We waited a few moments. Dex eyed the camera and gave it a little wink. Then he leaned in closer to the slot and aimed the flashlight in there to get a better look inside.
I kept the camera on him, the focus coming in and out, trying to catch him, but took my eyes away from it and watched in real life. I leaned forward for a better view. Part of me wanted to see what was inside, no matter how scared I was.
We both huddled around the slot as Dex illuminated a dark corner of the room.
We couldn’t see too much, but what we could see was in fact a padded cell. The walls looked like a fresh, clean mattress under the concentrated light. It faded and fuzzed out into a heavy mask of blackness on the sides where the light wouldn’t reach.
We exchanged a look and I leaned in even closer. This was as creepy as anything. A pristine-looking padded cell. He nodded, understanding what I was thinking. Then he shone the light over to the other corner of the room.
A small, bald man was standing there. Still as death. His back to us. Staring at the wall.
I felt an immense flow of evil seep out of the window and take hold of my body in a paralyzing grip. I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t look at Dex or check if I was aiming the camera correctly. I was stuck, my eyes locked onto this man in the straightjacket in the murky depths of the locked padded cell.
The man turned, slowly, to look at us. His face was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. It burned itself in my memory. He had only a wide, black mouth filled with bloody, wet teeth. No eyes and no nose. Essentially…no face.
Then the spell was over.
The man moved so fast toward us that he almost disappeared, until his gleaming, gaping mouth appeared at the slot, snapping and yelping horribly in our faces.
Dex and I both screamed in unison and turned to run for our fucking lives. Dex held me up as I almost went down; I dropped the flashlight but couldn’t care. We booked it down the hallway, moving as fast as humanly possible, our screams still emanating from our lungs, following us as we went.
We piled into the stairwell and ran down the steps two at a time, running and jumping until the stairs stopped and we slammed into a door.
Dex quickly flung it open and we burst inside a large, dark space, both collapsing onto a concrete floor. It scraped up my knees but I didn’t care. I rolled onto my back, whimpering, unable to think, to breathe, to talk. The terror was taking hold of me and bringing tears to my eyes. I kept seeing the faceless face of the man in the cell, those bloodied, slightly pointed teeth. The smoothness where the eyes and nose should have been.
“Perry?” I heard Dex spit out. I opened my eyes and looked up at the ceiling. It was dim in here, wherever we were, but my eyes were quickly adjusting to some type of light. Natural light.
Dex laid his hand on my stomach causing me to jump.
“Sorry,” he said between gasps. “I didn’t know where you were.”
I grabbed hold of his hand and held it. Held it so tight that it must have hurt him, at least a little bit.
He grunted and I felt him adjust himself beside me.
“Can you sit up?” he asked.
I did so, feeling lightheaded from the lack of oxygen. I looked around me, slowly and carefully. We were thankfully not in a padded cell but what looked to be the basement. We had overshot the whole first floor entirely and ran all the way to the very bottom.
I turned my head and looked at the source of the light. The basement was huge, taking up almost the entire square footage of the building. There was a line of four rectangular windows placed very high up against the ceiling. They looked out onto the parking lot and the light that was being filtered in was coming from the lampposts outside the building. A twinge of comfort came from the fact that we could see the Highlander parked just a few feet away. Our way out of here.
I sat up straighter and moved myself backward toward Dex. He was sitting beside me, knees up, breathing heavily and staring at the ground. When he noticed my eyes on him, he looked up. I was happy I could read his face. I wasn’t happy to see he looked just as terrified as I must have.
“What…” I said slowly. But it’s all I could say.
“The…fuck? I thought we were going to die,” he admitted, his voice quiet and slightly amazed. “I thought…that was it.”
“Who was that…what was that?”
“I don’t think we want to know.”
I shivered. I thought about that man/teeth thing opening the door and chasing us down into the basement. He would just need to open the door and we would most likely be trapped in here.
“Did you get it on the camera?” he asked, looking over at it beside me.
“Honestly, Dex, if you think I’m going to turn it on and look over the footage right now, you’ve got another thing coming.”
He smiled quickly and eased himself to his feet. He stretched up and looked around him. “Well ain’t this nice. Creepiest basement ever.”
I got up beside him and took a proper scan of the place. It was creepy. Not as creepy as what was upstairs but it was in the running. Boilers here and there, pipes, weird shapes and shadows, the occasional chains hanging from the ceiling (nice added touch) plus a lot of other weird crap and storage boxes.
“How about we take a quick look around here and call it a night?”
I turned to look at him and raised my brow. Was he serious? After everything that just happened?
He shrugged and held his hand out for the camera. Of course he was serious.
I sighed and placed the camera in his hands. He took the EVP out of his pocket and gave it to me. “I guess you dropped the flashlight.”
“Do you want me to go upstairs and get it?” I asked angrily.
He stepped toward me and said, “Perry, you are not going anywhere. We are filming this. Two minutes. And then we are gone. Into that car.” He pointed out the window to the Highlander.
“What happens after two minutes?”
“In two minutes my heart rate will have slowed enough that I’ll be able to think clearly. And I do not want to be here when my brain starts going over exactly what we saw upstairs. I couldn’t handle it. Not here. Not now.”
I agreed with him. The image of the man, the fright it gave us, the unknown of where he could be, what he was…it all kept trying to enter my mind every other second and I was so far doing an adequate job of keeping it all at bay. If Dex was going to lose it in two minutes, I was probably close as well.
“OK then,” I said and together we walked, carefully and side by side, down the length of the basement. It was cold but not as cold as the stairwell. And aside from a dripping noise that I could have sworn was blood dripping off of Abby (it was a leaky pipe), there was nothing too ghoulish or terrifying. Not that there needed to be. We were both so on the edge that we were literally attached at the hip and jumping at every little creak that the building made.
We got to the very end of the floor area and poked our heads around a slight corner. Through the night vision on the camera we saw a bunch of boxes that were filled with straightjackets. How lovely.
“Want to try one on?” Dex joked, picking one out of the box and holding it like it was poisoned. I pinched his side hard, hard enough that he dropped it onto the box with a thump.
“That’s not funny,” I hissed. “Don’t touch anything.”
It boggled my mind how he was able to still make jokes after what happened upstairs and the whole history of him being in a mental institute. But I guess a lot of him was always a defense mechanism. He was tricking himself into thinking none of this was a big deal.
A strange scratching noise from the side of the boxes brought me out of my thoughts. Once again I wanted to run but Dex just moved the camera over and searched for the cause of the noise.
In the corner, between a box and the moldy, concrete wall there was a frenzied movement on the ground. It was a bunch of bugs, spiders or ants or I don’t know what, and they were scurrying angrily over a small mound of something. Something dead.
“Oh God,” I said, putting my hand to my mouth, feeling sick at the sight and terrified of the feeding insects.
Dex leaned down closer, trying to get a better look.
“It must be a dead rat or something,” he said, adjusting the camera settings. “These things are going fucking-”
It jumped. The mound of writhing, consuming bugs suddenly flinched, moving closer to us. We both let out a small shriek and jumped backward. It stopped moving, but the fact that it moved to begin with was enough.
“OK, Dex, that’s the sign we get the fuck out of here. Before the zombie rats come after us with bugs on their backs.”
He nodded quickly, his eyes wide and round, freaked again.
We stepped away from the “dead” rat and walked back around the corner.
At that moment the entire basement was alight with an artificial, cutting glow that came searing through the small basement windows. Headlights were pulling into the driveway outside. A sedan parked a few spots down from the Highlander, closer to the main door.
“What the hell?” I said out loud, but Dex was already running toward the window, trying to see out. It was too tall for him, even after a few leaps, so he waved me over.
“Come on, quickly,” he whispered urgently.
I went to his side as fast as I could, only bumping into one pipe on the way. Once I was underneath the windows he put his hands around my waist. They felt so firm around me.
“I’m going to lift you up, tell me what you see.”
I wanted to protest at this arrangement since I was not exactly a lightweight but I knew he wouldn’t have any of it and I also knew he was freakishly strong for his size.
I relaxed and he propped me up. He swayed slightly and grunted at the effort while moving one hand down to get better leverage on my ass but managed to keep me upright. I grabbed the edge of the window to keep some of the load off of him and peered through it.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“It’s Spook Factory,” I cried out as I watched the unmistakable form of Annie and G.J. disappear into our building, while the rest of the crew exited the car and followed them, extravagant gear in hand. A faint sound of doors closing reached down into our murky basement.
“Are you shitting me!?” Dex exclaimed.
“No, they went inside. Put me down.”
He lowered me awkwardly and we looked at each other, unsure of what to do.
“Really?” he asked again. I nodded vigorously and held up my finger to shush him. We listened. The front doors from above us made another sound, probably Little Joe and Waldo coming inside after them.
“Those fuckers!” Dex growled, and he took off toward the basement door like a shot.
“Dex!” I yelled and scampered after him, nearly clothes lining myself on more wayward plumbing. If he got his hands on them, he was going to rip them to shreds. And though I was sure Dex could hold his own, G.J. did give up a career in Mixed Martial Arts, after all.
But Dex was stopped at the basement door. It wouldn’t open no matter how many times he yanked and twisted the handle. We were locked in. I suddenly wished I had brought my bobby pin and tweezers like I did the other day.
We started pounding on the door and yelling for help, hoping they would hear us. At this point we didn’t have a choice.