The green light of the terminal screen illuminated Arthur's bloodless face.
"Delivery Address: St. Jude's Old Apartments. Room 716."
Arthur looked up. Through the rain-streaked windshield, he stared at the brutalist 1960s architecture ahead. It didn't have a single lit window. It stood silently in the rainy night like a massive concrete tombstone overgrown with black moss. Even the halos of the nearby streetlamps seemed to intentionally avoid the building.
He pulled the handbrake and took the keys out of the ignition.
In the back of the van, Arthur found the eight-hundred-dollar package. It was an elongated cardboard box wrapped tightly in black waterproof canvas and bound in a cross shape with coarse twine.
The moment his fingers brushed the canvas, he jerked back.
Freezing.
It wasn't the chill of being soaked in the rain, but a bone-piercing cold like the bottom rack of a meat freezer. A layer of microscopic white frost coated the canvas. Leaning in, he caught a harsh whiff of chemical preservatives, mixed with dirt and the stench of old, burned paper.
Arthur tucked the package under his arm, pushed open the rusted iron gate, and stepped into the apartment building.
The lobby reeked of stale urine and a heavy mildew. Large chunks of plaster had sloughed off the walls, exposing water-stained bricks; in the shadows, the stains warped into the shapes of twisted human faces. A failing fluorescent tube buzzed overhead like a dying thing, its flickering light casting Arthur's shadow into grotesque contortions against the peeling walls.
The caged door of the old elevator was padlocked shut with thick, dust-caked chains. Arthur had no choice but to head for the concrete fire stairs deep within the lobby.
The stairwell was devoid of light. Arthur climbed step by step, relying solely on the faint glow of his terminal.
With every floor he ascended, the air grew colder and thicker. Every breath tasted of damp dust. The dull thud, thud of his combat boots echoed in the enclosed space—sounding almost as if someone above him in the dark was walking downstairs at the same rhythm.
One floor, two floors...
When Arthur stepped onto the landing between the sixth and seventh floors, his body froze in its tracks.
Without warning, the muscle above his left eyebrow began to twitch.
The veins at his temples bulged. The blood inside them felt as heavy and thick as molten lead; every heartbeat brought a bursting agony against his vessel walls.
A static numbness swept up his tailbone to his scalp. The hairs beneath his windbreaker stood on end, goosebumps erupting like a plague across his skin.
Arthur ground his teeth. Eight hundred bucks. He walked into the seventh-floor hallway.
The exact moment his boot hit the seventh-floor tile.
The world was muted.
The thunderstorm outside, the creaking of the aging building, even the subtle whisper of moving air—all severed in an instant. The hallway became an acoustic vacuum.
Only one sound remained in Arthur's ears.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The deafening roar of his own heart hammering against his ribs.
Primal panic took over. His breathing, no longer under conscious control, became deep and slow. His lungs strained for every molecule of oxygen, his face turning a suffocated purple just to prevent a single whisper of airflow from escaping his mouth.
The peeling paint and the junk piled along the walls rapidly blackened and blurred at the edges of his vision.
His field of view collapsed. Tunnel vision set in.
All that remained was the black-spotted wooden door at the end of the hall, bearing an oxidized, green-tinged brass plaque: [716].
With every step closer, the package under his arm seemed to grow heavier and colder.
Finally, he stood before Room 716.
Moving like an automaton, Arthur raised his hand, curled his knuckles, and knocked three times.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
In the dead silence, the knocks sounded muffled. The order demanded: Must knock and wait. Must hand-deliver to customer.
Creeeeeak—
No footsteps. No click of a deadbolt. Accompanied by a teeth-grinding friction, the wooden door swung outward on its own, opening a gap about four inches wide.
There were no lights on inside. The faint illumination from the hallway couldn't penetrate even an inch past the gap. Inside was an impenetrable darkness.
Arthur's Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed blood-flecked saliva. He supported the box through the fabric of his right sleeve.
He lifted the package and slowly, inch by inch, offered it through the gap.
Something moved in the dark.
A wave of freezing, rotting air washed over his face. Then, a hand reached out through the crack. It was corpse-pale, devoid of living skin texture, with nails a necrotic purplish-black. A fine layer of frost clung to the back of the hand. But the most horrifying part was its proportions. The withered fingers were impossibly long, defying human anatomy, terminating in razor-sharp nails.
Arthur's heart nearly stopped. The moment they took the package, he would run.
However, the frozen hand didn't reach for the edge of the cardboard.
Bypassing the box with blinding speed, it clamped down like a vise onto Arthur's left wrist!
Hssss—!
The cold pierced his skin in a heartbeat. Arthur could actually hear the crisp crackle of the cells in his wrist freezing, dying, and splitting open.
He wasn't given a fraction of a second to resist or scream.
A monstrous force erupted from that hand, yanking him inward!
His entire body was tossed like a weightless ragdoll, slammed toward the four-inch gap.
His shoulder smashed into the rough wooden doorframe. His collarbone snapped with a CRACK.
"Aaagh!!!"
Arthur let out a howl. He thrashed. The five fingers of his right hand—the ones with nails already broken from clawing the van window—dug into the rough wooden frame. Under the inhuman force, his remaining nails were ripped out by the roots. Flesh peeled back and tore off, smearing warm blood all over the door.
But the force was too massive. It crushed, folded, and dragged Arthur's body into that darkness.
The world vanished.
No floor. No ceiling. Arthur felt countless ice-cold things swarm him instantly.
In the dark, those grotesquely long, razor-clawed fingers dug into his cheeks.
They ripped downward. Accompanied by the sound of tearing flesh, his lips, cheeks, and brow were flayed alive, exposing the stark white bone of his skull and gums.
"Huuuuurk—!" With his lips gone, even his scream leaked into a hollow wheeze.
Immediately after, two piercing icicles stabbed directly into his eye sockets, pulverizing both eyeballs. The agonizing pain of severed optic nerves shot straight into his brain.
His torn face burned. His ribs caved inward, inch by inch, his internal organs crushed under the immense pressure.
His consciousness finally sank into the dark.
...