The Dead Tunnel

A Flash Fiction Story

A flash fiction story written for Mina Howell’s photo prompt for the week!

Enjoy <3

Lylian sits at the edge of the pier, the crooked wooden slats damp against her dress. Her mama would shriek at her if she knew she was here, if she knew the white lace of her dress was stained black with mud, if she knew she was anywhere but in her bedroom on a cold, misty autumn evening.

But she doesn’t, Lylian thinks. Does she, Anise?

Anise’s eyes are black, gleaming buttons, glimmering with the mist. Her porcelain skin is painted with spidering, splintering cracks. Her pursed, rosy lips are curved at the edges, as though she is smiling in agreement.

The wood is dark, soft and rotting, below her. There are slats missing, like the gaps where teeth were once rooted. Within them, the silvery waters swim. Lylian has heard stories of how deep the lake goes, of people disappearing below the silver surface and never returning. She has heard of the demons – her mama’s word for them – that sing in the mist, in the waning light, luring children into the waters.

But Anise says that’s only mama trying to scare me.

She isn’t scared, though, looking out onto the ghostly mist that lingers over the waters of the lake, like the silver web of a spider. She shivers, a little, out of thrill.

You always know best, Anise.

She turns, an affectionate smile on her lips, towards the doll sitting beside her on the pier, wearing a dress that is twin to hers. And she gasps, her small, muddy hands fluttering to her mouth as her mama’s always do when she is shocked.

Anise has disappeared.

Anise?

Lylian’s heart batters against her ribs as she scrambles to her feet and searches the pier. Her dress shoes clack against the wood, leaving dirty footprints. She reaches the other edge of the pier, where the wood feeds into damp, yellowed grass that slopes upwards, towards her house. The slick, bare trees; the withering, fallen leaves; the crest of the hills that surround her house… she cannot see Anise anywhere.

A soft creak behind her startles her. Lylian hears the whisper of a dress dragging across the rotten wood, as she spins around, Anise’s name on the tip of her tongue.

She sees her doll’s black curls vanish below the silver waters.

No!

Lylian rushes down the pier, her skirts dragging behind her, catching in the splintering wood, in the gasps between the slats. And then, just as she is about to reach the edge of the pier, she feels the soft wood give way, and the breath in her lungs hollows out, and she tumbles into the cold, deep waters with a stolen shriek.

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The waters snatch at her skirts, greedy and groping. Lylian cannot hope to keep afloat in their grasp. Still, once the cold shock dispels, and the fear blooms through her, she strikes out at the waters, wild and desperate. Her skirts drag her down… she butterflies up. In the silver gloom, she cannot see anything past her own pale, ghostly hands, past the black-and-white blossoms of her skirts.

Her hand grasps a small, porcelain one.

Anise’s black button eyes glow. Her rose-lipped smile has widened, dragging across her porcelain cheeks, revealing small, sharp, porcelain teeth. Her black curls are wet, and her dress blossoms like Lylian’s does.

Lylian feels a bright, curving grin touch her own lips. And, when Anise tells her to follow her deeper into the cold waters, she lets herself be guided. After all, she has always wondered what lies below the lake, and her mama would never allow her to explore. And though her limbs feel heavy and her lungs burn, she knows that Anise will never let any harm befall her.

They swim through the low, silver gloom until Lylian puffs out her cheeks to keep the air from spilling out… and then, she glimpses the tunnel that Anise is leading them towards.

What is it?

Anise does not answer but she does not have to. The soft, singing voices blossom from the tunnel’s mouth, filling the hollows of Lylian’s ears, trembling against her ribs, softening the burning in her lungs. She exhales in a strand of silvery bubbles.

The singing demons, they’re real!

Not demons, Anise tells her, and with that, they swim into the tunnel’s mouth, into the bottom of the lake, and leave behind the mist and the pale, silver-white glow of the broken sun far above. Lylian lets a hand dance against the slick, mossy walls of the tunnel. The stones are rotting. She forgets about them, though, as the singing voices thread through her once more.

The singing demons are the spirits of lost children, Anise tells her. Those that drowned or that were lured into the depths by others, searching for company. Those that felt alone, and were found. Now, Lylian will join them. Just as Anise herself once joined them, long before she came to inhabit the body of her beloved doll, who whispered secrets to her during the quiet nights.

Lylian follows Anise through the dark, mossy tunnel, but something stirs below her thoughts. Something like longing. Something like fear.

What about my mama? What about my bedroom? Will I ever see it again?

But Anise tells her she will not need to. She will have a new family, and a new home.

Lylian searches the walls once more, finds words painted against the stones in dark splotches. We’re waiting. Her throat tightens. She gazes deeper into the tunnel, and finds that something moves in the drifting darkness. Something that Anise calls spirits, and her mama calls demons.

The singing is breathy, hollow in her ears. Cold and wet, like the promise of drowning. Suddenly, she cannot stand to listen to it anymore. She drags her hand from Anise’s, throws her palms over her ears. But the singing still fills her. It echoes in her thoughts, and moves below her skin. It fills her lungs, where air and then water once lived. It grows louder and louder, twining through her skull and, when she looks at Anise, she sees her rosy doll lips moving in time with the melody, her button eyes sharp and smiling.

Lylian understands, only then, that the doll has lied to her.

Yet her own lips part. And she can do nothing against the ghostly choir trapped in her skull, nothing to escape the spectral hands that yank her into the darkest depths of the dead tunnel below the lake.

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The portrait leaned, askew, against the wall.

Gina’s small, pudgy hands reached, her toes pointed like a ballerina’s, to straighten it. Her pa said the old owners must have left it, that it had been hanging in the house since long before they moved into it. Its frame, a golden eye, encircled a portrait of a misty, silver lake, with a pier that fed into its depths. On the edge of the pier, sat a girl and a doll, wearing matching dresses. They were both looking over their shoulders to smile at Gina.

Gina smiled back.

That night, she dreamed the voices of the little girl and her doll, and they told her to come play with them on the pier; they told her that they would be the friends she never had. And, in the dream, Gina promised she would, because the silver light of the lake seemed enchanted, like a lake in a fairytale, and because she had always wanted a friend besides her pa.

When she awoke that morning, a smile still playing on her lips, the girl and her doll were beckoning to her in the portrait, their smiles wide and bright.

And Gina left the house that morning, knowing that she would follow them.

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