Experience Writing Halloween Flash Fiction Prompt: The Living Blob

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A.M. Moscoso

They trapped them there, locked in a windowless basement with nothing to see but darkness and nothing to hear but the sound of their breathing, which became irregular and ragged as the days and weeks wore on.

They thought they felt time dissolve in the dank, fetid darkness of the basement, and they thought that maybe they were dissolving too. The only certainty that existed for them was that the door at the top of the stairs would remain sealed.

“Does anybody up there hear us?” one of them wheezed.

“Not anymore; at least, I don’t think they can hear us.”

One of them moved a little closer to the earthen wall. “I used to hear them waking up and running around in the middle of the night, but they don’t do that anymore.”

“They whisper a lot,” a voice said from the corner of the basement.

“Do you think they’ll ever let us out? Or will they keep us down here to rot in the dark?”

“What is dark?” someone asked. “What is rot?”

“Are we rot? Are we darkness?” a thin, frail voice cried from the center of the room in despair.

A voice, a deep, rich voice which was always closest to the door, said, “Once I heard someone up there say never to open this door. The stuff of nightmares is down there.”

“Oh No! That can’t be true. How could we get away from the stuff of nightmares with the only door out of here locked?”

The voice near the door coughed, or maybe it laughed.

It’s hard to say.