A Fall of Red Roses | Little nightmare
Author: Doll
Romance;Thriller
Chapter 12
The locker-lined artery of the school pulsed with a suffocating, feverish heat, smelling of copper, unwashed skin, and old floor wax. Dozens of eyes—hollow, unblinking, and glistening with a cruel, collective hunger—bored into me as I moved. The world ran on a sickening delay; the ambient chatter of the student body was muted into a wet, low-frequency hum that vibrated inside my teeth.
Then, the crowd split like meat under a blade.
Standing dead center in the corridor was a lone boy. His spine was rigid, a low whine of confusion escaping his throat; his friends had just scattered into the classrooms like cockroaches sensing poison, leaving him entirely exposed.
I didn’t break stride. With fluid, sociopathic efficiency, I pivoted on my heel and drove my boot directly into the boy’s lower spine.
A sharp, wet crack echoed above the hum. Air and a spray of saliva erupted from his mouth as his body took flight, skidding across the grit-covered linoleum until his forehead shattered cleanly against the iron base of a locker. I didn’t look down to watch him convulse or trace the dark smear of fluid trailing from his hairline. I simply stepped over his twisting torso, the rubber of my soles tearing a patch of skin from his exposed lower back with a soft, sticky tear, and walked straight into the bathroom.
The air inside the bathroom was ice-cold, reeking of industrial lye and stagnant, copper-heavy urine. I stood before the stained porcelain basin, the cracked fluorescent bulbs overhead buzzing like trapped hornets. I watched the rusted tap water rush over my knuckles, scrubbing away a microscopic grease-smear of the boy’s skin.
A heavy, guttural groan rattled from the end stall.
The door swung open on corroded hinges, and Jun-ho stumbled out, wiping yellow bile from his chin onto his sleeve. He stepped up to the basin adjacent to mine, his skin a translucent, sickly green under the lights.
"Hey," Jun-ho wheezed, his voice bouncing off the damp, mold-flecked tiles. "Where the fuck have you been? Teachers are threatening to call the authorities. You look like a corpse, man."
My reflection stared back—sunken, dead eyes, and a mouth like a thin, bloodless seam. "Around," I muttered, the word dry as bone.
Jun-ho let out a wet, rattling laugh. "Classic. Never change, you prick." He turned to leave, but before his foot could clear the threshold, my boot connected sharply with his tailbone. Jun-ho stumbled into the hallway with a sharp gasp that turned into a forced chuckle, throwing up a middle finger. "See you in hell, psycho!"
The door hissed shut.
The laughter was amputated instantly. The silence that followed was heavy, dropping like wet cement into my ears. I reached for a paper towel, but my fingers froze an inch from the metal box.
...sunha... sunha... it’s leaking out... look behind you…
The whispers weren't coming from the stalls. They were scratching inside the copper pipes, bubbling up through the floor drains, hissing against my eardrums like hot fat on a grill. I blinked rapidly, but my retinas burned. The straight lines of the tiled walls began to liquefy, warping at agonizing, nauseating angles until the room felt like the throat of a dying animal. My pulse hammered against my ribs—a frantic, irregular thudding that tasted like iron.
Driven by a sudden, primal panic, I bolted for the door, ripping it off the latch. But the bustling hallway was gone. The school was gone. It was a cavernous, dead concrete shaft stretching into infinite dark. No students. No lockers. Just the smell of old lard and peeling paint.
Suddenly, gravity failed. The entire corridor tilted violently backward at a ninety-degree angle.
I lost my footing, my ribs smashing hard against the edge of the floor as the world became a vertical drop. I flipped onto my stomach, screaming as I slid backward into the abyss. My hands clawed desperately at the floorboards. My fingernails caught on the rough wood grain and split entirely backward, ripping away from the nail beds with a wet, splintering sound. I howled as the raw nerves scraped against the splintered pine, leaving ten thick, greasy trails of dark crimson fluid as I slid hopelessly toward the dark.
A shadow, massive and hot, fell over me.
I looked up, gasping through a mouth filled with my own blood. Looming directly above me was a skinless, towering monstrosity. It was a walking anatomy lesson of exposed, weeping red meat, twitching yellow fat, and gray tendons. Its jaw was entirely unhinged, split open into an impossible, ear-to-ear cavern lined with chaotic rows of needle-thin, yellowed teeth. Fat, black centipedes writhed through its exposed throat muscles, their legs burrowing into the wet tissue. Around its midsection, the abdominal wall was entirely gone; its gray, bloated intestines sagged down like a wet apron, swinging against its thighs, threatening to burst under their own putrid weight.
A thick, viscous drop of yellow serous fluid dripped from the creature’s lower jaw, landing directly into my open, unblinking eye. It burned like acid.
I let out a high-pitched, hysterical shriek, but the sound was violently cut short. With a sound like a heavy green branch snapping in half, my body folded. My knees were forced backward against their joints, the caps shattering into tiny fragments with a succession of wet, splintering cracks that echoed off the empty walls. My heels were driven up into my own shoulder blades, folding my spine completely in half until my ribs pierced my lungs.
The agony transcended human vocal cords. As I tried to let out another scream, my lower jaw unhinged too far. The bone popped out of its sockets with a dull, wet thud, and the sheer volume of my terror tore my face apart. The skin at the corners of my mouth ripped open to my ears, exposing the bloody muscle tissue underneath and spraying a fine mist of bile and blood.
Before my brain could register the mutilation, a massive, rusted steel I-beam dropped from the ceiling like a hydraulic press, obliterating my body in a flat, wet explosion of gray brain matter, marrow, and ruptured organs.
The sound of the explosion dissolved into a violent, hacking cough.
I took a deep drag of a cigarette, the gray, bitter smoke burning my throat. The excruciating pain was gone, replaced by the familiar sting of cheap tobacco. I found myself sitting on a massive stack of rotting timber behind the sports equipment shed, my legs dangling over the edge. Around me, my crew of delinquents sat scattered across concrete blocks, their coarse, ugly laughter filling the damp yard as if the world hadn't just ended.
"I'm telling you, it's a slaughterhouse out there," Seung-tae said, leaning against the rusty chain-link fence as he used a switchblade to scrape dirt from beneath his fingernails. "The whole city center is gridlocked. A massive protest."
I flicked a speck of ash from my uniform trousers, my fingers still twitching with phantom nerve pain. My voice was dead, hollow. "What are they crying about this time?"
Seung-tae’s grin turned sharp, malicious. "Everything. The economy hit bedrock last night. Currency is worthless. But the military set off the fuse. During the rally yesterday, a heavy troop transport ran straight over a kid from the tech school. Just... flattened his pelvis into the asphalt, left his top half screaming, and kept driving. Now they're saying plainclothes state security bagged three more students from their beds. No one knows where the bodies are."
He leaned in closer, his breath smelling of sour liquor. "And the rumor from the capital? The President ran. Left on a private jet to Europe at midnight. Leaving that sick fuck of a Vice President in charge—the one they just found out has been running an underground ring out of his villa for the last five years. Little boys, little girls. Dozens of them found in the basement, some half-eaten. People want blood, Sunha. Real blood."
I didn't even have time to drop my cigarette.
In the span of a single pulse, the quiet yard behind the school vanished. The smell of burning fat, tear gas, and a suffocating iron stench slammed into my senses. I was suddenly standing in the dead center of a roaring, chaotic sea of screaming flesh. My pristine uniform was gone, replaced by tattered, grease-stained rags that clung to my sweat-slicked, bruised skin.
"Move! Move!" a man screamed, his face half-peeled off by an explosion, before he collapsed into the mud.
The city was self-destructing. The grand administrative buildings of the government plaza were massive pyres, their stone pillars turning black as roaring, orange flames consumed the offices inside. The pavement was a thick, slippery sludge of shattered glass, discarded banners, and human grease.
A hundred yards away, a line of soldiers in dark tactical gear raised their rifles. A rhythmic, deafening thud-thud-thud shook the air. The military wasn't firing rubber bullets. I watched as a teenage girl three feet away took a high-velocity round to the face; her skull split open like a ripe melon, painting my rags in a hot, greasy layer of her brains. Even a few municipal police officers, caught between the military advance and the desperate mob, were cut down, their blue uniforms soaking in the same blood-choked gutters as the civilians.
The air was a symphony of industrial slaughter—the high-pitched shriek of burning horses, the guttural gurgles of men drowning in their own blood, and the rhythmic, heavy stomp of combat boots.
I took a terrified step back, my boot landing on something soft, wet, and inflating. I looked down.
I was standing directly on the bloated, purple stomach of a child no older than six, whose chest had been crushed flat by a stray fragment of masonry. The child's tongue hung out, swollen and black, while its sightless eyes stared directly into my own.
Before my mind could even process the revulsion, a cold circle of steel pressed hard against the base of my skull, right where my spine met my brain. The metal bit into my skin, smelling of old gun oil and hot gunpowder.
"Don't move a fucking inch," a low, gravelly voice hissed from behind.
I went rigid as ice. The chaotic noise of the riot seemed to recede, replaced by the deafening, frantic rhythm of my own heart hammering against my eardrums.
"Turn around. Slowly. Let me see your face."
I turned, my knees knocking together. The figure before me ...wore a heavily structured, broad-backed military dress uniform…complete with silver medals that glinted against the firelight. But above the starched, stiff collar, there was no man.
It was the demonic girl from my nightmares. Her skin was a bruised, mottled gray, her eyes entirely hollowed-out sockets filled with a thick, tar-like fluid that leaked down her cheeks. Her mouth parted into a jagged, ear-to-ear grin that exposed rows of thin, needle-like teeth, dripping with a black saliva that hissed and whistled as it hit the hot pavement.
Rage, hot and desperate, cut through my paralysis. With a guttural roar, I lunged forward, my ruined fingers clawing toward those dead eyes.
"Oi. Get in."
The voice came from the left, sharp, cold, and entirely real. My head snapped toward the sound, breaking my focus.
A sleek, black vintage sedan sat idling at the curb, completely untouched by the surrounding fire. Leaning against the driver's side door was a man in a tailored black suit. A lit cigarette dangled from his pale lips, the smoke rising lazily into the apocalyptic sky. His expression was entirely unreadable—bored, almost dead—as he scanned the burning plaza.
Without waiting for a response, the man slid into the driver’s seat. The heavy door clicked shut. The tint on the window rolled down halfway, and a pale, scarred hand emerged, tapping twice against the rear door panel. An invitation.
I looked back to where the demon girl had been standing. The space was empty. Only a puddle of black fluid remained on the asphalt, bubbling and smoking under the heat.
A cold sweat broke out across my neck. I scrambled toward the car, my boots sinking into the soft, unidentifiable heaps of human remains that lined the gutter. Every step felt like walking through wet mud, the ribs beneath my soles shifting and cracking until I tore the car door open and threw myself inside, slamming the apocalyptic world out.
The heavy click of the door sealed out the roar of the city. Inside, the car smelled of expensive leather, old paper, and sweet tobacco. The contrast was terrifying; the windows were heavily tinted, reducing the burning city outside to a silent, surreal shadow play of dying silhouettes.
The man in the front seat didn't look back. He shifted the car into drive, his hands moving over the leather steering wheel with casual grace.
"Rough day out there," the man said, his voice a smooth, low baritone.
I pressed my back against the seat, my breath coming in ragged gasps. "Who the hell are you? Where are we going?"
The man didn't answer. Instead, his right hand reached into his breast pocket. He didn't pull out a wallet. He pulled out a heavy, matte-black semi-automatic pistol. In one fluid, terrifying movement, he spun in his seat and buried the barrel of the gun directly into my right eye socket, forcing the eyelid open.
My heart stopped. The cold metal pressed against my eyeball, threatening to puncture my brain with the slightest twitch of his finger. I froze, wet tears of absolute terror leaking around the steel barrel, waiting for the blast to erase my mind.
. . .
The man burst into a loud, melodic laugh. He pulled the gun back, tossing it casually onto the passenger seat like a discarded toy. "You should see your face," he chuckled, turning back to the road. Before I could even process the spike of adrenaline, he reached out and flicked on the radio, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel to a cheerful, upbeat big-band tune that flooded the cabin. He began humming along to the brass section with absolute nonchalance, as if he hadn't just threatened to paint the back window with my brains in the middle of a civil war.
I turned my face toward the window, my chest heaving, my hands shaking so violently I had to sit on them to make them stop.
The car decelerated with a smooth, firm glide, coming to a halt in front of a fog-shrouded driveway.
"End of the line," the man said, his voice dripping with an artificial sweetness. "Good luck out there, kid."
I grabbed the handle and tumbled out of the car. The moment my boots hit the ground, the sound of the engine vanished. I looked back, but there was no car. No street.
I was standing in the foyer of my childhood home.
The house was dead silent, bathed in the sickly green light of a late afternoon storm filtering through the windows. The air was thick with the scent of old dust and something sweet—like pork left to rot in a closed drawer.
As I walked down the narrow corridor toward the back of the house, I noticed a dark stain on the hardwood floor. I knelt, tracing it with my finger. It was wet, sticky, and thick. A faint, continuous trail of crimson, smeared as if something heavy and bleeding had been dragged toward the kitchen.
A sick joke, I told myself, my jaw tightening as an aggressive anger replaced my confusion. My brothers are trying to mess with me again. It was exactly the kind of twisted, low-effort stunt those sadistic bastards would pull to get a rise out of me. They probably butchered a stray dog just to paint the floorboards.
I followed the trail, determined to slam my fist into my brother's face. It led straight to the kitchen door, which stood slightly ajar. A low, wet squelching sound traveled through the gap, accompanied by the heavy rhythmic scrape of teeth against bone.
I pushed the door open.
My entire family was there. My father sat at the head of the long oak table; my mother sat to the right, and my older brothers were lined up opposite her. They were all dressed in their Sunday best, their postures perfectly rigid, hands folded neatly in their laps.
In the center of the table sat a massive, silver platter. It was piled high with raw, glistening mounds of dark red meat, swimming in a thick pool of congealed blood that dripped over the edge of the silver and onto the white tablecloth, forming a dark puddle on the floor.
None of them blinked. Their faces were completely blank—slabs of dead, expressionless meat—as they stared at the platter. Then, without a word, my mother reached out with her bare fingers, pinched a wet strip of gray fat from the pile, and stuffed it into her mouth. She chewed mechanically, the dark fluid leaking from the corners of her lips and staining her lace collar.
My stomach violently convulsed. I threw my hand over my mouth, a hot wave of bile rising in my throat. I glared at my brothers, expecting them to burst out laughing at any second. "What... what the fuck is this? Is this your idea of a joke? You brought slaughterhouse scraps into the house?"
Slowly, in perfect unison, every head at the table snapped toward me.
Their blank expressions dissolved. Their lips began to stretch upward, pulling back into grins that defied the limits of human anatomy. The skin at the corners of their mouths audibly split, the tissue tearing open with a soft pop as their smiles reached past their cheekbones, exposing elongated, yellowed teeth that looked like rusted nails. Their pupils shrank into tiny, black vertical slits, surrounded by jaundiced, bloodshot sclera.
They didn't speak, but the intensity of their collective gaze pinned me to the floorboards. It was a silent, unyielding command. Sit and eat.
Driven by a primal, paralyzing fear, my legs moved against my will. I stepped forward, my boots squelching in the blood on the floor, and sank into the empty chair at the foot of the table.
The moment my thighs touched the wood, my mother smiled wider, the skin of her cheeks weeping dark red drops onto her shoulders. She lifted a heavy, dripping portion of the raw meat from the platter and dropped it onto the empty porcelain plate in front of me.
The stench hit me like a physical blow—the copper tang of fresh slaughter mixed with cheap perfume and fecal rot. My father and brothers didn't use utensils; they dug their dirty fingers deep into the raw mound, tearing off chunks of muscle tissue with their teeth, growling like feral animals as they swallowed the chunks whole, their throats bulging.
My hands shook so violently they rattled against the edge of the table. Forced by the oppressive weight in the room, I moved my arm forward, my fingertips brushing against the cold, wet surface of the meat on my plate.
My fingers caught on something hard. Something metallic and smooth.
I pushed a flap of raw flesh aside. Nestled deep within the muscle tissue was a silver chain bracelet, studded with small, familiar red gems.
My eyes dilated until they were completely black. I knew that bracelet. I had saved money for three months to buy it for her.
It wasn't animal scraps. It was a human arm.
"MIN-SEO!"
The scream tore from my throat like a physical tearing of tissue, ripping my vocal cords until my saliva tasted of blood. I lunged backward, my chair flipping over with a loud crash as I scrambled away from the table. My heel caught on the legs of a sideboard, and I collapsed onto my back, my limbs flailing as I howled her name into the ceiling. "MIN-SEO! NO, NO, NO! WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?!"
My family didn't stop eating. Instead, their guttural growls turned into a booming, deafening chorus of hysterical laughter. They raised their crystal glasses, filled to the brim with thick, blackish wine, and clinked them together in a grotesque toast. The force of their laughter made the entire house shake; the walls groaned, and the plaster began to rain down like white scab-flakes.
The faces of my older brothers began to liquefy, the skin melting off their cheeks to reveal dark, horned skulls beneath, their teeth still grinding on raw flesh. The light in the room shifted, turning a deep, suffocating crimson that felt heavy on my skin.
Then came the sound. Min-seo’s voice—loud, agonizing, and completely raw—shrieked from the center of the meat platter, vibrating through the marrow of my bones.
I tried to drag myself toward the front door, but my legs were dead weight, heavy as lead, my muscles refusing to contract. I could only claw futilely at the rug as a dense, freezing black mist materialized from the floorboards in front of me.
From the heart of the mist, a skeletal, multi-nailed hand emerged, holding a rusted iron chain. At the end of the chain was a massive, three-pronged meat hook, coated in old, dried fat.
Before I could close my mouth to scream, the shadowy entity lunged forward. The hook was driven straight down my open throat, the sharp tines tearing through my tongue, punching through my soft palate, and embedding themselves deep into the walls of my lower trachea.
The figure gave the chain a brutal, violent yank.
A horrific, wet crunch tore through the room. My jaw was pulled downward until the bone snapped out of its joints, my throat splitting open from the inside out as the hook tore through muscle, nerves, and cartilage. Thick, dark blood gushed from my mouth in a steady torrent, filling my throat and splashing over my chest. The pain was an absolute, white-hot void that consumed my entire mind. My screams turned into a wet, gurgling whistle of air and bloody froth.
Through the haze of my failing vision, I looked back at the table.
Min-seo’s butchered, skinless torso was now suspended above the platter. Heavy chains had been driven through her raw thighs and her severed neck, hanging her upside down like a slaughtered pig at a butcher's shop. As the chains twisted, her disembodied screams grew louder, mixing with the thunderous, mocking laughter of my family.
The shadowy entity standing over me planted its heavy boot onto my chest, pinning my lungs, and pulled the chain upward with both hands.
I felt the vertebrae in my neck separate one by one with distinct, wet pops. The skin of my throat stretched to its absolute limit, turning a translucent white before it violently tore open. With a final, sickening sound of wet leather ripping apart, my head was completely severed from my shoulders.
The gurgling stopped instantly. Complete, absolute silence fell over the room.
The entity held my head up by the hair, the severed esophagus, windpipe, and trailing spinal nerves dangling below like wet, red roots.
Then, a rapid succession of wet explosions shattered the silence. One by one, the heads of my mother, my father, and my brothers detonated like overripe fruit, painting the walls, the ceiling, and the white tablecloth in a thick, steaming layer of gray brain matter and dark blood.
A lone, intact eyeball from my father’s skull rolled across the floorboards, its lens covered in gray dust, coming to a stop against the entity's boot.
A second later, my headless torso collapsed from its upright position, falling flat onto the floor. My heavy chest cavity landed directly on top of the rolling eyeball, crushing it with a loud, disgusting squelch that sprayed fluid across the floorboards.
The dangling throat tissue still attached to my severed head hit the floor with a wet thud as the entity turned. Walking with slow, heavy steps, the shadow moved across the kitchen into the living room, heading toward the main wall.
With its grotesque, multi-nailed hand, it lifted my head, pressed the raw, dripping neck stub against the plaster, and drove a massive, ten-inch iron spike straight through my forehead. The bone cracked loudly as the spike pinned my head permanently to the wall, my dead, dilated eyes left to stare forever into the empty room.
