As a wave of intense dread and panic swept over Theo, his gaze snapped upward.
Everything around him seemed to press in on him. His breath hitched. And his heart raced. Staring at what looked to be a crimson stain on the wooden roof boards above, Theo's instincts screamed before his mind caught up.
His hand twitched, and before he could think to act, his body was already moving.
"Maria....."
As night was fast approaching, the halls were all dark, and quickly growing even more so as the sun set. Reaching for the switch on the wall as he ran past, he flicked it on and on, but the lights refused to come up.
"Damn it!!" he exclaimed.
Ignoring the light and running up the stairs as fast as he could, he quickly reached the next floor.
His foot hit the landing, and without slowing, he pushed off to the next floor. The creaking boards echoed in the empty building under the strain.
"Maria!" he called again, louder this time.
Theo's pulse pounded in his ears as he set foot on the next floor.
Hesitating for a moment, he stared into the dark hall ahead. He just stood there for a while, staring into the nothingness ahead.
'Is this... normal?' he thought, reaching his arm out.
He couldn't explain it, but for some reason, the air felt... thicker here. It wasn't in the literal sense of the air actually being thick; it was more like a heavy sense of danger overwhelmed him. He took a step forward, slow and calm, but before his foot could even land on the ground, a chill crawled up his arm.
'No… this isn't normal.'
Despite being a mundane person, Theo, for some reason, could tell. Darkness was a universal law. In a place where there is an absence of light and shadow alike, darkness reigned supreme. Pure elemental darkness that doesn't require an external source.
This, though, wasn't that. It felt forced, almost artificial. Like something, or someone was watching from somewhere within it.
'Was it always this dark up here?'
He swallowed hard. The faint glow from the stairwell behind him did little to push away the darkness ahead.
He took another step forward.
The floorboards under his foot groaned in protest, the sound echoing in the suffocating quiet. Theo winced but kept moving. Just then, however, his foot struck something. Unsettled, he took out the old, clunky phone from his pocket. After struggling for a couple of moments, he managed to turn on the flashlight.
The light flashed brightly for a brief moment, but was soon swallowed by the surrounding darkness. When it settled, the light was barely illuminating a few feet ahead.
'It's going to have to...'
Just then, a thick metallic scent stung his nostrils.
'Blood! Even more of it!'
He stomached the putrid stench and pushed forward. His instincts were telling him to run. To get away as fast as he could. But he couldn't. The thought of leaving Maria in the middle of whatever was happening reminded him of how he was left alone to fend for himself as an infant. And that thought disgusted him. The memories of being weak and helpless dragged forth a rage he thought he had long forgotten.
As much as it motivated him, though, he couldn't dwell on that. Right now, he needed to find Maria. Step, step, another step. Theo had barely made it past the stairs, but was already filled with a dozen times more dread than he had ever felt before this moment. But still, he pushed through.
Step, step, another... Stopping in his tracks, Theo's eyes widened.
He instinctively took a step back and dropped to his knees. Barely holding back a wretch, he turned back to the barely illuminated corridor.
'What the hell! What the actual hell!!'
Littering the ground in every direction were several dismembered and mangled corpses. Surrounding them were dark pools of blood, reflecting the dim light of his battered phone's torch.
Theo stared at the scene for what felt like an eternity, completely at a loss for words. However, before he could take in the horrid sight, if that was even possible. Another scent flooded his nostrils. It was acrid and charred, like burnt paper left too long in the fire.
Shifting his gaze and the dim light of the phone's torch to the side, he was taken aback. Covered with deep scorched gashes, what looked like marks left by a blade of some sort painted the wall.
Stepping closer, he ran his palm along the grooves. some were shallow, others carved so deep the concrete beneath showed through. The marks ran along the wall in strangely even arcs. They weren't random. They curved, overlapped, and formed an eerily beautiful and almost recognizable pattern.
Theo's throat tightened.
'Claw marks…?'
No. That wasn't right. The edges were too clean. Too sharp.
'A sword? But what was a sword doing here?'
That wasn't the only strange thing about the wall, though. Unlike the rest of the building that should have been drowning in a tide of cool air, the wall, this wall, was warm to the touch. In fact, looking a bit closer, he noticed some scorch marks in the grooves.
'Fire? Did someone melt the wall with a hot sword then?'
Furrowing his brow, he stepped back and deeper into the corridor. Looking over the corpses he passed by, he saw that, like the wall, the corpses had signs of being burnt as well. The mangled flesh resembling a grotesque mash up of flesh, and the small that followed was just ad unpleasant.
"What the hell...."
Picking up his pace, he hurried past the corpses and deeper into the corridor. Along its surface, he saw strange marks like the previous wall. The entire surface along the corridor, even the doors, were all charred.
He walked even faster.
Moving through the narrow hall, confused by what was now in front of him, Theo's mind raced with an unending number of possibilities. Possibilities, no matter how absurd they were, could explain exactly what could have transpired in his home.
'Exactly what, no who, could have done this? Did a fissure appear somewhere nearby? No, if there was, there would have been a warning... right? Those fools couldn't have been so neglectful of the outskirts that they would let spawn run free inside the walls.... right?'
Before he could formulate a rational map of events, he heard a faint sound coming from just up ahead. He paused and braced himself as he slowly edged closer, listening closely.
The closer he got, the clearer the sound became, and soon the very faint sound of someone's ragged breathing became clear. Locking down the hall to the door of his room, he bolted forward. Swinging the half-open door to his room open so hard he nearly ripped it off its hinges, he lunged into the room yelling at the top of is lungs.
"Maria!"
Running into the room, his heart nearly sank.