Дж. Хатчинс - Personal Effects - Dark Art

Drake began to mutter something. I stopped talking and watched his quivering lips form the words. “Hhhhh,” he said.

White vapor streamed from his mouth.

Oh …

The chill blasted over me like a gale-force wind, and I stumbled a half-step backward, instinctively clutching my arms, suddenly shivering. The air was brittle, so cold it burned.

“…no,” I said. My teeth were chattering.

“Hhhhh.” The vapor swirled around Drake’s face like cigarette smoke now. He chuckled, a manic, broken sound. “ Hhhhere. Arrrrk Man. Here. I… can… feel him.”

His head flung back as if he’d been hung from the gallows. His green eyes flashed open and stared at the ceiling, stared at something a thousand miles above. My furor had been supplanted by fear. Chitter-chitter went my teeth.

And the walls themselves replied: Tktktk. Tktktk. TKTKTK…

The light above flickered, buzzed, did what it had done three days ago—but there were new things here now, things that weren’t here during the last light show, the last hellshow, I run the red show, and Jesus Christ almighty, they were moving, turning sour, dying.

I stared in stone-cold terror as the murals’ colorful, manic lines and blobs came to life, swirling, breathing and undulating, rippling like water. The colors withered as I watched, transforming into a charcoal gray, two walls’ worth of Zach sketches, animated like a Disney film, chaotic and beautiful and terrible.

The gray lines were black now. They coalesced into arm-thick scribbles that twitched and jigged, swirling like giant ghoul’s eyes, cinderblock snakes. Some were slow, sliding toward the floor like refrigerated syrup—spoiled, bubbling with black curds.

But much of the dancing blackness was fast. Liquified panther.

The goop, glittering like crude oil in the strobing light, splashed down with a soul-chilling slurp. It became a shifting mass of pain-bringing things as it writhed on the cracked tile floor: barbs, razors, knives, claws, incisors, all black and wet. I lost a little of my mind in that glimmering, shimmering madness.

“Richard…” I whispered.

The cinderblock snakes flopped to the floor now, quivering and gelatinous, leaving ink snail-trails on the walls… and the onyx pool rushed to absorb them, hungry to be made whole. It wasn’t one voice that spoke now. It was legion.

Tktkpaytktkplaytktkilllnow

The frigid air was thinner now, harder to breathe. The obsidian pool rose and flattened, dimensionless once more. Black flame, charred paper, Butoh dance-arms, seesaw-seesaw rocking head.

The light strobed on and on, flashing against black teeth, black pearl, black fingers, long, longer now—growing longer still.

“…told you you’d die…” Drake said. “… hhhhere … with me… .”

Not going to die, I thought. No one else is going to die.

I whirled back to my patient. I hissed my words through blue lips.

“Listen to me, old man. Fucking listen to me.”

Tktktkouldkoobemine? Wouktktktbemiitk?

I doubled over, shivering, feverish. I pulled up again, spitting my words through gritted teeth.

“Cuh-cuh-crazy, Druh-Drake. Tha-that’s one option. But the uh-uh-other… .”

I heard the thing rising behind me, growling and growing taller, breathing ice on my shoulders. My stomach turned at the sound of slick tongues ticking across fangs.

I heard a whisper, a voice. I ignored it.

“LISTEN to me!” I bellowed. “Fir-first option gone! Nuh-no crazy man would draw myu-mural maps. Ssoo. Sssssane. Yuh gotta be sane.”

Drake’s limp body jerked, as if electrified. Another whisper, but not from him.

“You all-almost had me fooled, mindbender,” I snapped. “Had me thinking it wuh-wasn’t you. Ohhh, but it was, wasn’t it, Drake? All those peopnumigh —”

A dozen icicles pierced my skull, rail spikes in my brain, pumping black liquid into gray matter. The whispers were here now, inside my head, a soaring, roaring symphony of thunder-drums and sinuous snake hisses.

“Nnnn,” I said.

Tumbledownthesssteps, tktkartilagessnapping, Zaehsnapping

“Nnnno wonder you went blind,” I muttered. “Coward.”

Drake bucked again, his brow furrowing in confusion. His head titled forward, away from the ceiling, toward my voice.

“What?” he said.

The voices in my mind vanished for a moment. I sucked in a breath, feeble, asthmatic.

“I said—”

But the blackness gushed anew, and I screamed as the voices screamed, and they were the howls of the Golgotha-mad, the psychotics, the lifers, lifting their legion language in unholy chorus:

timeto go , Zaktktk. putyourhand innrr satktkchel, pull outktktk your pencilzzzzk.

And God help me, I did. My shivering fingers slid to my bag and found several sketching pencils with uncanny precision. I wasn’t driving my hand anymore. No, oh, no. The suicides heard this, I knew it now, twentysomething Rosemary Chapel hanging herself in her parents’ garage, black leather belt silver studs ripping her thrrrr

India ink was spilling over my eyes, no, into my eyes, sliding over my tear ducts, seeping into my retinas. The world was growing dark.

tktktkarmmm. take penciktktktktk. punch hkhkhole innn tktkarmmm . Like a slave, my fingers plucked a shaft from the bunch in my right hand. The pencil trembled in my iron grip. My fingernails dug into my palms, making them bleed. Damn me, I couldn’t let it go.

I raised the pencil high, like a knife, possessed. With everything I—it—had, it arced down, downward, plunging into my right forearm. I screamed. My hand, stupid with its own mind, broke the pencil as it yanked away. A half-inch of wood and graphite remained in my skin.

The air chuckled.

Tktkchest now.

Yes. God, yes. It was becoming more clear now, here in the dark. Another pencil in my left hand. It rushed toward me, as if I were beating my chest.

It pierced my right bicep, just above the nipple. The pain was exquisite.

And nowktktk. Eyyyyye for tktkeyyyye.

“No,” I said, but another pencil was in my hand now… and it was rising slowly, so slowly, to my face.

I howled, focused my mind on the noise. Used the focus to find words. Directed the words at Drake.

“I know you did it, Richard!” I screamed. “How you did them all!! The whole world is going to know! I’m going to put you away, cold-blooded killer that you are. It’s going to be in my report, old man, all of it! YOU KILLED THEM!”

The whispering wasp-swarm died down again, and Drake stirred in his chair once more. The pencil trembled, six inches from my face, as I fought the thing overpowering my body. The muscles in my forearm quivered, as if in an arm-wrestling contest.

The man’s sightless eyes quested for my face, and I could see a strange breed of vitality returning to him, bringing color to his cheeks. Tears were streaming down his face now.

But the room’s remaining air pressed around us now, wracking me with above-sea-level bends, and I cried out once more. The beast behind me whined, desperate. And then it growled, low and guttural. I felt the sound in my fillings.

The sputtering light above us went black. My heart stopped beating.

And I heard the nightmare millipede skitter-slide rush from behind me to beside me… and then before me. Airless, soundless, dimensionless space separated me from my patient.

I shut my eyes, lost in the ocean, and felt the pencil press forward anew, rejuvenated.

First, I’d lose my right eye. Then my left. And I’d be just as blind as him, the failure he said I was, they said I was, the failure I knew I was.