Storage

Unlike the last two pieces of fiction I’ve posted, which were excerpts from a novel in progress, this is a self-contained short story. It started a couple years ago as a riff on the backrooms, so… I guess that makes it a creepypasta?

Content warning: Lots of coarse language; grotesque and morbid imagery. At least that’s what I’m going for. And for those who know me, I’ll also give the disclaimer that this story is not a good representation of my own outlook. I don’t believe horror is inherently nihilistic as a genre, even if this rookie example turned out that way.

Marcus practically tumbled into the pantry and just avoided tripping over the kegs by the door. His heart felt like a trapped moth, dry and panicky. Two minutes, he told himself, long as it takes to piss, and then you need to have your shit together and be back out there.

You set the tone.

He inhaled slowly in an effort to keep his breathing disciplined, through the nose rather than mouth. His head filled with the pantry’s warm umami scents — raw potatoes, pasta in bulk, Walla Walla sweet onions and ciabatta rolls. The room’s beigeness seemed to mock him. An image flashed through his mind of one of those kegs exploding, driving an aluminum shard through his heart and dousing him in Doc Jim’s Silt Swimmer IPA as he choked on his own blood. What a way to go.

Marcus whacked himself on the side of the head with his palm in an attempt to dislodge the intrusive thought.

Get it together!

He wanted to love this place, but sometimes it felt like the rolls and kegs, the canned ketchup and squadrons of hot sauce bottles, the shelves and the drywall and walk-in fridge with its thawing beef patties and blocks of cheese — sometimes it felt like they all gave precisely zero shits about him. This was definitely one of those times. Over the past couple of weeks Cannery Corner, A Gastropub and Eatery, seemed almost to be grinning at Marcus as it slowly died.

Nice try dumbass. What made you think you could be a restaurateur?

But no. No, the place wasn’t dying. These were just the growing pains, inevitable for any and every small business venture. You can do all the market research you want ahead of time (and Marcus had), but ultimately you don’t know shit until you actually open your doors and start pouring pints for customers. It’s a learning process, and you’re gonna take some hits.

So it’s not the end of the world when you discover that sales need to increase by 200% within six months in order to keep a chef on the payroll.

… 200 percent.

Marcus doubled over and gasped when that number echoed in his head again.

Six months.

He straightened up a bit, hands still braced on his thighs, and forced the air to come in through his nose. Six months. A lot could happen in six months. Breathe, my guy, just breathe.

Marcus stood all the way upright now, dimly aware of what was turning out to be a permanent twinge in his lower back. He was thirty-one and, although healthy overall, had gained weight appreciably in the last year and a half. His jawline, gait and especially spine were starting to show the difference. But that wasn’t so bad. The panic attacks were more worrisome.

In any case, he had promised himself to be out of here within two minutes. The less time he spent freaking out, the less likely someone was to walk in on him freaking out. Marcus stood motionless for a moment and ran some quick internal diagnostics.

To say he was now calm wouldn’t be accurate, but his heart seemed to be beating normally. He wasn’t sure how long he’d actually been in here, almost certainly more than two minutes. He sighed, ran his hands through his hair and pushed the door back open.

Stepping out of the pantry, Marcus looked around the narrow hallway. Opposite and to his right was the door to the kitchen; through the plate glass he could see Jaylinn chatting with Carl as he plucked pepperoncinis out of a jar. To his left, the hallway extended blank and white until it banked around a corner. Beyond that were the restrooms and, finally, an empty back office. Although technically included in Cannery Corner’s lease, that terminal space had proven useless except as a spot to stash extra bistro tables. Marcus didn’t like it; it reminded him of all the things the pub could be but wasn’t yet, its emptiness a potential that threatened to never be realized. He looked quickly away and headed back to the dining room.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

It was when Regina started to wordlessly hold his gaze that Marcus realized something was up. She would do this sometimes in conversations, and he could never tell if she was waiting for him to speak or laboring to pick out her own words. He shifted his eyes past her shoulder and saw a small cluster cross the window outside. A chipper-looking young woman in the group dallied, glanced at the menu taped to the glass, then continued on. Goddamn it.

“So. Carl just quit.”

Marcus flicked his eyes back to meet Regina’s. “What?”

“Just now. He came in, tossed his apron on the bar, looked at me and told me he’s quitting. Then he walked out.”

The image of that empty back office flickered in Marcus’s mind as she spoke, and he had the panicky feeling that Carl had condemned the whole restaurant into it with his departure — buried everything else back there along with the unused tables.

But no. Panic wasn’t warranted. Carl was an arrogant prick and they were better off without him. They’d be fine. Marcus leaned back in his chair, shook his head and chuckled.

“You think I’m joking?” Regina demanded.

“No.” Marcus kneaded his forehead with his fingertips. “No, but I do think he is.”

“What, that it’s just some bid for attention or something? That he’s trying to get a rise out of us?”

“Yes, actually, that’s exactly what I think. He’s being pissy and theatrical because we’re not letting him run our restaurant.”

“Babe, he doesn’t want to run the restaurant. We offered him a partnership at the beginning, remember? And he turned it down.”

“Oh come on! That’s just paper and you know it; doesn’t mean he doesn’t have an ego.”

“I know he has an ego, but I also know that he tends to keep his word.”

Marcus’s eyes wandered to a nearby table, and accidentally met those of the lone man sitting there in a slate-grey suit. He awkwardly redirected his gaze to the window, but then didn’t want to see any more passers-by outside. Casting about again, he found the man still looking at him. Perturbed, Marcus looked back at Regina.

He sighed. “What time is it?” He pulled out his phone and looked. “8:43. Close is in a little over two hours. Let’s just call Trey in, he can pick up the slack.”

“I already texted him. He’s on his way. But he wasn’t scheduled for tomorrow at all, and I don’t think that he’s in a hurry to take on that many extra hours.”

“He doesn’t have to. What about Krissa?”

Regina pursed her lips. “Krissa might do it. Doesn’t change the fact that our chef quit.”

“Thank you, I know that.”

“Marcus. I’m not the one you need to be snapping at.”

He glared up at her, chastened. “Ok. I’ll start putting out postings tonight, and I guess we’ll just…”

He trailed off, glanced over and found that the man at the table was still staring at him, a sour smile curling the corners of his mouth, his skin the color of a discarded milk carton. Marcus felt a bubble of nausea rise in his throat and looked away.

“We’ll just… what?”

“Um.” He looked back at Regina. “We’ll just see if anything bites.”

Compulsively, his damnable eyes flicked back to the table by the window, and mercifully didn’t find the man’s gaze there to meet him. In fact the man was gone. Marcus started, squinted — the table was definitely empty.

Regina, reading from her tablet, didn’t notice his momentary shock. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess we’ll see.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Now, five hours later, Marcus was in the dark dining room, alone and fantastically drunk, more so than he had probably ever been since college. He bugged his eyes out and let loose a gurgling laugh, staring down his past self who was sitting there looking like a clueless asshole.

“You don’t do shit around here,” he drawled, and laughed again. Dropping his head on the golden tabletop, he began the exercise in futility that had been very well-rehearsed back in the day — trying to tally how many drinks he’d consumed. Let’s see…

After close, he had wandered over to the Pinball Room. Late Saturday night there had probably meant Jell-O shots. In fact, he’d definitely had two of the house’s signature ones. The Gumball, some obnoxious pink thing with the flavor of — surprise — bubble gum. Yeah, he’d had two. Why the hell was that?

“Yoooooo my guy here needs two Extra Balls!” Carson the New Guy had hollered over Marcus’s protests, and then dissolved into hysteria.

“Ok,” the unamused barmaid replied, propping a serving tray covered in jiggling pink plastic against her hip. “Six bucks total then.”

“Woah wait up babe, two for me too.”

“So you want four altogether?”

Marcus rolled his eyes and laughed. Carson cackled.

“Fuck yeah I do. Me ‘n my boy, we getting some baaalllllllss tonight!” he howled. Somehow the correct amount of bills was produced, the shots changed hands and the barmaid extracted herself.

“Hey. Heyheyhey,” Carson implored, leaning close to Marcus before they gulped down the brainlessly sweet booze. His breath smelled like gin aged in a glove compartment. “Here’s to rippin’ the pair off that douchebag at your place tonight.”

Marcus demurred. “Shit man, he’s not a bad guy, he’s just — ”

“No no no!” Carson insisted. “Bro, if you’re gonna be a… fuckin’… what’s the word?”

Marcus just stared at this red-faced young man he’d only just met.

“Entrepreneur!” the kid crowed, finally getting it. “You gonna be an entrepreneur, you gotta claim what’s yours and hold onto that shit! You don’t apologize to no one! I don’ care how good a guy this chef asshole is, you did the right thing.”

Marcus raised his eyebrows skeptically and took a gulp of his beer, ignoring the shots for the moment. It was dry and bitter; Doc Jim’s, his default when he was too tired to really be discriminating but not enough to resort to piss-in-a-glass lager.

Carson saw his expression and seemingly doubled his volume. “No bro I’m serious! You did the right thing. You didn’ take his shit! You jus’ tol’ him what’s what, and th’ fucker couldn’t handle it. So he dipped! So what? You’re better off without him!”

Marcus laughed, still disbelieving but appreciative of his new friend’s enthusiasm. Carson raised one of the little neon plastic glasses, dwarfing it in his beefy fingers. Marcus imitated the gesture, hands trembling slightly.

“Here’s to castrating the haters!” They both guffawed.

“Poetic,” Marcus acknowledged, and threw back the shot. Carson swallowed, cursed the drink’s sweetness, and immediately downed the second one. Marcus followed suit.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

“Hey dude, you want me to call you a taxi?” The bartender was squinting at him. A half-dozen people were left in the place, most in various stages of putting on jackets and drifting toward the exit. He didn’t recall when or how Carson had left, but at some point before doing so, the swarthy ex-marine had fixed his eyes on Marcus and said:

“I tell ya, man… I dunno what it is, but thrift stores scare the shit out of me.”

Marcus had no idea what the context for that comment had been. Noise and buzzing nerves swam around it. He fumbled with his phone, looked at the time without seeing it.

hEy, on my wsy — wait, who had he been texting? The chat window said Gretchen, and he swiped the message away without sending it. That was close.

“Dude, did you hear me?” the bartender pressed.

“Uh… yeah I’m fine,” Marcus replied belatedly. “My place is just…a ways down.” He waved vaguely parallel with the street outside.

“You can walk there?”

“Yup.” And he had. Which had landed him here, in the grinning grey-man’s chair.

Except Marcus was no longer in that chair, no longer in the dining room. He was now in the kitchen, alone, standing at the dish pit. His left hand was clamped on the rim of the sink, right arm half-cocked and holding a meat tenderizer. The faucet stretched out invitingly over the sink, shuddering at its joint as water pounded through it. Both spigots were wide open.

Without thinking, just because it was the obvious thing to do, he swung the meat tenderizer down onto the faucet’s neck. A bright full klang, and the faucet buckled and screamed. Marcus whooped with laughter as water suddenly sprayed directly into his face. He stepped back, took a couple of golf-like swings at the rim of the sink for good measure, then tired of this and turned toward the prep table. The water kept hissing and shrieking behind him.

“All y’all…get the fuck off that shelf and quit lookin at me.”

He stood gazing at columns of gleaming white dishware, and reached out toward them. An explosion, unlike anything he’d ever heard, a fantastically loud and heavy crash as he dropped a stack of probably twenty dinner plates straight to the floor.

He hacked and tore at a head of cabbage, flinging it in shredded chunks across the kitchen. A pint glass exploded with a satisfying thwock when he lobbed it onto the tiles. One of his shins was bleeding and had run down to stain his flip-flop. Lumps of fresh pink ground beef lay directly on the stove, shivering and popping in its heat.

“‘Bout goddamn time.” All this shit, all this stuff; this fucking clutter that filled the walls and cupboards and closets and walk-ins and stared at him all day every day. It was useless, inert, good only for gutting.

So he gutted it, with pleasure. He threw open the prep fridge and dragged out its contents all together, looking over his shoulder as they crashed and spattered. Carl’s favorite carving knife ran repeatedly through the paint and gypsum of the walls, and Marcus grunted with satisfaction when it eventually drove into a stud. He wrenched it out and stabbed the stud again, thought the knife had stuck and let it go, but it hadn’t and clattered to the tiles, just missing his feet.

Water had begun to coat the floor and run into the drains. He skidded once, flailed and fell and banged his knee; the pain rocketed into his throat and burst out as a wailing laugh. After a minute of rolling on the floor, alternating between yelps and guffaws, the pain receded to a throb and he found himself feeling slightly more awake. Glancing around at the wreckage, he zeroed in on the hissing and sizzling noises of the ravaged kitchen.

Momentarily, he felt a thrill of horror. What had he done? He had destroyed everything.

But no. This had been coming for a long time, and when he stopped to think he found that he did not regret it. It may have taken an inordinate amount of alcohol to get here, but he had finally declared independence from his own stupid optimism. Everything breaks. Fuck it.

Marcus hocked a wad up from his gummy throat and spat in no particular direction. Suddenly he became very aware of needing to piss. With a groan and a chuckle, he rolled off his back and slowly heaved himself up, the hammered knee wailing. He didn’t look behind him as he groped his way out into the darkness of the back hallway.

A soft white haze greeted him to the right, like a full moon; but this hallway had no windows to the outside. He looked toward the light and saw fluorescent glare pouring from a half-open door. He realized it was coming from the back room, and a cold rock seemed to fall into his stomach: the feeling a child when he wakes and sees his closet door ajar in the dark.

Marcus froze and wondered if he would be able to make it past to the bathroom, felt himself gearing up for a mad terrified sprint. He could see the unused bistro tables stored in the room standing there in silhouette, and half expected one to shamble towards him, poke its nose through the door and trundle out like some spindly animal.

But no. They were just tables, and it was just a room, a defunct empty storage space.

In fact…

He straightened up, realizing what he wanted to do. It was simple, immature and perfect for the occasion. Taking his hands off the kitchen door jamb, he ventured tipsily into the hall and limped over to the luminous doorway. The chamber of whatever, the nursery of mediocrity.

He took one, two, three steps into the room, made his way into its center. The place was maddeningly white, its discoloration from age and neglect notwithstanding. The spare bits of outside darkness that seeped between the cheap slat blinds made little difference to its blankness.

Marcus reached down and undid his fly.

“Fuck you,” he hissed, and began to urinate on the dusty carpet. He’d been needing to go like a racehorse and sighed with vindictive relief.

As he reached the end, he heard a soft thud somewhere behind him, almost inaudible over the loud spattering on the soaked carpet. A brief pause, ears cocked — Marcus wasn’t sure he’d actually heard the noise at all. He finished, put his business away and zipped back up. Turning to face the door, he grunted in surprise and confusion.

The door wasn’t there. A blank white wall greeted him.

Ok… so he was drunk and his spatial reasoning was screwed. He looked to the right, thinking he had just miscalculated the turn. But still no door. He sucked in his breath and the cold rock fell into his stomach again. He swiveled his head to the left. No door.

“What…?”

He spun completely around, back to the direction he’d been facing. The windows…? Thank God, the windows were still there. But something was different.

He squinted, couldn’t figure it out, then looked down to where he’d relieved himself. The wet spot was still there, a black spotty halo of mold blooming up around its edges. He grunted again, swallowed. That didn’t seem right either…

Looking back up, he peered at the windows once more. Suddenly it occurred to him what was different, but he had to be sure. A few limping steps, and he was up against the slat blinds, looking between them. Weren’t they just…?

He poked timorous fingers behind one of the plastic slats, drew it forward and gasped. Behind the slat there was no glass, no actual window; just more of the wall, set further in where the window should be. He looked down and saw a black widow lumbering across the sill, away from his intrusion. Marcus jolted backwards, tripped and landed flat on his ass. He watched stupidly as the spider stopped, started, stopped again, trying to navigate around the swinging blinds. Shuffling backwards, he turned and glanced back toward the door -

No. No door.

He got back to his feet, a twinge in his knee. The blinds ticked and tacked against each other as they settled back into place, and Marcus just gaped at the spot where the door had been. The fuzz of alcohol around his brain had dissolved and he felt terribly sober, locked in place, heart pounding. No. No no no, this didn’t -

He ground his palms into his eyes, blocking out the white. Keeping his eyes scrunched shut, he took a deep breath.

No you’re trapped -

WHAP! An explosion and pain above his right eyebrow. He had just punched himself in the head. Stop it stop it stop thinking like this it’s just…

Just what?

His eyes flew back open and that blank white wall remained.

WHAP again!

“Stoooooooop!” he screamed.

Then a sound came from his left — d-dd-d-dzzzzz.

A new white glare, flickering. He looked and saw not a door, but a corner. Another fluorescent light sparked awake behind it, revealing more grayed carpet and white walls, the molding at their base warped by old water damage. Another room, one he didn’t recognize. Marcus gazed into it, motionless, chest heaving. He ran his hands through his hair, still just staring, allowing his breath to even out. He became aware of the scent on the air: a damp reedy mixture of plaster and petrichor and dust.

It occurred to him that he was maybe just noticing something that had always been there. Of course… there had always been two rooms back here. The one that opened out to the hallway (used to open out to the hallway) was just an antechamber. They had stashed the tables in there, and then never bothered to look into the second room further back.

But now where were the tables? He looked from one corner to another, not finding them. They had just been here, standing behind him when he was taking a leak, and now -

Peering over into the second room, he craned his neck and saw them up against the far wall, arranged in a line like sentries. He stepped into the second room and approached them, looking around as he did so.

Oh that’s right, he’d forgotten about this room as well. The one with the painting. He stepped into the doorway, but before walking through he looked behind him. The entrance to the first room, that corner he’d just stepped around — it wasn’t a corner leading back to the first room at all. It was just an empty, shallow alcove, a closet with no door. Three coat hangers dangled there from a wooden rod. He laughed at himself and his forgetfulness — there had never been that first room, the one with the false windows. It had always just been this empty one, with the little closet and the painting. And nothing else.

He surveyed this new (old?) room. The bistro tables were gone. Or, wait, that’s right, they had never been in this room. They were nowhere; there had never been any extra tables. Had there even been a restaurant? No… there had only ever been this room. With the empty ghost closet and this painting, hanging alone on the wall. A silk print in a baby blue frame, of zinnias and marigolds on top of a table. Behind the table was a mirror, and in the mirror was –

Whumpf.

Marcus shook his head a bit, snapping out of a reverie.

What was that in the mirror? He leaned closer to the painting, trying to make it out. A face with no -

Whpff. Shhhlllllrrrr…

He swiveled around, forgetting the painting. The noise had come from behind him, from the room with the coat hangers. He shook his head — so there were two rooms? Sure enough, behind him the wall banked away around a corner. Had he just come from that direction? He couldn’t remember. Stepping over to the corner, he saw the empty room behind him, with its glassless window and shallow doorless closet. The coat hangers swung gently on the rod.

What had that noise been? Like something heavy and wet being dragged; across the wall, it had sounded like, not the floor. Maybe a mop?

“Hello?”

He listened avidly for a response, felt his heart trip over itself.

What are you doing here?

And it came to him that this made no sense. What the fuck was this place?

Instinctively, Marcus turned to sprint in the opposite direction and find his way out, but discovered — remembered? — that there was no next room. No more forward; only back, back in the direction of the noises. A drop of sweat ran down to his elbow from his armpit. He clapped a hand to the back of his neck, drew it away again and found his palm streaked with clotted dust.

You’ve been here awhile.

And there was only one way out. Fine. He turned back toward the little closet — no, not a closet. A doorway. He took a couple steps toward it. Whatever was in there -

Marcus poked his head through the doorway and groaned. Another blank white room, smaller than the one that had been there before. At the opposite end its walls bent away from each other rather than meeting in a corner, forming a new room immediately connected to this one on its corner, like two white tiles on a checkered kitchen floor. And at that room’s far end, he could see the walls bank away from each other again, and again past that.

Marcus gazed into an ongoing confusion of walls and corners, all the same dirty white, seeming to pulse in their blank uniformity. They were differentiated from each other only by the shadows and pools cast by zig-zagging fluorescent bars. Some of the lights pinged and stuttered but most held a steady hum. The maze was uninterrupted apart from an occasional picture frame or the sleek dark green of an artificial potted plant. The carpet extended like a placid, sick gray sea, punctuated by the sheer cliff faces of the walls.

Marcus found himself stretched out, flat on his belly in the bottom of a push-up position, arms bent like a grasshopper. He remembered being a kid and assuming this position on the carpet at home, trying to understand an insect’s perspective. He felt he understood it now.

From this position, low and close and staring down the monochrome horizon, he saw something that he couldn’t have seen while standing. A gray molding water stain at one of the carpet’s wide spots shrank into itself and stretched, like how elongated letters on the street become legible at a distance. It rippled into something vaguely recognizable; one of the disturbing suggestions that can appear in woodgrain or inkblots. A wide mouth leering upward and out, and two eyes rolling downward and in. Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk.

Uuhkk — Some faint, guttural vocalization, coming from dead ahead. Marcus scrambled back to his feet.

“Hello?” he called out, feeling choked and absurd. “Is anyone there?” The words fell from his mouth and died on the carpet. The endless plaster seemed to smother any echoes, shooting down sounds in mid-flight.

Pplllfff. A thud and wet sliding. Like a mop — but not quite. Heavier. A slab of meat being dragged across stone. And this time the sound had come from directly behind him.

Without thinking, without looking back, Marcus dove into the endless maze of back rooms and began to run. Each footstep landed with a thick splat, as if he were running into a bog, but he looked down and there was still only that damnable dingy carpet.

Whupf whupf whupf — the sounds of his footfalls were coming out of sync, and he realized the sounds weren’t actually coming from his own steps at all, but from others. They were behind him, and close. He was being chased.

Sucking in breath, still not looking behind him, Marcus doubled down and ran faster. But all he could see ahead of him was still the endless zig-zagging expanse of rooms, more rooms. He began to pass by shelves cluttered with cardboard boxes; moist at the bottom and splitting open, full to the brim with detritus. Old invoices, dusty keyboards, random kitchen implements.

“Stop! Stop stop stop stop!” he yowled. The rooms kept stretching ahead, the splattering footsteps continued behind. The fake plants began to brown and crinkle with simulated rot. He thought he could hear the heavy breath of something gaining on him, and still saw the endless checkerboard of dusty storage closets before him -

No, enough! He picked a corner at random, dove around it -

And found himself in the pantry.

No more rooms, nowhere else to run; he nearly plowed into one of the shelves and stopped, chest heaving. The thing behind him, whatever it was, would be on him any second. Marcus braced…

But nothing happened. After a moment, he realized he could no longer hear the grotesque footsteps. Looking up, he found his nose practically touching a row of bagged ciabatta rolls. Above these, cans of kidney beans and diced tomatoes. A warm, bready smell filled the small room. Perhaps he was back…

Marcus squeezed his eyes shut, counted to five, then swiveled around.

Before him was the pantry door, opened out to the brightly lit hallway. He could see the hinges of the kitchen door, hear the muffled clatter of the dish pit and a young voice — Jaylinn’s- ringing out. A heavy metallic thud and the dishwasher whooshed into its cycle. He heard Regina enter the kitchen from the dining room side and call out:

“Hey, anybody seen Marcus?”

Marcus shook his head, slowly coming to terms with the fact that he must be in the midst of a nervous breakdown, coming out of some vivid and prolonged panic attack. The warnings had all been true — starting a business will drive you to an early grave.

He swallowed, shoved a sweaty lock of hair out of his eyes.

Alright man, get your shit together. He stepped toward the door.

And it was as if he’d just walked off a landmine. Suddenly a stench burst up around him; thick and heavy and moist, like a compost pile on a summer afternoon. The sounds and voices from the kitchen were snuffed out, replaced with a ringing in his ears. Gagging, Marcus stumbled backward. And then -

Whupf, whupf — two ponderous footfalls, the light of the hallway was blotted out, and there it was, looming in the door.

A figure, horrendously tall, its body composed of gray-white tendons shining with grease, knotted with cords of drainpipe hair. Its face was a mass of garbage with a hole in the middle, a mouth where brown turned to black. Bent plastic, bones and sheet metal jabbed through a variegated layer of chicken fat and filmy vegetable matter. Thick fleshy stuff that might have been ground beef dropped in dangling chunks from a stump where its left hand should have been. Things fell from it all over in snapping ribbons and puffs of dust, some of them twitching. It exhaled gusts of some overwhelmingly complex stink; the dense, meaty funk of rot.

Marcus screamed and dove into the shelves, wrenching away their contents and flinging them to the floor, suddenly praying for the walls to open up again onto that pointless fluorescent maze. But they stayed there, behind the shelves, stubborn and blank despite his fingertips raking and pattering at them desperately.

“NO! NONONONONONONONO!”

Hhhhckckkklll, the creature sighed, its breath clotted with phlegm. A nauseating gust of warmth washed over the back of Marcus’s neck; he felt something heavy and wet fall on his shoulder and twist him around. He found himself staring up at a writhing hole, a tunnel of glistening yellowish tissue with teeth protruding from all sides, and deep inside of it…

Part of a face. A forehead and wild eyes peering out from between the folds of the creature’s throat. Dark hair splayed across it in a damp sticky mat. A nose and mouth emerged, and Marcus recognized the milk-faced man from the dining room. And then the face was his own.

A drain clanked open in his gut, the giddy panic flatlined and a single clarion thought burst into his mind. He stopped screaming and just stared at the face. Its eyes rolled around, met his for a moment, and rolled away again. It sank back into the folds and disappeared.

“Fuck it…” Marcus breathed, tipping back into the shelves and sliding to the floor.

The creature followed him down with an eyeless gaze and regarded him for a moment. Marcus looked back without really seeing it. There wasn’t anything to see; never had been. There was nothing for him in this place. Why had he stayed so long?

He didn’t make a sound when the thing fell upon him at last, mouth open.

****

Thanks for reading! As with the previous fiction I’ve shared, any and all thoughts you have in response to the following questions would be super appreciated. DM me on Insta or Twitter (@sensoremotor for both) or shoot me an email at powersjf@gmail.com.

How is the dialogue?

• Is it realistic?
• Do the characters’ “lines” indicate something of their character?
• Does Marcus’s “internal dialogue” make sense?

How is the prose?

• Does it give you a clear mental picture of the setting and action?
• Do you ever get confused about where things are spatially?
• Does it get bogged down with unnecessary detail?
• Does it call attention to itself (e.g. w stylistic flourishes or weird word choices)?

How do the characters feel?

• Do their words and actions generally make sense, based on what you know about them so far?
• Are there any instances of behavior that feels confusing, abrupt or otherwise out of character?
• Consider your emotional reaction to the protagonist. Do you find him sympathetic? Amusing? Irritating? Etc.

Overall, how would you describe your emotional reaction to this story? Did that reaction shift at all as the story progressed? Pay attention to how it actually made you feel, not how you think the author wants you to feel.