Peculiar Adventure (MPHFPC Millard X Reader)

September 3rd, 1940

     I tripped through the wreckage and stumbled blindly across the stinking basement to the stairs after them. But by the time I made it to the ground floor, where the daylight they'd stolen had somehow returned, they had vanished from the house.

     I bolted outside and down the crumbling brick steps into the grass, screaming, "Wait! Stop!" But they were gone. I scanned the yards, the woods, breathing hard, cursing myself. 

     Something snapped beyond the trees. I wheeled around to look and, through a screen of branches, caught a flash of blurred movement -- the hem of a (F/C) dress. It was her. I crashed into the woods, springing after. She took off running down the path. 

     I hurdled fallen logs and ducked low branches, chasing her until my lungs burned. She kept trying to lose me, cutting from the path into the trackless forest and back. Finally, the woods fell away, and we broke into open bogland. I saw my chance. Now she had nowhere to hid and with me in sneakers and jeans and her in a dress it would be no contest. Just as I started to catch up, though, she made a sudden turn and plunged straight into the bog. I had no choice but to follow.

      Running became impossible. The ground couldn't be trusted: It kept giving way, stripping me into knee-deep bog holes that soaked my pants and sucked at my legs. The girl, though, seemed to know just where to step, and she pulled farther and farther away, finally disappearing into the mist so that I had only her footprints to follow. 

     After she'd lost me, I kept expecting her prints to veer back toward the path, but they plowed ever deeper into the bog. Then the mist closed behind me, and I couldn't see the path anymore, and I began to wonder if I'd ever find my way out. I tried calling to her -- My name is Jacob Portman! I'm Abe's grandson! I won't hurt you! -- but the fog and the mud seemed to swallow my voice.

     Her footprints led to a mound of stones. It looked like a big gray igloo, but it was a cairn -- one of the Neolithic tombs after which Carinholm was named.

     the cairn was a little taller than me, long and narrow with a rectangular opening in one end, like a door, and it rose from the mud on a tussock of grass. Climbing out of the mire onto the relatively solid ground that ringed it, I saw that the opening was the entrance to a tunnel that burrowed deep inside. Intricate loops and spirals had been carved on either side, ancient hieroglyphs the meaning of which had been lost to the ages. Here lies bog boy, I thought. Or, more likely, abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

     But enter I did, because that's where the girl's footprints led. Inside, the cairn tunnel was damp and narrow and profoundly dark, so cramped that I could only move forward in a kind of hunchbacked crabwalk. Luckily, enclosed spaces were not one of the many things that scared the hell out of me.

     Imagining the girl frightened and trembling somewhere up ahead, I talked to her as I went along, doing my best to reassure her that I meant no harm. My words came slapping back at me in a disorienting echo. Just as my thighs were starting to ache from the bizarre posture I'd been forced to adopt, the tunnel widened into a chamber, pitch black but big enough that I could stand and stretch my arms to either side without touching a wall. 

     I pulled out my phone and once more pressed it into service as a makeshift flashlight. It didn't take long to size up the place. It was a simple stone-walled chamber about as large as my bedroom and it was completely empty. There was no girl to be found.

     I was standing there trying to figure out how the hell she'd managed to slip by when something occurred to me. There was never any girl. I'd imagined her, and the rest of them, too. My brain had conjured them up the very moment I was looking at their pictures. And the sudden, strange darkness that had preceded their arrival? A blackout.