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<center><div class="title">ONLY THIS</div> AND NOTHING MORE <div class="menulink">» <<click [[start]]>><<audio "heartbeat" play>><</click>> «</div> <div class="menulink2">» <<click [[warnings]]>><<audio "heartbeat" play>><</click>> «</div> <div class="menulink3">» <<click [[credits]]>><<audio "heartbeat" play>><</click>> «</div></center>

<<audio "dialtone" fadein loop>>DISPATCHER: 911. What is your emergency? <<timedinsert 2000ms>>CALLER: Yeah, I — Mother of God.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 4000ms>>DISPATCHER: Ma'am?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 6000ms>>CALLER: Hi, sorry. My, uh, my house is on fire. I just got home—<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 8000ms>>DISPATCHER: What is your address?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 10000ms>>CALLER: It's, uh — 18 Belfry Road. Lane. Lane, sorry.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 12000ms>>DISPATCHER: Alright, help is on the way. Do not enter the building. Is there anyone inside?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 14000ms>>CALLER: Everyone. Oh, my God. My—<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 16000ms>>DISPATCHER: There's a fire truck on the way right now. Can I get your name, ma'am?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 18000ms>>CALLER: Yeah. Yeah, [[it's]]—<<endtimedinsert>>

<center><big><big><big>warnings</big></big></big> <div class="warnings1">contains</div><div class="warnings2">gore, unsettling imagery, <<click "[+]">><<replace "#warn">>autocannibalism<</replace>><</click>></div> <div class="menulink4">» [[back|Untitled Passage]] «</div></center>

<center><big><big><big>credits</big></big></big> <div class="warnings1">writing & programming music sound effects scripts</div><div class="warnings2"><a href="https://twitter.com/RicassoFiction">@RICASSOFICTION</a> <a href="https://incompetech.com">KEVIN MACLEOD</a> + SEE BELOW + LEON ARNOTT (<a href="https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/user/584">L</a>)</div> <div class="credits">» FREESOUND USERS • <<click "[+]">><<replace "#credit">>CORMI, DRFX, ERH, HYDERPOTTER, JOBRO, KLANKBEELD, STEVELALONDE, & TAGIGOBASO<</replace>><</click>> » INCOMPETECH • <<click "[+]">><<replace "#credit2">>"Echoes of Time v2" "The Escalation" "This House" "Metaphysik" "Penumbra" <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">[License]</a><</replace>><</click>></div> <div class="menulink4">» [[back|Untitled Passage]] «</div></center>

<<audio "dialtone" stop>><<audio "House" fadein loop>>There was a way down, you remember: a makeshift parody of the sort of rope ladder that children might unfurl from a treehouse stronghold. Vines veined with slippery moss provided only the most rudimentary footholds, and you clutched the ridges of the wall with one hand, guided by thin furrows in the rock as you [[descended]] blind.

A sliver of daylight still hung overhead, a halo suspended above the fissure in the ground. It did not reach you as you climbed lower, but the climb was short, made to seem endless only by the grinding uncertainty of each step. The sole of your shoe came down once more, gingerly, on solid ground, and the other followed as you allowed yourself to drop, folding into a crouch with your back to the wall. Ridges of stone and vine pressed against your shoulderblades; a crawling sensation worked slowly up your spine. The gray daylight lingered, illuminating the edge from which you lowered yourself. It would not be too high to scale again when the time came to leave — and the sight of that edge, just out of reach, was more inviting than the darkness [[ahead]].

We moved in during early June. The town was tiny — two gas stations, a few stores, one hotel closed for renovations. Just closed, as if no one was going to stay there anyway. The next city over was an hour away. But the [[property]] was nothing to scoff at.

Me and my sister — my sister and I, rather; she always corrects me on that one — bought the house. She'd just had her baby, and the father wasn't in the picture. He hadn't been for some time. But we had been best friends since we were little girls, so we'd been thinking about moving in together for a while. We had it all planned out. We found this old bastard of a house and thought, this'll do. It was cheap for the amount of space and land we were getting. We were going to have stay for a while to build up our savings again, but we were hoping to end up [[relocating]] by the time the baby was ready for elementary school. Four or five years.

So, the house was built in the 1800's or something. That's what I mean when I say older than shit. The word the realtor used was "rustic," but I think my turn of phrase is serviceable enough. It was in good shape for its age, though, either despite or because of the fact that nobody had been living in it for a while before we turned up. It had first been occupied in the 1880's, and not often since. We thought it was poetic — we were moving in almost [[a hundred years]] after the original residents.

The property's out by the town line, so it's not the most convenient, and the other houses in the area are all pretty spaced out, but it's not like it's in the middle of the woods. Edge of the woods, actually. About fifty feet out from our back door, the woods start. Nice, dense treeline. We saw deer and squirrels all the time, until we [[didn't]].

The voices had come to you again as you walked. Distant and yet unmistakable — power and obscurity united in the dregs of long-dead speech. "Never should I have swaddled the thing. Oh, God save us. Is this where it has gone?" No animal cried out; no bird or cicada sang; no creatures seemed to scamper through the canopy or along the ground. The woods were silent but for your footsteps and harried women's voices, distorted as if underwater or in a dream. You were alone together. You allowed them to lead you [[off the trail]].

We didn’t have any problems for a few weeks. We never finished unpacking, but the first thing we did was get my niece’s things set up. The crib, the mobile, the works. Her room was next to my sister’s, down the hall from me, but I could hear whenever my sister got up or the baby started fussing. We thought she was just having a hard time adjusting. Moving is a big upheaval. But toward the end of the month she started to writhe and squirm whenever one of us put her in the crib. Then she started to [[scream]] the second we brought her in the room.

My sister had always been a little nervous and more than a little protective, but having a baby magnified that. Not surprisingly, all of this disturbed her. She started getting herself worked up. “What if there’s mold? Or gas?” They weren’t bad questions, considering the age of the place, but I told my sister that I wasn’t sure a baby was more reliable than an alarm or a handyman. For a moment, she looked at me with real contempt. “[[Be serious,]]” she told me. God, I always hated when she’d say that, but she was always right.

For a few more days we went on trying to calm the baby down. There was nothing wrong with her otherwise — she’d spend the whole day happy as a clam until it was time for a nap or time for bed, and then she’d cry and cry. My sister was ready to book an appointment with her pediatrician if it went on for one more day, just to rule things out. Until then, she decided to spend the night next to the crib, and if she woke up crying again — not a normal feeding cry, or a changing cry, but that piercing [[something’s wrong]] shriek — the crib would move into mom’s room.

She’d slept in the baby’s room before already, and there was nothing wrong then. She started to figure it might have been separation anxiety, and then she started to feel terrible, as if she’d been neglecting her child. I told her not to do that to herself. I said I’d help her move the crib in the morning. She gave me the [[baby monitor]].

<<audio "House" stop>><<audio "baby" fadein loop>><<timedinsert 2000ms>>Honey, what’s wrong?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 4000ms>>Shh, shh.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 6000ms>>Don’t cry.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 8000ms>>Please.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 10000ms>>[[Mommy’s here.]]<<endtimedinsert>>

<<audio "baby" stop>><<audio "mama" fadein loop>><<timedinsert 2000ms>>What <<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 2500ms>>is <<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 3000ms>>that?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 4000ms>>Are you hearing this?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 5000ms>>Are you awake?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 6000ms>>Wake up!<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 8000ms>>[[WAKE UP]]<<endtimedinsert>>

<<audio "mama" stop>><<audio "horror" fadein loop>> YRGNUH YREV OS YRGNUH OS MA <<timedinsert 1000ms>>I REHTOM ROF TAE OT ROVAS OT TNAW YLNO I<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 2000ms>>TNATROPMI TON ERA SDROW RUOY<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 3000ms>>DENODNABA GNIKOOL LLAMS OS DNA SSELPLEH OS UOY EVIECED ECNANETNUOC YM DID RETSNIPS HSILOOF NI EM KOOT OHW UOY SIT<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 4000ms>>ENIM REHTOM TEEWS LLA KLAT DELBRAG<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 5000ms>>SIHT RAEB TONNAC I GNIVRATS MA I HO [[YRGNUH]] !<<endtimedinsert>>

<<audio "horror" stop>><<audio "Echoes" fadein loop>>The baby was shrieking like I’d never heard before when I came in, and my sister was on the floor. She was clutching her head, pinching the bridge of her nose so hard that her hand shook, and in her other hand she had a rung of the crib in a white-knuckled grip. Her lips were pulled back over her gums in this look of grimacing agony, teeth bared, and her breathing wasn’t right. The baby [[went on screaming]].

I tried to get her out of the crib, but I froze. I felt like I had been punched in the gut, with none of the pain to go along with it — only an unrelenting nausea, a pressure in my stomach that worked up through my chest and into my throat and sat fizzing and coiling in my head like static, like a storm. For a second I thought I was hearing interference on the baby monitor, like it was picking up someone’s conversation in another house, or a radio broadcast, or something. [[Nothing more.]]

I listened, because I couldn’t move; I couldn’t do anything else. I felt like I would fall, and then we’d both be laid out on the floor and no one would be able to handle the baby. But, for too long, I couldn’t move. I stood still and tense trying not to vomit, but all the while I was straining to hear that sound — that voice. It a woman’s voice, higher than mine or my sister’s — a woman’s voice with an English accent. Maybe more than one — I caught snippets of different tones, different timbres. There was a man’s voice, somewhere beneath the others. A juvenile, masculine voice, not quite a child and not quite an adult, muffled and [[barely intelligible]].

It felt longer than it really lasted. The nausea faded quickly, and when I could move again my sister had already lurched to her feet and grabbed the baby. I stood there light-headed for a second, trying to make sense of what had come over us. We tried to forget about whatever it was — interference, or a shared hallucination, or some kind of prank — for long enough to move the crib into my sister’s room, but I kept thinking about it. I kept wondering if the baby had heard the same thing I had. I [[kept]] the baby monitor.

The next night was quiet, calm. No crying. No screaming. I went into the baby’s room in the middle of the night, left the monitor behind in mine. I had never seen my sister like that as long as I’d known her, and I’d never heard my niece scream like that, though I hadn’t known her very long. I wondered if there really was a gas leak, or toxic mold, or [[something]].

<<audio "Echoes" stop>><<audio "voices" fadein loop>><<timedinsert 1000ms>>YRGNUH MA I DESIMORP UOY LAFFO EHT EM EVIG UOY LLIW NEHW ENIM REHTOM<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 3000ms>>Begone from this house, devil!<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 5000ms>>EMUSNOC TSUM I HCUM WOH DNATSREDNU TON OD UOY REHTOM LEURC EVIAN<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 7000ms>>A demon, my love; pay it no heed; close your heart to it —<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 9000ms>>REHTOM YTHGUAN MAERCS DNA MAERCS LLAHS I KSA I SA OD TON OD UOY FI REHTOM YTSAN<<endtimedinsert>> <center><big><big><<timedinsert 11000ms>>I <<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 11500ms>>AM <<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 12000ms>>NOT <<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 12500ms>>YOUR <<endtimedinsert>><<timedinsert 13000ms>>[[MOTHER]]<<endtimedinsert>></big></big></center>

<<audio "voices" stop>><<audio "Echoes" fadein loop>>It kept happening. Always in that room, sometimes faint and sometimes stronger. I kept going in and out all night and for the next few days, trying different times and different points of the room. I wanted to be sure. I didn’t say anything to my sister. I didn’t want to [[worry]] her. She was still so shaken up.

A couple of days later, I went outside to try to get my bearings. I thought it would clear my mind to sit out in that big yard, spend some time with nature, maybe do some walking in those woods where nothing would follow me. There is — was — a patch of thinning, sun-baked grass at the edge of the porch, just past the stairs. As I walked by, I heard it again. [[The same woman.]]

I almost tripped, half-frozen for a second, startled and staggering in broad daylight. The sound was was faint and muffled, like it was seeping out of the house or being carried off by the wind. I didn’t want to hear it. I kept walking, past the patch of sunburned grass where I’d heard her, heading for the treeline instead. I walked for a while without any interruptions, and tried again to [[forget]] about it, if only for the time being.

But I heard it — her — again. Every so often down the trail, I would catch a snippet of a conversation. They grew in volume and clarity as I followed, until I could follow the conversation by ear while I followed it on foot. I walked in its echo until the dirt and grass turned gravelly and dusty, and when I looked up, I was standing not far from the entrance of a wide, shallow-looking cave. Some sweet, rank smell surrounded the area. Just the forest, I told myself, only nature at work. A den, or a plant, or some predator’s forgotten meal, and [[nothing more]].

The night after that, my sister opened her window to listen to the forest and enjoy the cool night breeze, but around two in the morning, I heard her whispering to me over the monitor. “Something’s walking around under my window.” Like before, I told myself that it had to be a deer, or a fox — an animal, and nothing more. Some [[hungry]], curious animal.

“You’re sure it’s not a deer?” “Please. Please, please, be serious.” She sounded close to tears. “[[Two legs]],” she whispered. “I can hear it.” She was right.

<<audio "Echoes" stop>><<audio "birds" fadein loop>>“Here’s your package, ma’am.” <<timedinsert 2000ms>>“Thanks, I — sorry; I've got it. Thank you.”<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 4000ms>>“Everything all right, ma’am?”<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 6000ms>>“Yeah. Little scare last night, is all.”<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 8000ms>>“Something happen out here?”<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 10000ms>>“I think someone was walking around the house. We might call the—”<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 12000ms>>“Are you the ones with the [[baby]], ma’am?”<<endtimedinsert>>

<<audio "birds" stop>><<audio "House" fadein loop>>I hadn’t mentioned my niece to the mailman. He’d never seen her, hadn't even met my sister yet. Word travels fast in little villages, I guess, but I didn’t like the way he asked. Like if the answer was yes, that would explain everything. He realized he’d upset me and apologized, told me to have a nice day. [[I didn't.]]

She wanted to call the cops when we found the footprints — ragged barefoot imprints of toes and heels, like misshapen punctuation in the dry dirt around the house where flowers might have grown if we’d had the time to plant them. They looked too human to her. I told her it might have just been a homeless person, but that didn't comfort her much. I saw that nervous glint in her eye — not the one I've known since childhood, the what if you get hurt look, the what if we get in trouble look. It was a young glimmer of anxiety that had only turned up when my niece's [[father]] had.

You followed the same path you had learned under the sunlight filtering through the woods’ summer canopy, in the same light as the day before, golden and bright, unthreatening, pastoral. You were not afraid of the voices when they surrounded you again — you heard their fear, and felt you were not alone. You were only bolstered by them, angry for them, hearing their tormented worries and woes. You were angry for them and for yourself and for your blood, overwhelmed by your desire to know what it was that had come [[lurking]] too close for comfort.

Often, the woman wept. At times another woman’s voice joined her, a soothing contralto whispering words of endearment. "Darling, please. Come to me. Do not follow the wretched thing; I'll not see you enter such a place. Come away." The other woman's anguish seemed to soften. "It does not want to be found," she whispered, "and I cannot bear to find it. I pray none shall ever find it again." "[[Let it go hungry,]]" the contralto said darkly.

<<audio "House" stop>><<audio "dialtone" fadein loop>>CALLER: I think I’m reporting a missing person.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 2000ms>>DISPATCHER: Can you tell me their name and description, ma’am?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 4000ms>>CALLER: My sister went into the woods and hasn’t come back all night. We live at — <<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 6000ms>>DISPATCHER: Name and description, ma’am?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 8000ms>>CALLER: Oh, Christ. I’m so sorry. I’m so embarrassed, ha, she must have just come home — <<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 10000ms>>CALLER: I’m so sorry for wasting your time. Is there a — a fine for this kind of thing?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 12000ms>>DISPATCHER: No, that’s alright, ma’am. You have a safe evening.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 14000ms>>CALLER: Thank you. Have a [[good night]].<<endtimedinsert>>

<<audio "dialtone" stop>><<audio "Echoes" fadein loop>>The spelunking was not my finest moment. I was in there for longer than I meant to be, wandering around, thinking it was shallower than it was and that I was closer to the entrance than I seemed. I was too furious to stop myself. So consumingly angry, and so on edge from those voices, that I kept pushing. I really don’t know what came over me, even now. I felt like there was something to find, some [[blood]] to follow.

<<audio "Echoes" stop>><<audio "heartbeat" fadein loop>>It was a den, a haphazard nest in some obscure crevice of the earth, rank and musky. The odor of the place turned your stomach the way the voices first had, rooting you in place. The sole of your foot was unlevel, your weight set upon a pile of what your flashlight revealed to be minute bones, gathering mold and crushed like shattered crockery. You raised the light by degrees, your movements tense and unnatural, half-hesitant yet overpowered by the simmering outrage that made you clench your impotent weapon in your other hand until your joints creaked. The light’s pale beam fell across [[something|something2]] gray and lean.

Under the light, a shadow became flesh, ragged and emaciated. You did not understand what you were seeing, at first, could not make out the dried edges of wet slimy meat as something human in shape. The leathery skin was black as if had been charred, but in places it peeled away to reveal the yellow curds of fat beneath. This was a creature, two-legged, bent double, hunched over the hoarded ancient remains of meals it had once [[savored]] and cherished.

You remember the strain of heaving yourself back out of the cave, vines snapping your hands and nearly throwing you back to the bottom. You remember the burn of your lungs and your legs as you ran, snapping twigs beneath you, the flashlight's beam flaring wildly around you. You ran half-blind past the sites of the voices guiding you back until they began to blur together in slurring panic. You remember falling to your knees, dropping your bat and flashlight, waylaid by a cramp in your ribs that stole your breath and left you gasping in the dark. You remember tree bark scraping your arm, a jagged stone under your knee. Your mind was so fraught, and your ears so full of dead women's voices and the sound of your own breathing. You did not remember something running [[past]] you.

<<audio "heartbeat" stop>><<audio "dialtone" fadein loop>>CALLER: An accident, there was an accident while I was out of the house. I —<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 2000ms>>DISPATCHER: Please try to remain calm. You need to leave the building.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 4000ms>>CALLER: You said there’s a truck on the way?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 6000ms>>DISPATCHER: Yes, it'll be there soon.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 8000ms>>DISPATCHER: Ma’am?<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 10000ms>>CALLER: It’s getting bad. I can’t stay on the line.<<endtimedinsert>> <<timedinsert 12000ms>>DISPATCHER: You need to get out. Help is on the way. You need to [[leave]] the building, ma’am.<<endtimedinsert>>

The air was thick; the scent of smoke was stronger inside. I screamed up to her and she told me not to come up, begged me, and the pain in my ribs had me clinging to the wall by the phone. The house was on fire. It was all I could do to call 911. She kept screaming. When I hung up, I called back up to her and she told me she was coming — don’t worry — don't worry — [[don't worry.]]

She came down the stairs in tears as I dropped the phone. “I thought it was you,” she sobbed, stammering, her breath coming out in horrible heaves. The baby wailed in her arms, clutched almost too tightly to her chest. She grabbed my by the hand so tightly I dropped the bat, and half-dragged me outside. I heard the fire above us. I felt the heat. “I'm so sorry," she kept saying at first, but then her voice went cold. "I had to,” she said. “[[I had to.]]”

<<audio "Penumbra" stop>><<audio "Metaphysik" fadein loop>>We stood outside in the dark and watched the fire start to eat through the roof of the house. The shrieking I'd heard before — raw and horrible and unfamiliar — sounded again while she stood beside me. It had [[never]] been my sister screaming.

It was covered in wounds. Where its starving body retained the most fat and meat, great gouges were torn from it: from the thighs, and the arms, and the torso. Some wounds, slick with white film, had gone untouched for some time. Others were a sickly orange-tinted red, as if worried at without pause. Blue veins stood out under the darkness-bleached skin, branching deep beneath the surface. Its breathing was labored, the hints of its voice emerging in keening wheezes pitched somewhere between the softness of a child and the harshness of an adult. Its [[toothless mouth]] gaped.

Again, you had frozen. For a few crucial moments, the heat of your anger abandoned you. You stood stunned as the creature pressed its sinewy forearm over its eye sockets and reached down, smoothing a palm over its thigh. Its hand passed over a wound, breaking the healing film and smearing a foul liquid over its skin. With a strangled noise that rang strangely like the self-soothing coo of an infant, it bent its fingers like blunt talons and [[dug]] into the wound.

You could take no more. You fled, scrambling through the cave, distantly thankful that it held no secret forks or damning drops, but your mind was consumed by the consumption you had witnessed and the shame that you could not bring yourself to raise your weapon. With the cave entrance in sight and the sound of loping flat footsteps behind you, you clung to the wall and [[vomited]].

<<audio "dialtone" stop>><<audio "Penumbra" fadein loop>>I could hear my sister screaming. It was this horrible, raw shriek I had never heard her make before, but I was sure it was her. By the time the house was in sight, I could smell smoke, but I couldn't see it. I was covered in puke, and the pain in my ribs was so bad I couldn't run, could barely walk. But I saw the porch torn up and the door smashed open, and I dropped my flashlight and [[ran in]] with the bat.

<center><div class="title">ONLY THIS</div> AND NOTHING MORE. <div class="menulink4">» <<click "RE-READ">><<audio "heartbeat" play>><<script>>state.restart()<</script>><</click>>?</div></center>

They might have been lovers, you thought, after hearing them for some time. It conjured unbidden the memory of the woman you’d loved and left in Europe a year before, the lilt of her accent like a shadow of the contralto's. You had parted on good terms, but every such parting is bitter. Yet you heard that same love in their voices, strong beneath their fear — a dire and assured thing. “We shall flee from here, where it cannot follow,” the contralto said, once. You heard her clearly. The two husbandless ladies had prayed for a child of their own — you had heard so many of their prayers — and when one had emerged in the forest they called it a miracle. It was their blessing, until it began to grow and to [[hunger]].

<<cacheaudio "Metaphysik" "music/Metaphysik.mp3">> <<cacheaudio "Penumbra" "music/Penumbra.mp3">> <<cacheaudio "House" "music/This House.mp3">> <<cacheaudio "Escalation" "music/The Escalation.mp3">> <<cacheaudio "Echoes" "music/Echoes of Time v2.mp3">> <<cacheaudio "dialtone" "sfx/hyderpotter-dialtone.wav">> <<cacheaudio "heartbeat" "sfx/jobro-heartbeat.wav">> <<cacheaudio "gothic" "sfx/cormi-gothic.wav">> <<cacheaudio "voices" "sfx/erh-voices.wav">> <<cacheaudio "mama" "sfx/drfx-mama.mp3">> <<cacheaudio "baby" "sfx/stevelalonde-baby.wav">> <<cacheaudio "horror" "sfx/klankbeeld-horror.wav">> <<cacheaudio "birds" "sfx/tagigobaso-birds.wav">>

You ventured forth and, in time, let yourself be surrounded on all sides by cool, damp rock. The earth beneath your feet hardened as you went; it became a carapace full of tiny ancient fissures, and you struggled with your footing as the cavern darkened. You focused on the beam of light before you and the fraught discontent in your heart pushing you forward. It moved you until you felt, in the core of your body, that there was no going back until you had found the desolate [[end]] of the cave.

It had begun to reek. The same cloying stench you'd detected at the entrance became more dire when there was no fresh air to wick it away, no scavengers to root out its source, no sunlight to bleach and bake it dry. You [[knew]] the smell.

A big yard all the way around, a nice treeline in the back. It was a really nice house — Colonial, like, with those porch columns on either side of the front door. Stately. Of course, the porch was rotting when we got there, but it wouldn't have been a big deal to pry up and replace a few boards. Repaint some of the trim, fix a hanging gutter, pull some weeds. It was an old house, but not a dump. Not a money pit. We didn't have the funds for that kind of thing. That is to say, we didn't have any. Anyway — old house. [[Older than shit.]]

The house is shot. She's not even [[one]] yet.

He's not worth wasting breath on, but I could read that look even before she asked if I thought he might have followed us, might have been fucking with the baby monitor, might have decided he wanted a daughter after all. I didn't think he'd have changed his tune, and I didn't see how he could have followed us, but I was ready to talk to him if he had. I keep a baseball bat by the front door for that purpose. But if those were his footprints, by some miserable stroke of bad luck, it looked like he was in bad shape. The prints looked too human for my sister, but [[not human enough]] for me.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she said, when she saw me heading out with my baseball bat and a flashlight. “No,” I told her. “I’m [[dead serious]].”

And if there was no end? You had not thought of that. You did not know how far you would go into that darkness. A distant part of you hoped with each step that your light would scatter over a flat and impassible wall and permit you to turn back the way you had come. It did, but the chamber had not been [[empty]].

Your heart ached for them. Your sister fled from every space where the hints of their voices echoed, whispering and conspiring and adoring, but you sought them out. In a way you could scarcely explain, they fascinated you, though the burred menacing tone that sometimes lurked beneath their voices, tormenting them, turned your stomach. You had listened to them for only a short time, but you had heard so much. They were close to you, and you to them. They were nearby when your sister withdrew into her room to cry with her baby. They were nearer than the police, than a hotel, than a solution. They spoke comforting words, if only to each other, but you let them [[wash over you]] all the same.

You shamed yourself for it, but you recoiled from the thought of leaving them. It seemed cruel to leave what was left of their story unheard, and so you followed them instead. You hoped they had managed their escape, but felt a chill wondering what they had [[left behind]].

It was rot, and offal, and roadkill, and death. It was organ meat and marrow. It was muscle and skin shredded from the bone. Your light strayed about the cavern as you walked, but you could not see the source. It was as if the smell had seeped into the walls long after even the bones had crumbled to dust been devoured. Yet the air felt wet. It was humid with the musk of decay, too [[fresh]] and heavy to stem from that dessicated emptiness.

Struggling not to sicken or to freeze, you pushed on, unconscionable and unconscious of the true danger at hand. You breathed the stench of rot. You took it into your lungs and exhaled death. The walls [[narrowed]] around you.

For several minutes, you watched your feet as you walked on, minding carefully your footing. When you looked up once more, a wide, low fissure gaped not far ahead. You approached it, marking how it extended and curved into the wall. The smell worsened, and you plucked the collar of your shirt up over your nose as you ducked [[into the hole]].

The rock was so cold as to feel wet, and it squeezed your shoulders as you moved, crouching and dragging yourself through; your flashlight jolted at awkward angles as you advanced. The passage was not longer than the length of your body. It was not difficult to enter, but would prove itself [[harrowing]] to leave.

The women’s voices died out once I dropped into the cave. I didn’t realize for a few minutes, until I started to miss them. I walked and listened for a while, waiting to hear them again. The place stank, and I squeezed myself through a hole half my height, thinking for some fucking reason that they might return if I went deeper in, found some specific place inside. But they didn't. That’s when I wanted to turn back, but in the next instant I stepped on something that [[crunched]].

If it had once possessed the ability to speak, it could scarcely use it any longer. This was no longer a fanged creature of silver tongue or clever tricks. It was a starving animal — hungry, and furious, and nothing more. Its hands scrabbled at the ground before flying to cover its black, glistening eyes. As it moved, it strew small bones and clumps of [[rot]] across the cave floor.

Your hand began to quiver, though your body remained marble-still. The flashlight's beam jittered as the creature scraped clots of fat and flesh and blood from its thigh. Frantically, it brought its hand to its mouth. There came a wet sucking noise as it rubbed its hand over its tongue and empty gums, devouring the tissue until thick rivulets of saliva ran down the inside of its arm. Its tendons and bones stood out unnaturally, twitching and straining. It began to rock back and forth on its heels, salivating without restraint, and reached to scoop a [[morsel]] from itself again.