The same cold, black fog that had taken Mikaela.
Sable considered running back up the stairs to where she would be safe. But then she thought about the terrifying creatures and the sadistic killers and the endless horror, and she quickly decided she wasn’t going to let her best friend have all the fun. Sorry

Determined to see Mikaela again, Sable hitched a ride to the theatre and soon found the door behind the movie screen. In the darkness she jimmied the door open with a crowbar and headed down a creaking, wooden stairway to the dank cellar. A light switch activated flickering fluorescent lights that illuminated a room filled with broken theatre seats and old movie posters dating back eighty years. She searched the sprawling basement and found a thick wooden door hidden behind a poster of the original Frankenstein. She pushed and shoved the door open to reveal an endless circular stairway descending into perfect darkness. Using a penlight to navigate, she descended for ten minutes before she noticed the cold, black fog rising from the lower depths.

A dark place.
A cold place.
An evil place.
Stay away from there, she begged. Stay away.
But Sable wasn’t about to stay away.
Not after that story.

Somehow the students couldn’t get out and everyone perished in the flames. Feeling close to an answer, she continued her research and discovered two teenage brothers had recently disappeared from the theatre. Elias and Elan. The only witness, their younger sister, Ellen, was committed to an institution after ripping her eyes out. And so, pretending to be a relative, Sable went to talk to Ellen who admitted she and her brothers had been trying to steal old movie posters from the storage room behind the movie screen. She then described a secret door in the basement and a passageway that led to another place.

Did The Unknown take her? Did she try to define The Unknown? What about her roommate? Her roommate disappeared as well. But then she realised Mikaela’s story wasn’t about The Unknown. It was about something else. Another dimension. A dimension filled with terrifying creatures, sadistic killers, and endless horror.
This was not The Unknown.
With this realisation, Sable began to investigate other disappearances in Greenville. Before long, she realised most of the disappearances occurred at the theatre or somewhere close by. Investigating further, she discovered the theatre was built over the ruins of an old, one-room schoolhouse that had burned to the ground in the 1920s.

One evening Sable had challenged Mikaela to tell a real horror story at Moonstone’s Annual Halloween Festival. Scare the crap out of people. Stop dancing around the horror and embrace it. Tell a story about The Unknown. Make them imagine it. Make them believe The Unknown will show up on stage. Nothing terrifies an audience more than a show that could potentially kill them. Mikaela laughed at the idea and declined the challenge because she was working on another story with her roommate.
But a strange, black fog had taken Mikaela during her performance and Sable felt the icy hand of guilt grab her by the back of the neck. She was convinced that she had somehow sent Mikaela to her doom