Wrath White - Scabs

As I sprinted beneath the last streetlight, preparing to charge into the darkness, I saw what looked like a wall of the fearsome night things raging amid the shadowy twilight between the street lamps. Now I could make out all of them. The biggest mob of creatures, swarming directly in my path, were led by faces that I’d known most of my life. The Christians had been right after all. These things were not some genetic experiments gone wrong or the aftermath of some industrial accident. But they hadn’t come from hell either. They were the most fearsome of all the demons, my own personal ones.

“The way out is not around but through.” I whispered as I tucked my chin and hurtled right into them swinging the axe as I prepared to make my last stand. I saw demons with the faces of my mother and father lunge toward me and I prepared to cleave their heads from their shoulders. But I couldn’t. I dropped the axe and ran, trying to dodge between them, but I was slow from injuries, exhaustion, and loss of blood, and there were too many of them. Their fangs and claws cut into my flesh and this time they hooked in deep. I couldn’t break free, but I didn’t slow my stride either. I dragged them along as I sprinted toward the light. My mother and father latched to my thighs and buttocks, slashing at my back. My sister, and brothers, my aunts, and uncles, and cousins, former friends, and ex-girlfriends, everyone who’d ever had the poor judgement to invest their emotions in me, were gnawing at my chest and stomach, working my muscle and fat free from my bones, and burrowing into my organs.

One of the night things, an ex-girlfriend whom I’d gotten pregnant and then coerced into having an abortion, scampered up my back and began biting and clawing at my throat, lacerating both my jugular and carotid arteries with its hooked talons and shark-like teeth. The spray of blood seemed to excite the demons already clinging to me and attract even more. I stumbled, nearly went down into the herd of rapacious shadows, then righted myself and continued to run. Staring at the cone of light just yards away, like an oasis in a desert of pain and death. I began to scream just before the thing on my back tore out my larynx, silencing me. Still, I kept running. It was what I had always done. The only way I knew how to deal with life. But now, my demons were catching up to me.

Best Friends

I was almost asleep, staring across the darkened room in a drowsy twilight haze at the moonlight beaming through my window, when a shadow crossed slowly in front of it, blocking the silver light from view. My heart drumrolled in my chest as the dark shape, a piece of the night, detached itself from the larger body of darkness and began moving towards me. My breath came in rapid bursts filling the silence with the sounds of a quiet steadily increasing panic as fear sent a surge of adrenaline through my nervous system and shot up my pulse rate somewhere around one hundred and fifty beats per minute. Nothing should have been moving in my room. Nothing except me.

I wanted to reach for the nurse’s call button sitting on my nightstand but I was afraid to move from the relative safety of my blankets. The room darkened even more. The inky black silhouette appeared to be absorbing the moonlight and breeding more shadows into the already stygian gloom. A tenebrous curtain of night obscured everything from view as the shadow approached my bedside.

My heartbeat doubled. The blood surged through my veins as if propelled by a steam engine. I watched the dark ethereal shape glide to the edge of my bed and I dug my fingernails into the sheets, ripping them. I imagined the sound of footsteps even though I heard none. A cold draft preceded the apparition as it floated toward me, whispering like wind beneath a doorsweep. Slowly a distinctly human silhouette emerged before me, taking on more anthropomorphic features as it drew closer. The outline of a human skull with ragged tufts of hair clinging to its otherwise bald head, emaciated arms, bony hips, skeletal legs. I could hear it breathing as it hovered above my bed. The dark shape expanding and contracting as it inhaled warm climate controlled air and breathed out that chill gasp. I began to pant terrified little breaths that turned to steam in the frigid air radiating from the nebulous penumbra above me.

Then the shadow reached out one lithe wisp of a limb, lifted my sheets and blanket, and slipped into bed beside me, snuggling its icy flesh against mine. The scream stuck in my throat and came out as a whimper as it drew itself still closer. It was trying to spoon with me. A riot of goosebumps exploded across my skin and icy tendrils clawed my spine raising the hair on my neck and forearms. I could feel it against me, cold, clammy, dead, but breathing. I was more shocked that the apparition had any substance at all than by its lack of body heat.

Too weak to move, I lay there with those cold skeletal arms wrapped around me, that frail damp torso pressed against my back, and its frigid breath creeping down my neck.

When it turned its face toward mine its eyes were gaping holes that yawned wide, more shadows slithering deep within them. It was a portrait of sorrow. Sorrow so deep that it had literally become her, bending each feature into the shape of that one emotion. Still, I recognized her.

“God damnit! Why the hell does she keep following me!” My fear and guilt had merged into one paralyzing emotion. Whatever she had come here to do to me I knew I deserved it.

Her name was Sarah Michelle and she’d had a crush on me, but I’d been too afraid of what others would say about me dating the emaciated little nerd to show her even the simplest human kindness. I had killed her. Or, at the very least, I’d given her no reason to want to keep living.

I never knew that she had cancer. She’d kept it to herself. Never using it as an excuse when people laughed at her sunken corpse-like face or her bald and mottled scalp, giving no explanation for these abnormalities at all. Enduring all the taunts and torments with stoic indifference even when they said she had AIDS and accused her of being a heroine junkie or a crack whore. The other kids were so cruel that I had felt sorry for her. So I tried to be nice.

I spoke to Sarah whenever I passed her in the hallways between classes. “Hi” and “Bye” mostly. I offered her a smile whenever I could. I was just trying to make her feel…I don’t know…not so alone. When I’d first started speaking to her she would eye me suspiciously and quickly walk away. It wasn’t long before she was returning my greetings and my smiles. It was like winning the trust of a wild animal. Soon I could see her lingering in the halls, waiting for me to notice and acknowledge her with a smile before shuffling off to class. I thought it was cute at first. Until she started following me.

Everywhere I went she would turn up. Lurking in the shadows. Staring. Flashing that weak nervous smile and turning away, blushing coyly whenever I would catch her looking at me. I was petrified that my friends would start to notice. That they’d tease me for hanging out with her. Say she was my girlfriend or something. Maybe say that I had AIDS too or that I was a junkie or a crackhead.

See, I was the new kid in school. I’d just transferred that semester and my popularity was something of a fluke. New kids were not supposed to be part of the in-crowd. The thought of being an outcast was the worse thing I could imagine.

“Dude, what’s up with you and the anorexia chick? You doin’ her or something? She’s always following you, man. What’s up with that?”

“She looks like a damned prisoner of war! Why don’t you tell your girlfriend to eat something for god’s sake!”

“You got a thing for crack whores now or what?”

It went on and on like that until I eventually started ignoring her, too. Just to make her go away. I didn’t want to get laughed at. I’d been teased before at other schools and it was not an experience I was eager to repeat. I mean, I was only trying to be nice to her. No need for us both to wind up as targets.