My looter mentality nudged me to search the carbonized body of the monster, which I did with a certain disgust, only to find out there was nothing of value in its possession. I returned to the chamber where the thing had come from, hoping to find something of use, and right where the chains had broken, I found a primitive flare of sorts, a small metal cylinder filled with a brownish, flammable mixture.

  I checked my matches and saw that in the many attempts it took me to light the torch, and the ones I used before, I had depleted my matchbook, now having barely two matches left. I sighed, wishing

  I still had my lighter, and then moved on to the staircase again, hoping that something had changed. I descended for about five minutes, with the all-encompassing darkness almost snuffing out my torch, which was halfway consumed by now.

  I realized then that the thing was speaking of the darkness as if it were a living thing, and after some of my experiences, I would have to second that opinion. The image of the flying pitch-black nightmares still haunted my mind. I pulled the flare from my pocket and pondered whether using it now was really the best idea. It didn't make much sense that the darkness was somehow keeping me here; it wasn't some mist in which I could get lost - it was a linear staircase that went down.

  Then again, people warped so much they could barely still be considered humans anymore, and weren't abundant in the real world either.

  I wished I could've saved the flare for emergency cases, such as the almost certain possibility that I would encounter yet another monster further down the line, but I decided that getting out of this damn prison took priority. "Live the present," as they say.

  Since the flare's metal casing made it too hot to hold, I decided to tear a sleeve out of my shirt and fasten the tube to the torch. The fabric would catch fire soon, but it was the best I had. Not many hardware stores around here, after all.

  Lighting the flare, I had to turn aside my eyes as the white light was eye-searing. I started descending as quickly as possible while holding it well above my head to avoid further eye injuries, its light vigorously dispelling the darkness.

  I shook my head, once again wishing to have saved it for the monsters, imagining zombie-like creatures melting at the light, their eyes rolling out of their sockets, and their jaw dropping as there was no muscle left to contain it. Their tongue would fall to the ground and wriggle around, confused, terminated.

  I even imagined having some cool underworld nickname like "Lightbringer" or something like that. Then I thought that if I killed all the monsters I came across, there would be no one left to tell the story. As I indulged myself in these power fantasies, the staircase ended abruptly. It took me a few moments to get used to it, as I had been going down almost mechanically for the past hour. I had a feeling of instability, or like I had become shorter somehow, similar to the feeling of getting off a horse's back after a particularly long ride.

  The flare had extinguished not long ago, and I was again in the dark. I felt a foul smell reach my nose, and I wrinkled in disgust - a mixture of manure and decay, sulfur perhaps, rotten eggs, and meat that had been too long out of the fridge in a closed plastic bag. I sighed. Were there no good places around here? I remembered the meadows. Perhaps this stinking place was better than the other unassuming death trap.

  I took a few steps forward and saw right ahead of me a stagnant water channel with floating detritus, like the type you'd expect to find in the sink of a pot that a lazy person had left to soak... for five years. Luckily for me, to the sides, there were narrow cobblestone paths. As I walked forward, small tubes joined small streams of brownish scum towards the main swamp. I had no doubts now: I was in a sewer.

  The human biology is kind, at least, and it spared me from having to endure the fumes of putrefaction for too long. Though I kept looking for manholes or drains that led to the streets above, I found none. I took a moment to ponder if this sewer was some manner of pollution control for the seas I'd seen moments before. While it wasn't anything I'd heard before, and I found the idea of man-eating monsters being eco-friendly hilarious, it was a way to more or less orient myself through this place.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  In my mind, I had already drawn a map, with the dark city as a starting point and this sewer as the last connecting dot. A part of me wished that I had walked in circles, and this was right underneath the darkness-city, but I knew better than to have expectations.

  The smell intensified a hundredfold, and I couldn't keep thinking. Looking ahead, I saw a mass of something blocking my way.

  I took a closer look, and there I saw that the white mass was a mound of corpses, maggot-filled, that the rot had melded together and bleached. Out of each crevice, writing worms crawled out and dug through the mushy flesh before going back inside the pile. I gagged and reflexively tried to puke, but having eaten nothing in the past day, nothing but bile came out. The acid taste stunned me for a moment, and then I forced myself to refocus.

  I tried to picture the mound as something inanimate, just a pile of rotten veggies or something like that. As disgusting as it might be, it wouldn't start moving and try to kill me. I looked once again and tried to see how high it was, and if I chose to climb on top of it, I would have to crawl the last part, as it almost touched the top of the tunnel, something which I wasn't willing to do.

  To my left, the greenish-blackish waters moved underneath a bed of floating organic debris. I tried to see the other side, but my sight didn't reach that far. It was too much to jump. I had to either crawl through the rotten pile or immerse myself in the decayed water. Neither were great options, but judging by my common knowledge of sewerage, the water, as revolting as it was, probably wasn't too deep. It wouldn't reach my mouth, something I couldn't say about the mound, which might suddenly collapse under my weight and cover me in gooey flesh and maggots, probably even slipping me into the water anyway.

  I dallied no longer and submerged myself in the scum. The viscous surface was stomach-churning, but the waters being so murky, I could not see if something inhabited them, which definitively unnerved me the most.

  I slowly went inside, and as my leg got submerged in the murky waste, I half-expected a leech to latch onto me or some piranha-like carnivorous fish, mutated by the surrounding contamination, to bite my toes.

  The seconds passed, and more and more of myself became submerged to the point where I was neck-deep in the black waters. I started walking forward, slowly, hoping not to stir too much, lest it get into my mouth.

  I kept looking to the sides, hoping that the mound would end, but no matter how much I moved, the mound just seemed to keep going. I felt pieces of lettuce and other vegetables passing through my hands, then something slippery and cylindrical, maybe a piece of soaked wood, or maybe a worm.

  The path seemed never-ending. Shadows dripped onto the water I was in. A strange, starchy liquid pooled near the corpse piles, slowly drifting towards the center: towards me. I closed my eyes and pressed on.

  Having finally moved past the mounds, I climbed to the left and continued my path. After walking for barely a minute, I had to drop my pants and shirt because the tarnish, coupled with the oversized fit, made them weigh a ton and slow me down too much. I was naked again. And I observed my battered body, my gashed leg that, if it wasn't infected before, it sure was now, bruises all over, and cuts from branches.

  My head still hurt, and I didn't know if that meant I had a concussion or what. I feared that if I drifted into sleep again – another nightmare, surely – I'd never wake up.

  I sat on the floor and sobbed, thinking about what I had done to deserve such punishment. I regretted every choice I made so far, even the correct ones, because I wanted more out of life than having a discussion with my parents over where we lived. I stood up again and moved awkwardly, still not used to being stark naked and not comfortable exposing myself to the putrescence that stretched throughout this place. After that, I felt like I walked for hours, turned left and then right, sticking to the left wall but always feeling like I was in the same place, avoiding rotten mounds and corpses floating in the water.

  In a moment of surprise, a sudden movement made me swallow some of the black water, and I wished I had anything left to puke, so that the vile would rinse the disease I just tasted.

  As I entered a larger chamber, I spotted a metal floodgate. I quickly activated the switches on either side, and the gate creaked open, as if straining under an enormous weight. I steeled myself for a deluge of water, but instead, the chamber was inundated with a putrid tide of rotten corpses.

  The stench was overwhelming, and the realization hit me hard: this was the end of the labyrinth. There was no way out but through the gruesome barricade. Unlike previous encounters where I'd tricked my mind into seeing vegetables past their prime, this was a ghastly accumulation on a massive scale. I struggled to comprehend the sheer number of human corpses, with limbs like hands and feet protruding from the heap. Were these the victims of this forsaken place? Had they been collected and deposited here through some supernatural means? I recalled the pig-man in the forest had 'repurposed' the cadavers and ruled out that possibility. Something was lurking here, something lethally predatory, and it was closing in.