The next chapter is here! We're closing in on the end now folks, and I want to say again that I'm happy some of you have stuck it out this far. I didn't expect this story to gain so much traction, but I'm glad I embarked on writing it. It's been fun, challenging in some respects, and educational in others. I think it also might have been responsible for me digging so deep into Stephen King's work, and I really, really am glad I did that. I think his style has already influenced mine a bit, and I'm A-OK with that.
Enjoy the next part of the story, and stay tuned, there's more to come...
How long Fred had been with her corpse he did not know, but after a time he found the will to lower her eyelids shut, and stand up. With a bowed head he made his final thoughts known, but he dared not speak them out loud. Whatever poison was in the air, he preferred it not infect his feelings for the red headed girl that been the driving force of his world for the past decade or so. He had fancies of asking her out some time, of getting on one knee and raising a little velvet box with a diamond ring inside somewhere down the road; dreams of making a family with her and in thirty years or so waking up on suburban street around 8:30 on Christmas morning, starting a fire in the living room as Christmas morning commenced, all smiles on every face. God rest her soul, Daphne Blake would never have any of that, and without her to share it, Fred wasn't sure he wanted any of it either.
The primal tick in his head told him to move on. Death and desolation had claimed most of him, but what was left could still escape. If he ran into the others on the way, so much the better, but at this point it was hoping beyond hope to expect they were still alive. Get a hold of yourself, and get the fuck out of this hellhole.
Nurse Jackie had a few useful tools laying around, and he picked out his favorite - the scalpel - and went on his way. If Mount Massive still wanted a piece of him, he was ready to give back as good as he got, right in the jugular.
Shaggy found himself in the disturbingly familiar position of waking up on a strange bed in a hall somewhere. A camcorder rested beside him, and had been paused at the beginning of an eight minute video. "Play me" had been written on the wall beside him in blood. With a shiver and a gulp he complied, and a montage of mysterious circumstances and horrific scenes played out for him.
A swarm of bugs, or at least that was what it appeared to be, wandered into the shot of a hallway and tore a patient apart piece by piece until he was no more than a bloody puddle. The gargantuan Chris Walker held up another patient by the throat in the next shot, and bashed his head through the wall of an office. In the third shot, the naked twins were pinning down and carving flesh from a live guard, still hollering as his body was devoured. More footage, mostly of the swarm, played out again and again, and soon the priest's words began to play over the gorey footage.
"This place has become a holy site. It is the gospel of the WALRIDER, which will stand the test of time. His dark power pervades the Earth here, spreads, procreates and multiplies. His testament must be known. I send this proof of his power along with a willing witness, this man, who came by divine circumstance, has seen first hand the madness instilled by our savior's presence. Heed his words, and this footage, as proof of his coming. The WALRIDER works in our blood. Billy Hope was the first prophet. I, Father Martin, am the second. And this man, Shaggy Rogers, is the third, and final prophet. Make way, all ye who hear, for the end times are upon you. The WALRIDER is coming. The WALRIDER is coming. The WALRIDER is coming for you all."
When he could barely keep the merciful sustenance from earlier down, Shaggy closed the player and slid it away from him.
"Take it."
Shaggy had no idea anyone was nearby, and fell out of the bed when one of the twins appeared beside him. He screamed and bolted in the opposite direction, only to run into the second twin, who held him back.
"Curious. He seems not to know," The one holding onto Shaggy commented.
"If not, he will soon. Father Martin promised us release. By the WALRIDER's power, it will be done."
"Like, what are you guys talking about? What's it got to do with me!?" Shaggy protested, still trying to worm his way out of the twin's graps.
"One more recording is left to be had, and then you are beckoned to return to the heathen world," The first twin spoke.
"Follow the candles, and the blood," Said the second, "Find Father Martin and observe the last miracle. Then, you must leave Mount Massive. Our law is known to all his followers. You will not be harmed by us, but other dangers still lurk. Be wary, and fast on your feet, Prophet."
The other twin handed him the camera, and then pointed him on his way.
"What about Scooby? What about my other friends? Where are they?"
The twins looked at each other for a moment, then said in unison, "Irrelevant. You must go now."
Unwilling to get on their bad side, and more so eager to get away from them, Shaggy went down the hall, and came to a fork in the path. The blood pointed him right, so he followed. Snaking his way through many corridors and down a few flights of stairs, he was back in the administration building, on the opposite side of where he had entered. That seemed like years ago, he could barely remember what music had been on the radio as the gang drove up the mountain, what they had been talking about. God help him, he even had a hard time remembering what some of them looked like. He felt as though he had been trapped in this nightmare for an eternity.
The sound of a door slamming shut made him jitter in his shoes, but the other person did not seem eager to confront him, so he hurried along, and continued to follow the blood.
Velma had just finished wrapping old bed linens around her legs when Scooby finished his story.
"I saw the twins just before falling through the floor! They must have already dropped Shaggy off, I didn't see him with them. Not that I got a good look..."
"Rhat about rou?"
"Me? Oh...well…" Velma bit her lip.
It was crazy, she knew it was crazy, even for all the hellish things going on around here, it was simply insane to admit that she'd been hearing voices, seeing monsters, imagining a blood red sea was coming to swallow them. She'd seen things she never imagined could be done, but she wasn't willing to admit an ancient, cosmic horror was about to turn the oceans of the world into blood, and re-emerge from a sleeping city to devour humanity. It was just too out there.
"I've just been running around a lot. I've had a hard time stomaching some of this stuff," She lied, "I'm sorry I've been a burden. Thank you for taking care of me."
"Rhat's it?"
"Yeah. That's it. Really. I think I'm okay now, and I should be able to go on. Let's regroup with the others and get the heck out of here."
Scooby nodded, and allowed Velma to keep a hand on his back as she got back into the groove of walking. A limp still impaired her right leg, but she'd stopped the bleeding, and that was enough for now. When they were back in civilization, back to the world that seemed in a different plane from the nightmare of Mount Massive, she could get proper treatment.
Not a different plane, the voices of the servants of the Great Old Ones whispered, only a stone's throw from observable space and time.
"Quiet!"
"Ruh?" Scooby looked towards her with a questioning face.
"I think I hear something!" She covered, "Keep quiet for a moment."
Your loyalties are already in question. The Master will take you into his throng. Throw yourself from the rooftops, join the countless dead of his banner, and come to the sleeping city.
"Rell? I ron't rear anything," Scooby said after a minute.
Velma shook her head, "Yeah...I guess I didn't hear anything either. Let's keep going."
We taste your fear. It is delectable.
Shaggy had been following the path directed for nearly ten minutes now, and finally he turned into a short hallway, that led to only one place: The sanitarium chapel. Drooling, mumbling patients with blood on their hands and on their lips stood slightly shaking and swaying at the doorway. Even as he began to turn back they smiled at him and beckoned him inside with their heads.
Swallowing another lump in this throat, Shaggy opened the doors and saw a large cross at the stage in front of the empty pews, and a pile of wood underneath. Surrounding the cross, more patients, who clapped and cheered for Shaggy as he slowly strode down the center aisle. On the cross itself, Father Martin was bound and smiling.
"Begin recording now, my son. This is the final miracle. This is the last piece of evidence you will need."
The camera seemed to weigh a ton, but Shaggy listened, and as he hit the record button, he dared to ask, "So what's the story here, man? What am I doing here?"
"You are my Job, and the world's Jonah. The final Prophet. It began with Billy Hope, yes, bless his heart. Billy opened the rift, beckoned the WALRIDER to our world. I was the second Prophet, I guided his actions, cultivated his worshippers, made this place ready for your arrival. I wasn't sure when you would come, and in truth, I began to doubt you would show up at all, but here you are. Now you stand before us, the final Prophet. You will bring his testimony to the Earth. You will show them the way, and in following your footsteps, the WALRIDER's holy works will be done."
"I don't understand, why me?" Shaggy asked, still recording the priest on his cross.
"It doesn't matter. It is you, and that is enough. The final promise has always been freedom from death. You will record my death, my resurrection in the WALRIDER's name, and together we will be free. The elevator is in order again, the path cleared: it will take you out of the Asylum. We will all be free at last. Now, my son. Now, go, and do our frightful lord's work."
One of the patients surrounding the cross lit a match, and flung it into the pile. The faint smell of gasoline registered to Shaggy just before the pyre went up in flames, and Father Martin's shaky breath quickly evolved into screams echoing in the chapel as the fire snaked up the cross and embraced him.
The other inmates bowed and prayed in whispers, and held up their hands in sick worship. Shaggy couldn't take anymore, and fell forward onto his knees. The smell of charring flesh forced him into movement and he scurried away, shutting off the camera, wondering if he could ever enjoy the taste of barbeque doors were open? Fine. He'd get the hell out of Mount Massive, and he'd tell the whole world about the evil here. Send in the army, the national guard, the FBI...send everyone. Rescue his friends, and level the whole miserable place.
He ran with a speed he didn't know he was capable of mustering. He'd always been the fastest member of the gang, except maybe for Scooby Doo. He hated to leave him and the others here, hated to be running away without them, hated himself for doing it, but this was his best chance. Someone had to make it out, someone had to get help and send in the cavalry, and he was in the best situation to do it. Being a hyprocite and abandoning his friends would be a worthy sacrifice if it meant this unholy murder scene was razed and forgotten.
His path led him through plenty more halls and empty rooms, up a few staircases and through a short stretch of the outdoors once or twice, and finally he found it. The elevator came into sight, and Shaggy skidded to a halt, and pushed the button to take him to the entrance like a child beating on the crosswalk button, and the way out. With an ungodly sluggish response, the elevator finally hummed to life, and descended.
It stopped and the doors opened, and he saw it. The main doors were open, just like when Trager cruelly teased him and the others. But there was no Trager now, no naked twins to stalk him, no burly meathead named Chris Walker to play Godzilla, he was finally out. He took one step forward, and the door slammed shut.
"What!? No!"
Shaggy beat on the button to open them back up, but the lights inside the cabin flickered, and then shut off. Alone in the dark, with nothing but the sound of his own heartbeat and heavy breathing, Shaggy could feel the invisible hands of the Asylum peeling back his sanity. It was not going to happen again. He had not come all this way to make it this close and then be yanked back into the gaping maw of hell. Not again!
The lights came back on, and a brief hope lit in his heart, spurned on by the ashes of Father Martin's funeral pyre, but just as quickly as the flame was lit, so too was it snuffed out. The doors remained shut, and Shaggy felt the elevator descend again.
"No. No. No. NO. NOOOO!"
He banged on the doors, he shouted at the top of his lungs, he beat his head against the cabin, he let tears well up in his eyes and fall down his face, and all the while the elevator descended. A new strain of fear rose up inside him when he realized that he had been going down for almost a minute straight. Then it stretched into almost two. Where in the hell was this lift taking him!?
After nearly three minutes in a descent, the doors opened into what appeared to be an arctic cavern of carved ice, and then the lift died again. Faint lights embedded in the walls, and the thin hum of unseen generators were his only company in this fresh, frozen haunting.
Their path had taken them into the women's ward, and due to a little shenanigans involving blocked pathways and holes in the wall, Velma and Scooby ended up on the fourth story of a labor building, with rows and rows of sewing machines ordered for a ward full of women to do women's work.
In the stillness of night, with the moon's nearly graceful rays shining down through the windows the sewing room looked like something out of one of their earlier adventures. Maybe they had been in a room like this once, chasing a man in a suit and a movie mask, or a person under a sheet and on stilts. Looking back from here, all those supposed ghosts, ghouls, and monsters seemed paltry and pathetic. And in truth they had been. Nothing would ever be the same after their venture here.
The sounds of someone beating against a door brought them caution and forced them into cover underneath one of the machines, but then Scooby's tail began to wag. Velma watched with an open mouth as he sniffed the air, and slowly rose from their hiding spot.
"Reddie!"
Scooby sprinted across the hardwood floor and jumped into the man wailing at the door, who stumbled into it as he barely caught the great dane.
"Scooby!"
"Fred!"
"Velma! I didn't think..."
"Have you seen Shaggy and Daphne?"
Velma's heart pounded as she saw the small smile break, and resentment began to flourish on his face, "I haven't seen Shaggy. Daph is…" He had to check his manhood, she saw, and swallowed deep regret in his throat, answering with a shaking voice, "she's gone."
Scooby's tail dropped and he began to whimper, Velma put a hand over her heart. Daphne Blake, one of her closest friends, the closest person to a sister she ever had - who she could confide in about boys and fashion and all things girly and romantic - was gone. It was too horrible to be true, but then that seemed to be the cadence of the night.
That street ran both ways, of course. Velma had been her confidante too. She'd listened, laying in bed with her laptop, scrolling through steamy fan fiction sites as Daphne talked about how groovy she thought Fred was, and wondered if Velma thought he was ever going to ask her out.
"I'm sorry," She whispered, placing a consoling hand on Fred's shoulder. It was all she could do, and it did nothing to assuage the tears leaking out of her eyelids.
She has gone to see the Master. You may join her yet. Give your blood to the Great Old Ones.
"It's…" Fred started and then trailed off. Velma could see him making fists and then uncurling his fingers. She empathized completely. Sometimes you had to physically try and regain control of your life. The horrible thought that those voices would never leave her mind bled into her heart, and she banished it with difficulty, and stubborn determination.
No. Never leave. Your mind has been aligned to the ancient psychics. We are forever linked; you will hear the whispers until your death. Then you will meet us.
"It'll be okay somehow," Fred said, though they all knew he didn't mean that, "Let's find a way out of here."
As a trio, they worked on the door, and after a few more times it broke open, revealing a decrepit hallway. Velma still had the wounds to know better than to even try going down the left. It was where both the elevator on this building and a floor besieged by many cracks and small holes lay. To the right the path was steadier looking, and a few unopened doors allowed the possibility of another way of escape.
"Down there, to the right," She insisted, and pointed for good measure.
"Alright," Fred led the way, "Let's go."
Shaggy could hear his every step, the way you do when you visit the hospital and turn down a quiet hall, or an empty store in the mall at night. The tap-tap-tap sound made him seem important, the only thing of significance in the entire place, but he wanted nothing to do with significance here. The elevator was finished, kaput, well and truly fucked. He wasn't getting out of this icy basement through it.
The hall of carved ice led him into a reception room, pillars of fine stone and metal doorways stained with blood, and bits and pieces of bodies decimated by some form of evil greeted him. Television screens and posters denoted this as a Murkoff Corporation facility, but somehow Shaggy doubted many visitors ever made it down here. At least, not any that were supposed to get out.
Labs and testing rooms out of a horror movie decorated the passageways. Some were shut off and locked, but those that weren't spoke of disaster: Cabinets stuffed with research specimens, syringes and bottles filled with myriad chemicals, shattered glass and broken laptops, and puddles of blood imprinted with the last moments of life by those who once worked here.
Something went thud somewhere, it was hard to tell direction in these tunnels, everything echoed and bounced around. Shaggy paused and held his breath; another set of footsteps began to go tap-tap-tap on the ice, but like the thud he could not discern from where. Running was a sure way to slip, he thought, just walking sometimes threatened your balance, a bad fall was only a second away, but whatever was walking around did not seem impeded. Go on or go back seemed the sum of his choices, and since the elevator was only good for getting caught in, he dared to keep onwards.
Any moment he expected to hear the voice of a crazed little man with a hunched back and goggles across his forehead, muttering under his breath about his secret experiment that would spell doom for the rest of the world. In a place like this, he would say such a mad scientist was on the right track. The sound of a glass shattering made him jump in place, and almost fall down, but he caught himself against the wall. The coldness here was starting to get to him. How an icy cave was hidden under a mountain in the Colorado Rockies made no sense, but there were more important things afoot that geographical conundrums.
Around the next bend a lab door swung open, and Shaggy blinked. It looked...almost like something exited. Something without footsteps, something not entirely there, but something all the same. It could have been his imagination, but he swore the air shifted, and then he really got worried. A shiver didn't just run down his spine, it felt dumped on him like a bucket of water and he rushed past the open door, but not too fast to miss the remains of a beaker splintered on the ground.
An intercom he wasn't previously aware of turned on and released a static moan into the air. He could no longer hear the footsteps. The next doorway was opened via a button, and was set up with a filter so a rush of stale air was thrust towards him. The floor became metal grating, and pipes and power lines ran alongside and above him down a dark pathway with several doors, all of them requiring an access card to enter, and as Shaggy had precisely zero, he did not bother attempting to get passed them.
Only one door had been left open, and it looked to Shaggy like he'd just been transported to NASA. Screens the size of cars sat stacked, one on top of another on the far wall. In rows before the big screens, dozens of work stations, all linked to the same network, all of them displaying the same message:
WALRIDER PROJECT: OPERATIONAL
STATUS: ACTIVE
HOST SUBJECT: WILLIAM P. HOPE
STATE: LUCID DREAMING
Shaggy felt the name tumble down his memory, and searched for the reason why when the doors at the front of the hall released more stale air and the lumbering behemoth called Chris Walker came into sight. In the clear light of the hall Shaggy could see his flesh in detail. It was all burned and crinkled and leathery, and his lips and nose were gone, as was much of the skin on his forehead. His muscles bulged and flexed as he approached, and Shaggy's feet fell out from under him, and the camera delivered to him as Martin's trusted prophet tumbled and opened.
"Little piggie...no more run away..."
Shaggy was able to scoot away on his hands and knees but he was trapped. There was only door from the computer room into the hall, and only way from the hall to the rest of the complex, and the psycho that had been following him almost the entire time he'd been here was coming through that hall. A game of ring around might get him out, but Walker was rushing now, and Shaggy's feet felt like they were made of quicksand. Another shudder overcame him, and Shaggy closed his eyes to embrace a -hopefully - quick and painless death.
"Yaaa-ARGH!"
Chris Walker was stumbling in place, swinging his beefy hands in the air like a kid trying to nab a butterfly in his hands, only the expression on his condemned face was not joy, but some kind of confused rage. Then, the anger gave way to shock, and his beedy eyes widened and he began feeling his own chest. Shaggy could hardly believe it when Walker was raised into the air and slammed into the pipes on the left side of the hall, then thrown against the steel on the right. Then he realized what was happening. The something from earlier, the thing that had knocked over the beaker, had returned. By chance he was the camera and that the night vision setting had been enabled. In the green screen, the silhouette of a grown man, all black and brimming with shimmering energy, was manhandling Walker. Picking him up, beating him down, rag dolling him into anything that would hurt.
The Walrider.
Chris Walker was screeching at the top of his lungs, sounding much like a wounded pig, and true terror filled the giant's eyes as his neck and throat began to strain. Shaggy grabbed the camera and observed the Walrider's invisible hands pulling the monster's head upwards. Chris Walker died as he had killed so many others, with his head being removed via brute strength. The tearing sound was horrible, the kind of sound one unearths from Pandora's Box. The spray was worse, and Shaggy felt in that moment he would remember the sight forever. With the camera, he wouldn't have to. The Walrider's physical form held Walker's head up like a trophy, and then squashed it into another red mist.
"Over here!"
Shaggy hardly registered the words as a secret entrance opened in the computer room wall, but his legs found strength again, and he bolted as fast as he could away from the black figment; it seemed to watch him go, and look on with curiosity Shaggy escaped death once more by the skin of his teeth.