Horrors, oh nameless horrors; the beings that walk this world that we don't know but still fear all the same.

Some would say that it started centuries ago when a hapless and intelligent young man saw the connection between several aspects of the physical world that others did not. Other would argue that it truly started when he first experimented with these connections and brought forth from the darkness a being that was wholly malevolent with only ill intentions. Still more people would argue that it was when this being became unsatisfied with the several hundred people that worshiped it and devoted their lives to it and decided that it wanted more.

But they're all wrong.

The end began a month ago when a seventeen year old girl, Taylor, had come to visit her brother at an old college in the Czech Republic. It took her four days just to get there, traveling by plane and train to the secluded brick buildings of the nameless campus that stood in the middle a forest that didn't have a name.

The final stretch of the journey was made on the boat of an old man who shuddered when Taylor told him where he was going. For nearly the entire length of the journey up the river the hunched old local tried to persuade her to not go, but when it became apparent that she wouldn't be dissuaded he looked her straight in the eye and said, "What ever you do there, girl, don't be goin' to the village. Aht least stay on campus, it's just slightly safer there."

Her brother had greeted her on the rotting boards of the dock where the old man had dropped her off, and instantly she had felt that something was wrong. Matt had been too quiet, not like his normal old self. His smile was convincing around the lips, but his eyes were dead; his hug was mechanical.

As it turned out he had testing so Taylor didn't see him for much of the week and instead spent most of her time exploring the grounds around the pretty much empty dormitory that her brother lived in. There were two other boys in the dormitory, but Taylor rarely saw them because they were often out at late hours of the night and lived in the attic of the six story crumbling brick monster.

She would take long strolls through the seemingly empty campus along streets and walkways that were paved not with concrete but with worn old flagstones and graying bricks. She passed towering bricks dormitories that were sometimes upwards of five stories tall, though they were more often two or three. The windows were usually broken, the remaining glass shards hanging down with a glistening menace. The architecture of these dilapidated buildings was still amazing, quite beautiful really, even for someone like Taylor who would generally care less. The bricks that made up the walls were patterned in such a way that the smaller ones, the lighter and the darker ones, and the larger ones and the minuscule scratches that adorned them all came together in a kaleidoscopic pattern that drew Taylor in and played off the weak sunlight.

But something didn't feel right.

Among a place like this that was seemingly so abandoned the smaller creatures of God (Taylor's family was Roman Catholic, after all) should have been alive and well, crawling amongst the bricks and wooden beams and scampering along the streets. There should have been insects filling the air with a slight hum and spiders spinning the beautiful art of death and birds in the rafters making their nests.

But there were none.

There weren't even plants growing through the cracks of stones and bricks, there to reclaim the land, and Taylor could vaguely understand why. These streets and alleyways had seemed dim at first, though not abnormally so as her first trek of exploration had been in the early hours of the morning, but as the day wore on and the sun rose higher and higher the light stayed the same, even with the sun strong overhead. After hours and hours spent wandering Taylor quite suddenly became acutely aware of physical needs, such as that for food and drink, so she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. It of course told her that there was no signal to be found her, but more than that it told her that it was close to seven. At night. And yet the light was the same.

She began to panic when she saw this, and would have lost all control if a voice at the back of her mind hadn't placed a seed of doubt that her phone was probably just incorrect.

For an hour she tried to retrace her steps, her heart racing as she jogged down the streets that had been so mysterious and friendly before but were now ominous and foreboding. And when all hope seemed to be lost Taylor suddenly found herself on the expansive and slightly overgrown lawn that surrounded her brother's dormitory; she had escaped the unending twilight and entered the dark of night.

Her mind reeling she went inside and to her room and stayed there the rest of the night, thinking of things that might explain what had happened. She finally decided that it had probably just been cloudy all day.

For two days she stayed in the dormitory for not wanting to accidentally find herself in the labyrinth of twilight again even though she told herself that it was simply a curiosity caused by the weather. But on the morning of the third day Taylor again found herself wandering, though, this time on the main roads and paths of the sprawling old campus.

Within a half hour of steady meandering Taylor had found her way back to the molding docks that she had come in on and sat down on the bank to cool her feet in the water. While she was basking in the sun and the river water she spied the outer part of the campus which appeared to be a three meter tall brick wall that separated the campus from the forest. Out of curiosity to see where it went Taylor got up and carried her shoes (her feet were still wet from the water) while she walked along the wall. For ten minutes she walked along the brick wall as it zigged and zagged back and forth. Occasionally it would merge with one of the campus buildings and Taylor would have to walk through the empty rooms of these buildings from one end to the other in order to get to the other side.

Upon coming out the other side of one of these buildings Taylor found herself standing on an empty brick road that was nearly fifteen feet wide and lined with dying trees, the usual crumbling brick sidewalks, and the accompanying ancient brick buildings. The wall, however, didn't continue. Rather, it had turned into a single brick watchtower that had burned down eons ago leaving an unstable shell that was likely to fall in upon itself. This tower overshadowed a metal gate that had long since rusted itself shut, but it appeared to be a good spot to jump the fence, so to speak.

After looking around to make sure no one was watching Taylor grabbed a hold of the top of the gate and somehow managed to clamber over without falling and breaking anything or cutting herself on any sharp and jagged metal. She soon found an overgrown path that soon joined a disused road and followed this with a sense of curiosity – perhaps it might lead to the nearby village where there might be other people not wrapped up in the studies of calculus, dimensional physics and the like. But the first building that she came across could hardly have been a building - rather, it looked more like the forest had grown a part of itself in the shape of a house, walls and all, with toxic looking yellow flowers forming an ironic sort of twisted ivy that climbed up the chimney side. Noxious flowering bushes formed uncomfortable looking chairs draping in flower pattern cloth and from the sink flowed an endless waterfall of tiny blue flowers frozen in time.

The next buildings were around one hundred feet away, and they weren't as badly grown over, but Taylor could barely make out the wooden beams and stone chimneys in the shadow of green and blossoming deathly flowers and thorns.

The preserved buildings seemed to be those right in the middle of the town, and they looked as if they hadn't been lived in in years. The windows were dusty, the doors were hanging on loose hinges.

And yet when Taylor explored them she found that everything looked like it had been abandoned in the middle of, well, everything. The dishes were in the sink sitting in murky water, waiting to be washed. The bones of the chicken were still in the cold oven. The laundry was still waiting to be ironed. Rotting clothes waved in the wind while draped across a moldering rope strung across between two houses. A filthy teddy bear covered in cockroaches waited forever on a fading pink bed for its little girl to come back.

Each of these abandoned lonely homes looked out upon the town square and what looked like a statue commemorating some ancient war or another, but it looked strange, rather like a tree...

And as it turned out, it wasn't a statue at all. It was an obelisk, black and smooth, covered with an odd writing that looked like the bastard child of Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Russian Cyrillic.

And at the top were eight bodies, each impaled on a stake, each strangely well preserved for being out in the open.

Each body also happened to have eyes of maggots, the hair of fungi, each individual hair a tiny sporangia, and the wriggling red lips of worms.

After throwing up Taylor ran away from the place, coming back to the school and scaling the gate again while in a state of panic.

She didn't leave the dormitory for three days.

When she did come out again (only because she had run out of food) she found that she was alone - she could not find anybody else on the campus. There was nobody.

All the maintained dormitories were empty. The main classrooms were empty. The main dining hall? Empty.

As the day wore on and the shadows cast by the sun grew longer Taylor began thinking that she was seeing things, shapes in the shadows, faces in the walls, people in the windows.

As the sun began to set she realized that she was quite far from her brother's dormitory and decided to stay the night in the nearest unlocked building, which was an old cottage tucked in the back yard of two old buildings whose roof was sagging and whose windows were boarded up.

She was able to get a fire going in the crumbling fireplace, and once the door was deadlocked she felt safe. Well, relatively so.

As the sun fell behind the world and the moon rose above it all black clouds came out from hiding and killed the moon, mading the night pitch black.

At approximately midnight Taylor fell asleep while sitting in an old moth eaten chair. She was woken up a half hour later by sounds outside the door.

She listened carefully, and thought she could hear footsteps. Then everything was quiet. And then the chanting began.

The voices were deep and the very air vibrated with their being. The words were not a language known by any sane man, and they bespoke of an evil older than the world itself.

The chanting continued for twenty minutes, the same words repeated over and over, the voices becoming deeper and rougher with every incantation until the words were indistinguishable and the only thing that could be heard, or rather, felt, was the shaking of the earth.

KOTH GRESHD'IN YEMALN SEPH'VERIET

NEETNEVES ETASTRETNI THUOS

Over and over the words were repeated, burying themselves in her mind. Slowly she began to go insane for not being able to do anything to stop it.

Then the fire went out, covering Taylor with darkness. Moments later something hit her on the head, and she went out like a light.

When she awoke she found that she was tied to a cross in such a manner that she was in pain but could stay there for a great long while, days perhaps.

It was very clearly day time, but dark clouds shunned away the sun's light.

It was also very clear that Taylor was on the roof of one of the main buildings, and sixty feet below her students were going on their way to classes.

None of them talked, there was no banter, were no hellos, no laughter.

And then when she looked to her left and then her right Taylor saw something that horrified her - eight other crosses falling away in straight lines, four on either side, and tied to each of them was a sickly, rotting, deathly thin body covered in a writhing mass of flies.

Then Taylor threw up, the vile liquid spilling onto the pavement below.

Nobody looked up.

She screamed at them.

Still nobody looked up.

She kept on screaming anyways, going on for hours until she lost her voice, and then resigning herself to the cross for the moment.

That night she watched as what seemed like everybody on campus gathered in the square below her, dressed in black robes with hoods that hid their faces in shadow.

Then one of them, small and hunched over, departed from the crowd and entered the building.

Taylor watched transfixed as the crowd began drawing something on the old flagstones. She had almost figured out what it was when she felt somebody begin untying her ropes.

When she had been let down onto the roof she turned half expecting to see her brother there to rescue her. Hope surged through Taylor and she almost smiled. And then she turned around, but, no, sadly, it was not her brother. Instead she was faced with the hunched over figure, their face invisible behind the shadow of their hood.

Taylor tried to fight against them, tried to escape. And she probably would have been able to make it, but the person grabbed her by the wrist with a vice-like grip that was too strong for what they were, instantly snapping the bones in her arm.

In her fear and anger Taylor lashed out against them and one of her nails caught on their black hood and pulled it away at the same instant that the moon fought out against the clouds and managed to shine through onto the thing's face, illuminating it and burning it in the single most terrifying moment of Taylor's life.

It wasn't a person behind the shadow. No, not a proper person at least. Their face seemed to be a skull with skin shrunken around it and a ridge of bone along the top. The eyes were sunken and yet fiery and curved in the strange Cleopatrian style and the skin was hairless and covered in a strange sort of slimy grime.

The thing hissed and its cracked and bloody lips pulled back in a twisted sneer revealing multiple rows of long and jagged teeth, many of which were cracked, black, or broken. The thing's head came closer and closer, its long, thin tongue probing the air before it, and Taylor, in her state of utter terror, became slowly aware that she was and had been screaming for the past thirty seconds at least and her lungs were in dire need of fresh air.

The thing pulled suddenly back and hit Taylor across the face hard with an open hand, sending her into a dazed state of shock where she could only watch and wait as she was dragged across the roof, down several flights of stairs, and out into the middle of the finished work that the amassed group of people had started mere minutes ago.

It was then that she realized what it was and where she recognized it from. It was in the bricks. The streets that she had wandered for hours on end with the buildings made of fading red bricks placed in strange patterns with varying colors and shapes and sizes had all been repeating this pattern again and again, across every wall and column the same bizarre geometrical patterns had been repeated, and the scratches hadn't been scratches but the most delicate of carvings repeating the same blasphemous and heretical scenes of heathenist rituals and perverse acts of worship of the dark gods.

Here Taylor's mind seemed to shut off and she was only vaguely aware of being dropped roughly onto the ground in the middle of the patterns and scene drawn in chalk and blood, and was only mildly disgusted by the noise of the bones in her broken arm breaking even more. When the group began chanting the same words that they had used the night that they had taken her from the cottage the noise only echoed quietly in her head, the reverberations from before absent.

When the same verse was chanted again for the fiftieth time Taylor thought nothing of it, and when the sky disappeared at the end of the sixtieth repetition of those cursed words and the crowd around her seemed to become amazingly distant she was only mildly interested.

But when a hole seemed to rip in the air in the same shape as the intricate work around her and a grotesque being stepped through from nowhere something clicked in Taylor's mind and the mental cushion of apathy that had been protecting her disappeared.

The being was tall and lithe and its body showed only the barest signs of having a humanoid form. It's legs were thin and appeared to be made of stone, and the skin on its body was stretched over countless ribs and bones like a sheet over a pair of resting lovers. Its mouth was an exaggerated version of the hunched figure that had brought her here, and when its seven thin curved eyes saw Taylor this lip less line curled backwards revealing several times more teeth than the hunched figure had had.

When it saw that Taylor's arm had been broken, though, it grabbed the hunched figure around the neck with and grotesquely muscled arm and tentacled fingers and threw it threw the hole in the air.

The being's mouth opened again and an unwholesome noise came out that caused Taylor to writhe in pain while the seemingly far away hooded figures watched.

Still they watched, doing nothing, as the creature advanced, towering over the sobbing Taylor.

The being gazed at her for a moment, pondering, and the reached forwards with a tentacled hand and began to rip off her clothing in one deft movement.

She was unconscious before the being, he, had finished tearing.