[i]Deep below Hallesdale there was a cavern. In the 1850's it had been full of gold, which of course had been nearly all mined up. Nearly. Over half the prospectors had vanished in the expansive, mazelike network of dripping tunnels and gaping holes. It would have been easy to get lost for good there, even in a group. Rest had decided it was a cursed place and had left the site to go home. Four hundred and seventy of them. Over the next fifty years, those who had returned to their families had gone missing too. Them, and every occupant in the structure they had lived in. Homes emptied. Apartment complexes left barren. Entire ritzy hotels had gone silent. They had left the blackness of the cavern, but it hadn't left them. Hadn't forgotten their scent. 
Yes it had been a big deal back then, town criers barking out the mysterious tragedies until their lungs were sore. But time had a way of hiding things, plopping them into obscurity. It hadn't been a war, afterall. Humans never forgot wars. 

A mossy skull rolled down a pale yellow mountain. It was no mountain of stone, but of bones. As high as a pyramid. The dark thing on top shifted and flopped restlessly, a ribcage tumbling down after the skull. It stirred and awoke. A whirring, a flapping. No excitement, only a dull ardor. Cleaving through the musty air, through slimy tunnels and snaking passages, and then straight up. It went towards pinprick of light, like a single star in an empty universe. 

The janitor of Hallesdale, Hubert Baterman, sighed as he trudged across the empty hallway, contemplating yet another day that he couldn't live out his dream of being a concert pianist. He felt like a Squidward. Oh yes he had seen many episodes of Spongebob. How could he not, when his four year old boy never stopped watching that show?

He opened his janitorial closet and stepped in to put up a broom. 

[b]"Shit monkeys!"[/b]

He stepped in alright. And his boot had plunged right through the old wooden floor and into a hole. Weren't these places supposed to have concrete foundations!? Bracing his hands on the wall, he pulled his foot out and contemplated just how much trouble the college would be in for this. What if a hurricane came? Without a solid foundation it'd...

Baterman's flesh crawled up his arms. Huge goose pimples erupted up and down his body as the hair on the back of his neck stood up. A strange vibration, very faint, had passed through him. It felt bad. A chilled wind came up through the hole and he shuddered. The wind was stale, musky, drenched in old fear. Then, the oddest thing happened. Everything went black and he felt weightless. He looked up, squinting against the rushing air to see a circle of light growing rapidly smaller, until it was a pinprick. There was an intense pressure on his ankle, like a clamp. At last his senses returned, and he screamed. Baterman would go on screaming even after they landed, even as it went to work on him. He'd scream until his vocal cords broke.

It cared little for the noise the soft little biped made. What it did care about was his smell. He had the scent of a child and woman on his clothing. Perhaps from the hug he had shared with his loved ones this morning before heading off to work. 

It was a cool night, brisk and moonless. That evening a shadow passed over the Baterman household. In two days the media would be all over the disappearances, but there was little chance it would be connected to a hole in a college janitorial closet. At least, not connected by ignorant humans...
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