Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Julia stumbled through the dim halls, slowly making her way upstairs before she started to hear something. Thum thum thum, it sounded like footsteps coming from around the corner, from where she had just came. It got louder and faster, like the person was getting faster as they drew nearer. She made a few more drunken steps up the stairs in front of her and past the emergency doorway that led up to the ceiling of the installation at the bottom of The Hole. When she reached the top she turned around slowly as the sound got louder and faster THUM THUM THUM THUM.
"Why are you running so fast?" Julia warbled in a shaky voice. Then it came around the corner. It was alive. It wasn't human. Julia's senses barely registered what she was seeing, it was a mass of the grey-black Heliogel. It formed a human-like shape with overly large feet and tubes of different sizes and shapes ran throughout a mass or sacs full of it in liquid form, rooting plates like crusty food, and knotted tangled muscle shapes. A football sized group of the glowing white bubbles pulsed on its lower right abdomen. Julia screamed in terror. The thing was running so fast it slammed into the far wall, and stickily pealed itself off the wall with creeping Heliogel crawling up its surface. She didn't even know it it oriented itself it just started stumbling as quickly as it could towards her. In a numb panic her brain suddenly surged with adrenaline and she slammed her hand on the emergency shut button. It was so close running up the stairs and as the heavy door shut closed 8 or 9 fingertips were caught in the bottom. They separated from the hand and crawled forward like worms before crinkling up and dying, like the worms were exposed to sunlight. They turned bone white. Julia was terrified and she stumbled back before she looked up into the thick glass window in the door. Embedded in the thick black mass that acted as a head was an eye. A human eye. The pupils were dilated but it blinked and twitched. Blood and black oil leaked from the corners.


- By Ashton