I just nod, unable to use my voice.
I settle back into the worn to threads cushion of the seat, in which my Sarah had been sitting countless times laughing, and gaze into the troubled black clouds. They resemble me like huge monsters that at any time could launch onto earth to beneath their claws rapture the last leftovers of mankind. Horrible grimaces shed from the masses, shouting a slobbering roar against me that I can only hear inside my head then wrapping themselves again into the coat out of darkness and shadows, which is covering the hills.
Trees and rocks like cowering shadows peak into the sky, lacking all color, like does the rest of the world.
Something’s wrong. I can feel it. The feeling creeps through my body, gnaws at my nerves and eats away my flesh. My blood seems to have turned into pure ice. I can feel how my heart pumps the ice through my veins and how it tries to hamstring my mind.
The air inside the Pick-up carries a subliminal fetor that reminds me of rotten meat. I try to make me believe that the odor was coming from my newest memories at ‘Tenberries’. In my mind I still see her childlike head explode, particles of bones and bloody slime striking against the side of the car and the gray asphalt.
This is where the fetor inside the car comes from. A nightmare that is deeply rooted inside me and that won’t release me for the rest of my life, as long as this mean rest might ever last.
But yet I feel that the stuffy, rotten air is trying to tell me something. Namely that something isn’t okay at all. I could grab my hands into plain air, would have felt the terrible answer right onto my skin and yet not have been able to keep a hold of it.
The world around us gets lost inside the darkness of an approaching storm. Trees and bushes in helpless humbleness bend before the terrible horsemen in the clouds. They seem like the slashed leftovers of mankind.
Barry doesn’t slow down the car. He even doesn’t when first raindrops strike the window pane. As he turns on the windshield wipers flies and beetles get smudged to a yellow slime. The world gets blurred and loses its every appearance of reality.
As Barry turns into the narrow path leading down to the house the world begins to spin around me. The droning of my heart inside the icy cave, which had become of my body, falls as silent as my brain. I finally see in brutal clarity what is wrong; where the fetor of rotten flesh is coming from. It doesn’t come from the memory of the girl at Devon. It also doesn’t come from the hill’s fetor of soil and rain, which so often had remembered Sarah of the moldy odor of old swamps. The fetor all the time we had been on our way had been preparing me for the things I was going to come across.
The porch door stands ajar.
It had been torn off its hinges and hangs at a single frame joint. Its lazy movement amidst the dark rain seems surreal to me.
Barry slows down the car and the next moment jumps out into the rain. I follow him, at which the book for Demi falls into the mud besides the Pick-up. The DVD-player falls rumbling into the leg area of my seat. But I don’t notice any of that.
My eyes are set onto the scrub marks leading from the porch though the garden to the fence and the meadow beyond it. The grass is trampled down and the formerly colorless green has been colored red.
On the steps up to the kitchen lies Murphy’s gun.
As I behind Barry stumble into the house the world around me gets lost inside a red haze.
Barry screams. I can see his lips moving and spittle shooting out between his teeth. But I can’t hear him.
My brains have adapted themselves to the sounds of the world. No cries. No rumble. Just a red, blurred silence. Rain is dripping from my hair into my eyes. Tears are turning my view into a grotesque spectacle.
Onto the kitchen floor I see blood; a dark, nearly black scrub mark leading out into the garden.
Bullet holes inside the door and the cupboard, in which I use to keep our plates. The room is filled by a fetor of decay, urine and gun smoke.
Barry keeps screaming. His mass body stumbles through the door out into the dark corridor.
I follow him like being caught inside a dream.
Dancing through this deep silence the world is in, I don’t feel a thing.
On the step lies the weapon Demi had used to bear. To the walls there’s blood and something white. Onto the middle step that for years had used to sing its familiar creak a puddle out of yellow slime is shining..
Barry crawls up the stairs on all fours. His hands splash through the puddle. I follow him dancing. My hand runs through the blood on the wall. It’s damp and warm.
When I clench my stained hand to a fist the outlines of my new world get even a bit more blurred.
Barry as a huge shadow stands inside the door case that leads to the sleeping room. That’s where Demi and Sarah should have been. His mouth is opened to a shout, his fists bang away at the door case. Then the shadow collapses back upon itself, melting with the sea out of blackness that surges over the floor.
Inside my silence there’s something screaming; words I don’t want to understand. The closer I get to the door, the louder gets the voice; until the world consists only of screaming and nagging.
As I reach the door and glance into the grey light inside the bedroom my world abruptly falls silent again. The red haze before my eyes turns into darkness.
To scream makes me ache. There’s a ripping pain inside my throat. But the world remains silent.
With the last desperate rear of my brains the few pictures, which I through the red curtain had been able to catch a glimpse of, appear like giggling demons out of my sub consciousness.
There’s blood running down the walls, leaving behind a bizarre painting.
There’s a fetid of flesh and vomit.
The sacrificial altar of the Shoggothen, on which are lying the leftovers of my Sarah.
At the same place, where I had left her behind, telling her one last time ‘I love you’.
At the same place, where Humphrey had used to visit us.
Then even the last spark inside of me is extinct and I fall into a deep unconsciousness.
IV
Barry appears before me.
His face is a deformed mask. His eyes are caverns out of tears, rage and decline.
He shakes me.
He beats me.
My head swirls aside.
As I look at him again the horrid mask is hiding behind a red curtain that hardly can be permeated. Distorted lips are shouting words at me. There’s another blow. There are cold, damp fingers running through my hair.
Then the shadow disappears. There is no touch any more.
No words.
There’s only a blood-red, stinking silence.
It all happens so fast.
The world rushes towards its end.
Harv
Why do I have do wake?
Why can’t I sink deeper and deeper into the emptiness of forget, leaving behind my memories and brains in the ruins of this horrible world?
Perhaps death doesn’t want me.
I unwillingly rise out of the nothingness back into the pains of dying and decline.
The storm is over.
The rain has stopped.
The back braking silence of death is covering the house.
It’s night.
The darkness around me seems to keep coming nearer, as if a huge beast was sneaking up at me. The fetid of blood, flesh and animals takes my breath away.
I vomit, but what comes splashing out between my lips is just bitter bile.
The silence inside the house is trying to weigh me down.
I couldn’t tell in which room I am. I lean against the wall, cowering at the floor, while the night is nestling up to me like being afraid of the creatures that had come from its lap.
I with a smile give myself over to the black mother and anew descend into the emptiness of neglect.
The silence around me collapses.
Something laps against the boards in front of the windows. I can hear steps moving lazily through
the darkness. They move from room to room. There’s the clarion Tack Tack Tack of claws onto the floor. Then there’s a wheeze.
Something jumps up the stair hissing. The middle step creaks beneath the weight of brawny muscles and damp fur. The horrible fetid of beasts overruns me like the waves of a dark sea.
I try to weep.
A miserable sob escapes from my throat. But my eyes that have no longer got tears only burn. That’s why I begin to laugh. It’s the kind of mad giggle that defines the scopes of life and death.
‘Humphrey has come to fetch me’, is the last thought I think in this life.
The world has moved on.
And now it stands still forever …
… and gets silent and dark …
Daryll
Daryll opens his eyes and has a look around in the grey twilight. He dozily rubs his eyes, sits up and reaches for the torch that is lying at the floor next to the mattress.
He makes it illuminate the empty classroom. It’s a ritual that he during the last two weeks had made his own. The trembling ray of light isn’t able to free him completely of the nightmares he uses to have at night. But to see that he’s still alone makes him feel better.
He yawns, stretches and puts on his trousers. He pushes the torch into its pocket and his weapon beneath the waistband above his left leg. Then he steps out to the orphaned corridor of the schoolhouse.
Daryll looks to all sides but can only recognize the grey twilight that from time to time is broken by the brighter grey of the skylights and that is rolling through the school building like a haze.
Another day in this damned town, he thinks, climbs his bicycle and drives towards the exit of the school.
Perhaps today he would find the car, which he yesterday had heard from afar …
THE END
Michael Dissieux
… Was born 1967 in Saarbrucken, Germany. He is a skilled lathe operator, who at the moment is working as a bus driver in the regular service.
He has now been writing short stories and novels in the field of mystery and dark fantasy for 30 years.
Some of his short stories had been published by the German publishing house “Bastei”, as well as in different fanzines.
He - until it had been abandoned - had also cooperated on the novel series “Jessica Bannister“, which had been published by “Bastei”, too.
A World of Darkness Page 21
