Her locks were yellow as gold;
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
S. T. Coleridge
As he walked up the steep, creaking stairs he shone his torch around at the old cobwebbed walls. He could not help feeling a little afraid. The place seemed to have a strange, frightening atmosphere about it. The walls seemed to warn him of unknown dangers. But he couldn't stop now. He shuddered as he opened the little door at the top of the stairs. It made a horrible squeaking sound as it opened and closed behind him.
He found himself in a long narrow passageway with a number of doors on either side. He focused his torch on a nearby one and headed towards it to see if the room it led to was suitable for spending the night in. Slowly he opened the door and stepped into a small room. With his torch, he studied the walls and floor for spiders or signs of rats. As he shone his torch into a corner of the room he jumped back in fright at the sight of a skeleton sitting against the wall. As Mike stood there in the darkness, wondering about the history of this pile of bones, the spaces which had once held eyes seemed to stare at him, seemed to tell him to get out of this room, go back down the stairs and out through the large entrance, and never come back again. There was something disturbingly life-like about the thing that gave him this silent warning. Mike suddenly turned, walked out the door and shut it. More unnerved than ever, he walked along the corridor to another door some distance from the former one. Nervously he opened it, and . . .
Mike stood petrified with horror at the thing he saw. Lying in the middle of the room was a human body. Its clothes were scratched and torn. It had four huge gashes across its face. It had probably been there for some time as it was in an advanced state of decay. And yet its eyes had a strange life-like look about them, and they seemed to be looking straight at Mike, who stood staring at this mangled horror. Then, even as he watched, its lips started to move. At first they just twitched a bit, then they started making a sound. Mike listened, too frightened to move, as the sounds formed into words. Slowly the butchered corpse mumbled in a soft, weird, painful voice the words, "Beware the Creature of Living Death!"
Terrified, Mike ran out of the room and slammed the door behind him. He hurried down the passageway to the door which would lead to the staircase, put his hand on the knob, and . . . it was locked. But who had locked it? Why was it locked? Slowly he turned around as he heard soft footsteps coming closer and closer. He turned back and tried to bash the door down. Then he turned his back to the door, facing the horrible monster which was pacing slowly towards him.
Mike did not need his torch, as the large eyes of the thing shone in the darkness, illuminating the passageway with a dull, ghostly light. Closer and closer and closer it came, this indescribably horrible beast. As it came towards Mike, it lifted its right arm at the end of which were four sharp, knife-like claws, with a thick bluish liquid oozing from the ends of them. It was now only a few yards away, now a few feet. Then . . . Mike gave a scream, a scream of pain and terror, and dropped to the floor.
For a time all he knew was a terrible pain. Then he found himself lying in agony on the floor of a room. He tried to move but could not. Soon he found he could move his eyes and even his lips and, with an enormous amount of effort and energy, could even make a sound.
A long period of time passed. But now he knew that he would lie there feeling the agonizing pain, dead, yet alive, until his flesh had rotted and decayed away and his bones had turned to dust.
