Chapter 503

The sign was impossible to miss, a garish beacon amidst the otherwise muted landscape: "The Smiling Labyrinth! Fun for the Whole Family!" Below, in smaller lettering, it promised "a journey through wonder, memories that will never be forgotten," and that claim would be truer than any of them could guess.

Thomas, ever the cynical traveler, adjusted his glasses, unimpressed. He'd seen a hundred such signs, all boasting cheap thrills and manufactured joy, yet still he felt compelled to enter.

This one felt different, like a morbid need to understand the macabre draw. His wife, Sarah, a hopeful optimist, however, was almost giddy.

"Oh, Thomas, doesn't it look… intriguing?" She clasped her hands, her eyes alight with a sort of naïve hope that never failed to irk him slightly, still he held her close.

They paid their entrance fee, a sum too cheap for a "family experience", or that felt so at the very least and found themselves face to face with the labyrinth's entrance.

It was a dark, yawning maw built of gnarled wood that seemed to drink in the daylight. It did not feel warm.

Inside, the first hall was confusing but seemingly harmless: walls made of rough, untreated wood, each turning, angled, and with doors that held a weird warped structure to them, and each was too quiet.

"It's kind of neat" Sarah spoke into the space, filling it like it were a vacuum and with an ever-so-slight, fake happiness.

The air carried an earthy aroma mixed with a subtle, metallic tang that made Thomas's nostrils sting ever so slightly, each door they came upon was darker than the last and felt as if he was falling further into this abyss.

The paths appeared to rearrange themselves, creating a sense of unease, where walls now seemed longer and more stretched in nature.

Each turn led deeper, the laughter and shouts from those still waiting to come into this twisted world gradually vanished behind them, their laughter now seeming as if they were in another place.

Or as though he'd heard them all some other day ago, leaving a sense of isolation and the heavy oppressive silence that comes with no laughter to give any sort of comfort or familiarity to one's existence.

Sarah had lost some of her enthusiasm; "Are we going to be much longer? It feels so cold."

It wasn't meant as a demand but instead sounded more like a child's cry to her mother.

A child needing the safety that only her mother would be able to give, but all she had was a miserable husk in human clothing and an odd need for morbid entertainment that held him like the very ground of the forest.

It lay beneath him and what made the labyrinth so high, all as if to tower above the trees themselves and what would dare to reach above.

Thomas tried to offer a reassuring smile but all that came out was something cold; "It's all part of the experience. Don't tell me you're scared already"

They found a small room, the wooden walls having strange grooves that snaked up and over it in patterns he could only call 'non-euclidean' where he noted it felt as if his mind itself was turning and warping against it.

With the weirdness that came from observing something such as the nature of the wooden grooves that seem to make little to no sense within his mind and yet were there still, existing like the twisted thing it truly was.

The floor appeared to have markings of old, almost as if there were maps all around it that had now turned faded by the sheer power of the many years that would make it nothing.

Like they were all long past the age in which a normal drawing on floor would. Sarah shuddered and pulled at Thomas.

"This room is odd, can we just leave here? Something doesn't sit well with me".

He tried the door, or what he presumed to be, with its similar markings of non-euclidean pattern across its wood which appeared to have gotten somehow bigger over these many moments.

The grooves and all were somehow reaching out even more like a hand reaching from some dark void. "Of course," he forced a calm tone "Just checking things over." Still nothing opened.

Deeper within the labyrinth the air grew heavier and something cold appeared to fall upon the skin, each door appearing exactly the same.

It started feeling like each moment felt long and stretching more and more, yet only fractions of it felt gone each time a thought would happen.

The paths appeared less a confusing jumble of halls but a network of tunnels with walls that felt too smooth, like a throat they had just slid through.

"Something isn't right, Tom. We haven't seen anyone" Sarah mentioned but was ignored by the silence from Thomas.

A low, grating sound echoed from ahead. It started as low and low but grew, turning almost painful with a higher frequency.

At first, Thomas presumed it was other people until it did nothing to stop but grew more distorted like that of something organic.

He looked over to see his wife's pale expression as the air grew ever colder. "Did you hear that?" He looked at Sarah, trying his best not to show his discomfort in the situation.

The path forked, and for the first time there appeared an inscription on the ground as a map that showed multiple doors in all directions, each appearing in weird ways he'd yet seen.

"Pick one." the map stated as though someone had made it recently. Thomas examined the options but could gleam no meaning from them "They all look the same," his tone held his irritation at what was before him.

But Sarah pushed forward, ignoring everything Thomas just said to walk and chose one with such reckless abandon; Thomas had a deep sense of foreboding for her.

The reckless and hopeful woman he'd had to accept through thick and thin of her personality.

The door gave a low moan when Sarah pushed into it, like it was forced beyond what it was made for and as soon as it was wide enough for one body to pass, the other doorways disappeared as if never there.

The hallway ahead felt… alive. The wood seemed to breathe, contracting and expanding as though trying to slowly kill and choke the walls like vines strangling all.

This was no longer a building made of wood; it had somehow turned to flesh, muscles under some thick bark and he knew instantly that whatever it was before was not the same now.

The metal smell got worse. It felt thick and metallic like he was bleeding it somehow into his own nostrils and down his own throat, each breath he'd try was worse than the last with how much metal was there.

Deeper they went. Thomas was now starting to grow tired, all of this walking, all of this madness felt as though he'd done more than his entire lifetime, it felt old and ancient, yet here it was all at the same moment.

This sense of his own awareness warped with how the hallways had been, it made his thoughts grow worse each time a hallway ended or a door came into sight.

He tried his best to seem calm for Sarah but in his core he felt a type of primal fear unlike any he had experienced before in all his days.

All while this place seemed to become more and more twisted the deeper they walked. "It smells like blood in here." She now tried to seem composed. It didn't work.

They found another chamber, its walls a patchwork of seemingly human skin and some still raw, with bits of hair and what he'd hoped to not be bits of ears sticking out as some fleshy wall ornaments.

Some places were just bare as though it'd simply ran out. This room did nothing to hide the new, horrific feeling, he turned his back, "Oh my god, what the hell is this!?"

It felt cold with every cell in his body that could scream at the top of its metaphorical lungs. Sarah, with a look that Thomas never thought was ever within her had taken to her own knee's and started to cry.

Thomas did nothing. He tried the next doorway but the sound this one gave when touched was the sound of flesh being tore apart by something hot, "There are other ways," a distorted voice echoed.

The floor vibrated, and the walls started pulsing in a weird cadence, all as if something alive and beyond their grasp had just spoken and they all seemed to acknowledge its speech by the way it pulsed.

Their awareness to the sound. "That voice…" Sarah started in horror as her hands were wrapped around her arms, and she held herself tight.

The floor rippled as the center bulged, and before they could register the change, tendrils of wood erupted, all twisting around Sarah and pulled her.

Like the very earth beneath it was a hungry monster itself, into its dark maw with only a shriek being the thing that left her behind.

Thomas stood, a rock of icy terror. He understood, in that horrible second, the purpose of this place.

A macabre meat grinder where hope had no place, he tried to speak but found nothing. The horror, it filled him as if the labyrinth was feeding itself on the despair and the sense of complete and utter loss.

As he did his best not to turn to where she was eaten. His skin, it crawled.

The smell grew thicker as though he'd doused himself within blood, his eyes began to ache with how hard he gripped onto the knowledge that the voice had given to him; the only purpose.

And now there were only the doors that sat silently around. He knew they weren't safe anymore.

He just wanted an exit and any sort of change of scenery to bring him some sort of familiar joy and yet he now realized it may not come to him, ever.

He was alone. And he knew he would become like the walls as he had seen, it now becoming what lay before him.

He lunged to the nearest doorway but found a scene almost exactly as the last. But in a weird, sickening change it appeared it would start moving and twisting as if to chase after him.

He ran. The passages stretched endlessly, doors twisting as each pathway seemed to melt away behind him while some were somehow chasing from in front.

It started making him laugh. He didn't know why he was laughing he didn't feel like he could stop, the sound just continued into the madness and endless space that continued like an ongoing void into the infinite halls.

It would change as well with sounds now being created behind each hallway like some cruel trick or a morbid jester laughing at his slow demise as he began to tire further from it.

The metallic smell, he hated the metallic smell as each breath grew deeper and sharper in the nose. He was coughing up blood as he ran now with each gasping sound making his run only worse each moment.

"Is this all you want? Huh?! Me? Is it!?" Thomas' words felt foreign. They didn't sound like he was actually saying them.

His legs were on fire, his lungs burning, but he couldn't stop; the voices, so many voices now joined his laughter.

They called to him and seemed to say his name with his every step; It did not sound right with their tongues.

Some were distorted while some where young or like old men or older women but he'd never hear anyone's tone correctly as it was all just the sound of it reaching for him.

"Is this fun?" it asked with a twisted and mocked curiosity, its sounds echoed. He started crying.

He didn't want to cry but tears formed each time he took a gasping sound for breath; "She's dead, she's… gone, I did nothing…"

The madness began its march deeper in his own consciousness. He laughed more.

He arrived to what seemed like the center, if it could have any structure to the concept as the very halls had long become a thing all at once that just felt alive and watching.

Waiting for what would come of all this, a grand scene where it watched the end of what was before its being.

The space was wide and in the middle there was a strange hole with something inside of it and his breath caught when he found an eye looking up.

"Come down, we have fun here" it said, but like all the others, he was now one of the distorted.

Thomas was sure it was always in front of them but something had warped his view as it felt only an inch from him but his perception had turned this tiny distance into a gulf as big as this horrible place itself.

He did nothing but step and feel his legs fail, he had accepted what he would become now, a memory as another layer to what this being was and Thomas started, with all his newfound strength he stepped.

The labyrinth pulsed. Its walls pulsed like muscles and bones shifting as another soul was consumed.

All sense of what is normal faded and was devoured as what remained grew to become like the being, no longer able to live for what had once been Thomas as he became yet another part of the Labyrinth's architecture.

One with an odd little bit of non-euclidean twist. The sign still stood proudly; The Smiling Labyrinth, just one more story waiting for its next souls.

The sun shone, unaware. Birds chirped, happy to have never known its evil existence and the earth rested as the many souls now found itself within a cruel trap.

That had long forgotten all who they once were to be consumed into another room in some never ending, grotesque labyrinth. No one would ever remember them, it'd start again.