THE CHILDREN'S DUNGEON
By Jman8763
Chapter 1
The Hole
Jeremy Wilkins was cleaning his room, kind of, in preparation to sitting down and attacking the pile of homework he'd been putting off all week, when he found a hole in the back of his closet.
It hadn't been there that morning; he was certain of that. He'd opened the closet door to get a shirt for school and his closet had been fine---messy, filled with his crap, but in a normal way---nothing supernatural.
He'd opened it again that afternoon, this time to toss the junk cluttering his small bedroom into the closet so Mom wouldn't nag at him to clean his room when she got home late that evening. And there was the hole.
Well, hole might not be the correct term for it; it was more of an upright five-foot-in-diameter pool of inky blackness replacing the dull gray wood paneling in the back of his closet.
In his ten years of life, Jeremy had seen nothing like it. For a moment, he wondered if his older brother was playing a joke on him. He couldn't imagine why. To play a joke on him, Andrew, would have to first acknowledge his younger brother Jeremy's existence.
Andrew was talking in the next room over. His voice cut through the silence as the skunk smell of marijuana seeped from under his bedroom door into the hallway. He claimed he needed the marijuana for a medical condition, but the best Jeremy could tell, his medical condition was one of being a jerk, and marijuana wasn't helping.
The hole, an upright pool of ink, blacker than the high-priced flat-screen TV his friend had, or anything else he'd ever seen, sat there looking scary and alien. Jeremy reached out to touch it, but then it occurred to him that might be a very bad idea. He pulled his hand back quickly.
Instead, he picked up an old shoe with holes in it that his feet had outgrown. He should have thrown it away long ago, but hadn't. He pushed the shoe into the inky blackness, encountering no resistance, then pulled it out again. The shoe looked fine---that is, in no worse shape than before. He threw the shoe into the hole, then left the room to check on the wall behind his closet.
The wall behind his closet was in the house's one bathroom and it looked fine. He pounded the wall. Nothing happened. It even felt normal. Whatever was going on in his closet didn't appear to extend to the rest of the house.
He returned to his room, wondering what to do next. The shoe flew out of the hole and smacked him on the head.
Ow! What the heck?
Getting an idea, Jeremy grabbed his cellphone, put the phone's camera on record, and tied the phone to the end of his bathrobe belt, making sure the knot was tight enough that the cellphone wouldn't fall out. He then tossed it gently through the hole. He waited a minute---then pulled it back. Something about the way it felt coming back made his skin crawl. He backed away from the hole, keeping as much distance between himself and the phone as he could. When his belt came out of the portal, the cellphone was gone. Instead, a foot-tall teddy bear somehow clung to the belt.
When the teddy bear dropped to the floor of his closet, its eyes glowed angry red and its mouth opened wider than any bear possibly could, revealing razor-sharp teeth--- nothing like a bear's teeth, closer to those of a shark. With a snarl, it attacked, its teddy-bear arms windmilling, while its legs propelled it forward.
For a long second, Jeremy froze with a feeling of unreality, like it was happening to someone else. Someone trapped in one of those science fiction horror movies he didn't even like and he only watched so his friends wouldn't think he was chicken.
Just before the teddy bear reached him, he cried out, stepping backward. Its teeth sank into his foot, going through his running shoe, causing him to fall to the floor in front of his dresser. He kicked out at it desperately with his left foot, sending the bear flying back, to thunk into his bedroom wall next to the poster of his favorite music group, “Uncharted Waters,” a group his older brother thought were some kind of genderqueer losers, even though they were obviously guys. The teddy bear dropped to the floor, unharmed, and charged him again.
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Jeremy pulled himself up off the floor and stepped backward until he bumped into his dresser. He frantically grabbed the hockey stick leaning against his dresser and swung it at the charging teddy bear. The bear tried to dodge at the last second and failed. Slamming against the wall next to his bedroom door, Jeremy's dart board fell off the wall and clattered to the ground.
His brother pounded the wall and shouted something about him keeping it down.
On Jeremy's second swing, the teddy bear bit his stick, sinking its teeth into it and holding on as Jeremy bashed the teddy bear against the floor, again and again, until green goop came out of it, until long after the red glow left the bear's eyes and it stopped moving.
Green goop splattered all over his gray tiled floor and wooden dresser, mixing with the blood droplets from his right foot. It wasn't until he saw his blood everywhere that he realized the bear's razor-sharp teeth had gone well past his running shoe and deep into his foot.
He realized he was shaking. What was going on? What was that thing? And where was his cellphone? He slammed his closet door closed. No way was he leaving that open.
Desperate, he used his nuclear option. He ran to his brother's room and pounded on the door.
After a minute of pounding, Andrew's door was flung open. “What?” Andrew glared vacantly at him. His bloodshot eyes and large pupils made it obvious the 17-year-old was stoned.
“S something in my room bit me,” Jeremy stuttered from shock, still shaking.
Andrew looked down at Jeremy's feet, noticing his torn-apart right shoe and his bleeding foot. “You hurt your foot. Wow. Do I look like Mom? Put a bandage on that thing and quit trailing blood everywhere.”
“Hey, kid. You want a hit?” one of Andrew's friends held out a pipe. “You look like you could use it.”
“Don't even joke about that, bro,” Andrew said. “We share with him, Mom will send me to military school. She would have already if she could afford it. Can't stand that...” Andrew trailed off, grumbling darkly.
Another time Jeremy might have taken issue with his brother's treatment of the woman working two jobs to keep a roof over their heads, but now wasn't the time.
He limped to the bathroom. Adrenaline wearing off, his foot began to hurt. He sat on the toilet, took off his shoe, and slowly peeled off his bloody sock. There was a ring of tooth marks behind his toes all the way around his foot, along with slashes the teeth had made when Jeremy had kicked it away. That small creature sure had a big mouth with very sharp teeth.
The first thing to do was clean it off and sterilize it. Since he didn't know anything about the thing that had bitten him, he would be wise to take no chances. He stood up, put his foot in the sink, and washed it. Then he pulled out the medical kit and covered the still bleeding bite marks with Betadine and wrapped it up in gauze. He wrapped the gauze in medical tape to make the gauze stay. Slipping his bare, but bandaged, foot back into his damaged shoe, he limped back to his brother.
***
“A teddy bear attacked you?” Andrew said, after he'd finished laughing. “Whoa, that's a good one. You sure you didn't trip over it?”
“It wasn't a teddy bear. I said it looked like a teddy bear. It came out of this hole in my closet. Please, you need to check.” There was no way Jeremy was going back to his room by himself.
Grumbling, Andrew reluctantly followed Jeremy to his room. “What teddy bear?”
“It vanished.” Jeremy looked frantically for his attacker's body, but it was gone. So was the green ooze. Nothing left but his blood, a broken hockey stick, and a messy room to show what had happened.
He pulled open the closet door. The inky pool was still there. “You see. It came out of that.”
“Came out of what?” Andrew asked. “The closet? There's nothing there.”
“That.” Jeremy turned on the closet light and entered the closet. “This hole, right here. See?” He pointed at the hole. How could Andrew not see it?
He felt Andrew grab him from behind and push him forward, propelling him directly into the inky pool.
Andrew turned away, ignoring his younger brother's frightened scream, not watching, caring, or noticing his younger brother vanish through the portal. “And you stay there until you chlax and quit being such a basic rodent!”
Andrew pushed Jeremy's dresser against the closet. That little rodent could come out when he'd calmed down and quit acting crazy. “My little brother is such a cringe,” Andrew moaned, rejoining his friends.
The last thing Jeremy heard from behind the portal was the closet door slamming shut.