House of Scales

Chapter 10: Look into the void

The fall was so quick that my colleagues rightly thought I had disappeared. As if I had teleported myself somewhere else. I saw her eyes as I fell. It felt as if everything was happening in slow motion, and I heard her screams reaching out to me.

"Simone! Simone!!" Charles screamed, coming to my help. "Where are you?"

He got close to the place I had fallen; I could hear him. He had a visual reference of the arrow stuck in the tree but seemed unable to get any other sign indicating where I was. Down there, I was paralysed by the vision that originated in my head. My hands were shaking at the sight of what was coming at me. Was I lying on a grave?

I couldn't help but scream at the top of my lungs as I tried to get to my feet. Now I could feel some pain in my knees, which would have peeled from the fall, although nothing serious seemed to have happened. My companions, several meters higher, became nervous, trying to find me.

"Sim, fuck, where are you?" my friend repeated. "Where the hell are you?"

Luanne was the first one who, calmer and analysing the terrain, spotted the hole and alerted my friend. She knelt in front of the small gap that had opened up in my body on the ground, and her voice reached to the bottom of the abyss.

"Simone?" she called out without raising her voice. "Are you alright? Are you hurt?"

She seemed worried, but she didn't let herself be carried away by the panic my best friend was in.

"What happened?" he asked perplexed. "How the hell did he fall?"

"He must have slipped and fallen down this ditch." She came closer to get a better look. "Yeah, it's full of mud."

"Are you alright, Sim?" Charles asked.

"Of course not!" I screamed. "This is a tomb; there are bones everywhere! Charles, get me out of here!"

"Shall we call the police?" asked Charles, still in a panic. "What do we do, Lua?"

"Relax and breath!" she suggested, standing up. "We're getting him out of there."

Luanne's voice, more relaxed than either of us, reassured me. I couldn't see what was going on around me or what was above, but I trusted them.

"Over here!" she guided. "Grab ahold of this!"

"Why do you have this in your bag?"

"In case you misbehaved," she joked.

"And now what?" he asked, holding what was most possibly a rope. "We throw it to him?"

The girl sighed exasperatedly. She took a deep breath and knelt in front of the ditch.

"No matter what you hear Charles say, Simone, we're going to get you out of here," she shouted over the hole. "Are you ready?"

"Yes!" I replied, without a clear idea of how they were going to get me out.

After that, she walked away from the hole and reprimanded Charles, whose footsteps moved away from the ditch.

"Get away from the wall!"

I listened to her while she started kicking the hole over my head. Although I stepped aside, trying to suppress nausea, I felt when I heard the pieces of bone-breaking, quite a lot of dirt and dust fell in. It enlarged the hole, and the light from outside finally reached me. I couldn't see much more than where I was, but it was enough to see the faces of my saviours.

"The rope won't go all the way down, and I don't think Simone will be able to hold on to it," she explained angrily. "I don't have any more, and this is the size I use to throw the target in the air."