This is a recollection of the events that occurred on the February of 2023.
As we got out of the rented car, my dad asked me “Ready for the tracks?” I replied, “Of course!” Little did I know that I was ready for the tracks, but not ready for what was about to happen. We started walking towards the seated ski lift. We entered the enclosure of the station for the lift, and as the seat slowly veered towards us, we sat down. I asked my dad “Which path are we gonna ride on?” My dad thinks for a few solid seconds, and then answers “Let’s go off-slope.” I hesitate for a second, flashbacks in my mind reminding me of what off-slope felt like back in Switzerland, and then agree with my dad. “Yeah, let’s go off-slope, why not?” We got off the lift and started thinking; should we start here, or go even further up? We decided to go even further up, actually the furthest up we could go. It was that decision, the decision to go to the top of the mountain, that proved terribly wrong. We reached the highest point you can go to by lift, I put down my skis, my dad put down his snowboard, and we checked if everything was in our backpacks. We brought a metallic thermos with tea, some cookies, flashlights just in case, a few hand-warmers, and a navigator, also just in case. I put the navigator in my left side pocket, because we both had small backpacks, and it didn’t fit in them. “Looks like we are ready to go.” Said my dad. I nodded, I strapped into my skis, and my dad strapped on his snowboard.
We took off, down the mountain, and we reached a pretty high speed quite quickly, maybe 30 or 40 kilometers per hour I’d say. I wanted to go in front of my dad, and I carefully overtook him. I turned around to give him a thumbs up, turned back around to face forward, and in one second, I was riding through the deep snow, in the next, I was flying downwards. Everything seemed to slow down at that moment, I looked downwards, and in my seconds of flight saw something interesting; the snow had fallen downwards, taking me with it. At first, I collided with the hard, snowy ground with my left side, but then my head caught up, and everything went black.
The first thing I saw after hitting the ground was my dad’s face, as he was trying to shake me awake. I mumbled something incomprehensible, and as I started to wake, I became aware that the navigator we brought had been crushed by the fall. ‘Oh no.’ I thought to myself. As I got up, I noticed that my skis and my dad’s snowboard had been snapped by the fall and that we were in some kind of cavity. As I looked up, I saw the huge height we had fallen off. A menacing question started creeping into my mind. ‘How are we going to get out?’ The sides of the hole we had fallen into were very smooth, and there was no way we could climb up them. My dad came up to me and started explaining what he saw when I started falling. “I was riding right behind you when I saw how you quickly fell down the hole, I tried to stop, but I was too fast and fell in right behind you. I didn’t want to land on you, so I jumped forward a bit and landed first on my board at an angle, so it snapped under all of the weight and I landed on my butt.” As we together thought of a way out, my dad decided to knock on all sides of the supposed ‘cave’ we fell into. All the knocks were the same, until one of them sounded very hollow. It was a sheet of ice on the wall, and the first idea that came to mind of what to do, was to kick the ice down. The sheet cracked on the second kick and completely shattered on the fifth.
As I looked inside, I saw something out of place. Metal structures. We were looking inside a room of some sort. The walls were white concrete, and there were some kind of metallic machines. We walked in, confused and a little creeped out. ‘Why and when was this built?’ I thought to myself, ‘Was this maybe some secret laboratory?’ It was eerily silent, except for the occasional dripping of water. As we walked further through the structure, the scent of mildew and dust hit our noses, and we started seeing other metallic machines with many different kinds of claws and hooks. It all looked very unsettling now. The light from the hole was fading steadily, and at some point, we had to pull out our flashlights when it got too dark for us to see properly. We were maybe 10 or so minutes in, is when we heard the first sound except for water droplets since we first entered the laboratory. It was the ever-so-faint sound of what appeared to be footsteps of some kind. I gave the signal to my father to turn off our flashlights and wait. Everything went silent for a few moments. The steps resumed after the 5 seconds that felt like hours, because of the fear that somebody was there with us. We got the chance to listen to the footsteps closely, and they sounded… off. They were offbeat and very slow; they didn’t sound human. Whatever it was, it was far away, and there was no way it heard us, so we were relatively safe. For now.
As we headed further in, I took my time to look at the equipment, scattered across the rotting tables, forgotten, and seemingly hadn’t been touched for 80 years. That theory proved correct when I saw a date on one of the crates which was used to transport the equipment, the crate being used in 1943. The date didn’t surprise me all that much, since it all looked as old as it indicated. My dad walked over and said “1943… That’s World War Two era.” Austria was occupied by Nazi Germany back then. ‘Hm, what use did they have for this lab in 1943? Nuclear or Bioweapons development?’ As I looked around the room, trying to spot any hints that may give away the purpose of the underground facility. My eyes stopped on many reddish-brown stains, scattered across the floor and walls. I tried to convince myself that it was just a coffee accident, and not what it looked like. I decided to follow the stain trail and called out to my dad to do the same. I found out where the trail led only a 10-second walk through the rooms to find the trail’s start. It was a glass chamber of some sort. It has a toilet, sink and a bed. The bed was also stained with that putrid color of brownish red. There was a spot on the glass wall where the glass was broken, and it seemed that someone, or something, had broken out of the chamber rather than in, since most of the glass shards were laying outside the enclosure. And at that moment I knew what this lab was for. It was for experimenting on people. Since this all happened during World War Two, it is a solid guess that they were experimenting on prisoners.
As I was looking around the and the horror inducing chamber, when I heard the footsteps again, but this time they were louder and way faster. I realized they were getting louder and louder each second; it was heading toward us. I signaled my dad to keep very quiet. I didn’t notice that my flashlight was still on, but it was already too late to turn it off. The beam of light was pointing directly at the thing that had been walking around the lab this whole time. I was dead silent as I turned my head to gaze at the creature, and was horrified. It was disturbingly humanoid, except its skin had turned a grayish tone and its eyes were missing. It was blind! That’s it, that’s why it didn’t see the beam of light. This meant that if we were very silent, then we could sneak past it and into another room. We were very lucky to find a room with doors that had working locks, and we sneaked inside, and as silently as we could, closed the doors and locked the locks.
We sat down on the floor, tired of the mix of adrenaline and fear. I decided to drink some tea and eat a little bit. I opened my backpack and realized that I hadn’t closed the thermos tightly enough, and it had leaked tea into my backpack, but the amount leaked was small. I drank the tea and ate a cookie. I finished drinking, I put the thermos on the floor. My dad gave me a hand warmer, and we started deciding which way we should go. We only had two choices since there were only two doors in the room, one led back to where we came from, and the other led to the other part of the laboratory. “Well, we aren’t going back to whatever the hell that thing was.” My dad reasoned, “Well, then the obvious choice is the door that leads further into the lab.”
I started putting my things back into my backpack when to my horror, the thermos I had brought with me slipped out of my hand because it was wet from the leak earlier. A loud “BANG!” Sounded in all directions. I quickly picked the thermos up, the steps started again, the loudest yet. We quickly exchanged glances with my dad, and sprinted as silently as we could, out of the room. As we ran away and closed the doors behind us, I could hear a menacing banging on the door we closed. Then we heard a horrifying “CRACK!” As the locked door seemingly was bashed in by the creature. ‘How strong is it?’ I thought to myself in terror. We sped up our sprint, as we heard a banging yet again, this time on the other door we closed while we ran. We ran even further when I noticed something different in the structure of the lab. It was a staircase. I signaled my dad to go up the stairs, and we started ascending. Even though we only went up 3 stories, it felt like a lot more. As we reached the 3 stories, we noticed that the stairs end there. We ran towards what hopefully was the exit of this wretched place.
There was a ladder, and with no hesitation, I and my dad quickly climbed up. My dad went first, so if there was a locked pothole, he could bash it open. And bash it open he did when we realized that it had corroded to the ground, so we needed a lot of force to open it. ‘I hope the creature can’t climb ladders’ I thought, while the footsteps grew ever louder. With a final thud to the rusted metal cover, it flew open. We hurried outside with unimaginable speed. As we got out, we noticed there was a lock on the outer side of the cover. ‘What would have happened to us if it was closed…? It’s best that we’ll never know.’ With the same unimaginable speed, we threw the cover back on the lab entrance and locked it. My dad proposed the idea that we put a boulder on the cover so that the creature will have no way to get out. “We can only hope that it is not strong enough to break through.” My dad said. I was too tired to respond, I just nodded. The adrenaline had started to wear off, and before I knew it, I collapsed into the snow. My dad lay down beside me, and we lay there for a while.
After we got a little strength back from our rest, we started a mix of climbing and sliding down the mountain. We had ended up on the peak of the mountain after we climbed out, and there was a pretty long way down. As soon as we reached the first track, we waved for people to slow down. One person stopped to help us, and we asked them to call the helpline, we told him to call a snowmobile, and it arrived after about 15 minutes. We were happy that the person on the snowmobile didn’t ask anything and just drove us straight to the hospital. We were let out of the hospital the same day because we only has minor bruises.
When we arrived home that day, I just went straight to my bed and collapsed into sleep. The next few days were spent mostly trying to find any information about a laboratory in the Austrian mountains, and found nothing, except on the fifth day of research, when I was ready to give up, I found a website with what appeared to be info on the lab. It was some kind of website, and the first thing I saw when I went to see it, was the big message “Not Secure” I didn’t hesitate even for one second, I immediately clicked on the button “Proceed to the website”. The website looked sketchy as hell, but I was very desperate for information. I read the text, and it said this: “The laboratory of ……….. was built in the Austrian Alps in late in the year 1940, and it was used to experiment on humans. The laboratory had been known to infect people with several parasites and viruses, but it was quickly abandoned in May of 1945, the most probable cause of its abandonment is the end of World War Two, but it is not certain. The laboratory has not been found, even to this day its location is unknown.” I didn’t know what to think of this. I accepted this as truth, because of what I’ve seen. I went to bed and didn’t think of the incident much, until one day.