Darcy is Not Dead

4: The Pool of Tears

As kids, Darcy used to pull Julius off of the monkey bars by his ankles. They were old enough to not be on monkey bars, but when Julius came to their middle school, he and Darcy were drawn to each other by their shared wickedness and penchant for chaos.

Alice had heard about their first clash secondhand while in the mess hall where all of the grades mingled. Someone approached her and Darcy's table to ask, "Did you really burrito the new kid in the theater curtain?"

Darcy looked up from her sandwich with a slow smack of her lips. "Yeah. Why?"

"Because he's saying you didn't." Alice only vaguely remember this kid's name because he and Darcy ran in the same circles. His ginger curls were easy to spot. Several years from then when they were in the same prom group, Alice's ma would turn to Alice and say under her breath, "Doesn't he look like Darcy's Irish twin?" He did.

Darcy threw her sandwich down and said, "Where is he so I can tell him to bite my entire ass and call me karma."

"No way! I ain't telling you," he said, but Darcy was already on her feet. They bickered, until they grew rambunctious enough for the neighboring table to figure out what was going on and betray Julius' location.

Darcy bowed to them and sauntered off. Alice slouched behind her lunchbox to shield her eyes from the scene that inevitably broke out when Julius declared that he was up for the challenge. It was the third lunch fight Darcy had gotten in since they were in elementary school. There might have been others before that, but Alice wasn't in school yet to witness it.

Julius won that match, which earned him Darcy's respect. And friendship.

Alice never wanted to fight, but she didn't consider herself a flight kind of girl. As she descended the stairs, however, she almost wished she had taken more from her and Darcy's blow-up boxing mitt fights on their relatives' trampoline. All she had was the mace her father gifted her before they drove back to Donnelley.

With one hand, she held the flashlight. With the other: the mace. The railing was too encrusted with cobwebs to hold.

Alice descended one flight before the haze at the end of her flashlight beam met with a distant glow—lights. She shut off her flashlight to see them better and found it reflecting up against the salted slate walls. Judging by the distance between her and those lights, she figured it was the basement of Olvera Hall.

She flicked her light back on and hurried. At each landing, she half-expected there to be a floor exit, but there never was. Three flights down, the pinkish hue on the walls bled a deep dark red. The plank on the following step was almost elastic under her boot, and the one after that gave with a squish.

Her momentum was too fast to stop.

The third step crumbled.

The ground shot out from under her. Her scream reverberated back in a hollow echo, her arms clambering on the railing. The wood was cushioned by cobwebs and feathery moss that sunk under her fingers as she slipped.

Her heart vaulted into her throat with a hoarse, strained scream.

"No, no, no—" she cried. The railing eased away from the wall and gave a bulbous moan that she felt like slime down to her feet.

She kicked, floundering for the steps ahead of her. The moment she made contact, the plank shot out from the frame and took three others with it before it splashed to the ground below.