The Hummingbird

Beneath a building, a shopping center if you will, lies a secret. Beyond the walls, circuits and hallways form a labyrinth of echoes and roads of cement and cold concrete, of steel pipes and roaring engines. Surrounded by these behemoths of ancient construction and advanced architecture, there is an elevator, one of LED lights and electronic displays. State of the art.

This elevator is used by every employee in store. It is used by only them, to transport them quickly up and down from floor to floor. From the first floor to floor 13.

No one knows that there is another floor. One that lies far beneath the earth. Far below the basement. Beyond sight and sound. During a time when the store shuts down, the elevator comes to life. The red numbers above the door shift, shatter, and reform, never corresponding to the floor it says it will bring you to. The numbers rise and fall, soon reaching even the hundreds, and then finally the negatives. The elevator begins to fall, descending deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth.

Eventually it stops, and the numbers display where it is: Floor 13R.

A second display, like an ancient TV screen, flickers on over the elevator doors. Among a grainy image a woman's face appears. She is drawn, young once but no longer. She is neurotic, pale, and beyond fear. Heavy bags hang below her eyes; she is thin. She has the look of one who has forgotten what peace and sunlight are. When she talks, her voice is quite and shudders with a deep, yet resigned, panic. She speaks of a man who holds a lab on this floor, 13R. How he draws others down and captures them, holding them in his secret space. He tortures them, experiments on their bodies, and then kills them. He revels in the title of scientist, but in reality he is only a killer. He loves the pain and the blood, the cold corpses and the fear. She speaks of on atrocity after another.

The woman's face disappears, to be replaced with other faces, one after another. Some are men; most are women. All of them were victims of the man of 13R. All of them tell you what the man has done and will do to them. Until finally they vanish and the TV screen displays the subject of their words. They display the horror himself, the man, and the lab of 13R.

You know this is a live viewing. You don't know if he knows he is being watched. You don't know if he cares he is being filmed, as he walks among the corpses of countless victims, some of them hanging from the ceiling, others lying slices open upon icy white tables. He speaks to himself, laughing words you don't understand. You watch him butcher the bodies, alive and dead, transporting living victims to the hell he has chosen for them. It becomes apparent he is not simply insane, but calculated, calm. He is not even human, only something cloaked in the skin of one.

Despite all this you feel nothing as the elevator doors draw apart. Here you are.

Welcome to 13R.