(Disclaimer: I don't own them or know the ones who do. And I am in no way connected to the writters...)

CHAPTER TWO:

THE CISTERN

Nick

The store was too clean for Nick's taste. There was a little girl brutally murdered on the wood plank floor and there isn't anything even disturbed otherwise. It was almost like if she was planted there just for them to find.

"I thought you said no one owned the place," Warrick says nearly making Nick jump from my already pale skin.

"That's what the city records said," Nick answers walking through the stacks of books now. All of them looked ancient, with their thickness and binding type, not to mention most of them were now missing important features such as spines and covers.

The place still seemed to clean to be a murder scene. The only other thing is it was an optical allusion. Some prankster's big joke on them waiting to come and jump out of the rafters laughing his ass off. Not that Nick was amused, he was very frightened of the idea that they were all in someone's sick little game. He was there once before and he hated every minute of it. Nick had already been down this road. Being led to the evidence to be kidnapped and put in a box waiting for death to find him. He hated the very idea of being stuck in someone's twisted and wicked game again and he walked through the undisturbed books looking for anything that caught his eye.

Then, something did, but the odd thing about it is… why he hadn't noticed it before. The trail of blood leading out of the book room and out to where the girl lies dead. Why hadn't he seen it before? He walks around the rows finding where the blood starts, but there was no particular way.

A book catches his eye. The Book of the Dark Shadow Tales was the name and he inches closer to it pulling on another set of gloves. He pulls the book from the shelf and flips it open to find the book written completely in a different language. But, it wasn't that which attracted his attention, it was the bloody handprint on the spine that lured him to it. He bagged it and tagged it before walking slowly and calmly down the row of books until the blood stopped at a single line location.

Nick looks over the area carefully to observe anything he needs to know and then he found the drawstring for the trap door in the floor. He pulls it open and photographs it before walking down the creaky rotten wooden stairs that he could swear led him straight to hell. They went down forever into the cool dark rock filled earth. Why hadn't this stairway been seen from the first floor? Why was it only accessible to the second floor? Nick neither knew the answers to these questions nor even wanted to know the answer as he walks down the stairs.

Lit by the light of wall-mounted torches Nick finally found the bottom of the stairway to hell. It was marvelous, like finding a new universe that no one knew about. It was full of water and a strange boat to take you through the catacombs of the city. Did Vegas even have catacombs? Nick shrugs it off and photographs the dark wooden well-decorated row boat before grabbing the torch and climbing aboard.

It was like rowing through something that the Ancient Romans would have built. For a second he thought maybe the Romans invaded this continent and set up things for them only to be forgotten about under the Earth. It wasn't true and he knew it, but he had no other way of describing the phenomena that he was witnessing.

Tall marble pillars must have been fifty feet at the most holding up even more glorious and well-decorated arches. He rowed through the open waterway in complete awe of everything. He could only feel so small to this vast place. He snapped pictures that he wouldn't ever be able to explain to anyone even if he tried. It was just something so unbelievable.

Something like awe fills Nick as he paddles softly through the tight waterways until he finds himself on the opposite side. It didn't also ruin him that the boat had blood droplets on the seat and the handles to the paddles.

Nick was stunned when he looks around and found a huge marble arch with a grand staircase leading up and away from the canal. Uncertain upon what he will find once he gets to the top he walks carefully quietly slowly to the top to find wooden wonderfully beautiful doors and he opens them to find a massacre. Blood everywhere a complete tragedy and a complete waste of good people. He snaps pictures left and right not knowing what to do. He can't touch them until the coroner arrives, but he couldn't go back and his cell phone had no signal here. It was just his luck that he was frozen right where he stood surrounded by death.

TO BE CONTINUED...