As I ventured deeper into the sunken crypt the sound of dripping water became eerily suggestive of some slippery, wet lapping sound. My feverish mind was surely playing tricks on me. Perhaps it was the water on the lake just outside, ebbing at the threshold, creeping ever further into the barrow's gaping maw. One day it would make this tomb its home, as the sinking earth, or rising waters of some winter thaw, turned that trickle past my ankles to a flood. It was for this very reason - I told myself - that I could not turn back now. Soon, very soon, the tomb of my ancestor would be a den for eels and toad-spawn and perhaps darker things fathomable in a submerged crypt. Then my granfather's signet ring would be even more difficult to retrive. The slow and constant slap-slap-slap of water grated on my nerves, eroding my resolve far quicker than the stone it no doubt wore a hole through, with its drip-drip-drip. Soon it became an act of shear willpower to take each and every step into that crypt of my fore-fathers. And my footfalls were overtaken by the slapping of that awful metronome. And then, it stopped. What had at first caused me such nauseous dread with its pressence, now caused utter terror with its absence. A dripping in a crypt, wether from condensation or filtration through the soil from above, as regular as that - it should not have a cause to stop! As if the shrill horror in me was not great enough already, it was at this moment that my torch started to fail, assuredly from the dank, moisture laden air. I shook it and the batteries inside rattled back and forth, giving out spits of light. Dimly it began to cooperate. And at first I thought I head the dripping resume in that cavernous shadow of the grave. But the growing sound, approaching, slapping, wet skin flapping on the stones - that was no dripping water from the rock above! It came closer and faster, that two beat drum of cold flesh so slick and terrible that I could feel its sound trickle in to my ear. The light from my torch blinked off and on, off and on again... As untrustworthy and eratic as my own heart beat. The light went out and the thing kept galloping through the darkness towards me. I shook the torch furiously, banged it against the palm of my hand. In a brief moment, it blazed into life as bright and clear as it ever had. And the THING was on top of me! The torch was either dropped or knocked from my hand, dead before it hit the ground. Shattered once it had. I don't know how long I stood there, hugging to the wall for dear life. How long, till I stumbled out of the crypt? ...No torch, no signet ring, no wits about me. How long did I sit shivering on the shores of that damnable lake till the sun rose over the water and warmed me to my senses? It had gone past me, the creeper in the crypt, past me and out into the black depths of that cursed lake. The thing had flailed half a dozen limbs in that split second of horrid torch light. Had I really seen it? Could such a thing really exist? Why had it left me, without so much as a scratch to prove to myself that I was sane? Oh but it had left something with me. For even now, when I am alone and in the Darkness, or if I close my eyes, I see it. That horrible moment, less than a tick of the clock, framed by the brilliance of a dying torch. That's when I see it, and shall always see, till the day I die - the Creeper in the Crypt! ------ DAZ 3D's free Creeper model and too much H.P.Lovecraft in the early hours of the morning!