the shape of a sun, one in the shape of a unicorn, one is a dinosaur, and one is a cloud. There were many more different childish shapes we continued to pull out.

"Aren't these cute? I wonder why they didn't get used, maybe this place died down before they could put them for sale and just left them here in case," Autumn says enthusiastically.

As we continue to pull the last of the cartoon balloons out of the box, one singular balloon rises from the middle. It isn't in any silly, cartoon shape though, and it still has helium unlike the others. This shape was just a regular, classic balloon. It was a bright green color with a basic white ribbon string tied to it. We all freeze as we watch it rise up to the storage room ceiling. Up, up, up it goes. Our eyes follow it all the way until it gets stuck.

A distant sound begins to fill our ears. A noise that would otherwise be goofy if we weren't where we were. It also would be goofier if it wasn't coming from the dark abyss of this large storage area that we thought we were alone in.

It was the sound of squeaky shoes. Large, squeaky shoes. Not like the sound where you skid around the floors in sneakers squeaky, but a dog toy like squeaking. Our heads all whip around to the direction the noise is coming from. We watch as a human figure begins to take shape in the dim industrial lighting. As it gets closer, I notice the faint red coming from the eye area. The shoe squeak gets louder and I notice a large afro hairdo on the silhouette.

The shoes stop squeaking. The figure stops walking, just close enough we can see its pale white, painted face. It starts laughing hysterically. The laugh screeches through the nearly empty building, causing my ears to hurt. We were all too terrified to cover our ears. We were frozen in place with horrified looks on our faces. What was a clown doing down here?