Chapter 7: The Second Trespass

Chapter 7: The Second Trespass

“Absolutely not.”

Maya’s voice was flat, final. She crossed her arms, a solid, unmovable wall of reason sitting across from them at her kitchen table. Sunlight streamed through the window, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air, a picture of domestic normalcy that felt like a mockery of the conversation they were having.

“Just listen,” Leo pleaded, his hands spread over the printouts and his open laptop on the table. It was his arsenal of obsession: the grainy photo of the work crew, the redacted municipal reports, the Morse code chart next to the damning, single word he’d transcribed. “This changes everything. We thought it was a monster, something evil. It’s not. It’s a message. It’s a cry for help.”

“It’s a word tapped out in static from a cheap phone that got wet!” Maya retorted, her eyes flashing. “Leo, listen to yourself. You’re talking about ghosts in the machine. We were scared, we saw some weird footprints, and now you’ve built this… this entire mythology around it.”

Beside Leo, Chloe flinched. She hadn’t said a word, just sat clutching a cold mug of tea, her knuckles white. She looked fragile, as if a strong wind could shatter her. “It’s not just the phone, Maya,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “I still feel it. Like… like it’s waiting. It’s in my head. If we don’t do something, it’s never going to leave me alone.”

That was the truth of it. This wasn’t an intellectual exercise for Chloe; it was an exorcism. The entity had latched onto her, and she was desperate to sever the connection, even if it meant facing the source.

Leo tapped the grainy photo of the work crew. “These people died down there, Maya. Crushed and buried in a tunnel the government just paved over and forgot about. They never got a burial. No one ever told their story. What if they can’t rest? What if they’re just… stuck? Reaching out to the first people who got close enough to hear them?”

He was spinning a narrative, half to convince her and half to convince himself. Framing it as a rescue mission was the only way he could stomach the idea of going back. They weren’t prey returning to the lion’s den; they were investigators on the verge of solving a seventy-year-old mystery. They were moving from reactive fear to proactive purpose.

Maya stared at the evidence, her skepticism warring with the genuine terror she saw in her friends’ faces. She saw Leo’s obsessive, red-rimmed eyes and Chloe’s haunted, broken stare. She’d tried calling Liam, but he’d brushed her off, muttering about them “feeding a delusion.” Ben and Sarah weren’t even answering their phones anymore, having retreated into a resolute, terrified denial. It was just the three of them left.

Finally, Maya let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Fine,” she said, the word heavy with reluctance. “Fine. But we do this my way. Broad daylight. We go in, we look, and we get out before noon. We take a first-aid kit, we take better flashlights, and the second—the second—anything feels wrong, we are gone. No arguments. Deal?”

Leo and Chloe both nodded, a wave of grim relief washing over them. It wasn’t a victory. It was a sentence they had all just agreed to carry out.

An hour later, they stood before the iron fence of Ashworth Park.

In the bright, crisp morning light, the place looked different. Less menacing, more melancholy. The rust on the fence was just rust, not dried blood. The trees were just trees, their leaves whispering in a gentle breeze. But the feeling was still there, a low-frequency hum of wrongness that vibrated just beneath the surface of the day. The memory of that high, grating screech as they’d first squeezed through the bars was a phantom sound in Leo’s ears. It felt like they were breaking a seal for a second time.

Their progress through the woods was slow and deliberate, a stark contrast to their panicked flight days before. They walked in silence, their boots crunching on dry leaves and twigs. Every snap of a branch in the distance made them freeze. The air was still, and the birdsong seemed unnervingly distant, as if the local wildlife knew to keep its distance from the heart of the park. It was the oppressive silence of a place that was holding its breath, a place that was watching.

The ruins of the train station emerged from the trees, a skeleton of concrete and rebar picked clean by time. In the daylight, its decay was pathetic rather than terrifying. Sunlight poured through the collapsed roof, illuminating the graffiti-scarred walls and the debris-littered floor.

“See?” Maya said, her voice a little too loud in the quiet. “It’s just an old building. We freaked ourselves out.”

But her bravado was a thin veneer. Leo saw the way her eyes darted towards the dark corners, the way she kept her hand close to the heavy Maglite clipped to her belt. Chloe said nothing, her gaze fixed on the corner of the main hall, on the spot where their tomb lay hidden.

Leo led the way, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. The pile of rubble was just as they’d left it. He and Maya worked together, pulling aside splintered wood and chunks of plaster until the low, steel-reinforced door was revealed. The rusted iron ring was cold and solid in his hand.

“You ready?” he asked, looking from Maya’s tense face to Chloe’s pale one.

Chloe gave a single, jerky nod. This was for her. They had to do this.

With a shared grunt of effort, they heaved the door open. It scraped against its concrete frame with a familiar, deep groan that echoed into the darkness below. The same wave of cool, musty air washed over them, thick with the scent of deep earth, metal, and something else… something like old, wet soil after a storm.

One by one, they descended the steep concrete steps, their powerful new flashlights cutting clean, white beams through the gloom. The bunker was exactly as they had left it: a small, claustrophobic box of sweating concrete. It was empty. Lifeless.

“Okay,” Maya said, sweeping her light across the bare walls. “We’re here. We’ve seen it. There’s nothing here, Leo. Can we please go now?”

“Wait,” Leo said, his own beam dancing around the small space. In their panicked flight and the terrified darkness of their first visit, they hadn’t been looking, they’d only been hiding. Now, he was seeing details. Rusted conduits running along the wall. A crumbling wooden crate in the corner. And… something else.

His flashlight beam fell on the wall opposite the stairs, near the floor. It wasn't just a concrete wall. Half-hidden by the decayed crate was the dark, straight edge of a frame set directly into the concrete. It was another door.

He kicked the remnants of the crate aside. It fell apart into a cloud of dry rot and dust. And there it was. A heavy, industrial steel door, about four feet high, riveted and braced, with a large, rust-frozen wheel where a handle should be. It didn’t look like an entrance to another room. It looked like the seal to a mineshaft.

“I didn’t see this before,” Maya breathed, her light joining his on the discovery.

“We were in the dark,” Leo replied, his voice hushed. “We were terrified. We weren’t looking for anything but a place to hide.”

His beam traced the edges of the door, landing on the thick, rusted hinge pins. This door hadn’t been opened in decades. It was sealed shut, a permanent monument to the men it had been designed to protect, the men who were now buried somewhere behind it. Below.

But as his light moved from the hinges to the other side, his breath caught in his throat.

The door wasn’t sealed.

It was slightly ajar.

A dark, vertical slit, no wider than a hand’s breadth, ran from the top of the door to the bottom. It was an impossible, absolute blackness, a slice of pure void that seemed to drink the beams of their flashlights. The heavy steel door had been moved. Recently.

A cold dread, far more profound than anything he had felt during the storm, settled over Leo. The door hadn’t been opened from their side. The wheel was rusted solid. It had been opened from the other side.

It wasn't a cry for help from prisoners wanting to be rescued.

It was a dark invitation into the earth, left open by something that had already gotten out.