Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. The Lindau Pit Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

THE LINDAU PIT

“Story goes, the entire town picked up and left without word after the earthquake sent all the plumbing and waterworks up through the streets and cracked a shaft down through the arena’s ice surface,” Lena says, looking in the rearview mirror, a grin tickling at the corners of her mouth.

In the backseat is Kelsey, she’s also grinning, simply excited to be there.

Riding shotgun is Tony. “Depends on who you ask,” he says, watching out the window at the endless sea of green, green corn. “Thirty minutes from Lindau, a John Deere plant closed its doors, and the prison lost its government funding. There was an earthquake, though.”

Lena swats absently in Tony’s direction. “You’re no fun.”

Kelsey is the third wheel within the Toyota YJ. She’s newly divorced and finally unchained. She’d given up her freedoms, by and by; then six years into the marriage, she had only virtual friends and asked her husband permission whenever she left the house aside from work. She couldn’t say exactly how it had happened, but it had, and now she had to make up for some lost time. Thankfully, Lena and Tony had remained on the periphery of her doomed relationship like dogs awaiting table scraps. Now, she was all butterflies in the tummy. The scent of the gear alone was like a promise that things do get better.

“Still, you’d think someone would’ve stayed. I mean, people stayed at Chernobyl, right?” Kelsey says. She hasn’t donned her caving gear in close to four years—aside from trying it on before they set out for the abandoned little town on the cusp of the seemingly endless Canadian Prairies. “How does everybody leave?”

Lena waggles her eyebrows, again looking into the rearview mirror. “Some say Satan himself crawled out of that cavern and nary a soul dared stick around. Others say it was mass suicide, people just.” Lena drags a thumbnail across her throat, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth.

Tony shakes his head. “If your father heard you talking like that…”

“Yeah, yeah. He’ll pitch a fit over any old thing,” Lena says, and then after a pause adds, “You know, Dad was asking how you were.”

“Oh?” Kelsey says. “Why?”

Lena huffs. “He thinks women only divorce their husbands because they get demons in them.”

Kelsey has nothing to say to that. Out the window, an ancient grain elevator stands tall, rusty, and seemingly out-of-place amid all that plant-life. A mile from that, down a long, long laneway is a farmhouse with three barns suggesting a major operation, suggesting that one man owns the land as far as her eyes can see, currently. It makes her angry to think about. She walked away from the marriage with nothing but a $10,000 limit on her VISA, leaving behind anything that might’ve been deemed theirs, and some man, likely fifth generation in a line of colonists of European descent, has all this land and will likely accumulate more and more until he dies and passes it down.

It’s another 99 minutes before they reach the town of Lindau. There’s a welcome sign with a flower box beneath it; the box is overrun with tall grass. The sign itself is done in stone, and stands boldly, no matter that rarely do eyes see it. The asphalt is pockmarked and dotted with potholes ranging small to big enough to damage the Toyota, if Lena doesn’t mind them. The buildings have gone grey under the harsh sun and even harsher winters. Boards are over most windows. The lack of graffiti is almost eerie. The nearest town is more than 100 KM away. The nearest Wal-Mart is 150 KM. The nearest hospital is close to 200 KM.

“Arena,” Tony says, pointing to a small sign on a hydro pole, an arrow directing them down a side street.

“Ghost towns are something else, huh?” Lena says, taking the turn, using her blinker despite the complete lack of traffic.

The homes are worse than the businesses. People had lived here, made lives, raised families, and it had all gone to hell. A tricycle on a lawn. A patio set gone to rust. Decorative fountains green with the ghosts of algae past. There was no way they wanted to move.

“Look at that,” Lena says, wheeling around a jagged sewer pipe rising through the crumbled asphalt.

“This is a sad place,” Kelsey says.

“Yeah, but the cave is supposed to be spectacular…though we couldn’t find any footage online.” Tony points again. “Arena that way.”

This sign is in worse shape, but easily legible. Lena takes a right and immediately has to drive onto a lawn of overgrown and windblown weeds to avoid sinking the Toyota in a five-foot crater.

“Jesus squeezus,” she says.

“There it is,” Tony says.

Kelsey leans forward and looks through the windshield at the faded green building with the word LINDAU COMMUNITY CENTRE in off-white huge across its face. Sheet metal and cinderblocks. There are three Ford trucks on rotten tires sitting like dead sentinels in the lot. As Lena takes them closer, the massive chains on the doors become apparent.

—

“Where’d you learn to do that?” Kelsey says.

Tony is kneeling at the heavy padlocks on the fat chains. He has a small kit on the ground before him and shiny little tools in his hands. “Practice,” he says, “and The Lockpicking Lawyer. He’s on YouTube. He sells the lockpicking kits, too.”

“I tried to tell him you can’t just become a lockpicker after watching videos and buying tools.” Lena is loading the packs with all the supplies they’ll need for an overnight in a pit more than 400 metres underground. “Then he proved me wrong.”

Almost as if on cue, the heavy chains clatter to the grey cement of the walkway leading up to the doors. He rises to his feet and yanks on a handle. The hinges cry for oil and a smell plays free. It’s almost like an old paperback; the atmosphere so thick it has a taste that weighs on the tongue. It’s dim beyond the doorway, but its obvious nobody has entered via these doors in a very long time. The dust on the floor is thick and unmarred by footfalls.

Kelsey looks over her shoulder to Lena and says, “How did you find out about this place?”

“That was Tony.”

Tony frowns, cocking his head sideways in a motion a bit like a chicken. “No, you told me.”

Lena quits what she’s doing and scrunches her facial features tight around her nose. “What? No.”

—

Their light beams cut bluely through the dusty atmosphere within the arena. It is a stilled life tableau. There’s a purse on a table next to the automatic skate sharpener. There’s a hockey bag on the floor, sticks stand guard above it, both wooden and heavy. The kind of sticks nobody has used in decades.

The trio say nothing for now, drinking it in, seeking the former ice surface.

Lena reaches a pair of swinging doors with large windows and pushes through. The backside of the boards surrounding the ice surface are in front of her. Tony and Kelsey follow. To their left and right are rising cement bleachers that go halfway around the rink space. Wooden slabs act as benches, bolted into the cement. Multicolored but all drab beneath the dust.

“There it is,” Lena says from the thick poly-glass.

She’s wiped a spot free like a child left in the backseat of a chilly car, and her nose nearly presses against the surface. She reaches down for the bolting mechanism that will open the double doors.

“It looks just how I imagined,” Tony says.

“You haven’t seen even a picture?” Kelsey says.

“I guess it must be a climbing community thing. Let’s every group discover it for themselves,” Tony says.

“Probably explains the lack of foot traffic,” Lena says as she steps onto the perfect, slick cement of the former ice surface. “It’s video that usually gets people out.”

The hole sits on one of the bluelines, through it. It stretches more than five metres across. When they tilt their heads and the lights attached to their scuffed helmets, the shine meets nothing. It’s a straight drop.

“So, what’s at the bottom?” Kelsey says.

“Caves I guess,” Tony says.

“Satan’s lair,” Lena says and begins Hammer Horror laughing.

“Right,” Kelsey mumbles and unshoulders her pack to begin the process of setting up topside. Something is funny here, but perhaps it’s only nerves. She hasn’t been trekking in so, so long.

—

The trio hangs in the darkness, about three metres apart. The exhilaration of possibly freefalling to their deaths has them slowing their descent. The walls around the mouth of the hole are rough, but quickly dropped away from the grand cavern. Almost imperceptibly, moving water can be heard, beneath the heavy thumps of their heartbeats. Each wears a headset, but none has reason to talk. Not yet.

At about 100 metres-deep, the cavern closes in onto itself. The trio continues ascending; their ropes lie puddled around the lips of this secondary mouth.

Once close enough, Lena understands what is lying beneath the coil of her white rope. “Holy shit,” she says, repelling to the lip and touching down with her feet.

Caving, one always expects bugs; in locales like these expects bats; now and then sees reptiles. Never does one think they’ll come across a corpse. The figure is mostly skeleton and clothing. It lies face down. Lena leans in close, hands hovering as if unsure just where to begin. Tony comes down on the far side of the mouth and gets her sentiment immediately.

“Wow,” he says.

The skeleton isn’t in climbing gear. It appears they’re donning a uniform of some fashion: pale shirt tucked into heavy cotton slacks, steel-toed boots on their feet. A yard away rests a dusty ballcap with a mesh back.

“Is that a skeleton?” Kelsey says a moment before her feet touch the floor.

Lena has come to a conclusion and reaches into the slight bulge of the skeleton’s back pocket. She comes away with a wallet. It is thick leather, shiny brown. There are six bucks in singles—a since discontinued denomination. There are several paper cards and coupons, a few photographs, and one laminated card. A driver’s license that had been issued in 1978 and would expire in 1982.

“Fred Kingsley Dorsey, born nineteen-fifty-one. Lived on Welbec Street, Lindau, Saskatchewan. Huh,” Lena says.

“Nobody came for him?” Kelsey says. “That’s insane…how did you guys hear about this spot?”

For a handful of heavy moments, neither Lena nor Tony answer, but Tony says then, “He must’ve been sad about having to leave and came back…suicide probably.”

Lena picks up the ballcap and blows off the crest above the bill. “Lindau Mule Skinners. Huh, that’s funny. Look.”

She hands the hat to Tony. The crest features a cartoon mule in hockey skates and gloves, holding a hockey stick. Beneath the image, in small print, reads the words 1977-78 LINDAU MEN’S LEAGUE CHAMPS.

“Doesn’t this seem a little odd to you?” Kelsey says, meekly.

Tony waggles his tongue against his teeth before he answers. “Perhaps it’s being treated like the Titanic. Respecting the dead where he lies.”

Lena nods and puts everything back into the wallet. She then stows the wallet into the skeleton’s pants pocket. She pats the butt for extra measure.

They begin to set up around the lip in preparation for further descent.

—

Smooth ridges play rings down the walls like the flesh wrinkles of a throat. A trickle of water rides the rings. The blue beams of their headlamps glint blackly off the backs of beetles. There’s a faint reek of feces.

“Must be bats,” Lena says and carries on in the lead.

There are no bat sounds, but that means very little. Their breaths and that trickle of water, the playing of rope through carabiners are the sum of the excursion’s soundtrack.

They continue their slow, careful descent into that mostly undisturbed pit. Bats line the walls, sleeping, fluttering occasionally, but no more than that. Lena pauses a moment. It takes a few seconds, but the others follow suit.

“Bottom?” she says, loudly.

The echo that banks back is shallow, suggesting another platform upcoming.

“Good. If it’s even remotely big enough to sit, I’d like a drink,” Tony says.

Above them, the bats grow active without doing much flying, as if tossing in their beds.

—

“If so few people have come down here, how do you know how deep it is?” Kelsey says.

Before an answer can come, Tony says, “Oh, wow, look at this.” He holds a white leather slipper with a wooden heel and a powder blue bow, about a size five in ladies. “There’s no maker’s marks.”

This platform is much slimmer; their legs dangle as if from the lip of a dock.

Kelsey shakes her head. “What’s it doing here?”

“Fell down the hole,” Tony says simply.

“No, but, isn’t it strange?” Kelsey says, a little panic in her tone.

Tony takes a mouthful from a sugar-free Red Bull and swallows. “Why? Maybe it was up on a catwalk above the ice and it fell down when the quake created the hole.”

Lena leans to her right, pivoting on her elbow to reach all the way over to Kelsey with the slipper. “Maybe there was some hanky-panky going on up there,” she says and then laughs.

Kelsey quickly passes off the slipper. “I guess,” she says.

After they finish their drinks, they set up once again. If the math is correct, this should be the final leg before finding bottom.

—

The walls have spread out, as if they’ve now reached the belly of the cavern. They are dropping into nothingness, the feeling akin to disobeying gravity and rising through a starless night. Despite the space, there’s a claustrophobic atmosphere here. They are more than 400 metres below the town of Lindau, 400 metres below the real world with its cars and capitalism and children on swings and dogs and cats and everything that makes human life, life.

“I think I hear something. Must be close,” Lena says.

The echo plays around them, enveloping them, as if coming from every direction. It is then that high, high above, one of Lena’s carabiners fails and her rope slams and rubs against the jagged rock of the last mouth.

She emits a shriek mingled with a gasp.

“What? What?” Tony says, dropping quickly to come closer to her.

Kelsey winces at all the sounds barreling around the walls. They seem to grow and quicken, the voice coming back at them in booming taunts. She is frozen in place, as frightened as she’s ever been. This isn’t how she felt before her failed marriage when she went spelunking.

“I lost a—ahh!” Lena says as the rope above her goes slack and she plummets. The thump is jarring in its report.

“Lena!” Tony says, repelling fast, finding the bottom in just seconds.

It isn’t flat, but it is smooth. It tilts downward. Kelsey watches one light roll and another slip downward. She takes a deep, deep breath. She can’t simply remain alone here. She has to make a choice: either begin the arduous journey up alone or accept gravity and rejoin her friends.

—

Lena has a broken ankle and likely a concussion. The bottom of the cavern is cool and peculiar. Like a snow hill, everything plays a strangely smooth slope toward a brief platform. Beyond the platform is a vast pool of grey mud. It smells sweet, though not like bat guano.

Lena is panting as Tony does his best to provide first-aid. His huge hands work quickly as Lena bites back the pain. The sweat of agony pebbles her face, running streams over her cheeks, down her neck. Kelsey has one of the high-powered flashlights out and is looking at the cave walls above the mud pool. There are ticks and slashes. Someone has been down here, counting, well into the hundreds, perhaps even a thousand or better. Tony and Lena have no idea, and she has to tell them.

Kelsey waits until Tony falls back, sweaty himself despite the cold atmosphere. “Look,” she says, the syllable riding a shudder. Her beam plays upon the wall.

Tony has the most upper body strength, and by more than a little. “I’m going to climb and once there, I’ll pull Lena. You follow.”

Obviously, the fall has axed their campout. Lena is drinking water and popping Tylenol with codeine. The pain has her shaking.

“Look,” Kelsey says again, shining the light.

“Great, cave painting,” Tony says. “Can you bring my pack? I’ll help pull you up, once I get Lena up.” He’s already created the foot sling for his ascent with a series of carabiners and pulley hitches. “Okay?”

Kelsey shakes her head. She can’t argue, however.

Lena reaches out and takes Kelsey’s hand. She squeezes and Kelsey begins to sob silently.

“This will be okay. It could’ve been so much worse,” Tony says before starting back up the slope, rope trailing behind him like a long tail.

Kelsey keeps her flashlight trained until it no longer reaches him. She listens. The clank of tools and his kicks and pulls will take him upward about a foot every four or five seconds on average, a bit faster to start.

“I don’t know what happened,” Lena says, leaning against her pack, eyes closed, drugs starting to work their magic in her bloodstream. Her grip loosens on Kelsey’s hand.

—

Kelsey sits on the lip of the pond with her knees to her chest and her arms around her knees. Lena is out and the sounds of Tony’s rise are distant and faint. Soon this will be over. She has turned off the flashlight to save on battery power—the beam from her headlamp is minimal by comparison.

Something burps in the mud, gasses escaping. She flicks on the flashlight. There’s a mound amid all that flat mud. It’s about the size of a basketball, perhaps a little smaller. Kelsey is watching it. She’s been to a tarpit and had gotten a little lost in reverie watching the gasses bubble up from the surface before popping. This one isn’t rising any higher, it isn’t popping any sulfuric scents into the chamber.

“Pop,” she whispers before letting her beam rise to the wall.

Those ticks and slashes. Some are older than others, but none look recent.

“There’s nobody down here anymore,” she says to herself before forcing a nervous laugh.

“Hey!” Tony’s voice echoes, growing louder as it plays toward her. “Lena? The headsets aren’t working!”

Kelsey swallows and closes her eyes a moment before answering. “She’s out.” Her flashlight and headlamp point up into the rising blackness.

“Okay…check…her…basket,” Tony says, making the demand clear.

Kelsey turns back to the mud pool as she pushes to stand. The bubble has disappeared. She hurries over to Lena. Everything looks fine. She tugs twice on Lena’s rope.

Tony says nothing more. Lena slides backward a foot. Instantly, she opens her eyes and cries out.

“He’s pulling you up,” Kelsey says.

Lena is wide-eyed, taking hulking breaths through her nose. Her hands go to the rope to steady herself. If either her or Tony had hoped she could use her good foot to climb while the rope retracted, it isn’t happening. Lena continues sliding in reverse, up the slope.

Kelsey gets busy readying herself. Having Tony’s pack as well as hers will slow her, but it beats the hell out of spending the night. The pond burps behind her and while she’s still bent over, she shines her flashlight. Three identical mounds have bubbled up.

“Fuck!” Lena screams.

Kelsey shines her light in that direction. It’s not quite bright enough to make out shapes, but the beam glints off a carabiner that appears to be several feet off the ground. Kelsey moves into overdrive, loading everything as quickly as she can. It’s heavy and clumsy, but far from making things impossible.

Monkey-walking on her fours, she starts up the smooth stone slope. Behind her, numerous bubbles burp in the dark. She doesn’t turn, it’s as if they’re watching her. She’s almost to the top of the sloped floor when the play of a hurrying rope whips through the air, cutting the quiet of the cavern.

Lena screams then, the hard landing silencing her.

Kelsey looks at the heap of her friend, only feet away. Her skull is cracked, blood is oozing from the gaps, from her ears, from her eyes. She is about to scream herself when she hears more rope. Tony has his hands at his sides, nosediving. His head drives his neck into oblivion with a cracking wet thunk, his gear rattling like sleigh bells.

Tony’s corpse is tumbling down the slope. Lena’s corpse is sliding, picking up speed.

Kelsey lifts her hands to her face, losing her balance at the weight of the dual packs. She tumbles down, each impact is jarring her, rattling her brain. She has only the wherewithal to keep herself from sliding into the mud pond. Tony bounces in. His body is sinking slowly. Hands bubble free of the mud and drag him deeper. Kelsey moans, licks at blood pouring from her nose. Her headlamp is out. The flashlight remains lit, only a few feet from her. It plays half-circles as it rolls closer and closer to the lip of the pond, shining its beam against Lena’s lifeless eyes.

She’s side-eying Lena as she reaches for the flashlight. She cannot be alone in the dark, cannot be down here without light. Her hand falls onto the flashlight and she makes to swing the beam around, but something cool and wet envelopes that hand. Kelsey gasps deeply through her nose as a filthy brown hand slides back down into the mud. She brings the light to her chest.

There’s slapping wet motions to her left. Kelsey spins. Three brown figures have risen from the mud and are dragging Lena’s corpse. They’re skinny and wrinkled, making her think of the Grauballe Man. Their hair is plastered to their boney heads, their clothes lumpy and loose upon their frames.

Six burps ring out quickly and Kelsey looks to the mud pond. Those are not bubbles like the ones she’d seen at the tarpit, these are heads, and have risen to just above their brows.

She swallows an invisible ball of terror.

Now, their brows are free, and they peer at her above the murky surf. Eyes black as pitch. Dozens upon dozens of other burps ring out over the large pond. Heads, hundreds of them, pop up.

A great rumbling steals her attention to her left and Kelsey shines the beam there. Muddy, eyes now black as the cavern, Tony’s head rises. He watches her. Kelsey begins panting, hyperventilating. A minute passes and Lena’s head rises. A squeaky creek rings out, clattering offensively around the cavern. Kelsey shifts the beam to the back wall. A double piggyback trio has risen from the pond; the top figure is especially skinny. It’s been mummified, pickled by the mud, turn to rugged leather. This one is scratching a stone next to a single dash. Once it has carved that digit, it continues for another. That done, the carving rock remains pressed to the wall and the figure turns its midnight gaze upon Kelsey, as if asking her only two?

Kelsey frantically shoulders free of Tony’s pack and begins running on her fours, up the slope, knowing they’re after her. She reaches the top of the slope quickly and spins, shining her light. They’ve all risen from the murk, dozens upon dozens upon dozens, and crowd less than ten paces behind her, watching her.

“Go!” she screams.

—

They’d followed her, she saw them clinging to the undersides of the first mouth she’d come to, and then the second. One had reached up and pulled Fred Kingsley Dorsey’s corpse down. The bats had fled at her approach and were now clinging to the underside of the lip of the arena floor as she pulls herself up, seeing light, feeling hope, trying to ignore the soothing voice telling her to let go, to fall, to join them. The people of Lindau hadn’t moved on; they were still here. They are coaxing her to join them, and it sounds so, so good.

She’s listened to enough soothing words, heard enough demands of her; she is free, and she won’t be tricked. The bats flutter around her, but they are less than nothing now. She reaches the smooth cement of the rink floor and inhales deeply of the dusty atmosphere. Her arms are jelly, and her legs are all pins and needles. She crawls until she can walk and walks until she can jog.

Outside, it is early morning. She slithers the heavy chains through the door handles and reengages the padlock. She checks the Toyota, but Tony’s keys must be in his pack. If he has a hideaway spare, she knows nothing of it. She drops the ropes and the ascension harness.

On foot, she heads south, toward the highway and the huge swatch of nothing between her and home. She passes not a soul within the town. She carries on as the sun rises and the fresh, fresh air of the world fills her lungs. Once beyond the town limits, she unshoulders her pack to find her cellphone. She is free. She is alone. She has no one to call.

At the highway, she sticks out her thumb to the slow trickle of traffic. Over the first three hours, six men in a row stop to offer her a ride, but she declines with apologies. The seventh vehicle is piloted by a woman. Kelsey gets in the shotgun seat, her pack between her knees. She can smell herself and it is embarrassing.

“Where ya headed?” The driver is jovial, bouncy, middle-aged, and plain.

Kelsey takes a moment, looking out the window, before saying, “I don’t know,” and begins to sob anew, tears cutting streaks through the dirt on her cheeks.

“Are you okay?” the woman says, merging onto the barren highway.

Kelsey opens her mouth to tell this woman the truth of her ordeal in the Lindau pit. It will sound like insanity. This woman won’t believe her, nobody will. She closes her mouth and shakes her head.

XX