Robert Finch 

9/19/01 

Holtslander P.4 

Story- Vivid Verbs 

He stood there in complete solitude. The cave was bleak and extremely dank. It smelled of mold, rotting corpses, and blood. His flashlight flickered and the light darted about as he trembled. From deep within the cave, he could detect groans and cries of pain. Shrill screams echoed and resounded through the interwoven passages. The thick, frigid, suffocating confines of the cave seemed to close in on him and squeeze the breath from his body like an insect caught in a flytrap. 

They were drawing near now, coming to destroy him so that he could be united with them in this desolate and uninhabitable place of immense misery and endless suffering. "Is this the end?" he asked himself. Though he tried to believe otherwise he could not. There was terror in his eyes. 

His heart began to beat briskly, soon he could hear nothing but the groans and screams and the throb of his heart pounding ominously like the war drum of a conquering army. They were nearing, vigorously pursuing him. "What should I do?" 

He scrambled into the darkness, never looking back, never stopping. Soon they began coming through the walls and the floor below his feet and from overhead. He was doomed to die. Soon the horrid beasts would engulf him, and he would be one of them. His heart kept beating quicker and more rapidly still, and then everything went void. "Where am I?" he wondered. "Dead, probably." 

Then he witnessed memories of himself, of his mother and father, and his brother he lost in the war. Memories of times prior to their deaths, deaths which had left him all alone. In an instant he knew where he was, this was his entire life flashing before his eyes. He couldn't give up. Somehow, he had to find a way out of this 'abode of the dead'. He woke in a numbing sweat. His heart was beating normally now. He was lying on the ground all alone in the gloomy cavern. But he wasn't alone; the phantoms still moved all around him, sweeping over him, crawling on him. They weren't attacking, though, and he could see their empty eye sockets, bloody nostrils, and rotting limbs. The smell was horrific. It was like being buried in a thousand corpses of ones long dead. 

Then he rose and walked away from the phantoms, but something was strange. His legs sank into the floor like it was quicksand. He looked down but he saw no legs. He raised his arm and found it to be nothing more than a rotting stub. He now knew the horrible truth. He had become a phantom, one who lives eternally in sorrow within the labyrinth of the Cave of the Dead.