The hotel loomed at the city's edge, a monument of soot-black stone hunched beneath an eclipsed moon. Once, it had been a mental hospital—a charnel house for the Black Plague's dying, its windows flickering with the fever of a thousand vanished souls. Now, under Maryanne's gaze, it pulsed with a living malignancy: eerie flickering lights jittered across the cracked facade, shadows moved on their own with animal patience, and disembodied voices lilted and hissed through the corridors—half plea, half threat.
The walls bore scratch marks and prayers unfinished. Demonic entities writhed like worms in the corners, their presence thick and predatory, but even here the Crowned-Deep wilted them to its will, its pressure a dark sun, bending all corruption to its gravity.
In the next coming days, Maryanne noticed an audio bug in her house. She thought, where did this come from? Unease crawled up her spine. She got a call—Dan's voice, smooth as oil, but as inviting as a furnace. She left her daughters behind, or so she thought. The daughters knowingly followed her on their bikes, shadows trailing, their eyes wide with dread and devotion.
She walked the ash-filled halls, each footstep stirring ghosts of burned flesh and sorrow. The air tasted of bitter worms, crawling on her tongue, memories of fire and famine. Orbs of different colored light drifted at the periphery—sometimes warm, pulsing with the gentle hush of good spirits, sometimes warped and jagged, demonic entities that leered and slithered through the gloom. In certain rooms, the air was thick with the stench of char, pressed into every brick. Maryanne's skin prickled. The lights above her buzzed and died, then returned in a stuttering pulse—a Morse code for the damned. She paused near the electric room, drawn by a hush colder than the grave. Her fingers, trembling, found a hidden latch in the wall, a secret hatch behind the breaker box. She pried it open. A draft of ancient rot spilled out, and below—through a ladder slick with ash—yawned a torture chamber. Here, punishment was meted out by starvation, by silence, by time itself.
She arrived at a room where the light didn't flicker. It looked like a wooden kitchen, but with mirrors on the walls and inverted symmetry. Dan's "house" was a suite in the haunted hotel, a room thick with the smell of scorched velvet and old beer. The abyssal mirror sat propped on the dresser, black as a wound. Maryanne's mind reeled—how did this get here? I just saw it at the house.
Dan grinned, eyes glinting with a hunger older than the building's stones. "Welcome to my humble abode," he intoned, gesturing with his hands flared. "I promise it's going to be a hell of a time." He snaps his finger pointing towards the torture chamber.
Her vision swam. The next moments unraveled—Dan started chanting menacingly, "Soap in the mouth before she growls." Dan's hands, deft and cruel, quickly chloroforms Maryanne. Then ties her to a rusted chair in the basement. The world shrank to a fever dream of morphine and fear, her limbs heavy, her mind a room full of burning beds. Above, the hotel's lights flickered, the descent of footsteps on stone echoing like the countdown to an execution.
Dan walked down the stairs with a spatula, his face split by a manic smile. "I've been waiting ages to taste your desires Maryanne. Now I have the chance and I'm not letting go." He slid the spatula across Maryanne's belly, pressing the cold steel to her skin—a caress and a threat.
Maryanne, tied up and drugged, spat blood and defiance: "You'll never take me alive, you sick mother fucker, I've fought too long to give up now—" She squirmed in her chair, rage burning through the morphine haze.
Dan licked his lips, eyes wild. "Oh, Maryanne, how delightful—a symphony to the dead. Remember a flower grown in the cracks of the concrete only grows because the concrete is a broken promise." He snapped at the air in front of her, savoring her terror.
The third time Dan came down, his hunger was rabid—a wolf at the end of days.
He asks Maryanne, "What does a sinner have to do with the righteous, or what is the inheritance of the wicked? is it not pain, suffering, and hunger. He lunged and bit Maryanne's ear off, chewing with a grotesque ecstasy.
At that moment, the daughters burst through the basement door, wielding a frying pan. Dan, still feasting, didn't see the blow coming. The pan flew across the air and crashed against his skull, with the sound of a collapsing bridge. He slumped, unconscious, a beast undone by the love he could never consume.
Ash drifted in the air, mingling with blood and the taste of rotten food. In the flickering dark, Maryanne's daughters untied her, and together they went to the hospital to get Maryanne stitches.