Can You See It?

Stomach Inversion

If there was ever a bad idea, it was entering the Kullman mine.

After wandering the forest the night before in search of Kate, Lauren was exhausted, physically and psychologically. She had awoken in a field of tall, dry grass the next morning - she assumed it was the next morning - but what little sleep she had gotten hadn't been enough. The camcorder she had brought with her had been lying in the grass beside her, the battery nearly full; the same could be said of the flashlight she had found on Kate's dining room table.

In the tall grass of the field, there were very few places to go. A few tiny constructions rested on the property, but the windows and doors had been boarded up, limiting the amount of exploration Lauren could do with her limited tools. A chain-link fence as well as the boulders and mountain range kept her blocked in, and Lauren supposed she could climb the fence and try to find her way back, but the chance that there could be a clue as to Kate's whereabouts in the mine proved to be too tempting.

Still, the Kullman mine itself wasn't the most inviting place. Down the main tunnel, several storage containers had been left about and the barrels that weren't stacked up were strewn haphazardly throughout the tunnel. The deeper in Lauren went, the darker it became, and less than halfway in, she became dependent on the light of the flashlight to guide her. Upon reaching the back, Lauren quickly realized that the tunnel came to an abrupt end, and she resorted to searching for another entrance. Her search was short-lived, considering she was quick to find the open door to the right that led into a second room, a second tunnel branching off from that room.

Lauren wasn't sure what the first clue should have been, but if the hundreds of arrows drawn on the floor and walls weren't a bad sign, she wasn't sure what was. Following the direction of the arrows, Lauren quickly saw the generator glowing in the dark. It looked identical to the ones that had lined the path behind Kate's house and she hoped that activating it would turn the lights on. While some of the lights turned on, the most immediate change was the doors and gates sliding open, permitting her entry into the darker and deeper parts of the mine. The sound of metal squealing and sliding against metal made her blood turn cold, but she forced herself to focus. Kate. She was looking for Kate.

According to the glowing lights above the elevator lift, there were six generators that needed to be activated before the elevator would receive enough power to be active again. If she found no other clues about Kate in the mine, then she hoped to at least find something at the top of the lift.

While Lauren's options were numerous, she decided to head down the passage to her right, passing several storage crates as she went. Old lockers for the previous employees of the mine lined the walls, broken up only by the doorway to a room or the appearance of another hallway. The red glow through one open door caught her attention and she hurried to the room, immediately finding a generator laying in wait of her. Activating the machine, a shiver ran down Lauren's spine at the pleasant "ding" the machine made; it wasn't an ominous noise, but it was still off-putting for some indescribable reason. She was quick to leave the room and resume hunting down the remaining four generators.

Exiting the room, Lauren entered the hallway again, making her way to a second short hallway and beginning to climb the stairs when a noise stopped her dead in her tracks. It was unlike anything she had ever heard before and it echoed off the walls, reverberating in her mind and chilling her to the core. Lauren couldn't identify what it was, and having nothing to compare it to made her all the more anxious. It definitely wasn't the familiar sound of lights turning on or the metal doors sliding open.