Monroe jerks his arms to snap the bindings at his wrists only to discover he is already untied. He reaches up to his bandages and begins unwrapping the layers around his eyes. As the bandages thin, Monroe prays for the sting of light, but finds he is still in darkness. Ah, he thinks, I am blind as well. But the darkness is not complete. There are shapes floating in the space before him, shades of black and grays forming vague objects in the distance. Eyes now uncovered, Monroe realizes this darkness is not his own. Relief passes over him for an instant and is gone. He has no idea where he is; the guards have so many hiding places it would be foolish to guess where they have taken him. But there must be a way out. The Tomb is a vertical maze, built to confuse and contain any threat rising that may from the stygian depths, but in the end there are only two directions to go: down or up. Monroe tightens the bandages around the rest of his face and steps out of the bed. The ground feels slimy and damp under his bare feet. As he moves away from the security of the hospital bed, Monroe is careful not to loose his footing. It would be his type of luck to slip and crack open his skull three steps into his escape. He can make out the outline of a door across the room, but his atrophied muscles make haste impossible. Inches at a time. Slow and steady in the greasy darkness. Monroe recalls Raymond’s descriptions of what it is to rise from the dead- “voiceless yearning in limbo”. At long last, something in common with that oddball, thinks Monroe. He is almost to the door. He reaches out for the handle but finds nothing. As his eyes adjust he sees that it is not a door but a passageway.
The walls are a slightly lighter shade of gray than the blackness of the room. Not fair, thinks Monroe, Raymond gets a bell with a bow, and I get more fucking limbo. He moves into the passageway, leaning on the walls for support. The walls have been hewed from rough stone, like a mine shaft cut into a mountain. I must be under the main compound, thinks Monroe, somewhere between levels. Out of the safe zone. Off the blueprints. He knows Raymond will never find him here. The thought sends a spike of fear into his gut. He forces himself to move faster, willing strength into his weakened body. He knows his quickened pace is an illusion, but it is a comforting one. The passageway bifurcates at the end of twenty feet and Monroe goes left, following a draft of slightly fresher air. The inky dimness of the light is maddeningly consistent and Monroe finds himself keeping his eyes closed for longer and longer stretches as he traverses the uneven hallway. After ten feet he stops, sensing an open space in front of him. Opening his eyes, he sees that he is at the edge of a small room, not unlike the one he woke up in moments ago. Monroe can make out the faint outline of a hospital bed pushed against the opposite wall. He can see nothing else in the space. He moves towards the bed, hoping he has not followed a cruel circle back to his own room, and it is a morbid relief when he sees the body. Monroe taps on the man’s chest, hoping the Morse code is obvious to the military man. Monroe recognizes the guard from his nametag: David Gugler, less a man than a boy, really, probably no older than 20. A new recruit, just back from Vietnam. David Gugler groans in disoriented pain, but Monroe cannot tell if it is a response to the tapping or simply they boy’s suffering. David’s face is bandaged much like Monroe’s had been, a full head covering save for a single eyehole to peer through. David Gugler is looking at Monroe and Monroe wants to look away. The boy’s solitary eye stares up from the bottom of a well, a distant glimmering in a pool of confusion and agony, offering a glimpse into a mind far beyond rescue. David Gugler has gone mad. Monroe pats David on the arm and keeps moving. The next passageway is much like the first, except here the rock walls have a peculiar texture. Monroe leans in close and sees that the stone has been carved with hundreds of images, each the size of a human hand: symbols, etched into the stone, from top to bottom and on both sides of the passage. Monroe cannot decipher their exact meaning, but the figures appear to be Raymond Love surrounded by the unearthly creatures it is his job to destroy. A cycle of war. The images repeat like a wallpaper pattern down the length of the passageway, until the next room. Another man lies in his hospital bed, Private Kyle Inouye, dead by his own hand. The young man had removed the IV needle from his arm and jammed it into his neck repeatedly until finally landing a precise strike into the carotid artery. The blood, streaked across the hospital bedsheets, appears black in the dim light. Monroe considers the IV needle but makes no move for it. He envies Private Inouye’s resolve. He must have known what was happening, must have understood the reason he was bought here, perhaps better than Monroe. Monroe moves out of the room, feeling the strength returning to his legs, even as his courage fades. His bandages, damp from the fetid subterranean air and his own copious perspiration, cling to his face, pressing down on the absence of his features, reminding him of what he has lost. His nose is gone. His exposed teeth push against the wet cloth, lipless and bare. He can feel thick stitching pulling tight the skin at his cheeks, binding gashes on both sides that run from mouth to ear. To think Raymond Love did this with his bare hands. What savagery. Monroe feels a surge of anger burn through his chest, but it is not aimed at Raymond. The man is a victim, a cursed soul to be pitied rather than blamed. Monroe knows it is the guards that are truly responsible, demanding observance of their absurd rituals, forcing Monroe to act as some variety of priest summoning forth an undying enigma into this world. He blames himself for indulging their silly superstitions. To willingly stand in front of that old door, arms open and defenseless, waiting for a frenzied, mindless lunatic to emerge- how ridiculous he had been. How long did he think he would get away with such a brazen stunt? Monroe tells himself he should have been stronger, stricter, that he should have run the Tomb like any research laboratory, with precise rules and logical procedures. Those bizarre traditions of the guards had been in place well before he had arrived to the Tomb, but he should have pulled them up by the roots on his very first day. Now that he has been injured they seek his company, his brotherhood. They have stashed him away, hidden him in the dark as they prepare his conversion. Monroe promises himself that he will resist with all the strength that remains to him, to his final breath. Halfway down the passageway Monroe hears a noise echoing from up ahead; the angry shriek of an inhuman animal. The walls tremble beneath his fingers. He pauses, thinking of the the split path two rooms back, regretting his choice. He turns around to retrace his steps. Five feet from the room where Private Inouye lays in black blood, Monroe hears another sound, a shuffling noise from inside the room. He stops. The sound is faint but unmistakable. He strains to listen, holding his own breath to make certain. It comes again, a raspy, shallow sigh. Was the man not dead? It isn’t possible, thinks Monroe, He had looked into those blind, staring eyes and seen nothing. There was no life in that body, he was sure of it. The sound of movement rebounds through the dark. It is a strange sound, bare flesh scraping across stone, moving closer. Something large is crawling, slithering towards the passageway, towards him. Monroe turns and forces himself to run. They are gathered together in prayer. The horror-faced guards of The Tomb stand together, heads bowed, bodies turned to face the giant hole in the distant wall. They hum like deranged Buddhist monks, a deep, guttural tone that Monroe feels in his chest. They have not seen him, or do not mind his presence. He stands in the back of what appears to be a primitive temple, a place of strange worship cut from the rock by impatient hands. Monroe’s strained effort to catch his breath is inaudible amidst the weird chanting. He knows every man here, about three quarters of the guard staff, although he has never spoken to most of them. They ignore him now as ever, all of them focused on a single point ahead. Their object of worship is no object at all, but instead a dark absence, a void in the rock wall, thirty feet wide and nearly as high. The disturbed susurrations build into a lunatic chorus, reaching a deafening crescendo that hammers at Monroe’s eardrums. He wants to scream. He wants to run through the assembled madmen and pluck out their tongues with his bare hands to silence them. He feels the urge in the pit of his stomach to join the terrible refrain, to add his own voice to the nightmare song. Then it is over. Silence blankets the room like a shroud. The guards are waiting…and Monroe waits with them.
Then, from deep within the void, something speaks.
Part 1:https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song
Part 2: https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-2
Part 3: https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-3
Part 4: https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-4
Part 5: https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-5
Part 6: https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-6
Part 7: https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-7
Part 8: https://steemit.com/horror/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-8
Part 9: https://steemit.com/writing/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-10
Part 10: https://steemit.com/writing/@senderos/3fmcns-the-nightmare-song-part-10
Part 11: https://steemit.com/writing/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-11
Part 12: https://steemit.com/story/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-12
Part 13: https://steemit.com/writing/@senderos/the-nightmare-song-part-13
Photo by Amanda CharchianStory by Daniel Capuzzi, 2016. All copyrights apply.