Hum

You’re tied to a table, face up, and one of them has just made an incision in your abdomen with a nasty-looking knife. They’re now working as one, none-too-delicately pulling out your entrails, enthusiastically rending you apart bit by bit, organ by organ, humming all the while. One yanks out a few yards of small intestine. Another starts manhandling your kidneys. The pain is excruciating. Rather than focus on the pain, you try to focus on the humming. The tune is recognizable, but the words escape you. There’s a sharp pain as they reach their hands inside you, and suddenly the lyrics are back. You can’t help smiling as you mouth the words:

Everything is awesome
Everything is cool when you’re part of a team
Everything is awesome
When you’re living your dream….

Choke

So autoerotic asphyxiation is a thing. Not my thing, but I’m not kink-shaming anybody here; I’m not going to yuck anybody’s yums. Deaths from autoerotic asphyxiation are also a thing, but far less common than has sometimes been claimed; apparently 500-1000 deaths per year is a number that sometimes gets thrown around, but the number of people in the U.S. who die every year from it is probably less than 160. Your death from garroting, while similar in methodology, is way less sexy and way less voluntary.

Music

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” Bram Stoker’s Dracula says of the wolves howling around his castle. It seems fitting in this world, too, where the Old One known as Alala is made of living sound, the Demon of Dissonance plagues the night, and Erich Zann becomes possessed while playing a manic tune on the viol. So if you’re going to ask me whether it was foolish of you to allow yourself to be lured downstairs by a haunting refrain on the piano, the answer is yes, of course yes, a thousand times yes. Death comes for us all, and in your case, death is quite musical.

Cobwebs

That door wasn’t here yesterday; you could swear it. It’s a perfectly ordinary door, yet somehow, irresistible. You open it and walk through corridor after winding corridor. You turn a corner and walk straight into a cobweb. You wipe the strands from your face and move on. It’s dark. You light a match. The hall is thick with cobwebs. You sidestep them. The match burns down to your fingertips. You strike another match. More spiderwebs, this time across the whole hall. You tear them aside and continue on. Another match. The cobwebs are thicker, ropy, sinewy. You try to brush them aside, but they hold your arm fast. The webs have a tensile strength you couldn’t have guessed. You try to retreat, but can’t move. You hear a skittering. Your pulse quickens. You struggle, to no avail. The sound repeats. You fight harder against the cobwebs, but you can’t move. At last, something turns the corner, and you sigh with relief when you see the woman’s face. That is, until you see her giant spider legs. The match burns out.

Shoes

You can’t move your legs.

You wake up, and your head hurts and you can’t see anything and you can’t move your legs.

Okay, you can move your knees. But definitely not your feet. They’re in some kind of hardened … structure?

The blindfold is ripped from your face. It smarts as it whips across the aching bruise on your temple. A bright lamp shines into your face, and you squint. You look down, and focus your eyesight. Gradually, the blurred vestiges of light-blindness fade, and your vision resolves on your feet, encased in concrete.

“Awake, eh?” comes the voice. You recognize it – one of your companions in this house cut off from civilization. “Don’t get too comfortable. Tonight, you sleep with the Old Ones.”

Just Dead, That's All

Yuh dead.

The Last Thing You Hear

BBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAACCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZBBBBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKKKKKKKKKKKKKKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ is the last thing you hear after your erstwhile companions force you to stand in a bathtub and toss you a plugged-in toaster.