Page 192 of Love at First Fright

The agony shredded my concentration, ripping me apart from the inside. Harrison’s body became a cage of nerve endings, all of them screaming.

I flew out.

Ejected myself from Harrison’s consciousness and reformed a metre away, flickering, translucent.

Harrison collapsed. His helmet clattered against stone as he writhed on the ground, both hands clutching his ruined foot. Blood pooled around him, seeping between the flagstones. His screams filled the tiny space, ricocheting off walls.

“Harrison!” Evelyn screamed.

Chaos erupted. Brad shoved past Father Ashworth, thundering down the stairs. Evelyn followed, stumbling, her heel catching on a step. The priest pressed himself against the wall, cross clutched to his chest.

All of them converged in that tiny space at the bottom. Shoulders colliding, arms tangling, everyone trying to help and just making everything worse.

Above their panic, I heard it.

A groan.

Not Harrison. Not any of them.

The door.

A flickering pulse of the symbols engraved on it, all those years ago.

A tremendous boom.

The door—metal bands and ancient wood and Ms Bénassy’s binding magic—tore free from its moorings. It fell inward, slamming against the flagstones with a crash that rattled my teeth.

Dust exploded outward. Stone fragments scattered.

And behind where the door had been—

Darkness. Absolute and hungry.

Well, I thought, watching the shadows begin to move. That went well.

The darkness didn’t just fill the doorway.

It breathed.

Harrison’s screams cut off mid-shriek. His body jerked upward—legs dangling, arms flailing—lifted by something invisible. Something that gripped him like a child’s doll. He shook. His head snapped back and forth, neck bending at angles that made my non‑existent stomach turn. Blood from his mangled foot sprayed in arcs, spattering Brad’s face, Evelyn’s dress, the ancient stone walls.

Then Harrison flew backwards into the darkness.

Gone.

Evelyn shrieked, the sound tearing right through me. “Do something! Do something!”

Brad stared at the doorway. His face had gone chalk-white, all that rugby-jock bravado stripped away. His eyes darted between the darkness and the stairs behind him. Calculating. Weighing odds.

Father Ashworth’s hand shot out—bony fingers digging into Brad’s shoulder—and shoved.

Brad yelped as he stumbled through the doorway, arms pinwheeling. The darkness swallowed him whole.

“Come on, boy!” Father Ashworth snapped. “Get that torch out!”

A beam of light flickered somewhere in the black. Brad’s voice echoed back, high and terrified. “I can’t—there’s nothing here, I can’t see—”

Evelyn followed them through. She gathered her dress in both hands and stepped into the darkness without hesitation, heels clicking against unseen stone.