He deep in a dirty, brown water. He had gone head first into it, falling into the darkness, into the frigid water. The fall had been a shock and Jack had not been able to get a full breath before he was sinking beneath the surface. He felt his body go into a sort of shock from the chill. He had not yet started to regret going into the house at the end of Culberson Circle after Cydni yet, but as he sank deeper and deeper, desperate for his eyes to train to the dark and get his bearings, he wasn’t sure if he would make it out of here alive.

Jack had been standing on the porch of the dingy, rotten house, surprised when Cydni had actually taken his dare at last. Had actually reached out for the door knob and turned it. And then she had been thrust forward, Cydni stumbling in through the doorway, the door shutting hard behind her. Jack stepped back with a start. He had not pushed her, though he was sure Cydni would never let him hear the end of it. Then he approached the door, “Cydni?” He called out.

There was no answer.

“Cydni, come on. You can come out now.”

Silence.

“Okay, Cydni, very funny,” Jack said, approaching the door. He reached a hand to the knob and turned it gingerly. It did not budge. He tried again, but still nothing. The door would not give. He started to pull back and forth on the doorknob, trying to pull the door open. Panic started to set in. It was just a house, he told himself, don’t be so stupid. But the door would not open and he did not hear anything from inside. It was almost like Cydni had just…disappeared.

Jack paced back and forth on the porch, waiting a moment. Maybe she had been knocking unconscious, taken a nasty fall. Maybe she would come to and open the door. After a handful of minutes with no sign of Cydni, his mind went wild with ideas of what fate befell her friend. Maybe she fell onto a loose nail and was bleeding out in there. No, maybe there was a squatter in there and she was being chased—maybe she was hiding. Maybe the door was stuck and with all the windows boarded up, she wouldn’t have another way out. Jack didn’t have the tools to pry the boards off the windows and he knew Cydni didn’t have the strength to try even if she found a pry bar in there somewhere. He would have to find another way in. Resolve clicked into place and gave way to action. Jack landed on a plan—find another way in. Maybe somewhere on the outside there was a crack or something overlooked or…

“A basement.” He said to himself. He grew up in this area. The development was the same in its make. They all had a basement. Like his house and like Cydni’s, there would be an exterior hatch that led down into the basement and, within, a door that would lead back up inside. Jack stopped for a moment and wondered if Cydni had come to the same conclusion and was looking for it, or, as Jack rather expected, perhaps she hadn’t thought to as fear would have certainly gripped her by now. Jack swallowed.

He started around the side of the house, hopping off the side of the porch through a break in the splintered railing to the left of the door. He hopped into the tall grass and started wading through the waste deep weeds around the side of the house. The weeds certainly would aid his search. It would be all but hidden because of them. He cornered the left edge of the house and came up around the side of it. It would be in the back, if he was right about the structures being near-replicas. The exterior was, though the insides of these houses had their own personality and lay out.

Jack came into the backyard where a splintered and sun blasted fence stood in the back, torn and tattered through the years and lack of maintenance. He squinted his eyes and pushed weeds aside, searching for the hatch. And surely enough, near the middle of the house, rusted and brown with age, a two-door hatch sat. The handles were corroded and flaking as his hands gripped around them. He pulled and heard the metal groaning in the night air. But it, too, did not budge. “Fucking things.” Jack swore to himself and mustered his strength, rallying for a second attempt. Jack pulled again, throwing his back into it and putting his feet on the edge of the crumpling wood trimming, groaning with effort. The hatch doors screeched as he pulled it open inch by inch, revealing a dark descent of ruined stone stairs.

Wiping the sweat from his brow, Jack sighed and pulled his phone from his hoodie pocket. He turned on the light and started down the stairs.

To his memory, there should only be a handful of steps before reaching the basement doors. But there were more here than he remembered. His light dimly revealed the path before him, but he couldn’t see two or three steps ahead of him before the light seemed to be swallowed by an unnatural darkness. As he continued downward, growing increasingly puzzled, the steps became more treacherous—the stone becoming more worn. Before long the steps transitioned into a downward stone path. Despite everything screaming inside him that this was wrong, that something was off, he pressed forward, determined to find his friend.

Then he knew something was wrong. As the walls on either side of the stone path went from wood to stone as well, craggy and rough. Jagged rocks peaked out of the walls, growing closer with every step, as though the path was narrowing. And it _was_ narrowing, Jack decided. He stopped, considering only for a moment that maybe he should just head back up and call the police. He turned around and his stomach dropped. The path was gone. Where he had come from was gone. Just a stone wall stood cold and careless behind him. He shook his head. It was impossible. That’s impossible. But there it was. A wall where steps had been. He had only been going straight down—and for far too long, he noted—he knew what he was seeing was impossible but still, there it was.

He turned back to the path ahead, to the sharp jutting stone. There was no way but forward.

The path narrowed further and further. The rocks started to catch his clothes, snagging on his hoodie. He moved carefully to avoid ripping it. But the wall closed in more. He turned to his side, sidling against the wall, the sharp stone grinding against his back. He grimaced and kept moving, one small step at a time at moments. Until there was almost no room to move. He became pressed foot to heel against the wall and now every movement was torture. He grunted and groaned in pain with every forced movement, sliding his skin between the stone walls. He felt something warm trickling through his shirt. He refused to look lest it be blood—he had always been the queasy sort—something Cydni always teased him about.

Jack made one final grunt, pressed against the walls, tearing his skin, pulling himself between the stones, and then he felt himself loose his footing. His phone tumbled out of his hand and fell in front of him, falling below a hidden precipice, vanishing into an inky black darkness. And then he felt himself falling too. He gasped as gravity took him. And then he felt something cold hit his ear as his head was submerged first. Shock struck his body as the rest of him fell in the water. It was dark and merky and he couldn’t get his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He held his breath, wishing he’d had a moment to take a deep breath before falling in.

He searched the depths fruitlessly, panicked, the cold setting to his bones. He could feel his limbs becoming stiff in the water as he sank lower and lower. Then he saw a light flickering below. His phone. It hadn’t been destroyed from the water damage yet. He could use it with what little time the thing had left. He dove deeper, ignoring the tinge of pain panging through his back and stomach as he swam. Jack reached out and grabbed his phone and quickly panned around. A flurry of shadows dancing with the light played with his eyes. He scanned in a panic. There had to be a way out. There had to be. But, then, he supposed there didn’t have to be anything. There shouldn’t a basement that went this deep, a stairwell that went down so far. None of it made sense. Especially what was apparently a small lake under a house.

Then he saw it, some sort of opening in the rock at the bottom of the water. His phone died the next moment, plunging him in the dark once more. He tried his best to remember where it was, swimming—flailing mostly—toward where he thought the opening was. His head collided with the hard wall and he grimaced in pain. He fumbled his hands against the cold stone, desperate to find the opening. His lungs were on fire. He could feel himself giving up, his diaphragm heaving, begging him to find air. He followed the wall to the left, slowly, until he reached out to meet his hand with the wall and found only open space.

Jack pushed his body to the space and found he would have to crouch to get through. Another tight, sharp space. His bones felt like lead as he pushed himself down onto his chest in the water, using his momentum to push his torso through the hole, his arms in front of him. Half of his body pushed through. But then he was stuck. His hips caught on the stone. He put his hands on the stone the opposite side of the wal and tried to force himself through, but he wouldn’t budge. He put his weight against the wall and could feel his skin tearing, his clothes ripping. His hips were burning. Then his thighs. Then his legs as he _ripped_ himself through the hole, screaming as he went.

There was still water on the other end and he was moving on borrowed time. Jack pushed off his stomach and planted his feet on the stone floor and kicked off as hard as he could. He emerged from the water and took a gasping breath. He swam lazily, his strength leaving him, looking for any surface to pull himself onto and get out of the frigid water. He sighed a breath of relief as he reached another rocky surface and pulled himself up out of the water.

Jack laid there for a moment in raspy breaths as he let his eyes adjust to his surroundings. Then he noticed a door behind him. It was another splintered, rotting door that sat against the jutting stones ajar. Jack picked himself up to his feet and stumbled toward the door. He stopped before it and opened it gingerly. The door swung toward him silently, revealing wooden stairs. Some of the steps were missing, rusty nails sticking out of the boards. But they led up to an open doorway at the top. Jack climbed the old staircase, holding his weight against the wall to make up for his newfound limp, careful not to end up with a nail in his foot.

Pulling himself up with a grunt, Jack reached the landing at the top of the stairs and stepped through the doorway. It was the kitchen. His gambit had paid off. While the basement wasn’t at all what he was expecting, if you could even call that dank, cold hole a basement, the hatch had indeed led inside the house.

“Cydni!” Jack shouted. “Cydni! Where are you?”

Jack carefully surveyed the kitchen. The cabinets were all layered in dust—the colors muted and drab. There were a full set of cabinets that lined the walls, an island which would. Have been of impressive marble now sat cracked and chipped and settled in dust. The floors were warped and the wood was fraying.

“Cydni!” He called again.

Silence.

There was nothing in this house. At least that is how it seemed. He would have to explore more thoroughly before trying the front door again, this time from the inside, to get back out and contact the authorities. His phone was back in the cave below. And he wouldn’t dare return.

Jack surveyed the kitchen once more and spotted something out of place. Amongst the dust and the cobwebs and the muted, dead colors, sat a mug. It was clean—polished, even. And from the cup, steam rose from a piping hot drink.