 It was old, older than God, older than the hundred foot pines that towered above. It looked like a submarine hatch, sitting on a low concrete rise planted firmly in the forest floor. It wore a tight beard of pine needles over a rusted wheel handle with bolts the size of apples. It took both of us to get the handle the turn, metal groaned in protest, screamed as it shaved away the layer of rust that had welded it shut. Together we pulled the lid open. It was heavy, heavier than a house. Then it split back on its hinge with a sigh of stale air. Darkness seemed to spill out of the hatchway, like it had been bottled up for eons and was now ready to infect the world. It looked as though a great metal mouth had opened up in the forest floor. A predator's mouth starving and ready to feed. We peered down. A surface ladder of rebar-like rungs descended the dark concrete bore into the great unknown. Hazy overcast sunlight fought the darkness and lost, penetrating a meager five feet before shadow claimed the hole for its own. Sammy found a rock that looked like a cat's head, negotiated it over the hatch and dropped it down. It whistled off into darkness. We waited. Two teenagers in the woods of Washington listening for a sound that never came, that rock hitting the bottom. I was spending a month of summer with my cousin Sammy at our grandma's place up in northern Washington. It was a gray, unsunny July. I'd only been there a day, but a kingdom of storm clouds had rolled in off the ocean and pitched camp over our corner of Washington, issuing unto it low, endless drizzle that left the world soggy and awful. But today the clouds had parted, pulling back in a blast of sunlight. With the weather cooperating, me and Sammy's daily dose of mischief had let us out through the trees behind grandma's house. The woods were a wide, primordial riot, not entirely claustrophobic, but dense enough that the massive pines would be warring for root space. We'd followed a thin vein of hiking trail, eventually breaking off on our own in search of someplace suitable. We'd been off the trail for no more than 10 minutes before Sammy called out to me, indicating the closed hatch that would eventually swallow us whole. We brushed away a thin skeleton of branches, a great bed of moss, a tangle of brush to finally unearth the thing that resembled something city workers in bright orange vest might descend to access a gas main, which was odd because it bore no markings to denote its origin, not even warnings with penal codes to dissuade would be vandals. It was anonymous and disconcerting, like its lack of designation meant it didn't belong, like it was an interloper. Sammy had asked me something. I looked up at her. What is it? She repeated, curious gaze pinned on the hatch. I don't know. I told her. I don't know what it is. I knew it was old, older than God, older than the hundred foot pines that towered above. The hatch was open and Sammy wanted to go down. Come on, Liam. She groaned. It'll be fun. We'll poke around to take some shots for our feeds. I'm not on that shit. I shot back. Social media is the death of rational thought. True, she grumbled, but what are we supposed to do? Hang out with grandma all day and watch rebel without a cause with commercials? I took a long pensive drag on the stale Winston, not wanting to admit that I was kind of terrified. Not only was I worried about the hatch lids slamming on us, trapping us in, but the thought of climbing down that shadowy ladder of disappearing into the earth's dark, quiet belly made me want to vomit. Luckily, I didn't have to make excuses. It started to rain. Shit, Sammy hissed as the first spray of drizzle fell in gray sheets. Help me close it. Don't want it to flood. The rain was a fine mist, nothing more than a sneeze. And I doubted very much if it would flood. But I was more than happy to help her seal off that dark orifice. We did together before heading back through the trees, leaving the hatch behind. We were soaked through by the time we made it back to grandma's. She fixed us up plates of hot lasagna and we all watched James Dean's effortless cool and rebel with the commercials. My grandma's house was not unimpressive. It was a two-story Victorian rising in a collage of faded red and white from a wide lot of crab grass. The open property hemmed by a wrought iron fence, all of it seemingly weighed down by 100 years of history. It looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie. A gothic manor surrounded by woods, a lone raft stranded in a sea of trees. I was staying in my dad's old digs, a mess of ancient band posters and records, breezy punk stuff like the gun club and the wipers. Despite all the vinyl, I was plugged into Spotify and Bowie was wailing Moon Age daydream when Sammy slipped in face bright with mischief. Come on, she said in an excited, breezy whisper, let's go. It was late, dark and late. I thought she'd gone to bed, but she claimed a spot on the edge of my bed charged with nervous energy. I lost my headphones and shifted to look at her, her eyes wide and excited. What? Go? I screwed my face into a confused knot. The thing, the hole in the ground, the mention of the hatch, the mouth, made my skin crawl. What? I said, no way, it's like midnight, it's atmospheric. She countered, it's pitch dark out. So? We'll vlog it or something, record it, I don't know, it'll be fun. I groaned, shook my head, no way, then I'll go without you, Sammy huffed, into the hole in the middle of the night. Yup, totally alone. So if I get molested by sub-dwelling mutants, it's on you, because you're the older cousin and all. Don't be an asshole, I said, feeling my cheeks flare up. She smiled, a dimple forming beside her mouth, clearly amused at having manipulated me into a stalemate of mutually assured destruction. I was caught, either I go with her and keep her in check or I let her go alone and something might happen. She was 15, only a year younger than me, but impulsive and brash and it wouldn't surprise me if she got hurt. I could claim ignorance, but if something happened, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. Despite being just cousins, we'd always been close. Sammy could drive me up the wall, but I still loved her and I could see in her eyes that she wouldn't be swayed. I blew another long sigh, pushed myself off the bed, shrugged on my black windbreaker. Ugh, let's get some flashlights, I said. I prayed for rain, I knew wouldn't come. The clouds had burned off in the moonlight, leaving the heavens bright and clear. We'd found a set of headlamps in grandma's junk drawer and navigated the low woods by the watery beams they provided. I had also taken an old Swiss army knife. It was made of rust and looked like it had survived the Great War, but I took it just in case. I was hoping I wouldn't need it, hoping we wouldn't thine the hatch, hoping it would be lost in the riot of trees. But something deep down, a high tickle in the deepest wrinkles of my soul, told me we would find it. And we did, almost immediately. It resolved out of the darkness, a small brutalist platform rising out of the still damp soil. Had it been so close before? It must have been, must have. The army was recording us with her phone, posting them on Instagram or something, who knows. My vision had whittled down to a dizzying pinprick, and all I could hear was the hot rush of blood pounding through my ears. I hoped her tug opened the hatch, vaguely heard myself ask if she really wanted to do this. Of course I do. She said with a tight smile as she pocketed her phone, it'll be exciting. Then she mounted the ladder and started off down the hatch. That sound only could have been made by the hatch lid slamming shut. We'd been climbing down the narrow bore for five minutes, each rung burning, with a hot metal freeze that nibbled through flesh and seemed to lick at the bone. When there had been a loud metallic report, thunk, we both froze on the ladder. Sammy just below me, panning like a tired dog. What was that? I whispered, hauling stale air through my aching lungs. Why are… Sammy started in her normal voice before dropping in an octave. Why are you whispering? What was that? I asked again. But I didn't have to ask. I already knew. She did too. I heard the growing scuffle of her climbing back up the ladder. I started too. One white hot rung after the next. My palms burning. My heart beating its angry fist against my ribs. The climb up was hard. My body seemed to weigh too much. Like each limb was encased in lead as I pulled myself up, up, nearing what I knew I'd find. And I was right. The hatch was closed. I pounded on it, screamed, knowing that the only ones to hear would be us. I chipped away at it with the army knife to no avail. We tried our phones, first mine then Sammy's, pressing the devices to the lid's rough rusted skin. No reception. Nothing but the mouth, I thought. No one but us. Two teenagers trapped in an awful ladder with nowhere to go but down. I don't like this. Sammy croaked. She sounded so young, like a little girl clutching her teddy bear after an especially dreadful nightmare. I didn't like it either. It was wrong. It was so, so wrong. It was, it was a pyramid of rocks. The climb down the ladder had been impossible. Time fell away, shifting into a dull blur that didn't much matter. All that mattered was finding your footing as you lowered yourself down, down, rung after rung, step after step. It might have been an hour or 10, but a while later, a long, long while, we hit a wide concrete room. It was about the size of your average backyard. The ceiling low, unblemished spare the circular opening through which the ladder ran. Shadows shifted in danced and black relief as we played our headlights across the dark space. On the wall opposite the ladder stood a wide ruined opening. Nothing but darkness beyond it. The massive bank vault style door that had once filled it sat in a twisted broken heap nearby torn free of its hinges by something that was disturbing. It sent a sudden flood of hot dread filling my guts like boiling water. But what was worse was the pyramid. It stood in the center of the room like a shitty roadside art sculpture, a painstaking pyramid fashioned out of countless rocks. I knew where those stones had come from. Sammy did too. They'd been dropped from the above by people like us, hundreds of them, thousands sacrificed to the darkness of the earth. The mouth. I knew because topping the pyramid like a Christmas tree star was the rock Sammy had dropped earlier. The exact same one, no doubt about it, tucked carefully atop the mountain of stones placed there by someone. Something a high trembling sound like an animal in a snare filled the room as the reality of the situation hit Sammy. She'd started to cry. She was losing it unraveling at the seams, sitting on the floor knees to her chest rocking and sobbing and apologizing for bringing me down here. We had to move. My whole body was one big screaming ache. And if we let exhaustion ease its warm blanket over our shoulders, we'd never get going. I saw it air through my lungs and boiled it into authority. We have to go. I said, she sniffled what her voice was nasally. She raised a trembling finger to the cracked entryway across the room through the hair. I nodded struck one of the matches I still had from the cigarettes. The flame wavered, guttered as a breeze tugged at it. There's a breeze. I said air flow another way out. She sniffled shook her head. No, no way. I say we wait here. Wait for someone to open the hatch. No one knows we're down here. I reminded her. No one but what if she started looking at the pyramid of rocks. She lowered her voice a horse whisper. If that thing that made that is in there, where else would it be? I fought, but I didn't say that I needed her in motion. We have nowhere else to go. I said nowhere. She looked at me, her face pale and ghostly in the light of my headlamp. Her eyes were puffy, red, bright with terror. Then she summoned her courage like one would a lung full of air and nodded. I hauled her to her feet and we started off through the doorway. There's someone following us, Sammy said in a choked whisper. The entryway had fed us into an underground hospital. It was abandoned, left to rot beneath the earth. A maze of scarred linoleum hallways, moldering gurneys with thick leather straps, blown out doorways with padded rooms beyond. No, not a hospital, an asylum or a laboratory, a kind of psycho mixture of both. Its construction spoke of a time before technology and the advancement of human rights. Wood walls and popcorn ceilings were shredded, torn to ribbons, like a feral something had been set loose. Rusty smears of dried blood texture the white darkness here and there. It was awful. Each footfall, each pull of breath, all sound seemed to echo, clang, reverberate through the white walls of this underground labyrinth. It was like a nightmarish painting. It was the mouth. Up until then, we'd been negotiating slowly, rounding corners, finding more shadow-soaked hallways, passing an overturned reception desk, more padded cells, driven forth by terror and primal survival instinct. Then Sammy had whispered in my ear, her breath hot, her voice hoarse with terror, there's something following us. I froze, a cold inflection of goosebumps when sprouting up over my body. My lungs were tight, empty of air. My heart was pounding with icy fear. I turned slowly, not wanting to make a sound, afraid that if I did, it might make the someone real. She must have imagined it. There was no one. There was. Then I saw the eyes. Two dull, milky pinpricks hovering just outside the light of our headlamps. They were head-level, higher than head-level, unblinking, hovering, and watching, eyes. Sammy's body was right up against mine. She was wound up like an overtorked screw, terror-radiated from her. In hot waves, I could feel fear beating through her veins, kathump, kathump. The eyes moved so suddenly that both of us screamed. They surged forward without any warning, rushed at us, the thing, the something, the awful sub-dwelling mutant that would devour our hot intestines while we were still shrieking. I saw its crooked, emaciated silhouette lumbering and lurching towards us, a tall, broken thing, its arms stick-like and so impossibly thin. Those glowing blind eyes set into a narrow, malformed head, as molded and precise as a canine skull. Then the creature hit our pool of light, and the eyeballs popped out of thin air like the light had banished that thing, leaving only two marbles which clattered down hit the floor, bounced and rolled to our feet. They stared up at us, pale, seeing and somehow blasphemous. Sammy and I jerked back and bolted like the wind. My cousin screamed and yanked me back just as solid ground dropped out beneath me. We'd been in a blind rush, a blur of hallway scrolling by, passing padded cells with shadows that moved within them, when the floor had suddenly stopped being. Sammy grabbed my shirt and jerked me back just as I went tumbling out over the sudden chasm. After a gut-wrenching sound of uncertainty, I found myself on solid ground, looking down at the vast, empty, nothingness. There was a 20-foot canyon separating the side from the other, a thin, splintery plank board running across it. It looked like someone had shoveled out a massive, crude pit in the hallway of the underground nightmare. We peered down, hauling air through broken lungs, hearts pounding, not sure what we were seeing. A solid knot of arms and legs, inner-woven and laced together, filled out the bottom of the abyss. They were gray, broken, decayed, torn flesh hung from bone, massive boils filled with hot pus textured rotting skin. But this wasn't a shallow grave, and they weren't the departed. As soon as our light hit them, they slithered apart, breaking away like a hive of snakes under the burning heat of a magnifying glass. Solid full heads, pained and drawn in agony, recoiled from the light, broken human-like things, forcing themselves off into shadow to reclaim what little salvation they had. They hissed and moaned and chuckled with insane humor like condemned souls cast from heaven, forever banished to this pit of darkness for an existence of raw pain. Oh my god, Sammy croaked. Oh my god. But there was no god in this place. It was a great blasphemy born from the sin of the unrighteous. It was awesome and awful. It was a low sound came from behind us, tucked into the cacophony of torment. Sammy didn't hear it, too taken with a pit of the damned. I slowly turned, turned, my heart fluttering with icy dread, my stomach nodding in on itself. But the hallway behind us was empty. I blew a relieved sigh. The giant meat spider exploded out of the darkness with a throaty screech, a blur of limbs carrying it across the scuffed ceiling. But they weren't limbs, they were human arms and legs. It gasped as it rattled down the wall, hissing and pulsing with hideous life as it joined the floor and surged forward. It bubbled into the light. A nightmarish set of conjoined twins, two separate androgynous entities melded together, appendages beginning where others ended, scraps of face in all the wrong places, eyeballs and noses and mouths all scattered about its lumpy, fleshy form. It was a nightmare of terrible industry and its head, much like a spider's, was bulbous and truly heinous. Patches of hair textured its lumpy scalp above rows of eyeballs and a wide mouth of thick razor teeth. Sammy turned, screamed and stepped back. It was instinctive, a single misplaced move that sent her out over empty space. She reached out for me, her fingertips skimming my arm as she issued a surprised noise. Then she was gone, plummeting into the sea of souls swallowed by the mass of forgotten bodies. I heard her shriek, heard her wail in bright agony as those things tore her limb from limb, picking her apart like a mean kid with a stunned fly. Then I looked up and a fleshy mass of teeth and eyes and hatred was atop me. The meat spider tore me down into darkness. I awoke in a biblical spiderweb to the reek of death. It was a dark, sticky place, hot with a stench of dead things. The smell flooded my lungs, burned my nose and eyes. I looked around, my eyes adjusting to the gloomy haze, I'd lost my headlamp. Fibrous white nets resolved out of the darkness, stretching to and fro like an entropic masterpiece, all of it seemingly random, in oddly beautiful in its precision. An incredible tapestry of psycho nature, massive cocooned lumps textured the space scattered throughout the nest like sleeping beauties. They were prey. And so was I. I couldn't move. I was melded to a wall of webbing by a spray of fiber, not entirely cocooned, but imprisoned in a straight jacket of dreadful string. I tried to scream, but my mouth was gagged with a shred of webbing. I issued a low muffled shriek, the sound of despair. Then the entire formation began to tremble with a low vibration. I heard a tight hiss, saw a dark shape skitter by. The meat spider mounted the nearest cocoon and tore into it with its terrible human-like arms, craning its lumpy head to suck meat from bone. I heard congested slurping, things tearing, flesh and bone snapping apart. It was feeding, and it would come for me next. I slowly began to struggle, trying to work some slack into my binds, but they held firm. I felt something in my back pocket. I patted it desperately. The Swiss Army knife. I worked it out, popped the blade as the noise of feeding slowed as the awful meat spider shredded its fill from one of its victims. I eased the rusty blade through the webbing and began to saw. It was like cutting through canvas. The web behind me instantly began to slacken, splitting apart, losing its tension as, oh god. Oh no. The meat spider lunged, drenched in still hot blood, moving with that deliberate speed afforded only to creepy crawlies. It was coming for me. Arms and legs pumping, its misshapen form throbbing with terrible heat. I worked the Swiss Army knife harder, faster, hacking away blindly, hatcheting apart the web holding me captive, and I could smell it. Oh god, the reek of ancient rot of things dead and decayed and hate, and it was here. Oh god, it was here. The meat spider lunged. For a terrifying instant, all I saw were eyes and teeth. There was a horrible intelligence in those eyes, an awful cunning that reminded me so much of the dead-eyed stare of serial killers in court. Then the web split beneath me, and I fell. I was tumbling down, down, plummeting like a stone, the ground black and solid and rushing towards me. It slammed into me like a freight train, and I crumpled like a bird. It wasn't solid ground. It was an angry rush of water. A river tumbled and heaved through a rocky canyon, the rabbit's froth like a rabid dog, whipping me around like a rag doll in the hands of a brat. I snapped this way and that, barking my arms and legs and brain off lips of rock that seemed to bite out at me. Here that reeked of rotten gasoline and the thousands of dead things it had washed away flooded my mouth, filled my lungs. I choked and fought and tumbled downstream until blackness expanded. I awoke in a drainpipe to the first light of dawn. It painted strange shapes on the curved concrete bore in which I was delivered. I folded over and vomited a warm spray of water. A thin trickle ran from the darkness of the pipe, issuing through my hands hair, flushing me with sobriety. That darkness repulsed me, made my skin ache and crawl. I staggered towards the light, fought my way out into a rocky shore. Seagulls were honking angrily, fighting over a scrap of meat on the beach. Other seabirds twisted through the foggy air above gray waters. The ocean heaved at my feet. I looked up at the sky and cried. A trucker found me, limping along the highway like an abused dog. I didn't struggle when he dragged me to the car. I collapsed limply into his arms and let myself be taken. He rushed me to the nearest hospital. I found out I was eighty miles from Grammus. I'm in a sterile white place now, a hospital that reminds me so much of that underground nightmare of things that should never see the light of day. I started this account, hoping it would bring me peace, hoping it would help me come to terms with the trauma I'd faced. It hasn't helped at all. The police are still looking for that hatch and for Sammy's body. It's been two days and they've found neither. I was hoping normality would return, would burn away the nightmares that have haunted me since I've been back, but it hasn't. When I shut my eyes, I see things, things I'd seen out of the corner of my eyes in those padded rooms, unspeakable horrors that belong not in this world, but in a place far beyond it. God save them. It's an empty platitude, but it's all I can offer. God save them. Hey everyone, remember to like and subscribe if you enjoyed the video, and a special thank you to the author The Crooked Boy for allowing me to narrate such a terrifying story. Make sure to check out more of the author's work, there's a link in the description. If you'd like to support me further, there's a link to my Patreon in the description. And remember, if you find a hatch in the middle of the woods, for the love of God, don't open it.