Death in Devil's Chasm

by Kooshmeister

Jonny Quest ran as if the devil himself were hot on his heels. It was the next best (worst?) thing, he supposed. A powerful, meat-eating dinosaur which his compuport, before he'd lost it, had identified as a Vastatosaurus rex was right behind him. He didn't need to see it to know it was right behind him, didn't dare look back, but he could hear the tyrant behind him, the huge body crashing through the trees, making the earth shake with each step it took. The preteen blonde boy was armed with a large knife, which he clutched in one hand, but he may as well have been completely unarmed. Against something as huge and terrifying as the V-rex, a modern day equivalent to the feared Tyrannosaurus rex, he may as well have tried to fight a crocodile with a toothpick. He was tiring already, his legs aching, but still he raced on, tearing through the dense foliage of the primordial jungle. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it was tearing through him, as each pass through a thick, thorny patch of unidentifiable plantlife, each brush past a jagged, low-hanging branch tore at Jonny's skin and clothes, ripping his black shirt and his jeans to ribbons. It even cut into his skin. Blood mixed with sweat as it ran down his gradually more and more naked torso.

As he ran, feeling the ground grow softer beneath his sneakered feet, Jonny reflected on how he'd gotten into this mess. As usual, he'd accompanied his father on one of his adventures to the remote Skull Island, where it was said giant apes once lived and modern day descendants of the dinosaurs still flourished. A true lost world right out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Nobody had visited the island since back in the 30s when the Denham expedition had ended with the infamous King Kong running amok in New York City. There'd been rumors that the island had been reclaimed by the sea, but Dr. Quest, Jonny's father, had refused to believe them, and after several years of searching, he found an ancient man who'd been a sailor aboard the Venture that fateful voyage, and managed to coax from him not only a more detailed account of the expedition than even Carl Denham had been willing to give to the papers back in the day, but also, more or less, the exact location of the island itself. Jonny hadn't been terribly interested, as he'd considered himself too old to find dinosaurs interesting. But he went with his father as he always had, with the rest of the gang coming along in the Quests' private jet, which landed inland on the island a few miles away from where the native village was supposed to be.

Things had gone wrong almost immediately. The natives didn't take too kindly to the interlopers and attacked the group. A few gunshots in the air courtesy of Race had scattered them, and the Quests made the fateful decision to try and evade their pursuers by running through the village towards the huge wall that the old sailor had described, rather than running back towards the jet. The door was long gone, destroyed, apparently, by Kong all those years ago. With the regrouping natives hot on their heels, the Quests had rushed through onto what was known as the Plain of the Altar, where women were regularly sacrificed to Kong back when the monstrous gorilla was still alive. The natives elected not to follow them. They quickly found out why, as a huge prehistoric monster, something like a Triceratops but with a clubbed tail like an Ankylosaurus, had attacked them. Bullets from Race's gun had done nothing. The charging beast separated the group. Dr. Quest, Race and Jessie went one way, and Jonny, Hadji and Bandit the dog went another. In the wild flight, Jonny lost sight of Bandit entirely and hadn't seen him since. After losing the Tricera-whatsit, the boys had stopped to catch their breath, and Jonny decided it might be prudent to study the information his father had added to the compuport he still carried after all these years, and gotten a basic rundown of the dinosaurs that were theorized to exist on Skull Island, courtesy of a copy of 4-DAC's consciousness which still remained in the small computer even after he'd been uploaded back into his original body.

The boys' rest was short lived. The V-rex appeared shortly thereafter. They tried to hide behind a huge fallen log, but Jonny had sneezed, drawing the predator's attention. Suddenly, cavernous jaws were snapping at him. At a suggestion from Hadji, they'd run in different directions, as the dinosaur couldn't possibly follow both of them. It'd just been Jonny's rotten luck that the thing had chosen to pursue him and not his adopted brother. He'd lost his compuport when racing across a shallow stream; he'd slipped on a slimy stone and dropped it, and it'd been swept away by the rushing water. Rather than risk his life attempting to retrieve it, he'd finished crossing the stream and now found himself being run down by the ferocious beast. He cursed the decision to even come to this hell-spawned island!

And so he ran from the dinosaur as the jungle gave up to a prehistoric swamp, losing his shoes and socks to the sucking mud, jagged rocks and rotting logs ripping his pants, shirt torn to ribbons by thorns and tree branches until he was basically naked, scratched up, a little bloody, his bare body covered in a mixture of sweat, mud and slimy fetid water, and the further in he went, the deeper the water got, the harder it became to extract his feet from the sucking mud, as with each step his pursuer took it feels as if the very world quakes under the predator's power. He was beginning to feel he was going to have to end up facing a sadistic choice, that he'd stumbled into a bog so deep and sticky it was going to suck him under completely unless he pulled back... but to pull back meant giving himself to the ravenous beast. He was convinced that he was going to die... and that his only say in the matter was how. And yet luck was with him. In a desperate act, he heaved himself deeper into the quicksand, grabbing a partially submerged log, feeling the mud's deadly grip sucking him down, thrusting his face up as his lips and tongue tried to get one final breath of air before he was pulled under. Schlluuurkkk! Pulling against the log, he managed to wrench himself free and struggle on through the thick ooze, gasping and cursing. It got shallower the further he went, and he finally dared a glance back over his shoulder, seeing the V-rex hesitate at the edge of the bog. Did the beast dare follow him in...?

It didn't. But it didn't give up, either. For even as Jonny, naked except for the ragged remnants of his shirt and jeans, barefoot, amazingly still clutching his knife, grateful for the fact he still had his modesty in the form of his white briefs, staggered out of the swamp onto firmer ground, he could hear the predator heading off to the right, intending to go around the swamp and catch up to him. It'd take the thing a few minutes... and so he had time to race ahead and find a hiding spot. If he was quick. He ran, pushing his tired, beaten body on. Little did he suspect that he was indeed destined to escape the V-rex... but only so he could meet a much longer, more horrifying fate than being eaten by a dinosaur or even smothered in quicksand, as he was to be terrorized in the dark depths of depravity and digested alive over the course of a long day. The longest day of his life. And the last.

As he plunged on, desperate to put some distance between himself and the meat eater, Jonny noticed too late that the ground was sloping a bit. A deceptive rise of tall grass and leafy plants hid the fact that the incline became a steep slope a mere two feet ahead... and Jonny ran right through, heedless, and almost ran right off the edge. He managed to slide to a halt, waving his arms frantically, almost dropping the knife, yelping as he beheld the yawning abyss known to the locals as Devil's Chasm. On both sides it was a gentle but steep, slippery-looking slip downwards into a foggy morass tangled with knotty vines and roots. It was said to be bottomless. From where he stood, Jonny certainly couldn't see any signs of a bottom, but he knew there had to be one. His father had theorized that its depth was an exaggeration. As to why it was called Devil's Chasm (or the native language's equivalent thereof), none knew; the old sailor who Dr. Quest had gotten most of his information from hadn't been among the party who accompanied Carl Denham and Jack Driscoll inland, and so although he knew that something lay deep in that pit, he couldn't say what; the survivors hadn't volunteered and he hadn't asked. Jonny wasn't exactly keen on finding out for himself. Backing up, careful not to slip in the mud, lest he slide in, he started looking for another way around, even as he heard his huge reptilian pursuer crashing through the trees behind him to his right.

As far as he could tell, the crevasse stretched for several miles in either direction. There was no way across from what he could see. Supposedly it had once been bridged by a fallen log, but the log was long gone now. Jonny was going to have to double back and try and circle around the V-rex, try to make his way back to Hadji and the others. Even as he was formulating this plan, it was rendered completely pointless as the V-rex exploded from the trees, making Jonny spin around, nearly losing his balance and falling backwards into the pit. He screamed. Salivating for its meal of boy meat, the dinosaur crouched low on its haunches, tail raised, and began advancing towards him, a keen, evil intelligence in its beady eyes telling Jonny the thing knew its prey was trapped. He turned and looked back down in the pit with its mist-shrouded depths. It seemed he was going to have to make a sadistic choice after all. Certain death in the jaws of the meat-eater... or take a literal leap into the unknown... and hope something broke his fall. They were his only options. Sweating, he sat down and scooted along on his butt so that he slid over the curved edge of the cliff rather than leaping down. Behind him, he heard the "clack" of the snapping jaws as the dinosaur lunged at him and bit into thin air. The slope's incline increased more sharply, and soon the boy was sliding down from his own weight and momentum, faster, then much faster, until finally he was tumbling head over heels down the side of the steep gorge, plunging uncontrollably down into Devil's Chasm to find out what awaited him a the bottom, after escaping from the horrible jaws of the V-rex.

Or had he...?

As he tumbled, he glanced up. In whirling, dizzy glimpses, he could see the dinosaur standing at the edge of the cliff, and hoped against hope the predator wouldn't try to follow him down or accidentally fall in. If it did, then it would surely tumble down onto him and crush him. Fortunately, after another tumble where all he saw was the side of the pit for a few seconds, he got a final disorienting view of the increasingly narrower and narrower gap above, and the V-rex was gone, apparently having given him up. But he had little time to celebrate or think of anything else but pain and panic as his young, nearly naked form was hurled ever downwards. He kept hold of the knife. Suddenly, he stopped. It was a bizarre sensation. He halted so suddenly that all the wind should've been knocked out of him, but it wasn't; instead, despite the abruptness of the stop, it had a kind of yielding "sproing" to it, and he actually bobbed in midair for a moment. He was on his back staring up. Although he couldn't see down and behind him, he knew for a fact he hadn't hit bottom yet. It took him a moment to realize that his fall had been broken by an enormous spider web that was stretched across the breadth of the chasm, having been hidden from view from above because it blended in with the fog at the bottom. Droplets of dew dappled its thick, cable-like webs. At first Jonny breathed a sigh of relief... but then his heart began pounding in his chest as he realized that based on his experience, giant spider webs often meant giant spiders. And sure enough, one such especially large, ugly specimen crawled from a narrow crevice in the side of the cliff wall and began scuttling across the bouncy web towards him. Its body was easily as big as he was, and the span of its eight hairy legs made it even larger. Its fangs glistened hungrily with venom for the meat that had fallen into its trap. Jonny screamed, wrenching one arm free, slashing wildly with the knife, trying to keep the huge arachnid at bay even as he struggled to break the sticky, glue-like grip of the web.

The boy strained and twisted, his eyes wide with fear. He'd never known such horror as he now felt watching that enormous spider scuttling towards him. As he thrashed, he was able to, bit by bit, wrench himself free from the sticky ropes that comprised the web, struggling to get himself into an upright position instead of laying on his back, exposed. The spider hesitated as the blade of the knife slashed through the air in front of it, wary of the fact the prey was armed. But it didn't stop entirely and continued advancing on Jonny, albeit more cautiously. Revulsion shuddered through the boy as the hairy legs touched his. In another few seconds, the creature would be upon him, and already he could see its bloated, bulging abdomen curling underneath itself, spinnerets ready to spray forth more sticky ropes to web him up. He wasn't going to let that happen. Jonny Quest would not die like this, like some hapless fly or beetle in an overgrown spider's web! Gritting his teeth, he managed to wrench himself upwards and stabbed down with the knife, jamming the blade into one of the spider's many eyes. The thing shrieked as ichor-like blood flowed freely. Jonny twisted the blade and then yanked it free. The spider backed off, shielding its face with its pedipalps.

This was his chance! Working to turn himself over onto his side, feeling his briefs tear as the web's sticky residue refused to relinquish them, Jonny hacked at the web with the knife. It wasn't easy to cut. It was like trying to slice through spun steel. But with enough desperate hacks, stabs and slices, Jonny was able to tear a hole big enough for him to slip through, and, with a yelp, he dropped down, ignoring the embarrassment that came with the fact he was torn right out of his briefs, the underwear left stuck in the web above, and he fell... stopping in midair with another "sproing" to dangle upside-down. Damn it! One of his ankles was still caught. He twisted, swinging naked back and forth, as the spider, recovering, crawled over and began attempting to follow him through the hole he'd made to retrieve him. Slashing wildly upwards, the boy tore his ankle loose from the web at long last, and dropped down, falling deeper into the pit, into the thick mist.

Tumbling through the air, losing his knife, the boy's descent was arrested by the thick, spongy vines which he bounced off of one by one, ensuring he wouldn't reach the ground at such a high rate of speed. The mist turned out to be just a dense layer a few feet above the actual bottom. The ground here was densely-packed mud and silt interspersed with stagnant, foul puddles of scummy water. Jonny landed feet-first and would've broken his legs if not for the fact the silty earth was so soft he plunged into it as if it were thick, viscous pudding, sinking in up to his thighs. After recovering from the shock of this awkward and unusual landing, the boy squirmed, trying to extract himself from the sticky, sucking earth which had broken his fall but which also seemed unwilling to give him up. He strained, arching his back, doing his best to ignore the fact he was somehow getting an erection from the exertion, his young cock rising to stand stiff and proud, gritting his teeth in frustration. He gasped as he managed to get one leg free, and then froze as he looked around. He was surrounded by death. Death everywhere. The discarded exoskeletons and shells of many unfortunate insects littered the ground around him. As well as the bones of vertebrates, lizards and small mammals. Some, no doubt, had dropped down from the giant spider feasting above, but Jonny knew that something else must be lurking down here to produce this many discarded remains.

Clickety click click click!

The boy tensed. He wasn't alone at the pit bottom. He'd been right about all those discarded carapaces, shells and bones. Something... no, some things were down here, and he felt a horror creeping its way up his spine as he began to see movement, slow at first, in the dark recesses of the pit bottom. Things were emerging into the murky light. Things that were hungry. Hungry for him. The clicking was from an enormous crab twice the size of the spider. There were huge, warty, diseased-looking lizards as well, along with giant centipedes and things like centipedes, but with wriggling tentacles like those of an octopus in lieu of legs. And crickets. Lots and lots of crickets of varying sizes. The final horror was a great crawling bulk that slid down the side of the cliff wall, revealing itself to be an enormous octopus that had adapted to life on land. The thing was easily the largest of the creatures, with vile, grasping tentacles. It seemed as if this pit was the breeding ground for the rottenest things on foul Skull Island, and they were all coming out in response to Jonny's landing. Every disgusting scavenger and parasite was crawling out of every single deep, dark crevice, clicking, hissing and snapping, and while many were content to feast on each other, most of them, it seemed, only had eyes for Jonny. There was fresh boy meat in their domain, and they wanted it. Wanted him.

He wailed in forlorn despair, but managed to wiggle his other leg free of the mud before the horde had descended upon him. Spotting his knife among some bones, he grabbed it, as well as a rusty old machete, probably dropped by one of the original Venture crew who'd fallen down here years before. Now Jonny understood why they called it Devil's Chasm, and why none of the survivors from the 30s had wanted to talk about what they'd seen and experienced down here. He'd fallen into a hellish netherworld full of crawling insect demons. As they closed in on him, he swiped at them with the blades. They kept their distance for the most part, but continued advancing. His chance to escape, or at least for a reprieve from their impending attack, came with the octopus grabbed one of the lizards rather than him, and the reptile's frenzied struggles sent the other pit denizens scurrying to the sides, creating and opening, one Jonny wasn't about to waste. He charged through the gap and ran down the long tunnel of the ravine, bare feet splashing in murky water that was getting gradually deeper. He noticed but didn't care. As long as he put that vile horde behind him. But he was to learn too late that once again he'd escaped from one death only to stumble into another, as a much more vile horde awaited him. He slowed, noticing the murky surface of the water beginning to bubble and churn slowly, and big lumps that he'd assumed were boulders or clumps of earth began to bulge and undulate... and rise up.

For a moment Jonny stood utterly transfixed by what he was witnessing as the fleshy mounds stirred and arose. At first the only comparison his mind could find for the things was bean bags or overstuffed garbage bags that glistened with slime. Slugs was his next guess. Really huge slugs. But then as he got a look at their somewhat knobby, wrinkly front ends with puckered openings for mouths, he grimaced as he thought of uncircumsized penises. Big, bloated, diseased uncircumsised penises. There were five or six of them of varying sizes, with the smallest being about the length of one of his arms and the largest being at least three times his size and as big around as a huge fridge. He took a reflexive step back, glancing over his shoulder, and was surprised to discover that the horde of hideous creatures that had been so dead set on descending upon him and devouring him only moments ago had not followed him down the length of the chasm. It wasn't that they were merely content to eat each other; although that was occurring, more than a few of the crabs, spiders, crickets, lizards and other horrors lingered, tense, uneasy, as they watched Jonny, as if they wanted to come for him but didn't dare. Another shudder of fear crept up the boy's spine as he realized these slug things lived in an area devoid of any other life. This area of Devil's Chasm was theirs, and none dared approach. And he was soon to find out why.

He turned back towards the creatures and watched with bug-eyed horror as first one, then another, and then all of them "unfolded" in the same manner. That puckered, wrinkly opening at their front swelled outwards and parted and a pinkish red tube of flesh slide out. At the end was a gaping maw. The maw itself was toothless, drooling obscenely, but the area around and beneath it was ringed in forward-curving spikes or teeth. The tubes kept sliding out. There seemed to be no end to them. Just how far deep down into the things' bodies did they go? They waves around, bobbing in the air; the creatures were effectively blind and deaf, but were highly attuned to smell and movement, the most perfectly adapted of all the pit creatures to life in the nearly lightless, murky gloom at the bottom of Devil's Chasm. If Jonny still had his compuport, 4-DAC would've told him immediately what they were; one of the island's most vile creatures, Carnictises. Their name meant "vile meat weasel" and they were essentially parasitic creatures like tapeworms that had evolved into becoming huge scavengers... and opportunistic predators. And here before them in this blonde boy was quite an opportunity. One of the hungry Carnictises were [i]not[/i] going to let pass them by. Almost as one entity they surged forwards with a grotesquely graceful undulating movement, their toothy, penis-like mouth tubes reaching for him, gulping greedily at the air. In seconds, they'd surrounded him. What was creepiest about them is that whereas all the other pit creatures made a variety of noises such as hisses, clicks and screeches, these things were utterly silent but for the lewd sucking noises their mouths made, and the splashes their bodies made in the fetid water they slithered through. It was unnerving.

Jonny steeled himself up. He was Jonny Quest! He wasn't going down without a fight! All around, thick vines dangled down the sides of the chasm. If he could fight his way free of the Carnictises and reach a vine, he could climb up to safety. He was naked and would have to explain how that happened upon being reunited with the rest of the team, but that could wait. He stabbed down with his small knife at the nearest Carnictis. The thing recoiled briefly, but then its mouth tube darted forwards again. It struck Jonny's wrist. The knife went flying away. Jonny never saw it again. But at least he still had the machete. He hacked down with it and the rusty blade, having lost none of its sharpness, sliced the grisly pink tube in half. It dropped with a splash. The Carnictis, deprived of its only method of eating, reeled back, its bulky body performing a heaving, gruesome dance of panic and pain, and two of its brethren turned on it, latching onto it like leeches to suck it dry of his vital fluids. The chopped off feeding tube flopped around in the shallow puddle at Jonny's feet like a fish that'd washed up on shore. He grimaced. Feeling something brush his arm, he jerked back and sidestepped, swinging the machete at another of the tapeworm-like things, nicking its feeding tube but not severing it; the thing reared back, giving the boy a more respectful distance. Behind it was the largest of the group, the fridge-sized one.

The smaller of the two creatures again lunged at Jonny. Carnictises had simple minds and short memories. It had already forgotten the cut it'd received to its mouth-tube and all it knew now was ravenous hunger. Jonny swung with the blade once more, but two things happened in quick succession which doomed the boy and ensured he'd never leave Devil's Chasm alive. Or at all. He overbalanced with his swing, missing the attacking worm, whose extended maw struck him in the bare belly, and he also stepped on the severed feeding mouth tube of the one he'd chopped off earlier, his bare foot sliding on its slick surface. With a yelp, the boy tumbled forwards, onto and over the attacking Carnictis, effectively somersaulting over its back, and landed with a slimy splash in the stinking water right in front of the other, larger creature. Slime dripped and dribbled off its heaving form in thick rivulets to drizzle down on Jonny as the creature lifted itself up a bit more, its feeding tube slithering down towards the boy. Screaming, Jonny felt for the handle of the machete and found thin air; the weapon was gone. He struggled up, managing to rise to one knee as though in a gesture of supplication to the creature, as the fanged maw slithered down to touch the boy's face. Jonny continued trying to rise but he got no further and in fact "stood up" into the yawning maw of the thing as the tip of the tube stretched and blossomed like a hideous, fanged flower and spread over his terrified face and blonde-haired head. In seconds, he'd been swallowed to the neck, and his entire world was dark, fleshy wetness. He screamed muffledly, flailing his hands in the air, grabbing at the slick tube and struggling to pull it off, his efforts deterred both by the sharp teeth and by the fact the skin was so slick that he couldn't get a grip. To his amazement and horror, his cock was still very hard, and in fact ached more pleasantly than it had in a long while. Was he actually being turned on by this?! Ugh!

Watching from the sidelines, the other pit creatures, including the other Carnictises, withdrew; the boy meat had been claimed, and once a Carnictis, especially a big one, had ahold of its food, there was no stopping it. A few of the smaller creatures could've scurried over and taken bites out of Jonny, but they didn't dare risk being eaten by the other Carnictises. The fetid pool at that end of the pit was a place of death in a place of death, where even the other horrors of Devil's Chasm dared not go. The Carnictis feasted on Jonny, already sucking his juices from his face and head even as the groping mouth-tube wormed its way down his neck and spread itself over his shoulders, forcing his arms together at his sides. All the thing was was appetite incarnate. Vile ooze dribbled out around the fang-ringed mouth to slide down Jonny's naked body as he was devoured, and the sucking tube tugged the boy against the thing's belly. The one he was soon to fill. He gasped out inside the flesh tube as he felt himself squished against the worm, begging and praying for something, anything, to happen that would interrupt the monster's feeding and spare him from this awful fate. But it was not to be. And he was still shamefully aroused at the prospect of his own slimy demise, cock bobbing in the air and then against the Carnictis' belly as he was dragged up, pulled deeper into that maw, the lengthy feeding tube now bulging with a nearly perfect outline of the lad's upper body. Slime oozed down over his bare lower body from the worm above, and he hit his orgasm, spewing forth a thick load of hot sticky cum as his body did a pleasurably terrified dance of desperation and despair the further and further he was dragged in. He'd now been pulled into a standing position, the slurping, greedy mouth eating its way down his bare, sweaty torso, saliva and other juices collecting in his belly button, oozing down onto and around his still spurting cock, and down into the crack of his ass, flowing down his bare legs. The mouth swallowed him to his knees in one huge glorping gulp, even as his cock shot its last splurt of cum, and then Jonny felt a stomach-churning lurch as he was lifted up and thrown back and up, the Carnictis flinging its feeding tube up into the air so it stuck straight up. Gravity and hideous gulping motions aided in sliding Jonny's legs in, and then, when all that was left visible to the outside world of the pit were his feet, the tube slowly retracted back into the body, the puckered, wrinkly opening it had emerged from sucking greedily on Jonny's toes before they were slurped out of sight.

The fat belly gurgled greedily for its meal and got it. Jonny was deposited into the thing's stomach for processing. Since Carnictises led relatively lazy, leisurely lives, there was no need for anything in their nature which required speed, and so it was with how they processed food. Jonny Quest would digest slowly and painfully for several days, his screams muffled by layers of flabby worm fat, heard by no one deep down in that chasm of horrors. On such a huge island, no one would even think to look in this particular area for him, and not even his remains would be recovered, for the Carnictises digested what they ate bones and all. Jonny's slow and torturous death began in earnest as the acidic slime began working its way into and through him. Ignoring the muffled screams, the unintelligible sorrowful moaning, the Carnictis and its brethren settled back down into the muddy water and returned to a position of rest, as the other pit creatures, feeling robbed of their meat, reluctantly returned to their burrows, cracks and crevices, the huge octopus last of all, crabbing a few of the crickets with its tentacles to devour as it went. Devil's Chasm soon fell silent again. A few feet up above, the spider busied itself with repairing the damage done to its web, removing and discarded the torn underwear and other bits of clothing. Elsewhere in the jungle, though Quest Team searched high and low, they could not find Jonny, with even Bandit unable to pick up his scent. The deepest, darkest depths of Skull Island had claimed the boy forever. It had been his last adventure. His last quest.

The End.