Investigate the sound

You are about to begin climbing when the childlike call for help sends another shiver down your spine. What sort of monster hunter would you be if you leave some poor child to be killed in this setting? Sighing with resignation, you steps away from the cliff and follow it along to the darkened mouth of the cave. The voice echoes out again. "Help me."

"I'm coming!" you call into the cave. "Are you heart?"

There is a pause and then another, slightly more urgent, "Help me!"

"Alright, I'm coming in," you say. If only you had a flashlight. The cave entrance is too small to walk into, so you get down on your hands and knees and begin crawling into the darkness. You keep shouting out to the voice, but you do not hear it again. Making your way carefully deeper into the cave you feel it widening into a chamber with a bowl-like depression in the floor. You slide out of the tunnel in which you were crawling and spill into the room.

You land with a thump against something yielding.

"It's okay, I'm here," you say, reaching out for the child. Your hand encounters a moist trunk of flesh. In the faint light spilling in from the cave entrance you see what is certainly no child. Like an immense snake, a segmented white worm rises up from the bowl of the chamber, at least 30 feet in length and as big around as your torso. Its pale flesh is unnatural and soft as if it has never left the cave. You realize there are bones of animals and humans all around you.

"Oh no," you have time to say as its eyeless face twists to look at you.

The worms inhuman, toothless mouth opens and it ejects a pungent wad of mucus that strikes you with so much **** you are knocked back down into the bowl. The slime coats your arms and chest, soaking your shirt and immediately numbing your upper body. You can hardly lift your head. You realize, with horror, that you can no longer move your arms. You kick and try to roll over as the worm slithers to your feet. Its mouth opens impossibly wide. You scream and kick but it is no use, the massive mouth begins to envelop your feet. Tiny hooks catch on your shoes and dig into your legs, pulling you into the yawning orifice. With horror, you realize you have fallen right into the creature's trap.

The screams grow weaker and weaker as they echo from the cave for more than an hour. They are finally muffled by the hungry mimic worm. It swallows the prey live, the pitiful creature stretching the worm's serpentine length, but unable to move in the tight confines of the worm's gullet. Eventually the prey suffocates as digestive juices begin to dissolve clothing and flesh. The monster hunter is soon nothing more than food for the hungry worm to digest. By the next morning the unlucky woman is gone, just some foul-smelling bones regurgitated onto the floor of the cave, joining the pile of those too foolish to heed the warnings of their friends.

The bones serve as a grim reminder that some monsters are just hungry.