Something yanked my ankle from behind.

I gasped and twisted around. The twine tied to my ankle was taut, and pulling me with terrible force, actually starting to drag me back the crawlway. I cried out, digging my fingers into the carpet.

The twine scraping against the edge of the junction behind us sounded coarse and ugly, like a rusty knife dragged over the hairy skin of a coconut.

“What the fuck, help me!” I shouted. The loop around my ankle was viciously tight, cutting off circulation. My fingers scrabbled for purchase but the carpet wasn’t shaggy enough to grip.

Niko scrambled back towards me, shrugging out of his pack and grabbing my arm. But as he pulled me back the twine dug into my ankle like a vise, like the pressure would saw the line straight through my foot. It hurt. “Cut it, fucking cut it!” I gasped.

He cursed and let me go, whipping back around to his pack and zippering it open, letting me get dragged away from him at a slow but steady pace. The sound of the twine scraping the corner seemed way too loud, like someone was holding a mike against it. I reached up to grab a wall sconce and the cheap thing twisted off in my hand, sparking as the bulb went out. I held onto it stupidly as the line around my ankle dragged us both away, reeling out drywall-dusted power cable from the wall.

I panicked. My mind flashed through visions of monsters waiting just around the corner, patiently reeling me in. A horned demon. Some evil-eyed little girl from a shitty horror movie. And then the history lady flashed into my head, inside-out and distorted past the breaking point, eyes white and wide; and I jabbed my fingers into the grooves in the fake wooden wall paneling and started babbling

DESCEND

mind slipping towards the only place it might be safe and

IF YOU ONLY KNEW WHAT AWAITS YOU

Niko cut the twine.

I missed the lead-up in my nightmare, but he’d dug through his pack for the Swiss army knife, lost at the bottom with the camping gear, then struggled to squeeze ahead of me without kicking me in the face. He told me later he’d barely touched the blade to the twine when the taut line snapped, whipping around the corner in a fraction of a second.

He had to spend a minute calming me down. Maybe it would be a better story if I left this out, but I was crying, bawling like a baby, and my pants were wet.

What brought me back, prosaically enough, was the growing unpleasant tingling in my foot. Pins and needles: painful, but familiar. The knot on the twine had slipped down and pulled a tight loop around my leg just above the ankle, digging half an inch into my skin through my jeans. Niko helped me cut it off and I sat rubbing my foot for a long time, calming down, waiting.

Listening.

After maybe fifteen minutes we started back, Niko up front with the knife. I was equally terrified bringing up the rear, though, constantly looking over my shoulder, miserably afraid.

The fact that the lighting was so bright and consistent, so cheery, only tinged my fear a more metallic shade.

Around the corner we found the cut end of the twine, slack and unmoving. We followed it all the way back to where we’d entered the maze.

It was no longer tied to the doorknob, like we’d left it. The twine lay coiled up in a neat loop. Right outside the threshold.

This is just one way the story can go. In the final version of Subcutanean, no two stories will ever be quite the same. Find out more at https://igg.me/at/subcutanean