Ignoring your instincts again, you creep closer to the mine and activate your phone’s flashlight. You walk up to the cart and look inside, finding a few unrefined gems—ruby, quartz, sapphire. After checking that no one is around, you tuck a few of them into your pocket.
Another sign lays in the dirt, rusted and covered in dust. It says “Danger! Do Not Enter!” painted over a skull and crossbones.
You swallow your fear and step into the mine. After a moment of indecision, you grab the oil lamp at the front in case your phone dies before you leave the mine. With the two light sources stretched out in front of you, you slowly creep farther into the mine, stumbling a few times over the tracks.
Almost immediately, sounds from the outside disappear, plunging you into complete silence. You can’t even hear your own footsteps or breathing. Goosebumps raise on your arms and you pull your jacket sleeves down to your wrists. The hair on the back of your neck stands up.
Even with the combined light of your flashlight and the oil lamp, you can only see about two feet in front of you. You walk slowly, carefully. Your heart thumps against your chest almost painfully, and you are hyper-aware of every nerve in your body.
There is no sign of the skeleton yet, and your anxiety only grows. You begin to think that this was a bad idea, but when you turn around there are three different paths behind you, and you can’t tell which one you came from. You take a moment to think and ultimately decide that the safest course of action is to continue deeper into the mine. Hopefully that way you will eventually exit from the other end of the mine.
You continue in the eerie silence, holding your phone close and tightening your grip on the oil lamp in case you need to use it as a weapon. By this point, you’ve been walking for about twenty minutes. A few feet in front of you, the tunnel starts to lighten, and you sigh with relief, hoping it means you’ve reached the end of the mine.
Instead, the tunnel continues but there is an opening in the wall to the right where the light is coming from. A pit forms in your stomach as you walk into the little cave, your legs trembling.
The first thing you see is candlelight coming from dozens of candles sitting on the floor. The flames flicker and dance across the walls, casting strange shadows. You turn your gaze on the rest of the room and your feet become rooted to the floor.
A small, rickety, wooden table sits in the middle of the cave, looking a hundred years old. A dusty teapot rests in the middle of it, surrounded by matching teacups and saucers. A plate of moldy fruitcake accompanies them, flies buzzing around it hungrily. Four chairs circle the table, and your heart skips a beat as you notice what sits in two of them.
Two bony skeletons. Stringy hair drips from the skull of one of them, but otherwise they are indistinguishable from the one you saw earlier. The hairless one could be the same one you saw, but something tells you it isn’t. It holds a teacup in its skeletal hand. The other two chairs are empty, and that somehow scares you even more than the skeletons.
You want to turn around. You want to run. You want to scream. But your muscles are frozen and you can only watch as the skeletons shift and look at you.
They open their mouths and say in identical, raspy, gravelly voices, “Would you like some tea?”
You finally force yourself to move and spin on your heels to run, but the entrance is blocked by another skeleton. You recognize without a doubt that this is the one you followed, and your entire body shakes as you look at it. Even without eyes, you can tell it is staring at you.
“Join us,” the skeleton says in the same voice as the others and reaches a hand towards you.
A high-pitched scream fills the air. The bony hand touches your flesh, and you know no more.
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