Chapter 12 (part 2)

He saw the texture of the stairs and his shoes. There was blood on his shoes as well as some other residue, a slimy substance that looked like snot. He wondered if it was the product of whatever had touched his shoe while he had sat on the cellar floor.

The cellar now seemed to be filled with the clucking noises. They were defiantly communicating with one another and they were getting closer.

From somewhere further off, there was a gunshot. The noise made no sense to Evan at first. The thought of a gun was too real and authentic to have a place in this absurd nightmare. But, as if to assure him that he was still awake and attached to the real world, the sound came two more times in quick succession.

He then heard a voice screaming out, “You have no right, you are not…” but another gunshot cut this short.

The gunshots told him that there was something unexpected going on within the complex of shacks. Had an outsider found the place? Maybe even the police?

Wasting no time, Evan turned around and practically leaped up the remaining stairs. He pounded at the door with both hands, temporarily oblivious to the pain in his left hand. He screamed to the top of his lungs, banging on the door in fear and desperation.

“Help me! Please, someone, help me!” These pleas became nothing more than urgent shouts of terror and anxiousness, wordless cries for a rescue.

Still, no matter how much he shouted, he could still hear the sounds of the creatures that he shared the darkness with. He heard them advancing towards him, climbing the stairs in an organic-sounding march: slap-slither-slide, slap-slither-slide.

There was another shot, another scream and then a loud clamor as something crashed to the ground. Two more shots sounded out, these a bit closer, and then Evan thought he heard an engine start up. It was too small to be the bus, but maybe one of the vans.

Realizing that he could hear these things clearly, he understood that he was no longer dazed. His hope of rescue had brought him around and now he seemed to even block out the noises and advancing sounds of the monsters in the dark.

This kept him grounded until he felt their touch at his legs again. There were three at once, one on his ankle and two closer to his knee. He felt them sliding around his leg, looking for purchase and trying to grab him.

Evan shouted, his throat seeming to expand with the effort. It was a scream of pure terror, a scream that amplified a bit more when he felt several other shapes slapping gently at him. He pressed himself to the doorway, screaming and pounding. He was in such a horrified frenzy that he barely noticed that someone was shouting to him from the other side of the door.

“Hold on,” a man’s voice was saying. “I have to shoot the lock. Step back.”

“I can’t,” Evan said. “There’s something here with me…I can’t.”

It was then that there was a tug at his leg and he went sliding down the stairs. As he fell backwards, he felt several other shapes grabbing at him: something fell across his chest in a wet, sticky caress; something fell in his face, a bitter tasting appendage slipping into his mouth and over his tongue.

He hit the ground hard and something juicy popped under his weight. There was a child-like wail of pain from one of the odd clucking voices, followed by an excited clamor of clucks and other throaty sounds.

Evan tried to open his mouth to scream but realized that his mouth was already open. There was something in it, something with a texture of raw fish and tasted a bit like dirt and vomit. He tried to voice something but only gagged.

Above him, at the top of the stairs, a gunshot sounded out. This was followed by a loud metallic clanking sound, and then the sound of something dropping to the floor. Despite having been overtaken by his still unseen assailants on the cellar floor, Evan recognized this sound as the lock falling from its place along the door.

There was one last crashing sound as the door at the top of the stairs was kicked open. Weak yellow tinted light spilled into the cellar in a flood.

Evan could only see the shape of a man standing there. There was a moment of hesitation and Evan could barely hear the man say, “What the hell?” over the eager cries of the things grabbing at him.

Then the man hurried down the stairs, kicking at several shapes along the way. He fired his gun twice at a few of the creatures as he made his way to Evan. He knelt by Evan and grabbed the thing that was working its way into Evan’s mouth, voicing a cry of disgust as he touched it. Evan felt the reaching appendage in his mouth withdraw and heard a defeated cry from the thing’s throat.

As the man tossed the creature to the side in a violent pitch, Evan saw what the things were. They were the same monstrosity he had seen in the restroom on the bus. Some of them were small, about the size of a softball, but a few of them were easily three feet in length. All of them had swarming tentacles and at least six eyes along their tiny heads.

Also, his estimate of six individual creatures was way off. As he got to his feet and helped his rescuer kick the creatures away, Evan glanced around furiously and saw that there were at least twenty of them. All of the eyes on all of those heads…seeing it was dizzying.

There were easily one hundred eyes staring at them in hunger.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” the man beside Evan said.

“Yeah,” Evan breathed, not even worried about Lott and his minions at the time. He’d gladly face Lott and another broken finger to get out of this mess. He could still taste the arm or tentacle or whatever of the thing that had reached into his mouth and when he realized that it had actually been inside his mouth, a creeping madness tried to take hold of him.

He looked past that madness as he and his savior climbed the stairs. Both men took the stairs in three bounding leaps. Once he was out of the doorway, Evan collapsed on the floor and started screaming. He was weak, he was hurt, he was tired and he was very much afraid that he might be losing his mind.

Above him, the man closed the cellar door and reached a hand out to him. He opened his mouth to say something but stopped short. He cast a curious look at Evan and then smiled thinly.

“I’ll be damned,” the man said. “A small world indeed.”

Confused, Evan looked up and really wasn’t all that surprised to see the face of Max Young looking down at him.

Chapter 12 (part 1)

Evan was fully aware that there were slithering sounds in the darkness.

There was something there, something in the cellar with him, but he was too disoriented to locate it. He did his best to focus on his breathing, to look beyond the dizzying darkness and the pain that swept through his body like fire. He sat on the floor and slowly began to use his legs to push himself back. He used his right hand to speed this process, making sure not to put any force at all on his injured left hand. His pinky was a throbbing maelstrom of agony and the pain seemed to be parading through his entire body.

When he came to the stairs that he had fallen down, he nearly screamed. He felt the bottom stair pressing against his back and was sure that it was some terrible instrument that would slice through him.

With the solid feel of the bottom stair at his back, he tried to imagine the layout of the cellar. He had only seen it briefly before he had gone tumbling down the stairs and he had assumed it to be a perfectly square room. So that meant that whatever was making the slithering sounds was very close to him. There were no walls between him and the sound; he was sharing an open space with whatever made the noises.

He kept seeing the creature from the bus toilet, certain that there was another one of those things down here with him. He saw its dented infantile head, its numerous eyes and reaching tentacles in his mind’s eye and it was very easy to imagine it in the darkness with him.

Directly ahead of him, he heard another sound of motion. It sounded like something being dragged across the floor, but he wasn’t certain. Then, following this, there was a gentle clucking sound that reminded him more of the qualities of a frog’s croaking rather than a chicken’s call.

It was this noise that helped him to realize that there were two sources to the noise. He heard the odd sounds coming from two different locations, from two different voices; it was almost like hearing crickets or tree frogs calling out to one another at night. It sounded like it could be one thick voice but it was unmistakably a chorus of voices, communicating something that his ears could not understand.

Evan narrowed his eyes and tried to peer into the darkness. There was not a single light source within the cellar and he could see nothing. He hoped that his eyes would quickly adjust, but the darkness was too thick and his eyes were still muddled from his disoriented state.

As he peered forward into the dark, something soft landed on his right leg. He felt it caressing, searching for purchase. He jerked his leg back with a shout, pressing his back harder against the stairway. In the darkness came that odd call again, a clicking sound from some bizarre throat.

Evan reached back and pushed himself up, using the stairs to help get to his feet. As he did this, he felt another reaching appendage slap against his foot, then another at his right leg where it tried to wrap around his knee. With each touch, he heard that clicking language again.

He tried figuring out how many separate voices he could hear and this only made his panic worse. His heart seemed to stammer when he realized that there were at least six different sources.

He slowly made his way back up the stairs in the darkness. He knew that there was only a locked door behind him, but he didn’t care. Each second he lived in ignorance of what was clucking in the cellar and reaching out for him was a glorious one. He backed up the stairs, tripping once and falling hard on his backside.

From the bottom of the stairs he heard a soft slapping sound. This was followed by another loud slapping, and then another. Following this, there was the sliding noise again. He imagined the creature from the toilet pulling itself along the cellar floor, grabbing onto the bottom step and pulling itself up.

Evan continued to make his way up the stairs, not daring to look back. He knew that there was the thinnest amount of light at the bottom of the door but he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to see any more. Yet, as he took one more step closer to the top, he realized that he could actually see the immediate space beside him. The light that barely crept in through the closed door was working with his slowly adjusting eyes and he was slowly beginning to make out what the darkness was hiding from him.