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Chip wrapped his arms around his torso, digging his nails into his sleeves as he tugged on the fabric. Slowly, and ever so painfully, he made his way through the winding halls of this building that he found himself in. His footsteps echoed against the decaying stone walls, moss and roots forcing itself through the mortar. The heavy stench of mildew filled the air, accented by something sharp and bitter, Chip found himself wrinkling his nose in an attempt to soothe himself from the odor.
The hallway was quiet; he could hear pebbles and small rocks crackling against the floor as his foot disturbed their rest and sent them tumbling. His heart pounded in his chest, the sound causing a ringing to rattle in his ear and writhe in his temples.
Chip shivered, passing by an open doorway where a slight chill settled from the dark gaping maw. He barely even took a glance into the new room that he skipped, seeing nothing but darkness waiting inside. No torches, no lanterns. Nothing. No windows or skylights. It was just darkness.
Pitch darkness.
Chip took a deep breath to steel himself, curling his arms around his torso tighter. The smell of the hallway burned his throat with every inhale, but he needed to get his nerves under control.
His memory failed to explain what he was doing here, or how he had ended up in a place like this. Faintly and with small flashes of what he assumed was correct information, he remembered passing through a forest and getting separated. He remembered the moonlight that barely peeked in through the dense mass of leaves and branches above him. And he remembered something following them, something that had caused the three of them to get separated.
But that’s all Chip could remember. He didn’t even know how he had gotten into this building or where he had found it. That part of his consciousness was coming up blank.
So far, he had been relying on what very faint moonlight slithered in through the cracks in the ceiling and his own (albeit poor) night vision. It was freezing down here, wherever he was, and he just wanted to get back to the ship.
A frantic voice in the back of his mind hissed in his ear, “what if they’ve left you already? They got back to the ship and would have just left. You wouldn’t be worth the time.”
Chip’s heart seemed to skip a beat, his chest stuttered and he had to stop walking for a few seconds to calm himself. They wouldn’t have left him, Gillion never would’ve allowed something like that. They had taken an oath after all.
Not that their oath really kept them obligated to each other, or to help each other. There really wasn’t any of that mentioned in the oath they took, and now that Chip looked back on it, maybe they should have done a little more revising on that one.
Forcing his legs to work, Chip took another step forward, then another, then another until he was back at the brisk-but-trying-to-be-casual-about-it pace down the hallway. The heels of his boots clicked against the floor and he shuddered again. The hair at the back of his neck stood and he could feel himself getting paranoid.
Eyes seemed to be crawling down his back, writhing against his flesh and tearing open wounds into his body. Chip raked his nails over his arms, quelling the itch that began tingling over his skin. His breath hitched and he swiveled his head back and forth to examine the walls with as much closeness as he could considering the fact that he could barely see.
He passed another doorway, this time it was smaller than the other entrances that Chip had gone by before. To get through it, he would have to duck down slightly just to fit the height, not to mention he didn’t even think he’d be able to get through it sideways. That observation made him slightly doubt that it was even a doorway at all.
But through what was most likely a growing crack, Chip could see the faint flickering of what he assumed was lantern light. This sudden appearance of any sort of illuminance caused Chip to hesitate, he stopped right in his tracks to peer through the opening.
Inside, Chip could see a small square-shaped room that wasn’t much bigger than their own sleeping quarters on the ship. Inside was a single lopsided table and a chair facing the opposite way. The wood of both objects seemed to be coated in a thick, goopy black substance that splattered on the floor and the walls like bloodstains.
A glass that seemed to have previously been containing this black substance was knocked over just beside the table, pouring the goop out onto the floor. It spread slowly like it had just been freshly knocked over. The sight of it made Chip nearly gag at the faint familiarity that it caused in the back of his mind.
The source of the light that had alerted Chip of this small room’s existence was a cracked lantern in the center of the wooden table. The flame inside flickered and wisped causing shadows to dance and throw about the walls.
The handle of the lantern was rusted and split with sharp edges making Chip’s palm ache just from seeing it. The glass seemed to almost be completely shattered despite it being in the same shape that it was supposed to be. The oil inside almost seemed to be leaking causing a spike of alarm in Chip’s chest. If that glass broke, or if that flame flickered out of control, the whole room would probably be set alight. And depending on if the black goop was flammable or not it would make the flames spread even faster.
Chip ripped at the sleeves of his shirt, his heart beating so fast in his chest that he feared it was going to burst. A writhing, churning feeling began to swell in his gut and he had the almost overwhelming urge that he didn’t want to be here anymore.
But like he was looking at a shipwreck, a part of him didn’t want to leave. There was something intriguing about the room, something about the way the flame flickered or the goop slowly spilled from the glass on the floor. A sick fascination that rooted his feet in place and kept him peering in through the much too narrow opening in the wall.
He noticed the splatters on the wall were dripping and melting down the wall at the same rate as the substance spilled from the cup. He noticed the wood of the chair and the table was beginning to rot (maybe that was where the black goop originated from). The table was lopsided with one leg much shorter than the rest but was thankfully undisturbed so it stood level for now.
One other thing that Chip noticed, or rather, noticed a lack of, was a door. There was no other entrance that Chip could see into this room. The three walls that stretched around the simple table and chair were bare of anything that could be used as an entrance or something to hide an entrance. Which meant that the crack that Chip was staring through was the only way to reach this small area.
The lantern on the table flickered. Chip watched the flame long enough for splotches to form in his vision when he looked away.
Bringing his hand up to rub his eyes, he felt another shiver roll down his spine as the cold air assaulted the place on his arm that he had previously warmed with his hand. Chip swallowed thickly, a harsh taste filling his mouth from the smell of the air. He took a step back away from the crack in the wall, the arch of lantern light tracing across his body the further back he stepped.
Chip took a shallow breath, his lungs constricting as the sight of the room suddenly caused a feeling of dread to weigh down in the pit of his stomach. He grabbed at his shirt and backed away until he bumped into the wall on the other side of the hallway. The narrow stream of light snaked across the floor, flickering like a dying beast as it scorched the stones.
Shadows that danced across the wall previously stretched and crept towards the entrance to the room. The crack in the wall nearly trembled as finger-like tendrils curled around the rock. The writhing mass seemed to echo and fizzle out with the flickering lantern as it hauled its grotesque hand of shadow out of the room.
First the hand, then a sickly arm.
And then Chip saw a face peering back at him from the small empty room. A pair of eyes, wide and bloodshot staring directly at him. The pupils seemed to vibrate as the thing darted back and forth, shaking and twitching with an unnatural hiss. An ivory-white smile pulled back behind unseen lips, revealing rows of straight human teeth. No gums were visible through its mass of shadow but Chip could see the sharp canines piercing into some mass of its own flesh.
The corners of the eyes crinkled and a few of the bottom teeth were covered in what might have almost been a smile. Veins writhed and popped from the whites of its sclera and it blinked.
Its claws left marks on the stone as it used the wall to grip itself. A grotesque chortling sound seemed to erupt from the thing as it started to drag itself from the crack.
Chip could feel his stomach drop, his heart skipping a beat. He froze, wide-eyed and too afraid to blink as the thing writhed and squirmed through the crack, its lithe form barely able to pull out of the room. The laughter and squealing noises continued to echo down the hallway despite the fact that the thing's mouth never moved. It stared straight ahead at Chip as it screeched. Another hand pulled itself from the room, clawing at the other side of the wall at a faster pace. Chip was frozen completely.
When Chip finally was forced to blink with tears welling from how dry his eyes were. The thing was gone the moment that he opened them back up.
The light that had previously been spilling out of the opening in the wall was gone as the lantern light seemed to have gone out completely. A ringing silence slammed down over the hallway as the thing’s desperate screeching had finally stopped.
Chip’s heart pounded so fast in his chest he thought he was going to pass out. His knees trembled and he couldn’t help but stare, shellshocked, towards the crack in the wall.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness that settled once more over the room like a wet blanket, he noticed with dread eating away at his stomach, that the claw marks were still scratched into the stone. Sharp nails that had torn away at the mortar left their scars in the wall that Chip couldn’t help but stare at.
He never had never needed to leave a place more but was unable to move. He didn’t want to know what that thing’s claws would do if Chip was at the receiving end of them. He didn’t want to know what its teeth were like.
But he couldn’t get himself to move. He couldn’t move. He was trapped where he stood.
Chip choked on his breath, panic clenching his internal organs so tight he felt like a squeeze toy. He was some doll that a stray dog had picked up on the street and was tearing into.
He curled his fingers around his torso, pressing his fingers deep into the sides of his stomach. The stench of the hallway seemed to have gotten stronger, the sharp bitter smell that he had noticed before overwhelming his senses and causing him to gag.
For what seemed like hours, Chip could only stand there with his back pressed against the wall and the smell of mold causing his eyes to water. His legs shook and he felt like he could pass out at any given moment despite nothing else being there. That should have calmed his nerves, that the thing wasn’t there anymore, that there seemed to be nothing else to come for him.
But it was the fact that he could still stare at the claw marks on the wall, that he could still trace the indents with his eyes no matter how many times he blinked and tried to will them away. Chip swallowed thickly, his mouth painfully dry as he panted.
The sound of a flint and steel clicking together jolted him out of the paralyzed fear that he had gotten trapped into. He stumbled forward like being pressed against the wall had physically burned him and Chip nearly tripped.
The soft metallic clicking of the stone on metal filled his ears like a death march and Chip willed his legs to move. He traced his hand against the wall to keep his balance, not even looking when he finally saw a flame burst from the inside of that room. Over his shoulder, he could see a steady stream of light beginning to snake its way out of the crack in the wall as the lantern on the table was once again lit up by some unknown force.
Chip didn’t wait to find out what would happen. He didn’t wait around to see if that thing would appear again.
He sprinted down the hall, panting like a dying dog in the middle of the summer and nearly tripping over rocks and debris that had fallen from the cracks in the ceiling. He couldn’t stop shaking, rounding the corner down another unknown hallway as he tried—with more desperation this time—to find the way out.
Faintly in the distance, he could hear the clicking of a flint and steel and what sounded like claws against stone.