Catching sight of him reaching out, she feels something constrict, and nods in response to his direction though she has to shoot down one of his ideas. "There's nowhere." Finding nothing along the visible edge, she steps back just beyond the boundary of the light, running her hands frantically along the wall. To her infinite surprise, her palm brushes over a protrusion, one that moves when she nudges it. More surprising still, when she tries pulling at it, she's successful. "I found something! It's falling apart..." Maybe it's wear and tear from the water, poor construction, or damage sometime in its life, but the pebbly brick that winds up in her hand is riddled with spidery cracks and spongy dips. She holds it carefully carrying it back out into the light where she can get a look at it, concerned that it could crumble in her grasp. In spite of the wear, though, she can still clearly make out the only marking it has, carved into one of its broad sides.
Her brow knits and she swallows past a lump in her throat before solemnly calling out, "Henry, it says 05105." When she looks to him across the chasm, her worry and confusion might be obvious on her face in spite of the distance. There's no time for explanation; if Lynn or Troy are prone to annoyance at private language and unspoken conversations, they'll have to just live with it today. One person over there knows why this makes no sense and makes her more afraid and that's enough. "Why would it...?"
She's stopped by a crash from behind her, louder than before. Time's almost up. But she notices something else, as well. Pebbles and bits of debris at her feet rattle with the impact from not far away, and she hears something else rattle as well, in the wall back where she found the stone. Putting it down, she hurries back into the corridor, a second later shouting back from the darkness, "There's more! There's four more, have you got seventeen over there or something?!"
"Uh I don't...." He's been looking around his area since she did, first because he was curious and later to distract him from the numbers on that tape. She was right, it didn't make any sense. 05105? And yet it was too close to ignore. "No, there's no blocks, I don't see anything." He's pressing everywhere he can, and yet, there's no indentations, not protrusions, nothing. It's all as smooth as a piece of paper.
"I don't think there's anything on this side. I'll keep looking..." Just in case. He can hear the thing crashing around behind them, although he can't see anything yet. Damn, they don't have much time.... "Anything else on your end?" he calls, a little louder.
"04105, this one's got an arrow on it," she replies, before setting it aside with the other one. #4, she can't help but notice, is in perfectly fine condition. The next one is predictable by now. "03105!" she shouts, louder now that the noise threatens to drown her out, and sounding more scared by the second. Lynn looks to be of a similar mind, backing away from the edge with terror and memory tightening her grip on the gun. "It's falling apart too!" Like the fifth, this stone looks nearly ready to crumble in Eileen's hands, and after the briefest of inspections under the light she puts it down with the other two. She stares at the three of them, something at the edge of her mind bothering her immensely. And for once, she actually quickly realizes what it is. "The tapes!" At this, Lynn blinks as though startled, just as time runs out.
With a squeal that sounds like cars colliding, something scrapes invisibly through the handprinted portal. Eileen backs away to the very lip of the ledge, mangled shoes knocking debris down into the dark. She cannot breathe for fear Henry and Lynn are about to watch them be impaled without a fight, but does what he said she should. She stands, waits in between one impenetrable darkness and another, thinks inexplicably of bladed gyroscopes, thinks not so inexplicably of how fast you'd have to be torn to pieces for it not to hurt. It barrels towards them with horrific speed, and her body breaks free of her will, flinching away before she's told it to. She all but throws herself aside, crouching down as a scream of old metal clips above and past her.
But not over the edge and into the abyss. When she lifts her head, she watches with horrified amazement as it rolls smoothly straight up the filthy wall above them. But only by about ten feet; then, like a backspun wheel, it abruptly reverses direction, screaming back down towards them.
Troy is not exactly pleased by this development. He was frantically ducking out of the way, but now it's on its way back. As far as he can tell, nothing hurts these damn things, these spinning machines of twisted spikes and rusted jigsaw teeth.
His mind is only a terrified white noise, but his arm is still working just fine. When it's about to reach them, he steps up and hits it with his crowbar. Wheels fly and metal crumples, but it merely serves to rotate the whole thing, puts it on its side. It punctures his left shoulder- his first thought, before the pain, is that it'll need a tetanus shot. He twists away and scrambles to put distance between him and it, as much as possible. That is, unfortunately, not much in this little hallway.
There's a squeak from the other side of the thing as it's spun by the blow, spines unfurling like a fan without fabric to sweep perilously close to her face, close enough that she feels the disturbed stale air in their wake go slithering across her cheek. She scuttles back like a crab, just enough to be out from under it, before fumbling at her waistline for her gun. The first squeeze of the trigger is a wasted shot, one precious round that passes right in between all the jagged sets of spokes to bury itself in the wall somewhere well above the two people on the other side of the gap. The second glances harmlessly off the edge of one of two elegant red-rusted ill-proportioned fish hooks, and her continued scramble back into the dark saves a leg from being sawed clean off in retaliation. But two more shots seem to at least inconvenience it, striking at the spinning whirring mess of layers towards the center of it. Its rotations shudder each time, jerking it incrementally to the right once, and incrementally back towards the chasm on the second. But both times, it's instantly recovered and apparently no worse for the wear, rearing three prongs up like a snake and striking nearly as quickly.
Lynn jerks, too, her shoulders hunching each time the nightmare pauses, but when none of it comes flying at her in retaliation, she catches on. As a scream sounds from Eileen, the two shots the young girl squeezes off are well off-target, but go noticed nonetheless. It draws back nearer to the chasm, its rotational axes aligning themselves nearer and more parallel to the ground, leaving it looking like a spider perched at the edge and considering its leap. Lynn's eyes are still wide and white, but her face hardens into something resembling a snarl as she unloads the rest of her clip in its general direction. When another squeeze of the trigger produces no results, she directs the look down at the handgun instead, but her face abruptly changes. Where her footsteps had disturbed the caked grime on the floor, it's clear that the surface is not even. She looks up at the crouched threat, but after a moment's frightened hesitation, suddenly drops to her hands and knees without explanation, sweeping her palms over the muck.
Henry's body is jerking, his arm is reaching out, trying to get over towards Eileen. The chasm is all that stops him, and even then, just barely. He doesn't have anything that could reach over there, not anything. Besides, he doesn't know what he'd do if he could be there. Lynn was scrabbling behind him, frantic. She hadn't been quite this frantic before, and she was on the other side of the danger.
He was focused on the fight in front of them- he couldn't break his focus to look at Lynn. But then she dropped to the ground, and he had to pay attention to her actions. She was brushing away something, something important. These things were always hidden in places like these. It was writing. Henry reads it aloud:
"I've let it have my voice Listen carefully to everything I cannot say
We share the mask but the sacred truths keep us apart. Too busy screaming for me to listen to me, to notice me screaming for you to hear. Pulled by my skin towards death, inevitable, but you don't even try to follow. You could never help me, and you didn't. No one can save you, and they won't. What will you do now?
If only you had trusted me Followed my lead We would both have been home. Live with it."
He stares for a moment, then looks back up to the fight. "It's a poem..." And a rather nasty one at that. So they have to fight, but Henry gets a poem? He doesn't know what it means, but he'll have to try and figure it out as quickly as possible.
Lynn's face goes unnaturally blank as the words are revealed, but then she seems to start and return to herself, her face twisting into something stricken. "I... I said things... and then..." The girl's voice rattles from disuse. "She knows my videos...? It was on one. I taped it, a-and then, they wouldn't erase. None of them would. They wouldn't let me..." She takes on an edge, the bitterest kind of determination as she stares across the way at the crown of blades and stones on the ground near its anchoring. "Near the end. The fourth one."
In the dark of the passageway, Eileen's presence is reduced to sound only. Agonized moans after the last scream and a wet impact, the rustle of fabric rolling over grit and debris, breaths drawn too harshly and too quickly. Then a gasp of effort, the scrape of an outstretched arm flung out along the floor, and the clattering of a handgun over broken tile that comes to rest near his feet.
Troy has a great deal less experience than Eileen with using a weapon, but he scrambles to pick up the gun when it slides on the floor. If he could hear Lynn, he'd know what she was talking about, but right now he's a bit busy trying not to die. He'd like it if Eileen didn't either, and both of those reasons are why he pulled the trigger.
He fired rather wildly, but one of bullets in the clip he empties actually hits a part of the mark that's not metal. This particular shot seems to have be particularly successful, as the monster rears back. It immediately spins out with something sharper, but then it twitches again. Every twiisted spike of metal on the creature gleams in the sick, low light.
When the barbs and wheels abruptly reverse their direction, Lynn looks genuinely surprised by herself as she instantly reacts. It spins jerkily towards the ledge opposite; she scrambles madly to slap the last clip into place. It launches itself across the gaping divide; she holds out her hands with the gun between them. And it never reaches her; all the shots fired but one miss it entirely, but the lone success disturbs that mad ratcheting spinning, sends pieces crashing into each other, sends the whole damn thing careening squealing down into the abyss.
The gun's components click against each other as its bearer's hands shake. She stares down into the dark in astonishment, and delicately sets the 9mm down on the inscribed floor in front of her.
Henry's eyes widen as the the creature flies at them, and stay that way when Lynn's shots actually seem to stop it. He watches it fall downwards, fade from sight as it continued to click and shift and screech. But it was too far out from either side now- no matter what it did, it couldn't quite reach.
The silence that settled after that was heavy, but Henry had to disturb it. "Eileen? You both okay over there?"
By the time he asks, she's actually able to cough and shout back, "Yes."
Sticky wet fingers had drawn crisscrossed trails over her coat as a flower blossomed in thick pulses through the fabric low down on her ribcage, one on her back and one on her front. Pieces of her she couldn't even name, had never felt before, displaced, splitting apart when they oughtn't, pressing together when they shouldn't. Oh God, it hurt, she'd wanted to scream but drawing breath made it worse, even sickened and weak whimpers made it worse, she couldn't help but squirm with it but that made it worse too. It felt like it tore through every part of her when she did, scraping bone and shearing nerves. Her hands quivered with misery, the strain of those few meager inches, but she did it, reaching into her pocket for the bottle. Troy had looked at her like she was nuts not twenty minutes earlier, grabbing a health drink of all things to take with her, but she knew how to make this stop. Being impaled is a first; surviving sure isn't.
She let the bottle slip from her fingers, once empty, waiting slumped and still and struggling to keep her eyes open long enough for agony to become pain, pain to become an ache, an ache to become an echo. A terrible long moment of nothing happening, of wondering if it was what she thought it was, wondering if maybe it wouldn't work the same in here after all. But the pulse of blood slowed and stopped, lashes lowered in exhaustion, and she didn't wonder even once what they'll all think of her now. The gunshots and the noise of the creature sounded exceptionally sharp, human voices distorted, but sound regains its clarity as she knits together in the dark. She hears Henry, finds herself capable of speech, and finds her speech capable of honesty. "I'm okay!"
Gasping as she pushes herself up off the ground, she nearly slumps right back down in relief seeing two people standing upright on the other side of the divide, and Troy Abernathy upright silhouetted against the dim light. To him, she asks, "Are you okay? The stones.... it didn't knock the stones off... did it...?"
He's still not completely sure the stress of the fight didn't kill him. Eileen's already bouncing back, but he needs a minute. He only had a brief encounter with that thing before, and he ran the fuck away then. It was nothing like this scrabbling, desperate fight, with knives and rusted corkscrews and saw teeth everywhere. And none of it touched him- it was all Eileen. He could barely tell what had been going on, but he knew she was more hurt than she is right now. ...right?
Troy startles as she asks him about the stones, shaking his head rapidly. He sets the gun on the ground gingerly next to the stones, as if it was some sort of violent animal. "No, no, they're still here," he says with a heavy tremor in his voice. He's scared shitless, and it's obvious. "The stones are all here, but what do we need them for?"
Wrapping an arm around her still-bloody midsection, she wearily stumbles out of the darkened corridor out to join him in the light at the edge of the chasm. Not missing the signs that Troy is positively petrified, she looks sympathetic and says as reassuringly as she can, "I don't know exactly, but I've got an idea." And when she crouches to retrieve her weapon, she tucks it away hidden inside her coat, clasping his shoulder and giving him a pale smile as she stands. "Thanks for this."
Having been flat on her back and bleeding when Henry and Lynn had made their discovery, and therefore not privy to it, when she turns back to the two across the way she just continues from where her own train of thought had last left off. "Henry, these things must be about the tapes, the third and fifth ones are all screwed up. The others have arrows."
"Arrows...?" Henry takes a few moments to process this. "I don't understand...is there somewhere we're supposed to put them? Or put them together...?"
Lynn had said something about the fourth one, that it had been 'near the end', that it wouldn't erase. There was something terrible about that one. "Eileen, the one marked as the fourth...what's on that one?" He doesn't imagine it'll give them too much helpful information, but these sorts of things were always part of something bigger. The poem was terrible, bringing up memories of disagreements, fights between him and Eileen that were frequently squashed. It was the one thing he ever gave her a hard time about, but saying it that way- well, he's not going to read the poem aloud again, at least. This place doesn't get that much out of him.
Eileen sways a little woozily as she picks up the block marked 04105, turning it until it sits in her hand in the same orientation as it was in the wall. "It points down," she calls out, pointing at the carved symbol as though they could possibly see it from way over there. "Right here, straight down." Warily, she stands on her toes to peer over the edge and down at the chasm, but she sees nothing on the wall beneath her and presumably, if there were something there, Henry and Lynn would be able to see it perfectly well. She shrugs helplessly and scowls at the ground under her feet, growing extremely sick of being over here while he's all the hell the way over there, all the fine details of him obscured by the distance.
Lynn, on the other hand, solemnly stands and looks at Henry knowingly.
Henry looks from Lynn over to Eileen, across the chasm, and then down. It's completely blac, ksinking down into nothingness. He couldn't even guess at how deep it might go. He knows that it really doesn't matter anyway.
"We've got to jump," he says, half expecting Eileen might have the idea already. "That's what it means. Eileen, we're going to have to go down there..."
He can't even really say he's scared, not because of this. He's made his decision already, he realizes. He only hopes that Eileen will understand, too. He watches her as closely as he can, wishing he could touch her and set them both more at ease.
Her brow knits and she swallows past a lump in her throat before solemnly calling out, "Henry, it says 05105." When she looks to him across the chasm, her worry and confusion might be obvious on her face in spite of the distance. There's no time for explanation; if Lynn or Troy are prone to annoyance at private language and unspoken conversations, they'll have to just live with it today. One person over there knows why this makes no sense and makes her more afraid and that's enough. "Why would it...?"
She's stopped by a crash from behind her, louder than before. Time's almost up. But she notices something else, as well. Pebbles and bits of debris at her feet rattle with the impact from not far away, and she hears something else rattle as well, in the wall back where she found the stone. Putting it down, she hurries back into the corridor, a second later shouting back from the darkness, "There's more! There's four more, have you got seventeen over there or something?!"
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"I don't think there's anything on this side. I'll keep looking..." Just in case. He can hear the thing crashing around behind them, although he can't see anything yet. Damn, they don't have much time.... "Anything else on your end?" he calls, a little louder.
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With a squeal that sounds like cars colliding, something scrapes invisibly through the handprinted portal. Eileen backs away to the very lip of the ledge, mangled shoes knocking debris down into the dark. She cannot breathe for fear Henry and Lynn are about to watch them be impaled without a fight, but does what he said she should. She stands, waits in between one impenetrable darkness and another, thinks inexplicably of bladed gyroscopes, thinks not so inexplicably of how fast you'd have to be torn to pieces for it not to hurt. It barrels towards them with horrific speed, and her body breaks free of her will, flinching away before she's told it to. She all but throws herself aside, crouching down as a scream of old metal clips above and past her.
But not over the edge and into the abyss. When she lifts her head, she watches with horrified amazement as it rolls smoothly straight up the filthy wall above them. But only by about ten feet; then, like a backspun wheel, it abruptly reverses direction, screaming back down towards them.
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His mind is only a terrified white noise, but his arm is still working just fine. When it's about to reach them, he steps up and hits it with his crowbar. Wheels fly and metal crumples, but it merely serves to rotate the whole thing, puts it on its side. It punctures his left shoulder- his first thought, before the pain, is that it'll need a tetanus shot. He twists away and scrambles to put distance between him and it, as much as possible. That is, unfortunately, not much in this little hallway.
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Lynn jerks, too, her shoulders hunching each time the nightmare pauses, but when none of it comes flying at her in retaliation, she catches on. As a scream sounds from Eileen, the two shots the young girl squeezes off are well off-target, but go noticed nonetheless. It draws back nearer to the chasm, its rotational axes aligning themselves nearer and more parallel to the ground, leaving it looking like a spider perched at the edge and considering its leap. Lynn's eyes are still wide and white, but her face hardens into something resembling a snarl as she unloads the rest of her clip in its general direction. When another squeeze of the trigger produces no results, she directs the look down at the handgun instead, but her face abruptly changes. Where her footsteps had disturbed the caked grime on the floor, it's clear that the surface is not even. She looks up at the crouched threat, but after a moment's frightened hesitation, suddenly drops to her hands and knees without explanation, sweeping her palms over the muck.
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He was focused on the fight in front of them- he couldn't break his focus to look at Lynn. But then she dropped to the ground, and he had to pay attention to her actions. She was brushing away something, something important. These things were always hidden in places like these. It was writing. Henry reads it aloud:
"I've let it have my voice
Listen carefully to everything I cannot say
We share the mask but the sacred truths keep us apart.
Too busy screaming for me to listen to me,
to notice me screaming for you to hear.
Pulled by my skin towards death, inevitable, but you don't even
try to follow.
You could never help me, and you didn't.
No one can save you, and they won't.
What will you do now?
If only you had trusted me
Followed my lead
We would both have been home.
Live with it."
He stares for a moment, then looks back up to the fight. "It's a poem..." And a rather nasty one at that. So they have to fight, but Henry gets a poem? He doesn't know what it means, but he'll have to try and figure it out as quickly as possible.
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In the dark of the passageway, Eileen's presence is reduced to sound only. Agonized moans after the last scream and a wet impact, the rustle of fabric rolling over grit and debris, breaths drawn too harshly and too quickly. Then a gasp of effort, the scrape of an outstretched arm flung out along the floor, and the clattering of a handgun over broken tile that comes to rest near his feet.
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He fired rather wildly, but one of bullets in the clip he empties actually hits a part of the mark that's not metal. This particular shot seems to have be particularly successful, as the monster rears back. It immediately spins out with something sharper, but then it twitches again. Every twiisted spike of metal on the creature gleams in the sick, low light.
Reply
The gun's components click against each other as its bearer's hands shake. She stares down into the dark in astonishment, and delicately sets the 9mm down on the inscribed floor in front of her.
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The silence that settled after that was heavy, but Henry had to disturb it. "Eileen? You both okay over there?"
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Sticky wet fingers had drawn crisscrossed trails over her coat as a flower blossomed in thick pulses through the fabric low down on her ribcage, one on her back and one on her front. Pieces of her she couldn't even name, had never felt before, displaced, splitting apart when they oughtn't, pressing together when they shouldn't. Oh God, it hurt, she'd wanted to scream but drawing breath made it worse, even sickened and weak whimpers made it worse, she couldn't help but squirm with it but that made it worse too. It felt like it tore through every part of her when she did, scraping bone and shearing nerves. Her hands quivered with misery, the strain of those few meager inches, but she did it, reaching into her pocket for the bottle. Troy had looked at her like she was nuts not twenty minutes earlier, grabbing a health drink of all things to take with her, but she knew how to make this stop. Being impaled is a first; surviving sure isn't.
She let the bottle slip from her fingers, once empty, waiting slumped and still and struggling to keep her eyes open long enough for agony to become pain, pain to become an ache, an ache to become an echo. A terrible long moment of nothing happening, of wondering if it was what she thought it was, wondering if maybe it wouldn't work the same in here after all. But the pulse of blood slowed and stopped, lashes lowered in exhaustion, and she didn't wonder even once what they'll all think of her now. The gunshots and the noise of the creature sounded exceptionally sharp, human voices distorted, but sound regains its clarity as she knits together in the dark. She hears Henry, finds herself capable of speech, and finds her speech capable of honesty. "I'm okay!"
Gasping as she pushes herself up off the ground, she nearly slumps right back down in relief seeing two people standing upright on the other side of the divide, and Troy Abernathy upright silhouetted against the dim light. To him, she asks, "Are you okay? The stones.... it didn't knock the stones off... did it...?"
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Troy startles as she asks him about the stones, shaking his head rapidly. He sets the gun on the ground gingerly next to the stones, as if it was some sort of violent animal. "No, no, they're still here," he says with a heavy tremor in his voice. He's scared shitless, and it's obvious. "The stones are all here, but what do we need them for?"
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Having been flat on her back and bleeding when Henry and Lynn had made their discovery, and therefore not privy to it, when she turns back to the two across the way she just continues from where her own train of thought had last left off. "Henry, these things must be about the tapes, the third and fifth ones are all screwed up. The others have arrows."
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Lynn had said something about the fourth one, that it had been 'near the end', that it wouldn't erase. There was something terrible about that one. "Eileen, the one marked as the fourth...what's on that one?" He doesn't imagine it'll give them too much helpful information, but these sorts of things were always part of something bigger. The poem was terrible, bringing up memories of disagreements, fights between him and Eileen that were frequently squashed. It was the one thing he ever gave her a hard time about, but saying it that way- well, he's not going to read the poem aloud again, at least. This place doesn't get that much out of him.
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Lynn, on the other hand, solemnly stands and looks at Henry knowingly.
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"We've got to jump," he says, half expecting Eileen might have the idea already. "That's what it means. Eileen, we're going to have to go down there..."
He can't even really say he's scared, not because of this. He's made his decision already, he realizes. He only hopes that Eileen will understand, too. He watches her as closely as he can, wishing he could touch her and set them both more at ease.
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