Ted’s forehead slammed into the low cave ceiling as drunkenly tried to go down the stairs. In a moment of clarity before his lights went out he regretted his decision to visit a stalacticte cave while in a day-drinking haze. When he came to, a short, squat figure was standing over him. It’s eyes reflected the electric lights like a cat’s; it looked like a huge, child-sized rat standing on its hind legs, wearing a kind of filthy leather vest hung with dozens of dirty tools and random brick-a-brack, almost giving it the cute look of a puppet from a children’s show. Except for the face; the thing had a long snout full of long, crooked yellow teeth that stuck out at odd angles. Saliva dripped from the crooked maw, and its eyes stared at Ted with a hungry and soulless intensity that reminded him of a shark.

He instinctively screamed at it to get away from him and scrambled to his feet. Although he was below average height, he still towered over the rat creature when standing, yet it seemed totally unafraid. Ted retched when its stench hit his nostrils like a sledgehammer; it stunk of rancid sweat and rotting garbage. It shrieked at him, pointing with a clawed paw that looked disturbingly human, and a chorus of similar voices answered from all around. Ted ran, and soon the patter of dozens of padded feet was on his trail.

The cave looked different than he remembered; soon the electric lights gave way to primitive clay oil lamps that burned with guttering orange flames. He breathlessly ran along a rubbish-strewn corridor, trying to get anywhere but here. Behind he heard inhuman snarls and the shrieking calls of the rat-things. The path didn’t fork any more but started widening, until it ended in a colossal cavern that declined into a pit full of what looked like bones, both old and dry as well as newly gnawed and glistening with juices and saliva.

Ted stumbled over a protruding rock and tumbled headlong into the mass. Instantly thousands of vermin swarmed him, fleas and leeches and biting beetles that lived on the scraps of rotting flesh. His skin lit up like fire from new wounds as the creatures hungrily drank from his veins. He screamed in pain, but saw the way back blocked by hundreds of glowing eyes at the top of the pit. They seemed to be chanting a word: “Grak! Grak!”. Ted felt something titanic strain in the depths of waste. Waves of refuse washed over him as a colossal grave worm reared and broke the surface like a demonic whale. In the dim light he saw a huge circular maw hurtling toward him, like a black moon crashing to the Earth. It scooped up everything around him, and the peristaltic pumping of the monster worm’s body drew him inside. I just wanted a drink and some harmless fun, Ted thought, as the worm’s digestive juices started drowning him.