Michelle flattens her body against the Scary door, breathing hard. That thing, possibly Jenny's putrid corpse, got a grip on one of her earrings and nearly yanked it right out. Michelle puts a hand up to check for blood. The cheap hoop has snapped in half, and she unfastens it and drops it. She'll have to get a new pair when all this is over.

The girls are clustered a few feet away from her, and she walks over to join them.

"Jenny's looking good, isn't she?" she says conversationally. They ignore her, which is sort of fucking rude, but it wasn't a good joke anyway. She tries very hard not to think about James.

"Let's keep going," Erin says, and Orla and Clare follow her further down the tunnel.

"Hold on, what if James is behind a different door?" Michelle says, hurrying after them. "We could be going the wrong way. Don't fucking ignore me, Erin, I'm right."

Erin doesn't even acknowledge Michelle's hand on her shoulder, and being told that she could be wrong is usually enough to bait her into a towering rage.

"Hello? Erin? Answer me, you dick." Michelle waves her hand in front of Erin's face, and Erin doesn't bother to smack it away. She just looks straight through Michelle like she's not even there.

"Clare?" Michelle tries, her voice small, and Clare brushes past her and ignores her.

"Fuck." Michelle stands there, staring at her own hands, until the light of the headlamp is far in the distance. She looks real enough to her own eyes.

The girls don't come back for her. Michelle starts hurrying after the headlamp, not quite running because there's the smallest chance this might just be an elaborate joke and she doesn't want them to know it got to her.

"Slow down! You motherfuckers left me behind."

Michelle can't see her feet in the dark and she slows down so she doesn't break her ankle. The light bobs and drifts further and further away.

"Fuck," Michelle says and gives up, leaning her back against the wall. Is she dead? She doesn't feel dead, but that doesn't really mean shit. She pinches her arm, hard, and it just hurts. She doesn't wake up. It's real fucking dark down here, wherever she is.

A stab of blind panic makes Michelle stumble blindly away from the light, back towards the door, until she remembers Jenny's zombie corpse behind it and stops, sinking down onto the floor this time. None of it seemed quite so scary with the girls in front of her, and not just because a murderer would get to them first.

Michelle might die down here. Her mouldering corpse will be stuck down here forever, and even her friends won't know where she is, or won't care, which is worse. Her ma's just going to take down Michelle's photo from the mantelpiece, like she did with Niall, and never speak her name again.

She's just another Derry kid, in the end, and they don't last long.

Michelle's sort of distantly aware that she's sobbing and gasping for breath, but that seems a reasonable fucking reaction to being abandoned to fucking die in a fucking tunnel by her best friends in the fucking world. She can feel her throat closing up.

"You – arsehole – motherfucking – clown pedo," she manages. Even the arsehole motherfucking clown pedo ignores her.

Michelle is going to die down here, and no-one's going to find her, because no-one fucking cares about her.

Orla stops, and Erin peeks over her shoulder. The tunnel splits in two in front of them. Both options look slimy and dark and even smaller than the first tunnel.

"Any of you have some string?" Erin asks.

"Why do we need string?" Clare hisses from behind her.

"So we don't get lost. Jason in the labyrinth, he had string and he didn't get lost."

"I have string," Orla says, passing Erin what looks like an old grubby shoelace. "And who's this wee Jason chap?"

"How's that going to keep us from getting lost, though?" Clare says.

Erin stares at it for a while.

"Well, you know, the string …" She shrugs.

"We're all going to die down here," Clare says matter-of-factly. "There's no use panicking, I've accepted it."

"We should put down breadcrumbs like Hansel and Gretel," Orla says.

"The birds ate all the breadcrumbs and then they got eaten by a witch, so that's not fucking helpful," Erin snaps. "Come on, we'll just go right at all of them. Then we can remember all the turns."

They take the right passage, then the right again when it branches again. The third time, they end up at an intersection that looks exactly like the first one, down to the moss growing over the doors.

"No breadcrumbs," Orla says, looking at the ground, and Erin tries very hard not to scream.

"We'll go back," she says firmly.

Three left turns later, they're at another intersection.

"I told you we're going to die down here!" Clare says. Erin looks at each passageway carefully.

"Maybe there's a secret door," she says, but she knows that's a vain hope. She pokes a few likely-looking spots on the tunnel wall anyway, just in case.

"These alien cultists don't even have an interesting lair like they do on X-Files," Orla says, sounding immensely disappointed.

There's a sudden rush of air out of one of the side passageways, that sounds a little like someone sighing, and the tunnel around them fades to pitch black.

"What the hell was that?" Clare says. Erin can still see her and Orla, just nothing else.

"It's obviously just a projector," Erin guesses. "They have those in Hollywood, to make all the sets look real."

Concrete walls appear behind Orla's head, and Erin gestures at them to prove her point.

"I wouldn't keep putting your faith in Hollywood, girls," a low voice says from behind them. Erin damn near jumps out of her skin. "Those movies, they lie to you."

There's a clown standing in one corner of the concrete room, in front of the door. The only door.

"It's the pedo clown cultist murderer!" Clare wails, and ducks behind Erin.

"Aye, movies do lie to you," Orla says calmly. "Like about Godzilla. I was dead disappointed when Erin told me he wasn't real."

The clown looks blank for a second, then keeps talking.

"Little girls who thought they could save the day, just like in the movies. You haven't done so well, have you?"

"We'd be doing fucking great if it weren't for the maze this place is," Erin says, feeling a little offended.

"Where's your friend Michelle?"

The question hits her like a bucket of cold water.

"We forgot Michelle! How the hell did we forget Michelle?"

"She was with us!" Clare says, then frowns. "Well, she was with us during the scary doors, and then we got out, and we just –"

"Forgot her, and fucked off on our merry way without her," Erin finishes. This is her worst fear. The girls may seem like they're an egalitarian group, but really everyone knows she's the leader, and everyone's safety is her responsibility, and she's lost James and now Michelle too.

"You ran away and you left your friend all alone to die," the clown says in a sing-song tone. "You selfish, selfish little girl."

Suddenly all the fear in Erin's mind is pure fury.

"I'm not fucking selfish, and I'm not a little girl, you fucking arsehole," she says. "I care about my friends, enough that I went into a creepy old abandoned church full of clown rapists to get James back, and I'm going to find Michelle from wherever you've kidnapped her, and you will wish you'd never been fucking born. And I'm sixteen, which is practically an adult!"

The clown takes a step back, looking a little shaken.

"Don't antagonize him!" Clare hisses.

"That was some craic, though," Orla says, and Clare nods.

"It was, just please don't do it again."

"The three of you are all alone down here, and very lost, and nobody knows you're here," the clown says. Erin had almost forgotten he was there. "And there's nasty things in these tunnels." He grins, showing a mouth full of far too many very pointy teeth.

"And I suppose you're going to murder us and eat us or some such," Erin says, rolling her eyes. "I mean, that's not even very original."

"Well, I will do all of that," the clown says, looking a little offended. "But first I'm going to make sure you're terrified."

There's a scratching sound almost too low to hear, and then one of the walls explodes inward, throwing dust over all of them. Erin feels the boots hitting the ground before she can hear it. A militia march out of the wall in formation, their faces covered in balaclavas and carrying very nasty-looking rifles.

"Why are there Provos down here?" Clare asks.

"It's a lair, obviously it has a secret passage through a wall. What sort of lair doesn't have a secret passage, Clare?" Erin says.

"Is that Robert from down the road?" Orla asks, and waves hopefully at one of the men.

"Are any of you going to help us look for James and Michelle?" Erin demands, and when the men look at her in confusion she waves her knife-containing hand at them impatiently. "Then don't stand around in our way."

The Provos vanish the way they came, leaving the clown alone again. He seems – shorter, maybe. His hair's a little droopy.

"Are you scared of me?" the clown asks, and Erin rolls her eyes.

"Obviously not, eejit. There's three of us and one of you, and we're armed."

"I'm scared," Clare says. Erin ignores her.

"You should be scared of me. You should be very, very scared." It sounds more whiny than menacing.

"Aye, sure we should be. Now make like the rest of your friends and get the hell out of our way." Erin waves the knife at him, and the clown grins, bows, and steps back through the door and into pitch darkness.

"I'll be seeing you!" he calls.

Erin brushes some of the dust off of her arms, which doesn't really help. Orla and Clare both look like they've been rolled in dirty snow, or very grey powdered sugar, and Erin's sure she doesn't look much better.

"That was wicked," Orla says cheerfully.

"How did you do that?" Clare asks, astonishment in her voice. "How'd you just – tell them off like that?"

Erin shrugs modestly and quotes her ma.

"Plenty of men talk like they're big and scary, but it's just because they don't expect a girl to talk back. You just have to be very stern with them and they leave you in peace."

"Still, that was dead brave, even if you knew we weren't in real danger," Clare says, and Erin grins.

"Thanks, Clare, don't mention it. Or do, if you want, flattery is the sincerest form of – something. Now let's go rescue everyone."


Michelle's having the worst day of her life, while Erin's approaching this entire thing with Scooby-Doo logic.

Setting notes:

The X-Files was an incredibly popular sci-fi show that you've probably all already heard of, with the plot centering around a shadowy government conspiracy to cover up the existence of aliens. It was an American show, but began airing on BBC in 1994.

The line Erin's butchering is "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", by fellow Irish literary great Oscar Wilde.