Richard reached out and took the photograph from Lily, holding it up and angling it in a futile effort to better distinguished what was depicted in the picture - even the sunlight seemed strangled, barely managing to leak through the opaque blanket of fog surrounding them. He frowned. "Probably the guy who owned the inn a while back." Shaking his head, Richard dropped the photo back onto the book and turned to study the building.
On hearing Max's suggestion, he nodded. "At least we'll be out of the cold. And we could try to wait out this fog - if we go wandering around looking for the village center, we could just get lost in it." Unkempt gravel and dead, damp grass crunched under his shoes as he joined Max at the tavern door. "You already tried it?" Without waiting for a response, he turned the rusted, metallic handle, hearing the inner mechanism whine, but the door stuck fast. Frowning, Richard angled his body and tried again, this time simultaneously knocking against the structure with his shoulder. Nothing.
He sighed. "Shit." Moving over, he stepped carefully through the knee high grass growing in clumps along the side of the path, his foot knocking against a large chunk of stone that had come away from the outer structure, and peered through one of the large windows to the right of the door. As Max had noted previously the dust and grime coating the glass made it almost impossible to see anything through it. Rubbing the surface with his jacket sleeve accomplished nothing, and when he flipped the flashlight option on his phone and squinted through, the only thing that was revealed was a thick, inky darkness. "Hello? Anyone there?"
No response.
After a moment, he turned back to look at the others, his expression grim. "Well, I don't think there's anyone here to complain." With that, he bent down to retrieve the rock his foot had knocked against. Drawing his sleeve up against his hand for protection, he knocked the rock against the glass, shattering one of the panels. As the sound of glass raining down onto the floor reached him, he hit the window again and again with the rock until the window was bare. The smell of mould and damp wafted out from the dark mouth now yawning before them. "We've got out way in," Richard muttered over his shoulder.
Still keeping a hold of the rock, he pulled himself up onto the windowledge, and taking a deep breath dropped through into darkness of the tavern.
