The Feeding Ground

Mark hadn't planned to return to Ecster, the village where decay hung in the air like a disease. But a letter had arrived, written in a child's scrawl, with a message as chilling as the cold sweat that broke out on his skin when he read it:

"Come back. She's waiting." It was signed Tina.

He hadn’t seen Tina in over twenty years, not since the fire in the old church—since her screams had torn through the night, louder than the crackling flames. But as Mark stepped into Ecster, he felt something worse than memory: it was as if the very ground exhaled, sighing in a low murmur that rattled the teeth in his skull.

The village was no longer abandoned. Dark figures lurked at the edges of his vision, half-glimpsed through the cracked windows of dilapidated houses. They stood perfectly still, watching him as he passed. Their silhouettes were distorted, limbs too long, necks bent at odd angles. But every time he turned to get a better look, the figures seemed to dissolve into the shadows.

Ahead loomed the remains of the old church, now swallowed by twisted, blackened trees that grew through the crumbling stone. Mark’s throat tightened as he crossed the churchyard, where weeds and pale fungi grew in patches of sickly yellow. A smell hit him then—familiar, yet repulsive: scorched flesh and something sour, like milk left out in the sun.

He was about to step inside when he noticed it. Carved into the wooden door, jagged and uneven, were the words:

"We never left."

The door swung open on its own, revealing the darkened interior. The air inside was thick with dampness and rot, the smell intensifying. Mark could hear faint sounds—scratches, shuffling, low whispers that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. He knew he had to go deeper, to find the place where the fire had burned hottest. But as he made his way down the long aisle, he realized that the church wasn’t empty.

Rows of pews were filled with dolls. They sat in rigid, unnatural poses, each one dressed in children's clothes, faces painted with expressions of agony—eyes too large, mouths frozen mid-scream. Mark’s skin prickled with the sensation of being watched, and not just by the dolls. The darkness seemed alive, as though it swayed and breathed with its own terrible will.

At the far end of the church, behind the ruined altar, a staircase spiraled down into the earth. The steps were slick and uneven, leading into the black maw of the crypt below. Mark hesitated. The air coming from the crypt was colder than it should have been, carrying with it a sound like faint sobbing. But when he heard the voice—a child’s voice, unmistakably Tina’s—his feet moved before his mind could protest.

“Mark,” it whimpered, “come play with me.”

He descended, the walls closing in, the sobs growing louder until they were no longer just Tina's voice, but a cacophony of anguished cries. The crypt seemed impossibly large, as if it extended far beyond the physical dimensions of the church. Rows of stone coffins lay open, each filled not with remains but with…parts. Disembodied hands, eyes, mouths—each twitching and writhing as though still alive.

At the center of the crypt lay a circular pit, from which emanated a wet, slithering sound. Mark peered over the edge, his breath catching in his throat. The pit was filled with dolls—but these were not ordinary toys. Their bodies squirmed, limbs writhing with insect-like precision. Their skin was made of stitched-together flesh, pieces of people Mark felt he somehow knew. But the eyes were the worst: real human eyes, moving frantically in their sockets, staring up at him with pleading desperation.

And then he saw Tina.

Or what was left of her.

She crawled from the pit, her body twisted and malformed, as if it had been pulled apart and put back together by a hand that didn’t understand anatomy. Her limbs bent in ways that defied nature, her skin pale and translucent, revealing veins pulsing with something dark and thick. Her face was split in a grotesque grin, lips peeled back to expose jagged teeth that looked like they had been filed to points.

“You left me here,” she hissed, the words overlapping with a hundred other voices that came from her throat, some young, some impossibly old. “We all waited…so hungry…”

Mark tried to back away, but the walls themselves seemed to breathe, closing in, their surfaces rippling as though filled with countless shifting bodies. He could feel them moving beneath the stone, hear them whispering through cracks and crevices—whispering his name.

Tina lunged forward, her hand reaching out with fingers elongated like claws. She seized his wrist with a strength that belied her frail appearance, pulling him closer to the pit.

“Feed them,” she whispered. “Or be fed to them.”

The ground beneath Mark began to buckle, and he realized, to his horror, that the entire floor was alive. It was not made of stone at all, but of pale flesh, riddled with hundreds of mouths, each drooling a thick black ichor. As he struggled, the mouths snapped and gnashed, biting at his legs, his arms—anything they could reach. The taste of his sweat seemed to awaken them further, their movements becoming more frantic, more ravenous.

The dolls in the pit began to climb, clambering over one another, their sewn eyes wide with hunger. Mark thrashed, screaming as one doll tore at his flesh with teeth sharper than razors, pulling a strip of skin from his arm in a spasm of pain. The dolls began to climb up him, using his body as a ladder, gnawing and tearing as they ascended.

But the worst part wasn’t the pain. It was the realization that each bite was accompanied by a rush of memories—his memories. The dolls were devouring not just his flesh but the very essence of his being, his childhood, his first kiss, his mother’s voice. Each fragment ripped away left him more hollow, more empty, until he could barely remember why he was even fighting.

Tina’s laughter filled the crypt, a high-pitched, warbling sound. “You can stay, Mark,” she crooned, her face inches from his, breath rancid with decay.

“We can make you one of us. Forever.”

And as the dolls swarmed over him, as the darkness closed in and the mouths began to chew through muscle and bone, Mark’s last thought was a distant, fading question:

Had he ever truly left Ecster at all?