. so i figured it was either too long, or, i don't know, but whatever. so i shortened it a bit. please read and tell me what you think. thanks a lot. 
The Workout Closet
Bobby Dunwood was lying on his back. The room was spinning. “I’m feeling pretty rebellious lately,” he said through closed teeth. The slurred words struggled, but they managed to escape and reach their destination. “It’s just like…I don’t know…I wanna do something bad.”
His eyes were closed, and a bout of laughter nearly took hold of his senses; if the laughter commenced it would have carried him away, fettered to his dismal judgment. What had inspired him to say that? Was it the straight Vodka or the other clear liquid his friend John Ryan had practically shoved down his throat? Maybe neither; the thought of throwing all caution to the moaning wind outside and doing something bad had been gnawing through the pit of his stomach for a number of weeks. The drinks he had consumed created an elevator to put these thoughts in action.
And oh yeah, there had been drinks, too many for his one hundred twenty pound sixteen year old body to handle. He opened his eyes, and he saw them, lined up, surrounding him and his two friends, winking furtively.
The three of them (three? you mean thirty of us???) had dashed straight to John’s father’s alcohol cabinet located on the other side of the basement when the closing front door reverberated throughout the desolate suburban house, announcing that his parents were gone. It started with the bottle of Vodka that scratched at Bobby’s chest on the way down, making it feel like he was consuming belligerent flames, and finished with a few rounds of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. He could stand before the hard lemonade; he wasn’t aware of it as he lay face up on the Ryan basement floor, but it had acted as a catalyst to push him straight through the land of tipsy.
He was getting ready to lift his body up when his shared rebellion seemed to settle in on his companion’s brains. Steve Corrine—the biggest and most obnoxious of the trio—spoke, a raspy voice clouded with lassitude.
“Then do something bad, man,” he said and Bobby’s mind jumped (his body refused); Steve was closer than Bobby had originally surmised and he could feel his hot breath puncturing his right ear. “Let’s do something.”
John Ryan remained silent; there was not a drink in the world that could shroud his father’s belt.
Bobby was not silent, though, and giggled, a spasmodic burst of air from his lungs that could have passed for a dying man’s cough. “What are we gonna do? I just wanna do something bad, you know?”
“Break the bottles,” Steve said. “Break the damn bottles on this damn suburb street. Just throw ‘em.”
Bobby could think of no argument. He stood up and fresh waves of dizziness took over and his arms flew out from his sides, attempting to keep his face from being introduced to the sturdy basement floor of 9104 Lemur Drive. He was vaguely aware of Steve collecting the empty glass bottles.
“No,” John was saying, but Bobby could only see his mouth moving in slow motion. Bobby laughed. “My dad’ll kill us if he finds out. He’s already gonna know some of his drinks are missing and he’s gonna explode when he sees broken glass all over the street. He’ll know it’s us. I don’t think it’s a good id—”
The bottles were back on the floor before John could finish his argument, and Steve was on top of him, blatantly informing him that he was nothing more than the euphonized form for a vagina. Bobby watched and giggled.
Steve stood up when he had enough, leaving John laying on the carpet, laughing and repeating no, no, no, no. Steve grabbed a bottle rolling around at his feet, snapped his fingers, looked at Bobby, and pointed at the stairs leading up to the rest of the house. Steve reached the stairs and started to go up two at a time. When he was half way up he paused, placed his hand on his forehead, and turned back around.
“In here,” he said, flicking his thumb towards the closed door under the stairs. The work out room. Bobby shuffled in behind Steve and watched as he closed the door and the basement’s fluorescent lights ceased to exist.
The work out room’s light flickered into action automatically after three long seconds in the dark. The room was small—only about a quarter of the size of the rest of the basement—but was filled to bursting with complicated looking contraptions that Bobby found hard to believe were used to strengthen the body. There was a treadmill sleeping off the right, but other than that everything looked foreign.
“He’s gonna find us,” Bobby heard his own voice saying.
“Nah,” Steve said, looking around frantically. “Look! Over there. That closet!”
And before Bobby could protest, Steve’s free hand was wrapped around his thin arm and he was being dragged in the seemingly insignificant closet on the other side of the work out room, shoved behind a barbell as if it were a mere afterthought.
The closet was musty, but as Steve closed the door Bobby’s nose picked up a faint flowery odor, one which reminded him of the perfume his mother liked to wear when painting the town red.
The interior was bigger than Bobby expected; there was enough room for a sighing Steve to stretch his body to what looked like its bursting point and lay down. Bobby held his knees against his chest, silently rocking back and forth, providing a cargo boat for the vertigo and sudden nausea.
Steve pulled his cell phone from his jean pocket and slid it open. Bobby blinked several times, allowing his eyes to sift through the incapacitating darkness and examine the room. There was nothing but clothes surrounding the pair; everything from long, dark robes to chambray work shirts that looked as if they haven’t touched Mr. Ryan’s chest since the early 80s.
“There’s more clothes in here than there is in my damn house,” Bobby said. “Could probably cloth a small nation.” He could see Steve’s stone face smile and nod.
They sat in silence for a while, and for the first time in Bobby’s life he really thought he was experiencing authentic silence. He was never even an expert on quietness—his own house was no library and his parents were certainly not librarians.
“He’ll find us eventually, right?” Steve said, forcing Bobby to cringe. “We should take a video of it. We’ll scare the crap out of him. It’ll be the next big YouTube thing, ya know? He’ll shit himself, man.”
Bobby smiled and said he could picture it.
Steve’s schematics of the plan were this: listen carefully and wait until they heard the workout room door open; let John look around the diminutive room for a few moments; jump out and scream bloody murder when they felt he was drawing close enough to the nearly camouflaged closet.
They waited, and the minutes ticked by, slow, fat ones that seemed to be an omnipresent reminder that he was seated in a closet with Steve Corrine. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty five.
After thirty-three minutes in the closet the room was soon reiterating the cracking of Steve’s knuckles.
“Where the hell is he?” Steve whispered.
Bobby shrugged, a lackadaisical gesture that was useless in the darkness.
“Should I call him?”
“Why not? Whisper though.”
Steve removed his cell from his pocket once more and slid it open. The blue light painted his face and Bobby watched as he stared at it for a long moment. “Shit. No service.” Did you really expect there to be service, buddy? You can barely get service outside of the T-Mobile office; why should you get it down here in the corners of Hell?
“Try yours.”
Bobby groped at his pockets, and a fleeting blink brought on the image of his cell phone, lonely, seated at the kitchen table next to the empty plate of pizza they had eaten earlier. He felt his shoulders shrug again, feeling that would suffice as an explanation.
Steve rolled his eyes, and there was a sudden vibration. Steve’s widening eyes told him that it was his just his cell phone ringing. So much for the corners of Hell.
“It’s John,” Steve said, smiling. “About time.” His thumb pressed the answer key.
“Steve?” John’s deep voice soared from the phone and bounced off of the cramped room’s walls. “Where the hell are you guys? This isn’t funny, c’mon.”
Steve giggled and said: “I don’t know where we are.”
“SERIOUSLY!”
“Did you check the basement?”
“No shit I checked the basement! Stop being an ass hole; it’s not that big and you know it!” John took a deep breath. “Where are you guys? I ran outside like an idiot, checked the whole damn house—”
“Should we just tell him?” Bobby whispered.
John was yelling intangible drivel.
“You won’t find us with that attitude,” Steve said through an elongated sigh. “You checked the workout room?”
“Yes. I told you I checked the whole damn basement—”
“Well you didn’t check good enough. We’re in that closet in the work out room. The small one in the back corner.”
Another pause. “What?”
Steve closed his eyes and repeated the hiding place slowly.
“Closet? What closet?”
“Tell him it’s behind a set of barbells in the back of the workout room,” Bobby whispered quickly, loud enough for John to hear.
“Dude, I’m in the damn workout room and there’s no closet! I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about! Stop playing games, guys, c’mon! It’s not funny at all.”
Bobby’s heart skipped a beat. He locked gazes with Steve, who seemed unruffled.
“If you were in the workout room you would hear us,” Steve said simply.
“I don’t hear anything because there’s no damn closet!”
“This is ridiculous…” Bobby said and stood up, hosing his foot from a deep sleep. He grabbed the knob and shook, expecting it to fly open and to see John standing by the treadmill with his phone pressed against his ear, grinning ear to ear, ha-ha, you almost got me but I really got you, didn’t I?
It was locked.
“Steve…” But Steve wasn’t listening; he threw the phone away, and watched as it disappeared beneath a small pile of clothes in the corner of the closet. Bobby could hear the static, roaring and causing his interior temperature to descend another twenty degrees.
Bobby’s chest constricted once more, and this time he could actually taste the recycled air circulating the room drowning him. He was aware of one fact as Steve stood up and the pair banged on the door, screaming bloody murder for help, anyone, please help. The fact: there was no crack under the door; there was no vent.
The room had ceased spinning some time ago (was it after an hour or a day?). He held his fingers over his nose, attempting to block out the stench of the vomit and the rotting Steve Corrine.
Steve had died some time ago—but no, Bobby corrected, there is no time in this place; the Devil does not recognize a clock. Bobby had managed to roll Steve’s oversized body in the best ball he could, cover it with a thick robe and place it in the corner. Bobby had been unable to create a blockade against his own spewing vomit when Steve’s cold hand had squeezed out from under the robe and fell across his bare leg.
Bobby was lying face up, watching the black ceiling.
He thought he was screaming. The scream may have just been in his mind though; he somewhat remembered his voice running out of steam a while back, almost just after they had found out that they were trapped in the closet and going to die.
The door opened and there was a blinding white light.
There were people talking, and he wanted to tell them to shut up because he was serene in this place, this library, this final resting plateau. His ears managed to pick up three words, and they were three words that sounded familiar, a ubiquitous reminder of the life before the closet.
The words: “Look at this.”
It was answered by a motley voice of various tones. It was distorted, made of screeching static and sonorous whining. “What is it?” the voice said.
“A human,” the first voice answered. “We’ve got ourselves a human being, boys! Two of them! There’s another in the corner!”
Laughter, a sharp cackle contradicting the voices that resonated what sounded like deepness.
There were sharp claws and teeth and a word that sounded like dinner.
*Please don't use full caps in your title ~Kitty15~*
