The Secret to Character-Driven Stories
The ringing shock of the gunshots in an enclosed space made me flinch. I stumbled backward involuntarily. Above my head, a man collapsed and fell UP the stairwell, rolling over the steps on the ceiling and out of sight around the curve of the stone spiral. A bullet chipped the brick in front of me, stinging my face with shards of debris. I covered my head and staggered further back down the stairwell, out of the line of fire.
I shouldn’t have closed my eyes.
When I looked up again, a vast, flat expanse stretched out in all directions, the winding stairwell nowhere in sight. Another deafening gunshot blasted my eardrums and dragged my gaze upwards to see the spiral staircase twisting sideways like a giant stone screw overhead. Below the toe of my shoe, a hallway extended downward like a mineshaft, its opening a single square hole in the featureless cavern on which I stood. I looked up again. Kelly was still up there, oriented ninety degrees from my frame of reference but still crouching as if gravity still worked along the staircase’s axis instead of mine.
He fired the last round in his pistol and ejected the magazine, which fell towards me and clattered to the rocky chasm edge in front of me before bouncing down the hallway-mineshaft.
Kelly never finished his reload. The men in black suits swarmed him from above and below, pinioning his arms and dragging him away.
“Run, Ethan!” he shouted to me. “Get out of here! They don't want you! Go back the way you came!”
And he was gone.
Back the way I came. How? I looked down the stone mineshaft in front of me. It looked familiar. I’d come this way before, except before the hallway hadn’t been a vertical shaft. Still…I could hop down to a sconce five feet below, and perhaps climb down the depth of the hall that way.
I gripped the ledge and lowered myself into the tunnel, but as I did, I felt gravity shift. Now I found myself kneeling on the edge of a vast chasm, leaning precariously over the edge of a hallway dead-ending at a bottomless drop. The yawning gorge I’d just climbed out of received my lunch without a sound.
Quivering with fear and nausea, I struggled to my feet and ran down the hall. I turned the corner to see a glowing EXIT sign pointing through a doorway halfway down. I guess that was simple enough.
Following a string of EXIT signs, I found myself back in the dungeon, the door at the end of the raised walkway still open, and the bright glow of daylight beyond. An escape. I bolted for the door, made it halfway across the corpse-filled dungeon, and stopped.
I looked back behind me. In the stillness, I could still hear Kelly screaming. I looked to the door again. The space outside was a simple alleyway again
He’d told me to run. I could escape. I could forget everything. Become nobody. The Director had no reason to kill me. Really, I was the only one with a chance to get out.
But what about Kelly?
I sighed and turned away from the exit, raising my hands and sinking to my knees. It wasn’t long before a man in a black suit came for me. He raised a pistol to my head.
“Wait,” I said. “I give up. I want to see the Director.“
The man in the black suit looked only vaguely amused. He looked to the dead bodies all around us. My bodies. “You’re the writer,” the man said, returning his pistol to a hidden shoulder holster. “You want to see the Director? Let’s go.”
