Crossfades Read Free Page B

hundred steps before stopping. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called out in a voice that sounded alien to her own ears.
    “Hello?” Her greeting echoed in the blackness, each repetition sounding as though it were spoken by a slightly different voice. The tone seemed to change as well; hopeful questioning slowly morphed to the point that the faintest echoes seemed to sneer and mock before diminishing completely. “Is anyone down here?”
    As had become her habit, she waited for a reply. Holding her breath, she strained to hear even the slightest sound as she counted fifty beats of her heart. But, as always, there was no reply. Another hundred steps and she’d try again. The woman was determined to repeat this process until someone answered. Or, barring that, until she actually ended up somewhere other than these darkened tunnels.
    She was about to take the first step when she thought she heard something. She froze with her foot suspended several inches off the floor and cocked her head to the side so she could better listen. Dripping condensation; slight puffs as she exhaled through her nose but nothing more.
    It must have been her imagination then. Surely she couldn’t be subjected to hours of complete blindness without her mind eventually playing tricks on her. The human brain craved stimulation after all. For example, even if the passage had been completely silent, her ears would have insisted they heard a high-pitched ringing. So that had to be it then. Nothing more than an auditory hallucination.
    She lowered her foot upon the cool cobbles and prepared to take another step when she froze.
    There it was again.
    A sound like the softest of sighs, thin and wheezy. Faint, to be certain…but definitely not imagined.
    Something about the noise quickened the woman’s pulse. She felt the vein in her neck throb and heard the whoosh and swish of blood in her eardrums as her heart thudded harder. This change wasn’t brought about by the possibility that she wasn’t alone down here, however. It wasn’t excitement…it was fear.
    She stood perfectly still and within minutes heard the sigh again. Was it closer this time? She couldn’t tell. But she thought so. It would have certainly had to have been louder to be heard over the sound of her own heartbeat. Wouldn’t it?
    Despite the chill in the air, the woman suddenly felt flushed and warm. Rather than just beating hard, her heart was galloping now, squishing out surges of adrenaline that tensed her muscles. Her throat felt pinched and she couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen, no matter how quickly her lungs insisted on breathing.
    But why was she so afraid? It was nothing more than a noise in the darkness, after all. Not even a particularly threatening one. Most likely the source of the sound, given her environment, was a rat.
    That’s no motherfuckin’ rat!
    The woman felt as though a terrified child hid somewhere within the recesses of her fractured psyche. The little girl cried and blubbered, repeatedly insisting that they should go, that they should go
now
. Begging. Pleading. Yet the woman held her ground. Not because of courage mustered in the face of danger. Not because of heroism. No, she stood motionless in the dark simply because she was incapable of doing anything else.
    She wanted to listen to her inner child.
    She wanted her legs to move.
    She wanted to
run
.
    But the instructions got lost somewhere between thought and execution.
    She merely stood. And listened.
    A new noise reached her ears, this one coming from somewhere overhead. It was close enough that she could hear it distinctly, but far enough away that she never could have reached whatever made the sound, even if she stood on tiptoe and stretched. It was like the fluttering of a thousand delicate wings, each one beating faster than it ever had before as the swarm fled from something…
monstrous
.
    That was the right word. She was sure of it.
    Within the span of a second, the flurry had