So, if it IS the vultures that are scratching above, then I, now, fall into the category of those who beg the winged beasts to take their lives…

…and it won't be long until the roof caves in and I become food in the belly of history's erasers.
I'm falling asleep.


…

(there are 2 or 3 paragraphs that were entirely too illegible to transcribe)

I ate something that was alive today.
Surprisingly, it was tolerable. I'm becoming more adept in the dark, but I still couldn't properly gut or clean whatever it was, so I just ate it whole. I will never admit this outside of here, but for an instance, imagining the tiny creature's innards as ketchup, and the bones as lettuce actually made the meal semi-decent. I guess, when you compare it to my normal meals of sucking my tongue dry of all of its sodium that I collect from the putrid air in here while I sleep, it IS probably a good meal. At least enough to –

…


Within just a few seconds, everything changed.
Night after night, I have been obsessively laying my head near the crack in the door, clawing and pounding on the surface, begging for the sliver of light to shower me again, so MAYBE I can see enough to get my bearings and plan my escape.
The light never came.
But while I was casually writing about what I ate, on the other side of the room, something ELSE happened.
Something other than the tiniest sunset.
Something other than a band-aid-sized beam of light.
There was a fucking exploding star of light…as the door OPENED!
Though it the light fizzled out almost instantaneously as the door slammed and locked shut moments later, what I saw was enough to change everything I had been thinking. Before the door opened, I was scared. But it was a fear of being neglected. Fear of being trapped, alone, starving. The fear of dying was there because I knew there wasn't much I could do to stop it. I feared, however, that I wouldn't prolong death long enough. That I would keel over just hours before my escape route revealed itself to me. So that's why I was fighting to stay alive. But now, after being granted the right to see, if only for an instance, I am afraid for a much different reason.

The door opened. My eyes stung but I fought to keep them agape. The rest of my body frozen in both terror, shock, and sadness.
The light revealed where I am, which I pretty much figured out already: a basement.
The light revealed my new arm: atrophied and gray. Transformed.
The light revealed what my mysterious, squishy furniture was: bodies, upon bodies, upon bodies. A disgusting orgy of the dead. I struggled to take in every detail of the mess. Bodies, half-naked, gutted. Some were completely dismantled, every part of their body sliced open and pillaged. Some, only parts. A stomach opened like a Christmas present. An arm split from finger-tip to shoulder blade, the hanging flaps of skin fluttering like a windsock from the short burts of circulating air let in from the open door. Eyes not just missing, but completely cut out of faces. Mouths gone. What I thought was garbage strewn randomly throughout the room was actually tongues and fingers and fingernails, and teeth, and hair, and lions and bears and FUCK! The water puddles were a mixture of blood and condensation and escaped fluids. I must have grown to fully ignore the flies, because the sheer amount of them that were revealed in the light shocked me almost more than the pile of dumped bodies.

After the door opened, another body was thrown into the room so violently and effortlessly there is no way it was thrown by an average being. The body smashed into the wall and folded in half, cracking loudly as it slid to the floor to join the others in the cadaverous debauchery that blanketed the bloodied cement floor.
After the body slammed into the wall, I noticed that it was attached to something by its leg. Something long, dark, and thin at the tip. And that "something" retracted from the corpse after the impact. I thought it might have just been a shadow, but darkness is something I am so familiar with now, I KNEW it was something more tangible. As I quickly followed the retraction back toward the door, and I saw it join a group. It was like…
a pitch black, thick, VINE rejoined a bigger group of black vines that were dancing in the doorway behind the silhouette of the man they are attached to. The vines swallowed up any details I could make out, but I saw that he was tall, thin, covered in blood, and that he had no idea that I was still alive…
As the shadow-man turned around, the light revealed one last detail. The lower half of his face was draped in a long, bright yellow scarf, and the VINES slammed the door shut.

I need to get out.
I am no longer scared of hunger.
I am now scared…of HIM.