Back to chapter index
“Prepare to die, Emily! I’m sorry, but I just cannot let you out of here knowing all you do!” Claire readied her dagger up against Emily’s throated and began the pressing motion. However, the phrase “Aaaahhh fuck” came out of her mouth before she was able to, and she slumped to the ground, instantly dead. Emily nervously looked down at her corpse and saw a large red tendril having pierced through it.
“What the hell?” She slowly turned her head upwards and saw The Red retracting the tendril back into itself.
“That was, uh, me,” it said nervously. “Didn’t really want you to… die… really...”
“Huh… thanks,” she replied slowly. The Red shot out another tendril, grasped Claire’s cadaver, and tossed her indelicately into her corpse pit, directly on top of Trent Bloodbag, actually, crushing him and making him look even more disgusting than he had previously.
The Red said “I have been waiting for forever to do that… pretty much since I met Claire, actually. I probably should’ve earlier… kind of didn’t, uh, realize I could do that with my tendrils. That was pretty nifty.”
“Uh…”
“If I did that earlier maybe she wouldn’t have killed that many people.” Emily looked over at the corpse pit, seeing at least several hundred people lying in there. How the hell did Claire not get caught before this? Oh right, there was that whole thing with the police going on in this town. That thing. Right.
“Can you explain any of what’s going on? I actually have no clue who you are, I’ve only ever casually said hi to you.”
“I’ve lived here with Claire for quite some time now, eating rats and stuff for food. There is a truly insane amount of rats down here. It’s ridiculous. Where are they coming from? Anyways, I’ve tried to get out of here several times to inform the authorities of Claire’s misdeeds, but I kind of can’t move seeing as I’m a giant glob of flesh. I don’t actually even know how I’m talking right now.”
“What species are you…?”
“I have no goddamn clue. I don’t even remember how I got here. Oh hey look at that,” The Red said excitedly as another rat walked over, touched it, and was instantly absorbed into it. “That was a good one.” Emily tried and failed to suppress an expression of disgust. She pulled out a cigarette from her pocket. She was hoping she had the budget for a fuckton more of these because god knows she was gonna need them.
“So you knew all along that Claire has been killing people? Why the hell didn’t you tell me so I could go alert someone??”
“The only times you’ve been down here are when Claire has also been here, and I think you just saw how that went.”
“Well why didn’t you kill her earlier???”
“I already explained that I didn’t realize I could do that until now.”
“But I feel like there has to have been something either one of us could’ve done to prevent all of this! We were basically Claire’s only friends!”
“Remove the ‘basically’ on that one, Emily.”
“Right, right. Is there really nothing we could’ve done to help here or to prevent this many people from getting murdered for no fucking reason??”
“There really isn’t. Blaming yourself for this won’t result in anything, Emily. Trust me on this one, I’ve spent a very lengthy amount of time doing the same with myself. Claire is dead now, at the very least.”
“But don’t you miss her at all, or feel anything towards killing her? You’ve lived with her for, uh, some amount of time…”
“Yes, well, unlike you, I’ve been fully aware she’s been sacrificing people, so my empathy for her ran out much faster than yours.”
“But, I did really enjoy her company… although… hm… fuck… so there’s literally nothing either of us could have done to prevent any of this?”
“There really isn’t, no.”
Emily didn’t say anything, discarding her previous cigarette into the corpse pit (falling on top of Claire, who was already on top of Trent, and lighting her cloak on fire, quickly spreading to the rest of the corpse pit, erupting the entire chasm in an inferno of bodies, creating a hellish scene reminiscent of the paintings by that French guy, you know the one, right, creating a scent possibly even more abyssal than the visual, which didn’t bother Emily nor The Red, as Emily was focused on looking at The Red at the moment and was mainly smelling her current cigarette, which she had not lit up at the point before this parentheses but by this point chronologically she had, and The Red had no faculties of scent, so none of them noticed this carcass blaze until it had subsided within a few minutes and had turned the corpse pit into a place Emily would definitely throw more cigarettes, an ash tray, ahaha) and lighting up another.
“So…” The Red said.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with all this information? Just supposed to keep living my life, somehow?”
“That’s all you can do sometimes. I would know, as I literally cannot leave this room.”
“Yeah that checks out.” She started walking away from The Red before turning around and saying “Hey, do you want to keep in touch somehow? I know you can’t move from here but you seem like a nice per- uh… flesh mass.”
“Sure, my number is, let me see…” The Red jutted out another tendril from its form, with the endpoint shaping itself into an exact replica of a modern cellular telephone. “I’ll be damned, I can do that. It’s this.” It displayed the number on the phone, which Emily dialed into her own (non-flesh-mass-produced, instead being produced by humans treated quite horribly in a factory somewhere, who are basically flesh mass, in a way). “Alright, thanks, I’ll talk to you later,” she waved while smiling an immensely unhappy smile. The Red didn’t anything. (The ash in the corpse pit didn’t, either, as all of the ghosts in there had been long reaped. Well, besides one of them… next chapter setup…)