Chapter 4: A Symphony of Screams

Chapter 4: A Symphony of Screams

The hum in Percy’s skull was a frantic metronome counting down to his own madness. It drove him from his house, propelled him through the silent, sleeping streets of Mountain Rim, and delivered him once more to the sickly-sweet lobby of the theater. This time, the ticket-taker didn’t even look up, his hand sliding the blank white ticket under the glass with the practiced apathy of a ferryman on the River Styx.

Inside, the audience was the same—a scattered collection of the tired and the lost, their faces already smoothed into masks of placid expectation. They were the flock, willingly gathering for the shearing. Percy’s stomach churned. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but he felt like the only conscious sheep in a slaughterhouse. He found a seat in the middle of a mostly empty row, the sticky floor grabbing at the soles of his shoes. He could feel the low thrum of the building, the echo of the hum in his head. This place was a machine, and it was powering up.

The lights went out. The world vanished into a perfect, velvety black.

This was the moment of commitment. Percy took a sharp, ragged breath and squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t just close them; he clamped them down with all his might, his facial muscles screaming in protest. To make sure, he pressed the heels of his hands hard against his sockets, forcing darkness upon darkness. The last thing he saw, burned onto the backs of his retinas by sheer force of will, was the ghostly afterimage of that single, damning word.

ENJOY.

The familiar whir of the ancient projector crackled to life. A few seconds later, he heard the first faint chuckles from the audience around him. The mime. It was starting just as it had before, with the goofy, disarming pantomime. The laughter was a lure, a gentle current meant to pull you into the anesthetic tide. Percy gritted his teeth, the sound of his own blood roaring in his ears, fighting to focus on the plan. Just listen. Just listen.

The chuckles died down. Then, the real show began.

It started with static. Not the gentle hiss of an untuned radio, but a deafening, soul-scouring roar of white noise. It erupted from the speakers with the force of a tidal wave, a sound so immense and abrasive it felt like a physical assault. It was sandpaper on his brain, a wall of pure noise designed to overwhelm, to disorient, to make him tear his hands from his face and open his eyes in a desperate search for the source. He dug his fingernails into the plush, torn fabric of the armrests, his body rigid, his jaw locked so tight his teeth ached. He would not look.

The static cut out as suddenly as it began, plunging the theater into a silence so profound it felt like a vacuum. His ears rang. In that void, a new sound began.

It was a wet, heavy scraping.

Schhhllluuurrrp… draaaag… schhhllluuurrrp…

It was the sound of something immense and waterlogged being pulled across a vast, rough surface. It was coming from above. From the ceiling. A cold dread, colder and sharper than anything he had ever known, pierced through him. This was it. This was the secret the light had been hiding.

A low, guttural clicking accompanied the scraping, like a thousand wet tongues clacking against teeth. And there was a dripping. A slow, viscous plop… plop… of some thick liquid hitting the floor in the rows ahead of him.

Then, the audience began to laugh.

It wasn't the amused chuckling from before. This was a strange, hollow sound—rhythmic, hypnotic, and utterly devoid of joy. It was the sound of the bliss he remembered, the vacant contentment made audible. It was a chorus of the damned, laughing on command as the monster crawled above their heads.

The scraping grew louder, more frantic. The wet dragging sound was punctuated by heavy, sickening thuds, as if the creature was dropping parts of its immense weight as it moved. The laughter from the audience began to change, the pitch rising, the rhythm breaking. It became hysterical, unhinged, spiraling up into something that bordered on a scream.

And then the real screams began, cutting through the manic laughter like blades.

They were not screams of terror. They were high, piercing shrieks of pure, unadulterated agony. The sound of minds and bodies being torn asunder. The laughter was ripped away, replaced by this symphony of torment.

Percy’s stomach heaved. He fought back a wave of vomit, his knuckles white, his eyes screwed so tightly shut he saw bursts of frantic, kaleidoscopic color. Over the chorus of screams, a new set of sounds emerged, the sounds he would hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life. The sound of tearing flesh, a wet, ripping noise like a butcher pulling a side of beef from a hook. The snap of gristle and bone. The disgusting, slurping, gulping sounds of a ravenous feast.

He was in a feeding trough. They were all in a feeding trough, and they were laughing as they were eaten alive, their memories and emotions—their very souls—being consumed by the thing on the ceiling.

His desperate curiosity had turned to suffocating horror. He had his answer. He knew the truth. And all he wanted now was to be ignorant again, to be one of the smiling, empty-headed sheep. He wanted to run, but his limbs were locked in place by a primal terror that had seized every muscle in his body.

Then, the sound of the scraping changed. It was no longer a random, searching crawl across the ceiling. It had found a direction. A purpose. It was moving toward him.

The cacophony of screams and tearing began to recede into the background as the massive, wet dragging grew louder, closer. Schhhllluuurrrp… draaaag… Directly over the aisle next to him. Schhhllluuurrrp… draaaag… Now over the row in front. He could feel the vibrations through the back of his seat, a deep, resonant shudder that seemed to shake the very foundations of the theater. A single drop of something thick, warm, and foul-smelling landed on his cheek. He choked back a sob, not daring to move, not daring to even breathe.

The scraping stopped.

The silence was absolute. The screams had ceased. The feeding was over. The thing, the enormous, wet, heavy thing, was now perfectly still, directly above his head.

He sat frozen in the dark, a statue carved from fear, his hands still clamped over his eyes. He could feel its presence, a palpable weight pressing down on the air around him, a chilling cold that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Then he heard it.

A soft, wet, sniffing sound. A series of rapid, inquisitive inhalations, just feet above his hair. Sniff… sniff-sniff…

It was the sound of a predator examining a strange piece of food. Something different from the rest. Something that hadn't partaken in the bliss. Something that was still whole. Something that was aware.

In that silent, suffocating darkness, with the stench of it filling his nostrils and the single drop of its saliva cooling on his skin, Percy Miller knew, with a certainty that froze his very soul, that it had sensed him.