Chapter Text
So, you broke into an abandoned museum on Christmas Eve.
The trip wasn't meant to be solo. In fact, you spent the months prior carefully coordinating the schedules of a bunch of sorta-kinda-friends you met online. You could classify the group as urban explorers. Loosely, anyways. There were your usual hobbyists and delinquents, but a few members of the group were creative types: photographers that stuck around for the sights and an artist that occasionally dabbled in decrepit architecture. The location you picked appealed to everyone's interests, which made it all the more shocking when the cancellations rolled in. A sudden pivot into wedding photography, a hiatus due to respiratory illness, more pressing plans made with people that were actually considered friends... by all accounts the trip wasn't happening.
And yet, here you were months later: a solitary soul framed against the darkened sky, your boots slick with slurry as you followed the local railway to a forgotten terminal.
The tracks fed directly into the building, and you were pleasantly surprised to find that the platform to your right led to the lobby entrance. It took a bit of time for you to maneuver your way up, but you soon found yourself peering through the glass doorways.
You couldn't get a full view due to some downed shutters, but the interior looked remarkably preserved. There were shapes in the far darkness that you could only assume were either a front desk or security station. The tiles closest to the entrance were gleaming underneath the moonlight with a level of shine that made staring for too long hurt. The cleanness was ruined only by several flowers spray painted across the ground and a series of marks. A closer inspection revealed the marks to be remnants of a game of hopscotch.
Great! If a bunch of kids could sneak in here then you wouldn't need any of the tools you brought. And so, you made your way up and down the platform. None of the staff and utility doors on your side were unlocked, thus forcing you to shuffle your way back down and across the other side. It was the same story here: except one of the doors was... uniquely dirty.
Urban exploration and grime kind of went hand in hand, but this was dirty dirty. A pitch-black and noxious dirty that slipped right past your mask. It looked like the door was smeared with tar, or maybe oil? But you've never seen either of those things in your life to be certain. Either way: if it smelled like it could kill you, it probably would. You briskly moved past, because the smell really was unbearable.
Creak.
You whipped around immediately. The door was ajar. It wasn't noticeable before with how unreflective the substance was, but the door was ajar.
Hopscotch. Shoddy ass graffiti. Children.
Christ almighty.
You had half a mind to write a message for them: maybe don't put your toddler hands on chemicals just because you were lazy?? But it did take two hours or so to hike up the abandoned rails, so you could ignore their egregious risk-taking this one time.
Your boot shimmied its way between the door and its frame.
... Yeah. You could excuse them alright. After all, they did save you the trouble of touching this stuff yourself.
You pushed your way into a hallway so foul smelling that you had to step back out and let the scent dissipate. At the end of the darkened hall, indicated by a speckled plaque, was a stairway that you quickly shoulder-checked your way into. The resounding bang was loud, but not enough to drown out the roar of your own heart as you leaned over the railing to bear witness to the museum's infinite depth. Not even your flashlight—the strongest one you owned—was able to reach the stairwell's concrete bottom.
Warmth surged over you as you giggled in disbelief. A familiar feeling was stirring up in your chest again, that bullheaded, juvenile pull to assert and disprove.
Truthfully, your group backing out of this trip wasn't a surprise, because each cited the same concern: Gardenview was too dangerous.
Local forums spoke of cryptids roaming the surrounding woods and train tracks, superstition you pointedly ignored even when faced with reports of "strange snakebites" that caused some kind of acute amnesia. People that ventured near the museum would come stumbling back down into civilization—or be found by a search party—completely out of it. Rainbow, devil by the tracks, train train train did you hear it? Tick tick tick it wound up, it ran me over, tick tick tick it wound up, over me, over, over.
The building was supposed to be demolished several times over, some reports said. But it never was. Its old owners had some advance power setup so that the museum could run on its own grid. Water, electricity, and as the rumors claimed: gas. Entirely self sufficient. No one understood how it worked or how to dismantle it, just that it was strange. And anything strange in these parts was dangerous.
And so an entire plot of land and the surrounding woods was deemed haunted just like that—because a bunch of kids and teens and adults with no wilderness experience got high, bitten by very normal and probably venomous snakes, or sick from the stinking black chemicals all over the place, and then the incompetent town pinned that bad press on some power grid too advanced for them to take advantage of.
And your group really believed that shit enough to abandon you?
Ha. You had several gifts wrapped up in your backpack that you chose months in advance for everyone, but since they were too cowardly to tell you they simply didn't want to spend the holiday with you, that you were only considered a friend during planned excursions and not outside of them?
You'd take those gifts. You'd take on Gardenview, crawl through as much of its interior as possible, grab some souvenirs as proof of exploration, and then spend Christmas riding the highs of superiority.
There was nothing wrong with this place. You were just surrounded by a bunch of spineless bastards.