Its footsteps course through your bones; the earth trembles with every stride as it passes behind abandoned warehouses, over debris, and through the shanties. You dare not peek around a corner at the monstrosity though. There is a rule about things you can see: they can see you too.
With each turn through the ordered procession of hovels, you wait for a roar, another footstep, a growl. Then you dash in the opposite direction. The weaving path—through the dark metal shacks, under strange driftwood huts, over rusted cars and planes—brings bizarre sights indeed. The boatyard is a decaying amalgam of time and space, piecemealed from lost waste, built by lost souls, as if a wormhole had sucked up everything the world wouldn't miss and discarded it here. Your heart sinks at the idea, for you are here too.
After adrenaline wears thin, you glimpse a straight line of sight to the dock. The dinghy is moored. How many knots? Two? Five? How long to untie each?
No time can be wasted, it's at the end of an enormous open space, away from the tattered belongings of past places. The only obstacles remaining: the teetering carcasses of dozens of ships, stripped, torn apart, and melted by years and decades and centuries. Ancient masts rise like tombstones above the dead vessels, casting crosses along their own remains.
But you have not a second to spare for awe. You edge toward the dock and pass open cargo holds wafting rotting wood, metal, and meat from their pitch-black interiors. The scuttling of small animals calls from within, silencing whenever the monster screams in the distance. Finally, you reach the last building—the last shelter—and you whisper your last prayer.
You run.
YOU ARE READING
The Second Stage
TerrorA world unseen dies over and over. It shrieks at a pitch that you cannot hear. It rots with a stench that you will never quite know. It isn't a place meant for you and I, it is merely a bank for the dead and dying; a vault of visceral agony. I...
