CHOOSE YOUR OWN MINDFUCK: A Night in Eighth Block Tower (A50)

Bedlam Bible fans! Explore the Eighth Block Tower! Choose your fate! New posts every Tuesday and Friday. September '23 through December '23. Don't succumb to the huummmmmmmmm...

You’ve decided to check the vent…

You walk over to the vent and kneel down in front of it. The carpet in the hallway has been trampled to the point it's merely a thin, soiled cloth at this point, unraveling at the edges. Piles of white salt have collected along the baseboards of the hallway, each standing about knee-high, creating a valley on the floor directly in front of the vent. In the light dusting of salt there, you notice a set of footprints that seem to belong to a cat, except that they’re easily three times the size you expect them to be.

You look back at Lynda, who’s still standing outside the doorway of her apartment, watching you, gnawing on her fingernails. She shrugs her shoulders.

“What? Is everything okay?” she asks.

“What kind of cat is Baby?” you say. “Just curious.”

“There’s different kinds?” She seems genuinely confused.

“I mean, she’s not a goddamn mountain lion, is she?”

Lynda laughs, then her head twitches as if she’s about to fall into a seizure, but she quickly recovers. “I… don’t think so?”

You nod, annoyed that you even bothered to ask in the first place. Asking her questions has only proven to be a waste of your precious time, so you turn away from her and give your full attention to the vent in front of you.

It’s large, much larger than the vents you’ve seen in any of the places you’ve lived in the past, just wide enough to accommodate the width of your shoulders. It’d be a tight squeeze, but you’re fairly certain you’d be able to crawl through, if necessary. Upon closer inspection, you realize it’s the intake vent for the entire building’s HVAC system. The vent cover is sitting loose inside the wall, but there isn’t an opening wide enough for anything larger than a mouse to slip through. If the cat is indeed somewhere inside the vent, it didn’t get in through here.

You work the vent cover out of the wall and toss it aside. As soon as you do, the eerie caterwauling returns full force, much louder than before. What was once a low resonating bellow has now blossomed into a high-pitched shriek, as if Baby is in a great deal of pain. It breaks your heart to hear it. Without hesitation, you lean forward to crawl inside the vent.

“No, wait… don’t!” Lynda shouts. What could it possibly be now?, you think, then lean back to look at her. Her entire body is trembling. She shakes her head, violently whipping the ends of her choppy blonde hair against her face. She keeps repeating the word, “no.”

“What’s gotten into you?” you ask, then immediately the caterwaul echoing throughout the chamber in front of you grows so incredibly loud that every little hair on your body stiffens, causing your skin to feel numb in places. You look back at the vent, down into that impossibly dark cavity carved into the wall, and your eyes fail to see the end of it.

“You can’t go now,” she says, just loud enough for me to hear. “Come back later. She’s eating.”

“Come back later?” you say, almost shouting. You can hardly believe what you’re hearing. “Lady, if I leave now, I’m never coming back.”

“Then never come back,” she says, staring blankly ahead now, as if lost in some deep thought. For a moment, you actually consider walking away, but every time you think of leaving that cat there to die, you fight the urge.

You decide to ignore Lynda and crawl inside the vent.

“No! You can’t!” Lynda shouts, then screams a bloodcurdling scream. You keep pushing forward, moving through the thick layer of dust that’s collected there at the bottom of the vent. “She’ll eat you alive!”

It’s just a goddamn housecat, you think, then laugh out loud. She’s so dramatic.

Eventually, you’re so deep inside the vent that you can no longer hear Lynda’s wailing, only Baby’s incessant moan. Then you move into a space where the air is so thick you can hardly breathe at all, smelling almost like hot machinery, but with an added hint of laundry mildew. Inside this space too is a low constant hum, loud enough you can feel the vibrations from it rattling the walls of the vent that surround you, and because of that, you feel as if you’re swimming inside it.

All at once, a wave of nausea comes over you and your arms become so weak you can hardly pull yourself forward anymore.

But you’re almost to the end of the vent.

You see a faint light flickering in the space beyond it.

It looks to be some sort of room.

You keep pushing forward.

When you finally reach the end of the vent, it opens up into a pentagonal room that’s mostly dark except for what little light is provided by each of its five burning candles, strategically placed at the center of each wall. There are two white horses inside this room, you notice right away—one standing and one dead. The living one is thrashing around the room, seemingly looking for a path of escape, but there isn’t a passageway large enough to accommodate its massive body. You’re confused as to how it came to be inside this room in the first place. You decide to stay there inside the vent, to avoid becoming trampled.

Then another kind of movement catches your eye, over by the dead horse—another body, shifting inside the darkness, but you’re having trouble deducing just what it is. The thing has human-sized shoulders and the torso of a woman, but doesn’t have arms or even a place where arms should be. It has only a single leg, bent in the center, appearing almost like a tail—some sort of skinned mermaid, devoid of scales and fins. Its head though… there’s nothing human about that. Its features are certainly feline, however elongated, especially at the ears, which stand tall atop its crown like two pointed daggers.

Baby?, you wonder, but don’t dare utter aloud.

This creature, whatever it is, hunkers over the pale horse and buries its fangs into the gut, tearing deep into putrid flesh. Then, right before your eyes, its body contorts and out from each of its shoulders grows a long, slender appendage—bones, covered only by a thin sheet of skin. Each of the appendages are as pink as the rest of it, and at first you assume its growing wings, but soon enough they each swell into fully-functioning arms, complete with paws and a set of razor-sharp claws. The horrid creature wastes no time in sinking its hooks into the horse’s fat belly. Its innards spill out onto the floor the instant the incision is made.

It’s around this time you decide it’s probably best if you leave—however, the nausea has worsened and your body has only grown weaker from it. You start to panic when you realize your arms and legs are no longer functioning. You thrash back and forth inside that compact space, trying to move as far back into the vent as you can—but you don’t get far.

In all your thrashing, you cause quite a stir, alerting the shapeshifting creature of your presence. It looks over at you with its beady black eyes, no bigger than a dime, and the moment it makes eye contact with you, a cold shiver runs right through to your toes.

It’s walking toward you now, the way a cougar stalks its prey—slow, calculated, and with a watchful eye. Its bones shift beneath the skin until the gruesome thing has four limbs and a tail, taking on the shape of a pudgy little housecat. It hops up into the opening in the vent, only a foot or so away now. A little bell on its collar rings with every step it takes toward you. There’s a name tag hanging there as well, you notice, and soon enough it’s close enough you can read the name inscribed upon it: Baby.

You don’t stand a chance.

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