Tiny Horror

She didn't scream; she sighed, a sound like wet leather being torn from a drum. With a series of sickening, wet crunches, the Mother heaved herself upward.

The industrial-grade flashlight, wedged in the refuse below her, cast a jagged, erratic beam that cut through the dust but failed to illuminate the nightmare in its entirety. The angle was wrong. It threw wild, distorted shadows against the peeling wallpaper, turning the room into a strobe-lit cage.

Deke only caught sickening glimpses: a flash of translucent, shivering flank here, the jagged angle of a spindly leg there. He saw the dark, churning fluids of her organs pulsing through the pale jelly of her skin, and the wet gleam of obsidian eyes rolling independently in the gloom. But he couldn't see the whole of her. The bulk of her body remained a dark, suffocating mountain that seemed to expand to fill every corner of the room, blending seamlessly with the trash until he couldn't tell where the garbage ended and the monster began.

Deke pressed his spine against the cold oak of the door, his breath hitching in his throat. His eyes darted toward the base of the mound where the erratic light caught the matte-black edge of the knife. It was barely ten feet away, wedged between a pile of ribcages and a rusted toaster. He was helpless without it. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to lunge for the blade, to at least die with steel in his hand. But the sheer, undulating mass of the Mother was already spilling down the side of the mound toward the weapon, a slow-motion landslide of flesh.

The tale continues...