Werehouse
The lighting is dim, and dank are the halls of a room long untapped by its owners. Buildings, like creatures, can grow feral, perhaps turning on their owners, perhaps turning to the wild suburbia to find suitable prey. And there it festers, hidden from light by walls built long ago to keep intruders at bay–walls that have since closed in and tightened protectively like the coils of a snake around its prey.
The floor is stained, black-dried blood marking its deathcry upon cement, twisted in anguish. Chains rattle above; suspended at varying heights, half-faded into the darkness of a pitless ceiling, are the cages. Steel floored and barred, three-foot square and gleaming like knifepoints in the dim light, they hold what was once life and will soon become prey to the beast.
An arm can be seen, severed and bloodied, fingers clenched in death and reaching for freedom. Freedom would not come, not to this poor soul–or, at least, to this soul’s appendage. Blood, darkened by the air, is suspended from the fingertips, threatening to fall and disturb the half-congealed puddle below.
And on. A mesh of body parts, twisted and writhing for inanimate freedoms in their cages, dripping their soulless blood unto the cement, falling like tears of a shattered and bloody heart. They would cry out, if only they had been spared their mouths.
No one would hear them.
A fell breeze lifts, carrying dank air from one dusky window through the void of humanity within, sending ripples through the stagnant crimson pools. The sound of fluttering paper. A whirlwind, a tornado of yellowed notes and hand-scrawled tales of that which had been important at one time and since discarded, the stained papers of a business left to decay for want of humanity.
The wind dies down, and the papers settle, floating to rest in pools of blood, soaking it into their sparse texture.
The eaves groan, the walls sigh, the foundation settles.
The werehouse has sated its hunger tonight.