Chapter 1 - Into the light

The Votes are in and a monster has risen from the darkness. Check out this monsters story Here.

Below is the description of the monster. Once again. This blog is bi-monthly so a new poll is up to vote on what comes out of the darkness next. Everyone has two weeks to get your monster sketched up and sent in. Please send submissions to art@machinesandmonsters.org. Once again descriptions/story ideas for the Machines and Monster are welcome.

Chapter one

Into The light
By: Alex K Barton

It was a Tuesday and David had just started the move into his new apartment right on the corner of Cherry Lane and McBee Street. It was a good sized flat, nothing fancy.

“Look here Sarah, it even comes with a microwave!” David smiled and plugged it in.

“It’s probably some piece of junk a former resident left, just trash. David pressed the start button to see if the microwave was working. Nothing, only the light inside seemed to work. David gave it a shrug and ran into the bathroom where Sarah was gawking at the water stained ceiling and the old led paint pealing like birch bark.

“Gawd, David this place is a shit whole. I wish you would have waited to sign the lease. I would have liked to try and talk you out of it.” Sarah put her hands on her hips and frowned. “Come on, Its got all this room and such charm! Plus, I needed to get into a place quick. Living with my parents again was the worst. It’s nice to have a place to my self.”

“Yeah well, I can’t argue with that. Moving in with Amy was one of the worst ideas I think you've ever had. Lets go get some stuff off the truck. We have a lot of work ahead of us!”

David had recently broken up with his girlfriend Amy Rutherford: an avid drinker and a connoisseur of the local male population. David was unlucky enough to think she could be monogamous. He was a little old fashioned and felt it was with little love for him that she had invited a strange man into there bed hoping for David’s included participation. Needless to say, David had decided to leave the relationship in hopes of brighter horizons and in turn losing out when it came to the lease holder of their apartment. It was a nasty break up. David was, however, making the best of it. He had made a call to his ever faithful fall back Sarah Ackley, who was a former lover now lesbian buddy. David was famously unlucky with women.
The evening pressed on; she mopped, he scrubbed. They sat and ate pizza, and then moved box after box. They mopped and scrubbed some more. Soon David was sitting with all his earthly possessions alone in his new apartment thinking about what to do next. His life was in shambles. He had gone to college to become a journalist, however, with the death of the magazine and news paper in full swing and a bad economy to boot, work was tough to find. He found a job at a computer repair shop making little more than minimum wage. It was seldom that he made time to write. He procrastinated and avoided sitting at his computer. He hated to even look at it due to the fact he looked at them all day anyway at his tech job. He decided that he needed to wash some clothes. This was less procrastination and more necessity. Amy thew most of his stuff in the street when he walked out.

“Crazy bitch...,” he mumbled as he walked though the darkness to the the communal laundry room. He had little money and the apartment only came furnished with a refrigerator, and a microwave. David stopped at an old navy blue door. Dust and a set of metal bars obstructed the view through the window to the inside. He felt around for the carabiniere attaching the keys to his hip. With keys in hand he tried to supported the basket of dirty clothes with his belly against the door as he struggled with the old lock. Both hands occupied with the key the the door flew open and David had little time to grab the basket as it fell down a small flight of stairs just on the other side of the door.

“Shit!” David looked around for the light. He flicked it on and off. David thought the bulb was out or the breaker was flipped. There was just enough moon light seeping though the door way that he could make out the single set of working washer and dryer at the back wall. Down the set of old wooden steps he picked up the clothes strewn about on his way to the bottom. Suddenly, he heard something scratching across the floor to the right of him. He looked up with a sudden wave of fear to see the the faint outline of his upside down laundry basket sliding across the cold cement floor.
“Fucking rats! This is a shit hole.” He finished picking up the clothes he could find and scooped up some of detergent off the ground that had also bounced down the stairs and placed it all in the washer. He did his best to avoid the laundry basket in fear that the rat might bite him if he let it out. He started the washer and with nothing more interesting to do he sat in the darkness of the laundry room and watched his laundry basket scoot around the floor. After a few minutes of this he realized that he could get a little light and maybe take a look at the rat if he just opened the dryer. He jumped off his perch atop the washer and popped open the dryer door. He gazed into the darkness and saw that the basket was shuffling toward the light. David moved the to side and jumped back on top of the dryer as the basket came closer and closer. It stopped just in front of the open dryer door. David still couldn't make out what was under the basket. Putting fear aside he kicked the basket over. David froze. A cat sized black glob with a bright red dot was what sat under the basket. He had never seen anything like it. Was it a bug? It couldn't be. It was much too large. He didn't know and with that came fear. He thought it best to try and get out of the laundry room. The glob flenched and turned towards him in the manner of a spider recognizing a threat, or food in its net. David could see its slick pore covered skin tighten as if it was tensing its muscles to make its self look bigger. He thought it best to get his clothes in the morning when this terrifying slug was’t around. He counted down in his head to make a run for it. One, Two, Three! David leaped off the washer and sprinted across the room for the stairs. He had only made it a short distance before he felt something cold making its way up his leg. David looked down to see a two tentacles swarming at his feet and a third making its way up to his knee. He looked back towards the stairs. Only a few more steps and he would be there. Abruptly, his feet were taken out from under him and his face smashed into the cement floor chin first making him bite the tip of his tongue. His blood dripped onto the floor. This seemed to make the tentacles ravenous dragging him closer and closer to the glob like creature. David began to scream for help but a tentacle wrapped around his face almost suffocating him. He ripped at the tentacle around his face to no avail. Looking forward, he reached out again and could make out the stairs falling further and further away. Trying desperately he scrapped at the floor with his nails. Unknown to the David at the time was that the glob had crawled into the dryer and a bright light began to flash from within. David felt his body being dragged up. His belly scrapped on the lip of the dryer door. He tried to use this as leverage to keep himself from getting dragged any farther. The tentacles finally took hold of his arms and lifted him into the light... To be continued.