About a minute of stumbling in the almost-dark brought us to a proper dead end. New and I ran our hands over the soft plasterboard before us until I felt the catch of a seam and we found a small trapdoor no taller than our knees. New crouched and pushed on it with his elbow. It was a little sticky, probably due to a fresh paint job rather than real age, but it soon swung forward. Looking inside brought the sight of a tunnel of indeterminate length, lined by flowing curtains and a low, wire crosshatch ceiling, above which more fabric was draped. Rather than face possible self-strangulation by trying to scoot through the small tunnel in our huge bedsheets, New and I decided to disrobe, roll our costumes into balls to tuck into our chests, and then crawl through like golems on our toes.
"Are you claustrophobic?" New asked before we entered, turning back to me when I placed my hand on his arm again. I was struggling to connect the gaping hole ahead to anything 'human' that might be found in a house -- the shower drain was my best guess, but there would have been more effective ways to construct that -- thus it was the first thing I was genuinely finding a bit freaky. I choked back the bubbling sense of fear -- you're a literal ghost, Tay Tawan, and country fetes have creepier attractions than this -- then curled my fingers and squeezed with a mixture of reassurance and reproach.
"I'm afraid of heights," I replied, giving a shaky smile. "Big spaces, not small ones." New looked pointedly at my persisting grip.
"You can be afraid of both," he said, as if that was supposed to comfort me.
"I just want you to know I'm still here." I really dug my fingers in and he tried to squirm away from me, but there wasn't very far for him to go even still out in the passage.
"Ouch, alright Te, I won't ask you again. Let's go before something jumps out to make us move."
I didn't need him to say that twice. We wriggled ourselves into the tunnel and commenced our planned golem crawl. It was a little awkward trying to stay upright with my left arm carrying my sheet and my right fused to New's t-shirt sleeve, but the textures of both helped me feel more solid in that eerie, black oesophagus.
"I can't tell if they had to spend a lot of money on this, or none at all," New muttered after thirty very long seconds. I'd just begun kind of wanting to see my sister Muk, pulling me out of a fight with my brother, or stepping in between me and a stray street dog, or stopping my tears on another birthday without my dad -- she always gave me thirty seconds to decide what I would do, and after that she would show me what she would do. Of course Muk couldn't have suddenly appeared to make this damn tunnel end; instead the end came in that unperturbed yet sour impatience of New's voice.
"R-right." I huffed out a laugh, trying to remember what he'd said. He dragged his back leg forward and ducked his head quickly when his hair got caught on the crude wire of the mesh above. Given the state of Arm's carefully cemented hair styling, I realised he'd done that more than a few times already.
"This is chicken wire, doubled over," he grumbled, giving it a flick. We listened to the thin sound of it moving in the darkness. "And these bedsheets have a lower thread count than our costumes." He sniffed at the fabric walls. "They smell like an op shop."
"Gross, don't put your nose against them." I waved him away. "You're right though. They haven't even bothered trying to scare us. I figured there'd be some staff waiting to pop through the walls. Why else would they use fabric?"
"It's cheaper. And I imagine the OH&S on a tunnel this long in a haunted house could be complicated if they can't get to the visitors quickly when someone has a panic attack in here. It's bad enough as it is."
YOU ARE READING
The Ordinary Haunting II
Fanfiction~Sequel to The Ordinary Haunting~ Tay Tawan was not expecting to get tied to New Thitipoom when he died. He used to be a happy-go-lucky kind of guy; the kind with no real troubles or regrets that he considered important enough to stop him from his e...
