Tunnel Vision 2.

Who knows what malevolent horrors inhabit the fetid blackness deep within these gaping maws. Their dank walls oozing and bubbling a sulphorous phlegm as soot from the steam trains that ceased to pass through long ago is washed onto the ground to form stagnant puddles.

The air, if it could be called that, stings as it is reluctantly breathed and leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. There is a soft crunching underfoot from countless thousands of bat carcasses that crush into the thick layer of their droppings with each step. While overhead their cousins silently screech their sonar and fill the air with the sound of a million tiny flapping wings.

But down from the furthest impenetrable reaches of the void there comes another noise. Quiet at first but increasing in volume as it nears; a grotesque slurping, ticking cluck that no creature on earth should make and no creature in this world should hear. It fills the senses and slowly engulfs the hapless figure who stands immobile, pathetically waving his torch, it's inefectual beam absorbed by the opaque soup of darkness.

Outside among the nettles a magpie is startled into flight by the plaintive gutteral moan coming from the tunnel. It doesn't know or care what has happened.

The bats know but say nothing.