The Confluence

The Confluence Part X

X

The bell screamed through Suzie's eardrums as she woke up with start, head leaping up from the desk she had fallen asleep at. She had been in the Kennedy high school library, reading a book on dreams, but none held any answers about the creatures she saw, nor the empty void she had found herself in that terrible nightmare. The bell she had just heard signaled the end of classes for that day, and she began packing her stuff up in her shoddy hand-me-down military pack she was given to by her father when he first came back from Vietnam. She got up and left the building, and almost immediately zipped her thin coat up against the brisk wind that had picked up over the course of the fall day. As she walked quickly down the front steps of the school towards the bus stop, she noticed the tall, gangly form of Johnny, smoking a cigarette. She walked over to him and said "Hi Johnny. You got another one of those?" She pointed to his cigarette. He pulled out his pack, handed her one, and lit it for her with a match. "You doing anything tonight?" He asked her.

"Not sleeping, that's for sure." She muttered quietly. "Well, I got the perfect distraction for you, babe. I heard about this rave going down tonight."

"Oh yeah? Where the fuck is somebody gonna host a rave around here?"

Johnny grinned a devilish smile. "One place the cops aren't gonna find us. I'll tell you about it on the way to the entrance." Suzie sighed, but followed him to his car. She really didn't want to sleep, not after the visceral nightmare she had the night before.

As they were driving, Suzie noticed they were going out towards the mountain, and the foothills before it. "Where the fuck is this place?" Suzie asked. Johnny looked over at her from the driver's seat, and smiled. "It's beneath us." Suzie turned towards him, eyes wide. "Excuse me?"

"Yeah, it's going down in the ruins of the old town. I heard some druggie spelunkers found this cathedral down there and that's where they're hosting the rave. The entrance is right... there!" He leaned forward and pointed to an unassuming section of the woods. Suzie followed the line his finger drew, and then she saw it. It seemed almost alien amongst the deep greens and browns of the underbrush. It was the sewer entrance, which consisted of little more than a large pipe sticking out from the base of a steep hill. The pipe was huge, and dry. About seven feet high, and easily eight feet wide, the entrance was easy to enter, and after parking the car a little farther up the road at a discreet location, Suzie and Johnny climbed up into the pipe, and started making their way deeper into the earth. Wet, foul smelling air rushed out of the pipe, picking up the loose curls of Suzie's hair and tousling them. Johnny gagged a little ahead of her on the stench of the air, but still they walked cautiously on. There were small clumps of moss that tapered down a good foot down off the roof of the pipe, sometimes slithering along the backs of the two teens' necks, both of them equally revulsed by the hair-like feeling of the moss. As it got darker, Johnny pulled out a zippo, and with slight hesitation, flicked it. Nothing. He flicked it again, but still no flame appeared. "Ah fuck." Softly floated down the pipe. Two more flicks and suddenly light flared in front of him, illuminating about five more feet of mossy wet pipe. They trudged on, and the deeper they went in, other sounds became clear. It was confusing at first, like a low incoherent buzz, that solidified into many voices, all talking over music. Johnny and Suzie both picked the pace, and quickly reached the end of the pipe. Inside was a large cavern, and about hundred yards from where they stood loomed a massive stone structure. It seemed to be made of stone, and there were three gaping arches on the front where once was stained glass, but all that was left were a few shards of multi-colored glass lodged in the stone. Some of the masonry was crumbling in places, the widest being at the base. The damage was centered around the base of the cathedral like the whole building was dropped down into this cavern. Despite the gothic appearance, it was well lit. Someone had drug two generators down into the cavern, and had strung Christmas lights everywhere on the inside and along the broken window arches, cascading what would've been an ominous place in soft shades of orange. There were people dancing in the cathedral, throngs of them, jumping and dancing laughing in a kind of mania to the music. Johnny leapt forward, jumping onto rocks beneath the pipe and worked his way down, grinning excitedly. The outside of the cathedral wasn't lit very well, and once or twice Johnny almost lost his footing. Suzie was clambering after him, but he had too much of a head start. She started feeling flustered, and called out his name, but it was lost in the confusion of sound. Johnny was almost to the ground when out of the inky darkness something snaked out and snagged Johnny's ankle, tripping him. To Suzie's eyes, it looked like Johnny just slipped on shadows. She crawled along the rocks a little faster, scraping her knuckles against a particularly sharp rock, making her wince in pain as she left a bit of skin on the rock. Johnny hadn't gotten back up. "What the fuck..." Suzie panted. She gazed into the pool of shadows Johnny had tripped into. As she stared, something seemed to writhe in the shadows with this insatiable urgency, and then suddenly, the movement stopped. Suzie felt something warm spatter across her face. A head with long dark hair started coming out into the orange light spilling out of the cathedral, but there was something wrong. Something was wrong when the head kept rolling but no body followed. Suzie shot up, and started jumping down the rocks, tears already streaming down her face, while her head screamed denial. She was almost to where Johnny was when she heard a hideous slurping, bubbling sound. Her eyes widened as her mind slipped. I'm dreaming. I am dreaming. I AM DREAMING. Crouched over a weird headless mannequin in Johnny's clothes, was this pale, grey skinned thing. Its hands had three fingers with wicked sharp black claws, which were sunk into the torso of the mannequin Johnny. The limbs attached to the hands were horribly thin, and dappled with blue veins. And its head, there was no face *whereisitsface* there was a hole, a hole filled with this bubbling black viscous liquid, and the liquid was shooting out small polyps that were snatching hunks of red meat out of the corpseitshisfuckingcorpse.

Suzie screamed. No one inside the cathedral heard, but a man had drunkenly wandered out of a hole in the wall of the cathedral; He had a black v-neck on, and blue jeans, and he was barely holding onto a red dixie cup. He stumbled out, almost fell, and then leaned against the more solid end of the wall, and glanced down. At his feet was Johnny's bloodied head, jaw broken into an eternal scream, and his eyes rolled back up into his skull. The man stared and stared, and then with a quick heave, vomited all over his shoddy sneakers. The thing eating Johnny's body looked buthowcanitlookwithnoeyes in the direction of the puking man, and with a terrifying speed, it dropped Johnny's corpse like a doll cast aside by a distracted child. It stood up to its full height, and it loomed above Suzie, silently crying and curled in a ball muttering to herself that she had to be sleeping. The man was still puking when he looked up, and saw the creature, all stick thin and towering eight feet in the air. He didn't know what to do. He heaved again and felt the hot vomit slide up his throat and out his mouth as the thing seemed to fold onto all fours. It began to crawl towards him, its black liquid bubbling excitedly. The man looked up one last time and only saw bubbling blackness. In that moment he knew only redness and pain as the thing shot hunks of black liquid into his face; each polyp tearing off a chunk of flesh, teeth and bone then eagerly making off with the still glistening pieces of flesh into the hole of its face.