The crunching glass underfoot echoed painfully tenfold around my surroundings. I stood in silence as the entrance hall reverberated with my presence. It looked as if the bomb had dropped. A room as disorderly as you could ever imagine - paperwork strewn across the floor, rusty filing-cabinets on their sides. To my immediate left lay a strange kiln with its door hanging off. A subterranean glow flickered from inside. A candle burned slowly in complete ignorance of the internal draughts. The ante-chamber on the opposite side of the room proved equally as perplexing. An obscure piece of dental surgery type equipment stood almost as new in the centre of the floor. Attached to one side was a small vial of putrid, sickly-smelling liquid most akin to dog slobber. It dawned on me that this was a rather strange place to put such a piece of equipment. Tiny red speckles littered the floor and the whole room had a morbid air about it.

(Like a tomb - that's what it is. It's a tomb. You know that.)

A subconscious force drew me out into the open courtyard ahead. I became more and more confused as to the original purpose of this place. The wing directly before me had been completely overgrown with thick yellow weed - the long dried grass had made itself very much at home. I stood in the dead centre of the yard and noticed the numbers five and six. They were painted in gothic style on the ends of two wings which petered off into the forseeable distance. Turning around to the direction I had come from, set above the doors, some more lettering, still gothic, but this time I could see that it was German. 3fe Kompanie. Then it struck me again how it was colder inside than out. I went forward under the corrugated iron roof that ran full length across the courtyard, covering the entrance to the building ahead.

I now found myself standing in a corridor. If it was wide enough, and providing there was no roof, you could easily have landed a plane there. It was without doubt the longest corridor I had ever seen. So long, in fact, that I could not see right to each end - there were four converging lines either side of me. And here I was standing dead in the middle. Ahead now, a few steps across to the other side of this vast walkway, a sinister glow beckoned me into an otherwise dark chamber. As I drew closer, I saw another candle - this time lighting up a rotten moss-covered crucifix on the west wall. A door to the right of the cross seemed to be saying "open me." The room flickered in its doom as I made my way cautiously to the door. I turned the handle and it swung violently open.

A torrid waft of all the bad smells in this world seeped out. But that wasn't the most sickening thing. Imagine your worst nightmare. Imagine this.

It was a small alcove with a meat-hook on the wall. Impaled on this hook was a head. A human head. One eye had gone - torn out entirely with just strands of sinew dangling from its socket. The other eye just stared at me as if to say "you're too late."

(You know don't you? You know everything.)

I stared back into the eye. It moved. It wasn't my imagination - it actually moved. It began convulsing and pulsating.

(You know.)

With an audible "pop", it burst open - a seething mass of fat white maggots pouring out onto the floor. They started dropping from the tubes in the severed neck, feeding voraciously on every last morsel of flesh on offer. A pool of sticky liquid trickled from the left side of the larynx. Drip. Drip. Drip. Into a puddle on the ground. A puddle that contained a decomposing forearm with the remains of a hand at one end. It was holding a crumpled piece of paper with the words asphyxial haemorrhage precariously scribbled in gothic lettering.

The I saw the rest of the body. Propped up on a chair in the corner - dressed like a clergyman. And disintegrating. A third instar of maggots were busy with the decomposing meat. A large hole in the chest revealed a half-eaten heart hidden partially by a broken ribcage. It was about as much as I could take.

(It has killed once and it will do so again. You know that.)

I threw up violently over the corpse.

I turned and ran until I was heading south down the endless corridor. As I stopped to catch my breath, I felt something squishy on the bottom of my boot. The missing eyeball. Perhaps all that was left of the unfortunate man of the cloth by now. I had an empty stomach, and - without so much as a conscious thought - it made an adequate meal. For the time being.

TO BE CONTINUED...

 

Note from the (embarrased to admit to being the) author:

I know, I know - it's hilarious. From memory - and it's a bit hazy on this one - I think I wrote it in late 1994. And I haven't got a clue what was supposed to happen next - had I ever thought that far ahead.

(probably not. You know that.)

I did have a far far better idea - still a horror type plot - not gore - just suspense. It's called "Some Kind of Dead House" and I have got it written down with a screenplay in mind - but it's almost in point form so I wouldn't dream of getting it up here - well, not in the forseeable future at least. Still, I guess the interest with that trash above, if you can call see past the trash part, lies in the description of entering the CRCMH from the road. Obviously it's been greatly exaggerated - just a silly story after all - but it has been based on what "making the jump" was like in reality a bit. The location and artefacts described are all real as you probably know (save for the one-eyed priest), so I suppose many of you might relate in some way to the description. Or not.

Damon Torsten,
January 2002

P.S. Beware of soft shoe shufflers.