9 - Into The Castle

He was deep underground now, he guessed, by the length of time that he’d been going down stairs. It was the strong smell of nature, too, that hinted it, which was what cancelled out the other smell.

It grew colder, which only made sense, and his clothes were still pretty wet. “Not one of my best days, that’s for sure,” he muttered to himself, feeling around the walls.

They were lumpy and made of dirt. He even felt a bug crawl on his hand and he shook it away as if it were just dust.

Bugs, he wasn’t afraid of. They were only smaller and more annoying than humans like himself and he had no problem with that as long as they didn’t swarm all over him.

His hand continued to drag along the dirt wall and stopped when he felt something cold and wiry.

“What’s this?”

It was thick and metal-like, but also felt rusty. Past that one was about a few inches space and more of the same cold, wiry metal. He felt around with both his hands and realized they were bars.

“Like a cage,” he whispered, losing his breath. Asher swallowed this information in hard. He’d gone too far down underground the castle. The only place he could be at right now was the dungeon. “The only place I didn’t want to end up at and here I am,” he said, worriedly.

The thin bars weren’t strong and even some were bent. There was one part at the very bottom where it was anything but straight and even. They were bent angularly and even a few were broken and missing bars to connect all the way to the ground. The ends of the broken bars were jagged, as if they’d been ripped right off.

“Who could do that, though?” He thought out loud.

Asher remembered from his textbooks and history class at school, the people from long ago who could’ve been prisoners seemed small and weak. They were usually from poor villages nearby who had nothing to give or offer them as taxes and so lost their freedom due to the selfishness and greed of the higher class society that lived in castles.

He knelt down on cold dirt, his hand blindly searching around for the other missing bars. Instead of that though, his hand landed on something small and furry. It squeaked.

Asher gasped and quickly retreated his hand.

Just a mouse. He hoped it wasn’t carrying any diseases or he surely wouldn’t know what to do.

“Not that it matters if I don’t get out of here,” he gulped. He’d get out of here. He would. Right?

He wondered if he really would. It was dark and he was pretty much lost and deep underground a castle that no one knew he’d gone to. Except for that girl at the café.

“Not that she’d be any help.”

If the police couldn’t find the missing people from before, then what were the chances that they’d find Asher?

“How am I ever going to find my way back up?” He asked himself, frustrated. “Or out of here at all?”