Excerpt: With Strange Aeons

They drew near a stone tower, roughly 30 feet tall. Stones lay around the base, some looked like chunks that had fallen off of the tower, but on closer inspection some were much larger and embedded deeply in the ground in a pattern, like a poor man's Stonehenge.

"Careful," Leo said, "it looks unstable. Let's study the outside before we try to go in."

"Is that a door up there?" Mike asked, pointing to the top of the tower on the side that was still intact. "A door to nothing?"

Leo looked where Mike was pointing. "Could it have connected to another structure? Something that was dismantled and removed, or made of wood that's rotted away?"

"It's possible, but I don't see any signs of a foundation for it, or any way it would have connected to the tower," Don said.

"We'll have to climb up there and see," Raph said. "C'mon, there's a staircase inside."

They joined him standing around the ground level entrance. Inside the structure was cool and dark. A steep stone staircase wound around the wall. Otherwise the tower was narrow and featureless.

"I'm just gonna ask the obvious question here. How could a whole group of people get lost in here?" Mike asked.

"Could this be the wrong ruins? Maybe this is just a watchtower, or--"

"An outhouse," Mike said.

"--and there's another structure nearby," Leo finished, ignoring Mike.

"Let's take a look," Raph said impatiently, and started up the staircase quickly.

"Raph, it's falling apart, it's not safe!" Leo called.

"So stay behind with your feet safely on the ground and let me go," Raph said.

Don nodded. "It's safest if only one of us goes. It's more likely to collapse if we put more weight on it," he said pragmatically. "Raph's right... kind of."

Leo crossed his arms and waited. "Well?" he called to Raphael.

"Nothin'," Raph replied, nudging a piece of rubble out of the upper door with his toe. "Just trees."

"Well, six people didn't walk into this tiny space and never come back," Leo said tersely. "A New York City phone booth could hold more people. This is the wrong place, or Mari was having a joke on us -- or her students are having one on her."

"I dunno, they seemed pretty serious when we saw them in the woods," Mike said.

"Too serious," Raph agreed, sitting on the steps about halfway down. He and Mike exchanged a guilty look for scaring them.

"But... people could be in danger... so we have to continue the rescue mission until we know otherwise," Leo sighed.

"You heard her last night at the farmhouse," Don said, "She was really panicked. If her story wasn't true, then she's either a great actress or she hallucinated the whole thing. Let me think a second. Maybe we're missing something major here." Don knelt near the wall with a flashlight from his pack and leaned down to take a closer look at it. The dangling ends of his mask fluttered in a slight draft.

"Don!" Mike said.

"Hmm?"

"Look!" Mike said, pointing at it.

Don saw it and moved his hand toward the wall trying to determine the source. "I think there's a fissure here." He prodded a large stone in the base of the wall, experimentally. "This stone is loose, and look, there's a handhold... help me shift it."

It took a while to move several loose stones to reveal the tunnel. Raph muttered about how much easier secret passages always looked in movies. A lot of cold, stale air was blowing out of it, which as they all knew from a lifetime of living in the sewers was an indication that the tunnel went somewhere and connected with the surface. Don studied the structure, noting how it had been constructed so that a portion of the space under the stairs was hollow, and the loose stones only appeard to be part of the wall, while the ones around them bore the weight.

The stones they removed were marked with a design on the back. They laid them out and a pattern emerged -- a complicated sort of pictograph. The tower started really feeling creepy for the first time.

"'S kinda tight," Raph said, peering into the tunnel. "Looks like it opens up once you get inside."

"Well, it's a good thing none of us is claustrophobic," Leo said, preparing to go in.