To Love Victoria

10: Flesh Wall

They say that when you lose one of your senses, the others become amplified to compensate. All of my senses had become even more heightened than normal. The stench of the heavy stale air permeated my nostrils and left a foul taste in my mouth. The floor below me felt like endless miles of concrete with no end in sight. The sobbing became louder and louder as I approached, filling the air with a sombre atmosphere. It felt like miles of empty space but was probably no longer than fifty metres. I couldn't tell, either direction was curtained in a thick wall of darkness.

Eventually, I came across a door with what sounded like the source of the crying on the other side. It sounded so incredibly human, but nothing could shake the fear in the back of my mind that it was another trap. I opened the door slowly, just waiting for something to pounce on me. The room was even darker than the previous one. The walls were covered in, no, they were made from some kind of black flesh that pulsated as if it were a beating heart. Several bodies were planted inside the walls in various states of decay, most of them recent. I came to the end of the room where there was a young woman hanging and partially submerged in the flesh. "It's okay, I'm here to rescue you."

"Oh thank God. Please help me, I've been trapped here for hours now." I started trying to tear my way through the flesh with my bare hands. It was horrifically warm to touch and seemed to respond to my movements, almost trying to push me away. I dug my fingernails into the side of it and a black liquid began leaking from it, causing me to gag at the stench. Digging my nails further into the flesh, I tore out a large chunk and the foul liquid began oozing out at an alarming rate, exposing what appeared to be some kind of organs. The stench assaulted me from all around, but I continued on, grabbing at the strange organs and ripping them from the wall. It seemed to writhe in pain, shaking and squirming with every touch as it began pulsating more and more.

Eventually, I was able to tear the woman from her horrific prison, but she was too weak to stand. There was more sobbing over in the distance, but I needed to get her out of there first. A loud thud echoed throughout the building, followed by another one. It repeated continuously along with that vile scraping sound. My heart began rapidly beating, knowing what was coming. My legs began to shake but I tried to steady myself as I held the woman. It was only a wooden door, it would not hold against whatever was outside.

The woman whispered weakly into my ear. "Below you, sometimes they come through there."

I looked below me and there was some kind of handle wedged into the floor. I put the woman down against the floor and lifted it up, revealing some kind of tunnel. I lowered the woman down and jumped down after her. I sealed the cover over the top of our heads right as something large broke down the door. We could hear it above, grunting and breathing heavily, searching for its victim. We held our breaths, praying that it wouldn't find us. The trap door creaked above us as the weight shifted on top of it, barely holding underneath the behemoth just inches above my head.

We needed to move. I picked her up, taking slow and quiet steps forward into the abyss ahead of us, trying not to alert whatever was hunting us down. She felt so strangely light, though I was a lot stronger than I had been previously. We inched further and further into the dark, ahead of us was nothing but pitch-black void. Continuing further, my arms brushed up against the wall and it seemed as if it was trying to grab me and pull me into its disgustingly fleshy surface.

There was something wrong with my footsteps. Something very wrong. I walked slightly further ahead, listening intently. My footsteps seemed to echo but with a slight delay. I took another few steps and they still sounded off. I lifted my foot up, gently lowering it to the ground but my foot didn't touch the ground. I heard it, I heard, a footstep. Something was down here. It wasn't just some beast, it was intelligent. It knew what it was doing and knew how to conceal itself from us. A shiver ran down my spine and the hair on my neck stood at attention. I continued walking further, listening out for whatever was behind me.