Chapter 3: The Devil's Ladder

Chapter 3: The Devil's Ladder

The flashlight lay on the floor, its beam a stark, accusatory finger pointing at Alan’s face. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. The knowledge that flooded his mind was a poison, paralyzing him from the inside out. He was the master of this abattoir. The architect of this suffering.

Flesh is but clay. Will is the fire. The form is mutable.

The words from the plaque were no longer just an inscription; they were a creed, his creed, echoing in the hollows of his skull. The intrusive, clinical thoughts assaulted him again. The creature with the bird wings—a failure in nerve-splicing, the avian motor cortex refusing to integrate with the human spine. The stitched-together menagerie in the cage—an attempt at a multi-homologous chimera, resulting in systemic organ rejection and constant, low-level agony.

He was not just a spectator to this horror. He was its god.

A low, insistent thump from the steel door he’d bolted shut snapped him out of his internal spiral. It was a heavy, meaty sound, like a side of beef being slammed against the metal.

Thump.

Alan scrambled backward, grabbing the flashlight. His throbbing, bandaged hand flared with pain, and a phantom memory flashed behind his eyes: the sharp sting of a scalpel slipping, a curse hissed through gritted teeth, blood welling up over his knuckles as he worked feverishly on… something. Something that writhed on the table before him.

Thump. THUMP.

The sound was louder now, more forceful. The steel door groaned, its frame vibrating with the impacts. The Mother-Thing was not giving up. Its twisted, programmed love was patient, but its strength was absolute. It wanted its sick boy back.

"Alan," his mother’s voice drifted through the thick steel, muffled but still clear, laced with a pained, sorrowful tone. "Why do you lock me out? Don't you love me anymore? Let me in. Let me heal that nasty cut on your hand."

The intimate knowledge of his injury sent a fresh wave of revulsion through him. It knew. Of course, it knew. He had probably told it. In his madness, had he treated that abomination as a confidant?

He had to move. He had to escape. Staying here meant being 'cared for' by those foot-long needle-claws.

Forcing his shaking legs to obey, Alan pushed himself to his feet. The disembodied whisper that had guided him before was gone, leaving him utterly alone with his sins and the monster at the door. He swept the flashlight beam across the macabre laboratory, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. There had to be another way out.

He stumbled past the tables, forcing himself not to look too closely at the familiar, tragic failures displayed upon them. He skirted the cage where the whimpering chimera huddled, its many mismatched eyes tracking his light with a look of pure misery. He felt a pang of something—not pity, but a cold, academic shame. This was flawed work. Unrefined.

The back wall was solid concrete, offering no hope. No windows, no vents large enough to crawl through. Panic began to claw at his throat again, cold and sharp. Was this it? A second dead end?

CRACK!

A deafening bang echoed from the main door. A dent, the size of a human head, had appeared in the steel. The bolt was holding, but the door itself was beginning to buckle. He didn't have much time.

He swept the light across the floor in a last, desperate search. And there, near the back wall, almost hidden beneath a discarded, blood-stained lab coat, was a dark iron ring set flush into the concrete.

A trapdoor.

Relief and dread warred within him. Another descent. Deeper into the nightmare Marie had sent him to confront. Deeper into his own forgotten hell. But it was a chance.

He threw himself at it, dropping to his knees and hooking his fingers through the cold, grimy ring. It wouldn't budge. He saw the bolts then, four of them, thick and rusted, pinning the hatch to its frame. He clawed at the first one, his fingers raw and slippery with sweat. It was stiff, frozen with age and disuse.

BOOM!

The main door shuddered violently. A thin crack of light appeared along the warped frame. The bolt groaned, metal screaming in protest.

"I'm coming, darling!" the Mother-Thing shrieked, its voice losing its gentle edge, replaced now by a raw, furious hunger. "Mother is coming to get you!"

The terror gave him strength. He put his whole body into it, grunting as he twisted the first bolt. It gave way with a screech of tortured metal. Then the second. His muscles screamed, his injured hand throbbed with white-hot agony, but he kept going. The third bolt turned.

He was reaching for the fourth when a new sound froze the blood in his veins.

It came from below him, from beneath the iron trapdoor. A sound that was nothing like the guttural growls or wet screams he’d heard before. It was a high-pitched, inhuman shriek, shot through with a crackle of what sounded like radio static. It was the sound of a broken machine and a dying animal all at once, an electronic death rattle that scraped at the inside of his skull. It was a sound of pure, alien agony.

Alan froze, his hand hovering over the final bolt.

Behind him, the steel door was splintering, the main bolt about to tear free from its housing. The Mother-Thing, the devil he knew, was seconds away from breaking through. Its intentions were clear: a horrifying, invasive 'treatment' delivered by its needle-claws.

Below him, sealed beneath this iron plate, was a new horror. A shrieking, static-laced unknown. The Devil's Ladder led down to a new circle of hell, one that might be infinitely worse than this one.

The choice was impossible. Capture and a fate he could dimly, terribly imagine, or a blind plunge into an abyss that screamed with the voices of the damned?

CRUNCH.

The main door's bolt tore free. The door swung inward with a deafening groan, and the hulking silhouette of the Mother-Thing filled the doorway.

"There you are," it crooned, shambling forward.

Alan didn't think. He acted. He chose the unknown.

With a final, desperate roar, he twisted the last bolt. He yanked the iron ring, pulling the heavy trapdoor open. It swung upward on protesting hinges, revealing not a room, but a gaping black maw. A square of perfect, silent darkness. A set of rusted iron rungs descended into the void, disappearing after only a few feet.

"Alan! Don't you dare leave me!" the Mother-Thing bellowed, its pace quickening.

He didn't hesitate. He swung his legs over the edge, his feet finding the first cold rung. He scrambled down, the static-laced shriek echoing from the depths below him, a horrifying welcome. He glanced up. The Mother-Thing was at the edge of the opening, its lipless, hooked mouth gaping, its needle-claws reaching for him.

With his last ounce of strength, he reached up, grabbed the edge of the heavy iron hatch, and pulled. It slammed shut above him with a deafening, final CLANG, plunging him into absolute, suffocating darkness and a silence more terrifying than any scream. He was sealed in, descending into a new, unknown level of his own personal hell.