The Cabin Is Always Hungry (A Dungeon Core Horror Slasher)

DEAD PACIFICA
Part 1

Somewhere in New York City…

One Year After the Death Core's Birth.

New York City in July was a hellscape.

By late afternoon the heatwave had thickened into something sentient, stretching heavy arms across Manhattan, and pinning the city down beneath a wet, humid, smothering palm. The skyscrapers shimmered like half-melted crayons left on a dashboard. Steam rose in hazy ribbons from manholes and fissures in the pavement. The air itself tasted like burnt rubber, sweat, and something metallic no one could make out, and never would.

Crowds swarmed the sidewalks in a fast, miserable tide. Office workers trudged along with sweat-dampened collars. Tourists choked every corner ever since the pandemic lockdown had been lifted a couple of years ago, and their numbers seemed to grow exponentially with each passing month. Street vendors hawked cold bottles of water and greasy hotdogs. A subway grate exhaled a breath hotter than the devil's armpit. Sirens from an ambulance and police cruisers wailed in the distance with the enthusiasm of a city that had simply been crying out for help ever since the heatwave began a couple of days ago.

New York City was alive, cranky, loud, and sticky with sweat and body odor.

And Eugene Reilly hated every second of it.

He sat in the back of his black SUV, the air conditioning blasting cold air across his face hard enough to sting his cheeks. His driver, Bachmann, drummed impatient fingers on the steering wheel as traffic stood still for several minutes now, locked in a gridlock stretching from the East Side straight to whatever circle of hell this intersection belonged to.

Ahead of them, two vehicles were twisted in the middle of the crosswalk—a city bus whose front bumper had been peeled open like a sardine tin and a Honda Civic sitting crooked several feet away on a blown-out tire. Glass littered the pavement like crushed ice. A wall of honking ricocheted between buildings from impatient drivers. There were two ambulances nearby, medics on the scene, cops and firefighters trying to keep the curious crowd from closing in.

Eugene checked the time on his watch. He exhaled a long, flat sigh.

I'm late.

He couldn't be late today.

Not when The Collector was expecting him.

He stared out the tinted window. At forty-two years old, partner at the prestigious law firm of Dunning, Keller & Reilly—though the name "Reilly" only appeared on the wall plaque because Eugene had bled for it, groveling and smiling through clenched teeth for fifteen years. He managed portfolios bigger than small nations, navigated corporate crimes with surgical precision, and kept secrets that could topple boardrooms.

Yet here he was, stuck in traffic like every other schmuck in Midtown.

And he hadn't even mentioned the other job yet; the one that truly demanded his devotion.

The Cult of Astaroth.

The Seat.

The Collector.

Even thinking about him sent pin-pricks slide down his spine.

"I hope he is in a good mood," he muttered.

"Sir?" Bachmann glanced back through the rearview mirror.

"Nothing. Just—Jesus Christ, how long is this going to take?"

"Hard to say. Cops are redirecting traffic up ahead. Sorry, sir."

He waved him off, gesturing that everything was fine. Though his frustrations remained.

His phone buzzed—Margaret.

Of course it was.

His wife's text popped up across the screen like a small, pastel-colored grenade: Are we still going to Mom's this weekend? Need to confirm ferry times so we can all go together.

Eugene let the words hang there, pulsing softly with that awful little blue iMessage glow. Martha's Vineyard. Another weekend at his mother-in-law's oversized coastal monstrosity with weathered shingles, nautical décor, and a house that smelled permanently of lemon wipes and bitchy judgement from the hag of the east. The trip was a summer tradition that refused to die, no matter how many times Eugene wished it would. He wished he'd just go fishing at Montauk rather than spend a long weekend with Margaret's sisters and her mother who all seemed to regenerate themselves like some kind of wealthy, New England hydra—same pearl necklaces and earrings, same blowout, same medium-cut blonde hair, same pastel and beige clothes, same gossip about who's got more money and which family to cozy up to this summer.

Eugene pictured Margaret at home right now in the apartment, barefoot, already two glasses into a bottle of sauvignon blanc and three pills in of benzos, sitting on their cream-colored sectional with daytime TV glowing against her bored, meticulously-curated face. She'd be lounging like an exhausted swan, wearing a cashmere throw as the AC was set to "arctic tundra." A woman so used to drifting through life in a haze of charity luncheons and wellness retreats that conversations had become optional, maybe even optional for years now.

This wasn't the first time Margaret had asked him about this. She wanted the whole family to arrive on the island together. It was important for the image. For their sons.

God, his sons.

Eugene imagined Brandon, his eldest son, at Dartmouth studying law, probably sleeping in some woman's dorm right now, convinced his life would be golden if Eugene's name and wallet opened doors for him once he graduated from university. And Connor, his youngest—God help that boy—upstate, hiding from reporters while his fraternity brothers spun blameless stories after one pledge died from alcohol poisoning and cardiac arrest from a house party his son hosted. Eugene paid six lawyers and a team of crisis publicists to keep that mess contained.

But right now? With traffic locked, sweat prickling the back of his neck, and a meeting with The Collector looming like a blade?

The Vineyard, his wife, and his family were the absolute last thing on his mind.

He slid the phone back into his pocket. He made a note in his head to answer her later. Not too long or else she'd make a fuss about it, and he didn't want to get into another fight. The last one lasted a whole month.

"Pull over," he said suddenly.

"Sir?"

"I'll walk the rest of the way. It's only four blocks."

"Uh, in this heat, sir?"

"Yes, in this heat." Eugene jabbed a finger toward the curb. "Pull. Over."

Bachmann obeyed.

The moment the door cracked open, New York slapped him in the face with a wave of what felt like boiling air. It wrapped around him, humid and angry. Car horns blared. A food cart vendor traded barbs with a complaining customer. Somewhere nearby, a man shouted at another for stepping on their shoe. The sidewalk quaked under the rhythm of boots, heels, sandals, and sneakers. A cyclist shot past him with a swear, a messenger bag thumping by their side. And a rat darted across the gutter, dragging the other half of a bagel almost twice its size like a gladiator carrying a trophy.

Eugene straightened his shirt, adjusted his tie, and wiped the sweat forming on his temple before merging into the human current heading downtown for another four blocks. I can do four blocks. He willed his feet to go faster just to get out of the oppressive heat. The city swallowed him whole nonetheless.

By the time Eugene turned the final corner onto East 72nd street, the city's noise seemed to dim. The building rose above the street like a fortress. An opulent pre-war giant, all limestone and carved lintels, its façade polished to a pale, regal sheen that caught the sun like drying old bones. Brass-framed windows winked in the heat and black wrought-iron balconies curled like ornate, skeletal ribs, exemplifying the building's aura of power and old money.

The place had been lovingly restored to look like a high-end museum on the lower floors—and it was, technically. The Vanne Rook Museum, a private art-and-antiquities collection that was surprisingly open to the public given The Collector's obsessive desire for such rare toys and that the entire collection alone was worth billions. It was curated with such refined taste that art critics swooned and historians argued over the nature of its rarities. People joked that the Collector must have a time machine. Several countries had requested (more like demanded) for these rare treasures back to their homeland. Of course, The Collector refused and his pockets became a strong shield against these artifacts from ever leaving his hands. Some countries were totally unaware at first that these artifacts in his stockpile even existed, much less belonged to their ancestral history.

Or maybe he really has a time machine, Eugene thought.

Once inside, the marble lobby was a refrigerator compared to the hellscape outside. Cool air poured over Eugene as he stepped in, smelling faintly of citrus polish, roses, old wood, and leather to evoke nostalgia to all the guests.

Tourists gathered in clumps, reading off from banners announcing new exhibitions like: Treasures of the Hellenistic East; Mysteries of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty; and Strange Relics of Northern Mesopotamia.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

All of it a front.

All of it a fancy stage built on top of a ritual pit for many years now.

Eugene threaded through the crowd. Docents in dark-blue blazers, security guards built like retired linebackers, and archivists with key rings jangling at their hips nodded to him as he walked past. They all knew his face. Knew his name. Knew who he served.

As he passed the threshold dividing the public access area from the restricted staff corridors, one of the guards, a tall woman with a shaved head and eyes like polished steel—I think her name was Susan—pressed the release button without being asked.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Reilly," she said. Her voice was courteous.

"Afternoon," he murmured, stepping into the staff section of the building. Susan, or whoever she was, he doubted he'd see her around much after this.

The museum's hum faded behind the heavy door, replaced by the low, constant thrum of hidden machinery. The corridor's lighting was dimmer and a lot colder. The walls were painted a tasteful museum gray and were lined with framed photographs of artifacts that never appeared in any public exhibition; the real ones were in the vaults below the building. A few employees, all of them members of the cult, moved through the hall, each one very careful in the step and avoided making eye contact with anyone. Here, in the guts of the building, the cult's presence pulsed like a second circulatory system.

Eugene's shoes clicked on the polished stone floor as he approached the private elevator that would lead to The Collector's palace in the top floors. A keycard panel glowed a faint red and he slid his card across it. The panel blinked to green, and the elevator doors parted.

Eugene stepped inside.

The doors slid shut behind him and the elevator began to rise toward the penthouse.

Once he reached the top, it opened into the penthouse anteroom. There were no assistants or servants to greet him. Just the security. They stood around like rows of mannequins staged for a luxury catalog, except for the faint bulges at the hips where their weapons sat holstered. Their faces were blank in the way men get after too many years of doing—and seeing—unspeakable things for unspeakable people.

Mr. Cotter, The Collector's head of security, stepped forward, his dark suit a little too tight across the chest, the fabric groaning around his shoulders. "Mr. Reilly," Cotter said with a curt nod. "He's in the sanctum."

Of course he was. Eugene followed him. Cotter keyed the biometric lock, and the doors to the sanctum parted with a hydraulic push.

The chamber beyond always made Eugene feel as though he'd stepped into the center of a different world. A hexagon large enough to get lost in. Sometimes he often wondered how a room as massive as this could fit in the building. The air was always chilly and dense with incense and scented oils.

The Collector stood in the middle of the chamber, wearing a pale blue shirt, the collar open. Khakis. Sensible black shoes. A man who could've been a banker or an overpaid consultant if you met him at a Starbucks. His hair was peppered at the temples, and his wire-frame glasses glinted under the sconces as he leaned over his work. His sleeves rolled neatly past the elbow, exposing forearms smudged with ink and blood. His hands were sunk deep into the splayed bodies of three dead ravens laying on top of a pedestal. Their feathers were slick with ceremonial oil, their glassy eyes reflecting the sanctum's gold sconces. The Collector's lips moved silently, quickly, as if carrying out several conversations at once.

Though he and a small few could recognize The Collector's face in a crowd, Seat members always wore masks when speaking to the rest of the Society. Eugene was not surprised that he was not wearing one of those porcelain white masks in this sanctum. Barely anyone were allowed to enter this chamber. But that's all he knew about The Collector. Not his name. Not his social security number. Not if he had family of his own or the names of his parents. Not even his favorite color.

Without lifting his gaze, The Collector made a small gesture with a flick of his hand, saying: Stand there. Be quiet.

Eugene obeyed and watched, fascinated, as a trickle of raven blood ran down the obsidian basin, down the pedestal, and pattered softly onto the marble floor. He kept his posture straight as he didn't want The Collector to have the impression that he was being lazy or impatient. That would be bad for him. Instead, his eyes wandered around the sanctum.

Every wall was painted with frescoes that was flown from all over the world and placed here, some were millennia old that they were probably not even known by many historians and archeologists. They depicted the first contact of their god, Astaroth, descending through storm clouds in a tangle of wings and implausible geometry. Humans knelt at the edges of each mural, their faces uplifted in awe or terror or both. In the next scenes, Astaroth gifted them power: a young hunter holding a bow that glowed like molten glass; a scribe offered a book that bled ink; a king or queen crowned with a halo of molten fire.

Other panels showed the price. People melting into ash for overreaching their ambition. Cities swallowed by the earth as a punishment for their transgressions. A large battlefield of Astaroth and his armies marching across the Fields of Heaven to fight the angels. A cluster of monks having their eyes replaced by onyx stones, the sockets dripping resin that hardened into stalactites mid-fall, creating delicate, ghastly monstrosities from a sea of darkness.

But none of that held a candle to the centerpiece of the room.

The Slab.

A monolith of black granite stood at the sanctum's northern breadth, thick as a bank vault door and carved in one seamless piece. At its center was a cracked, bowl-like depression shaped to cradle a Dungeon Core. Eugene had seen it filled once, two years ago, when the Collector had summoned him for a demonstration that still clung to Eugene's memory like a grease stain. The empty Core glowed faintly in that hollow base like a captured star. The sight of it was…perfect. A vessel was the only ingredient left.

Now, of course, it was empty. That star had found its way west. Into the Cascades. Captured a vessel in Mark Castle. And into a year-long headache that was about to turn into a long-term crisis the cult had never faced before. They've fought powerful people before for centuries: blackmailed presidents and head-of-states. Hunted other monsters that get in their way. Threatened, tortured, and even killed if they had to in order to have what they want. And oftentimes, they'd win.

But how do you kill a young godling? Eugene often wondered. The Havashar Society had never killed a god before, even a young one. But gaining control of it was still the goal of the Society.

A soft wet sound snapped Eugene's attention.

"Have you heard any word from them?" The Collector asked without looking up. He set down the thin metallic prod, still slick with something dark and iridescent, and dipped his hands into a bowl of clean water. Then he dried them on a linen cloth already stained from previous rituals. Only then did he bother to glance at Eugene, his face unreadable behind his glasses.

Eugene swallowed hard. "Still the same, sir. I'm afraid I don't have any new updates on that front. My team and I have been trying to make contact with the rest of the Seat."

"Ah, and so far, they haven't answered any of my calls." The Collector exhaled slowly, almost theatrical in how tired it sounded, but his eyes remained bright and calculating. "They're leaving me to clean up the mess, I see. Very typical of them."

He tossed the cloth aside, landed in a silent heap on the floor.

Three months.

Three months of silence from the rest of the Seat.

The White Queen, The Teeth, and The Blacksmith ghosted The Collector like petty exes instead of sitting down and solving this problem in the west. But the Core fell under The Collector's domain, in North America, and so the rest of the Seat left the problem solving on The Collector's head instead. They didn't want to bother allocating the entire might and resources of the cult, and hoarded it for themselves. Backup plans in case The Collector failed at retrieving the Core.

If Eugene were one of them? He'd do the same. Hell, he'd be sharpening the dagger.

The Collector had lost the Core. Their Core. It was supposed to be his triumph, his offering, his grand ascension to Astaroth's golden honor guard. Instead, it became a big clusterfuck: an entire retrieval sect shredded by a dungeon lord who should've died in the first ten minutes. Mark Castle. The rogue Core. The constant embarrassment that walked and talked and killed men far better trained than Eugene. If it were any other Core, they'd have it in their vault by now and they'd be patting each others backs for a job well done. But this was no ordinary Core. This was a Death Core they're dealing with. Only a few within the organization knew what powers it could bring to a world like Earth—and to many other worlds. Their supreme liege have shown them visions of realms destroyed by Death Cores and how dangerous they were, especially when wielded as a weapon by mortals, so Eugene understood The Collector's caution.

So far, he hadn't sent in the big guns. To lose them like they did with Justin Hodge would be catastrophic for the cult and a blow to The Collector's influence within the Society.

Eugene knew why the others were distancing themselves. If he were The White Queen, he'd already be courting Astaroth's favor behind The Collector's back. If he were The Teeth, he'd be gathering the ears of loyalists to join his side for a potential civil war. If he were The Blacksmith, he'd be quietly preparing the replacement puppet that would vastly extend his dominion. If any of them wanted to remove The Collector from the board, now was the moment.

Why share the blame when you could let a rival drown in it?

Eugene felt the cold stone floor through the soles of his shoes. The frescoes around him seemed to tilt inward, their painted supplicants watching with distant pity. In the cracked indentation on the granite slab, shadows pooled like a ghostly bruise over The Collector's future.

"He is growing," The Collector said at last. "I thought we have years to prepare before he eventually reaches us, but no. He has been constantly feeding and feeding like a starving bear."

"We have been trying our best to combat the fake news that is coming from the—"

"—No." The Collector's voice sliced clean through the air. "No, Mr. Reilly. It only made things worse. It pushed more people into his maw, which is exactly what he wants."

Eugene fell silent. They'd scrubbed the internet of videos, flagged posts from keywords, buried the evidence…and all it had done was turn the rumors into a creepy folklore. Cryptid stories for bored teenagers and people with nothing better to do, becoming an uncontrollable wildfire. He didn't want to admit it was partly his fault. Stories about the mountain and how dangerous it was to scare tourists only made them want to explore it more. That was his fuck-up and The Collector seemed to constantly remind him of it.

"At least his reach has stopped near the Mississippi River," The Collector murmured, pacing slowly, hands clasped behind his back. "But give him another year—if he continues at this rate—he'll envelope the entire east coast. Then our thoughts are no longer safe." He tapped his temple. "We cannot let that happen."

Eugene knew very little about how fast Death Cores grew in other realms—the pace differed from world to world—but one thing remained the same: they never stopped expanding unless people, mortals, put a stop to it.

"His borders still remained at the mountains, sir," Eugene said. "Even if his expansion there is slowed down compared to his mind, at least that remains consistent based on what we can observe."

"And thank Astaroth for that."

The Collector stopped at the edge of the slab and peered into the cracked recess as if expecting something to appear out of thin air. His reflection in the polished stone looked older, more tired, as though the Core's absence had aged him in ways a good night's sleep could not repair.

"The Core's true influence is only around a small area, generally speaking," Eugene went on. "He is bound to it. What if we offer him something he needs?"

The Collector pivoted to face him. "Like what?"

"The world. More delvers. Anything."

A long beat of silence.

"Are you suggesting that I capitulate, Eugene?"

"No! Not at all, sir! That's not what I meant! The Havashar Society doesn't surrender to forces against our high prince. I know that." Eugene held up his hands. "I'm saying that…we adapt. It's been almost a year since anyone from our side has seen his domain firsthand. We've collected, what—three survivors now? And one of them is barely coherent, and the other is the son of our own members who isn't keen at joining our table."

"The Whittaker boy will get onboard, eventually. Mark my words."

"Until then, all I'm saying is, we don't know what Mark Castle is planning or how many monsters he have summoned already. The last report we have was a Yeti. It's like he's taking inspiration from—"

"—from movies? Yes. We noticed that. I was the one who ordered the psych eval report and read it twice."

"Of course, sir. We just don't know the structure, the layout, and the expansions of his levels now, or how complex he is becoming. All we have are a bunch of scraps. The delvers' secondhand accounts of their delves. It's better to have keen eyes than fight our enemy blind."

The Collector studied him—studied him like a butcher might study a side of beef, deciding where to cut first. "Then, what should we do, Mr. Reilly?"

Eugene paused for a moment. "Bring these said eyes into his domain and offer him something he cannot refuse."

Slowly, the corner of The Collector's mouth curled into a knowing smile. "Very well, Mr. Reilly. Very well. Perhaps it's time to pay Mark Castle an overdue visit. Setup the meeting. Make sure he doesn't kill our envoy at first sight once we step foot in his domain."

"I can send James Milford to parlay with the Core. He has managed to convince several survivors to at least talk to us, including Kevin Yates," Eugene said. "He might convince Mark Castle to do the same. Shall I also gather a commando unit, sir?"

"I think that's wise for our Milford. We can't just have him be thrown to the wolves without protection."

"Right away, sir."

"But make sure we don't have another plane crash in our hands."