For the first time in this god-awful venture, despite the disturbing scene I just trotted away from, I felt relief at it coming to an end. It was liberating. As the hallway turned into a wide and winding staircase I watched my steps. Lord knows I had fallen like a clumsy toddler enough today. My new sense of relief gave me a boost of confidence.

I passed the noisy generator near the head of the staircase. The collector must have found it as deafening as I did and so kept it further from his hording hovel. I had only paused fleetingly to look at the rumbling machine. I found machinery to be fascinating and futuristic but wholly unnecessary. Humans had gotten along just fine without them so far. No doubt my father would have stopped to marvel at it, casting an enchanted eye over what was really just grease and iron. He would have seen it as metal animating itself to provide power. It was something he often marveled at with a near toothless grin on his face. I continued down the stone stairs.

The staircase listed downward in a subtle spiral. It was peculiarly relaxing. I allowed my mind to wander off to what I would do when I brought father home. Taking a nice long nap in plenty of light was first on that list. That was after a bath of course. Everything in this place, to include the air, coated me in some sort of grime physical or psychological. I would gently scold my mother for encouraging father to wander off into some place so dangerous. Perhaps I would even try to be a braver person. I decided that I would certainly be a braver person; otherwise I would come out on the other side of this with nothing to show for it.

I wandered out of my thoughts when the staircase ended in a landing. I was thankful for this, having been worried about going deeper underground being counterproductive. There were no more stairs, no more unending hallways. A sense of finality loomed over this landing that greeted me only with three jeering doorways.

To my left the doorway had half collapsed. Likewise half of the walls seemed to spill into the room beyond like an avalanche of masonry. The remaining portion of that room was surprisingly devoid of anything. Empty cupboards and workbenches weren't violently ransacked but the contents appeared to have been properly moved somewhere else. As this was obviously not the way to go I turned about.

I stepped to the doorway at my right for a moment just to peer inside. Something metal glinted at me from the dark depths of this large and cool room. My sandaled feet feel upon pristine tiles as I stepped past the threshold. This was most curious. My lantern did as little to illuminate the dark as did the small window at the other end of the room. I scanned the wall for a candle holder but instead found only a switch. I stared at it a moment before flicking it upward in a practice of bravery.

I was prepared for the worst but it had merely illuminated the room. Long fluorescent tubes of light from the ceiling hesitantly flickered to life and buzzed as if yawning. I squinted at this light. It was unnatural. It bathed the room in a glow that was somehow unsettling in its artificial origin. The tiles were white and immaculate. I glanced around to see the rest of the room was just as immaculate. It would have been encouraging if I didn't find myself standing in a morgue.

The glint that had enticed me to step closer was another stainless steel gurney. My breath shortened as I noticed there were straps on it. In this place there was only darkness, a profound loneliness. In this place the slaves had nowhere else to go and the prisoners fought each other. In this place the morgue tables needed leather straps.

I cast my eyes downward wondering why I was even surprised anymore. My pensive gaze was met with a drain in the middle of the spotless tiles. This was just as ominous. My fear-addled toddler side came back into being to offer up a nugget of wisdom.

If you stare long enough, it said, you can probably hear the screaming all the way from hell. I agreed with it this time and opted it time to leave.

I frowned at the wall opposite me. It was not a wall but a set of steel drawers, of course. I shouldn't frown at death, I supposed as I read some of the tags. At least the Snake had the decency to put bodies in the cooled drawers and not just throw them in a pit of bones. There was probably a pit of bones somewhere.

All the tags were written in the same spidery, trailing handwriting as on the back of the photo. Lord Orochimaru's handwriting. Xaiylia Mei 28 F., Kayla Usagiri 19 F., Kaito Takanashi 25 M. Orochimaru ∞ M….

Quite the sense of humor, this one.

I tapped the switch again and returned the morgue to its darkness. Only one way left to go and it was forward. I took another cleansing breath and assured myself I was almost home free.

The doorway in front of me opened up into an incredibly large chamber. I couldn't help but gape. It was two stories and lined with prison cells on one side. On the other side, across a considerable empty space between, were shelves and cubbies. There were more gurneys as well as seating apparatuses that I could only describe as torture chairs. I averted my gaze from that side of the chamber.

I remembered what the collector had said about a prison riot upon spotting long dried blood on the worn flagstones. I looked up only to face a cell, its bars choked in creeping ivy, containing a heap of human skeletons. I frowned again, deepening lines already in my face. It must have been a very one sided riot. These poor men (my mind did not allow me to think of women also having to be imprisoned here). Surely they had hopes and ambitions? How long had some of them been there? Why even fight? Questions I would never know answers to but would now always ask.

A noise startled me from my grisly pondering. It sounded like shifting in a pile of scraps. I knew this kind of noise intimately, as it had always heralded the appearance or delighted laughter of my father sifting through his own collections. My heart leapt to my throat. I never thought I'd be happy to hear a disembodied noise in this dark testament to a madman.

I jogged gingerly down the prison block to a room off to the side. Beyond the entrance to this room was a wide door. This door was open. This door was letting in fresh air and moonlight. I smiled so wide I could have cried. I slowed and peered into the door of the preceding room.

Lo and behold, there was my small, withered father with that irrevocable grin on his face. He was standing near the middle of this close room. It appeared to be a very personal laboratory with a low ceiling. It was cluttered with instruments, desks and a large console of some sort. There were many buttons and monitors. It looked very complicated. I dismissed this and called out to my old man.

"Father!"

He stopped gleefully tapping a vacuum bulb attached to an apparatus in the ceiling and looked over at me calmly. Where I would have panicked he only smiled from ear to ear with his eyes a' twinkle as always. He reached for something in his trolley in front of him.

"Oh my boy, look at what I found mounted in here. I think you'd like them!"

My father held up a very large ivory something. It looked to be half of a gigantic jawbone, but not of any animal I had ever seen. It was absolutely bristling in wicked teeth, perhaps up to three rows of them. I must have looked momentarily shocked because father put it down next to an identical bone, a gape more than large enough to accommodate human-sized meals. I didn't think any animal had a jaw that didn't meet in the front. Except for snakes. I touched my own chin at the lingering thought.

"Father, do not distract me. You have been down here for days! You made me come all the way down here, this horrible place! I thought surely that awful squatter had eaten you!" I placed my hands on my hips in genuine anger.

"He was nice." My father piped. My frown deepened. My father's smile softened as he pattered a few steps to pat my shoulder.

"Look at my boy, come all the way down here after his old man. I told you that you had guts."

My rage faltered. My father was proud of me for being brave.

My shoulders slumped in defeat and clasped my father's shoulder in return. "Come on, old man, get your trolley and let's get out of this place while we still have our skins."

My father tottered over to his large trolley and casually reached up. He plucked the vacuum tube from its setting. Before he could set it in the trolley the entire room gave a bellowing metallic groan which I felt in my feet. Various little lights jumped to life all across the console and through the walls up to the ceiling. I realized the apparatus was not in the ceiling; it was the ceiling. It culminated in a round container tapering to a point in the center.

Before I could iterate to my father how bad this was the monitors along the console came on with a dull zapping sound. The face of a young man appeared on them between bursts of static. By most means he looked unassuming; light skinned, silver hair pulled into a studious ponytail, his youthful face accented with large round spectacles. But the eyes behind those spectacles looked anything but youthful and unassuming. They looked tired and steely. They looked full of malice and at the same time sadness.

A voice cracked into the silence from speakers I could not see. Only the malice came through in the voice. It was curt and polite malice, as if he were addressing a noble and not intruders. The white noise fractured his address but it was clear the intruders are whom it was recorded for.

"Very persistent… made it into…be … rewarded."

That did not bode well.

The circular apparatus in the center of the ceiling whirred. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to get out. I inched along the walls to avoid the middle of the room, trying to get to my father. I kept my eyes on the ominous ceiling as my father pulled at his trolley. The apparatus opened at a point and I held my breath.

A small drop of dark liquid formed at the center and began falling to the floor. That was all. Just a drop.

I traced its path as it fell in what seemed like slow motion. Under the dust & rubble was some sort of pattern. It looked like ink smeared out in a web. I wasn't sure exactly what it was; it looked of something in a shinobi's bag of tricks. I could only pull on my father's arm as the drop fell in the center of it.

The drop combusted into a dance of liquid striking a surface, revealed as red for only a moment before the pattern erupted into smoke. Smoke filled the room. It didn't dissipate fast enough that I hadn't inhaled much of it into my panic-stricken chest. It stung my eyes.

Through my bleary vision I could see something looming through the smoke. At first I thought it was several things but as I blinked tears away I saw that it was just one big thing. One gigantic serpent, its thick triangular head was easily far larger than father's trolley. Its massive coils filled the room and blocked the exit. Its eyes pierced me. For a monster with little facial structures to express intentions, its face seemed to jeer at me.

I froze under the gaze of golden orbs and swayed to a deep soul-jarring hiss. It was only the splitting of the creature's face the broke my trance. Dozens of small hooked teeth lined a cotton mouth along trails in half a dozen places. Its maw was highlighted by two huge fangs that swung forward as I watched it lunge towards me.

Even as I felt the jaws clamp around much of my torso this didn't feel real. Even as the fangs pierced my back and curved around my spine I felt I must be dreaming. Nothing hurt but I could feel the impact rock me backward. I felt the impact of my knees hit the flagstones. I felt an alien fire spreading through my body and rendering me useless. I could only lie on the ground becoming slowly encompassed in coils, sheer sheets of muscle covered in cold scales.

What had felt like an eon proved to only be half a second. That was how long it took for the serpent to strike down my father. My poor wonderful old father. I watched him fall to the ground, his brittle bones rattling. My stomach lurched even now. I could not cry out. I could not move.

The great beast turned its head to me.

The world went dark and ceased to be.

-End-

BAM. I Stephen King'd you. In all seriousness I do hope anybody that reads this whole thing likes it. It was meant to be a suspense, be disturbing on a subtle (or not subtle) level. I've never had the willpower to write anything so long & I'd love it if you could give it a helpful review!

-Orochimartyr