Sundew

Chapter 25

When he woke up, Sunny found himself in the most bizarre place. A rainforest. Sunny may as well have been dropped in the middle of Argentina. All about him, trees. Tres everywhere. Some small, some home to entire mini-ecosystems. Vines, flowers of all color and variety, it were as if mother nature had finally developed an effective antibody against climate change and was now reclaiming the earth. In the middle of the field, beneath a sky that was a rich, healthy blue, Sunny noticed something. A flower—one made up of thousands of smaller ones. Sunny didn't even realize his legs had been moving until one of them had gotten snagged on a branch lodged in the ground. He jerked, unable to remove at first, then yanked violently. The old, time-strengthened wood made a cracking noise like a piece of goodyear rubber snapping in two while caught in a metal press. Sunny magnetized to the flower, filling his nostrils with a scent like that of a bakery. He came closer, closer, yet closer still, vaguely aware of his zombie-like speed. The flower was a pinkish-red color like that of Baskin-Robbins' bubblegum flavor (and smelling of it, too, enticing Sunny to come further).

"Come now, child," Sunny heard it speak into his head, a sultry-sweet lullaby whispering directly to his brain's most carnal instincts, let me get a better look at you. I always love to get a good look at my children before I feed and care for them the way a mother would her babe~"

Two petals opened up on the side of the flower, like a lover opening their arms to a dearly-missed partner.

Sunny obliged the request. The inside of the plant was particularly sweet. Sunny realized what was happening after it was far too late. He'd been had, he realized. The nectar was narcotic in nature, sedating him temporarily so that Sunny could easily slip into the mouth of the beast. He fell down the plant's throat, landing in a deep pool of water. He panicked, screamed, tried to climb back out, but the walls were too slippery to gain any foothold. He'd given up but was still about to give climbing another attempt when he spotted it. A change of light in the water. He screamed again and backed away, but the thing which had caused the visual disruption did not pursue him. He thought back to seeing A New Hope and assumed the thing in the water would give chase, but it just stayed where it was. Sunny, against his better judgment, took a deep breath, and looked under the water. He was horrified to see... Himself. He rushed back to the surface, running to what served as the shoreline in this thing. He also noticed that he could actually breathe the water, strangely. But the mind tries to focus our attention on other things during times of physical pain, so this quickly removed itself from his attention, however, as he tried to focus simply on not going into cardiac arrest from such a shock as what he was now experiencing

After an hour or so (Who knows, maybe it's been longer, he thought), Sunny went back under, ignoring the one closest to him. There was something down there—a black silhouette illuminated by dim, ominous red light. It looked like the mouth of a carnivorous demon, one who camouflages itself, and then, like an alligator snapping turtle, leaves its mouth open for unsuspecting prey. He took in a sickly-sweet breath of plant-fluid and plunged deeper. The dark shapes were coming closer. Sunny tried and failed to convince himself that his heart was, in fact, not threatening to leap out of his chest—that it was not attempting to do acrobatics like the tightrope walkers he'd seen when Dad took him to the circus all those years ago. The dark shapes came into view slowly but surely. He had a creeping, terrifying suspicion in his gut–in the pit of his stomach—that he knew exactly what the shapes were. Over and over, Sunny prayed this was not the case. But as he got closer, his suspicions were confirmed. There must have been millions of them, all frozen in time and endlessly spiraling down this chute, flowing, like a diagram of blood cells flowing through an artery. Down. Down. Down into the red light—that impossible light of ominous intent—and to god knows where. He did not know how it could be possible. When he looked under the water that first time, he saw himself. Dead. Dead and floating aimlessly.

Now, all around him, Weren't just duplicates of himself. There were others He saw clones of Gary, Olivia, and the other patients who survived with him, even his mother and father. All of them, mutilated, violated, some of them ripped apart. Suddenly, the sense of deja vu Sunny had felt repeatedly made all too much sense now. He was surprised, ironically, to have not been surprised, as they had told him he would never die. Sunny swam even further down, moving past the bodies, trying to ignore the lack of emotion in the ones who still had faces.

Sunny was now blinded with red light. He'd swam to what felt like the bottom of this thing, and was left speechless. He came out the other side, and was surprised to find he was pulling himself up and out of a body of water in a cave, as if he hadn't been swimming downward. The cave was quiet. The kind of stillness you feel in the air right before the portals of hell are opened violently, flooding the mortal world with the fires of hell.

All did not remain still for long, as Sunny soon heard the screams. All around him, the darkness was quickly banished, replaced with fire—an inferno, one forever tormenting Olivia, Alexia, his mother, his father, and the others. They were trapped inside the jaws of hungry dionaeas, reaching through the teeth to get out while being slowly crushed, or stuck to oversized sundews slowly injecting them with digestive enzymes. They begged for release from this nightmare, only to be brought back to life for it to happen all over again. But this was not the end of the horror. Those who were not trapped quickly fled in the coming of the being that had spoken to Sunny, Its body was a dense jungle with the face of his Mom, wrapped in a network of corkscrew plants, smiling and attempting to look pretty, as if to lure in the most unobservant of prey. The few who remained, naked and damaged beyond recognition, quickly fled deeper into the inferno, desperate to escape this plant-god.

"Jonathan!" It said, " You've come home! Home at last!"

Chapter 20

Out of the face of the thing impersonating his mom—out of its very pores, leaked a substance— a foul-smelling one that looked to be a combination of pus, coagulated blood, blood-ridden stool, and cum. Sunny laughed. Out of both the absurdity of the situation and simply from madness. If this were a poorly-made horror story written by an even stupider edgelord, the appearance of these bodily products would be funny, in a juvenile way, under different circumstances.

All these bodily fluids, Sunny thought, and I can still smell the sweet part of that disgusting sickly-sweet smell. Except, this time, the sweetness is overpowered. They're not even trying to be subtle—to mask the scent of rot with that of a fresh sheet of cookies—anymore.

The thing was enormous. It could be perfectly grasped by the human eye, no doubt—a Lovecraftian being it was not—but the colossal size of the damn thing! It went on for a long time—longer than you think, Sunny thought—on and on and on until it faded into the horizon of maddening red light, a shade of red that made you see no other color but red. The greens and other colors of the plants that made up the collective mass of this thing faded into a spectrum of lighter and darker red, each.