<span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Smell.<br/><br/>It envelops you like a caul, soaking the cramped channel of cavern as you descend.  An immediate presence, it lights the mind up with an unreasoning alarm.  It is worse than foul.  It is wrong.  It is the kind of smell that suggest something fundamental of the world is fatally sick.<br/><br/>To the nose, it is a complex, greasy miasma.  One almost expects to see it floating - a greenish mist or a curtain of gray wetness in the air - but it is wholly invisible.  It registers as ripe blooms of sugary sweetness; the sweetness of rancid honey.  It has tones of rubber to it.  Tones of great age.  <br/><br/>But once the brain tastes it, that taste soils all thought - opening glistening pink sores on the skin of memory and reason.<br/><br/>It is simple enough to figure out where the mind is wounded and to overcome it.  The effect of the smell is not as confusing as it is unsettling.  It is unsettling indeed:<br/><br/>Objects disassociate - you have to take a moment to remind yourself that your torch is not your satchel, that your satchel contains rations instead of babies, that your hand is not connected to your face.  Memory slips as well, filtering oddity in to its usually sound gallery - the house where you grew up had four walls to a room, not thirty-seven; mother did not have a bird beak; you did not eat eyes for breakfast.  <br/><br/>Consciousness tenses at this revolt of the basis of reason - heaves at the poisoning of the ego.  Emotions feel their flesh crawl.<br/><br/>For the senses, though, there is only the smell.  Unearthly.  Possessive.  Guilty of this sin against your mind, your reality.  Only the smell and the darkness.<br/><br/>Then the light of the torch insinuates into a vaster chamber, a room surely cut deliberately long ago, but since smeared into its vaguest shape by the shifting of the stone around it.  It is a rough square that stretches beyond the meager fifty foot pool of illumination cast by the torch.  Dim slinks everywhere in it.  And in the dim, at the edges of the torch, weird and horrible things happen.<br/><br/>Across the planed floor, some fifty feet directly ahead, another titanic bugbear stands.  He is heavily armored - draped in plates of some black, cured hide that spool with the suggestion of awful, frantic engraving.  Only his shark-like maw is visible below a helmet like a conspiracy of horns, his lips twitching with a febrile muttering.  His towering form is balanced on a fierce rod of steel - similar to the one his slain companion had; its stout length overflowing with serrated blades and fused chains.  And his balances sways slightly, as if afflicted by some hot, bestial ecstasy, as he chants.<br/><br/>Would that he were the worst of the horrors here.<br/><br/>Next to him, central to the room, there is a dais.  <br/><br/>At the edges of the dais, torchlight and the wash of shadows war.<br/><br/>Upon the dais, there is a Thing.<br/><br/>To say it is large is to strain the word to the limits of its meaning.  The mass of the Thing bulges beyond the proportions of an elephant, arranged in flabby, swollen torso and gangly arms that stretch and stretch.  Even with its bullet-shaped skull bowed, the Thing's squat reaches a height of at least ten feet, perhaps more.  <br/><br/>Hunched shoulders flex an army of muscle indolently as it breathes.  Its arms' horrible span is bunched close in on its bulbous body, lifting hands the size of a large dog to its mouth.  Fingers that move with spider-like calm use their leathery enormity to fill its maw - a maw ringed and fanged vastly like a lamprey's, gaping like an apes.  Into that mouth, the Thing shoves what is left of one of the missing girls.<br/><br/>Pallid as fish flesh, the remains of the girl are being squeezed like a feed bag into the quivering, suckling jaws of the Thing.  Her legs dangle, kicking like an unstringed puppet, shiny with her emptied bowels' contents, as the Thing crushes the contents of her abdomen into its gorge with leisurely motions of its hands.  Runnels of gray tubes, russet organs and bright red blood squirt from the rims of the Thing's teeth.  And its eyes, alight with a lusty intelligence, roll with satisfaction as its flexing throat guzzles down the thick feast.<br/><br/>Ponderous as that of a toad, the belly of the Thing swells.  Pestilential surface crawling with hideous parasitic life, the blue-black of the Thing's gut skin bloats wider and wider, making a knotty navel project from its raw, veined lips.  The huge ocean of fat and flesh that is the Thing's center runs with lazy cascades of innards, and shivers joyously as it gluts.  The motions below, in the lap of the thing, between its two coiled legs, go almost unnoticed.<br/><br/>Almost, for she is small.  But there is the last missing girl - a kernel of trembling, white skin.  Tucked upon the groin of the thing in a fetal ball; blond hair spattered to black by the rain of human flesh on her, she twitches.  She convulses with screaming.<br/><br/>And as the light touches her, the girl screams all the more frantic, screams her throat raw and choking on the void, screams until she is blank with hysteria.<br/><br/>And the Thing works more into its jiggling throat and rolls its happy eyes.<br/><br/>And the world, gone sick with the unearthly taint of the smell, seems to wait to die or be healed by your next moment.</span>