Shouldn’t Be Here - A (Very) Short Story in Original Writings

‘You know you shouldn’t be in here,’ a man spoke with a stern, simple and audible voice, an unclear Northeast American dialect. Upon utterance of the first syllable he noticed a young woman who stood in a slightly hunched over position some tens of feet away from him, her face turned away. Incandescent light began flooding slowly into the previously dark room. The man’s left hand flicked a switch adjacent to a door that led into a dark area that could not be described by the naked, unknowing eye. A single key was jammed into the handle of the door with several more jangling without noise below. The door swung slowly to and fro, creaking loudly from long disuse.

His outstretched hand remained at the dingy switch panel, all three switches on it now facing up as various bulbs from seven positions in the large room began to burn at indiscriminate times. The man’s right hand held a well-worn push broom with several multicolored bent bristles. An out of shape, slightly overweight body held his medium frame inside of a faded blue jumpsuit. His clean shaven but rugged face held a sparse head of salt and pepper hair, olive tanned skin and a pair of brown eyes that could not break his gaze away from the sight of the young woman.

The man gasped and covered his mouth, dropping the broom in his hand. His gasp was sharp and panged, even louder than his opening sentence when entering the room. Lights began to pulse and fade, some flickering out, as the woman turned her head towards the man. Her auburn hair and pale skin were covered by a dirty, ragged sheet of discolored cloth one might have called a dress at one point, but this was torn and disfigured, no longer recognizable as any sort of fashion except to say that it was dated. She was clearly shivering and filthy, her pallor marked more clearly by extreme and jagged translucent veins running like a map of rivers across her bruised body.

Her face turned towards the man to reveal several broken and disfigured teeth, marked brownish red from what looked like long dried bloodstains. Her eyes were black, not to mark an emptiness in the sockets no; there were clearly eyes in the sockets where they should have been, but the cornea, the iris, the pupil, all parts were jet black. Her mouth was drawn into a rectangular snarl, her teeth bared out as she hissed towards the man. He quickly began to collect his broom and keys but stopped short as the woman began to walk slowly towards him.

She spoke with scratching tones, noises that resemble no language spoken by tongues of Earth. He responded with a short burst of fear, the lights in the room still beginning to flicker as if being controlled by her will. This will, her words, her movements and all about her startled him beyond recognition as it was nothing he had ever seen before. His mind could not process the occurrence, a thing of which his instincts and nervous system made sure his body was aware as he started towards the door to close it and leave the woman inside. Before he could finish taking a second step to the door, his brain began to pulsate with sound as if his ears were privy to the inside of a hurricane wind. This corresponded to the woman’s open mouth, her eyes glowing with a malevolent rim of what looked like black fire, her skin mapped veins darkening to the same hue.

The man covered his ears in futility. This was an assault on the senses. The waves of sound, garbling static and crashing waves in his head, rendered him inert and dropped him to his knees. He screamed just to see if he could hear himself. He could not. Outside of the sound in his brain, the room filled with the sound of the man’s fearful timbre. The woman was within arm’s reach now. Her mouth opened more as if agape and holding back the fires of hell itself, waiting to swallow the man and send him to its depths.

He reached out to swat her away, his body jettisoning up out of a cold bed at the earliest hours of morning. 3:25 AM, a digital clock read at his bedside. He turned to recognize his surroundings. A bedroom. A bookshelf. A nightstand. An alarm clock. Curtains on the window. A door. He was disoriented still from the dream he’d just experienced. Rubbing the drowse from his eyes and giving his lachrymal glands a jump, he batted his eyelids open and shut a few times to further gain his bearings. A door to his left was edge-lit with incandescent light, as though shielding a hallway with all the lights on. He felt a sharp pain in his right side, which was sudden and critical. His breathing got heavy and as he clutched his body to discover the source of the pain, he noticed blood pouring from his right rib cage. His lungs were slowly filling with liquid and his breathing became stertorous. He could see in the dark room, thanks to the rectangle of light from the door, that a knife was slowly being drawn from his side, held by a slender woman with auburn hair.

The memories began to wash into his mind. The night out. The drinking. The meeting with his mistress. The sex. The wife he’d lied to. The risks he was taking by making this happen. He was not in his bedroom right now; he was at the bedroom of his mistress’ home. Peering out with weary eyes and coughing a small stream of blood, he saw two mutilated bodies on the floor of the bedroom before him. His mistress. Her husband. And at his bedside, wielding a cold blade of curved steel, his wife. She uttered a few words as he began to feel himself collapse:

‘You know you shouldn’t be in here.’

property of Skeletor, 7-19-18

Last updated October 23, 2018