Darkness…
Pitch-black darkness was all that surrounded me. Boisterous lamentations of distress reverberated throughout the desolate oblivion. Chains incessantly rapped against the hollow black walls. Seeming to come as a weep in the wind, a queer mirthless voice intoned Closer… closer… I knew not where the voice was coming, but I could sense it nigh.
Before my eyes, a trail of blood seeped through the damp bleary ground before me, signaling the way to goodness knows what, causing me to halt in perplexity. My heart pulsated at so fast a rate that it felt as though it would burst at any moment. My thoughts were grasped by suspense, filling me with a horrid curiosity as I followed up the trail.
Toward the end of the murky corridor, a glinting reddish light shone upon two obscure pendulous figures. I froze and mused whether to continue or not. The blood is your life… the blood is your destiny... let darkness take you to the river of a thousand young... Again the voice spoke, only that time in a more menacing and brooding tone.
I slowly carried on, furtive and petrified. My body shook; assortments of horrific visions flickered incessantly in my mind, symbolizing conjectures of what was about to come. As I approached the awkward light, I halted at the sight of repulsion—two mangled twitching bodies doused in blood, hung from the ceiling by dozens upon dozens of chained hooks deeply piercing into their tattered flesh eliciting excruciating screams so inhuman as to resemble the weeping of banshees. The hooks sprung apart their gutted torsos, expanding the flesh like a bat spreading its wings. Their intestines drooped like blood-smothered icicles. Their pulsating hearts educed blood from their ruptured veins, cascading down their eviscerated bodies in abundant quantities to meet the ground. Hundreds of cockroaches, moths, maggots, and any other repulsive insect known to man seeped from every orifice of their bodies, creeping and crawling, masticating frenziedly at their flesh and viscera.
Further ahead lied a door, though not just any ordinary door. The door was meticulously fabricated with human flesh molded and warped into lacerated faces with contorted expressions—it almost looked as though the faces were crying for help.
Suddenly, my mind blanked and slowly I fell into a trance. It felt as if something—or someone—was controlling me like a puppet. I opened the door and upon crossing through long, cyclopean corridors of crimson granite, I found myself before an enormous octagonal pit. Gallons of blood, amalgamated with bits and pieces of viscera, poured like a waterfall from a gargantuan gap in the ceiling, splashing sloppily into the pit. The puzzling trance wore off. I gasped at the horror before me. The door once behind me vanished. Like a spider I clung to the wall, mustering all my strength to hold me back. I looked up and just as the abhorrent bloodfall ceased to spill, fire encircled the ceiling, forming the shape of a pentagram. Hundreds of naked carcasses were heaved into the gigantic blood pool as though something monstrous from above regurgitated them from its bowels.
Now, they were not just random corpses of varied physiques nor were they in the process of decomposing. The bodies were fresh and untarnished. All were ashen-skinned, bleach-blonde, lean young women no older than sixteen. I looked down. My eyes glued to the horrific blood stew. My reveries—my thoughts—were snatched by revulsion and delirium. The carcasses floated like dead fish. The phosphorescence of their eyes were like those of a demoniac black-cat prowling the night, gawking at me direly. They chanted the words “Join us! Join us! Join us!" in unison, their ghastly voices analogous to a choir of wraiths.
The thick dilapidated brick-walls enshrouding me ran crimson with oozing blood as the carcasses burst into flames. I then realized that I stood at the brink of hell's abysmal maw... and the only salvation... was the shock... of awakening...
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