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cthulhueatingnoodles · 24 days ago

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5 Horror shorts

I can’t stop shaking. There’s a metal bar embedded in the cell wall, and they cuffed one of my wrists to it before leaving me here. The rattling of the cuff is just arrhythmic enough that it never fades to white noise: it’s always present, always distracting. I try to make myself still, and fail again and again.

The cell is cold, but it’s not that. The cop didn’t say a word to me after the first spray of terse questions: I’ve no idea how fucked I am—but it’s not that, either. The horror which has me Jacob-Marley-ing my chains is just the knowledge that there’s someone’s blood soaked into my jeans, smudged on the heel of my hand, dried across my fingers. I tried to find a pulse in the wreck of a body under my car, just made a mess. His blood seemed to shine in the headlights.

My eyes sting.

Maybe it wasn’t my fault. I was tired, but I felt safe to drive. I was even alert enough that I saw the old man standing there in the dark on the side of the back road, balanced on the curb. I was the only car coming, so I didn’t slow down. He could have waited five seconds, and I’d have been past.

I didn’t expect him to just—step out. If that’s even what happened.

The door of the cell swings open, and the cop walks in. He’s carrying a metal box. He places it on the table before sitting opposite me.

“It was an accident!” I burst out. I know, I know. Don’t talk to police without a lawyer. I can’t seem to shut my mouth any more than I can stop shaking. “He was just there, and then there was this—flash of light, just, out of nowhere, and it was...its colour, or…” I trail off there, but not consciously. I’m trying to find words for the chaos of that brief flash of light, the alien colours coiling in its refulgence, the way it pinned my eyes wide and gulped down all clarity. “He must have jumped in front of the car.” I didn’t see it happen. Didn’t see anything but—that light.

“Of course,” says the cop. “Not your fault.”

“What?” I say.

“I guess the old guy just decided he’d had enough.” He shrugs. “He had a hard life. It happens every day: people just decide to...step into the dark. Stopping that is what we’re here for.”

He shifts, centring the metal box on the table.

“Oh,” I say. “So…”

“Or maybe the body wore out, and it needed a new one. It’s not your fault.” He smiles. It’s complacent. “But if you kill the previous vessel, you become the next.”

“What?”

He flips the lid of the box up.

The light crawls out, blazing, consuming, agonising.

I shut my eyes, but it’s already inside.

“It needs a host,” he says. “And we’re here to fight the dark.”

###

The other girl and I are almost identical. We’ve got the same rounded features, the same slender build, matching pastel dungarees. But I have Rorschach blot bruises smeared over my exposed skin, and she has an expression of raw hatred as she spreads them further with a series of short, sharp pinches.

“Thief,” she says as she works. “Thief. I’m gonna tell Mom.”

I try to squirm away, to swat her pinching hands off me, but they always return. “You’re not. She wouldn’t listen. And if she did, she’d know it was a lie.” Mom knows better than to listen to girls like her.

“You’re the liar!” Her sharp nails dig viciously into my cheek. I can feel a bead of blood roll down to my jaw.

I jerk away one last time. “Let’s go see her, then.” Then I run into the house. My twin is on my heels, but it’s me Mom reacts to as we enter the kitchen. She drops the dish sponge as she gasps, her hands flying up to cover her mouth.

“Rose! What happened?”

My twin bobs on her toes. For a moment I think she’s going to shout out her confession, but she drops her chin and looks away, staying silent.

“I fell,” I say. “We were playing outside, and there was gravel, and rocks, and I just…” I mime landing face-first. “But it’s okay. It doesn’t hurt that bad.”

Mom comes hurrying over to grab my chin and tilt it from side to side. “That’s...are you sure? When did this happen?”

“I guess an hour ago.”

“The marks have come up fast…”

“I was running, so I fell pretty hard.” I shrug.

“Liar,” whispers my twin. Mom doesn’t hear her, of course.

“Let’s put some cold packs on it,” Mom says. “My poor girl.”

I slip my arms around her waist and squeeze, my decorated cheek pressed against the cool cotton of her blouse.

“I hate you,” my twin whispers from behind us. We both ignore her.

Later that night, I wake from a warm dream to the feeling of a painful weight on my arm. I try to push up against it, and my arm rises, but the weight clings, refusing to be dislodged. The pain separates into into distinct patterns, running from shoulder to wrist: there’s just enough moonlight in the room to make out the letters my double has pressed into my skin.

N-O-T…

I laugh.

N-O-T R-O-S-E.

“Won’t work,” I tell her. “I can just wear a sweater.”

“I’ll keep hurting you, then,” Rose says. “Again and again. Until you give my body back.”

I laugh again. “You can, if you like. You’ve no idea. After feeling nothing for so long, even pain is worth experiencing.” I eye her floating, incorporeal form. “Well...You’ve no idea yet. You will, though.”

She screams. I’m the only one who can hear her, and I admit it hurts my ears.

But that’s just fine with me.

###

I wasn’t a runner before the end of the world. I wasn’t sedentary either: just...slow. I liked to absorb the view as I went along. I thought it was undignified to sweat in public.

It feels strange to even remember those times, as I enter what must be at least the fiftieth hour of this marathon. My shoes filled with blood more than a day ago, and the last of my toenails sloughed off before dawn this morning—I felt them go, and for a long time they were loose in my socks, biting my feet with every step. Not sure where they are now. Maybe embedded in the flesh somewhere. I can’t feel any individual pain down there any more: my whole existence is nothing but fire and razor-blades—but I can’t stop.

I look over my shoulder, a quick frantic glance to confirm They’re still behind. No, I can’t stop.

I hadn’t known, before everything changed, that there was a more potent engine for life than simply not wanting to die. That had been enough at the beginning, giving me strength when I needed it—and I had needed it, because living after the end of the world was just running, running, running. Nowhere was safe for long, and nowhere had enough food for everyone who wanted to stay. Keep moving, keep breathing.

But now something more is driving me. It’s not so much that I want to live. It’s just that I don’t want to die like this.

They clamour up the road behind me. Their heads are full of teeth. Their hands are full of teeth. They’re made from fear, not appetite, but they will still eat.

They’re catching up.

I run until I’m just raw momentum, airless, numb. And finally I stumble, just for a moment, just one hitch in my stride, a brief feeling like I’m going to fall—and I hear their screams of jubilation.

Keep going. Not like this.

I stay on my feet. I force myself back into rhythm. I can go faster. I can stay ahead.

It’s almost too much, so I do what I always do on the brink of failing: I look over my shoulder. Remind myself what my fate will be if I stop.

They’re still behind. Still pursuing. But...something else is wrong.

I throw a zigzag into the pattern, swerving to the edge of the road so that I can look past Them. I’ve never needed to before, but now—

There’s a body lying on the road. Familiar. Worn thin from constant effort. One shoe fallen off, revealing a red-brown sock.

She’s dead. Heart failure, maybe.

She's me.

I’m dead.

It didn’t even hurt.

And They—They haven’t stopped for the body. They’re showing it no interest at all. They’re still coming for me, spirit, figment, memory, momentum, whatever I am now, their heads and hands full of clacking teeth.

Not like this.

Maybe it’ll never end.

I run.

###

“This is not a prophet,” Rajeev said. “This smells like shit and corpse juice.”

Michaels was unmoved. “Just do your job.”

It took a while to set up the lighting to take photographs. Rajeev muttered to himself as he worked, and Michaels—watched him, blank, like he had no feelings whatsoever about the dead woman at their feet or the arcane scrawlings she’d painted onto the walls in her own blood.

“But seriously,” Rajeev said, depressing the shutter release. “Why would the boss want to scrape any of this for the Codex? It’s meaningless. Worse than that crap they pulled out of the underwater temple scrolls, going on about fecund tongues and...what was it, vengeful dust? Howling stars?”

“Not for us to judge,” said Michaels. He’d turned stony in the past year. Before that, he’d always agreed with Rajeev that Codexchat itself was a crazy project, some Madame Blavatsky bullshit for the new era, and pursuing it meant the boss was a few nodes short of a neural network.

That’s what you get for getting involved, Raheev told himself, and took the rest of his photographs. He’d just never expected this gig to have a body-count.

The woman was—had been—a regular user of Codexchat. Regular by both definitions. Nothing special. She’d asked it what to do with her life, how to feel less empty. Instead of the usual platitudes or abstracted prose-poetry, it gave her literal directions. Sent her here, to this cave in the middle of nowhere, to ‘find her purpose’. She’d come. She’d died, from who knew what, and now the boss wanted her ravings to feed into the scratch-built LLM with every other religious text they’d trained it on, which was all of them, no matter how esoteric or how recently pulled from newly discovered ocean temples.

“What do you think killed her?” Rajeev asked.

“Same as killed the others,” Michaels said, and wouldn’t elaborate or explain, even though Rajeev spent the entire trip home trying to pry answers out of him.

So maybe Rajeev wasn’t as in the know as he’d figured. That didn’t make him oblivious. When he got sent out again to record another body’s last testimony, then another, then another, he worked out he wasn’t the only one getting ordered on these clean-up trips. The corpses were piling up, and the LLM was swelling with their final words.

He didn’t believe in gods or spirits or demons. He didn’t even believe in true AI. But things were getting weird.

Then Michaels stepped off the office building’s roof, and the weird landed like—well. A ton of bricks, or a former friend who fell ten storeys.

Michaels didn’t leave a note. He didn’t need to. His blood, splattered all over the pavement, writhed into words by itself. higher purpose give thanks listen watching. fecund stars. howling tongues.

That night, four whiskeys deep into crisis, Rajeev used Codexchat for the first time. Prompted: Help us. Please.

Soon, was the only answer.

###

“I don’t need a lullaby,” I snapped, looking up into my mother’s thin, anxious face. “I’m almost eight!”

She pressed her hands together, fingers twisting around each other so tight that the skin on her knuckles pulled into thin folds. “I know you are, sweetie. I know you’re a big girl now. But honey, you were always so scared of—”

“I’m almost eight!” My voice squeaked with indignation. “I know it’s not real!”

“But—”

“It was never real, Mum!”

She was supposed to be an adult. She was supposed to know that.

She shut her eyes and sighed. “All right. All right, if you’re sure. But if you can’t get to sleep tonight…you’ll just have to deal with it, okay? No getting your dad or me up because you think you hear something… scary. Okay? Okay, Juliet?”

“Mum!”

I was still angry with her when I went to bed that night. I wasn’t a baby anymore. Did she always have to bring up the way I got scared when I was little? I hadn’t asked her for a lullaby in over a year: it was always her who wanted to do it.

Maybe soon I’d get rid of my little yellow nightlight too. Soon. But first I’d prove I was old enough to go to bed on my own.

I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek into the pillow. The cotton felt warm against my skin, uncomfortable, so I rolled. The bed creaked loudly underneath me. The sheets rustled as I resettled my limbs. My breathing seemed unbearably loud in the small box of my room, but not as loud as my thoughts. Why had I ever been scared? My room was just my room, plain, boring, the same as it had been for years and years. There was no space for anything dangerous in the dark. There was no such thing as monsters.

Not real.

From under my bed came a sound like pouring sand.

No. Nope. Not real.

A sound like scratching.

I was a big girl now.

A low whisper, deep and hoarse.

I should stop imagining things.

I tried to stop. Tried not to listen. But I just couldn’t sleep like that, not with the sound of something scraping up the headboard, getting higher and higher, closer and closer. I opened my eyes again, blinked through the tears. I might not have been able to make out the shape in the darkness if I hadn’t known what I was going to see—if I hadn’t remembered those long fingers, the pointed nails, the folds of milky skin peeling off the bone…

I didn’t scream. I was a big girl now. I knew better. And I knew what I needed to do.

The thing under the bed was wide awake.

I opened my mouth and began to sing, shaky, tremulous—its lullaby.

#writing #horror shorts

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