Written by Colin Ellis Cuming

Faces shrieking for salvation formed from vapor in the abyss of the creature’s jaws. Nightmares bubbling from the gaping threat that, had Jennifer been turned around to see, would have stopped her in her tracks.

She rose on shaky legs in the twitching darkness of my confines as the moaning intensified behind her. Scratching sounds became bright and metallic. Loud tapping vibrated across my walls a demented morse code the beast shared with me, communicating its hateful message.

Dim, blinking, emergency lights slashed across Jennifer’s perspective within my awakened, haunted bowels. “Fuck this, I shouldn’t’ve taken that fucking interview… “ Jennifer chided herself, searching for a hiding place, looking excitedly down the dim hall.

I could taste her fear slowly leeching out like all the others and how much it yearned to be set free, fuel to my ensouled structure. My prison cum house of wrath.

And there it was, coming down the stairs, the beast born of vengeance. The demon given to me for safe harbor on this earthly plane. My dark progeny.

Jennifer strained to move beyond the threshold, sensing the closeness of the threat, and for the nausea inducing pungency of electrical burning further down the line.

She voided her bowels, desperately spying for an escape. Further into the basement level of my prison complex, the execution wing, sweating more than she had in her entire life as though her body had become pure, fluid anxiety.

I could taste all of her, and what I can taste so can my dark babe, its jaws clacking just around the corner.

My heat rose the further she moved inward away from the threat. Smoke plumed and wafted from the far end of the corridor, my heart of fire. My execution chamber.

She found me. My essence of flame. The haunted penetralia of my desecrated penitentiary’s corpus.

The demon child filled the gap between the wing and the stairs. No way back.

My heart and my heart’s vengeful desire, my beast of burden. The creature doing for me what I cannot to end this inhuman charade.

“You tell yourself you want to be a good person. You wanted to help, whatever the hell that means. Now this place wants to eat you. You can’t have me!” Jennifer spoke defiantly to me as much as to herself. Tears streaming down her cheeks.

The creature moaned in multitudes showing its insides, a skeletal pylon vocalizing for the babbling condemned all their agony from within the cavernous muzzle. It wasn’t only living people moaning for life in my prison walls, but the dead wailing for mercy from out of my black creation.

Pity. She seemed to be such a nice woman. The helping kind. Her life is very much how I would like to have lived had I been made human.

The ceiling began to fall and nearly ended Jennifer before my demon babe could have her. She moved just in time to avoid being crushed.

My entire structure began rattling through the walls like exploded plumbing shaking me apart.

My darling creature’s shadow flooded the corridor into the wing. Eyeless and dripping ichor from silver teeth, the huge mouth seemed to stretch so wide that it tore a gash in space, a starless and Bible black ocean expanding before her.

Unable to process what she saw, Jennifer went to move gaining no purchase in her quicksand of terror, frozen in the crude blackness slowly washing over everything.

The beast continued to moved in. It’s rigid, spiked back sparking in the shadows. An encroaching pool of dread rising with the temperature.

Of course, she began screaming as if that noise would save her. As if she were a special case out of everyone of the unguarded condemned.

Then I could feel hope leeching from her as all the others. Felt her giving into the end, letting us consume her soul.

Thunderous crumpling abruptly cut through the moment as a violent rupture of brick and mortar fissured in jagged spiderwebs across my interior. The emergency lights, those few still working, all blew out with an aggressive wind, leaving the wing entirely in the dark, save for the incandescence at wing’s end.

Jennifer looked around wildly in the split moment between being and nothing, when the bell tolls. I could sense her refusal to be a victim. The helper, apparently not the helpless.

“I’m not going to let you eat me! Sonofabitch!” Jennifer almost tripped over something that clanked at her feet, then bent to grab the rusty piece of pipe. “Stay back!” She screamed, swinging the pipe wildly at the creature, backing away from the carpeting darkness, closer to my fire.

A choir of electric hissing came from out of the cells lining both sides of the wing, what sounded like electric reptiles on high alert. The rust-covered cell doors opened, moaning with the rest of me.

Ghostly susurrations emanated from the opened cells, echoing through the hall, invading all my space.

A white exit sign, barely visible through the brown, moldering grease and dirt along the execution wing’s walls, caught Jennifer’s frantically searching eyes. It stood just behind the execution chamber in the rear of the wing, leading into a holding cell connected to the outside world.

So she did the only thing she could and ran, ran from the creature, the form massive in its shrouded blackness, seeded by the lost soul once called Antoine Jackson when it was a brown-eyed youth unfairly convicted of murder, now filled with other countless, misled, and lost souls, dwelling within the void-like jaws of my dark son.