Terror in The Basement

The iron staircase twisted like the spine of a forgotten nightmare, plunged into the belly of the neoclassical behemoth. Once a resplendent architectural masterpiece, the building now clung to the shreds of its former grandeur like a fading ghost refusing to leave the stage. Its history, a tapestry woven from the vibrancy of primavera grapes once hauled from the city’s harbor to distant markets, had bled into the cracks of its walls. Those grape merchants, nouveau riche in their day, birthed palatial homes like this one, where they reveled in opulence, ensnared by their raisin-fueled excesses. The remnants of beauty clung desperately to the building’s form, just as memories of lost beauty clung to the minds of old men.

Through generations, this edifice had metamorphosed, shape-shifting from a raisin mogul’s opulent abode in 1890 to a neglected relic abandoned to the clutches of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within its walls, once echoing with the laughs of the hedonistic, now labored the honest struggles of a small law firm, a group of underdogs banding together against the economic tempest. Not the vultures of the law, but rather the remnants of the just, seeking unity to stave off the inevitable march of desperation. The building had become a harbor for these embattled souls, trading the trappings of past splendor for functional spaces to weather the storm.

And within this maze of faded glory wandered Axel Stigell, a poet trapped in a lawyer’s skin. As if a puppet of destiny’s cruel whims, he bore the yoke of his lineage, shackled by the demon known as Duty. Born to a lineage of notaries, he begrudgingly embraced the mantle of legal studies, a sacrifice to preserve his soul’s whispers of verse and dreams. Within the grandeur of the Delimari Street palace, Axel found his sanctuary, his mental haven, where unused words converged into the tapestries of imagination.

Nights often found him alone in his sanctuary, his eyes caressing the remnants of the building’s prime. Marble staircases gleamed in his mind’s eye, elegant banisters held stories of hands long gone, and chandeliers once ignited by fervor cast their languid glow on Damask-clad tables laden with precious porcelain. In his reverie, he danced through opulent feasts, a time capsule of opulence unspooling amidst the spectral moonlight. The men, smoking cigars as they discussed distant markets, were his companions, his co-conspirators in this temporal masquerade.

On the frigid eve of January 27, 2021, the city’s veins pulsed with the solitude of pandemic-induced lockdowns. The sun dipped below the horizon, forsaking the city’s inhabitants to the chilling embrace of winter. Yet, Axel, impervious to isolation, remained, lit by the dim glow of his office windows. He worked in the building’s hollow shell, gazing upon the city’s forsaken streets, a lone sentinel against the pandemic’s onslaught. But the building, like a sleeping giant, harbored mysteries yet to unravel.

As Axel toiled, an unnatural cold seeped into the room, despite the radiator’s desperate hum. The inexplicable chill bit through him, gnawing at his senses. He reached for the cold metal, a futile touch to a phantom warmth that vanished. Memory, like an unwelcome guest, resurrected a colleague’s comment about the oil tank’s impending depletion. It hit him that this moment marked the culmination of that prediction.

Reluctantly, he journeyed into the building’s belly, guided by the specter of necessity. His steps carried the weight of curses as he treaded the iron staircase, a stairwell of shadows and secrets. A door, sagging like the crooked grin of a haggard jester, opened to a realm of forgotten medical echoes. Ventilators stood like macabre sentinels, rusty and dilapidated, encased in the chilling grip of the basement’s damp embrace. But what held Axel’s gaze was a doorway hidden in the room’s recesses.

Beneath flickering light, Axel entered this crypt, his heart’s staccato rhythm matching his labored breath. Shelves adorned with sealed glass vessels housed grotesque specimens embryos suspended in the morbid embrace of formaldehyde. The basement exhaled its secrets, a chilling tableau that clawed at his sanity. A clandestine mortuary for unborn souls lay beneath his office, each fetus cocooned in the eerie liquid like a grotesque butterfly awaiting metamorphosis.

“Embryos in formaldehyde!” Axel’s thoughts rang out like the desperate screams of the doomed. His knees gave way beneath him as the chilling realization numbed his senses, and he retreated, by hopelessly crawling on the decrepit dust-filled floor backwards. Their proportions were unnatural. Their features were warped and twisted as if nature had forgotten how limbs worked and where facial features are supposed to go. As his eyes were captivated by the grotesque display in front of him, the storm of thoughts subsided with surprising clarity.

These are not the results of mere preservation of human specimens. These bore the marks of human experimentation.