UrbEx

Alice was UrbEx. That is to say: she was an Urban Explorer. A huge portion of her life revolved around the hidden and unseen, whether by mind or by body. With a crowbar, a camera, a flashlight, an orange hooded sweatshirt (and several other supplies), she pried into the crumbling strata of the malnourished city, each outlying tendril rife with decay.
An important weekend had been looming ahead for some time in Alice's life, and the closer it came, the slower it came. Through several online forums she had become aware of an abandoned prison several towns over.
The reports all corroborated certain details: there wasn't any security -- not even night watch; the fences around it were breached in various places; it was large and maze-like, especially so in the maintenance corridors that sprawled across TWO(!) basement levels; it was all relatively stable and safe to explore.
All of this added up well in Alice's mind, and aside from the typical ghost stories, there was nothing bad said about the place. She had booked some vacation time on the Friday preceding the weekend, and felt ready in terms of both equipment and psychological set. Prepared for pretty much anything.
On the road, she dug in to the main course of the drive as night fell. The scenery either side of the road melted into a murky river of ink, fulvous in the headlights of her car. She wasn't quite under the speed limit, but she wasn't driving dangerously -- surely the empty road was that forgiving. In the pallid gloom around her, she thought she saw animals here and there, now and then.
After a good 90 minutes, with a small hamlet of a town behind her, she came round a bend, and saw the prison nestled amongst trees on the side of a hill to her fore-right. It's left corner cut into the sky, it's right lost in the dark of the slope. She felt the moonless night present her to the complex like a sullen pearl on a black platter.
From behind the stark corner of the prison, and the ragged silhouettes of the autumn trees atop the hill, a faint light shone. The sky, clear of the poisoning tint of the city, glowed with a timid lavender luminance, adding a celestial crispness to the darkened vista.
Gripped with the scene, an event befell Alice unexpectedly. Into the dim pallor of her headlights wandered a deer, unseen. With a gruesome thump the dying thing rolled up onto her windshield, his frightened eyes white and spinning as his tongue lolled out. As she turned in shock to face this scene, the choking mouth let out a low death rattle, quickly followed by the grinding smash of metal.
The release of the airbag replaced the visual shock with physical shock, but it left Alice seemingly unharmed. She slowly exited her car, shaking, to investigate the crash. In disbelief, and with some trepidation, she noticed that she had driven into the prison gate at the side of the road. It's twisted latticework lay bent and wrecked in the threshold.
Turning to the hood of her car, she looked at the carcass, and decided that she should call someone. Trying not to look at the poor thing longer than she had to, she returned to the door and reached for her bag, in turn fishing her phone out of it. No signal. There probably wouldn't be any traffic until morning. This is where Alice, maybe in shock, decided that she had time until morning, time enough to visit the prison.
With gear in hand, she started to the bent-in gate. The deer's antlers tugged at her sweatshirt. With a snapping click it's head turned to stare at her, it's vacant eyes morose. Alice shivered and freed herself, and continued through the gate with the gently winding road ahead of her.
In the faint starlight the road was a dull gray band that wound it's way up the hill, lined in overgrown hedges. Every now and then the stark edge of the prison stood visible against the sky, before being lost in the outline of the hedges again. Alice could hear nothing but the quiet clap of her shoes on the ground. At last, the shrubbery ended and the prison stood before her in earnest.
The dismal place Alice faced did not match the descriptions she had read, but for size. It had a sunken concave appearance, and Alice felt a small pang of vertigo, as if she stood above a precipice. The foyer in front of her had partially collapsed, and she could see the smashed footprint of a desk through gaps in the wall. The scaly crumbs of this forsaken edifice piled into the corners of the remaining frameworks along with rubble; plant life clung copiously anywhere it could root.
A real thrill shot through Alice, perhaps amplified by her accident. Slowly and pointedly she walked through the hole where the door had been. It's frame, and the door itself, were bent and crumpled at either side of the hole, and she briefly thought of the gate. She felt pulled into the darkness.
The dark-speckled-white sky scrolled slowly behind the gaps in the roof above her as she picked her way through the debris. With a soft click the button on her torch indented, and an amoebic blob of illumination slid over the room in front of her. Passing the flattened desk, she went through the leftmost door.
Alice found herself in a dingy break-room. The invasive scent of mildew filled her sinuses and pallet, but she found this a reassuring sensation. Old chairs upholstered with scraps of the 70's lay jumbled all over the room. Picking her way through them, she headed right and into new shadow.
After navigating a service corridor and a guard station, she found herself looking down a vaulted glassed-in avenue lined in corroding bone-white filaments of iron, creating negative vacancies of space like black teeth. Alice's glowing probe traced itself over the contours of one of these mouths and the rotting cot therein. She could imagine the dismantling bile of time eating away at the people who were once locked in these metallic gullets.
Walking slowly, the darkness at the end of this woeful gutter keeping pace, Alice's mind slowed and stopped, until she was enmeshed with her environs. The weight of the place fell languidly on her shoulders, and the feeling of vertigo returned, as if the floor here sloped sharply down before her. With a scuffing stop, she tumbled over a pile of ruin, catching herself against the ground.
When she righted herself, Alice felt a dull ache in her left shoulder and neck. Not enough to stop her swinging the flashlight, not enough to stop her from carrying on. The pain receded with the fall, and was reduced to an intangible throb. She shifted her pack so that it tugged on her right shoulder alone.
She now came upon the end of the aisle, where it branched out either side in a T. A doorway, naked of it's cover, beckoned to Alice in the center of the intersection, and her flashlight seemed to penetrate the darkness to no degree. In her subdued and dreamlike state, she marched stoically into this cimmerian portal, as a knife cuts into a plum, until it eclipsed her.
She found herself in another maintenance passage, running parallel to the T. She poured her light down either path, and it was to her left that she spotted what she had really been questing for this whole time: stairs. She wandered towards them.
The stairwell was a square cement shaft with a metal skeleton of stairs hung inside it. The stairs were not safe. Rust suspended through an era had chewed and bit the stairs. They were still there, not really mangled. With some kicking and stomping Alice decided she could risk it, and headed down.
With creaking and groaning, the stairs held, and Alice entered the lower floor of the basement. The area was spacious laterally, the ceiling was low. Pipes cracked and broken rested on the floor, their orange and red drool long dried on the rough surface. Various fixtures spanned the vertical gap, many had bent pipes hanging off of them like wilting flowers.
In a daze, Alice meandered forwards. The lighting was limited to what she had brought, and where she pointed it. A dull chill slid through her bones like a freezing oil.
As the light carved out a path for her, Alice noticed something: there were holes in the floor. Her mind reeled backwards and she clearly recalled taking the rickety stairs down to the B2 level. She approached the nearest hole and poured light into it. It was a structured place beneath her, ordered and poured like the structure above it.
It was rare enough for this kind of building to have two basement levels, but a third was both a rarity and an oddity, she thought to herself as the pale yellow disc played across the details. She was gripped with such a fierce compulsion to find a way down that she was struck by it; questioning for the first time the irresistible pull that drove her on -- but not refusing.
She searched the gray expanse around her, peering into each black and reflection-less puddle for a way down. Finally, she saw a cabinet beneath her. With some resolve, she placed the flashlight on the lip of the maw, turned, and began easing herself over the edge, planning to drop onto the cabinet beneath her. As the most pressure was being placed on her arms, pain erupted in her shoulder.
Tumbling backwards, she landed on the edge of the cabinet, and it keeled over, spilling her on the floor. She landed on her left hip, and the two new pains made her feel as if her left side had been skewered. The flashlight, still on, lay next to her face. Everything was quiet. Turning on her back, she picked up the torch and examined her surroundings.
First she noticed that she was not in a whole floor, but a door-less room for which the only opening was the one in the ceiling. The room was furnished. There were no electrical appliances or outlets, and when she touched a chair near her, it crumbled into a gray dust. Then her scanning beam fell into one of the corners.
This corner would not be illuminated. It was as if a black sphere, maybe a meter in radius, was wedged into the corner, eating up the light. Then, the vertigo returned. With it, a new feeling, one of slipping. With dread she realized that she was slipping across the floor as if it was a slope, pulled and sucked into this inky anti-kernel. Her maimed and struggling body could give no resistance, and everything she tried to hold on to crumbled like the chair. With a small cry she watched as her feet slowly disappeared into the orb.

The End.