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.
Eileen hadn't really arrived at that idea, blockaded by some subconscious self-defense mechanism maybe. She looks taken aback at first, turning to Troy with a somewhat bewildered look and saying, "He must be right... You ready for this?" And Lynn, meanwhile, doesn't look bewildered one bit. She looks relieved. Wrapping her arms around herself, she leans forward, and then quickly disappears into the dark.
A cry comes from Eileen's side of the chasm watching it happen; even with her faith in Henry's chosen paths and without the sound of impact, seeing the girl just fall like that feels burned into her. And she's quite certain she doesn't want to see Henry do it too. For months, she's bristled at the suggestion that he fears watching harm come to her, having never paused to consider that she sickens with fright at the notion that she could watch harm come to him. She looks at him across the way, can tell from here that he's leaning towards her, and finds that in spite of her resolve to break all the desperate wounded bad habits that have gotten her in trouble with him lately, there's one that's still present in force. Perhaps it will be enough that she is well aware that as she twists her hands together and stands at the edge of oblivion, of what looks and smells a great deal like death itself, she is determined to make him proud somehow. "God... Okay. Okay, you want to do this on three?"
Henry's vaguely aware of Troy clinging to the wall and watching Lynn's descent with wide eyes, but Henry's focus is on Eileen. They've done everything they can for Troy, they got him this far. He's going to have to take the final step himself, just like they are.
Going at the same time really is probably the best idea. He hadn't expected Lynn to just walk out like that, although maybe perhaps he should have. And the darkness was beginning to weigh on him. He doesn't think he could stand to watch Eileen take that step alone...neither was she, apparently.
He resolves not to look down and finds it easy to stare into her eyes instead. He nods to her and says, "We're almost home. Okay. One....two....three." He swings his legs forward and lets himself fall into the abyss, determined to move in sync with her. He reaches out towards her again, hoping for more success this time.
With a last encouraging nervous smile for the latest one to accompany her through this place, she turns back to Henry and mirrors his steps across the distance.
She gasps as she plunges downwards, instinctively throwing out her hands for something to cling to and halt her descent. But she might as well be nowhere at all, everything is so dark and silent, she can't even feel the air whipping over her face and a sickening swoop of her stomach precludes a scream. Please, please, please, please, is all that races across the surface of her brain. Please let him still be out there nearby, even if she can't see or hear or touch him to confirm it. Please let this have been right, she's fallen too far to possibly survive if it wasn't.
Without warning, it feels as though something in her head abruptly snaps, like a violin string shrieking from a note held too long. The flare of pain lingers even into her sudden unconsciousness, her body tumbling as she continues to fall.
She would be unaware of when, where, and how exactly the transition occurred from freefall to lying limp and crumpled on packed earth, in a darkness that smells like mildew and rain rather than rot and decay.
Henry had been hoping to grab her hand during the fall, brush up against her, something- but instead there was only air. The stale, horrible air. For a brief moment, he wondered if he'd condemned them all, if maybe there was another way. And then everything shifted, and he couldn't manage to think of anything anymore.
Opening his eyes to gray was not unusual, and neither was realizing he was on the ground. He groaned and pushed himself up off the concrete, sitting up and blinking the blurriness out of his eyes. "Eileen...?" Oh, God, she has to be here. She has to.
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.
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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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A cry comes from Eileen's side of the chasm watching it happen; even with her faith in Henry's chosen paths and without the sound of impact, seeing the girl just fall like that feels burned into her. And she's quite certain she doesn't want to see Henry do it too. For months, she's bristled at the suggestion that he fears watching harm come to her, having never paused to consider that she sickens with fright at the notion that she could watch harm come to him. She looks at him across the way, can tell from here that he's leaning towards her, and finds that in spite of her resolve to break all the desperate wounded bad habits that have gotten her in trouble with him lately, there's one that's still present in force. Perhaps it will be enough that she is well aware that as she twists her hands together and stands at the edge of oblivion, of what looks and smells a great deal like death itself, she is determined to make him proud somehow. "God... Okay. Okay, you want to do this on three?"
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Going at the same time really is probably the best idea. He hadn't expected Lynn to just walk out like that, although maybe perhaps he should have. And the darkness was beginning to weigh on him. He doesn't think he could stand to watch Eileen take that step alone...neither was she, apparently.
He resolves not to look down and finds it easy to stare into her eyes instead. He nods to her and says, "We're almost home. Okay. One....two....three." He swings his legs forward and lets himself fall into the abyss, determined to move in sync with her. He reaches out towards her again, hoping for more success this time.
For once, he's not unsure at all.
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She gasps as she plunges downwards, instinctively throwing out her hands for something to cling to and halt her descent. But she might as well be nowhere at all, everything is so dark and silent, she can't even feel the air whipping over her face and a sickening swoop of her stomach precludes a scream. Please, please, please, please, is all that races across the surface of her brain. Please let him still be out there nearby, even if she can't see or hear or touch him to confirm it. Please let this have been right, she's fallen too far to possibly survive if it wasn't.
Without warning, it feels as though something in her head abruptly snaps, like a violin string shrieking from a note held too long. The flare of pain lingers even into her sudden unconsciousness, her body tumbling as she continues to fall.
She would be unaware of when, where, and how exactly the transition occurred from freefall to lying limp and crumpled on packed earth, in a darkness that smells like mildew and rain rather than rot and decay.
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Opening his eyes to gray was not unusual, and neither was realizing he was on the ground. He groaned and pushed himself up off the concrete, sitting up and blinking the blurriness out of his eyes. "Eileen...?" Oh, God, she has to be here. She has to.
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