A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [2]
The strangest aspect of the shaft came in the way the light wouldn’t reach the bottom. She trained the powerful beam down the shaft, just above the stairs, but it dissipated and vanished where the light from the main chamber stopped. Rose furrowed her brow. It looked like the sunlight and flashlight hit a wall of dark and couldn’t go any farther.
Rose took a halting step down onto the first stair. Then another. A third. The shaft swallowed her to the shoulders, but the light would not illuminate more than she could already see. Her shadow blotted out everything, leaving the dimmest shapes below.
She lowered herself to the next step. She stood two steps from the light-consuming wall. She pointed the beam at her palm and it lit strong enough to shine through the web of reddish skin between thumb and forefinger. She screwed her face up, and pointed the light back down the shaft.
It died in a diffused fuzz a few steps down.
Rose aimed it at the steps, but the beam didn’t show anything. The light didn’t reach them.
“All right, that’s just weird.” The sound of her whisper scared her.
She edged another step down.
Her form blocked most of the light from above now. Through the gloom of her shadow she made out the stairs between her and that black curtain a few inches beyond.
She swallowed, but her dry mouth resisted until she forced the muscles in her throat to push down the knot lumped there. She turned back.
The square of light above her seemed small, a notebook-sized cut-out of brightness in a sea of dark. She jumped at the distance. She didn’t remember moving so far down the shaft.
Something thrummed under her feet, around her. The air seemed to pulse with a vibration she felt but couldn’t pinpoint. A throb, like distant heavy machinery. She held the flashlight at arm’s length.
Again, the beam died; this time about two inches from the end of the light quivering in her shaking hand.
Rose swiveled her head back to the light at the top of the shaft.
It was the size of an index card, a white, glazed patch far above her.
She slammed the heel of her hand into her mouth to stop the scream that surged to her lips. Her heart spiked. She stepped up, turned back to the night-curtain below her. She felt it follow her, swore she heard it moving on the concrete sand encrusted steps. She faced the shaft opening.
Her head poked above the floor to her chin. She surveyed the gutted building around her, heart fluttering, pulse jangling.
A jittering gasp escaped her. “But ... I was so far down ... how ...?”
She looked back into the stairwell, and something winked in the beam. Metallic, rusty, mineral-coated. She panned the light, and a snap of white snaked at her from the murky dark.
“How?” Her heart hammered in her chest. She reached out of the hole and dug into her purse. She pulled out her cell phone, snapped it open, and stared into the staircase. She took another step toward the top.
Rose thumbed through the phone’s contact list until she found Butch’s number, hit the SEND button. A hiss while circuits closed, then a ring. Two. Butch answered on the third.
“Hey, Rose,” he said. She wondered if his voice held an edge of irritation.
“Butch, sorry to bother you,” she said. “I’m here in the staircase, and I—”
“You’re in the staircase? In it?”
“Well ... yeah. I wanted to see what was down there, and I ... didn’t have anything else to do.”
“Listen, that staircase didn’t exactly look code to me, you know? You need to not go in that shaft. You could get hurt. I mean, really hurt.”
“Okay, fine, but I was in here anyway, all right? So I wanted to see what was at the bottom. I got a flashlight and went down there, and ...”
Hiss and noise on the line, the wind blowing into the speaker on Butch’s end. “And?”
“And ... did you notice anything ... unusual about the shaft?”
“Unusual?”
“Weird.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, it looked like some old