I found the hatch in the basement of an abandoned school on the outskirts of town. It stood ever so slightly ajar despite the debris and crumbled plaster lying in a pile atop it. I considered myself lucky to have found it, hidden as it was in the mess of steam tunnels and boilers crisscrossing beneath the school.
Abandoned buildings, especially ones in towns like these, aren’t uncommon in the part of Europe I live in. A long history of war and fear piled on top of one another, and you’ve got a recipe for whole villages that haven’t seen residents in decades. It’s beautiful, to tell you the truth. Not the wars or the landmines still lingering out here, but the decay. Life after people. It’s always drawn me in with a sort of morbid curiosity, and once I’m out here, I can just enjoy the tranquility of it.
The part that always gets my blood pumping, however, is the bunkers. There’s a lot of them out here, in the cities and in the countryside. More than you’d expect. Most are hidden or at least in places you wouldn’t think to look, but nearly all have been found and ventured into by others like me.
But the bunker I found beneath that school? Tucked away in the tunnels, hidden, and with decay piled over it, I think I was the first to set foot within it. That’s what had me so excited, so eager to see what remained.
It didn’t take long to clear the debris away. The heavier pieces I could push aside, and the rest I just flung away. That was when I found the hatch still open. Despite the weight pressed over it for all these years, there lay a sliver of air between it and the frame. Almost like it was inviting me inside.
I got my fingers under the hatch and pulled the thing open. It came up easy, and within seconds, I had my light trained down a long shaft, a ladder leading down into the darkness my flashlight couldn’t penetrate.
There are a lot of different ways to enter a bunker. If you get lucky, like I did, you can just walk down a flight of steps or climb down a ladder; other times you need to find the ventilation shafts and negotiate your way down their claustrophobic drops. Standing above the entrance, I was glad for the ladder. Exploration is something I love, but I will admit to being somewhat of a claustrophobe.
Feeling excitement and that healthy prickle of fear at the prospect of exploring a place like this, I began my descent. There was enough space between the ladder and the back wall for me to cast the light down and see how much farther I had left. It was quite a long drop, much farther than any other bunker I’d been in before, and I figured it must have been built a long time ago, long before there were any sort of standards about how a place like this should be built.
As I neared the bottom, I found my light catching on something poking out of the doorway at the foot of the ladder. It looked like fabric, and my heart leaped in my chest, considering the prospect of finding some old hazmat suit perhaps. The closer I got to it, however, and the less it looked like an old suit. Something white and shiny poked out from the degraded holes in the fabric, and I realized with a jolt of horror that it was a leg.
I hung on the ladder a few rungs from the bottom, my light trained on the leg. Something inside me wanted to just turn around and climb out of this place, but my curiosity wouldn’t allow that. It never would. Instead, I dropped down and trained my light on what the leg attached to.
It was a man. I’d guess it was a man, at least. It looked like he’d been dead for decades, the skin long since rotted to bone. As I moved to get a closer look, I saw the legs were twisted at unnatural angles beneath the military fatigues, making him look like a marionette with far too many joints. The skull was cracked against the concrete floor.
The flashlight shook in my sweating hands. Jesus Christ. I looked back up at the shaft I’d just climbed down. One wrong move and that could’ve been me.
The initial fear I’d felt at seeing the leg was fading now. I figured I’d need to call the authorities, tell them about this poor bastard. Not that police needed to be involved, it just felt wrong to leave him down here. I decided I’d save that for the return trip out. No one had to know I’d pressed on a bit further, now did they? As I stepped past the body and shone my light about the place, I wondered idly at who he’d left behind. If there were still family wondering where he’d gone. It was an ugly thought, made worse by the atmosphere of the bunker.
Now, there’s something I need to make perfectly clear to those who’ve never been in a place like this before. When you get this far below ground, sealed behind sturdy concrete walls, it is dark. Not just broken streetlight dark or closed blinds at 2AM dark, but proper, complete darkness. Places like these can almost feel alive, they’re so desolate. It scared the hell out of me the first time I explored a bunker, but I got used to it over time. You can never quite get over that fear, baked so far within the psyche as it is, but you can at least tame it to the point of mild unease.
But this place? It was something else altogether. The darkness was so thick and so still that it bred a fear that felt as if it were living. Like the darkness was a physical presence and not just the absence of light. I chalked it up to the body lying just meters behind me, took a deep breath, and pushed it to the side.
The back of the bunker, it seemed, was a short circle. There were some generators, a ventilation shaft that looked like it had collapsed in on itself, and a healthy fuel stockpile. It wasn’t long before I stepped through a doorway and found myself staring back down at the body of the soldier splayed horribly against the concrete floor. I pushed aside the growing sense of unease as I walked past the body toward the main section of the bunker. It felt as if something were watching me down here, some eye gazing about for the source of the thing that had disturbed this untouched place. Your mind plays tricks on you in the darkness. Something about losing a sensory input so vital and commonplace in everyday life just sets the whole brain flailing about in unease.
I hadn’t gone far when I found the notebook. Oftentimes, you can find stuff like that down in old bunkers. Inspection notices, construction dates, repair manuals, that sort of thing. But this notebook looked different. It lay on a small table beside a thick, steel door. I picked it up and shone my light on it as I flicked through the pages.
-
They said the strikes were imminent, that there wasn’t much time to prepare. I was outside town when the alarms sounded, those terrible wails we’d all been dreading. This was it, wasn’t it? The bastards had actually done it.
For all the drills, and training, and preparation, it was nothing short of mayhem. I don’t think anyone was truly expecting it to happen. I didn’t know what to do or where to go, and I found myself separated by the old school. There were civilians out there, the ones who live way out in those tiny villages. And their eyes, dear God, their eyes. They saw my clothes, knew who I was, they thought I could protect them. What else could I do? In the event of an attack, of the attack, protocol was to stick with the squadrons inside the town, but I had no way of knowing how long we had. They had kids for Christ’s sake, what else was I to do?
I knew about the bunker inside the school, and got them situated within. They found the rations and living quarters, and must’ve gotten the generator running while I was still topside, but it didn’t look like the lights were working. Truth be told, I don’t think this place has been serviced in years, the state it’s in. No, that’s wrong. I know this place hasn’t been serviced, was never even fit to house people. I was the last one down, and that’s when I saw it. The hatch. The damn hatch doesn’t close all the way! What good is a bunker that can’t be sealed against the very thing it’s supposed to protect against?
I did what I could, did the only thing I could think of, and I pray that God will look upon my sacrifice with grace when the time comes. There’s only one way into the main section of the bunker, only one door. And that door can be sealed from the outside. I locked them all inside. I only hope that someone, anyone, survives what is coming and finds this place.
At least they have a chance to live.
It’s been a few hours now, and this darkness is getting to me. There’s something wrong with this place, I know there is.
A few more hours have passed, and nothing has happened. I haven’t heard any impacts, no explosions, nothing. I think I’m going to climb back up and see what’s going on. It’s not like staying here will protect me. Besides, my flashlight is almost out, and I don’t want to be alone down here.
-
The farther I read, the worse I felt. My stomach was heaving, I needed air. Fresh air, not the stale air of this tomb.
I shouldn’t have opened that door. Should’ve just turned around and left. Curiosity’s a bitch, isn’t it? And that darkness, something about it was stifling. I swear to you, it felt like that door wanted to be opened.
I heaved the latch up and, finding a grip, pulled the steel door open.
The smell that hit me wasn’t just rot, wasn’t just decay. I don’t know how to describe it. The door opened to a long rectangular room, beds hugging the wall. And on each bed, piled against each other, discarded rations and water bottles littering the floor, were corpses. So many corpses.
I took a single, involuntary step into that room. The nightmare that was these people’s final days flashed around me. The fear they must have felt, trapped down here in the cloying, hungry darkness. A darkness that lives.
That’s when the bodies began to move. One by one at first and then all at once. Like a tidal wave of inhumanity, rotten heads raised weakly from beds, arms flailed towards me, horrific glinting smiles opened against the darkness.
And from somewhere on the far end of that long, long room, where my light died against the breathing darkness, came the sound of footsteps. Heavy footsteps, gaining in speed. Warm, putrid air rushed against my face, and the darkness seemed to claw at me.
I don’t know how long those people lived down there. I don’t know if they died when the food ran out or when the oxygen failed. I don’t know if the darkness fed on their fear until it was finally capable of feeding on them.
But I do know the laugh that came from within that nightmarish room was not human.
I stepped back and flung the steel door shut. The hatch doesn’t close all the way, but this one sure as hell does.