“What?” Adam whispered acidically.
“Look, I know you don’t like me, and I’m not particularly fond of you either, but this is important. I just noticed that the symbols on the doors caused my sanity to drop by three points just now, and I only looked at them for about ten seconds. We need to take care at what we look at here, because I can’t help but feel that this place is one massive trap that we should not have stuck our heads into”.
Putting his hands into his pockets, Adam frowned as Maynard spoke. He looked back towards the group and replied, “I’ll pass on the word. Now tell me, did you find anything valuable in the vaults you looked at?”
“Nothing of value, the first was literally empty, and the second had a sheet of metal with a bloody hand-print on it,” Maynard said with faux disappointment. He could feel Adam’s eyes boring into him as he spoke, but the man left him well enough alone as he kicked the dirt and stared him down.
“You have bad luck,” Adam replied with a chuckle, “These are vaults of necessity. They have a chance of giving you what you need, whether you know it or not. As you experienced though, sometimes they don’t give you anything at all, and that can be an issue”.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“This time is a freebie, but when we find the next area, we’re splitting the rooms by member value. We’re here to survive and get stronger, but considering your innate value you’re going to have to work harder than anyone else to catch up to any of us. That clear?”
“As clear as crystal,” Maynard replied, moving back to the group. He double checked on Tommy, who had made lightning work of the sanity draining symbols, and was now clutching his temples in pain because of it. Lockley, however, had recovered. The portly man stood up and began making his way further down the hall, gesturing with his cane and ushering the group on.
“Come on chaps, we only have the far room to look at!” With a slight sway in his stride, Lockley walked down the hallway, ignorant in the knowledge that people had yet to follow. One by one they left Tommy to recover by the door and followed the professor into the final room. Unlike the vaults of necessity, this room had similar design to the hallways as the runic markings followed directly on in an unbroken path, and the pillars continued to line the walls of the large, ringed room. The roof seemed to slope in towards the heart of the space, where a comparatively ornate altar sat, dominating the scene. As Maynard stepped inside the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and the feeling that had settled into his stomach bubbled up into his chest. His lungs constricted and he involuntarily took a step back as all the nerves in his body screamed at him to flee from the terror that sat in the room. He took a step back as he tried to speak, to open his mouth and warn the people in the room that they were stepping into the maw of a monster, but no words would come out. He could not speak, because to speak was to attract the attention of the monster that lurked within, and he knew that would kill him. His fourth step back attracted the attention of Philippe, who saw him pulling out of the room in horror.
When the tanned man saw Maynard retreating from the room in fear, he walked over to him and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I trust my instincts,” Maynard whispered, “And that room… there’s something in that room that will absolutely kill us if we give it the chance. I don’t know how I can tell, but I can’t stay in there”.
As Maynard wiped the sweat off his face, Philippe stepped out of the room and helped them both move further away from the room. They reached the far end of the hall and Maynard slumped against the wall, sliding down until he sat next to Tommy. Watching him continue to shake, Philippe said, “You do not look well”.
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” Maynard replied as he tried to gain some control over his body. The intense brush with death he had just felt had rattled him, and the 91 that now sat as his sanity score made him feel like he had to leave the mine as soon as he could.
“I feel that intensely,” Tommy interjected with a groan. The Asian man was intensely pale, and his right fist was tensely clamped around the pencil that he had used to draw out the symbols which had so heavily taxed his mind. He turned, looked at Maynard and said, “What caused you to be in such a state?”
“That room at the end,” Maynard said, a shudder echoing out of his body unbidden even as he simply remembered the room, “It felt like I was walking into a lion’s mouth, just waiting to snap shut and devour me whole. I’m honestly surprised you didn’t feel any sort of danger from that place, Philippe”.
“I mean it made me feel uncomfortable, but that was it. Are you sure that…” The door at the end of the hallway slammed shut, cutting Philippe’s sentence short. All three men looked down the hall and watched as the violet glow around the doorway intensified greatly. The light began pulsing, increasing in intensity second after second until it reached a peak. After a minute the light faded and as the door slid open, letting the three men who had been trapped inside tumble out while Adam held onto an ornate dagger sat inside a black and purple sheath. For a moment, Maynard thought that the violet light from the room was wrapping around the three men, as if it was attempting to strangle them, bind them and pull them back into the room, but as Maynard blinked the vision disappeared. Rubbing his eyes, Maynard thought to himself, I must be seeing things. My decreased sanity score has got to be to blame for that. I just hope it doesn’t get any worse…
“What in the name of the lord was that?” Philippe said.
“I don’t know,” Adam said, glancing at professor Lockley and putting the dagger into the bag he had brought down into the cave. “We need to get out of here though, the professor was struck by the light more than anyone else. Whatever it did to us, it did more to him”.
With Philippe’s help, Maynard and Tommy both managed to get on their feet. They grabbed all of the sketches that they had made while inside the crypt and made their way back through the tooth-like cavern. The cavern still made Maynard uncomfortable, but it was nothing compared to the inside of the final room. Unlike their entry however, Maynard kept seeing flickering movement out of the corner of his eye. Each time he would turn to look at the location and simply see the stalagmites standing stationary as rocks were famously known to do, but that feeling that there was something there did not go away. It simply grew.
With their lamps re-lit, the group made their way back into the tunnels as quickly as they could, but the situation of the group made their journey a slow one. Callum still took the vanguard, but his movement was sluggish and he was far jumpier than when they were entering the mines. Philippe supported Tommy and Adam supported the professor, his left hand firmly gripped on the knife that they had pilfered. Maynard continued to act as the rearguard, but he was just as jumpy as Callum, if not more-so. At every idle background sound he would glance about and try to move slightly quicker, but he was still held back by the movement speed of the group as a whole. The cloying sensation that had stuck to him since he first entered the cavern had only thickened, and now he felt like he was pushing through molasses, only held back by the flickering lamplight that he held above his head.
The entire group flinched as they heard something squeak in the darkness, but as a small rat rushed into the range of their lamps they realised that they were jumping at shadows. Adam raised his hand and motioned for everyone to stop. He grabbed Callum by the shoulder and said, “We need to take a moment here. The entire group is tense, and that’s understandable after the weirdness we experienced in that crypt, but we need to focus on just getting back up to the surface. Can you all hold on for another half hour?”
There was a round of assents, but the group was slightly cut off by the movement of a falling stone just on the edge of lamplight. Maynard moved his lamp slightly and watched the rat’s tail wiggle and they all let out a collective sense of relief. The rest of the group’s interest faded and they gradually got back into the mindset of traveling through the darkness to get out of the caves, but Maynard’s attention stayed on the rat. There was something wrong about the way the tail wiggled, and more importantly continued to wiggle while their eyes were on it. He could not quite put his finger on it but the movement did not seem natural. The flecks of red that speckled the stones in the area could have been blood, but they could have just as easily been iron ore, and with all this in mind Maynard had to wonder whether there was something going on, or whether his eyes were playing tricks on him.
The group continued to move while making sure that nobody was left behind and after what felt like an eternity they began to see flecks of light that indicated the entrance to the mine. Seeing the exit raised their morale, but considering their experience they were not in a mood to make idle chatter. Lockley was being supported by Adam and Callum as the portly man was breathing incredibly heavily and having some difficulty standing, but Maynard and Tommy had mostly recovered from the trauma they experienced. They began picking up their pace, but they still stayed within the pools of light provided by Callum and Maynard’s lamps. Nobody wanted to exit the light.
They reached the maw of the cave and the group let out a collective sigh of relief. They knew they were not out of the woods just yet, but there was less than a hundred meters between them and freedom. With each step that brought them closer to freedom, an itching sensation that the hand of the crypt was going to make some kind of attempt at them gnawed into the back of Maynard’s skull.
More stone was disturbed behind the group and they sped up once again, crossing the threshold back into the mining camp and the open sky. Flecks of starlight and the open air hung above their head, freeing the group from the oppression of thousands of tonnes of stone and metal ores. There was a collective sigh of relief as the group made their way back to the drop off point and returned their goods, but Maynard kept his lamp.
“Alright chaps,” Lockley said as he held the drawings that they had made in his still trembling hands. “You’ll each be getting five shillings for the day’s work, and we’ll be going back into the caverns with a larger group either tomorrow or the day after. You all are more than welcome to come along as you have first hand experience with the crypt and we shall need to collect everything we can from the area. I do not believe I will be here for that, but I will direct my assistant to pay you handsomely when you do”. After slowly pulling open an intricate leather pouch, he handed out five large silver coins to each ringbearer and checked his pocket watch before continuing, “That should be more than enough. Adam, Callum, I need to speak to the two of you before you all leave. Your coach should arrive in two hours, so please be by the gate before then. It’s a long walk back to Illham otherwise”.
The group dispersed and as Maynard made his way towards where he remembered that Harry would be congregating he felt a weight lift off him. It was as if the eye that had been affixed on his back for the entire journey up the mine was no longer looking at him and he could finally breathe easy again. Perhaps it wasn’t me the crypt was after? Moving through a camp that had been so busy only hours beforehand was still slightly unnerving, but in comparison to the knife edge that Maynard felt like he had been crossing before it was a welcome reprieve, and the sound of laughter that accompanied the increasing lights blunted even that.
