MicroHorror

She woke screaming, covered in sweat and slime, and chained.

As her voice came out of her mouth unwanted, her eyes tried to adjust to the darkness. She could not see beyond a few feet from where she lay; the light shed by the single lantern above her head was weak. There was nothing that she could make out beyond a few scattered boxes and a fallen chair. Looking down at her arms and legs, she realized that thick, heavy steel links were cold around her wrists and ankles and chained her to a large pipe.

She did not know how she had gotten here. The last thing she remembered was walking in the dimly lit street leading from her workplace to the bus terminal. She had taken a route that she had been taking for as long as she had been working in the office. But she never reached the terminal. Whoever had brought her here had taken her before she got there.

Whoever had taken her here had left her bruised and with a dull pain on the side of her head. The slime… It was a dark green color, sticky and rank with the stench of vomit and insect blood. She had layers of it on her appendages and on her face. She could not get much of it off her cheeks without scratching her skin off. She began to panic, thinking that she had been abducted by a deranged man with an abominable fetish.

It was as she desperately pulled at her chains that she heard the sound for the first time. It made her cease her struggles. She waited. It took her a few more times of hearing the sound to realize that it was a low moan. It was coming from somewhere to her right.

She gasped. From the thick dark not reached by the swinging light, a young boy’s head and upper torso had emerged. His face was emaciated and pale, anguished, and his arm was outstretched towards her. The boy, who she thought could have been no older than seven years, was crawling with great effort. He looked only half-alive.

Anger replaced fear. How could anyone do this to a child? How long had he been kept here in this dank dungeon, unfed and left to rot? The boy’s every moan drove a stabbing pain through her heart.

“Who brought you here?” she asked with a hoarse voice. She cleared her throat and said, “Are you all right?”

The boy said nothing and only continued to moan.

“You bastard!” she screamed into the shadows. “Let us go!”

In response, there came a series of skittering sounds from in front of her. She felt the hair rise on her arms, for the sounds made her think of multiple insect legs hitting the cold stone floor. A robed figure, humanoid in form yet a few feet taller than she would have thought possible for a human, slid into view from the dark. Indeed, with the robe concealing its feet, it seemed not to have walked the way any normal person would.

Whatever expletive she had intended to cry out died in her throat. Fear had seized her again. “What…what do you want with us?” She began to cry. “Please, let us go.”

The thing cocked its head to the side. The motion reminded her of a curious mantis. She felt her bladder empty.

“Please…” it said, in a voice that sounded much like hers, save that it was accompanied by a noise no human mouth or larynx could make. “Please… feed my child.”

Her eyes widened. Trembling, she turned to where the child was. How could she not have seen it? How could she have mistaken the thing’s spawn for anything other than what it was?

Where legs should have been, there was a lumbering, sluggish posterior, segmented and plated, wet with sludge. It was finally near enough so the light bathed its entire form.

It had finally stopped moaning.