After a moment’s consideration —and another few moments of trying to talk myself out of it —I decided I had no choice but to go back and retrieve a bedframe from the pile.
Back through the stifling darkness.
Back past that unseen thing.
With a steeling breath, I retreated from the faint illumination of the doorway above, plunging once more into the absolute black of the basement. The creature in the darkness shifted, and its breathing hitched and skipped —its sleep turning fitful perhaps as the skim left its system?
I did my best to ignore it. My best wasn’t very fucking good. Like trying to catch some Zs on an inner tube while the lifeguard’s screaming “SHARK!", only maybe not as relaxing.
I found the bed-frames by pure sense-memory, all the while knowing when I passed them last, I’d been close enough to trip over whatever it was that slumbered beside me. I held my breath, lifted a bed-frame off the pile. Rusted springs shrieked like harpies. I froze, and my eyes clenched shut, some lizard-brain part of me seizing up as I waited for the killing blow.
It never came.
I turned and took a step, bed-frame in hand. My right shoulder ached like hell from the recent dislocation, the joint oddly loose and wobbly. At least I hadn’t disturbed the sleeping Whatever, I thought.
And that’s when everything went to shit.
A chitinous click beside me, a rustle like a snake uncoiling, and once more, the breathing hitched.
And then stopped.
And then sniffed.
I told myself that I was nuts. That I had to be mistaken. But there was no mistake. Silence, and then two sharp inhalations —rapid, regular —as though the creature was sampling the basement air around it.
Maybe it sensed an intruder. Maybe it was just hungry. But either way, I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around to find out.
I abandoned any pretense of stealth, my dress shoes clapping against the dirt floor as I sprinted toward the stairs. The bed-frame squeaked in time with every step, a vulgar parody of sensual passion. I didn’t have the time to find that funny. Behind me —hell, all around me —the darkness came alive with squirmy, whispery movement, as the creature behind me roused itself and unfurled.
Christ, how big was this fucking thing?
Demons come in all shapes and sizes, but most that interact with humankind at least loosely play by the rules of our physical world. If I had to guess, though, I’d say this fucker didn’t venture out of the Depths all that often, because whatever the hell it was, it resisted any kind of sense-making. It seemed to fill the darkness, to encircle me without actually giving chase; its size increased with every passing second. I could feel the strain of my poor meat-suit’s brain as it tried to make sense of the contradictory input it was being given. The sensation fell somewhere between migraine and amateur lobotomy.
But still, God bless it, that meat-suit kept on running.
Again, that chitinous click, like some horrid beak clacking shut —right behind me, and also to my left and right, and maybe above. I grit my teeth and kept on going.
A faint susurrus of whispered words jabbed into my brain like an ice pick, unknown to me but awful nonetheless. A threat, I thought.
No —not a threat, exactly. More like an invitation.
I was pretty sure I oughta pass.
I slammed the bed-frame against the ruined stairs, the metal feet digging into dirt floor and rotten wood as I wedged it between them. Something cold and slick wound its way around my waist —a tendril seemingly of darkness itself. I kicked and scratched, and scrambled up the makeshift ramp, rusty springs piercing my skin. The creature bellowed —aloud or in my head I wasn’t sure —and drew closer, as if intoxicated by the scent of fresh blood.
My hand found the doorframe at the head of the stairs and gripped it, pulling me toward the faint candlelight. The creature tightened its grasp. I locked my gaze on my knuckles, ghostly white in the scant illumination. The pressure in my meat-suit’s brain eased, the visual input a balm against the senselessness of the creature at my feet. Behind me, the creature snapped and clicked —in hunger, perhaps, or maybe in anger.
I glanced backward toward it, and the strength of its assault intensified, yanking me backward toward the darkness that enshrouded it. My fingernails dug into the doorframe, splinters plunging into the tender flesh beneath them.
And suddenly, I realized how this game was played.
I tore my attention from the beast that held me, and once more focused it on the door, the hall, the blessed candlelight. That candlelight was my tether to the rational world, and as I fixed my gaze on it, the demon’s grip on me slackened. It squealed in frustration, mirroring the squeal of the bed-frame beneath me. Heartened by its cries, I kicked and thrashed —my foot connecting against something hard and brittle behind me, which caved in with a sickening crack.
Suddenly —briefly —I was free. As I pulled myself through the doorway, something wrapped around my ankle, and despite myself, I looked back. I caught a glimpse of translucent gray flesh, the glint of jet-black eye —a ruined beak of brownish red. Pain erupted behind my eyes, and I fought to keep from yelling —unwilling to give away my position to whatever else lurked in this godforsaken place.
It dragged me back toward the doorway, toward the darkness, toward its shattered, snapping beak. I skittered backward along the dusty floor, finding no purchase with which to stop myself.
I found no purchase because I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t looking because I was too busy trying to reach the mirror.
It was but a shard of mirror, really, jagged-edged and dulled with age. It lay on the floor a few feet to the right of the basement door —tantalizingly close. As the creature yanked me backward, I snatched at it.
Glass bit into the meat of my palm, into my fingertips, but I held on to that mirror as though my life depended on it. I’m pretty sure it did.
As I slid through the doorway toward the creature, I twisted in its grasp, angling the mirror as best I could to pierce the darkness of the basement with the hallway’s candlelight.
The creature thrashed, recoiled as the light struck it —but it didn’t let go. It still had me by one shoe, my leg dangling off the side of the stairwell, shaded from the reflected light by one rotted joist.
I kicked at the heel of that shoe with the toe of the other, over and over again —still sliding backward, toward the pressing darkness.
Finally, my shoe came off, a sacrifice to the angry beast. I flopped back into the hallway with a thud. Then I crab-walked backward a few feet away from the basement door, my meat-suit’s survival instinct and terror working hand-in-hand to get me the hell away from there and further into the protective candlelight.
Don’t get me wrong —spent and shaken as I was, I appreciated the help. But at that point, it wasn’t strictly necessary.
The creature was gone —swallowed by the darkness below.
22.
Upstairs, a quiet cacophony, like a nightmare cocktail party heard through a shared wall. Myriad drips, drops, and plinks as the torrent outside found its way into the decrepit structure —pooling in depressions, leaking through cracks, pouring off of jagged ledges where the first-floor ceiling had caved in. Dozens of voices, some raised, some quiet, talking all at once in tongues both foreign and familiar. The thud of heavy footsteps above —shuffling, skipping about, and unless I was mistaken, dancing. The crackle of a warped and timeworn record from somewhere far away, playing Patsy Cline at half the speed and twice the warble. And the snap and hiss of candles in the damp.