The Voice in the Copper Tap
A crash.
You slammed the elevator doors on the hound's neck. It wailed, spasming in the air, going past any reasonable volume for something whose jaws hung shattered. The cage lurched mid-ascension, and you scrambled back towards the sturdiest wall (not that there were many left in this place) and dialed the emergency number. It took several agonizing seconds for a synthesized voice to answer out of the receiver.
"Congratulations," chimed the operator, "you just learned how to weaponize an elevator."
Oh, wasn't it just funny? How you cradle your broken fingers with a scraped elbow and try, in a hilariously futile attempt, not to put pressure on the wounds on your back as well. Wouldn’t it be just hilarious, if you ended up sustaining, on top of your wounds from the struggle, a few more dislocated joints in your fight to get away from the same creature? The floor below glimmered sadly back at you with some dark, sickly substance. It looked a little like grease, and a lot like blood.
It was definitely blood.
"We may have a small issue here," you breathed to the receiver, sandwiching it between your ear and your shoulder. You eyed the bundle of venom and rabies crushed between the doors, and made a silent gratitude to whatever god you worshiped that you'd invested in such possibilities to bring a cloth. You dabbed it at the hand before realizing some things are probably beyond saving at this point and promptly retract some gratitude. You were better off saving your last thoughts to compose an obituary.
Please refer to your earlier guides in Level 1. Entity 8 are humanoids with strange biology-
"No."
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The hound thrashed with its head in the doors, but you held it firmly shut. What life did it count for anyways; it couldn’t even properly die.
🙥
But there were no pinpricks of stars at all.
"Hey, hey, hey," your eyes froze, locked onto the thing looming from across the chasm, "We need to leav—"
Something above stammered. Then the cage begun falling.
"Move!" you screamed, and you couldn't check if the boy had heeded your call from the corner of your peripherals. You flew to the control panel, bounced around like a marionette between the walls, as you hit every single button in descending order.
Above you, the ceiling of the cage flew off, weightless, like a piece of cardboard in the wind. Your hair unraveled around your head as the space blurred. Green, brown, tan, sickly yellow. Your head whipped around behind you as the boy (who you didn't know the name of) scanned the elevator cage with a befuddled look, and you had nearly no time to push him against the corner before the world rattled—
—then closed in on itself.
(But it doesn't end.)
Storm clouds, the color of autumn leaves, erupted into the sky.
Your old shell laid on the shattered ceramic floor, her neck missing the head it was supposed to hold. Your new body was smaller, leaner. Sustaining heavy damage comparable to its predecessor. Its cuff was bloody, but the golden vest shone back at you.
(But it doesn't end.)
"You have reached the elevator support system. What is your issue today?"
"What," you stared at the spot where the copper call box once sat mounted, like it had grown another head. The call box, which must have broken open in the midst, saw a worming cord snaking from the bowels of the container to an old cradle telephone wobbling on the floor.
"Ah, the bright heavens not to your taste? Our services are happy to provide accommodations to that."
"I’m not dead yet," you snarled.
There was a spot of silence. "Aren’t you?" asked the disembodied voice.
"Of course I'm not," you snapped, "I'm breathing, aren't I?"
"I won’t say you’re much alive either", said the voice, "When was the last time you really lived?"
You grit your teeth, "What's even the difference? Who are you?"
"I'm nothing, dear," it answered, "You're hallucinating from the blood loss."
You thought you hear it chuckle primly to itself, but it didn't matter — you had to hold on. If you hold on, no one else would die —"
(But even then, it wasn't over.)
"Would the client be interested in courses on self-protection?", asked the most annoying piece of fiction your brain had ever conjured up, "Our services provide state-of-art tutorials on how to navigate these mazes."
"Whatever. Sure," the corners of your mouth tugged into a grin, "Go ahead. Hit me."
"Affirmative. Now entering: Tutorial Level."
The iron doors before you shuttered open to a yellow hallway. In the distance, you saw a lumbering figure, coming into focus before your eyes.
"No! Fuck. You."
The hound charged forward, snarling.
And you slammed the elevator door right onto its neck.
🙥
While it did its best to enact a valiant attempt, though, you collapsed onto the ground and contemplated your next move.
Thanks, you could mutter into the receiver, and even hang it back onto a wall a little forcefully, for dignity’s sake. No, you’d still end up picking it up again sooner or later. There wasn't a way to win here, was there?
Sounds gushed from the doors. All manners of soundtracks pulled straight from your personal nightmares poured into the tiny space, reverberating off your prison. You still had no idea how you were going to get Mariah's body out. It was starting to smell. You could envision yourself cursing your current decisions in the soon-foreseeable future, but for the moment, you ignored all that semantic stuff. For the moment, you took to cleaving away at the grime littered about the elevator floor and bunkered down for the foreseeable future. How hard could it be anyway? You weren’t going to get outlasted by a quadruped.
(That would just be a new low…even for you.)
As if on cue, the lights in the cart above flickered, then went out. The dust settled…a deathly calm soaked up against dark walls. It is content in hell.
You could still hear it crying through the steel.