With every cautious step along the corridor, you fear the boards beneath your feet will creak loud enough to give you away. You hardly dare breathe. You’re sure the predator stalking you through this ruined old house can hear the clamorous pounding of your heart.

Finally, you reach the next turning, praying it won’t take you to yet another fucking corridor. There must be a way out somewhere. You’ve been lost in the aged, crumbling manor for what feels like hours, wandering its winding passages in the dead of night. It was unnerving enough when you and your friends first got here and started exploring... it got increasingly scary when they started to disappear, one by one... and it’s utterly terrifying now that you know there’s a monster lurking in the shadows somewhere, responsible for picking off your friends, now stalking you with the same lethal goal.

Peering round the corner, you see a wide hallway lined with doors, some ajar, some shut. Creeping forwards, you glance anxiously around, trying to choose which route to take. Many of these doors could draw out your nerve-wracking journey even longer, but one could lead to your salvation... or your doom. The ancient hinges are liable to squeal in protest, so you should pick a door that’s already open. You choose the one furthest away, because Sod’s Law dictates it’s the one most likely to lead to safety.

You take one tentative step forward, then another.

You here a rustling above you. A heavy slithering sound, accompanied by a soft hiss.

A thrill of terror goes through you. With a strong sense of dawning dread, you slowly look up.

There, coiling around a beam in the rafters of the high ceiling, is a massive python, leering back down at you. His eyes are a sickly orange, its pupils savage slits. His mouth is gaping widely, the corners turned up into an evil grin, pairs of wickedly-sharp fangs protruding from his upper and lower jaw.

It’s a nightmarish vision - and if it wasn’t bad enough, you can see what appears to be saliva dangling from his lower lip on long, thin strings. It looks like saliva, but you know it isn’t. In the split second you spend staring up in horror at him before your survival instincts kick in and compel you to flee, a tiny speck from his slavering maw falls and lands on your cheek, just below your eye.

There’s absolutely no time to lose. You’ve seen how fast this beast can move - it’s a miracle you’ve evaded it this long. Your companions weren’t so lucky. And now, of course, there’s the new obstacle of the splash of venom trickling down your face like a tear. One droplet was all it took. You can feel numbness spreading through your body, your mind growing foggy and slow. You’ve got seconds left.

Without enough time to reach your original choice, you instead dart for the nearest open door, slamming it shut behind you. You find yourself in a tiny room, the little light you’d had before you shut it out having given you a glimpse of just how confined a space it is. It’s comparable in size to a closet, or a larder. Maybe it was once used as one or the other. You can’t think about that now.

With what little presence of mind you have left, you realise this might be the perfect place to hold out against the mighty serpent. The door opens inwards, so if you brace your back against it, and your feet against the opposite wall, the wall that’s so close...

You don’t have time to complete the line of thought - you already instinctively know where you’re going with it, anyway. You don’t so much sit down, as fall down, your control over your body diminishing faster and faster. In the moments you have left, you manage to prop yourself against the door and plant your feet against the wall.

The venom does the work for you, the potential instrument of your doom instead helping to delay it. It freezes your body rigid, turning you into a stiff, static statue. You’ve seen this happen to your friends. You’ve seen the snake immobilise them, then encircle them, cinching his coils around their bodies, and envelope them in his wide jaw. You didn’t see all of them get eaten - you missed his first few attacks, and once you saw a few more first-hand, you learned pretty quickly to run for your life whenever he was near. But petrified as they were, none of your pals would’ve been able to escape the powerful predator.

It was awful to watch your companions be rendered so helpless, unable to defend themselves. You hated having to run away and leave them, no more able to stop them from being devoured as they were themselves.

But because you saw what happened to them, you’ve seen the venom’s effects. And that’s how you know your legs are like steel bars now, braced between the wall and the door. So there’s no way that door can be opened right now, as long as you’re stuck like this. You’re using yourself as a barricade, and a very effective one, too.

Perhaps while you’re paralysed and shut away in this small space, the python will give up and slither away, seeking out a more accessible meal. You’re pretty sure he’s already eaten everyone else, but he doesn’t necessarily know that. By the time he realises and comes back looking for you, the effects could’ve worn off, and you can make a break for it. Maybe you could even escape this house, this rotting ruin that he’s plainly using as his lair, at long last.

Some time passes, with you frozen on the floor gazing into the pitch-black dark, only able to breathe and blink. How much time, you can’t say. Everything’s hazy, your mind clouded and confused by the venom. You feel dazed, detached, disconnected, your body numb and nerveless, as inert and insensate as if it’s a lifesize porcelain doll. It’s like your consciousness has been divorced from your physical form, and now you’re a mere onlooker, observing your own predicament from a distance.

At last, though, feeling begins to slowly return to you. You can move your eyes, breaking your fixated stare. You can wiggle the tips of your toes and fingers. You can open your mouth, flexing your jaw, slowly stretching it out wide as if imitating your serpentine pursuer.

Your body starts to feel less rigid, relaxing a little more every moment, the stiffness slowly softening. You feel mobility return to your hands, and your feet. Your face is fully animated now. Your arms are starting to feel just a little more slack... as are your legs.

And almost as soon as you notice this, there’s an audible click just above your head - the door handle, turning. And then a thump against the wood behind you, followed by a sustained pressure. Someone - or, more likely, something - is pushing against the door, trying to force it open.

And little by little, your legs - no longer two unyielding bars of steel - are giving way.

No, no, no, no, no. You want to scream, to sob, to beg and plead, but the words won’t come, your vocal chords still mostly paralysed - the best you can manage is a pathetic croaking. That’s the whole problem - the venom’s worn off enough to make you less stiff, less unwaveringly inflexible, but not enough that you can actually move. Not in any meaningful sense. You can’t move enough to defend yourself yet, and by the time you can, it’ll be far too late.

You try to force motion back into your body, to make it move, scrunching up your hands, your feet and your face. It doesn’t do you any good. All you can do is watch your knees rise inexorably higher, as your increasingly pliant legs bend upwards and your butt slowly scoots forwards across the wooden floor.

As soon as the door’s open far enough, the great snake begins to slither through. You still can’t move your head, so you can’t look down and see him enter - but you can hear his heavy trunk slide upon the floorboards. In an almost playful gesture, he licks the back of your hand.

And that’s it again. You’re back to being fully frozen, stiff and rigid, in your new slightly folded pose, an expression of pure, plaintive panic on your paralysed face. Powerless to protect yourself against the python pushing its way into your place of supposed safety.

You watch him wind his way across your torso, his head rising up towards your shoulder, circling around and above your head. His weight presses on your chest, restricting your breathing. Even if the toxin in your blood wore off now, which it won’t, you’d be pinned down, unable to get free.

There’s nothing to be done now, no way to escape. You’re finished.

The awareness of that brings with it a sort of sad serenity, as you resign yourself to your fate. Why make your final minutes any more fraught than they need to be?

You sense his head moving into position above you, see his unhinged jaw widening in your upper periphery. You feel it slip over the top of your head. You see the corner of his mouth slide past your eyes.

And then you’re plunged into deep darkness, hearing the pulsating of his heartbeat, louder even than your own in your ears, feeling his hot, slimy innards surrounding you on all sides.

He swallows more and more of you by the moment - your head, then your shoulders, then your chest and upper arms, then your forearms and your torso... He’s all the way down to your waist now, wrapping up the whole of your top half in his wet, warm guts. If you could only move, you could strike him from the inside, where he’s at his most vulnerable. But of course you can’t move, and, you realise with devastating inevitability, you never will again.

Even in your venom-induced state of physical and mental dissociation, you feel your skin being stung by the serpent’s stomach acids. Thankfully, that’s as bad as it gets. You can’t feel enough of yourself to register any serious pain. You suppose that’s a kindness, in a way - to be subjected to this distant, muted sting, rather than the unimaginable burning agony you would otherwise experience as your flesh is seared from your bones. You can just about find it in yourself, at this point, to be grateful for small mercies.

That circus tent of a mouth slips over your shoe-clad feet, and then finally snaps shut. Now it’s the satisfied snake’s turn to lie still on the closet floor, sighing contentedly as he slowly digests the sizeable morsel nestled in his stomach, stretching his slender body from within. It shouldn’t take too long, though - probably not even as long as you’d been sitting there, stuck and stiff but supposedly safe.

As your limited vision finally fails completely and your erratic heartbeat struggles to a stop, you dimly recall one of the possible uses you’d imagined for that tiny room you’d used as your refuge. One of the last thoughts you ever have is that you were never really safe in there. The snake didn’t need to leave you alone and look for easier prey. All he had to do was wait you out - he must’ve known how long it’d take before his venom started to wear off. You hadn’t barricaded yourself in a secure sanctuary...

All you’d done was store yourself in his larder.