v-s.net v0.6

Tuesday, 7:47 pm in Storytime

It wasn’t too long after he first arrived that Lain realised there was another presence in the house. Stilled, but powerful. Oh so terribly powerful. So he spent his time searching for it. The place was so large and the other occupants so reclusive that they rarely saw each other, thus there was no-one to warn Lain about that which he was seeking.

It was elusive, but eventually he found the source of the power; Loqia’s room. Lain had never been there, and neither had anyone else as far as he knew. The door was always locked. Almost tentativley he rapped on the scarred wood. The door was uneven – bigger at the top than bown the bottom and sloped in both so many directions that it should by no rights have ever opened – and the frame was deadflesh marble, adorned atop by a strange keystone. It was all too familiar.

Noone answered Lain’s knocking, to which he wasn’t surprised; Loqia would be sitting outside the Softwall, as he always did. Something had broken through not long ago, Lain knew. Loqia was obsessed to see if it – or anything else – would do the same. Lain didn’t ask about it anymorel when he had, Element’s eyes had gotten a very strange haunted look that hadn’t passed for days.

He tried Loqia’s doorknob; an ugly, twisted claw-like thing that seemed solely designed to scare anyone who had to touch it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it would animate at his touch, grab onto his wrist and pull him inside the door, to a world of endless hallways.

It didn’t.

He expected the door to be locked.

It wasn’t.

Or, more to the point, it had been, but the temblers had clicked into place as soon as he had tried to turn it.

Behind the door was more or less what he had expected; a confused jumble of Burtonesque gothic mangled with post-industrial cyberpunk. There were wires and screens everything pulse with an absinthe luminescence. In the corner was a giant, cast-iron four poster bed draped with an iridescent black veil. The dresser was covered in cobwebs made from wire. The closet looked as if something were ready to leap out at any moment.

It was Hallowe’en and Disneyland all at the same time. Visual and clichéd and oh-so fake but at the same time filled with a kind of deadly serious menace. Not, Lain thought, unlike its owner, and he knew instinctivley that he shouldn’t be here.

He entered the technophile gloom room anyway, the door closing behind him with a sort of doomed finality.

The presence he had sensed before only faintly was almost stifling in this place. He could feel it seeping into the core of his being; blood and shit and bile and rot.

He took another step.

Something moved.

It occured to Lain that coming here may not have been such a good idea. Perhaps the door, too, was part of the cliché; designed not so much to keep people out, but to keep whatever elder thing it was that lurked here in.

And involuntary step backwards resulted into a resounding clang that caused Lain to cry out.

It was and onld ammo box, the lid of which looked as if it had been wrenched off from within. The whole thing was covered in bullet holes and dried blood. It hadn’t been there when he came and, Lain knew with the absolute certainty of a thousand late nights in front of the television, hidden behind a pillow, that all he need do now was turn around.

He found, of course, that he could do nothing but.

• Tags » anthro, grungefur, herebeyond, writing