The DOOM Chronicles

Chapter 46: The Spirit World

The room that Jack appeared in immediately set him on edge.

Even more so than the average room in Hell did. He remembered, at least, to step off the teleport pad as he did a three-sixty, making sure to scope everything out immediately. But he was alone. Not a roaring Demon or groaning zombie to be seen. He had appeared in a small, asymmetrical room. The floor was multicolored cobblestone and the ceiling was a bland, smooth grid of tan rock. But it was the walls that were getting to him.

They were made of dark green rock covered in rivulets and holes and ridges and bumps, all of it random and ugly, and something about it made him squirm.

But the walls beyond the pair of openings he could see ahead of him were actually worse. They looked to be made completely of some alien, pale green vines, so thickly dense that he couldn't tell if they were the walls or they had grown over the original surface. When he wasn't looking directly at them, sections of them seemed to writhe and twist, just barely within his sight. But they stopped when he looked squarely at them.

He genuinely couldn't tell if it was his imagination or not.

As the others teleported in one by one, he took stock of the rest of the room. Besides one tall, oddly narrow door with red trim, (and in this case trim meant stacks of red skulls embedded in the wall to either side of the bullet-riddled metal door), there were just some brass candle-holders stuck in an asymmetrical ring around the center of the room.

"Fuck this place," Hollenshead muttered as he came in.

"Yep," Jack replied. "Let's just get this done."

"Where to first?" Cortez asked.

"Lemme check the map," Jack muttered, making sure one more time that they were safe, then calling up the digital overlay. The thing they were looking for, ironically, was right behind them, through the locked door. He sighed. "Cortez, see if you can get that door open without a key."

"On it," he replied.

Jack went back to studying. This place was pretty big. There were two other ways out of this room, both open and clear for the moment. The one to the right led to not a whole lot, just a few other rooms according to the map, the left led to the rest of the lair. And of course the teleportation pad that led to the Icon of Sin was at the far end of the left section. And since he had no idea where everything else was, i.e. keys, he didn't really have a good plan beyond: search it all.

"Can't do it," Cortez reported after another few minutes.

Jack sighed. "Figured. All right, let's start search and slaughter," he said. "We'll get this right area out of the way first."

They set to it, heading through the right opening, Jack leading the way, Hollenshead watching their six. They found a weird section of wall that was two big wooden blocks with skulls embedded in them, and a small tunnel, the floor of which was recessed down and filled with a pool of blood. He readjusted his grip on the double-barrel shotgun and got to work.

Ten minutes later, the squad was back where they'd started, having found about as much as they'd expended wiping out a dozen seemingly random demons who had been waiting for them behind closed-off sections of walls just for the opportunity to jump-scare them. Jack and his fellow Marines had been more than happy to reward them with a faceful of lead for their troubles. But there were no key-cards or skull-keys hidden among any of the rooms or hidey-holes.

They moved down to the only passageway left to them, coming into a tunnel that began broadening as it twisted around to the left. Strange, five-foot spiky protrusions jutted up out of the floor like alien growths. They gave them a lot of room, unsure of what the fuck they were or what they might do, and then slowed as they came to the final section of the passageway.