Running around campus at night always gives me a rush. Two beams of light – our phones on flashlight mode – led the way as we hurried into the October wind, the old stone dorms sleeping in the dark around us, eerie dark clouds shifting in the deep purple sky above the lake. It was close to curfew, and everyone was already in their dorms. Everyone except us. We were in disguise – Pat still in the fake beard, me in the cowboy hat – and it was easy to imagine we were spies on a secret mission.

‘Here,’ Pat said suddenly. He tugged down the fake beard so it hung down the front of his fleece like a scarf.

‘Wait …’ I frowned and looked around suspiciously.

Before, when I’d noticed those spooky clouds gathering over the lake, I hadn’t totally realized that we were heading towards the lake – and now we stood mere feet from the stone steps that led down to that infamous pathway …

‘Oh HELL, no!’ I spluttered, my voice ringing out in the cold air. ‘You want to walk around the LAKE with me? If you think I’m the kind of girl who wants to walk around the LAKE, then clearly you’ve taken one too many hockey pucks to the face …’

‘Not there,’ Pat corrected me impatiently, waving his hand towards the lake. ‘Here. Right here.’

He shone his phone light down at his Chuck Taylors. He was standing on a metal grate.

‘The sewer?’ I said.

‘Trust me.’ He squatted and started turning the crisscross metal grate.

I sighed. ‘Well, we’ve been flirty-texting for a few weeks now, so I guess it was inevitable – this was the time in the relationship when you’d show me your underground lair.’

I squatted to help Pat lift the heavy grate and push it over into the grass. Kneeling on either side, we shone our lights down into the void.

‘I’m going in,’ Pat declared cheerfully.

‘WHAT?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Are you serious?’

But already he was lowering himself into the hole, gripping the grass on either side, and then he disappeared completely into the darkness.

‘Come down!’ his echoey voice called up to me. ‘There’s steps!’

It turned out to be true. Of course, by the time I confirmed that, I had already stuffed my iPhone in my jacket pocket, tightened the laces on my motorcycle boots, gritted my teeth and accepted my impending death. Then I lowered myself down into the hole, my arms trembling (friggin’ fake fitness-test pull-ups AGAIN!), flailed my legs in hopeless panic for several adrenaline-fueled seconds, and finally, with relief, found somewhere solid to rest my feet – a wooden platform cut into the side of the tightly packed earth wall.

There were steps.

It wasn’t long before, using the wooden steps as a ladder, I touched down on the soft dirt bottom of the – Where the hell was I?