7 - Into The Castle

There was another hiss. He heard it! He was sure he heard it! He had to have!

Asher looked frantically and blindly from left to right and right to left, seeing nothing, hearing nothing more, and smelling only the horrible disgusting stench of decay. It smelled as if something had died in the tightly confined air. He wouldn’t be surprised. People came here all the time and went missing. Oh God! He hoped it wasn’t what he was thinking.

“Please, please no...” he whispered in one long breath.

He gulped, hoping it was just some animal that got in through a hole and got lost trying to figure its way out. It couldn’t be a dead body-

Make that dead bodies, he thought in plural form. There were so many people who’d gone missing; he wouldn’t even dare count how many bodies there could be.

Stop it! Don’t think like that!

It was a dead animal. It was a dead animal. It was a dead animal. Asher thought that if he kept thinking this way, he’d eventually actually believe it, though right now, he just didn’t know what to believe.

But then what about that hiss? No dead body could’ve made that or else it was a zombie and he refused to go into that state of mind. There’s no such thing as zombies. No such thing!

It must've been an animal; some sort of hissing animal that was also trapped and lost in the dark. The poor thing must be just as afraid as he was.

With this convinced, Asher sighed and cleared his head.

The noises, the smell, the darkness; they were all distracting him from what he really came here for. It was his curiosity. Now who was the one that said ‘curiosity killed the cat?’

Asher smiled, chuckling nervously. It was a wrong decision and misjudgment. He never should’ve come here; never should’ve gone in, especially through the side door; never should’ve tried to make his one eighteenth birthday so different from all the rest of his other birthdays. “Why try to be so special?”

He slowly got over his fear of the quiet darkness and started thinking his thoughts out loud. “Why did you even come here in the first place? It’s not as if you’re the first to even try.”

His tense muscles loosened as he practiced the breathing exercise of taking a deep breath in then out, in then out, and so on until he was sure he was completely calm.

Asher shook his head, regaining his senses. I’d be an idiot for coming here just so I can be scared out of my wits, he thought.

It was true. That was what everyone else had done, taking flights and crossing borders just to come to a castle they believed to be haunted or something. Those people were idiots. Asher was an intelligent and independent young man and he was most definitely smarter than that.

So then why am I here?

Asher pushed himself to move, he was blind in the dark, and was smart enough to figure out he had other senses to use. Though his nose still could not get past much of the thick, rotting smell, he could still use his ears and hands.

No more strange hissing noises came to scare him, but now that he was concentrating on distinct sorts of sounds, he could hear water dripping from somewhere nearby.