Art Pact 69


The figures writhed and climbed sleepily over each other, overcome by a lethargy that made them irritable and ugly. The sight reminded me of newborn piglets nosing around their comatose mother, if only the piglets in question were ugly horrors, grey wrinkled shapes, weak and vicious.

In the centre, the horror of horrors, the obese form of the mother pig himself. He'd hung me up where I could get a good view of his hideous form, and I had been watching the sight with increasing horror for half an hour. I must have reached the peak of my capacity for fear, though, because I felt myself begin to calm down and peacefully begin to evaluate my chances.

The main problem with escape was that I had been bound hand and leg to the beam, so that I could only move my neck or wiggle my feet. My phone was still with me - the head vampire, as in hindsight seemed perfectly explicable, did not seem to understand that there were now ways to summon help that hadn't been available in his day. Unfortunately it was in my pocket, my hand bound over it so that there was no way to operate it, even at random.

I haven't mentioned the stench. The mephitic smell that I'd noticed rolling off the head vampire when he'd approached me, a blend of sulphur and mildew, was here magnified a hundred-fold, almost tangibly strong. I was blinking and gasping and trying not to vomit the whole time, tears rolling out of my eyes and down my nose to form into a little bubble at the end before tumbling down into the scrum of vampires. Every time one of my tears hit a vampire they would hiss gently in irritation and wave one of their horrible paws at the damp spot.

These, then, were my tools - tears and the wiggling of my feet. And the calmer I got, the longer I was there, the more that I found that my eyes began to dry up. Whether the stench was abating or I was simply getting accustomed to it (either physically or emotionally) I do not know. But I was sure that I did not want to stay there any longer, indeed, that I had stayed too long as it was.

It was at about that moment that I noticed, on the far side of the basement, something so subtle that for a second I thought that I had imagined it. The room was well-lit (thankfully, for the only thing worse than having to look at the disgusting mass writhing beneath me would have been to have had to listen to them without being able to see that they were still several meters away), but I caught a glimpse of a little flash of extra illumination, a thin line of orange light that flickered on then off then on again. I realised that it had always been there - the light coming from beneath the door on the other side of the room - but that something had interrupted it briefly. There was someone there. Someone, perhaps, who could help me.

The dilemma now was whether to call out and risk alerting the somnolent monsters below me, or keep quiet and risk my possible saviour not knowing that I was here. I decided on silence, reasoning that there was no way that someone would have come down here for no reason at all - they must know what was in here, and that meant that they would be coming in sooner or later.

As it turned out, it was sooner - but it was also not through the door. A tap on the ceiling next to me turned into a more serious pounding, dislodging powdery plaster-dust which drifted slowly down to mingle with the creatures, filth, blood and tears below. With a final crack a fist appeared, attended by big chunks of plaster that tumbled onto the scrum. Both the hand and I froze, until a minute later I could hold my breath no longer and I exhaled in an explosive sigh.

"That was close." said a voice from above.

"Yes," I whispered. "I don't mean to seem ungrateful, but do you think you could be a bit quieter?"

"No, no - I understand." The hand unfroze, then groped around in a circle. Finding nothing, the arm extended further into the room, almost all the way to the shoulder, then felt around again - only half a circle this time. "Bollocks," said the voice. "You're further away, aren't you?"

"I'm afraid so," I admitted.

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