"Only one place left to go."
I went first, through the heavy rubber divider and down the shallow incline. At one time, the passage had been covered in 30-foot-long slip resistant rugs. Those were now visible rolled up and laying in the still water at the base of the ramp. I felt my boot threaten to slip more than once against the slick, wet surface. I reached out and touched the wall to steady myself but quickly pulled it back, wiping it on my jeans instinctively.
Everything underground was wet. The water even formed rivulets as it ran from cracks in the cement walls. I was forcibly reminded of the dreams; dreams of water filling the world, pouring from every crack and crevice; of trying to run, only postponing the inevitable; of the people who rose up out of the water and turned to look at me, to chase me; of being pulled down into the deep, turbulent green water; of being drowned; of being killed.
I told myself that this wasn't a dream - that those things couldn't hurt me in real life. What a strange thing, to be so afraid of fear itself that you try to tell yourself *this is real.* I tried to control my breathing, but the thick smell of mold kept each breath shallow.
"Hey. You with me?" asked Ryan. I locked my wide eyes onto his inquisitive ones. Somehow, they brought me back again. I think it was the humanity, the connection that told me that I wasn't alone.
"Panic attack. Sorry... I-" I wanted to explain why. To tell him about the dreams and show that I had a good reason. I didn't. "I'm good."
"You sure? We could come back tomorrow."
"No. I need to know."
"Right. Can't be much more, this place isn't that big."
The water that covered about three inches of the floor of the basement was freezing. The cold pierced through my boots and socks, and crept up my legs. The sounds of our feet splashing bounced around the walls. On our right was a doorway; locked. I guess that's why I had brought the sledgehammer. With a deafening crack that echoed into the unexplored hall, the door was blasted open.
We walked into an office with a large walk-in file room in the rear. Nothing looked like it had been moved in 20 years. Urban explorers sometimes say that they feel a high as they cross the threshold into a forgotten place. I've heard some of them talk about the smell of those places being intoxicating.
They're right.
I walked into that room with a smile. To my left, on a waterlogged wooden desk was an electric typewriter, still plugged in. A stack of papers, rippled from the wet air, sat in the "out" box. The chair behind the desk was pushed back like the person had just gotten up and walked out of the room five minutes ago. In the filing room stood three large cabinets. Surely something was there. A name, a record, a clue to what had happened.
Ryan cracked the first cabinet with his crowbar. The old, thin metal gave easily. I pulled the first drawer out, eagerly looking inside. Empty. Not even the dividers were left. The second cabinet was the same way. We thought that the third was too, until we came to the bottom drawer. A pile of papers were sprawled crookedly, half-submerged in the murky water.
They looked like reports of some kind, like you might write for a college class. The cover sheets all said "Case study number: ######" in bold writing, and below that, "Philippe R. Menser, M.D." the insides were too detailed or too damaged to try to give a proper summary; in the first one, I thought that it might have been a trial for a new medication. Several were listed in the early paragraphs, but the latter pages mentioned nothing about them. Instead, they gave a long, detailed description of the mental state of the "subject," their habits, dietary preferences, etc. In all, there were about a dozen case studies, each containing 50 - 100 pages.
Ryan and I were looking through the papers spread across the desk by the light of our flashlights, trying to get a sense of what we'd found. Something in the hall caught his eye. His head snapped up and he glared intently at the water. His whole body tensed, then I saw it too.
The water in the hall was rippling. Something had just moved past us into the darkness.
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