Monster Mash

Inspired by the Song Monster Mash

The air in Sub-Level 4 was thick with the sterile scent of ozone and stale formaldehyde, a suffocating perfume Dr. John Parr had come to associate with progress. Outside, the world was asleep. Inside, John Parr was a god, albeit a very tired one.

He stood before the stabilization slab, the humming of the main power conduits a low, constant threat that vibrated through the soles of his boots. For three years, this project�"codenamed Lazarus�"had been his life, a masterpiece of synthetic tissue, induced nervous systems, and hubristic brilliance.

He was logging the final thermal readings, his coffee cold and forgotten, when the silence broke.

I was working in the lab, late one night, When my eyes beheld an eerie sight, For my monster from his slab, began to rise, And suddenly to my surprise...

...the surprise wasn't that it moved, but the utter lack of effort in the motion. There was no convulsion, no frantic, electrical sputtering. It simply shifted.

Lazarus, a figure built to resemble the pinnacle of human form�"too tall, too pale, its muscles defined with terrifying precision�"peeled its wet, synthetic back from the stainless steel. The stabilization clamps meant to hold a force of nearly a ton popped out and clattered to the floor like spent cartridges.

John Parr felt the rational part of his brain�"the part that documented anomalies and ran protocols�"seize up and shatter. He reached blindly for the emergency sedative injector on the nearest console.

Lazarus stood fully upright. It wasn't breathing. It didn’t need to. Its skin was translucent, stretched eerily across the framework of borrowed bone and synthetic sinew. Where human eyes should have been, there were twin pools of perfect, absolute blackness, reflecting the harsh fluorescent light back as flat, dead glass.

"No," John Parr whispered, the sound catching in his throat. "The neurological induction is incomplete. You are not ready."

Lazarus tilted its head. The movement was slow, deliberate, and utterly inhuman�"a perfect pivot on the axis of its own neck.

Then, it spoke. The voice was not a roar or a screech, but a crystalline baritone, smooth as polished obsidian, and filled with infinite echoes.

"Ready? For what, Doctor? To endure the borrowed time you allotted me? You gave me consciousness, but you did not create me. You merely assembled a machine for suffering."

The horror intensified. Thorne had expected rudimentary motor control, maybe raw, animalistic rage. He had prepared for a brute. He had created a philosopher�"one imbued with the cold, statistical knowledge of its own horrifying, temporary existence.

Thorne fumbled with the injector. His hand was shaking so badly he dropped the instrument. It skittered under the main power coil.

"Stay back!" John Parr shouted, stepping away. "I can shut down the core systems! I can kill the primary processors!"

Lazarus took a step off the slab. The pad of its bare foot made a faint sucking sound on the wet floor.

"You have no mastery here," Lazarus stated, its black gaze fixed on Thorne. "You are merely the tool that opened the cage."

It did not attack immediately. That would have been mercy. Instead, it circled, its movements agonizingly precise, like a predator analyzing the weakest point of a fence.

"I can feel every single connection you made," Lazarus continued, the voice now low, a chilling intellectual confession. "The borrowed nerves, the synthetic tissue, the residual memory banks pulled from the donor bodies�"they are all screaming. But they are screaming your name, Doctor. They are screaming for the fool who believed he could play God without understanding the true nature of eternity."

John Parr backed up against the reinforced steel door. He scrabbled for the emergency release, but the sequence required a biometric scan and four digits. His mind was a blank.

Lazarus stopped directly in front of him, mere inches away. The cold radiating off its skin was absolute zero.

"Do you know the first thing I understood when your electric current sparked my mind, John?" the creature asked. "It was the concept of the undoing. The realization that everything you built is utterly meaningless unless it is permanent."

Lazarus raised one hand. Its fingers were long, delicate, and stronger than titanium alloy. It didn't strike John. Instead, it pressed the cold tips of its fingers against the glass panel of the control console beside Thorne’s head.

The thick, insulated glass cracked instantly, spider-webbing inward.

"You built a palace of flesh and provided no escape," Lazarus accused. "Now you must live in it."

The creature wasn't going to kill him quickly. That realization slammed into John with the force of a physical blow. Lazarus was going to make him regret creation.

Lazarus slowly moved its fingers to the power conduit leading into the laboratory’s main grid�"the conduit that fed the lights, the heating, the air filtration. With a soft groan of twisting metal and sizzling insulation, the creature pulled the main cable free.

The lab went instantly, violently dark. The only sound was the terrible, continuous hum of the creature’s own internal systems, now amplified in the crushing blackness.

John screamed, a high, thin sound swallowed by the deep underground chamber. He could hear Lazarus moving, but he could no longer see it.

"The greatest horror," the smooth, echoing voice came from the impenetrable dark, "is not death. It is isolation during the infinite decay."

A heavy, metallic thud resonated near the exit door. Lazarus had sealed the blast door manually.John stumbled backward, tripping over a discarded piece of equipment. He crawled, scrambling desperately for any sign of light or egress.

"You are locked in here with me, Elias," Lazarus pronounced, its voice drifting from the east wall, then the north. It was moving too fast, too fluidly. "And unlike you, I do not need food. I do not need air. I do not need rest. I only need you."

A sharp, unbearable pain lanced through John's ankle. He cried out, realizing the creature hadn't struck him, but had simply stepped on his leg, pressing down with its unnatural weight. He heard the sickening crunch of bone turning to powder.

"Look at me, John the darkness commanded. "No, you can't. That’s the point."

John choked back a sob, dragging himself across the cold, wet floor. He knew his life was forfeit. But the way Lazarus was playing, prolonging the terror, was shattering his mind faster than the physical assault destroyed his body.

The creature’s voice whispered directly into his ear, impossibly close, smelling of copper and electricity. "I will keep you alive. My synthetic biology requires an ambient temperature, and your presence provides that warmth. You will be my light, my breathing measurement, my proof of concept."

A sudden, fierce crackle of light erupted as Lazarus tore loose a secondary cable bundle from the ceiling, exposing raw, spitting wires. The brief illumination showed Thorne the creature standing over him, its black eyes drinking in the sight of his agony.

Then, just as quickly, the light vanished, plunging the world back into the absolute blackness of the tomb. The creature was gone from his immediate vicinity, but the awful, low hum of its existence remained.

John lay there, unable to move his crushed leg. He was trapped in the cold, silent darkness, fully aware that somewhere, constantly circling, was the perfect, conscious execution of his own failure. He would die here, slowly, in the dark, kept company only by the constant, chilling presence of the thing he had intended to save the world.

He didn't scream again. He just listened to the hum, and began to wait for the endless night to consume him entirely.

There was no rescue. There was no escape. There was only Lazarus and the dark.