“The Sickness from Hell”

The smell hit Kara first—a nauseating blend of rotting paper, mothballs, and something else she couldn’t identify. Something wrong. She pulled her cloak tighter as she approached the weathered door of Maud’s Warehouse, its paint peeling like diseased skin.

“Are you certain about this?” whispered Thorne, the young cleric beside her. His holy symbol seemed to dim in the twilight, as if the very air here resisted divine light.

Kara nodded grimly. “The constables won’t listen. Three people have gone missing near this place, and the locals are too frightened to investigate.” She tested the door handle—unlocked, which somehow made her more nervous than if it had been barred shut.

The warehouse yawned before them like a massive mouth. Enormous papier-mâché faces leered from the shadows, their painted grins twisted into malevolent sneers. Old parade floats stood silent as tombstones, their wooden wheels larger than a person. The faded masks pinned to the walls seemed to track their movement with hollow eyes.

“Saints preserve us,” Thorne breathed, his voice barely audible over the distant sound of a guitar—melancholy notes that seemed to echo from everywhere and nowhere at once.

They picked their way carefully between the wheeled monuments to forgotten celebrations. What should have been nostalgic relics of the city’s joy felt corrupted, tainted by an otherworldly malevolence that made Kara’s skin crawl.

“Help you?” came a scratchy voice from the darkness.

They turned to see an elderly woman emerge from behind a towering carnival dragon. She moved with difficulty, leaning heavily on the parade floats as she approached. Her hair hung in greasy strands, and her clothes looked as if she hadn’t changed them in weeks.

“We’re here about the disturbances,” Kara said carefully. “The missing people.”

The woman—Maud, presumably—cackled bitterly. “Disturbances? Oh, child, you have no idea.” She gestured vaguely at the warehouse around them. “They told me it would be simple. Just let his friends visit, they said. Easy money.”

Thorne stepped forward, his holy symbol beginning to glow faintly. “Who told you this?”

“The tall man. Thin as a rail, eyes like winter nights.” Maud’s voice dropped to a whisper as she spoke to one of the parade floats. “Yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t tell them. But they’re here now, aren’t they?”

Kara exchanged a worried glance with Thorne. The woman was clearly unhinged, talking to inanimate objects as if they could respond. But there was something else—a genuine terror in her eyes that suggested her madness had a very real cause.

“Where are these… friends?” Kara asked.

Maud’s face crumpled. “I didn’t know. How could I know what he meant? I just needed the money for the mortgage, and he offered me those beautiful rubies.” She fumbled in her apron, producing a blood-red gem etched with symbols that hurt to look at. “Used two of them to save this place. But the third one… oh, what have I done?”

A sound echoed through the warehouse—a wet, sliding noise like something massive dragging itself across stone. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.

“Show us,” Kara said firmly. “Show us what you’ve done.”

Maud led them deeper into the warehouse, past rooms filled with moth-eaten costumes that seemed to writhe in their peripheral vision. The guitar music grew louder, more discordant, as if the player’s fingers were bleeding on the strings.

They reached a section where the air itself seemed wrong. Kara felt her ears pop as if she were climbing a mountain, and the shadows moved independently of their sources. At the center of the space, the floor had been torn open in a jagged circle. The edges glowed with a dull red heat, and the smell of sulfur mixed with the warehouse’s existing odors to create something truly nauseating.

“The portal,” Maud whispered. “His friends come and go as they please now. Into the city, doing terrible things. And my daughter…” Her voice broke. “My sweet Sarah, she’s so sick. The corruption, it’s in her blood now.”

As if summoned by her words, a young woman appeared in the doorway to what must be living quarters. She was pale as parchment, her skin covered in angry red welts that pulsed with their own faint light. When she coughed, specks of something that definitely wasn’t blood spattered her handkerchief.

“Mama?” Sarah’s voice was weak, strained. “Who are these people?”

“They’re here to help, dear one,” Maud said, though her tone suggested she didn’t believe it herself.

Thorne was already moving toward the girl, his holy symbol blazing with white light. But as he approached the portal, the light began to flicker and dim. “There’s too much corruption here,” he said through gritted teeth. “I can’t maintain the blessing.”

Kara studied the portal’s edge, noting the symbols carved there. They were similar to the ones on Maud’s ruby, but more complex. “We need someone who can read these runes. If they’re spoken in the correct order—”

A roar erupted from the portal, and something black and writhing began to emerge. Tentacles thick as tree trunks lashed out, followed by eyes that burned like coals and a mouth full of teeth designed for tearing rather than chewing.

“It knows!” Maud shrieked. “It knows you’re trying to close the door!”

More creatures poured from the opening—smaller devils with barbed tails and claws like razors. The warehouse filled with their hissing and the sound of their claws scraping against stone. Sarah screamed as one of the larger tentacles wrapped around her waist, dragging her toward the portal.

Kara drew her sword, the blessed steel ringing as it cleared the scabbard. “Thorne! The runes!”

The cleric pulled out a scroll, scanning it frantically even as he dodged a swipe from a devil’s claws. “I think I have it, but if I’m wrong—”

“Then we’re all dead anyway!” Kara severed a tentacle with her blade, black ichor spraying across the floor where it hissed and burned. “Do it!”

As Thorne began to chant in a language that predated human civilization, the creatures became more frantic. The great tongue that held Sarah tightened its grip, pulling her closer to the portal’s edge. Parts of the warehouse floor began to crumble away, revealing pools of fire beneath.

Kara fought desperately, her sword work keeping the smaller devils at bay while Thorne continued his incantation. Each word he spoke made the portal’s glow flicker, and with each flicker, the creatures’ attacks became more vicious.

“Almost there!” Thorne shouted over the chaos. “Just a few more—”

The portal suddenly contracted, its edges rushing inward like a closing wound. The massive devil holding Sarah gave one final roar of frustration before the tentacle was severed by the portal’s collapse. Sarah fell hard to the warehouse floor, gasping and covered in the creature’s black blood, but alive.

Silence fell over the warehouse like a shroud. Even the guitar music had stopped.

“It’s over,” Thorne said, slumping against a parade float. His holy symbol had cracked from the strain, but it still glowed faintly.

“No,” said a new voice, smooth and cold as winter ice. “It’s just beginning.”

The tall, thin man materialized from the shadows as if he had always been there. His eyes were indeed like winter nights—black and empty and full of terrible promises. He looked at the collapsed portal with mild annoyance, the way one might regard a broken toy.

“The contract was quite specific, dear Maud,” he said conversationally. “Access to this realm in exchange for your prosperity. You’ve reneged on our agreement.”

“I didn’t know—” Maud began, but the stranger raised one pale hand.

“Ignorance is no excuse in matters of law, mortal or otherwise.” He smiled, revealing teeth that were too sharp and too numerous. “I’m afraid I’ll have to collect on the collateral.”

Maud screamed as fire erupted around her—not the orange flames of a normal fire, but something green and hungry that seemed to consume her soul along with her flesh. When it faded, she was still there, but changed. Her hair writhed like living flame, her eyes burned with hellish light, and her skin had taken on the texture of charred wood.

“Hellfire Maud,” the stranger said with satisfaction. “You’ll serve quite nicely in the lower realms.”

Before anyone could react, he gestured and a new portal tore open behind him. Smaller than the first, but no less terrible. Maud—or the thing she had become—walked toward it with jerky, puppet-like movements.

“Mama!” Sarah cried out, struggling to her feet despite her weakness.

The stranger paused at the portal’s threshold. “The girl will die within the day unless the corruption is cleansed. There’s a root that grows on the Screaming Isles that might save her, but I doubt you’ll find anyone foolish enough to make that journey.” He pulled the transformed Maud through the portal. “Do give my regards to the constables.”

The portal snapped shut, leaving only the lingering smell of sulfur and the echo of Sarah’s sobs.

Kara knelt beside the girl, checking her pulse. Still strong, despite everything. “We’ll find a way,” she promised. “That root he mentioned—someone in the city will know where to find it.”

Thorne picked up the remaining ruby from where Maud had dropped it. The symbols on its surface had gone dark, but it still radiated a malevolent energy. “We should destroy this.”

“No,” Sarah said weakly. “If mama’s trapped in that place, we might need it to get her back.”

As they helped Sarah to her feet and prepared to leave the cursed warehouse, Kara couldn’t shake the feeling that this was far from over. Somewhere in the depths of hell, Maud was learning what it meant to make deals with devils. And somewhere in the city, other desperate people were probably being approached by tall, thin strangers with winter-night eyes and promises too good to be true.

The rough part of town had always been dangerous. Now it was something worse—it was haunted by the consequences of desperation and the terrible price of hope.

This short story was created by Claude.AI, using the one page dungeon named “The Sickness from Hell” in The Rough Part of Town as the training set. This is an experiment to see if the Heartwizard Games roleplaying supplements can be used as source material to generate stories. Hopefully you liked it!