Creature From The Inky Core (BATIM)

Chapter 1

I walked down the roads and crossed the sidewalks with the nostalgia from a big piece of my life. Could it be true that 30 years had passed? It seemed as though it was yesterday that me and my buddy Joey had started our first cartoons in an effort to make a living. Those were the days that I would laugh in my desk while he was frustrated because a finger or two on a beloved character looked like sausages or when his pen would bleed out on the paper he was almost finished with. Even when I arrived at the studio, I couldn't believe my eyes. Mind you, I ended up staring at the building until I could feel myself getting older by the minute. It looked slightly run-down and crusty, just like when you leave a pen uncapped for five hours and try to write with it as soon as you grab it. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life trying to get that pen to work and when it does work spend your eternal afterlife cleaning your new white shirt that for some fucking reason you had on when you KNEW you are going to work with pots of ink, be my guest. In that same building, Joey was usually that guest. Every time he came to the studio, he just had to come in with the brightest or hardest to clean shirt on the planet. Just remembering those countless hours made me laugh out loud even when people passing by looked at me like if I was possessed or something. Finally, I made my first steps inside, expecting to find my buddy to be as nostalgic as I was. To my surprise, however, I didn't find him anywhere. I knew very well that Joey had a habit to wander around the place he told he'd be in, but this time, I really didn't find him. That's when I decided to go down stairs. I grabbed a flashlight, turned it on, and went downstairs. On my way there, though, I found a hallway that I didn't remember was there and I slowly walked in. After my first steps, I felt something oozing from beneath my shoe. I pointed my flashlight to the floor and all I could see was something pitch black. That's when I caught the smell, fresh ink, just like a newly-bought pen. I kept walking and the ink kept following me, it didn't seem to end. I started to look at the walls, there was doodles that seemed like a five-year-old did them. Those doodles were of small stick figured families, a fat dog with skinny legs that would snap in real life, and a cat with ears larger than its body. As I examined the doodles, I felt something cold fall on my head, more ink. I rubbed it off and continued down. How long was this fucking hallway? Eventually the inky smell drastically changed to a strong smell of death and I was immediately shivering out of fear. The ink on my shoes was no longer a problem because it changed into dark red puddles. I quickly looked at the walls, even the doodles changed. They weren't childish anymore, instead they were almost demonic. Pentagrams were scattered across the walls and even the ceiling and now, there were red words on the walls. "Turn Back Now" they said. With even more fear than before, I walked a little more until I tripped on something. I stood frozen still as I flashed whatever the hell it was with the flashlight. It was a head. A motherfucking head. Not a mask, no, a head just on the floor like if it was supposed to be there. What the actual fuck was Joey doing? Because this right here looked like some creepy paranormal shit I wasn't going to deal with. I moved the flashlight forwards and saw eight corpses just sitting on both sides. This was perfectly normal you know just some decaying bodies in a dark hallway, nothing to be scared of here. As I checked the bodies, I realized that none of them were intact. Some didn't have their heads, others didn't have arms or legs, and one final body wasn't even a fucking body it was just organs sitting on the floor. All of them were cut by something like a saw or something, I'm not a detective, I'm just a very scared grown man that's about to shit his pants. I finally reached the end of the long-ass hallway. The wall just said, "Found you." I looked around, there was nothing, until my flashlight decided to die. It was black and I was so sure I was dead, this is it, my death, I'm going to die in a dark hallway where no one can find my dead body. Best way to die ever. Suddenly I felt something cold dripping behind my back and I was paralyzed. Then a voice from the past of this studio came to life...
"Greetings, Henry. I was expecting you."
...Just to kill me.