#eldritch fic

No, no. 

It’s a fucking monstrosity.

A bump makes everything jolt. You. The metal chains. The world. You yank in a hard breath and feel the elastic in your bathing suit stretch along your chest and around your neck. Something cold drips down over your arms and stomach. It’s sticky and thick. 

It’s not real–it can’t possibly be real. This is a dream. A nightmare. A fantasy.

The humidity within the cave makes everything thick and damp. It’s much more than the sweat beading along your brow. It drips down along your throat and down to where the sticky mess they’ve smeared on you. You squirm again as it burns your nerves with itches you can’t scratch, but it only sends an ache to your stomach–the angle of the board they’ve chained you to keeps you slanted, unsteady, and stuck. 

This is a fucking nightmare–nothing more. It has to just be that. A very real-feeling nightmare.

The jostling stops, and that’s when you feel your pulse break through whatever was in the tea they’d served you however long ago that was. Could’ve been ten minutes or ten hours. Time itself has been bleeding together since then. As you go from slanted to upright. As hands come to find you, grabbing you at your waist, wrists, ankles. They haul you from the board as easily as a sack of potatoes, and despite how hard you try to thrash from their grasp, you barely twitch.

A low, heavy breathing breaks through the sounds of their scurrying.

A single, heavy, chilling drop falls into your stomach.

Goosebumps spread like wildfire in a drought. The air gets thicker; a murmured conversation in a language incomprehensible to your ears sends chills up to the hairs standing tall on the back of your neck. 

Squelching.

There’s…squelching.

It sits there behind your eyes. No matter how hard you try to open them, they weigh a thousand pounds. It’s not sleep trying to take you, no. It’s not unconsciousness. No, you just…can’t yet. Can’t get there. Can’t come to. 

But your heart stammers when those moving you lift your wrists up and bind them together on a hook. A cold, damp hook as thick as your forearms. Up. Hands fall away with a neighboring creeeaaak, and your stomach drops. But you lift. Up. Up. Up! Your toes brush the cold ground. You can kick, you can wiggle, you can writhe. But there’s one last brush of ground beneath you and that’s it–you’re dangling in the air with the ache of your weight carrying down through your arms and shoulders.

N-No….

It’s there–the painting of the…the thing inside that little seaside antique shop. The frame no bigger than your laptop screen and so old, it looked ready to fall apart if a gust of wind snuck into the shop. A mass of colors took up the canvas. Dark greens of similar shades, but none singular. At first, it just looked like a mess. But something about it held you steady. Hypnotic, really. You could see the brush strokes the longer you studied it. Stepping closer, you could see. Really see. Where the greens differentiated. Where there were shades of black shadows amongst them. Where the mass of paint wasn’t an abstract design, but a thing. A creature. Two yellow dots mixed in were piercing eyes. The faintest dash of white were the sharp pricks of teeth–fangs. Dozens upon dozens of…of mixing tentacles wrapped around each other and spread out across the canvas, taking up space like it was trying to break free of the frame.

And down as a speck–a little, barely-there speck–was a dollop of paint. 

A person.

Drowning in the things arms.

Something stirred deep in your stomach. You scurried back to your friends, taking a moment to catch your stolen breath whilst staring pointlessly into the front counter. The sea of jewels looking back at you with prices you couldn’t afford. 

While your friends went to the back to try on some vintage clothes, the kind person behind the counter offered you a cup of tea. For some reason, looking into their calming opal eyes, you accepted. 

They gave it to you in a back room far from your friends. It only took a few minutes for the water to boil, but standing there looking around the little room, they talked about that painting. There were more in there–more for them to reference, for you to reference, as they spoke about the monster so many feared when the island once upon a time lost its fishing rights. They spoke of it like it was a god. It’s gargantuan size, it’s magic prowess, it’s all-knowing knowledge. You listened, you obeyed, or you suffered. 

No turn took you away from some rendition of the beast. One of it bursting out of the water to roar at the very island you’d visited for a desperate vacation. Another of it attacking a boat the stranger said entered its waters without permission. Then another of various sailors being wrapped up in its tentacles, trapped like prisoners, their clothing torn and eyes entirely black. Then, as the stranger returned with your tea, you looked upon another, framed in gold. A spread of people without a speck of white in their eyes, splayed out naked, draped in its tentacles like they were fine clothing. Mouths wide, bodies limp and arched and curved. 

“We have to keep it satisfied,” they said. The tea tasted like chamomile at first. Then, chamomile with something else. And then…something a little more. “You’ll be perfect.”

Their smile penetrated the fog crawling beyond the room and into you. The tea cup slipped from your fingers and the crash of ceramic to the tile floor was far away. So far away. 

Their smile faded into darkness.

Then….

You jostle on the hook. The conversation carries off behind you farther into the distance. Another hoist of hook brings you higher; it sends another lurching ache through your upper body, but there’s nothing you can do. 

But your eyes move.

They actually move.

The squelching gets louder.

The breathing gets closer.

No…no….

Opening your eyes…you feel them get lighter. You feel them want to open. But opening them means you look at where you are. You face what you can hear squelching closer. Lots of squelching–lots of things. A cold sweat carries itself over you like an anchor dropping. Your toes twitch and a sob climbs your throat.

Something…hot….

A hot gust of wind kisses you. Entirely. You breath hitches. No. You clamp your eyes shut so they stay that way. 

It’s not wind.

The squelching doesn’t get louder, it just gets closer. All around you like a tidal wave closing in. No. No. No. 

You want to scream, but your jaw won’t move.

You want to break free, but you can barely sniffle.

You want to go back to the beach with your friends, back to work with the boss you hate, anywhere but the antique shop that your friends had to go into.

A low, world-stopping snarl makes everything freeze.

The scent of the sea rushes at you.

Something…something pierces the veil of darkness behind your eyes like needles. 

A tear slips out as your eyes involuntarily open.

One single yellow eye the size of you looks upon you. Enshrouded in darkness–a rich, slimy green so dark it nearly looks pitch black. Its pupil shrinks in focus, zeroing in on your frozen self. Around you, there’s the flicker of flames somewhere, but they’re gone in moments. One blink, and there’s darkness again, but your eyes remain open. They remain on the single eye in front of you.

It blinks.

And then something warm and slimy touches your foot.

It approves. From below, its servants watch with smiles. Spared another couple of months, should the new sacrifice fulfill its needs sufficiently. You came with friends, and surely they could use them if needed. It’s reassuring, though, as they bow to their god and whisper sweet thanks, how eager it seems with you.

It goes slowly–curiously. Its tendrils encapsulate your legs first, parting them. Its green excretion will only take moments to consume you, and it seems to take its time watching your eyes blacken and roll back. How it hasn’t even climbed higher than your thighs when your body falls limp and your chest heaves. An addiction made in moments; a new follower indoctrinated and awaited claim.

Its rumbling hum that shakes the cave–the island–with an earthquake sends a rush of excitement amongst its followers. They beam up at their good work. A new chosen one picked perfectly. Watching from below, through the mess of tendrils, they witness their fine work from beginning to its eventual end. 

The fall of the thin swimsuit material.

The glistening skin the tendrils overtake.

The sacrifice being risen off the hook and draping herself within the hungry tendrils.

Smiles break out across the crowd.

Wrapped in its first gift, the sacrifice takes the second. Dressed in its tentacles like a tight gown, not a speck of skin bared to anyone but itself beneath them. They squelch and writhe, and a second gift becomes a third. A slow filling, a slow pulsing, a slow thrusting third.

A fourth, muffling all sounds slipping out.

A fifth to fill full and satisfy only the beginning of its hunger.

Thick, loud droplets fall and splatter along the cave floor.

The sacrifice’s muffled scream breaks through the squelching, and there’s a spatter of rain from above. Their god rumbles happily.

It’s only begun.

It needs to relieve. To feed. To breed.

But they picked well–it likes you.

Greatly.

And you accepted its gifts so easily.

They bow again and watch eagerly as the ritual continues.