Short Storiesby DeckuZora |
| The Painter in the Sky |
| Untitled |
| The Letter |
The LetterThis tale tells the reflection of a soul. It holds the confusion, the madness, anxiety and suffering of a man. Worry not, for it will never try to harm you, I hope to imagine, but its very nature lies in the conveyance and procurement of misery and strife. At the end of this tale, please assist it in procuring a new one, one of your own. Mark crashed through the rotting, decrepit wall, smashing head first into the back of a large mirror. But there was no time for thought of self-preservation on such a small scale, no, not when they’re coming. He urgently glanced about it; the faded rug, the broken glass, the boarded up windows with miserable cold daylight streaming through, the bed with the mattress stuffing torn and shredded from it. Nothing to arm himself with, not even a closet to hide within. But, yes, there was a large ornate cabinet standing there to his left! He only need push it over! Mark brushed the glass and splinters from his palms and, with the gait of a broken man, wretched himself from the floor and against the old wood of the cabinet. It was polished. It was solid. It was also heavy. Good. He rammed his shoulder against it weakly but it barely shivered. Again, he pressed it so it would yield. Again it denied him such luxuries. Exhausted, he stared hopelessly up at the would-be savior and cursed himself. He couldn’t do it. He was going to die. Listening carefully, he could hear it. The strange uneven steps, the sniffling and deathly panting, the creak of the floorboards from the hallway, they were coming. No! He urged himself up once more and with one final awe-inducing charge, he toppled the cabinet – which if not for the dusty carpet, surely would have made a more tremendous bang as it crashed before the door and the weak opening in the wall. Relieved with his final barricade, Mark sat down, back against the carved wood of the cabinet’s side to breathe. As he panted from his exhaustion, he reached for the letter in his pocket and a pen. Hurriedly, he scrawled his latest accounts upon its surface. The letter was more than a page long, crumpled, damp, torn and frayed, but still he wrote. Should he not survive, this was his only chance to explain what had happened. As he hurriedly dotted his last sentence, he looked at his handiwork. He found it falsely amusing, even now, in his handiwork, he had retained his novelist writing style, unable to write even his own letter in the first person. As a fledgling novelist, Mark had moved to a small town, a far cry from his last home. It was a difficult move, but he was (at the time) pleased by the idea of a new vista to influence his writing. It was too good to be true. He had moved into a relatively finished and furnished home. He had a cute neighbor girl to talk to and he had found a smalltime, well-paying job at the local market. He was all set to begin his first career making literary masterpiece. Mark brushed the sandy, unkempt hair from his eyes and stared blurrily into space, almost oblivious to the now loud scratching from the other side of the cabinet. His eyes burned and watered in the dust. Surely his life had been so good those first few months. Where did it all go? When exactly did the very earth forsake him? He stared quietly at the letter and thought how he had come across it. Six days ago, when he left his workplace to return home, and that young girl ran past, dropping behind her a piece of paper. It must have been then. That drive he took home; where his torment started. Why on earth did he deviate from his routine? He tried to remember. Walking home, a girl ran past. Yes, she was incredibly pretty. He was sure of it. Yet, for no reason that he could explain, he could not recall her face, no matter how he tried. Even her clothing and her hair, now that he tried, were slipping from his memory. All he could be sure of was her loveliness, for he had been struck through the heart at the sight. As she ran past, a note had fallen from her garb. It held itself in place for but a moment, before drifting down to his feet. He had picked it up, oddly vibrant amongst the blur of its owner within his mind, and brushed the dirt from it. He then looked up, in meaning to return it to her and to his surprise at the time: For where she ran, she was no longer. Unsure where he had missed her, he had run to the direction she had gone, but after a minute without her in sight, he had assumed he must have simply taken a wrong turn and it was hopeless to attempt to rectify it now. He had headed home. That night though, in his small room, while he lay in bed, strange urgency and panic had set upon his chest. For some reason, he had felt like he was being watched. Constantly, his ears would pick up strange whispers, and creaks, and frequently he would jump as something brushed his shoulders. He did not see anything within his reach however, and dismissed it. And then a child ran across the foot of his bed. The next day had been mostly a blur, unable to sleep from his terror; Mark had been unable to shake the fatigue from his body and simply sat in a daze at his kitchen table. The morning light was less inviting than his dimly lit, muted kitchen was, and his eyes had hazed over as he gazed about. Whether or not he had slept that day, he did not recall, only that strange things had begun to happen. He had visions of strange patterns on the walls and floors, almost tribal, and occasionally, bloody footprints flashed upon a suddenly vibrant room. He was unable to do anything that day – the entire time wondering why he spent it in the kitchen, and why he had never gotten a call from his boss for not showing up. He had been unable to call in either. The line refused to connect. By the time it got dark, he had passed out on the chair. *** Mark had an unexpected encounter upon waking up. A humming sound, like a small child’s favorite tune, had been drifting into his ear. Blearily he had opened his eyes. It was still dark, and his eyes did not adjust well at the time, but what he had seen had nearly stopped his heart. A girl, with bright blue eyes – not quite older than four by appearance, was sitting in his lap, humming to herself. Her brown curls tumbled down her back, over her naked body. She was playing idly with a doll, and, perhaps more importantly, was coated in blood. In a cry, he had leapt up, and she dropped to the floor with a clatter. She sat there, blue eyes staring up at him for a single eternity. Frozen in time, and slowly her mouth opened, easing its way wide. But not naturally, almost as if it was a machine, and hadn’t had enough polish to prevent it from sticking. However, sure enough, soon her mouth was a nearly perfect O. And she screamed. Her eyes bulged, her lips chaffed, her throat and chest letting loose everything they had had to announce their displeasure. Mark, frightened, had run away from her and quickly closed himself in the nearby hallway before sprinting up the stairwell. At the end of the hall was his study. He had his way in, and locked the door shut behind him. The single scream did not stop until the clock hit midnight. Then it was followed by six hours of silence. Upon this third day, Mark had again become reacquainted with the voices; whispering to him as he wandered the empty hallways, and as he worked through his eerily silent home. For some reason, he had been unable to find his way back down the stairs, for it never appeared to him as he had walked towards it. As if the entire segment of the hallway just skipped and suddenly the next room was there. Nor could he actually be sure it was missing since, for whatever reason, he blanked every time he reached the hallway and only came to when he was again at the opposite end of the floor; only to vaguely recall the path he took to get there, and unable to remember if he had actually reached the stairs. He blamed the voices and cursed their presence near-constantly, urging them away. Mark was unsure if he slept the third day or if he had simply entered the fourth day in his stupor, but he remembered quite visibly the moment he finally saw the stairwell. He simply came to as he walked through the hallway, and spotting the stairwell, and in earnest, realizing his now present freedom, he rushed towards it- -Only to scream in terror. A woman had fallen, head first from the ceiling next to him, down the stairs to disappear from sight. Her eyes were wide and staring at his, her mouth tight as if there simply was nothing to say. He heard the sickening thud at the bottom of the stairwell, but in his fear, he simply ran to his study once more, and locked it tight. From the other side, for the rest of the evening, he heard faint scratching on the other side of the door. He was unable to sleep at all. By day five - which was yesterday - he had realized it. The windows had been boarded up from the outside. He was unable to push them open or break them either. The place had also become deathly silent and upon tentative exploration into the hallway, he discovered it had become dilapidated and aged beyond repair. He was mortified with the idea of venturing a few steps from the study. But hunger had set in. He had to eat. Cautiously, he had grabbed a poker from the fireplace of his study, and as lithely as he could, eased his way down the now rotting steps towards the kitchen. Upon opening the refrigerator, he discovered most of the food had long gone bad, covered in mold, or turned fetid, or simply generally unsafe for consumption. The power had also gone out, he knew not when. He raided his pantry, which to his dismay, yielded only very similar results. He did finally come across a can of pre-cooked sausage, which he had devoured messily, letting the liquid from the can run down his throat as he gnashed at the soft, salty and wormy meat. He had swallowed it, and lowered the can. The girl was sitting there; in the chair across the kitchen. She had been humming softly drawing a picture with some crayons. Mark had readied the poker but cautiously walked over to investigate. She noticed the movement and turned her large blue eyes towards him. He had noted her rather deathly pale. On the paper, had been a drawing of a man, a girl and a woman, he remembered that, because to his horror, the girl and the woman were lying in coffins, and calling to the man. The pale girl had then slowly parted her lips. “Daddy… Join us..?” She had reached for his arm, he had swatted it away, but her eyes held him there as she got closer. Chilling hands pressed themselves against his leg, and she had clung to it. “Don’t leave us Daddy… Join us…” He had fled again, but unable to find his way out, he randomly broke into rooms he could no longer recognize. He, had again, heard her wails as she screamed at him and as he looked back, along the floor, rapidly crawling after him, was the woman, whom he had seen fall from the ceiling. Her back and neck were visibly broken, as she awkwardly flailed her limbs in attempts to reach him, her mouth wide agape. Today however, was day six. Mark brushed the glass away from his legs, and finding a sizable piece, looked at a shard of the mirror, his eyes were sunken deeply into his skull. He laughed hollowly, before deciding to write the ending of his letter. As final cracks appeared in the wall, yielding to the now omnipresent slamming on the other side, he decided to pen the paragraph that had been written at the top since he found it, the page that had floated off the beautiful mystery woman six days ago: “This tale tells the reflection of a soul. It holds the confusion, the madness, anxiety and suffering of a man. Worry not, for it will never try to harm you, I hope to imagine, but its very nature lies in the conveyance and procurement of misery and strife. At the end of this tale, please assist it in procuring a new one, one of your own.” |
