A Place So Wicked by Patrick Reuman (life books to read txt) 📕

They circled around Paisley, looking to surround Toby. Paisley started jerking at her arms again, but the ropes were just too tight. She couldn’t break free.

They were like stalking hyenas as they approached Toby. But he was ready. Eli had already loosened his grip. He couldn’t take them all; Toby knew that. Plus, one of them had a big-ass knife. There was only one thing he could do, and he had no idea if it would work or do anything at all.

He burst forward, pulling his hands apart and sending the rope dropping to the floor. He went for Addison, her being the smallest, and charged right through her. She jumped out of the way at the last moment, startled that he had broken free. As he passed by her, he was glad, a small part of him happy that he didn’t have to ram her to the floor.

He stopped at the door, the etchings just barely visible in the flickering candlelight. The way the candlelight danced against the stone walls made him feel like he was in an ancient cave standing before the entrance to an Egyptian tomb.

There was clatter and commotion behind him as everyone made to rush him. Toby shoved the key into the lock and screamed the words like he had been rehearsing them all day.

“ULTRA HAEC QUAEDAM TENEBRAE MANENT IPSAS UT LIBERES VERBA CLAVE CANTA!”

As the final word slipped from his tongue, he turned the key.

A light breeze whipped through the basement as if the door was releasing a breath it had long held. Toby released the key and stepped back. For a long moment, he wondered if that was it, if the gust was all that was held behind the door. Until a black mist suddenly began seeping through the outlining cracks of the door.

It came out slow at first, and then in a stream, licking up the walls, following them like vines until the darkness spread to the ceiling. This darkness was impossibly black, like a new color darker even then the shadows that lurked in every corner of the room. Even as it climbed across the ceiling like flames, they could all see the blackness separate from all the other darkness.

The entire room had fallen into silence. All except Eli, who hurried past the stunned captors and used his pocketknife to cut the ropes off Paisley. None of them seemed to notice, their eyes fixated on the ceiling and walls.

The door opened. Toby hadn’t touched it. Nobody had. But it was open, and Toby was staring inside. The candle flames had grown in height, as if feeding on the darkness. Their light shone through the door at a well. It was short, built up just a few feet off the ground. On the stones that formed the well were carvings that Toby recognized as Native American in origin from history classes he had taken in school. They depicted people holding spears, fighting back a monster that engulfed most of the remainder of the well, the creature drawn in with some sort of black substance.

Like the well was a beacon, it drew Toby in until he was standing over it, looking straight down into its depths. All he saw was blackness, not as if it were a bottomless hole, but rather, as if it were filled near the brim with black ink. On the inside of the well, between the rocks and the ink, were more rocks, these ones shaped differently, as if carved out with different tools than the others. And on those rocks were even more symbols, these ones completely different from the ones on the outer rocks and those on the door. They looked beyond ancient, something similar to hieroglyphs but completely different at the same time. As if being told by the well itself, he suddenly knew that those carvings were left by peoples who knew no time, who existed long before those who wrote on the door and long before those that carved the people on the rocks. They were people from the beginning.

A light rumble erupted under his feet, just enough to pull his attention away from the pit of black. He stepped away from it, back into the real world, as if severing an invisible connection. Then the black that was in the well leapt from its confines straight into the air, smashing into the ceiling like it was being poured onto the ground, only the ground was the ceiling. It splattered and spread, far more violently than the mist had. It rampaged out the door directly over Toby’s head and infected the entire basement in moments.

First it ran along the walls just as the mist had, but then it sprung away from it in long strands, latching onto the faces of the doctor, Addison’s mother, and the two that had never spoken or uncovered their hoods. It pumped into their mouths, and into their eyes, and even into their pores, stretching them wide and filling them until their skin went dark and their eyes went blank. It expanded beneath their skin like veins of pure darkness, cutting off into different directions like the roots of a tree, as if they were in a hurry to be everywhere all at once.

It skipped right past Toby. He stood there in complete shock. He thought as it leapt from the well that he was dead for sure. But it was as if the darkness had ignored him, choosing instead to attack these other people, its captors, the ones who held it hostage for God only knew how long.

Toby regained himself and burst toward Eli and Paisley. He grabbed them.

“C’mon!” he yelled, dragging them behind him. “Let’s go!”

They rushed up the stairs as the blackness twirled and exploded off of every surface, a massive tsunami surging over a