[Statement Begins]
“Have you ever tasted fresh blood, Mr. Glass? Statistically, you probably have. I… I know I read it in a book once, a while ago. Ninety-six percent of Americans eat meat! Ninety-three percent of the United Kingdom, it said. Only fourteen percent in Brazil, but that’s a bit of an outlier if you’d care to know. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Not really. I mean human blood. I don’t suppose it’s much different, really, save that the latter is a fair bit more traumatizing. I’m a vegetarian, you see, and the idea of eating even animal meat has never really been on the metaphorical table. I had never tasted any kind of blood; bipedal or otherwise. No thank you kindly, and all that.
I’m telling you this because I want you to know how odd it was. That the first thing I thought of when I tasted fresh, straight from the source, honest-to-God human blood was: “Does it count, if the thing’s still alive?”
Which it was, I think, at the time.
But I’m jumping into the middle of things. I’ll… I’ll circle back to the blood-tasting in a bit, but I need to explain how I ended up trapped in that evil place, first.
Things haven’t been particularly great for me recently. It’s actually been a bit of an… abrupt downward spiral, let’s call it. I lost my job when the bar I worked at burned to the ground last month. The fire marshals came to take a look but ended up ruling it an unsolved act of arson and closed the case a few days later, which was great because it made it basically impossible for the staff to get new jobs. Turns out, companies prefer not to interact with employees who may have incinerated their last place of business. That is to say, I was pretty desperate. Really desperate. I actually went and dug the classified section out of a trashcan. It was not my finest moment, but we do what we must.
The point is that I was out of options, which was the only reason I even considered responding to a call from an old college friend who owed me some money. His name was Max. And Max, the rotten fuck, cheated me out of two thousand dollars in my senior year. We were pretty close at the time, and I genuinely believed he needed help. You can imagine my surprise when he took my money and promptly vanished off the face of the Earth in a puff of fine white powder. Last week, I got a voicemail. He said he’d straightened himself out, finally found someone to help him break out of his addiction and get his life on track. Part of the rehabilitation process was making amends, so he said.
Anyway, he told me he had my money and wanted to meet to pay it back and apologize for making such a mess of things. It was pretty shady. I knew it was shady! I never pictured Max as someone capable of change, but what choice did I really have? I was finally seeing a way out of the hole I’d fallen into, and decided it was worth the risk. His message included an address downtown for an apartment building. The West Palaces, or something equally cheery and generic. I’d check the message, but I can’t seem to find it now. It’s not on my phone, or in my call history, or in my service provider’s call records. I checked.
The apartment building looked sad, to be honest. It was five or six stories, painted the color of a smoker’s fingernails. whole thing felt anemic. Even the windows looked off, darkened like something was smeared over the inside. That was clearly when I should have left, took my chances elsewhere, but it’s not like I could have ever actually predicted what I’d find inside. How do you plan for the unimaginable? Max’s apartment was on the third floor. As I walked through the halls, the eerie feeling in the back of my mind started nagging at me. Everything looked almost right, in the same way a movie set looks almost real. The overhead lights were fixed at strange angles. The grimy brown carpet looked oily, like the floor had been soaked in something that never fully dried. I think what bothered me most is how static it felt, like I’d missed the DO NOT ENTER or BUILDING CONDEMNED sign somewhere, painted in big red letters. I don’t think I heard a single sound since walking through the lobby. It stayed “just creepy” until I got to Max’s door. That’s when absolutely everything went to hell.
You have to understand when I tell you there wasn’t a fountain of blood behind that door, or a river, or a flood. That doesn’t begin to describe just how impossibly much there was. It was as if my opening it had summoned a portal at the bottom of an ocean, and the whole thing was determined to flow right out into that grimy little tobacco-colored hallway. It smashed me against the wall so hard that I felt a few ribs crack and pinned me there for, I don’t know, a very long time. Way too long. I should have drowned right there in the hall, three stories up and a hundred miles from any body of water. Just before my lungs actually failed from lack of air, it stopped all at once. It was like the United Utilities folks turned off the waterline. I fell to my knees, hacking up blood that wasn’t my own for at least a couple more minutes before I started to feel like I could breathe again.
I have a friend who used to be a soldier in the US. Served in Iraq or Afghanistan or the like. I’m not sure. He rarely talked about it, and I was fine with that. Never really pictured myself as much of a fighter, so if he wanted to keep it to himself that was fine by me. And he did, mostly. Keep it to himself, I mean. He only really brought it up once, when we went out to celebrate something or other that we both got too pissed to remember, and I asked him why he looked so out of it. He started up in this real somber voice, staring straight at the wall in front of him, talking about why the army’d “dropped him”. It didn’t sound like he wanted to tell me, but he went on anyway like it was an obligation. It was an IED. My friend was lucky, really. He only took some shrapnel. Tore up his arm and leg pretty good but that was the worst of it, more or less. The poor sod next to him…
Suffice it to say, dear old Richie knew what human blood tasted like. And brains. And bone. The blood was salty, he told me. Sticks to your teeth. There’s the metallic taste, of course, but mostly it just tastes hot and sticky and too god-damn salty. Brain matter, if you’re wondering, tastes bitter and a little like pork fat. I sure as hell wasn’t. I don’t even remember the name of the bar we went to that night, but I remember that, clear as day. At least I know he wasn’t exaggerating. Silver linings.
When I could finally move my head again without making my vision swim, I glanced up into the room. Every surface I could see was covered in, shockingly, blood, but it wasn’t like the stuff in the hallway. This blood was old, rusty brown, caked on the walls like muddy plaster. I thanked every god I could think of that I was still too dazed to register the smell that must have come out of a place like that. Then, right before mine own fucking eyes, the back wall started moving. Peeling itself off like a layer of visceral ivy and folding over a body slumped in a chair in the middle of the room. I almost hadn’t noticed it since everything was the same nauseating rusty red, but when it twitched and its eyes fluttered open, we saw each other. And then Max was gone. The mass slammed down on top of him and made something else. It looked like someone took a sheet of tin foil and vaguely crumpled it into the shape of a human. Except this one’s proportions were all wrong, and it had way too many legs. I couldn’t tell you why, but I’m absolutely certain that the blood, all of it, every last impossible drop, belonged to the man in the chair that was no longer there.
That was my next thought, after the minor existential crisis, and was followed shortly after by the most overwhelming urge to run like a fucking coward and never look back, which I did. I charged back down the suddenly very red carpeted hallway, trying by very best to ignore the squelches every time my feet touched the ground. I was pretty distracted as you could probably imagine, but as I ran, I saw everything… breaking down around me.
There’s really no other way to say it. It was far beyond the simple strangeness I’d felt earlier. At first there were doorways every three or four meters. There were the same tacky pictures on the walls and the lights were all on, even if the light they gave off was a little rose colored. Soon, I was running two-dozen steps before coming to another door, and the paintings started getting pretty weird. More and more of them would just show the same featureless hallway I was running down, minus the rather notable splatters of gore. Eventually they disappeared altogether. The doors too. Soon enough the only way I could even tell I was actually moving anywhere at all was the volume of the thing somewhere behind me. It kept making this horrid sound like, like nothing. There are no words to describe the noise that leaked out of its indeterminate head. It made my bones itch.
I just kept running, turning down more identical yellow hallways. No matter how far I went, no matter how many times I turned and ran until I couldn’t choke down another breath, I couldn’t find the fucking exit. There obviously was no exit. The whole mess didn’t lead anywhere, and I think I already knew that, but stopping seemed thoroughly unappealing. At one point, I came to the end of a hallway that only turned left. Next one was the same thing. Two hundred meters, and another ninety-degree turn. I counted six lefts before the path straightened out again.
I made one more turn, and bounced hard off a wall blocking my path. I had simply run out of hallway, and was very, very trapped. I decided that if I couldn’t escape the thing in the hallway, I would be thoroughly dead when it reached me. Figured whatever waited on the other side of paradise had to be an awful lot better than becoming a part of… that… of it. I heard it getting closer and panicked. Panicked more, rather, if that was possible. I stepped back as many times as I dared and sprinted at the wall hoping to smash through it, or at least cave my skull in. The second I touched plaster; my vision went black. There was an instant of searing pain, like my whole body had been forced through a fine wire screen, then nothing at all.
I woke up in a dirt lot behind the apartment sometime later. I don’t know how long I was inside, but the sun had already set. It felt like days. There was a mostly broken streetlamp nearby, but it gave off enough light to take stock of myself. I noticed my clothes were clean, but my mouth still tasted like iron and my ribs hurt, so I knew something must have happened. It was a lot to take in, you understand. I couldn’t move; I could barely breathe. I sat there in the dirt and alley grime, face in my hands, and cried.
I wanted to believe someone had drugged me. How awful is that? I wanted to believe so badly that I had simply been drugged, or that someone had mugged me and left me for dead, or that I fell and hit my head and that. Was. All. But it wasn’t. My wallet was still there, in my pocket. I flipped it open, already knowing that nothing was missing, when a folded Polaroid fluttered to the ground. I picked it up. It was a picture of an all-too-familiar tobacco-colored hallway with a soiled red carpet. The words Come Back Soon! were written in a cheery scrawl of red ink. I’m pretty sure it was red ink.
I burned the Polaroid and the wallet in a trashcan nearby. When I finally got home, I collapsed on the floor of my room, still in my clothes. Three days later, I went back. It wouldn’t let me go. Maybe I wouldn’t let it go. Stupid as it might have been, I wanted to know that I wasn’t losing my mind, and I went back.
The only reason I am sitting here in this glum little office, no offense, is because someone else beat me there. He reminded me of a character from a book I once read. Cold blue bombardier’s eyes. He was old, hunched, skin like tanned leather. You can see I’ve had a lot of meat on the mind, lately. Anyway, he stopped me. Turned around, put a hand on my chest and looked me in the eyes. He didn’t say a word, but I knew he knew. Just like I knew about the blood. Like the thought had always been in my mind; buried. He was going to take care of it and I didn’t have to worry anymore.
Even with the impossible knowledge that I was safe, I barely slept until I read online that the whole apartment complex burned to the ground. The mighty gas pipe strikes again. No one was hurt. This was surprising, the article said, because neighbors reported hearing screams all night long.
I never really minded blood in an abstract sense. Its nearly as benign as anything could be, and yet, it scares me now in a way I never could’ve imagined. I don’t want to be afraid, but I’ll never really believe that thing in the hallway died. Even if it did, I know enough to know there’s probably others. I’ve slept very poorly, since I learned how big the world was. I wonder if I’ll ever dream again.
[End Statement]