DOUGHY NIGHTMARE

 DOUGHY NIGHTMARE
"The hand retreated through the opening, scraping the edge, and a huge vague face peered down with eyes like blobs of dough."

"For the flood was composed of bodies which clambered over one another, clutching for the trapped rat. The rat was tearing at the pudgy hands, ripping pieces from the doughy flesh, but that seemed not to affect them at all. Huge toothless mouths gaped in the puffy faces, collapsed inward like senile lips, sucking loudly, hungrily. Three of the bloated heads fell on the rat, and she hear its squeals above their sucking."

"Great moist nostrils were dilating and vanishing in their noseless faces. Could they see her light with their blobs of eyes, or were they smelling her terror?"

"Once, delirious, she'd heard all the sounds around her grow stealthily padded, but this softness was far worse. She was trying both to stand back and to jab the lift button, quite uselessly; the doors refused to budge. The doughy shapes would pile in like tripe, suffocating her, putting out the flame, gorging themselves on her in the dark. The one that had ridden the lift was slithering down the outside to join them."

"Swollen hands were thumping them, soft fingers like grubs were trying to squeeze between them, but already the lift was sailing upward."

"The lift's doors opened, and the doughy face lurched in, its fat white blind eyes bulging, its avid mouth huge as a fist. It took her a moment prolonged as a nightmare to realize that it had been crushed between the lift and shaft - for as the doors struggled open, the face began to tear."
Ramsey Campbell, Down There