Katters knocks on it again, listening. “Might have found something,” she says, and runs her hands along the surface of it, looking for a seam or something else useful.
A trap door — perfect. Katters gets her claws around its edges and pulls, but it’s heavier than she expects and it slips back into place, scraping her fingertips and bending one of her claws backwards. “Shit,” she hisses, and tries again. She’s more successful the second time. “Yo! Red!”
Red dives for the trapdoor, throwing her body into the space between it and the floor, helping hold it open. "Get in?"
“Duh,” Katters says. She regathers her things, slipping the knife into her vest, before climbing into the hole.
Red tumbles after as the wood of the house beguns to splinter under the assault of hooves and hounds.
Katters crouches beneath the trap door, ears cocked upward. She’s tense, and ready to run, again, but for a moment she just listens.
There's a sound of heavy feet hitting the floor above them, of something heavy dragging, slow, against the wood.
Red curls into a ball, shivering and shaking, pressing her hands against her own mouth to stifle any noises
Katters crouches lower, flinching away from the sounds. She doesn’t notice that she’s holding her breath.
The wood above splinters as a massive spearhead bursts through the trapdoor, then jerks back out. Claws rapidly hook into the new hole, ripping away at the wood until the trapdoor is ruined, sending rays of harsh light into their hiding place, and twisted, monstrous faces leer down. They look like they were human, once. There's one with heavy, drooping jowls, slavering as it jibbers gleefully down at them, clawing up the wood on the edge. Another has twisted, pointed ears, face pulled out long and sharp into a snout, overfull with long, sharklike teeth that are cutting into its' own lips. A third has deepset eyes and looks almost human, but their body is all the more twisted than that of the others, warped, curving, like it's some swirled carving from bone and flesh. They chorus, loud. "HERE, HERE, HERE-"
Loud — LOUD — PANIC Katters scrambles forward, a keening whine ripped out of her throat. She falls, rolls, pushes herself backwards with frantic kicks while pulling the knife from her vest and waving it in front of her, halfway between defence and offence.
Red lets out a loud howling yowl, hissing and spitting, teeth bared and claws out, backing into a corner.
The figure who steps into sight is huge, stretching into the sky, holding a spear, body clad in heavy, thick pelts... with more than a chunk of them looking like they're woven from long lengths of hair attached to dried, shrunken scalps. The tip of the spear thrusts into the hole, pressing against Katters' throat.
Katters hits wall much sooner than she’s comfortable with, back pressing into something with some give, but not nearly enough. She drops the knife and grabs the spear, pushing it to the side and away from her windpipe. She keeps a grip on it, locking her elbow when it’s far enough away.
The spear pulls back... lifting Katters... pulling her up, out, towards the edge of the hole and the slavering beasts.
Katters refuses to let go — if she lets go, she’s sure there’ll be less poking and more stabbing — instead slipping her kit around her wrist and grabbing the shaft of the spear with her other hand, too.
Red tries to hold on and keep Katters in the hole, out of reach of the dogs, but a swift shake of the spear sends her head cracking against a wall.
