How to NOT get in home after a long night in a manhole (3)

The tunnel felt smaller now, and it wasn't just my imagination. Each breath seemed to consume the last traces of oxygen, and the remaining air came in dense, contaminated, saturated with the vapors of decades of rot compacted into stone.

The walls were sweating moisture, but there was something more — as if the old concrete was slowly giving back every secret it had absorbed over the years. The space between me and the rat was short, but the time between my heartbeats stretched out with cruelty.

Blood ran from the cut on my arm, hot and throbbing, mixing with the muck on the ground like spilled paint on a ruined canvas.

Behind me, Thalia tried to stay still, but her panic vibrated in the air like a muffled drum, pulsing right at the back of my neck. I felt it. All of it.

The creature still stared at me, and now there was a slight sway in its body — not nervous, but ready. An animal rhythm, instinctive, that comes right before the leap.