The Twelve Days I Spent Inside the Beast: A Horror Story

Circe remembers the blood, the bile, the endless corrosion. When she's concerned her father sees an opportunity in her, she does anything in her power to escape her fate.

This is a short story I wrote for a competition a couple months ago. It’s quite different from what you can usually expect from me. But it is spooky season, so I hope you enjoy this horrific tale.

tw: Gore

The acid ran down my throat into my gut, competing with my bile. My lungs were corrosive bombs, ready to explode. It smelt like vomit and decay. The blissful mercy of my scent glands being burnt away escaped me. My skin on fire, my eyes burnt open, staring into the abyss.

“Circe? Are you paying attention?”

I threw papers at my father’s face. He tilted his head to the side and let them flap against his pink neck. He always looked swollen with his pudgy red head. The room whispered things about me.

“Here she goes again.”

“Why does the General put up with this?”

“Nepotism.”

“A disgrace.”

I wanted to scream. I always wanted to scream.

“What is Plan B?” I said.

“That’s classified,” Father said.

“If we can’t take down Gluttony, what’s Plan B?”

He didn’t respond. I picked up my pen and chucked it at his face. He dodged it.

“That’s enough,” he said. “You’re excused.”

I pushed out my chair so hard it rolled and hit the wall with a crack. The murmurs grew louder, agitated. Someone stood up.

“How dare you speak to the General like that,” she said.

I turned one eye on her, and she jumped. I left the room with a slam.

My heart pounded like a distant fire alarm wailing. I ran up a set of stairs and shot out onto the roof of the complex. Guards looked at me and decided not to say anything. I had privilege, I had earned it. If you do this, you’ll be a hero.

I’ll do it daddy.

The words of a naïve child.

I wanted to be alone. Normally, when someone wanted to be alone, they crawled up in a corner, somewhere dark. I couldn’t be in the dark. Even the space between blinks was too much for me.

I put my hands on the concrete railing and stared off at the killing field. In the distance, I could see the distortion of reality that let the monsters into our realm. My body shook. It normally wasn’t so bad. What was Plan B? I glanced down. Blood trailed down from the concrete slab. I opened my palm to see red rivers streaking out of places where my fingernails had cut. The crescents were missing, already healed. Likely, the blood only spilled out because my nails were still in the wound. Healing was my magic ability. It wasn’t an uncommon gift, but my healing factor was the highest ever recorded. Many people said that it wasn’t possible for death to come for me.

They were right.

I stared down at the ten story drop onto concrete. The fall would just be inconvenient.

A shadow came over the sun and I returned to hell.

Dark, the burning dark, it swallowed, it conquered. The hissing sound of burning flesh, the desperate pounding of my broken heart. The gulping burps of acid pops. The squeezing pressure of meat crushing my bones. Distant screams and vibrations mirroring my desperate gasps and wheezes. No time existed, only erosion.

Kill me.

The sun came out and I found blood dripping down my chin from where I had nearly bit off my lip. I wiped it away and walked inside. The guards stepped aside.

“What’s wrong with her?” They whispered.

I laughed.

Are you a brave girl?

Yes, daddy.

I threw open the door to my father’s office. He was sitting there with a bandaid on his face. One paper must have left a cut. Good. He stiffened as I slammed my hands on his desk.

“You can’t just enter!” A woman called after me.

“You are dismissed,” my father said to his secretary.

“What’s Plan B?” I said.

He sighed.

“It’s classified.”

“Like it was last time?” I laughed. “Surely I can know about it.”

“It’s not what you think it is,” he said.

“Really?” I leaned forward.

“I won’t do that to you again, Circe.”

“Like I fucking believe you,” I threw open the door before glancing back. “I won’t do it again.”

That night I dreamed of being very small. Cradled in the warm dream, I held my father’s hand as he brought me out to a field of flowers. He named them pansies, daisies, and ones I had forgotten. Surrounded by pinks and violets, he kneeled down and crushed them.

“It’s so pretty!” I squealed.

“This is what we’re protecting,” he said.

“I can save them?”

I woke up to a thunderstorm. With every flash of light, I escaped from those choking tubes of acid. The squelching horrors that pushed around me in the intestines. Fermented bodies stuck in my nose.

Eternity was twelve days long.

I didn’t go in for duty that day or the next. I waited until the day the monster came and did my best to stay in bed. Even when the sirens wailed. Even when people started evacuating. Even when the floor shook, my cup of water rippling every second.

I heard a little girl crying out my window. She pointed at something in the sky. I knew what it looked like. A gummy smile for a head with two hollowed out eyes. It didn’t have a need for teeth; it swallowed its prey whole. A man picked her up and towed her away from the monster. This is what we’re protecting.

I got out of bed. I dry heaved and choked. I climbed off the floor and staggered towards the door. Every time I blinked, the darkness consumed me. Still, I walked. I stared into the hollowed out eyes in the distance, its wicked smile and rolling tongue. I didn’t stop. I made it through the doors of the base and up the steps. Havoc wracked the base. I didn’t see or hear it, only a faint burning on my skin kept me in reality. I could hear the screams and thumps of battle up top. I grabbed my gun and sword and made it to the gate. I opened the door and met my nightmare.

Its mouth could eat buildings. This one was smaller than the one I met when I was younger. That one could eat cities. Maybe this was a child gluttony. The thought felt absurd. My sword clanked against my skin as I shook. I was determined. I could face this thing.

I blinked, and I was in the darkness. Blood leaked out of me and the acid poured in.

I opened my eyes and stared up at a bright blue sky marred by a monster.

“There she is!” I heard someone say. It was vague compared to those endless eyes, the maw, that void.

Someone grabbed me. I jolted aside. I brought my sword up, but he knocked it aside. Soldiers surrounded me.

“What are you doing!” I said. A needle pierced my neck. Burning laced through my veins. “Idiot, I’ll just heal whatever you put in me.”

I stumbled. My gun fell to the ground. Before I landed on my face, they caught me and twisted me around so I saw the sky. I couldn’t feel my limbs. They had created something my body couldn’t fight. My mind raced through molasses. On one hand, I frantically thought of solutions, fears squabbled against hope, and on the other I dreamt of flowers. They brought me up to the command center secured within the wall.

“Here she is sir,” the soldier displayed me to my father.

“Is she drugged?” He said.

The soldier nodded.

“You said you wouldn’t,” I croaked.

My father looked away. “I do what must be done. As a soldier, you must understand.”

“No, I don’t,” tears leaked down my face.

“Don’t be like that. You’re a grownup now.”

“Does that make it better?”

“I know you can handle it.”

“You don’t know anything! Don’t you dare, don’t you dare!” I said.

“Take her,” he said to his attendant. The one who always hated me.

“Are you sure, sir?” She said.

“Of course,” he said.

“Daddy please,”

“Take her.” He wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t fucking dare look at me. He didn’t have the balls.

“I hate you! You’re gonna rot in hell for this! I’m gonna kill you!” My shrieks turned into nonsense. I did everything in my power to move my muscles, but nothing worked. The attendant gagged me.

“Don’t do this,” I whispered to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were wide and unseeing, her hands shaking. She handed me off to a soldier and covered her mouth as tears streamed down her face. My father didn’t look at me. I watched his back disappear. Just another monster, one lurking in human skin.

I knew what happened next. My mind raced violently through anything that could help me, but part of me had already given in. Twelve days. That’s how long it took to get to the core last time. The weak point in the goliath buried deep beneath its steel-like flesh. Unprotected from the inside, all you needed to do was survive until you reached it.

Survive being digested for twelve days.

The soldier flew us up into the air. Gluttony turned its gaze on us. A tongue shot upward like a frog after a fly. The soldier dropped me.

I heard a snap as my body broke between the curls of the tongue. I heard the shh sound as it retracted. I smelt the bile, the vomit of a city. I looked up at the blue sky for one last time.

“Daddy, please!” I begged.

But no one came. No one would ever come.

I shut my eyes as acid mixed with tears on my cheeks.

If you enjoyed this short story consider reading my dark fantasy/horror story “A Midnight Noon”