Chapter 5
Edie was awake, but she didn’t open her eyes.
She was lying down on a hard, uneven surface with her hands duct-taped behind her back. The air was chilly without there being a distinct wind, and the ground pressing against her cheek was slightly damp.
I’m someplace underground.
Voices were talking in hushed tones a few feet away. If Edie focused, she could make out a bit of what they were saying.
“…being used…”
“…unacceptable…”
“…dark is unsatisfied…”
“…not pawns…”
“Is this really necessary?”
The last voice was quiet, but clear.
It’s a woman. She sounds nervous. Hang on- someone else is talking. A man. He sounds…weird. Like he’s in a trance, or maybe on drugs, but somehow lucid at the same time?
“The darkness must be fed, Dr. Skirth. Sacrifices must be made.”
Brainwashed, Edie realized. He sounds like he’s been brainwashed. Crap, have I been kidnapped by a friggin’ cult?
“Does the…sacrifice…have to be awake? Wouldn’t it be easier to seal her in while she’s unconscious?” the female voice- Skirth- asked.
“Does this bother you, Doctor?”
Edie felt a hand grab the collar of her shirt and yank her upright so she was kneeling. A sudden, sharp pain burst across her cheek.
“I know you’re awake, Edith Brock.”
She kept her eyes closed, letting her head hang limply. There was another slap, this time bruising the opposite side of her face.
“What are you doing?” Skirth sounded panicked.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
Edie felt herself be thrown forward. She automatically tried holding her hands out to help break her fall, her wrists chafing against the tape around them. She twisted enough to keep her nose from being the first thing to meet the ground, her jaw cracking against cold rock.
“Stop! Stop it!”
Edie opened her eyes, looking up as she struggled not to focus on the pain coursing through her face. She could see a figure with a white lab coat and a messy bun standing between her and a pale man whose black robes, straggly hair, and strange, detached expression screamed “evil cult member.”
“Now you interfere? I am not responsible for this woman’s presence here,” the man remarked, gesturing toward Edie. “If your conscience disturbs you so, then leave.”
“I can’t,” Skirth protested. “Mr. Drake sent me to ensure that…everything went smoothly.”
“Ah. He needn’t fear on that part. Rest assured the meat will die before the week is out. The darkness has been deprived for far too long for her to last any longer than that.”
Skirth glanced back at Edie, wincing as she saw the purple blotches forming on the latter’s face. Edie glared up at her.
“So you’re just here to make sure I get good and dead, huh? Funny, I’d have thought Drake would’ve sent someone with a stronger stomach for that. Or is it too difficult to watch someone suffer in person?” she spat.
Skirth flinched, though Edie wasn’t sure whether it was due to her comment or how Mr. Obviously-a-Cultist responded to it. He moved past the doctor and kicked at Edie’s unprotected stomach, driving the wind from her. Then he kicked at her knees, multiple times, until there was a loud crack.
As she blinked back the tears in her eyes, some random part of her wondered if he wore steel-toed boots for the aesthetic, completing the whole “prophet of darkness” look, or for practical purposes, like kicking the crap out of mouthy kidnapping victims.
The man knelt down, plucking Edie up in his arms and lifting her as if he was her knight in shining armor, instead of the freak that had just beat her up.
“Hush now, meat. Your suffering will end soon enough…if you are lucky,” he murmured comfortingly. “The darkness is hungry, but it may also be bored. Pray that it does not decide to play with its food beforehand.”
Didn’t its mother teach it any manners? she thought, wheezing a little as a half-laugh pressed any remaining air out of her diaphragm. Invisible knives cut into her sides at the unwelcome movement, leaving her to gasp as shallowly as she could to try and manage the pain. Through her watering eyes, Edie caught blurred glimpses of white light. The sight struck her as oddly familiar, but before she could ruminate on it too much, her attention was pulled to what the light was surrounding- a narrow crack in the wall of the cave that seemed to widen moment by moment, opening like a mouth.
“The darkness welcomes you, Edith Brock. You are now a part of something greater than anything you ever have been. Find peace in this knowledge, and die.”
Before confusion could even register in her mind, Edie felt herself being thrown forward. She tumbled through the crack in the wall, hitting her head on the unyielding rock of the ground.
She had just enough time to think, I’m gonna die with no clue what the heck is going on, before her vision cut to black.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
They had almost grown used to being alone.
They didn’t like it any more than they had, but the ache inside them, the longing for someone, anyone, to connect to, had numbed with the passing of time.
They were alone, and they would be alone. That was how things were. They’d been coming to accept that fact.
Then someone new fell into the vault, and their world flipped upside down.
The new person- a woman- had been knocked unconscious on entry. This wasn’t exactly a new occurrence. Others who had been forced into the prison a little more roughly had also received concussions courtesy of the cavern floor.
Their first instinct was to rush over, try to heal what damage they could before they were inevitably pushed away. They nearly did, but the swell of not alone and someone here and need to help hit them all at once, and they froze, struggling to process it.
Once it sank in that, yes, there was someone here, they were not alone, they allowed themselves to move toward her. They reached out-
-and stopped.
Something was different about this one.
They weren’t certain what exactly was different. They tried to pinpoint it as they circled around her, examining her from a reasonable distance. She was female, but about half of the others had been too, so that was hardly unusual. She was small, despite her being fully developed, but not excessively so. Her skin and hair didn’t possess much melanin, but that wasn’t sufficient to differentiate her from the other couple dozen pasty humans that had been tossed in the vault with them.
They suddenly realized they were nervous, more so than they had ever been around the others, and the human hadn’t even woken yet. Perhaps the extended period of time they’d suffered without contact had set them on edge. They willed themselves to relax, focusing on the woman’s face as they waited for her eyes to open.
The first thing they noticed was that the hair on her face was different than the hair on her head. Her brows and lashes had thin coats of artificial substances that seemed to hold the purpose of making them darker. However, they could tell that even without such substances, the eyelashes and such contained more melanin than the rest of the hair and would have still been darker regardless of whether they were enhanced with chemical paints.
The second thing that caught their metaphorical eye were her lips. They had only the roughest idea of what was considered aesthetically pleasing to humans, but the woman’s lips seemed an elegant shape. The subtle dent in the upper lip, the slight outwards curve of the lower one, the rich flush of color as compared to the rest of the skin- it was oddly captivating.
Their fascination was briefly interrupted by the realization that the human had a bruise on her cheek. Automatically they reached out to heal it, but they stopped just before they could touch her skin.
Her skin looked soft, and delicate, and warm. The purple of the bruise contrasted with the white and pink of the rest of her face, a harsh, glaring mark that only made the woman seem more fragile. It would be painful to her, they knew.
They didn’t want her to be in pain.
So why couldn’t they bring themselves to touch her?
She stirred, and they panicked, fleeing to the other side of the cave.
They watched as she sat up, watched as she turned her head, and-
Oh.
Her eyes were blue.
Blue like the sky they had only caught glimpses of. Blue like the waters that swallowed the surface above them. Blue like flowers, especially the ones that they had learned were colloquially named “forget-me-nots.”
Blue like His eyes.
His eyes.
Him.
Who am I thinking of?
Someone- someone important. He was important to me. He- Him-
I can’t remember.
This epiphany might’ve been more disturbing if they weren’t distracted by the fact that the woman was awake, her unforgettably blue eyes adjusting to the dark. They needed to hide, to get away, because if she saw them she would be afraid, like the others had been.
They should’ve been used to it.
Why bother to hide? It won’t change anything.
They crept along the edges of the cave, searching, searching for a crevice that they could shelter themselves in. They found one- a hole that led off into a tunnel. When they’d first been enclosed in the vault, they might’ve been foolish enough to try to slip into the tunnel, attempt an escape.
Their memories might have blurred, but the scent of scorching flesh, the shrieking that resonated down to their very core, the dying cry of the one that had dared try to leave the cavern…
They shook off the hideous recollection. They were not stupid enough to try to leave this way. They were simply hiding.
Hiding, and watching.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Edie’s first thought when she opened her eyes was, I can’t see crap.
Her second thought was, Everything hurts.
Which wasn’t precisely true. The pain was mostly localized to three main areas: her legs, her abdomen, and her head. That still encompassed most of her body, but at least her arms had been spared. Although that might’ve been due to the fact that they’d been trapped behind her back for so long that they’d gone numb.
Drawing a shuddering breath, she forced herself to sit upright, her stomach clenching in protest as the muscles in her torso contracted. Blinking back tears as she struggled not to fixate on the pain, she looked around at her surroundings, allowing her eyes to adjust.
She was in a cave. Granted, she had already been in a cave before Mr. Creepy Cultist had thrown her in here, but this felt a little more traditionally cave-like: a domed ceiling with stalactites poking down like teeth in a giant mouth, an oppressive darkness only barely relieved by the light issuing from the crack in the wall behind her, an eerie feeling of being observed by something unseen. Very classic underground horror vibes.
There was a small noise, like the crunching of gravel under feet, and Edie turned to try and spot the source of it. Naturally, nothing was there.
Okay. There are two possibilities here. One, I have a concussion and might be having auditory hallucinations on the side. Two, I still have a concussion, but I’m not hallucinating and there’s something in here with me.
A sharp ache shot through her skull and she winced.
“Ow,” she muttered, automatically moving to bring her hand up to her head to apply pressure to her temples before overbalancing and falling back over, this time getting one of her conveniently numbed arms to take the brunt of the impact as she collapsed onto the ground again.
“Ow!” she repeated, scowling at her duct-taped limbs as if she might free them by expressing her displeasure vocally enough.
The wet-gravel noise reached her ears again, and she twisted to see where it was coming from. Still nothing.
She lay there, every muscle in her body taut and aching, sweat drying on her forehead and arms. Her mouth felt like she’d gone to the Sahara and stuck her tongue in a sand dune.
“Okay, if something is in here with me, could you just come out already? If some freaky cult monster is going to torture me or eat me or whatever, I’d like to at least see it first,” she snapped.
Edie wasn’t sure what she expected to happen. She hadn’t really thought that yelling at an invisible monster had accomplished anything. Even if there was a creature in the cave with her, she couldn’t truly expect it to listen to her.
She certainly hadn’t expected for the monster to do what she said.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
They hadn’t expected her to speak to them.
They especially hadn’t expected her to sound so angry.
On the rare occasions the others had actually addressed them directly, it had always been with fear, with pleading, with a sort of awe inspired by being in the presence of what one knew to be dangerous, even if one knew nothing else.
She did not sound afraid. She sounded defiant. Commanding.
Before they had realized what they were doing, they had emerged from the crevice, creeping across the floor until they were right in front of her.
She made a noise as she saw them, something that might have been a yelp if it hadn’t been caught and strangled in her throat. Her eyes widened in surprise and confusion. Her mouth opened, and she spoke again.
“The heck?” she squeaked, shifting away from them before wincing as she glared down at her injured knees. Then she looked up again, her shock tempered by irritation.
“The heck are you?” she croaked, her eyebrows drawn together in an expression that might have conveyed a hint of worry, but mostly showcased annoyance.
They immediately tried to answer her before recalling the fact that they did not possess vocal cords. They attempted to form some, struggling to imitate a humanoid larynx, and pushed air out through a makeshift mouth in a crude facsimile of speech.
“Hakshrfrthhnynasfrdnnnsskkthhh.”
At that point they remembered that while they had heard the others speak it, they had no concept of how to speak English themselves.
They wanted to speak. They wanted to explain. They wanted her to understand.
But they were scared.
Monster, she had said. And they had responded.
If she pushed them away-
That’s happened before, part of them reasoned. What difference does it make?
Yet this was different. She was different, somehow, in some way they couldn’t quite put together in their mind.
And however much they longed to reach out, the thought of her rejecting them, being scared of them…
It hurt. More than the loneliness eating them up from the inside.
They melted into themselves, and shrank away, disappearing back into their hiding spot.