Bogleech.com's 2016 Horror Write-off:
The Hooligans: Basilisk
Submitted by
Jac R. B. (Jacobguy)
I've been traveling across the countryside this year in loo of a vacation, Hopping from town to town to meet people and see sights.
Not a lot of notable things, mostly off road towns around the woods and abandoned complexes (I like to do some urbex in my spare time) but this town is different somehow.
I don't know what it is, whether it's the strange feeling in the air, or perhaps the perpetual overcast, or maybe the quiet, almost hush hush nature of the inhabitants. But whatever it is, something strange is going on here.
I've stayed in this particular town longer than any other simply trying to discover what's going on, only to find no purchase anywhere from anyone, save for one person.
She was an old mystic. An older woman, seemingly with an interest in the occult. After hearing Me ask around about the strangeness of the little place, she confronted me, claiming answers.
I wanted to know more, so she ushered me into her little home.
A very small place, located tightly between two buildings (the library and a building no longer in use) and extended underground.
Her home was covered in carpets and rugs with beautiful patterns and seemingly mystical charms that I've never seen nor heard of before.
She spun tale after tale of mysterious happenings throughout the town, mysterious shrieks in the night, a strange buzzing hum before the disappearance of children, explosions without explanation, people disappearing with no trace save for a home completely caked in mold or a mysterious TV set.
Story after story was taken back. How could she know this i pressed.
She said nothing as the silently handed me a picture of a young woman and an infant. The woman was very familiar, and at first i couldn't place it, until i remembered the particular sorrow with which she told the stories of the children, and I understood.
After a solemn moment of silence she said to me,
"Should you still seek the unknown, further out from the town, deep in the woods, you will find an abandoned factory. Go there and you will find some.... answers"
I pressed a bit further, but she no longer gave purchase.
Before I left, she had one last piece of advice.
Handing me a rather large lump of coal, she mentioned only that I would need it, and know what to do when the time came.
I heeded her word and sent out. I packed up and drove to the location. The abandoned factory in the woods. Overgrown in dead, withering vines.
As I slowly enter, I thought I could see smoke rising out of the chimneys.
It was dark, and labyrinthine, more so than a factory ever would be built.
The maze of a building with winding halls seemed to just go downward and downward, like a roundabout spiral. Empty room after empty room, all completely caked with soot and ash.
I wound and wound through hallway after hallway, deeper into the dark. Until I came to the room.
It was a deep, charred black with red hot cracks in its flesh as though burning from within. It looked as though a massive, serpentine reptile with numerous legs had the skull of a frog rather than any lizard, as its empty eye sockets pointed straight upwards.
It sat stop a massive pile of charred bones, luckily none of them human as far as I can tell.
But the most cutting of all was how even without eyes, it stared intently at me, as though waiting.
It took but a moment before the red, burning cracks in its skin tipped me off.
I tossed the coal to it, and it nodded before licking it up like a cow does a salt lick.
For a moment, nothing moved, but then it's eyes roared and sparked to life.
mighty flames of white, bordered by a royal magenta.
Inside I could see everything.
I saw myself, the factory, the town, the state, the country, the world, the cosmos itself.
I even saw the ancients before us, those who created the world as we know it.
And I saw the monsters before them.
But then, with what seemed to be a pained or scared look on its face, the image changed. It changed and distorted to what came before everything.
Before the ancient originators.
Before the primordial monsters.
Before the great nothing.
I don't know what i saw, but I know that no matter what, I can no longer sleep, or even rest soundly knowing what I know. I am frozen here in my bed, the image of that Horrible kaleidoscope still burns white hot in my memory.
What do you do when even the Gods of your gods are afraid?