She did good. She listened and came through the hole without hesitation. She even resisted the urge to look back. Trust me, I know from experience that those looks back can be deadly.

I stood and looked around as I helped her to her feet. We weren’t on the other side of the building as I thought. We were still inside the place, but in a small enclosure. I looked closer and saw that the hole we’d crawled in through had been some sort of entry. The overgrown tree roots had both sealed and ripped apart what had once been a door. The rip was the hole we’d come through. It was the only way in, or out.

“Oh god,” Sabrina whispered, piecing together what I already had.

We were trapped.

Outside in the main area, we could hear the creatures cautiously moving around, but they were getting braver by the second. I looked at the hole, no bigger than a basketball, but the edges were shredded steel. There was a chance they could reach inside and grab us. There was also a chance, if they were as strong as I feared, they could peel back the tears and come in after us.

I stumbled back away from the hole and my feet kicked a pile of what I wished were sticks and debris, but I knew that hollow sound. Only one thing makes that sound: bones.

I took out my lighter and sparked it for only a second; long enough for Sabrina and I to see the chamber we were in. It was a cell, steel, cold gray with no windows, just the sealed door. There were bones on the floor, whole skeletons. At first glance they appeared human, but the skulls were larger, and the limbs were longer and thicker. It didn’t take a genius to see they were the bones of creatures like the ones outside the chamber. But why were they here, and how?

Listening to the nervous snorts and grunts outside the hole gave me some possible insight. If the creatures had put the remains in the hole, I doubted they would be afraid, but if this place had been a laboratory where they were captured, or raised, or grown, or whatever the fuck crazy people do with monsters in labs, then that would explain their fear.

I didn’t care at that moment, but the idea that these legendary creatures of the woods were created in a lab, or at one time captured for study intrigued me. Sabrina must have been having a stroke. For Speculator Magazine, her magazine, something like this was like finding the Holy fucking Grail.

Sabrina had moved to the corner farthest from the hole, and she was looking at a skull in the pile of bones, a particular skull.

I leaned down to her. “What is it?”

“Look.”