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They had only been on this investigation for less than an hour, and Impulse's head was already spinning.
"Should've brought some chalk or something. This place is a proper maze!" Grian mumbled from next to him. His flashlight swept over the smooth, arched ceilings of the tunnel system. The light caught on the few raised edges in the unadorned tan rock, casting sharp-edged shadows in the gloom. Neither of them were particularly tall, but the highest point of the arch hung low enough that Impulse could easily reach up and run his hand over the stone.
"In hindsight, that might've been smart, yeah," Impulse admitted. "Not something we normally keep on us."
"Not something we normally need," Grian said. He sighed and reached for his radio. "Scar? Gem? Find anything over there?"
"Nothing so far," Gem responded. "Scar thought he heard something on the parabidoxtical, but there's no sign of it that I can see."
"It was whispering!"
"You sure it's not the wind, Scar?" Grian drily commented.
"I believe him. The air is so still down here, and he definitely wasn't hearing anything above ground," Gem said. "This place is so creepy!"
"Kind of weird to have all these tunnels but nothing in them. Feels like there should be catacombs at least, or something. Some sort of purpose," Impulse said.
"Impulse!"
"There's- there's not dead bodies, right? Right?" Scar stammered.
"Well, we don't know, do we?" Grian said. "Scar, what direction were you hearing the whispering from?"
"Uh- it's- it's hard to tell. It was to the right earlier, but now it's- uh- maybe towards where you and Impulse are?"
"Honestly, we're kind of turned around. We should've brought some chalk or something to mark the walls."
"That's what I was saying!" Grian exclaimed.
"Just keep your eyes peeled," Impulse said. He swallowed the gathering tightness in his throat as the path split into two, each tunnel dragging on deeper into the darkness. "A-and try not to get lost. Easier said than done, I know. Check in if you find anything."
"Got it. Be careful, Impy. Feels like we should've seen some sign of this ghost by now," Gem responded.
"I know, I know. It's got to be here somewhere," Impulse responded. "Which way, G?"
"Dude, what makes you think I know?" Grian shook his head. "Left? Why not. Let's go left. Not like we can get anymore lost down here."
"Don't jinx it," Impulse warned. He swept his light over the left path, the loose stones crunching beneath his feet as he forced his legs forwards. There had to be a ghost down here somewhere. The church sitting above these tunnels had been hearing footsteps for weeks and what they've described as an overall sense of unease, to the point where the patrons had begun to complain. Ghost Huntin' Distribution had passed the job to Impulse, with nothing to go on other than reports that the footsteps were unusually fast. They didn't have a map of the tunnel system, even though they were clearly far from natural. No one from the church ever went any deeper than the crypt. Even before the footsteps had appeared.
Fast footsteps. Impulse had gone into this job on guard for a Hantu, but while the air was certainly cool underground, it was far from the cold of a Hantu. No electronics for a Raiju, which meant Twins, Obambo, Thaye, or Deo.
Impulse tried to focus on the positive of having more information than normal going into this investigation, than the nagging unease of being lost in these tunnels with a hunt happening. Worse if the ghost was a Deo, and they didn't know where the dead ends were.
He tried not to think of that.
"Impulse?"
Impulse shook himself and shivered. "Yeah?"
"The company didn't say these were catacombs, right?"
"No, nothing like that. They just called them tunnels. But no one's been down here in probably centuries."
"No one that they know of," Grian pointed out, and Impulse conceded his point with a tilt of his head. No sense of religious obligation or fear of the divine would've stopped an intrepid urban explorer. "It's just- why? Why build these tunnels and then abandon them? Look, I'm not an expert on this, but these do look like catacombs that were carved out and then abandoned before they actually put the bodies in!"
"I wish I knew. All I know is that the staff of the church won't go any further than the crypt. Didn't tell me why, just that no one has gone past that point in the last hundred years at least."
"Even if someone else has gotten past, feels like we should've seen some graffiti or rubbish or something. There's just nothing here. Like-" Grian stopped and stiffened. Impulse opened his mouth, as a wave of something musty and putrid drifted from ahead. He caught Grian's eye and reached for his smudge where it had been clipped to his belt, and the lighter in his pocket. Grian shone the light over his shoulder as Impulse inched around the bend in the tunnel. Grian gasped.
"Oh my god- I- I thought that was Scar for a second," Grian said. He leaned around Impulse, dropping his light to the body slouched in the corner at the base of a flat, featureless wall. Like all moisture had been drained away, the skin had been almost shrink-wrapped around the bones, dry and flaking away with that disgusting smell. The mouth hung open with only a few stained teeth remaining, its eyes nothing but vacant sockets and tangles of ratty dark hair clinging to the skin. It wore a tattered brown jacket with a dark stain in the front, and tan cargo pants.
With the clothes and what remained of the hair, it did almost look like Scar.
"Let's just leave it alone," Impulse whispered. He grabbed Grian's elbow and tugged him away, returning his smudge to his belt before reaching for his radio. "Well, we found a corpse. Any luck over there?"
He waited for a response, and his chest tightened the longer the silence stretched on.
"Gem? Scar? Hello?"
"Guys?" Grian said into his own radio. "Scar! Gem! Come in! Answer us!"
Impulse shivered. His heart pounded in his ears, eating away at the silence digging into his skin like knives. Every beat squeezed his lungs, his ears buzzing as he waited for a burst of static, for a voice, for any sign from his friends.
The silence dragged on.
"Out. Out. We're getting out," Grian said.
"Yep." Impulse slipped on a loose pile of pebbles as he followed Grian taking off in a run. They wound through the tunnels, Grian barely hesitating before diving down the next path. The tunnel wound upwards, closer to the surface. Impulse panted for breath, the dry air burning until his lungs ached, and he hacked out a cough after catching himself on a corner. Grian's red sweater rushed forwards, disappearing out of the range of Impulse's flashlight. "Grian- G- wait. I- I need a- moment."
Grian didn't respond. Impulse huffed a breath and swept his flashlight over the room— an open room that they had definitely passed by earlier, with a low, bowed ceiling and tunnels branching off in every direction. One of the open rooms, anyway. They had separated from Gem and Scar after the first one, but Impulse definitely remembered there being two. He swallowed the pasty dryness clinging to his tongue and pressed a hand to his pounding heartbeat, listening to it slowly fade in his ears.
"Grian?" he croaked, and coughed again. Dust shimmered in the air, suspended motionless. Every tunnel looked the same as Impulse turned in place.
The way he had come in became like any other tunnel. One of a dozen featureless, shadowed pits in the walls.
"Grian!"
Impulse fumbled for his radio, the sharp burst of static doing little to calm his nerves. "G! Come back! You left me behind!"
His radio hummed, a dim, red light glaring from the darkness like a scornful eye. It watched him with contempt, as if he was dumb for expecting an answer in this place.
"Grian?" Impulse tried again. Slowly backing up, Impulse pressed his back to the wall and forced deep breaths in and out of his lungs, listening to the steady, slowing beat of his heart.
He needed to breathe. He needed to think.
His thumb remained pressed on his radio, the raised bumps on the button digging into his skin. He had nothing but a smudge, a lighter, a thermometer, and his flashlight.
And he was alone. The featureless walls with their pitted shadows crept in on him, the low ceiling bearing down as if it would give away and bury him alive. Utterly alone with nothing but his own ragged breaths rushing in and out of his lungs and the relentless beat of his heart, refusing to slow to a normal pace. Impulse pressed his hand to the rough stone behind him, forcing his hand to still as he slowly dragged his light over each tunnel.
There had to be something. A distinguishing feature. A mark on the wall, or a certain arrangement of stones at the tunnel's entrance, anything he could use to distinguish one path from the next.
Yet he had nothing.
Smudge. Lighter. Flashlight. Thermometer. He could in theory leave his thermometer behind as a landmark, but these things were expensive.
However—
Impulse thumbed his lighter, igniting a small flame that he held to the rock at the tunnel entrance to his right. The stone hissed after a while, heat washing over his hands until he pulled it away.
When shining his flashlight on it, a small, light streak had appeared where the flame had been. Hardly visible, and would be nearly impossible to pick out at a distance, but it was the best he could do.
Impulse ran his hand along the left side of the tunnel wall as he set down the one he had marked. A smooth, level path that twisted and turned through the rock, that ended in a flat, featureless wall. Identical to where him and Grian had found the corpse earlier.
He swallowed and turned back, steadying his shaking hand with his other so his light didn't waver as much. Keeping his lighter clutched between his aching fingers, he kept his footsteps light as possible. Maybe he'd get back to the central room and Grian would be waiting for him, laughing about him getting lost. Maybe he'd have Gem and Scar with him.
Maybe something had gone wrong with their radios for whatever reason.
Of course, the room was as empty as Impulse left it. He squinted through the darkness, finding the mark he had left on the wall, then set off down the tunnel to the right. Every few steps, he tried his radio. Calling for Grian, for Gem, for Scar, and receiving nothing but silence in return.
His head was spinning. Without the empty static, he could only fixate on his heartbeat and the rush of air in his lungs. Impulse drowned the uncomfortable awareness of his own blood in his ears in whatever noise he could produce. The sound and feeling of the smudge bumping against the side of his leg. The loose stones scattered across the floor grinding beneath his shoes.
"Grian?" he called. "Buddy- I- I hope you found Gem and Scar."
Talking. Talking helped, made his world something other than darkness, his heartbeat, and forced breaths of the same stale, empty air. The tunnel ended in another blank wall, and Impulse turned back.
"I- I'm sure the radios aren't working for-for some reason, right?"
Back in the central room, Impulse took the tunnel to the right once again. Hope flared in his chest as this one wound upwards, gently sloping towards the surface. His legs burned as he climbed, an ache squeezing his lungs as the walls narrowed. The ceiling pressed down, closing in.
By the time the path levelled off, Impulse was hunched over, half crawling and shuffling himself along with one hand on the wall to steady himself. He ignored the nagging feeling of wrong, of not remembering this on his way down with Grian. Out. He needed out, and up was good. Up meant out.
Impulse squeezed himself through a gap, and stumbled. Pain flared through his wrists as he caught himself, barely saving his face from cracking against the rock. He hissed, flipping himself over and giving his wrists an experimental roll. A throb of pain shot up his arms and down into his fingers, leaving them aching and tingling, and he winced.
"Dang it-" he hissed through his teeth. Despite not having hit his head, a dull headache throbbed in his temples, and Impulse sighed and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and shifted his foot.
His eyes shot open when his foot nudged against something that certainly wasn't the stone wall. Something flimsy, that shifted itself at his touch. Fumbling for his flashlight where it had fallen, he screamed and scrambled back when a clawed shadow rose against the far wall. A mummified hand, emaciated and frozen in a claw grip, stretched out towards him, as if it had been reaching out to wrap its hand around his ankle.
Two more corpses lay where the tunnel opened up again. The same drained, mummified skin and tattered clothes as the one further down. Only, the one that had been reaching for him had its arm stretched from the decayed, stained sleeve of a red sweater.
"G-Grian?" Impulse whispered. "N-no, no no no, you can't-"
The corpse lay flat on the ground on its stomach, as if it had fallen and never gotten back up before being completely drained and left behind. Impulse shifted his wavering flashlight beam to the second corpse, slouched against the wall. Tattered overalls. Stringy hair clinging to its dry, drained skin that could've once been red.
He couldn't breathe. The smell hit him now, that same musty, rotten stench that was the only variation in the stale, empty air of the rest of the tunnel system. What little light he had from his flashlight surged and dimmed.
He couldn't tear his eyes away from the corpses. Gem and Grian. Which meant one below was Scar. Impulse's ragged breaths echoed in his ears, his lungs aching. He gagged. The stench washed over him, every gasp of air only drawing more into his nose, yet he remained frozen in place. He was numb. No tears came, though his eyes burned, the light searing until his breaths became all he could hear. All he could feel.
Impulse inhaled, gagged, and exhaled. As he did, another heavy inhale rattled in his ears, followed by a deep, hissing exhale. Impulse gasped in another gulp of air through the vice tightening around his throat and chest, and the breath came again.
He snapped his gaze away from Gem's corpse, down to his wavering flashlight. Head spinning, he held his breath.
Another slow exhale hissed in his ears. One that was not his own. Cold prickled over his neck and down his back, followed by a stench of something different. Something rotten, without the dry mustiness of the corpses in front of him.
Impulse screamed and lit his smudge. The casing clattered against the ground as he unclipped it and let it fall, heady, curling incense hiding the stench of death pressed between the narrow walls. The ghost hissed behind him, and Impulse ran. The shock shooting up his aching wrists as he caught himself on the wall brought tears to his eyes, and he squeezed himself through the gap. Footsteps sprinted after him as he ran, and burst into the centre room.
Impulse backed away from the ghost stepping free from the tunnel. It looked like any other. A flickering, tattered corpse with blank, hungry eyes set in the exposed bone of its skull. Its sprint slowed as it approached, turning to the slow, heavy footsteps of a Deo.
He couldn't find the mark he had made on the wall. With only his flickering flashlight in hand, Impulse slowly backed away from the Deo into the tunnel at his back. One he hadn't explored yet. He felt it slope upwards, never once tearing his eyes from the ghost while keeping a safe distance between him and it.
The hunt had to end soon.
It had to before he hit the end of the tunnel.
Otherwise—
Impulse swallowed and stumbled on a raised edge, his heart pounding as he righted himself and kept backing away.
The hunt dragged on. The ghost never tore its empty eyes from Impulse, and Impulse never let it out of his sight for more than a second. Every now and then, he threw a glance over his shoulder to the darkness behind him.
Of course, his luck would run out.
His shoulder hit a wall. Panic gripped at his chest, squeezing his lungs as he felt around and found only stone. Empty handed, Impulse closed his eyes and bowed his head. With heavy breaths and stale air, his roaring heartbeat, and the frozen touch of rough stone behind him, this was where he was going to die.
The Deo closed in.
"Impulse!"
A hand wrapped around his arm and pulled him away, around the outcropping that he had backed into. The Deo's footsteps sped up, then disappeared.
"It's gone! Hunt's over!"
Impulse gasped for breath as he slowed to a stop. The hand released him, and his own shot out to grab it before it retreated. The soft fibres of a sweater slid across his skin.
"Impulse! Breathe! You're fine!"
"What-" Impulse gasped. His eyes burned, and he lifted his eyes from the red sweater beneath his fingers, to Grian's face. Gem and Scar stood behind him, Scar with a parabolic microphone and each of them wearing identical expressions of concern.
"Breathe, dude," Grian said. "We lost you down in the tunnels for a bit there. I just- I just turned around and you were gone!"
"I- but- you're dead- you're all- you're all dead!" Impulse stammered.
"We're alive, Impy. Promise," Gem said.
"I saw your bodies!" Impulse blurted out.
The other three stared at him, their eyes widening. "Impulse. I- look. I don't know what we saw down there, but- I don't think that corpse was real. Something- the ghostie, probably, was messing with our heads. I think you getting lost made it… worse."
"Guys? Can we- can we get out of here?" Scar shifted on his feet. "I- uh- uh- heard it again."
"Oh my gosh- yes. Please. Before it hunts again."
"I remember the way. Come on, Impulse. Let's get you out of here." Grian tugged Impulse's hand on his arm, and he lurched after his friends. His alive friends. Grian led them past an empty corner, and for a moment, Impulse swore he saw a glimmer of the mummified corpses from deeper down. Their dry, flaking skin and empty eye sockets, the patches of hair and the smell— it had all been so real.
"Did you hear me at all on the radio?" Impulse croaked.
Grian glanced back to Gem and Scar. "No. And Gem and Scar didn't hear us either when we were both trying to find them."
"Oh." Impulse swallowed, and coughed when a feeling of a dry lump caught in his throat. His eyes burned, heavy and aching.
"Here! I remember this way now!" Gem exclaimed. She disappeared around a corner, and Impulse felt his heart lurch.
Yet, she was fine, smiling triumphantly at the base of the staircase where they had come in.
The fresh air outside of the tunnels and the church were like a balm. Impulse let himself be pulled to the truck and into a folding chair, and drank down the bottle of water that was pressed into his hand. Grian knelt on the floor in front of him, and smiled when Impulse finally let go of his sleeve.
"I'm sorry, man. Didn't mean to leave you behind. I- I mean it when I said I turned around and you were gone. Thought you were behind me the whole time."
"G, makes sure he eats something," Gem called. She tossed a granola bar across the truck, and Grian caught it.
"Are you alright?"
"Yeah-" Impulse swallowed and accepted the food. "I- I think so. I will be."
"That's about the closest call we've had with a Deo, I think."
"Yeah, no kidding." Impulse bit into the bar. It tasted like ash and sand, but he forced himself to swallow. "We don't normally have so many dead ends in a normal house, though."
"Maybe we should stick to normal houses for now. You know?" Scar said as he joined them, followed by Gem.
Impulse breathed a soft laugh and nodded. "Are you sure you three are alright?"
"Dude, why're you worrying about us?!" Grian clambered to his feet, his voice incredulous.
"Stop worrying about us for once, Impy," Gem said, glaring at him until he averted his eyes to the wall of the equipment. "You're the one who almost died. How about we get out of here and go home, away from this horrible place. We'll take care of the report. You just rest. Got it?"
"Thanks, guys. I- I'd like that," Impulse admitted, earning himself three bright smiles he thought he'd never see again. It would take time before he no longer saw corpses slouched in the corners, or stopping feeling breaths that were not his own from behind him, but home was a good place to start.