House of Rot by Danger Slater

Author:Danger Slater [Slater, Danger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 9798985992397
Published: 2023-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

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BRAD EVENTUALLY STUMBLED back to his apartment. Elenya and Myles could hear him clunking and crashing about. He was right. These walls were paper thin. He flopped down on the couch. Thunk. Started to snore. Zzz. Only a few feet beyond this pimpled and pulsating veil, the wall looking meatier by the moment, the hallway like an intestinal tube, connecting their bedroom to the rest of the living space.

It was clear to the DeNovas that no one was coming to save them. At least not tonight. And probably not ever. Had Brad even called anyone? Did anyone but Brad know they were in there?

And yet the newlyweds stayed awake as long as they could, foolishly hoping that some outside force would intervene on their behalf. Some passerby with a keen set of ears would hear them. Some door-to-door salesmen looking to offload a set of encyclopedias would discover their imprisonment. Myles ready to shout, “Yes. Please. We’ll take ‘em, all twenty-six volumes, the whole dang alphabet, aardvark to zebra, just get us out of here!”

But in the end, exhaustion won out, as they knew it invariably would. They were vinegar drunk, insides asizzle. And like Brad next door, Elenya and Myles made their way to bed too.

The clock ticked past midnight. It was only the end of day two. Day fucking TWO.

And once again, in the darkness, the footsteps returned.

Elenya groggily awoke, head pounding like a timpani drum, stomach ready to lurch. Hot bile climbed her throat and into her nose, where it smoldered like fire. She turned to Myles, reaching out and placing her hand on his chest. It rose and fell in shallow breaths. He felt smaller, like he’d been partially deflated, and his flesh felt as damp and as pliant as papier-mâché. She could probably tear chunks off of him, if she wanted to.

Clomp. Clomp. Clomp. The sound echoed though the gloam. Their nightly visitors once again stomped around like they owned the place.

The footsteps and the fungus were related to each other, that much was clear. But the question was how? And why? And where were they going? And what did they want from the two of them?

Searching for some kind of answer, Elenya thought about her loving husband and her difficult neighbor and the faceless ghosts that occupied their twilight. She thought about the life she was promised yet still had left to achieve. She thought about all the people who had come and gone before her—the 100 billion human souls that somehow managed to claw their way out of the darkness only to quickly return, like they were never here at all. In the Great Grand Scheme of Things, she wondered what sort of impact any one individual could truly ever hope to have.

She thought about the unending chain of evolution, backwards through the eons and ages, to the beginning of time. The proto-human. The chimps and monkeys. The rats and squirrels and marsupials. The lizards and salamanders and fish and flatworms. And the fungus, the primordial muck, the puddle of nothing, the genesis of them all.

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