The Hollow Dark

She checked the time. 11:43 p.m.

The reservoir had been rising since dusk. A storm upstream had forced the dam operators to open the western sluices, and the old station sat directly beneath the overflow channel. If the lower level was still accessible, it would not be for long.

Mara wedged the pry bar into the door and leaned her weight against it.

Metal groaned.

Something knocked on the other side.

She froze.

The sound came again. Three soft taps.

Mara pulled the bar free and aimed her flashlight at the door. Water trembled around her boots.

“Hello?”

The word vanished into the concrete stairwell.

No answer came. Only the tick of cooling metal and the far-off grind of water moving through the reservoir.

She told herself the door had shifted under pressure. She told herself the station was empty.

Then she forced it open.

A breath of cold air moved over her face. Beyond the door, a corridor disappeared into darkness beneath a low ceiling. Water covered the floor to her ankles, black and perfectly still. The flashlight beam stretched along it, broke against a bend, and seemed to return from somewhere much closer.

Mara stepped inside.

The door swung shut behind her with a heavy clang.

She turned at once. The handle refused to move.

“Fine,” she muttered. “That’s fine.”

Her voice sounded wrong in the corridor, flattened and delayed. A second Mara seemed to speak half a beat after her.

She faced forward and started walking.

The service corridor was narrower than the plans showed. Pipes crowded the ceiling, wrapped in torn insulation. Red emergency lamps sat at intervals along the walls, all dead except one far ahead, where a weak pulse brightened and faded.

The meter crackled in her hand.

She followed the pulse.

At the first junction, a sign hung crookedly from two bolts.

LOWER CONTROL AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

The arrow pointed left.

Mara turned.

The corridor sloped downward almost immediately. Water climbed from her ankles to her shins. It was cold enough to numb her legs through her trousers. She kept one hand against the wall and the other around the meter, watching the needle tremble as she descended.

Behind her, water stirred.

Mara stopped.

The ripples moved toward her.

Not away from her boots. Toward them.

She swung the flashlight around. The corridor behind her was empty, the water lying smooth beneath the beam.

A drop struck the surface near her shoulder.

Then another, farther back.

She listened.

Something brushed the wall.

Mara’s fingers tightened around the pry bar. “Who’s there?”

The sound of her question traveled down the passage and came back in pieces.

There.

Who’s - There.

She moved faster.

The corridor bent right, then left. According to the station plans, the lower control level should have been forty yards from the entrance. She had walked twice that distance when the meter began to scream.

The needle slammed against the red stop.

Every emergency lamp along the wall flared on.

Mara flinched and raised an arm. The sudden light revealed doors on both sides of the corridor, each one marked with a faded number. The nearest stood open. Inside, water churned around overturned filing cabinets.

A speaker grille above the door crackled.

“Mara.”

She stopped.

The voice was low and distorted, but it was not a stranger’s voice.

She knew the shape of it. The slight lift at the end of a sentence. The softness beneath the consonants.

“No,” Mara said.

The speaker hissed.

“Mara, don’t go down there.”

Her grip slipped on the pry bar.

Elise had said those words once, years ago, in the half-lit kitchen of their mother’s house. Mara had been seventeen, Elise thirteen, and the basement door had been standing open though neither of them had touched it.

Don’t go down there, Mare-Bear.

The private name struck harder than the memory.

Mara stepped beneath the speaker and stared up at it. Rust ringed the grille. A strand of wet hair hung from one corner.

“Elise?”

The station answered with a burst of static.

Then, from somewhere behind her, a girl laughed.

Mara spun.

The beam cut across empty water. For one instant, a small figure stood at the far bend in a yellow raincoat, head tilted toward her.

Mara blinked.

Nothing remained.

The water reached her knees now. Something cold touched her calf.

She kicked backward and struck metal.

A door.

Her flashlight found a black-painted panel marked LOWER ACCESS. The handle was sealed with a thick brass lock, polished bright against the corrosion.

The surge pulsed through the station. Pipes shuddered overhead.

Mara pulled the plans from her pack with shaking fingers. The lower access door was not on the original layout. She unfolded the damp paper against the wall and found the junction by counting the corridor turns.

The passage behind her should have been straight.

It was not.

The bend had moved.

Mara looked over her shoulder. The corridor stretched away in both directions, the emergency lights shrinking into darkness. She could no longer see the entrance.

Water lapped against her thighs.

The speaker crackled again.

“You left me in the dark.”

Mara pressed her palm to the sealed door.

“I came back.”

“You waited.”

The words were Elise’s. Not an imitation. Not close enough to fool her. Elise’s voice, carrying the old accusation she had never spoken aloud.

Mara yanked the pry bar from her belt and drove it beneath the lock housing.

The brass lock held.

Behind her, water slapped against the walls.

A slow step sounded in the corridor.

Mara leaned into the bar. Her shoulder burned. The lock groaned but did not break.

Another step.

She glanced back.

Nothing.

The flashlight beam shuddered over the water. A dark shape passed beneath the surface, too long to be a person and too deliberate to be debris. It moved against the current, circling her legs without touching them.

Mara struck the lock again.

The brass split with a sharp crack.

The lower door opened inward.

Beyond it, a stairwell descended into darkness.

The water began pouring through the doorway.

Mara seized the edge and pulled herself inside. A hand - or something shaped like one - closed around her ankle.

She screamed and kicked.

Her boot tore free, leaving the lace behind in the grip.

The door slammed shut between them.

For several seconds Mara lay on the stairs, gasping, while water streamed beneath the door. On the other side, something dragged its fingers across the metal.

Scrape.

Scrape.

Scrape.

She forced herself upright.

The stairwell dropped farther than the plans allowed. The walls were tiled in white ceramic, all of it stained gray. At the bottom, a green light glowed beneath a second door.

Her meter had gone silent.

Mara descended.

Each step took her deeper into a pressure she could feel behind her eyes. The air grew warmer. Somewhere below, machinery turned with a slow, patient rhythm.

The second door stood ajar.

Inside was a control room.

Banks of dead monitors lined the walls. Cables hung from the ceiling in wet loops. A generator occupied the center of the room, its housing vibrating, its status lights glowing green.

The station was alive.

Mara approached the nearest console. A screen flickered on before she touched it.

A date appeared.

OCTOBER 17, 2014.

Elise’s disappearance.

Mara’s breath caught.

The screen changed.

CAMERA 06: NORTH INTAKE CAMERA 07: SERVICE STAIR CAMERA 08: LOWER ACCESS

A grainy image filled the display. Mara saw herself standing in the corridor above, bent over the broken lock.

The camera angle shifted.

Another screen lit.

Mara in the stairwell.

Another.

Mara entering the control room.

She stepped backward.

The last monitor showed a room she had never seen. Concrete walls. A narrow cot. A child’s yellow raincoat hanging from a pipe.

Elise’s raincoat.

Mara reached for the screen.

The speaker above the console clicked on.

“Mare-Bear.”

She stopped breathing.

The nickname belonged to a summer before the disappearance, before the accusations, before Elise had learned to keep secrets from her. No one had heard it except their mother. Mara had not spoken it in twenty years.

The voice whispered through the control room.

“Bring me the key.”

A compartment beneath the console sprang open.

Inside, on a bed of black silt, lay a brass key.

Mara stared at it. The bow was shaped like a small house. Three scratches marked its face.

Elise had made those scratches with a compass point while waiting for Mara to come home from college.

Mara reached into the compartment.

The generator stopped.

Every light died.

In the dark, water began rushing somewhere below.

Mara snatched the key and turned toward the stairs. The door at the top was closed now. Beyond it came the muffled sound of something climbing.

One step.

Then another.

Mara ran.

The stairwell seemed to lengthen beneath her. Her boots slipped on the wet tiles. Behind her, the footsteps climbed with steady patience, never gaining, never falling back.

She reached the lower access door and pulled.

It opened onto the corridor, but the water had risen to her waist.

The current seized her immediately.

Mara slammed one hand against the wall and fought toward the entrance. Her pack dragged at her shoulders. The brass key cut into her palm.

“Mara,” the voice called.

She kept moving.

“Mara, wait.”

The corridor bent. The emergency lights flickered awake, revealing a figure standing waist-deep in the water ahead.

Yellow raincoat.

Dark hair plastered to a narrow face.

Elise.

Mara stopped so violently the current spun her sideways.

The figure lifted its head.

Its face remained hidden beneath wet strands, but the voice came clearly.

“Mare-Bear.”

Mara drove the pry bar into the wall and hauled herself around the bend.

The figure moved after her.

She did not look back again.

The entrance appeared where it should not have been, a rectangle of storm light above the black water. Mara lunged for it, caught the lower frame, and dragged herself up the submerged steps. Behind her, the station gave a deep mechanical groan.

The current surged.

Mara climbed until water released her legs. She crawled through the service door and collapsed onto the concrete stairs outside.

Cold rain struck her face.

For a while she could only hear herself breathing and the reservoir grinding against the ice.

Then something slid across the threshold behind her.

Mara turned.

The brass key lay on the wet concrete between her hands.

The door stood open.

From the darkness below, Elise whispered once more, close enough to touch.

“Mare-Bear, you promised you’d come back.”

The door slammed shut.

Mara stared at the key until the storm blurred it into gold. Then she closed her fist around it and rose, leaving the station’s dead lights burning beneath the water.

End of chapter one. 4 more chapters and about 9,180 words in the full book.