Conrad walked down the subway staircase and saw that the subway car was gone. He stood on the platform, still trying to warm himself after walking through the ghostly figures at the carnival. He looked down the tunnel and saw a distant glint of light. His clothes smelled of smoke and sugar.

“Maybe I should go check if that’s the train…” he said while hopping off the platform onto the tracks. He approached the glint deep within the dark tunnel. Suddenly, his shoes made a squish sound. “Huh?!” he muttered, feeling weirded out. “Maybe it’s just some water.” He shrugged.

When he got closer to the small light, he noticed the walls were covered with red flesh-like constructs. A small orange light illuminated the front of a rusty open door.

No point going in there… Conrad thought as he turned around to head back to the platform. Suddenly, he heard a man’s voice yelling for help from deep inside the entrance where the rusty door was. Conrad turned around and looked at the entrance. The flesh-like constructs were beating rapidly and moving.

“Ugh, curse my sense of duty, but whoever that is, if I save them, they may help me escape…” He muttered and went into the entrance. The hall was narrow, and the place was covered in rusty pipes that shot out steam. Flesh constructs moved rapidly upon the walls, and there was an orange glow from the dirty lamps that led him down the hall. His boots made a squish sound with each step. The temperature started heating up the further he went down the hallway. A blast of steam hit Conrad in the face once and knocked him backward through one of the doors.

He fell into a room where a huge bug immediately hissed at him and charged at him. He hopped up from the floor and pushed the bug to the side, its slimy body leaving his hands sticky with slime. The bug was hunchbacked, had large antennae over its pitch-black eyes, and was a rusty red color. The bug charged at Conrad again, this time Conrad ran into the hall, but the bug was unable to go through the door. The bug shrieked and was salivating, chomping its mandibles from behind the door entrance.

“Please help me!” the man’s voice from before yelled down the hall.

Conrad got up and shut the door on the bug, which had retreated into a fleshy room riddled with tunnels.

His breathing had become erratic. I could’ve died… he thought.

He continued down the hall and down some stairs to a door. He pushed the door open, and a blast of frigid cold air hit him in the face, making him shiver a bit and cough. There, he saw a man behind an ice wall, chained to the ground on his knees. He looked around and saw a broken pipe on the ground, and grabbed it. He started to hit the ice wall, which cracked slowly, draining his energy in the process. The man on the other side remained hunched over, his long hair covering his face, and he was dressed in a business suit.

The wall finally shattered, and he approached the man. Suddenly, the man’s clothes collapsed to the ground, empty. All that remained was a tarot card: The Devil, depicted in a business suit.

 “Hmm…” he stared at the card. It had a man and a woman dressed in business suits, chained to a large white pig, smoking a cigar. Stacks of cash towered behind them, with a distant pyramid looming in the background. He searched the room but couldn’t find anything else, so he returned to the hallway. The fleshy constructs had started making the walls bleed red, and the hallway was slowly filling with blood. The orange lights had shifted to red, turning the blood black against rusty concrete and pipes.

“Argh!” he winced as he waded through the blood-filled hallway that was ankle-deep now. “Just my luck.” The blood continued to flow, occasionally bleeding onto his hair and clothes. Steam blasted him in the face again, making him wish to be in the cool ice room. When Conrad reached the door he entered from, the blood was now knee-deep. The door was barely able to budge more than an inch open. Conrad wedged the pipe into the gap and used it as a lever to pry open the door. The pipe bent, and the door opened, releasing a torrent of blood into the subway tunnel.

“Shit…” he was breathing heavily when he saw the subway car waiting at the lit platform. He made his way to the car, heaving, while leaving red handprints on the tunnel walls.

When he finally got into the subway car, he saw that he had left bloody footprints smeared across the floor as he sat down with a sigh. He started processing what had happened, his blood-soaked clothes staining the seat. The subway car made its usual announcement of where it was going.

He was numb to his emotions now and tired. He slowly dozed off to the sound of light bumps and the shaking of metal handles from the ceiling.