Gina Williams barely had time to scream when the floor opened up beneath her feet and she plunged awkwardly down a cavernous shaft like a Looney Tunes character whose luck had run out. 

“Thanks a lot, Mother!” she screamed as she hit the bottom. Even from beyond the grave, the old hag continued to make her life miserable, this time with a sure concussion and a broken rib or two. 

To say that Gina’s relationship with the late Denise Williams had been problematic from the start was an understatement. It all began with an unwanted late pregnancy that was only seen through because Gina’s father begged her not to abort. After pumping out two girls and a boy in a little over six years, Denise was more than ready to never worry about the miracle of conception again, and when those plans fell through, so did her patience to start the nurturing process all over again.

Gina practically grew up without her positive influence but also without a father who divorced his neurotic spouse two years after she was born. The reason cited was “irreconcilable differences”, a euphemism for her affair with the gardener, a short-lived stint just for the fun and giggles.

When she was not busy being a certified bitch, Denise was a novelist. Her first book, a lascivious sci-fi piece depicting the events of an invasion by genetically altered men, had become a best-seller overnight, spending the following year on the top lists of every bookstore and every newspaper everywhere. The success of her erotic adventure led to the creation of a series, one she spent two decades of her life expanding and milking to perfection. Her passing had left millions of fans in distress for being deprived of reading the next chapters in their beloved collection.

As for Gina, she couldn’t care less. If her mother had been such an absent figure through and through, then why would she be bothered by her death? If it weren’t for her sisters, she wouldn’t even have attended the funeral let alone the reading of the will. In hindsight, staying away from both events would have been the right choice. 

At the wake, she had surprised everyone by lambasting her mother’s achievements with a glass of red wine in her right hand. The damning speech was a spur of the moment that lasted about ten minutes but it could have been an hour or more had she not been dragged away by her brother, accusing her of being drunk.

“No, I’m not!” She replied, pushing him against the appetizer table. “I wish I was, though. Go get me a bottle, will you?”

“I think you should head back to your hotel before things get even uglier,” Jake retorted, his angry fists threatening violence.

“You’re a fucking spoilsport, you know that?”

“Better that than whatever it you’re being right now. She was your mother, too. Show some respect!”

“Why if she never respected me? She was not a good person and you know it so don’t you dare try to gaslight me into thinking otherwise. If you had a spine, you would be ashamed of the things she said and did while she was still alive.”

“There’s no point in trying to talk to you when you’re like this. Just leave, okay?”

“Already gone...” Gina stormed out of the house without looking back. She ended the night, not with one empty bottle but two and the promise of a splintering hangover the following day.

During the reading of the will, it was her turn to be surprised. While her siblings received cars, money, and even control over her mother’s literary estate, she got a house. Well, more like a shit hole in the middle of nowhere bought one crazy Summer to serve as a secondary writing spot. Denise never really used it and so whatever value the property once had was lost to years of decay and neglect. 

“What the hell am I going to do with this?” she asked when she received the deed of the property and the keys to go with it.

“Whatever you wish, Miss Williams, “ the executor replied. “The house is yours now.”

“Right, but it’s fucking worthless! You can keep it for all I care.”

“That’s not how this works and I wouldn’t be so quick to pass judgment. My advice is that you visit the house and draw your own conclusions instead of relying on years of prejudice against your mother. There may be more to this place than you suspect. Have a good day.”

The balding man’s strange words didn’t go unnoticed and so, on a stormy weekend, she rented a car and drove approximately three hundred and fifty miles to find her mother’s so-called secluded haven, a house so old and decrepit it would even scare a ghost wanting to live there.

Gina hated everything about it from the dusty furniture to the cracks in the walls and the empty painting frames left behind in a corner. The overgrown foliage both outside and inside the house was a sanctuary of the creepiest crawlers alive and the smell - God, the smell! - was that of Death incarnate. There was absolutely nothing that could be salvaged in there without a lot of money and effort, both things she lacked.

“More to this place, my ass!” she said, resenting the executor’s words as well as her own curiosity. Five minutes on the property had sufficed to never want to go there again and if the entire place was to burn down that night, it would probably qualify as an act of mercy.

“Okay, I’ve seen enough!” she clicked her heels and headed toward what remained of the main door. The wooden boards creaked under her feet and then, without warning, darkness claimed her, pulling her body into a subterranean new reality that was as confusing as overwhelming.

After falling for about a second, Gina landed on her back on what appeared to be a stack of dried hay. As she rolled away from it, she was happy to have it break the fall. Her muscles were sore and she was bleeding from a small gash on her right leg. Panting heavily, she got up and peered into the world she had fallen into, a relic of bygone years.

“What is this place?” she thought, reaching for the inner pocket of her winter jacket to see if her smartphone was still intact. The answer was yes, so she turned on the flashlight and shot a beam of white light through her dark surroundings.

She was in a tunnel, one of many in an interconnected system that ran under the house and beyond. Water was dripping from two small fissures to the left, perhaps a sign there was a spring nearby. A few meters ahead rested a handful of wood boxes with leftovers of electric wiring and two broken lightbulbs. 

Gina directed the light toward the tunnel’s ceiling and spotted an old electric installation running across its length. It appeared intact despite having no current run through it. The tunnel split into two in front of her with two other passageways snaking behind her. However, only one of them featured the lights up top, perhaps showing her the path she was to follow.

“Okay, Gina, think...” she muttered, glancing upward at the hole that had brought her there. The shaft was incredibly smooth as if it had been drilled by heavy machinery and it was also impossible to climb without the proper equipment. She needed to look for an alternate exit and the wiring on the ceiling was her safest bet to do so. “Forward or backward?” she continued.

Forward. Always forward. She had tried going back many times in her life, always with unsatisfactory results, and while the comparison didn’t exactly apply to the situation at hand, it’s what she told herself to stay focused. Gina wasn’t a pessimist but she wasn’t an optimist either. The reality was that she was underground with no cell service, in the middle of nowhere. No one knew her whereabouts so waiting for a possible rescue team was out of the question, and if she couldn’t find a way out before her smartphone’s battery drained she would be forced to spend the night in the dark down there.

“Not happening...” she concluded, limping forward. Her leg hurt more than it appeared at first glance but the pain was still tolerable. She hugged the wall to her right and followed the tunnel.

As she walked, she mused about where she was and the ultimate purpose of that cavernous system. Had it been something her mother paid someone to do or a remnant of Prohibition days? She saw no reason for the former so she hoped for the latter, along with a moonshine stash waiting for her at the end of the tunnel.

The path she was on continued for about one hundred feet before splitting again, this time in three different directions. The corridor to the left was narrower and ended abruptly in a pile of sharp rocks. The one in front of her led to a hole so deep and dark that her flashlight couldn’t light up so she veered to the right, dragging her injured leg until a hint of phosphorescent yellow light glimmered in the distance.

“Hmm, what is this now?” she continued down the chosen path until it ended in a circular chamber where things got even more bizarre.

The first thing she noticed was a patch of bioluminescent vines creeping from the ground and slithering across the irregular walls. They had red spiked thorns protruding from the leaves and exuded a sulfurous-like liquid as they intertwined in gruesome ways. They resembled nothing she had ever seen before as if they had been created in an alternate dimension and then brought forcefully to our world. Beyond the first cluster stood a man-made construct, a workshop with hints of gold and silver and forgotten objects who had resisted the test of time. She saw vials filled with gooey, bubbling substances with all the colors in the rainbow, ceramic containers lined side by side, some chipped on the inside, and others held together by little more than a fine coat of dust. An alembic lay next to them as well as a small bellow and a pair of tongs. On a stool to the right, there were two alumina crucibles. A black leather-bound tome whose pages were of the same color as the impossible plants growing all around was half-open on the ground.

Gina limped toward it and picked it up. While perusing its contents, she found transmutation formulas and complex schematics for building other pieces of equipment. The scribbles on the margins of the pages had a feminine touch to them, the shapes of the letters leaving no room for doubt. Her mother had made them.

“What the fuck?” she lay down the book on the workbench. “What were you doing messing with alchemy stuff, old woman?”

The strange room offered no response, only a deafening silence that made the hairs on the back of Gina’s neck stand up. From the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a ghostly figure moving across the chamber but when she turned around to face it, nothing was there. Opposite the workshop, she spotted a large rectangular tank filled with the same collection of viscous multicolored substances she had just looked at and the strange odor coming from it almost made her throw up.

“Jesus, did something die in here?”

No, or at least nothing she could see past the goo. Reaching for the pair of tongs, she stirred the inside of the container, and a seed the size of a tennis ball floated upward, followed by two more that were slightly smaller. The seeds were dark green with golden specks irradiating from the center in a whirlwind shape. The same pattern could also be seen on a page of the book she had found, but there was no mention of what it was.

“Hmm...” Gina said, her bewilderment growing by the second. “What were you doing here, mother, and why?”

Gina looked at her phone, the battery draining faster than she hoped. As intrigued as she was by everything she had witnessed on her little forced detour underground she had to go back to searching for an exit. With nowhere to go past the alchemical lab, her only option was to return to her entry point and take the downward path but first...

She took off her jacket and wrapped the book and the three mysterious seeds in it. Once she got back to the big city, she intended to have someone analyze them to find out exactly what was happening down there. As she finished her preparations, the words of the executor came back to her once more, making her wonder if he knew of the existence of that subterranean network or not. Mr. Davies had been a long-time friend of her mother’s, and occasional lover as well, so yes, there was a possibility, albeit slim, that his earlier remarks had something to do with her surprising discoveries, but she could figure the details later.

Gina took a deep breath and started the way back. The pain in her leg had subsided and she was no longer bleeding. When she returned to the place where she had fallen through she heard a whooshing sound and the lights above her suddenly turned on. Startled by yet another enigmatic event, she pushed through the other tunnel and after walking for three minutes in a straight line, came across a rusty metal ladder that led to an open well at the back of the derelict house. A full moon hung in the leaden sky, and the cold rain soaked her long and curly brown hair. Once she got to the car, she turned on the heated seat covers and rested her head against the back of the chair. That little underground excursion had not been part of the plan and could have gone terribly wrong if she had broken something in the fall. Thanking whatever gods lived above the stormy clouds, she unwrapped her strange findings and sat there for a few minutes, thinking of her mother and what other secrets she had taken with her to the grave. 

“And why did you leave me this place, huh?” she spoke out loud as if she were sitting right next to her. “We never got along, so what’s the point of all this? What do you want from me?”

So many questions that needed answers... Gina sighed and reached for the largest of the seeds, holding it in the palm of her right hand as if it were a precious stone dug up from the bowels of the earth. It was cold, heavy, and rather unpleasant to the touch, so she put it back, wrapped it out of sight, and set a course on the car’s GPS to the nearest settlement where she could find a place to sleep.

Had she bothered to look in the rearview mirror as she drove away, she would have seen the disembodied apparition of her mother floating solemnly by the house’s decaying porch with an evil smile on her lips.