The Abyssal Maw

"No!" Elias screamed. He lunged forward, aiming the heavy brass flashlight at Silas’s head, desperate to break past him and escape the house.

But Silas was terrifyingly fast. He caught Elias’s wrist with a grip like a steel vise. Silas’s hand was freezing, his skin feeling terribly slick and scaled beneath Elias’s touch. With a burst of unnatural, monstrous strength, Silas twisted Elias’s arm and shoved him backward, hard, into the open stairwell.

Elias tumbled down the wooden steps, crying out as his shoulder smashed against the railing. He slid down, his legs plunging into the freezing, viscous black water.

The cold was absolute. It paralyzed his muscles instantly. Elias scrambled, trying to pull himself back up the wet wooden stairs, but the water seemed to possess a magnetic pull, heavy and suffocating.

From the dark water, a tentacle whipped out. It wrapped around Elias’s ankle with a sickening, wet slap. The suckers latched onto his jeans, tearing through the denim and biting into his skin.

Elias screamed, a raw, tearing sound that echoed in the cavernous cellar. He clawed at the wooden stairs, his fingernails splintering the wood, but the entity in the water pulled with the weight of an anchor.

He looked up at the doorway.

Silas stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at him. The man's face was impassive, completely stripped of its humanity.

"Tell your mother I kept my word," Silas said.

Silas reached out, grabbed the heavy iron handle of the basement door, and pulled it shut. The *click* of the lock sliding into place was the most final sound Elias had ever heard.

Total darkness consumed the stairwell.

Elias kicked frantically, feeling the icy water rise to his waist, then his chest. Another tentacle slithered around his waist, thick and pulsing with cold, alien life. The stench of the dead ocean filled his nose and throat. He opened his mouth to scream one last time, but as he was violently yanked backward off the stairs, the freezing black water rushed in to fill his lungs.

Above him, through the floorboards, Silas listened as the thrashing stopped. Outside, the storm raged on, the waves of the midnight tide crashing against the cliffs, slowly, inevitably, beginning to drag the house down into the deep.