Quick note: This is a horror short
It was upon the verge of night.
The waning light of another day lost in fretted melody threw odd shadows across your room: dusty and tired. Moving to retire for the night you notice a small marking, newly appeared, upon the floor. Curious you walk closer, each step falling heavier than the last.
You see it.
Below your windowsill a patch of floorboard held a perfect devil .
Still, as the moments between a clock’s tick, this devil lay without life.
Only a pattern you think, some imperfection in the wood; A pattern can hold no hidden malice, no threat veiled beyond its appearance.
But yet, as you stare beyond the faded lacquer of this floorboard your tired eyes blur and lines begin to feel more fragile than they should be.
It couldn’t exist…
The devil waits, poised for a movement that never comes, a tension that builds as you try to look away. You wonder how long it has lived with you, why haven’t you noticed it before?
You hear a breath by your ear and in this moment the world holds still.
*Click*
The fridge motor lurches and cold creeps across the floor. You realise just how alone this room makes you feel, it always has. Under your feet the wood grows thin; depth rings hollow in the unfathomable absence below, an ocean of space so still, and so black, nothing could exist beyond it.
A perfect devil .
Not a shape or scrawl, but an imperfection forced directly into the wood, holding presence and holding evil. It screams weight, a living energy that is twisted into the very fibre of the floor’s wooden grain. You look away but the devil lingers in the corner of your vision. A figure impossible, a sight so inescapable.
And then, a drop of blood.
A single drop of pure red blood forms upon the devil’s centre as if it was drawn from the dying ground. Much like a blossom weeping from the earth, the blood blooms from a hidden crack: unseeable and untrue.
It grows in silent crescendo, dropping slowly upwards to then splat upon the roof as if gravity had become reversed. A second drop thuds near the first and several more follow in a quiet patter; ichor seeps from the devil within the floorboard and falls upward with maddeding normalcy.
All you can hear is your heartbeat, fear, tightly coiled, holds you to watch as time holts its march.
The rumble returns. For so long you have tuned it out, ignored its everpressence. The gathering clouds grow dark on the horizon, the din of thunder obscures what hides beyond. Blood to the sky then we all fall down.
It’s with you now, revivified in completion.
The devil moves, it seems to awaken. Shifting without movement the twisting of its form blackens all else within the room. To hell you see beyond it, an eternity condensed within this pattern, transfixing and broken.
It opens its eye and regards you.
You can not speak for the night has already come, left you behind.
…
Jacob McCray
-2019
Sunday Short Stories 