Within These Walls

Life After Dark: 16 (WTW Sequel)

(Sorry for the hold up this week! It's been hard to find time to write on the weekdays, which means I've been doing a lot of the heavy-lifting on the weekends, specifically on Sunday. And it finally caught up with me. Thanks for all of your patience and continued support. Apologies for any errors - it's in the middle of the night and I'm halfway asleep.)

The shadowy figure leads me deep into the woods behind the cabin, deeper than Willow and I went during our bonding walk. I had just enough sense to grab my flashlight, phone, boots, and coat on the way out of the door. I don't tell anyone though. I don't have the mind to think so freely. Nothing else matters except following the dark shape.

It's been fifteen minutes since I snuck out of our temporary home and followed the shadow, and I've given up on resisting the inexplicable, bone-itching need to follow it—him. It's no use. It's like something has taken over my frontal lobe and I've been crammed in the back, forced to watch my body make decisions I have no control over.

I'm terrified. I'm slipping and sliding on the ice in pursuit of the shadow, but all I want is to run back to the cabin and bury myself in my sleeping bag. This is wrong on a level that sends alarms going off everywhere. The scary thing is, a part of me knows I'm going someplace I might not come back from. That part of me is kicking and screaming all the way down the hill toward the heavily-adorned trees, now menacing in the dark.

The figure never stops or looks back at me. He's as black as night, just a silhouette of a fairly tall and well-built man, but the weird thing is that I never lose track of him. No matter how often I stumble and bruise myself or run into a cluster of shrubs and vines, no matter how hard I struggle to turn back, he's right there every time the beam of my flashlight searches him out. He wants me to follow him. He expects me to follow him.

"Where are you taking me?" I find the courage to ask at some point. Surely he's the one doing this to me. Forcing me to go along with his game.

Is he one of the Shroud?

Is this the end for me?

We reach the bottom of the hill and walk parallel to it until the steep path becomes a granite cliff and I hear the faint trickling of a creek. I splash across it, shivering when my jeans become soaked with freezing water, and the next time I look up to keep track of the shadow, he's bending over an area near the rock face with sparse vegetation.

He gets on his knees and crawls forward, disappearing into a dark hole.

I shrivel on the inside even as my body takes steps in his direction. The small mouth of the cave beckons me. It's blacker than night. The No! Snap out of it! Do not go inside there. Don't do it, don't do it—

Bits of twigs and rocks dig into my palms as I crawled through the opening. It's a tight fit, and my clothes and hair are coated with dust and fine grains of dirt by the time I draw myself to my feet. My eyes widen as I flash my beam around.

Instead of a small cave like I expected, I'm standing in a small space with rough, jagged walls and a narrow tunnel that leads even deeper. A soft green light pulses from the tunnel. Sweat rolls down my back despite the cold. I'm swallowing painfully every two seconds, fighting down the rock wedged into my throat. That feeling of being buried alive—it rises inside me again, except worse than ever before. An omen of what's to come.

The shadow continues down the tunnel, and so do I.

The tunnel grows fuzzy-green, and it takes me a second to blink away the tears of stifling fear. The tunnel is sloped downward. I'm descending into the belly of the earth. Half a minute later, I discover the source of the strange light.