I found the bunker of a prepper family who went missing three years ago!!

I found the bunker of a prepper family who went missing three years ago!!

Dr Daniel Vance was a smart man. Too smart for his own good, maybe. Forty years old, a lecturer in fluid dynamics with a mind made of shapes and numbers. No one knows why but one day, on a whim, he crunched the numbers on the apocalypse and came to a troubling conclusion. He didn’t share exactly what it was he’d deduced, but given that he immediately quit his job and liquidated his many assets, it’s fair to say it wasn’t positive. Swept up in the wake of this tremendous upheaval was his wife, a twenty-four year old PhD student who had grown infatuated with Daniel some time before. She loved the strange bear of a man who could just as easily build a log cabin as he could explain the idiosyncrasies of an asteroid’s orbit. Speaking to Daniel always left you with the profound impression he was right, so when he told her what he wanted to do, she agreed.

Fifteen years and five children later, the Vances were living in the distant woods just beyond my hometown. They were enigmatic, richer than the Pope, and extremely serious about their prepper lifestyle. But they were also funny, easygoing, and incredibly compelling to speak to. Larger than life survivalists who swept into town with bizarre requests that thrilled local businesses. Vast quantities of cement, iron, lead, and steel were all shipped through the remote mountains so that the Vances could build their shelter. The advanced methods they used to keep it secret were legendary. Daniel had once spent six months earning the licence necessary to drive HGVs up to his compound so that no one else would lay eyes on it. And on one occasion when a company had refused his request for GPS tracker-free vehicles, he bought them out wholesale so that they had no choice.

So when they stopped appearing in town during the pandemic, when requests for food and goods stopped and all contact was dropped, most attributed it to lockdown. They had a bunker and had spent their entire lives training to be self-sufficient in the face of civilisation’s collapse. Even Alexander, the youngest at just three, was already collecting firewood as a chore, and learning what local plants were edible. Most of us just assumed that if anyone could ride out Covid without breaking a sweat, it would be the Vances.

The reality turned out to be something else.

When the worst came to light, we discovered that Daniel had used the pandemic as an excuse for a dry-run. The family intended to spend six months in lockdown and essentially beta test their fallout bunker. Three months in and the Sheriff received a distress call on the radio. Coordinates were provided by the hushed voice of a sobbing child that most assume was Alexander, even though that’s never been proven.

The police arrived and found the bunker still sealed. It took hours for emergency responders to cut into the door, all the while efforts were made to contact the family within but to no avail. Once inside, police were left dumbfounded. There was no one to be rescued. No bodies. No survivors. There was evidence the door’s locking mechanism had failed and trapped the Vances inside with no way out, but if so where had they gone?

Beds and cots lay everywhere with mouldering yellow sheets, buckets close to hand with stains all around them. Some doors were barred, others smashed to pieces. There was even evidence of makeshift quarantines and, in places, what looked like violence. The police, usually a fantastic source of gossip, were not forthcoming until the town demanded answers and the Sheriff was forced to offer only the barest of outlines.

An outbreak of a waterborne illness had struck the Vances down not long after they were locked inside and unable to seek help. Rumours of contagion were overstated, fuelled by the unrelated rise of Covid. Whatever contaminant had killed the Vances, it was non-organic in nature. No need to panic. The Vances loved-ones had been notified. The bunker was going to be demolished, and we could all put this terrible tragedy behind us.

Of course we still had questions. A thousand of them. Why hadn’t the family called for help? They had radios, computers, smartphones too. They were survivalists, not Amish. And where were they? What had happened to their bodies? Why hadn’t they simply left? We shouted these and more at the town meeting but the police simply refused to comment. For most of us the excitement lasted another week or two until we realised we weren’t getting answers any time soon. Besides, the pandemic was in full swing and most of us had other things to worry about. The tragic story eventually faded until it was just one of those awful things in the town’s history that we didn’t talk about. I was as guilty as anyone else of just forgetting about it.

I certainly never expected to find the bunker out there in the woods, faded police tape still on the open door that hung wide open with scorch marks around the lock. It stood out in the woods like someone had cut a hole right in the fabric of reality, the darkness so deep and black it almost ached to look at. The sight of it made my heart drop into my stomach. It radiated pain. Does that make sense? I think some part of my lizard brain picked out details that wouldn’t become apparent to me until I got closer, like the bloody finger streaks that stained the handle from where someone had scrabbled furiously at the lock without success. And the tiny viewing window had been smashed with a hammer that still lay nearby. I needed only to glimpse it to imagine the family taking turns to stand there and scream into the woods desperate for rescue.

Under any other circumstances, I would have run.

But I’d gone there looking for my dog, and my light revealed a few wet paw prints making their way down the dusty concrete tunnel. Half Bernese and half collie, Ripley is the sort of dog who trembles in my arms when a storm buffets the windows and needs his paws held when we brush him. I love him. I do not have much of a family, or a wife, or even many friends. But I have Ripley, and I could no more have turned around and gone home to an empty apartment where I would have to sob my grief away than I could flap my arms and fly. He was my dog and I’d raised him since he was a puppy, and I wasn’t going to leave him out in those woods.

I went in after him.

I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. Whatever the police had found, they’d not only kept most of the morbid details to themselves, they had also lied. The bunker was not demolished, or even sealed off. In fact, looking at the occasional blue latex glove tossed aside and the one or two broken police-issue flashlights, it seemed like the last people inside had been in a hurry to get out. Given this was where seven people had presumably died, I assumed it was someone’s job to clean it all up. But the corridor looked largely untouched. Just a few metres in and manic writing started to cover the walls, the desperate scrawls of a lone survivor left there to be rediscovered like cave paintings. Most were deliberations on how to get out. Diagrams. Blueprints. Equations and formulae. All focused on the door and the circuits responsible for its faulty lock. I instinctively assumed they belonged to Daniel and that he’d been the last to die. What a God awful fate for a man to outlive his children. And yet it got worse. Slowly the writing changed from equations and plans to a desperate scrawl. The same few phrases repeated over and over.

Five doors. Five. Not six. Six. Didn’t make it. Didn’t make it. Six doors. Six.

It seemed like the kind of thing you’d find in an asylum. A psychotic rambling punctuated only by six paragraphs right at the end. Each letter was impeccably neat, and each small paragraph was topped with a beautifully drawn Christian cross.

Elliott Vance aged fifteen. A gifted guitarist. He liked boys even though he thought I did not know. I loved him with everything I had. He would have made a great man.

Alicia Vance aged fourteen. She liked to paint and to shoot. She had her mother’s mean streak. It would have served her well in the future.

Elijah Vance aged eight. The smartest of us all…

These were Daniel’s memorials to his family, and seeing the words lit up by my torch was a haunting insight into the overwhelming despair he’d endured. He must have realised he wouldn’t get the chance to speak at his family’s funerals or to write their obituaries. This was his last desperate way of making sure the world might one day know them as he did - as real people.

The words marked the end of the tunnel, standing adjacent to a trapdoor in the ground. It was not open but the tunnel came to a dead end immediately afterwards and Ripley’s prints disappeared at the hatch. I feared he might be in danger, but still I stopped and looked at the bunker door twenty metres behind me. The once gloomy forest looked so bright, even on this cloudy day, the air dotted with rain. A part of me felt like I was leaving the whole world behind as I began to climb the ladder down.

I entered a large circular living space that was packed with furniture and little nooks and crannies. The walls were covered with folding beds and tables and every inch was multifunctional. A dining space could become a sitting space, which in turn might be where someone slept, or even exercised. It all depended on what particular bit of furniture you unfolded or unclipped or unfurled. Seven people in close quarters, nowhere near enough privacy, it made sense they went with this cluttered overlapping use of space. But it was still a large room, bigger than most studio apartments. And there were a few corridors that led deeper into the Earth telling me the bunker had unseen depths.

I looked for some sign of my dog and soon found his trail, but this far from the rainy copse Ripley’s prints were starting to fade. After barely a few metres they petered out vaguely in the direction of a nearby door. I wanted to follow but stopped myself from rushing onwards. It was unlikely Ripley was getting out any other way, and I’d do us no good getting hurt myself. I decided to take a look around and quickly spotted a dinner table.

If I needed proof the police had not bothered with a clean up, this was it. The plates were still out, the food rotten to a strange blackened husk. A child’s hat lay across one place-setting, the once-creamy fleece turned a sickly green and yellow. The chairs had their backs reinforced with wooden beams fitted with long grooves so that something the width of a nail could slide into them. And on each of the cushions were foul smelling stains that looked oddly like an ass print. I touched one with gloved hands and the material crackled audibly. Whatever it was, similar stains were on the cutlery and plates, and there were even handprints of it placed firmly on the tablecloth. At first I thought it was blood, but that wasn’t quite right. It was too contained to be from leaking blood. On the back of one of the chairs a stain tapered exactly where a woman’s waist would be like a near perfect silhouette. I shivered as I remembered that Miranda Vance had always been a slim woman and wondered how she had left her imprint on the grey fabric.

Using my torch, I saw that these stains repeated in the oddest of places. Yes, there were some on beds and blankets and even patches of plain floor exactly like you might expect in a room full of sick people. But why did one stain on the floor bear such a strong resemblance to a child huddled in the foetal position? And why was the same stuff all over the tv remote, and on books on shelves, and board games too. Everything from sofa cushions to DVD boxes to piles of dirty laundry were covered in the same dried brownish material that gave off a foul coppery miasma.

I found the jigsaw particularly baffling. Someone had set up another table with four chairs, all modified with the same back support as those by the dinner table. And a jigsaw had been lain out with four separate piles, but only one was depleted. The rest looked largely untouched, almost like someone had portioned out pieces for three other people who had absolutely no interest in going along with it. Maybe Daniel had tried to keep up morale while the family were sick? God help me, if that were true I couldn’t help but imagine the poor man sat there with his loved ones close to death, desperately trying to encourage them to click their own pieces into place while they faded in and out of consciousness.

Something about that room emanated madness, and the longer I stayed down there flicking the bright disk of light of my torch from one detail to another, the more I wanted to leave. One door had wooden beams nailed across it. One sofa had been partially disassembled. Multiple beds had been burned. And all the light bulbs had been removed and put in a box on the kitchen counter top. Looking up at the ceiling, I finally had some insight into why the police were so confident the Vances had not survived despite never finding their bodies. Someone had jammed a human finger into one of the empty sockets, almost like they’d expected it to glow with the flick of a switch.

What was it about this place that had caused the police to leave and never return? Not to even take that finger and test it for signs of illness, or even just to confirm who it belonged to?

I decided it was time to hurry up and find my dog. People had died in that place, and while I’m not superstitious, I can’t be the only sceptic who has done the calculations in his head and realised it costs nothing to be respectful of ghosts. That bunker was cramped, terrifying, and the air stank so bad I started to worry I’d get sick myself. It served no one any good to linger. But I’d be damned if I’d just walk away and leave Ripley to rot down there. It’s not like he could climb a ladder and get out on his own (even if I wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten down there in the first place).

Summoning what little bravery I had left I called out and broke the silence, something which felt like a terrible taboo in that God awful place, like screaming in a graveyard.

“Ripley!”

I waited and hoped to hell I’d hear the pitter patter of his paws, but for the longest of moments there was only the kind of silence that makes you wonder if someone or something in the darkness is holding its breath trying to look like just another patch of nothing. Biding its time until you finally turn around and show it your back…

The TV came on with a blurt of white noise that was so loud and so sudden I cried, threw my arms up, and nearly fell backwards onto a rolled-out sleeping bag that looked like it had spent a week in the sewer. By the time I realised what had caused the noise, I could already hear a tinny rendition of Daniel Vance’s voice.

…I realise the issue here. I need to emphasise just how little I understand anything that’s…

I frowned at the screen as I approached. It showed a greenish infrared view of the bunker with Daniel upfront, and the dinner table behind him. It was grainy and hard to see, but I could clearly tell that his family were sitting in those chairs.

…Miranda was first to fall ill. Looking back it makes perfect sense. Miranda often went into storage to fetch food for cooking and we found it behind one of the refrigerators. So that’s–ah shit..

One of the figures in the background slumped onto the table with a loud clank and sent a plate spinning off onto the ground.

Shit shit shit, Daniel muttered as he got up and grabbed the woman by the shoulders and sat her upright. Miranda never did like my cooking! He snorted a laugh as he fussed with something at the back of the chair. The rods are much better than tape. All those hours spent taping them upright to the chairs. Never worked. But the rods… they fit right into the spine and with a little modification I can just slot them into the chairs. That way everyone is able to join in for dinner. I’m working on something similar for family game night.

Daniel wandered over to the camera and with a grin he lifted it from the tripod and scanned the dinner table. What I saw nearly made me drop my torch.

His family were long dead. Gaunt faces. Missing noses. Lips that had receded to reveal awful grins. These were corpses, plain as day, even when viewed through such a low resolution image. The only thing that made them seem remotely alive was the way their eyes still reflected the infrared back so that they glowed in the dark. And yet Daniel seemed oblivious to it all. He tousled Elliot’s hair. Kissed his wife on the cheek. Run a hand across one young girl’s shoulder. He even picked the young Alexander up from his high chair and I assume he coddled him. I don’t know for sure because I looked away, unwilling to see the poor boy up close.

Eyes averted from the screen, I couldn’t help but pan my torch across to that same dinner table and shiver as I finally realised what all those stains were. Not quite blood. But close. Liquefying flesh. Left alone for months, Daniel had not put his family’s bodies to rest. Instead he had moved them around from place to place and puppeted them, living life as if nothing had really changed. Looking at where those stains had settled I saw a clear pattern emerge. He had put them to bed. He had set them dinner. He had propped them up to watch TV, or gave them their favourite books. They even sat there as lifeless husks while Daniel waited for them complete a fucking jigsaw. The idea horrified me to my core.

…back to work. It’s obviously not part of the original designs. No room on the other side, not on the blueprints. Elliot didn’t believe me and why would he? I made every inch of this place, but I did not install that door in storage on the bottom level. I checked the cameras and some of the photos I took during the build and the wall is just blank. But the door is there now and it must lead somewhere. I don’t know when or why it opens, but it does and the next time I’ll be ready. Because I have to know what’s on the other side, and why it did this to us. Alone down here, often all asleep at once. Anything could have slit our throats and been done with it. But it didn’t. It took its time and I have to know why!

It took our radios and computers and phones. One by one. None of us noticing until it was far too late. I kept telling the kids they needed to take better care of their things, and even as they complained I just assumed the phones were lying behind some shelf. Where else could they go in a locked bunker? But it wasn’t the children at all. Looking back there are so many signs… who kept taking away the lights? Who kept draining the batteries in our torches? How long did we live with it before we finally realised we weren’t alone? Was it here every step of the way?

A door out of nothing that leads to nowhere, at least most of the time. Because I know for a fact it does not always open onto a blank wall. There is something behind it. I can hear it shuffling around in there, wet breath rattling in its lungs, a horrible sound I hear roaming these halls when it thinks I’m asleep…

I listened to Daniel, fascinated by this strangely compelling rant, when movement caught my eye. An infrared camera running in the dark, its image a roiling mess of uniform noise. What was it I’d seen? I paused the tape and rewound. Squinting, I saw two pinpricks of light in the darkness just over Daniel’s shoulder. Slowly, the image resolved itself in my mind. I knew what I was seeing and it turned my blood to ice.

Miranda Vance had turned her head, and her lifeless eyes glowed as she fixed them on the back of Daniel’s head.

…not even any point leaving at this stage. I’m no doctor, but that door is giving off enough radiation to… well, to kill a family of seven. If none of us had touched it… Being in the same room is risky, but not lethal. But given how sick we’ve become, it’s pretty obvious our curiosity got the better of us, one by one, and we all got too close. Or maybe not. Maybe that thing on the other side came through and did this. I don’t even kn… wait… what was that?

Daniel turned and the camera stopped recording. The image it froze on was of a lone man, bright as a star in the camera’s lens, facing off against unknowable darkness broken only by six pairs of white, glowing eyes.

I became painfully aware of my position relative to the table and I had the painful premonition that if I turned, those chairs would not be empty. I would see the Vances, all of them, Daniel as well, waiting for me. Heads turned. Bodies left to rot for years in the dark. Behind me something shifted. It breathed. Loud. Quick. I knew what it was. I knew. It came at me so fast that when I felt something hot and wet touch my hand I screamed, only for the presence to suddenly recoil. But then, without hesitation, it leapt at me and bore me to the ground.

I wept as Ripley licked my face. He was shivering and, worst of all, silent which was not normal. He was not a quiet dog, not when greeting me and not when excited like he was now. But whatever he’d seen down here, he clung to me and dug his paws into my shoulders like he wanted to be cradled over the shoulder, something he has been too big to do for years.

“Oh you fucking idiot,” I cooed in a soft whisper and even in the dark I could feel his tail wagging. Joking aside, I felt nothing but relief at finding him. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I picked him up, straining a little under the weight but refusing to give into tired muscles, and made for the ladder. It wasn’t easy climbing the three or four rungs to the hatch, but I managed it and gave the hatch a shove. First one hand, then two. Again and again, with everything I had, but still that hatch refused to budge.

“Shit!” I cried while pounding at it with my fists, but all I achieved was a sore wrist. The hatch had jammed when, somehow, the handle had been snapped clean off. Now I’d need a pair of pliers or something to cut through the metal bar locking it shut. My fingers couldn’t move it, nor could I brute force the hatch open. The metal bar was an inch thick and, at the very least, I’d need some tools to get at it from this side.

At least it’s fixable, I thought as I climbed back down and caught my breath. On one wall I noticed a simple diagram of the bunker made in chalk. It had three floors. The bottom was storage–Daniel had mentioned that before, and I noticed that he had drawn through it with a large red X–and the top floor was labelled Quarters, where I stood now. But the middle floor was labelled workshops and it was there I realised that I’d find what I needed.

There was one door that opened onto a concrete stairwell and, standing at the top, I shone my light down the spiralling guard rails unsure of what it was I hoped to see. There were only harsh shadows and the sense of something foul rising up on the air. A smell that tickled my throat and burned a little in my lungs. Had the police even gone down this far? Had they seen what I’d seen on that TV and just left? Somehow I thought it was unlikely that had been enough to send the entire Sheriff’s department running, so was it something else that had done it. Something that had been enough to terrify dozens of armed men. Something that was almost definitely down there.

The door…

I went down quietly. At first I considered leaving Ripley behind, but after losing him the first time I decided I’d rather risk it just to know that he was right next to me. Besides, he was being quieter than I was, and I didn’t feel much like going down those stairs on my own. He accompanied me with only the quiet click clack of his paws on concrete, a sound I found deeply comforting as I barely managed to keep my torch from shaking in my hand and my breathing steady.

Down one floor and I found the workshop exactly as you might expect. A large space filled with generators and fuel and water tanks and boilers and heaters and pretty much anything and everything that you’d need to survive but which you couldn’t put outside due to fallout. Wires pipes and tubes ran from one end of the room to the other and even years later, most of the machinery still hummed in the pitch black emptiness, an idea I found deeply unsettling. Taking one look at that strange tangle of harsh shapes and industrial figures looming out of the walls and floor, I shivered and looked around, quickly finding a small area Daniel had cordoned off for his own use. About a fifth of the total floor space, there was a large workbench and some seriously high end machining equipment, all very well used. Lathes. Buzzsaws. Drills. Belt sanders. Welding torches. Everything a man needed to do-it-himself.

And Daniel had been busy.

I’m not sure exactly what it was he’d been working, but there was an arm on the bench. It sat atop a pile of papers that had slowly turned brown over the years until the whole thing looked like it had been soaked in tobacco spit. On the whiteboard was a faded but still visible diagram of what looked to me like a ball-and-socket joint. I thought of the tape, of Daniel’s little mechanism to keep his family upright, and then looked at the arm and suppressed a momentary gag reflex. I don’t know if Dan had been working on posable limbs, or just a way to put the decomposing remains back together after they’d started to fall apart, but the size of the arm suggested a pre-teen child, and he’d left it out on the surface like it was a disassembled clock. It was also missing a finger. Just how fucking crazy was he? I wondered as I pinched my nose with one hand and began overturning boxes looking for a hefty pair of pliers, or maybe a hacksaw. Ripley backed away from the noise, but once I made sure he wasn’t going anywhere I carried on grabbing and pulling at box after box hoping I’d find what I was looking for. Anything to break that fucking metal bar.

In the end I managed to get a pair of bolt cutters, a crowbar, and a heavy duty pair of pliers. One went in my pocket, one went down the back of my jeans, and the other was clutched in my fist, too large to be tucked away in my clothes. The bolt cutters felt hefty in my hand which was a bit of comfort, but that feeling didn’t last long.

Something moved in the darkness, out there in the twisted jungle of shadows cast by all those pipes and wires that ran from one machine to the next. A figure moved. Thin, but unmistakably human in its outline. I couldn’t help but remember what I’d seen on that tape. Surely it couldn’t have been real? Maybe Daniel had rigged something up. Some fishing wire and a motor, maybe? The idea that those bodies had been moving on their own… I couldn’t be sure of that, could I? It was a frightening idea, one my mind had latched onto out of sheer panic. That was all…

And then I saw them. A pair of white pin-pricks reflecting back at me from the depths of that cluttered room. Ripley, already behind me, head nuzzled into my leg, pushed even closer against me and let out a barely audible whine under his breath. The behaviour of a dog who was terrified, close to pissing himself with fear.

Just a bit of metal, I told myself as the light shook so violently in my hand I struggled to see straight. Just two shiny bits of metal…

They blinked and began to come towards me. If I had any doubts left, they were dispersed by the sight of a pale white hand emerging into the light.

I ran straight to the stairs and went to climb them, but only one or two steps in and I saw something gripping the handrail on the top floor. A mouldy clump of flesh only just recognisable as a fist, the flesh withered until the fingers were basically bone. Without meaning to, I brought my light up out of habit and I saw the bloated face of a hairless corpse glaring down at me. I couldn’t even tell you if it had been a teenage girl or the sixty-year-old Daniel, either way I instinctively turned and found another body shambling towards me out of the workshop. I was trapped. Nowhere to go. By the feel of warm fluid on the back of my leg I could tell Ripley had finally pissed himself. An adult dog, tail between his legs, shivering like a puppy and desperate to be picked up. God I needed him to just stay together for a little longer. I couldn’t take him in my arms, but I couldn’t leave him behind either…

With nowhere to go I ran down and entered storage. There was the temptation to stop once I hit the bottom. Down here the air was thicker and the sounds of my breathing were muted, somehow distant. But I only had to look back up to see three pairs of eyes glaring down at me, so without giving any of it much further thought I barreled down the corridor and stumbled onto a door at random. Opening it, I saw what looked like your standard storage room, only most of the shelves had been overturned and the food left to rot on the floor. One or two shelving units were still upright though, and their shelves were covered in tall opaque boxes that made them a fantastic hiding spot. That, I decided, would have to be where I crouched down and turned off my light.

I was already inside when I realised that wasn’t all that was in there…

The door almost looked normal. I could see why Daniel must have been confused by it because it looked a little bit like all the other doors down there, but it was different too. It was too tall and too wide, about a foot and a half off the ground, and the metal rusted in its entirety like it had aged out of sync with everything else down there. All around the jamb was a profusion of wet soppy moss like the kind you find hanging off trees in a swamp, and every few seconds the door would leak something strange and oily, like the kind of thing you find in a parking lot on a rainy day. Of course that wasn’t too strange in itself, but the leak was horizontal, defying gravity so that every few seconds a large glob of the stuff would whip across the room and slap into the wall opposite creating a puddle about the size of a man that defied all reason.

Remembering Daniel’s words about radiation, I instinctively inched away from this puddle and the door on the opposite wall, backing myself into the darkest quietest corner I could while I pulled Ripley behind me and hoped to hell he wouldn’t give me away. Once I was in there I turned off my light and waited.

I must have taken longer than I’d thought to hide spot because it was barely two seconds later when a few figures entered the room. It was pitch black after I’d turned off my torch, but they made enough noise to let me know that at least two of them had stumbled in after me. I stayed there, unable to see anything, not sure if they were heading straight for me or just getting ready to leave, forced to hold out and let luck decide my fate. When I finally heard something scrape against the wall barely two feet from where I stood, I gave up and switched my light on, desperate to know what was coming for me.

The sound had been terribly misleading.

Daniel Vance was no more than six inches from my face.

“Get out,” he hissed from a toothless and cracked mouth. A living corpse just like the others, somehow a flash of intelligence remained in those wide, terrified eyes.

And then I heard it. The creaking of a door. And without even thinking I turned the light and saw it on the wall. I saw it open, and behind the strange steel there was more than just plain old concrete. Much more. I saw a raging gullet of flesh. A ringed tube of pulsing muscle lined with teeth the size of hands. A spiralling descent into madness. Hot foetid air washed into the room, buffeting me and the rotting corpses, all of us paralysed by what we were seeing, even if for most of the figures beside Daniel and myself, they didn’t have eyes to see with.

“What the f***…?” I muttered, unable to take my eyes from the flesh tube beyond that doorway.

“It’s coming,” Daniel whispered as he grabbed me with one fist and hurled me out of the room. I hit the floor and skidded along a slick fluid left by the Vance’s footprints, the smell of which turned my stomach. Perhaps the worst detail was that it was cold. I don’t know why, I’d just expected whatever oozed them off them to be feverishly hot. But it wasn’t. It soaked my shirt like I’d fallen into a muddy puddle.

“It’s coming.”

This voice wasn’t Daniel’s. I couldn’t say for sure, but it sounded like a child’s whisper. One by one the bodies shuffled over to the open door and knelt before it. I don’t know why but I got the impression the others had lost pretty much everything left of their minds, but Daniel remained aware. He looked back at me once more and spoke before he pressed his head to the floor in supplication with the others.

“The only thing we did wrong was being here for it to torture. It didn’t need a reason, just an opportunity. Leave. It won’t let us go. It won’t even let us die. And if it catches you, it won’t let you go either.”

His forehead kissed the dirt.

And then something reached through the door and gripped his head in its palm the way you or I might pick up an apple.

In full panic, I ran over and grabbed my dog and the bolt cutters and I ran like my legs were pistons, machines whose signals of exhaustion and fatigue could not slow me down, or cause me to fall. I had to move. I had to leave. The hand that had grabbed Daniel… the sight of it flushed my mind clean like some kind of enema. It hurt to see the image replay in my mind but there was nothing else in my head echoing around except the sight of fingers with one too many knuckles, and nails as large as a smartphone.

I reached the top floor and nearly collapsed from breathlessness, but I wouldn’t let myself stay down for long. I crawled over to the ladder and climbed up and immediately went to work trying to cut the metal lock. It was hell with just one hand, the other clinging to the torch that I kept frantically pointing at the door behind me, and it wasn’t long before I fumbled one too many times and dropped my only source of light.

“No no no no…” I mewed. But there was no time to look for it. I had to get out and I had to get out fast! I couldn’t see but I was sure I could hear something climbing up those stairs. Not the steady thump thump of human feet. No this was different. This was a rapid pitter patter of a spider, maybe. Something with hundreds of feet or hands, or God knows what, skittering along the floor and walls and ceiling, pulling itself along with a body whose mere shape would offend God.

Using all my strength I leaned hard on the bolt cutters and, at last, the bolt gave. I threw the hatch open and got just enough ambient light to see Ripley hovering at the bottom of the ladder, growling ineffectually at the doorway. I crouched down, scooped him up, and fled up the ladder so quickly that my muscles turned to jelly at the top and I fell over onto hands and knees. But still, I was out. The long corridor covered in writing was ahead of me, and at the very end a doorway capped now by the tired blue light of a full moon.

Ripley needed no encouragement. He whipped down the corridor with canine speed and I followed at a broken and stumbling crawl, eventually shouldering past the open door and collapsing onto the forest floor.

For a few seconds I drifted in and out of consciousness, but when I looked up and saw the canopy overhead moving–the branches backlit by a full moon–I snapped awake and glared down at something gripping my ankle. The hand had reached out of the dark and seized me and was slowly dragging me back into the Earth below. Whatever it was, most of its body lurked out of sight in the shadows behind the doorway, but the hand that crushed my leg was the size of my torso with an arm that looked like it belonged to a mole rat.

I struck it with my own fist. I dug my nails in. I cried and kicked and screamed, but nothing could stop it. From behind the door, something like a face grinned and leered at me with joy. It was taking its time, sure enough, pulling me in so slowly that it gave my mind all the time in the world to appreciate the nightmare that awaited me. I think if, in that moment, you’d given me a gun, I would’ve shot myself because God help me I couldn’t escape the look in Daniel’s eyes, how he’d knelt to worship this thing like a man who knew that hope or pride or joy or anything with even a hint of goodness to it was so far out of reach for him it might as well be a dream. How long was this thing going to keep them down there? How long did it intend to keep me!?

I wept like a child, feeling like my mind was slowly cracking as I tried everything to stop that fucking pulling me into the shadows. I kicked at the earth. I dug into it using my hands looking for a root or a pipe or anything to hold onto. Nothing, nothing, I did would slow it down.

I was no more than a foot from the doorway when Ripley reappeared.

A dog afraid of hoovers and plastic bags and doors that move on their own. A dog who once got stared down by a particularly feisty rabbit who stopped mid chase and turned around, baffling the predator on its tail. A dog you couldn’t even watch scary movies around…

And he lunged at that arm like he was a wolf, like he’d always been one. And while he didn’t quite break the skin, the pressure was enough to make the thing’s grip weaken and I slid my leg out. Unable to stand, I knelt and grabbed the dog and pulled as hard as I could and now that fucking thing bled at last as the pressure of the jaws and the sliding teeth ripped into its flesh. Together, at last, Ripley and I were let go and sent rolling backwards head over hells.

I wasted no time waiting or looking or processing. I heaved the dog to my chest and crawled until I passed out, making it maybe half a kilometre away. Only when I could no longer see the door did I let myself fall to the ground face first and gave up consciousness.

-

The doctors said I had pneumonia, which I suppose made some kind of sense. I might have even believed them were it not for the Sheriff’s visit, asking strange questions of me as I lay in bed about what I may or may not have seen. I dismissed them to the best of my ability. I wasn’t interested in chasing that particular nightmare down, figuring out if it had been real or not, at least not while I lay there half-drowning in my own infection. To be fair, I had at least some sympathy for why the police had done so little to seal that place off. I have, on occasion, thought about going and doing the job myself, but to this day I still have nightmares about being pulled into the dark beyond that door. Not just the bunker door, the one I narrowly avoided at the end, but the one below. What I saw was a kind of madness, I’m sure of it, and I often think of Daniel’s words.

It didn’t need a reason, just an opportunity.

Somehow, the Vances were that opportunity. Maybe they built their bunker on a leyline, or a weak spot between dimensions, or the site of former Satanic rituals. I’m not sure it even matters. They went into the dark thinking it’d be a safe place to wait out the world’s troubles, but something had been down there waiting for them, waiting for a chance to get at a family of seven people, to lock them in and deprive them of escape and slowly take from them everything it could.

I’ve moved since then. Couldn’t help it. It wasn’t just the memories you see. It was the short-wave radio I kept in my basement. Something my father passed onto me when I was just a boy. God I’d forgotten about it… at least until I woke up one day to the sound of it blaring white noise down in the dark.

And buried in that sound was the faint whispering of a man, his voice barely recognisable, but unmistakably his.

…let them go let them go let them go let them go let them go let them go…