A Change in Fate

Chapter Ten: Trust

     "What is this place?" Gregory stared at the eerie room around him. The beam of his flashlight flickered, consistently consuming him in darkness, before the light flashed back, only to go out again. Giving a groan, he slapped the device a couple of times, until the flickering stopped. He could do without that. This area already frightened him enough and baffled him too. Out of all the things he could have found beneath Mike's basement, a long, dreary tunnel eventually leading into a child's bedroom was not one of them.

    Gregory moved his flashlight around the room, the beam illuminating off the patterned wallpaper and the toys littering the floor. Immediately, something struck him as off. The room had two doors on either side, both left ajar. The openings behind them were pitch black, revealing nothing of whatever lay beyond the room. In the center of the room, facing the bed where Gregory stood, was a double-doored closet. He treaded across the floor, taking in the other pieces of furniture. A shiver went through his body when he peered into the closet to see an old Foxy plush sitting at the back, sprawled on the floor. He tried to think of an explanation for the bedroom of a child to be beneath the house, and quite far away, too. He couldn't quite figure out why such a long, bendy tunnel that looked rather industrial led to this. And from Michael's house, no less.

    He ruffled his hair in frustration and went for one of the doors. His flickering flashlight illuminated a shadowy, stretching hallway beyond the room. He moved to the other door—the left one, only to the see the same thing. Nothing but a frightening corridor. He drew back, eyes searching the bedroom fruitlessly for something, anything that could tell him what this was.

    "Does Mike know this is down here?" he whispered. He gulped hard, turning back to the hall. Though something in his gut told him not go on, his own curiosity urged him onward. After smacking the flashlight to stop its flickering, he set off down the left corridor. Unfortunately, the glow of this light dimmed. Clearly, the thing needed batteries. Gregory rolled his eyes as he walked on with a cautious pace. The corridor went for a little while, before it stopped at a large doorway. He ran his eyes over the length of it, then without any further hesitation, entered the room. He stopped as soon as he did, for something crunched beneath his foot. Frowning, he lifted it and peered down at the floor, which had previously been carpeted, but now looked like normal hard flooring. A tiny object lay there in half.

    Gregory bent down and grabbed this. The moment he did, he recognized it. "One of those weird discs I found," he whispered, thinking back to his time trapped in the room with the conveyor. A new chill came over his body. This wasn't that location, so what was it doing beneath Michael's house? Then again, this wasn't under the house anymore, was it? That passage had gone for at least a little while. Tucking the disc in his pocket, he examined the new room he stood in. Again, his flashlight barely lit up the area, but a short distance away from him he could just barely make out a figure...but not of a person. Now thoroughly unnerved, Gregory cautiously approached it. He stopped as soon as he neared it, almost dropping his flashlight. Something sat there, slumped over itself. It looked like a mess of wires, with bits of solid metal peeking through. Stains of oil littered it, and it didn't seem to even have eyes, but it sort of resembled an animatronic. He recognized the tube-like endo parts, though didn't remember seeing the framework peeking through open spaces in the rest of the animatronics.

    Gregory gulped repeatedly, falling back a step. His mind struggled to catch up with the current events. Out of everything that could have happened, this was far from it. All he expected to find beneath that basement was an extra basement, perhaps a small room used for more storage. Not this. Now he knew he had to go back; he would leave, seal off that wretched trapdoor, and wait for Michael to return. Which he would return! Gregory didn't dare think otherwise, and then once again, he would have questions for Michael. It always seemed, no matter how many times Mike answered his questions, there was still more for Gregory to discover. However, would Michael even have the answers this time? He had acted so nonchalant about the basement, said there was nothing interesting about it. Had he lied? Tried to keep Gregory away from it? No, that didn't make sense. He said Gregory could explore it. He trusted Michael, anyway.