The car sped on the road winding up the hill, It was raining, the sun was setting, and it cast a red glow all over the landscape. The dark gray clouds cloaked the sky, and the entire setting looked like a painting made by someone who was severely depressed.
Jared parked the car next to the bridge located over the river, which was situated between two hills. Lightning flashed as the rumbling sound of thunder blended in with the trickling noise of rain cascading into the gushing river.
"Come on," Jared said, and climbed over the railing. We followed him down the embankment in a scatter of scree and pebbles.
"The coordinates lead here," he stated, glancing at his phone.
Below the bridge was a small opening to a tunnel.
Jared went in first, and the rest of us pursued.
It was gloomy, but we had brought a few flashlights as well as other supplies in a backpack. Water from the heavy rain seeped through the tunnel which extended straight ahead, not seeming to turn in any particular direction.
The water from the rain was deeper now. Dead animals had floated past us three times: a rat, a kitten, and a swollen glossy thing that might have been a beaver.
The water we were creeping through was relatively placid, but all that was going to come
to an end fairly soon: there was a steady cavity roaring not too far up ahead. It grew louder, rising to a monotone roar. The tunnel curved to the right.
It felt as if I was almost cutting through the darkness physically, a flashlight held out before me, part of me expecting that at any moment, it would encounter flesh and black eyes that would open in the darkness.
The gloom was crammed with sounds, all of them magnified and echoing. I could hear the rest creeping along behind me in silence.
We crawled farther into the darkness while water rushed around us and while, outside, the storm rambled and the setting sun brought night to the city of Los Angeles, a night that howled with wind and bungled with lightning and clattered with falling trees that sounded like the cries of a wounded animal.
In some places, the tunnel was so wide that we could not reach the top even by stretching our arms up all the way. Sometimes we had to crawl, and once, for five excruciatingly long minutes (which felt more like five hours), we snaked our way along on our stomachs, Jared leading, the rest of us following with our noses to the feet of the person ahead.
"Do you know where we are?" I asked Jared.
Jared pointed down the slightly crooked bore of the tunnel. "We're under the Hollywood Sign right now, I think. But Gabe..."
The flashlight slipped out of my hands. We were submersed in darkness.
Someone... I think it was Nakia... groaned.
But before I had dropped the flashlight, I had seen the disquiet on Jared's face.
"What? What is it?"
"When I say we're under the sign, I mean we're actually under it." he sighed. "We've been going down for a long time now."
We continued walking. The tunnel advanced steadily downward.
We craned our necks back to see the ceiling, which was now fifty feet or more above us, and littered with long spiky stalactites with nets of dirty cobwebs hung between them. The floor was made of rock, but overlain with so much aged that it were scarcely visible. The up-curving walls of the tunnels were easily fifty feet away on either side.
It now seemed that we were not walking in a tunnel at all but making our way through a huge cavern, the approach to a wall at the end of the gigantic corridor.
But as we drew closer, we saw that the wall was not entirely blank after all. Built inside it was an iron door, with a small brass doorknob.
Jared clasped his hand around the doorknob, and pushed it open.
An eerie sight encountered our eyes: We were standing on the edge of a colossal lake, so prodigious that I couldn't make out the remote banks, in a cavern so high that the ceiling was out of sight. A foggy red light shone far away in what looked like the center of the lake; it was mirrored in the completely tranquil water below.
The nebulous red gleam and the light from the flashlights were the only things that broke the otherwise silky blackness, although their light would not permeate as much as we would have expected. The darkness was somehow deeper than ordinary darkness.
As Jared shone his flashlight over the lake, he gasped. "This isn't water," he gasped.
"It's blood. Be careful not to step into it." he added. "Stay close."
He set off around the edge of the lake, and the rest of us followed close behind him. Our footsteps made resonant sounds on the narrow rim of stone that encircled the lake. On and on we walked, but the view did not deviate: On one side of us, the rough cavern wall, on the other, the limitless expanse of smooth, glassy red-blackness, at the very middle of which was that cryptic red glow. I found the site and the silence unnerving.
As we walked, my foot stepped on something that was not rock.
I shone the flashlight on it.
It was a long chain, extending from the depths of the blood.
I signaled towards the others and Jared bent down and started pulling on the chain, winding itself on the ground with a clinking sound that echoed noisily off the rocky walls, pulling something hefty from the depths of the blood.
The front of a tiny raft broke the surface, and floated, with barely a ripple, toward the place on the shore where we stood.
Jared looked at us. "Let's go." Everyone started climbing into the raft. I hesitated.
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" I asked.
"It's fine, what's the worst that could happen?," he replied.
I could think of many things that could happen, but I sat anyway.
We were crammed in together; I sat right at the edge of the raft, which began to move at once. There was no sound other than the sleek rustle of the raft's base parting the blood; it moved without our help, as though an unseen rope was pulling it towards the ruby light in the center.
Soon we could no longer see the walls of the cavern.
The boat suddenly came to a stop.
The light from Jared's flashlight illuminated a circular wall, reaching all the way towards the invisible ceiling . The red luminosity was originating from large letters incised onto a curved metal door.
"Memento Mori"
"Memento Mori," Ryan read out loud. "What does that mean?"
"It's an ancient Latin aphorism," answered Jared with a grim expression. "It means 'remember you must die'."
"Real optimist, this BloodLust," said Nakia.
Jared placed his hand on the metal door, and thrust it open.
It opened out into the top of a large winding stairwell, the bottom of which could not be penetrated by the light of our flashlight.
We started going down the stairs. They seemed endless, as if we were walking down to the very innards of the planet.
"I still don't understand something," Jared said, his footsteps echoing on the stone steps. "Why would BloodLust take Lorraine to his lair, if he could have easily killed her?"
The answer was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairwell.
