~5.13~

She waited there, standing motionless in the dark courtyard… waiting to see if something dramatic would present itself dramatically moments after she resigned herself to the impossibility of any such thing happening.

When moments turned into seconds and nothing had happened, Laurie began to feel both cold and foolish. Whether she felt it was enough or not, it seemed as though her adventure truly was over. She would fall back on going to the Mile Mall and maybe look for a museum or something the next day so that her vacation wouldn’t seem like it was wasted… though she had gotten exactly what she’d come for.

She turned off the camera and put it in her bag, taking one last look around the lonely night garden. As she did, she felt a touch of something again… a sense of something both timeless and ageless, something otherworldly and hyper-real, something numinous. Before the girl vanished, she might have thought of the feeling as supernatural, but now that she had a better benchmark she recognized it as just a feeling… she was in an old place, alone, at night, and she was letting herself get creeped out.

She shouldered the bag and turned to leave, heading for the passageway that would lead her out. This time, less eager to see where it lead, she paid more attention itself: the unevenly worn bricks of the wall that caught the lanterns’ light with jutting corners, making it a tangle of shadows, the cracked flagstones beneath her feet, the iron grate set in a low space in the ground. There was a small standing puddle inches trapped in a depression inches away from it.

The glimpse of darkness beneath the iron grate gave her an odd frisson: a dark passage underneath the dark passage, a secret place hidden inside a secret place.

If she were really adventurous, she’d be an urban explorer instead of standing in somebody’s yard in the dead of night.

But she wasn’t, it seemed.