I
Through my peephole, I saw that it was still there. The flayed skin glistened under the dim glow of the hanging incandescent lightbulb. It knew I was watching and came close until the peephole framed only its visage. The conjoined faces of my neighbors stared into me, with mouths that might’ve been kissing once, it grinned or tried to. Their tongues had fused to become fat and forked and it now used to lick at the glass of my peephole.
It pulls back without warning and once more I get a good look at it. Two human forms smashed together. The smaller one clinging to the larger one’s torso, resembling a gibbon and her young but distorted into something fleshy and vile. I can see the sinew of its exposed muscles, the blood vessels, and the flaps of flesh that hang off it. I can see the hanging skinned testicles on the larger body and can see that the clinging body grinds itself into him where their groins meet. But whether it’s in agony or ecstasy I can’t tell. It runs off into the dark corners of the hallway but I’m not fooled. I know it’s trying to lure me out and I don’t want to find out why.
I need your help, please. I’m trapped on the 4th floor of Rochester Heights, in room 405, a dilapidated highrise Apartment in east Oakland. Within the last 6 hours, at what must have been dead midnight, something horrible happened. Whether it was an invading force or a corrupting evil I don’t know, but I can’t leave and my room is the only safety I have. And even then I don’t know how long until it gets in. I’ll have to go back, recount all that’s happened leading up to this, and maybe, just maybe, someone can help me.
It all started with that damn fetish. Not the sexual perversion type, no it was an idol. It was 4 a.m. and I was about to throw in a load of laundry before I was off to bed and there it was. Splayed out smack dab in the middle of our laundromat, still slick with blood. I didn’t know what I was looking at, some spindly thing strung up to a wooden crescent frame. But with each passing second more of its form registered in my mind and I nearly doubled over and lost my breakfast at the realization that it was a skinned headless dog, crucified.
The cops were called and it was found out that the new cameras were touted by management and used as a justification for another yet another outrageous rent hike…was nothing more than a “deterrent.” As in they’re useless and not even hooked up to a power source. They’ve let my bathtub sink halfway into the room underneath me so while it was infuriating, I wasn’t surprised.
Later it came to be known that the dog was Mrs. Lorent’s beloved poodle, Butterball. The poor widow was hysterical and demanding a full-scale investigation. She might have gotten her way had nightfall not greeted us with yet another fucked up finding. Harold, a shut-in who lived on the top floor was found dead.
I’m a night owl through and through, so I was awake when the discovery was made. There was no commotion but hushed whispers and tensed bodies. I tend to creep around the stairwell between the 4th and 3rd floor since it’s scarcely populated and has a small accessible window that I can smoke out of. I was trying to fish for a signal this time since my wifi was acting up and my cell signal was dead altogether. That’s when I heard them walking down the stairs, talking. Eleana and Macey from the 4th floor. I could tell from their tone of voice something was wrong, that and the time. 2 a.m. No one but me was up this late here most days. I strained my ears to listen in.
“Folded like a fucking pretzel and there was a mess everywhere. Tony says he thinks he’s been there since they found the hag’s dog in the laundromat. He tried calling the cops but it’s not going through.” Eleana was whispering to Macey
“Well, who was it?” Macey asked.
“That creep Harold from the 2nd floor. The one that Carter beat up for stalking his girlfriend, what was her name?… John?”
“It’s Joanna, don’t be mean, this is serious. What did Tony do about the body?”
“Sorry, I just think she’s frumpy and plain. Way out of Carter’s league. And nothing, yet. He told the manager and he tried calling the police too but no luck. He wants the body out of here as soon as possible so he sent Tony out to the station in person. But it’s been 2 hours since and he hasn’t even texted me once. I’m starting to get worried.”
“Wanna go look for him?”
“No, that would be dramatic of me, we’re not even dating, just messing around. Still… You know the Donut Royal is open 24/7. We can get a few and meet Tony halfway there.” Eleana said, and the two started walking down the stairs.
I froze and the thought to try to sneak away came to me too late. The two women didn’t even acknowledge me as they walked past me. I knew 3 things then. That Eleana is fucking our maintenance man, that I’m either invisible or detestable enough to be invisible, and that Harold was dead. I wouldn’t know it then but I would learn later that night that this was just the beginning of a nightmare.
I finished my cigarette and sulked back upstairs, still unaware that anything was wrong. I should have paid attention more to my surroundings during my trek because I’m certain by then it had started. I only picked up on the fact that every light was dimmer, not by much but enough for it to be noticeable.
I went back to my room, bolted the door, and tried getting my laptop to connect to the internet again. The only two pages it loaded up were ones I already had open before the wifi shat out. Reddit, and a random porn site that only played a very low-quality section of a video I was trying to get off to. It wasn’t cutting it so I decided to use my imagination but after 15 minutes and a cramped hand, I decided to try to settle in for an early night.
I gave it up after 45 restless minutes and pressed my ear to the wall next door. The couple there, Joanna and Carter, were young and hot-blooded fucking all hours of the night, and I had gotten off to the sounds a few times. Sometimes they went at it around the building in communal spaces they thought were empty late hours of the night. I had caught them a few times but it was never reciprocated. They’d finish and sheepishly walk away and none were wiser of my presence. Now they were quiet except for the natural shifts and breathing that came with sleep.
I wondered if they knew Harold was dead, and I wondered how’d they react when they found out. I wasn’t there for the supposed blowout between him and Carter, but I had heard about it. Macey and Eleana love to gossip above my smoking spot. I think Harold caught them like I had and the poor fellow, trapped within the cage of his delusions, confronted Carter. Everyone knew he had a thing for Joanna, and she was too polite or sympathetic to ever be stern with him. So he must’ve interpreted it as reciprocation and it ended with him getting stomped out and the residents being quietly grateful for it.
Poor Harold, in his mid-40s and living with his geriatric mother because he was too messed up in the head to go anywhere else. Mary was her name I think and then I felt a horrible tinge of guilt. Did she know of her son’s death and where was she? I hoped she had her mind completely slipped away tonight so that she couldn’t comprehend what had happened to Harold.
I used to fear ending up like him the most, but that was before tonight. Sleepless and frustrated I felt the ache for another cigarette and I went for a smoke. I pondered why no one else was freaking out about his death or why it was being kept secret. I didn’t consider it until then but if he was dead and he truly died in such an agonized way… who had done it? And were they still around? Cold sweat trickled down my face at the question and I felt compelled to turn around and head back to my room.
After two more steps, I decided to do just that but something else was off. The hallway was darker now, much more than before and the air was cold in a way that’s hard to describe, it’s bitter chilling piercing straight into nerve and bone. Vertigo threatened to overcome me with each passing moment as the persuasive wrongness intensified. I couldn’t define it at first but as I kept walking it became clear, the hallway was longer than it should’ve been. I froze, unable to make sense of that fact and I scrutinized my surroundings a bit more. The ceiling was higher too, by a few feet. My mouth was dry now and I tried to swallow but nothing could bring me back to lucidity.
Foot over foot I forced myself to walk back towards my room and I was halfway there when once more my heart stilled in abject fear. At the end of the hallway, from the 5th floor, someone was descending the stairs. Rational thought should have driven me to head toward them and ask or warn them about what was happening. But some deep instinct knew it was wrong in all the ways a living thing could be. Even the stairs leading up to the upper floors felt wrong as if they weren’t of this world.
I’d have to get closer to this approaching thing If I wanted to get to my room so I turned back around and tried to dash as silently but quickly as possible down the hall but feared I would be spotted before I could fling myself down them.
A storage closet to my right that was never locked served as my refuge and I tried to slink into it as quietly as possible. The closet used a repurposed apartment door so it had a peephole for me to gaze out of. Minutes passed by at an agonizing pace but it did eventually come into view. From the periphery it emerged, robed in ornate cloth and moving as if it were dancing on air. Upon looking down I saw that it was skating across the air, legless and floating. From its hood a strange blinking light cast out onto the dark hallway. As it was at eye level with me and directly in front of me I caught a side profile of its face and I held my breath to stifle a gasp.
Its face was like TV static, flickering in black-and-white chaos. I closed my eyes then, fearing that it would turn to face me and I’d get an unadulterated look at it. In the still moments, as I waited for it to fling the door open, I thought back to all the other strange shit I had heard about leading up to now. Tony had found nearly a dozen dead animals around the apartment perimeter in the last few days, he didn’t want to talk about the state he found them in, and I wondered if they were anything like butterball, skinned and crucified.
I waited until my body ached and I mustered the courage to peer into the hole once more. An empty hallway greeted me and I slowly opened the door and crept my way out. This floor was only occupied by me, Macey, Eleana, Carter, and Joanna. I went to their door and caught myself when I went to knock. I hesitated for a moment before I tried the knob. I winced as it creaked open and I made my way in, trying to close the door as quietly as possible. I called out for them in a hushed voice but as I looked around their empty living room I felt silly. Before I left I decided to check their room, someone needed to know about the wrongness of what was happening, and I still don’t know what the fuck is happening.
I didn’t recognize them at first, I thought it was a pile of blankets but as the heavy movement and labored breath caused something to click in my head I couldn’t stifle the yell. It caused the head, or more aptly, heads to snap up to face me and I had no delusions of what it was. Carter and Joanna permanently joined at their groins, chest, and mouth. They had been fucking missionary when it happened so Carter had his body draped over Joannas and her arms and legs clasped around his torso, waist, and ass. I thought they had been flayed at first but the more I looked the more it seemed like the flesh had sloughed off them.
They… it hoisted itself up on all fours if you can call it that, and let out a breathy moan in both male and female voices. The conjoined mouth grinned at me and as it took a step towards me I finally snapped out of it. We both ran at the same time but it was slowed by it’s deformed mass, but the distance between us was still too close for any comfort as I ran out into the hallway and towards my room.
I thanked God that I hadn’t locked my door as I threw it open and turned to slam it shut. I screamed the moment I was face to face with the abomination, and without a moment to spare I bolted and locked it. It tried the knob a few times before it resorted to gentle taps and then deafening pounding and then silence. Now it’s just waiting there for me but what I fear most is that whatever did that to them will come around, lured by its presence, and do the same to me.
It’s been hours since but the sun has not risen. I tried sleeping in the bathtub, I couldn’t stand the proximity of my bed to Joanne’s and Carter’s. But when I stepped in I remembered that half the tub couldn’t support my weight as water damage had left it half sunk into the floor. So I went back to the living room and saw my laptop still sitting there with this webpage open. Please if anyone can help me or has any ideas, nows the fucking time. I don’t know how much longer I have left, just now I decided to peer out my window and was greeted by stygian darkness but what really scares me is the few breaks in it. Occasionally lighting flashes across the sky and illuminates the world below, a lifeless sand sea. Lighting cut through in brilliant flashes, stained by black and white patterning like TV static.
II
A lot has happened since my last post but i’d like to thank you all for your suggestions. Especially the bathtub suggestion. Salt is ineffective against whatever is happening here and I’ve learned my lesson about trying to static noise.
I haven’t slept since and Joanna and Carter are still prowling the hallway, fucking with me. I can only guess that whatever warped their bodies also twisted their minds. I thought I was screwed but then I was reminded of the bathtub. I went to it with my pack filled with a few bottles of water and my laptop.
The landlord and management have known about it for 6 months now. Water had seeped into the walls and started to rot away the floor, so much so that the bathtub’s far end was noticeably sunk in. When I showered I hugged the drain end, fearful that my weight would cause it to fall through the floor. Now I went to that end and stepped in. It sagged and groaned with my weight but held so I started jumping on it, landing with as much force as I could muster until on the 3rd try the floor gave way and I went with it.
I landed badly, cracking my side across the outer rim of the tub, and had the wind knocked out of me but I had done it. My tub and some of the floor were in my downstairs neighbor’s bathroom. Picking off bits of debris I struggled to my feet and stepped out into the living room. A single mother named Naomi lived here with two toddlers, I had never talked to her but had a brief interaction with her son who asked me my name of all things. I knew they often spent the night at her baby daddy’s house (once again Eleana’s and Macey’s gossip keying me in) and it held true tonight. The living room and bedroom were empty and I was grateful.
I tried to hurry as my fall down a floor wasn’t exactly silent and if anything else was out there it surely heard. I rushed down the hallway in long strides, trying not to look but there were details you could not but notice.
A section of brick wall had discolored monochrome, black and white, and back to faded red. I didn’t stop to observe, I had to keep moving. Only once I came upon several blood-stained doors did my pace slow but I didn’t stop. I tried to not think about the people who lived there or what had happened to them but by now the apartment should’ve been full of the sounds of life instead of the bleak oppressive silence I was drowning in.
I made it to the stairs and practically lept down an entire flight of stairs to the second floor. Blood pumping and confidence high I was running now. This hallway was warped like the one on the 4th floor but in much more extreme ways. The walls had not only narrowed but they were slanted, warping and turning at an angle with every foot until the hallway was nearly spiraled. I had to slow to a stop to get my bearings as it was all so dizzying. The floor beneath my feet ceased to be shitty faux wood laminate and was isntead a smooth stone that felt almost slippery.
The brick walls had melted away to some mottled and stringy maroon cloth thrown over what looked to be grating made of the same smooth stone. It looked almost organic but at the same time, it could’ve been fabric. The thick dangling strands made me think of sea anemone tendrils and I shuddered at the thought of touching them.
So I forced myself to run once more, past an open door to a room that had a body perfectly bisected and sprawled out on the floor. The pile of intestines between the two halves writhing and rising into the air. It freaked me out enough that I ran past the next open door with my eyes shut tight. It was Harold’s room and I feared seeing what had become of him. I thought mercy was on my side as the hallway eventually straightened out and the next half dozen doors were shut. But as I came up to the last doors that lined the hallway the one to my left flung open with incredible force.
Flayed hands from a black void reached out to grab at me and I pivoted out of the way just before they made contact. But I couldn’t stop my momentum and went stumbling onto the cold slippery floor. I tried scrambling back up as the door to my right opened and from it, Sarah Palmer emerged.
I knew it was her despite her corrupted form, flayed and covered in sinewy tumor-like growths. The severely obese woman had merged into her mobility scooter and she used it to move forward. Sloughed flesh made it difficult as it had wrapped around the wheels but still, it inched forward. The center of her abdomen had split open into a gaping hole and with a quiver and a moan, it erupted with some vile bile-like fluid as it vomited a small figure out onto the floor before me.
The newly birthed child got up at the same time I did and followed me in my panicked rush down the rest of the hallway and onto the stairway. The toddler-sized thing made of diseased and partially digested sinew was fast shrieked like a joyous child as it closed the gap between us with a leap. It was my turn to shriek as I tried shaking it off. As it scaled up my back towards my shoulder I took hold of the thing with my hands and pried it off. The flesh was gelatinous and my fingers suck into it in ways that made my stomach churn.
“Tag you’re it!” the thing said in a voice I thought was vaguely familiar.
Disgust drove me to fling it at the wall with all the force I could muster and its body crunched and splattered on impact with the wall that had reverted back to normal. It let out a small pained groan as it slid off the wall into the floor. As I ran by it spoke in an agonized whisper that I could not rend from my mind no matter how much I try
“Chris, why? I just wanted to play,” it said and I had to stifle a heaving gasp as I cleared the flight of stairs into the first-floor lobby.
The only child who knew my name here was Naomi’s son, they weren’t supposed to be here, not tonight. They had always left on weeknights to their father’s house. Had Naomi called off the attempts of reconciliation off tonight of all nights? Or had this begun earlier than I had thought? I didn’t know and wouldn’t ponder it until I was out of this nightmare.
The lobby was normal by all means except for the lack of lights, but now the darkness did nothing to deter me. The exit was right there and I ran towards it. The double glass doors froze me in place, not because they were bolted but because of what lay beyond. Pitch dark world where nothing could be seen, except for the momentary brilliance brought out by flashes of lightning ripped across the sky like whips made of TV static. In those moments I saw them, a line of things just waiting for me to step out.
One was a smooth-skinned pale humanoid with a hole right through its chest that leaked inky black fluid, it had no face. Another was a tangle of violet tendrils that appeared to be made of smaller writhing strands. Then there was one that was a massive looming serpentine thing doted with eyes the size of human heads, each iris alien in shape, and one end that I assumed to be it’s head was tusked with mandibles that must’ve been six feet in length. There were dozens of others but their forms were too varied, too abstract to ever accurately describe.
What drew my attention the most was the many puddles and stains of crimson at their feet and scraps of clothing, one of them obviously being Macey’s distinctive denim Jacket. One work boot lay on its side, one I thought might’ve belonged to a maintenance worker. I would not be leaving… not here. I tried to comfort myself by telling myself that whatever was keeping me here wasn’t letting them in but it wasn’t reassuring in any measure.
I ended up crawling underneath the shitty lobby desk and curling up into a ball for what felt like hours. It could’ve been longer for all I know but nothing mattered in that moment, I was fucked. Only when I heard the sound of a procession shuffling by did I stir. Peaking out from my hiding place I saw them, the robed figures, 6 of them now. Upon their shoulders, they bore the weight of a marble slab, and upon it, a huddled figure. I watched them, backs to me, shuffle down the room and into the hallway that led to the manager’s office.
I tried sulking out as silently as possible to bear witness to the ritual that was about to unfold. The bearers lowered themselves and the slab and as light gleamed across it I realized who it was. The body was bent back into itself until it formed a circle. The belly was pointed out to the world the back and spine contorted and twisted, the eyes empty. But goddamn the mouth, Harold was grinning ear to ear in an expression of pure ecstasy.
The chanting began then, as the flung back and twisted glare of Harold’s body lay upon me. Strange throaty vocalizations, deep and reverberating and inhuman. The sound of a mountain splitting apart or two worlds coming together. The vibrational forces of the universe melting away a border that kept the background machinations of a reality unseen. Somehow I knew this, that we had been pulled into this nightmare, but by what or who I still didn’t know.
They continued the hum chants until the space in front of them began to ripple like water and when they ceased so did the distortion. Half a heartbeat passed before it shattered, like glass, and beyond it a massive eye. I flinched, hoping it didn’t see me but if it did, it must’ve not cared since it retreated back into the darkness before it hauled itself out. A spindly arachnid leg, covered in jagged angles and spines stepped out followed by another and another. Until a towering pinwheeled monstrosity of legs and appendages emerging from a central core stood before the cultists. An eye with concentric pupils was at its center and the rest of it radiated out like a sea urchin.
Every aspect of it told of the agonies it could inflict, it looked like pain incarnate with the sheer amount of sharp corners and serrated spines. Every inch of its being was meant to cause harm, and the longer I looked at it the more detail came to me. Hooks and sythed ends, tendrils laden with hungry gnashing mouths. The thing that stood out the most was the way it distorted the space around it. Though it was within a confined space as I gazed upon it seemed to expand the air around it so that some hidden aspect of itself could be felt. This was a part of a much larger whole and I got the impression that some massive hands on a cosmic scale held this thing out before us and yet they were one and the same.
I looked away, not wanting to gaze upon this abomination, this emanation of pain, any longer. It spoke in an alien language then, a sound so vile like a rusty nail being dragged along my eardrums and corneas. But I understood it, unmistakable gratitude.
I slunk back into my hiding spot and waited for it to be over, waited for them to leave and they did, moving through the hallway, past the stairs into the basement laundromat and into the community room. It’s been hours since and they’ve still not emerged. I took the time to try to silently rummage around and in the manager’s office. Next to a pile of fine pulp of flesh that had still Mr.Roderick’s weeping face, our landlord, an axe. I picked up, knowing it would be of no use to me should I face those cultists or the pain entity.
What I did know is that Harold had a role to play in this in some way or another and that his room was just a floor above. If there’s any chance of escape or answers, it would be there. If you don’t hear back from me, I’m dead. I’m certain that there’s no way anyone from outside this hell can help, even then I still ask that you’ll wish me luck. I certainly know I’ll need it.
III
Rochester Heights had always been a hell hole. I know that now, I mean I never doubted that some of the people here were assholes but in the time I’ve had to reflect I realize how either indigent or cruel they were to each other. Maybe when people group together like that with no goal beyond inhabitance unpleasant things arise. I lamented once that to them I was nothing but a sulking shadow only half-remembered. Once my landlord had forgotten I even lived there and sent Tony to get the place ready for a new tenant. Now, I’m not so sure I mind as much, being one of the forgotten ones might’ve saved my life.
I was ready for the horrors of the 2nd-floor hallway, meeting the grasping hands with an overhead axe swing that nearly severed one hand at the wrist. Pulling back I used the butt end to smash away another grasping hand until I could slip past them.
Sarah Palmer was next, swiveling around in her mobility scooter to face me but it was too late. The heel of the axe sunk into flesh soft as putty and as I yanked the axe loose half her face sloughed off. I heard her chuckle as I ran past. Something was burning in me, even if I died here, I had to know the what and how of Rochester’s descent into madness.
Harold’s room door was still ajar and I made sure to bolt the door the moment I ran in, only then did I slowly turn around. I thought it was graphorrhea at first. I had read about it one late night, a disorder most often associated with schizophrenics. The incoherent ramblings written and spoken.
The living room floor and adjacent floor contained countless sharp-edged sigils and glyphs. They looked occultic in their configurations but the actual characters themselves were completely foreign. Dead center at the circle was free of the scrawl but stained with brownish-red blood. I knew it was where Tony had found Harold’s body. There was a journal left on the coffee table and flipping through I confirmed that it was his.
In the few minutes I had in that room I didn’t have much time to really understand its contents. And though I still have it and I’ve spent hours since pouring over it, I’ve only been able to come up with a rudimentary understanding of what Harold was on to. I’ll summarize it here the best I can.
Harold moved back in with his mother after an episode that cost him his job a year prior. They lived off her social security checks and he deeply resented her for her advanced age, every day she’d wake up with less of her mind intact. He was also having issues with extreme sexual frustration and began clinging delusionally to Joanne’s politeness as a signal that she wanted him.
The confrontation with her boyfriend Carter was the breaking point. It wasn’t the reason why he did all this, but it was the final straw. But he had reason to resent everyone here and he detailed all his grievances big and small. I learned then the difference between being someone pushed to the wayside but still scrutinized with an eye of assumed threat like Harold and being forgotten altogether, like me. In his pages upon pages of detailed slights never once did my name come up, my existence failed to register to someone who was uncomfortably similar. It made me feel bitter and I don’t know why.
Then there was talk of what he dubbed “The Background World,” I still don’t quite understand what it is and its purpose but that’s the thing that ties this all together, I’ll let Harold explain in his own words.
I first saw it in a dream, then a vision. It started with a tusked worm taking a bite out of the thin air, and like a scalloped finger, it peeled back what I thought was real to show me the machinations that ran behind what could be seen. Two places within the same space but never allowed to touch or interact. As above so below and from below to above, everything is mirrored. If it exists here in our layer it exists below, within The Background World.
That was the first rule it told me, the most important for creating an interstice where we can finally meet. The second rule is that for an Autarch to touch the human domain something must be offered to it, a life or part of one. Most often the offering is someone else. The greater the offering the more an Autarch can manipulate the human domain as long as it’s within its sphere of influence. The most powerful offerings are oneself, a year of your life, or the greatest joy you’ll ever feel. The greatest offer one can make to an Autarch is your own life.
There’s more, he mentions that the Autarch he’s in contact with is one that operates within the sphere of agony, pain is its domain and Harold knew pain better than most. The best I can piece together is that somehow he came into contact with this entity. Maybe it preyed on him for being vulnerable or maybe its influence scrambled his thoughts, or maybe what he learned was too much for any mind to bear without consequence.
I say this because I don’t believe that Harold was crazy, ill, and in need of help but there are enough commonalities in the strange runic language and his journaling that it feels as if he was truly uncovering something. He was not a stark raving madman, at least not until he let himself sink deeper into the influence of what had been encircling him.
He spent the week leading up to the fateful night of his death preparing for Rochester’s fall into the background world. 16 fetishes were placed around the apartment to mark the boundary for where the Autarch would lift the veil and let our worlds merge. 6 of them were made from parts of his mother. The rest from strays and pets around the apartment. The last of them was Mrs. Lorent’s dog, in the laundromat. Mirrored above and below, even if they were removed they still created something in the background world that sanctioned this hell.
Harold lamented that he never placed one in the basement below it and that was my chance. Maybe just maybe the building was only partially within the insterstice and if I could make it to the 2nd basement and emerge it would be into the outside I had always known, or maybe I’d step righ into The Background World. Regardless, I had no choice but to try.
I scrounged around the apartment and found that Harold was a heavy drinker with a taste for cheap vodka. I fashioned 5 Molotovs with what he had and started the trek back down to the 1st floor.
Stepping into the hallway I was greeted by them, the conjoined endlessly fucking monstrosity that had started this. I greeted them with a sprinter’s launching bolt and an axe swing. The side of Carter’s and Joanna’s faces took the blow and though the flesh came away in a huge chunk and I heard the clinking of teeth splattering across stone floors they didn’t even flinch.
Carter tried lunging at me, arm outstretched but I flung myself against the wall and was trying to slip behind them. they pivoted around to try to face me but the strange distribution of their weight made them cumbersome and the fear I felt was gone. Another axe swing sunk deep into compromised muscle and bone and cleaved through them far easier than uncorrupted tissues. It was enough to nearly decapitate them and they let out this horrible wheezing gasp. Another lunging grasp was met with an axe blow that sent nearly half his fingers skipping across the ground and one last swing to their neck finished it.
Though their head was on the floor before me they did not die. What remained of their face was opening and closing its mouth and I could see that the destroyed cheek was starting to restructure and regenerate. This truly was hell, willed into existence by a resentful heart. The body didn’t fall and wasn’t still either, jerking and twitching about, it eventually started grasping towards its head.
I had the Molotov lit by the time it took hold of its neck and thrown in the moment it lifted it up. They erupted into a ball of fire and I swore I heard screaming, as if some part of their warped mind registered what had just occurred and I hoped that the fire would be enough to put an end to them. The 2nd Molotov was thrown into the corner where Sarah and the hands tried and failed once more to apprehend me, I was gonna burn this place down if I could. Maybe then I would be able to spare them. The third was thrown atop the lobby desk. The last two were for the laundromat. I didn’t know if the building would actually burn but I wanted to cause some harm, to do anything.
The mad dash to the laundry was the fastest I’ve ever run, I’m sure of it. I was certain that the commotion and the fires would have caused the Autarch and its cultist to emerge from management’s office but nothing ever impeded my flight down the stairs into the laundry room.
I landed on soft floors and the lights now were dim and blood red but even then I saw the horror that lay before me. A pulsating mass, a conglomerate of flesh formed at the center of the room, and it stretched out across the floor, walls, and machines. Every inch was living tissue and sinews, nerves, blood vessels, all of it. A dozen limbs raked and reached out at open air weakly and I swore they had some identifying features. A watch that could’ve belonged to Jose from the 7th floor, a sleeve of a distinctive neon green sweater from Kiana a college student.
I didn’t need another reason, the 4th Molotov was thrown on the fleshy floor behind me and the final directly at the tumor. The dark was eclipsed by the burning sun that stood behind me. The threshold of the sub-basement and my hopeful exit was before me now but I hesitated for a moment. The heat licked at my spine and my eyes watered at the rising smoke. If I was wrong I would be fucked, but I’d be fucked fire or not.
I moved forward and the moment my foot touched the first step the world behind me plunged back into darkness as the fire extinguished. In an instant it all ceased, the heat, the smoke, a curtain of silence fell and a wave of dread rose. I knew I shouldn’t have looked back but I couldn’t help myself, with a thundering heart I threw my gaze back and saw it. The Autarch of Agony that had caused all this, goaded and tempted Harold with its promise of pain to all he hated. The center of its eye blossomed before me and grew to encompass all before it in its vision.
Yes, it was a vision that it showed me, screams around me rose to a crescendo as the tumor grew to the size of the apartment itself, a living edifice. And yet it still paled in size compared to the Autarch who looked down on it. The countless tendrils and their instruments of torture reached down to the tower of flesh and it raked and sliced and tore and ate and… it all grew back. It would continue so, for eternity. That was a dark wish of Harold. The thing began to bulge and split apart, a perfect copy of its spherical form, mitosis. This thing could split itself and that’s how it planned to fulfill its promise and continue to operate without being bound to it.
I screamed, or I think I did because when I was able to pry my eyes away from it to look around I saw the shadow of my exit, the descent into the sub-basement. I ran, refusing to look back, I wouldn’t, couldn’t look back. So into the murky depths, I went.
I had been in the subbasement once before, small and damp it had only a few fold-up tables and chairs. There were no entries or exits except a single narrow staircase and a seldom-used door, leftovers from a bygone era. It was barred and locked at all times but the door was old, wooden and I was certain it would only take a good kick to break it down.
But what lay before me was not the basement, no it was some dark plane of reality that could not have been The Background World. I had seen brief glimpses of it just outside my window and this was different. Narrow and claustrophobic but at the same time impossibly expansive. Light did not exist here, even when I tried my lighter the air around me wicked away illuimantion. I reached out to touch concrete walls and found that I was in a tunnel. With no other option, I walked and walked until time ceased to have meaning. I know I must’ve been there for hours since hunger and exhaustion forced me to rest, but comfort was impossible so after a few minutes I got back up and pushed forward.
When at last I came upon an exit dimly illuminated it hurt my eyes that had been bathed in darkness for so long, a shallow staircase that led down to the sub-basement I had always known. The door was there and with a frenzied kick it fell away and I burst out to the world above with a half-scream of joy and a half-maddened sob. It was midday and Rochester Heights did not exist anymore. I had emerged from a subbasement into an empty, overgrown lot.
A homeless man nearby turned to glare at me momentarily before returning to whatever he was doing. Nothing exists of my ordeal and no one even remembers of Rochester Heights. I’ve done searches on the residents and it’s like they don’t exist. Everything and everyone marked by the Agony Autarch have ceased to exist meaningfully, or have been rewritten out of history. I found Macey’s mother and called to ask about her daughter and she swore to me she never had children. The company that owns the lot told me it’s been unoccupied and on the market for half a year.
I’ve not been the same since my escape from Rochester Heights. There’s so much left in this goddamn journal but every time I look at it I get this sense of overwhelming doom. There’s so many questions, if what exists below is reflected above, and vice versa hows the world changed? Now as a speak there’s a tower of flesh that rises high above the world below and it casts its long shadow into the world above and i shudder to think at how it will manifest.
I know Rochester Heights has cast it’s shadow over me, darkened my heart one way or another. The people there didn’t deserve what happened to them, and Harold deserved better but in hatred or love their gaze eluded me. Once I resented that but now I find solace in it. The nightmares will never end, and I will never be ok. But at least any that casts it’s hateful gaze upon our world will see nothing but a shadow in my place.
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Credit: Santiago Del Mar
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