A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [9]
Rose balked, turned back toward the door.
The wall was gone. The door was open, the stairs illuminated in the soft candlelight-colored glow of the passageway. Above, clear, bright white against the blackness of the stairwell shaft, the tiny patch of surface sunlight beamed.
The stairwell shaft! The way out!
Her heart smashed into her throat. She spun, ran toward the door, and in a single, violent motion a blast of fiery hot wind roared past her, stinging her skin as it scraped by, and she winced against the needle-sharp bite.
And the huge, heavy metal door of rivets and cross-braced metal beams snapped closed in front of her with a final, hollow clang.
Rose’s momentum smashed her full-face into it, and the force bucked her head back, stars whirling in her vision, a nasty, coppery bite spattering in her mouth and nasal cavities. She collapsed and sank to the foot of the door. She waited a few seconds, then blinked back the water in her eyes and reached for the door handle.
There wasn’t one.
She heard the wails, the cries, the screams, grown to a cacophony behind her, and tried to worm her fingers into the cracks between the door and jamb. They seemed fused together. She couldn’t identify the seams in the dim light.
She screamed again, but it was a wasted, desiccated sound, the sound of a dried, shriveled corpse as her voice gave out. She kicked the door, beat it with her fists, banged as hard as she could and screamed until the moaning, chilling sounds from the passage became louder than her cries.
Her hands pulsed pain with every heartbeat. Rose collapsed at the foot of the great, solid door.
She choked back a sob.
In the shifting, changing light of the passageway ahead of her, she saw a shadow. A head, stretching long as it approached in the winding stairwell, the bony shoulders and long, skeletal fingers, tipped with crooked claws.
She shook her head. The flickering light played havoc with her vision, but there was a shadow on the wall, growing larger with each passing second. She stood up, pressed her back to the warm door.
Another stream of burning hot furnace air plastered her to the wall, and she cried out as her skin screamed in pain. She glanced down and watched as blisters formed on her exposed arms and hands. She shook in agony and cried out again.
The shadow blocked the light from the passage now.
The din from the crying voices assaulted her, the heat scorched her, and Rose felt panic rise to choke her. She shrank against the wall and door and cowered.
The screams wavered, rose and fell as individual voices, but united they were an unbroken river of horror.
Over them she heard the flutter of leathery wings as the shadow on the wall rounded the corner.
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Music oozed through speakers mounted high in the room’s corners and spilled over the murky half-light leaking through cracks around the heavy drapes and shut blinds. The sliding closet door stood ajar, revealing a jumble of clothes thrown haphazardly onto hangers and shoved onto the packed rod. Some stood free, wrinkling atop the mashed wads of others behind. The floor piled high with more fabric cadavers. A dresser, night stand and table teetered beneath piles of detritus and miscellany from their horizontal surfaces. Unmated shoes spread across the battlefield floor. Sugary, preservative-laden drinks festered in forgotten aluminum cans.
A black light buzzed in a fluorescent fixture over posters above the bed. Strange, eerie artwork adorned almost every square inch of wall space, some overlapping other. Exotic indie music band posters, prints of macabre and gothic people and places, vampiric images and statements, all stared into the heart of the room toward the unmade bed.
A voice wavered from the edge of the mattress. “Danny, you sure about this? You can get in trouble, dude.”
“Shut up, Aaron. I do this all the time. I haven’t handed in an assignment I wrote yet.” Danny sat at the computer, tipped back on his chair, long hair draped