The Caverns of Carnage

Eighty Years Later…

October 20, 2023

A few years ago my family moved into the town in a valley in California. Our house was a nice one, in a pleasant neighborhood, overlooking a town at the bottom of the valley. Soon enough though, things started to get weird.

Dreams are supposed to be a magical place, a place where we can escape from our everyday lives, where our imagination can run free.

Once I dreamed I was in a world of gray, it wasn’t necessarily dark, just bland. There were gray houses, gray streets, the gray ground bare of vegetation.

Looking around I saw almost nothing of note, until I spotted a person sitting on a bench, a person I did not recognize.

From what I’ve read, the brain does not simply invent faces, we can only dream of what we’ve seen.

So, perhaps this person was someone I had walked by in a crowd once, or seen in the background of a TV show, someone I had seen just long enough to conjure their face in my dream.

The person stood there completely still, like they were simply a prop to this world. Then, after a long stare down, the person began to raise their right arm. They began to point at something, the direction they were pointing was close to them, but not directly at me.

As I began to turn to look at what they were pointing at, I was ripped from my dream, I found myself lying in my bed on my side, my heart was beating incredibly fast, yet I had no clue why.

When I was in elementary school, I can’t specifically remember when, I somehow developed nightmares. I dreamt often that I was abducted by aliens and that was often enough to terrify me.

Now that I’m fifteen years old, I realize there were two very strange patterns around this that I overlooked as a child.

The first was frightening to realize and always perplexed me, dealing with the fact that I had never known about aliens before I started having the nightmares. I hadn’t even seen E.T yet, which was obviously a bit strange for my age but it was the truth, we didn’t even own the movie at the time.

The thing that worries me even now, is how could I have nightmares about an idea I shouldn’t have known existed?

Anyways, this is when the story begins. Friday, October 20th 2023

On this night I had a dream that my parent’s beds lay empty.

I felt my blood run cold, my fingers went stiff with fear. I couldn’t believe my eyes … my parents wouldn’t leave me in the middle of the night… right?

I stared at the tidy and orderly room. It looked so eerie and unnatural. The bed was made, the desk was clean, and the curtains were open, letting the cold moonlight enter.

“Mom? Dad? You said I could stay up late,” I called out hesitantly. No reply, as expected.

“Wow, this is what I get for watching horror movies,” I told myself. I went back to bed, pulled the covers over my head, and squeezed my eyes shut. I could hear a soft rustling sound of the trees outside my window in the wind.

Attempting to fall asleep didn’t work, so I went into my parent’s room again. Maybe I should call my friends. What’s the point of that anyway, you should call the police, my brain signaled me. I didn’t do either of those.

That was when I noticed the blood.

“You weren’t here before…” I breathed. “And definitely aren’t welcome.”

It was just a drop, right in front of my foot. It’s just a dream, some part of my mind reminded myself in an attempt to calm me down. It didn’t work. I bent down to look at it and another drop appeared out of nowhere, a few steps away from the first.

Suddenly a whole trail appeared, leading to my father’s bedside table. I dimwittedly followed the blood and came to a small piece of paper lying on top of a book my father was reading called “It, by Stephen King”. A sinister name, I thought, and what I read on the paper sent chills down my spine.

“Call at +(666)-666-666”

There was nothing on the back. That number was the creepiest I’d ever seen.

I was wondering what to do when I thought of going to my friend, Ryan Carrelli’s house, who lived just across the forest next to the hill-side. I grabbed my flashlight and walked downstairs to the living room. The front door was locked, and so was the gate, so I had to use the back door.

Behind my house was the forest, and behind it was Ryan’s house. I climbed over the fence and stood in front of the looming trees. There was something eerie about the forest that made me hesitate. I pointed my flashlight in front of me and started walking.

The town-hall clock struck the midnight hour. The sounds blew across a town that was empty, emptier than it had ever been. Over empty streets and empty lots and empty lawns, the sound faded.

I walked alone down the midnight street, down the late autumn-night silence. I saw houses with dark windows and far away I heard a dog barking.

I froze.

Wait, I told myself.

I took a step. There was an echo.

I took another step. Another echo.

Another step, just a fraction of a moment later.

Someone was following me. Someone was walking on the street behind me.

I didn’t turn around.

Another step, another echo.

“Every time I take a step, they take one.” I thought.

A step and an echo.

The crickets were still. The crickets were listening.

As soon as I stepped between the trees of the forest, the wind stopped suddenly.

There was no sound at all besides my heart beating and the soft crunches of my sneakers on the ground. The moon was hidden behind the clouds, so the only light illuminating the forest was my flashlight.

After a few minutes of walking, my legs started to feel sore. The forest seemed deeper and larger than I remembered. The sounds of the town had disappeared and the forest alarmingly seemed to get darker by the minute.

I started to panic. I looked around. The dirt trail had mysteriously vanished. I tried to remember the direction that I came from, but all the trees looked the same. I checked my footprints and started walking in the opposite direction.

After about a minute of walking I spotted something in the distance. I walked closer. It was a large stone well.

I picked up a small rock and threw it down the well. It clattered against the walls as it bounced from one side to another. I waited, straining both ears. There was no indication that it had reached the bottom.

“Hello?” I whispered tentatively in a low shaky voice as I peered down into the darkness, my eyes unable to penetrate its inky depth.

My voice was reverberating against the sodden ancient walls, lessened to a discordant choir of echoes that was harassing the stillness of the enclosed darkness within. Something felt off. I was not supposed to be there.

“Hello?” I called out again louder but still as hesitant, my whole face tensed hard. This time a dreadful silence was filling up the well. There were no echoes, as if the well had just swallowed my voice whole.

Immediately, the bottom of the well lit up with fire. It began to spread up the dark walls of the wall, drawing closer towards the opening. My skin began to crawl and I had just turned to go back when something grabbed me from behind.

I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Illuminated by the light of the fire from the well, a dark shadow was crouching over me, but this was a man, a creature that no living person would dare to lay eyes on.

He had no skin on his face. It looked badly scorched, and long scars ran down his beady eyes. His body was covered with a series of black metal slabs, with deep red glowing cracks around the arms and chest-plate, forming a robust suit of armor.

He reached out a cold metal hand with long fingers and wrapped it around my face. I couldn’t hear anything. My vision began to feel blurry, and the entire scene of the forest, the well, and the man was swirling around me.

The hand constricted tightly around me. I started to hear a high-pitched ringing in my ears, which rose louder and louder until everything went black.