Quick note: This is a horror short
Night darkens my study once again.
A crooked lamp of iron and fractured glass looms below the arch of my window and embers quietly against the clutch of night. It’s pole, wrenched to an angle by damage long past, allows the glow of this fragile will o’wisp to grace my solem study at this lonely hour.
Distracted, my gaze falls absent and I watch this lamp flicker in apparent dying breath, its flame throwing a silken pall of light across my desk and into the darkness beyond, a light that brings life, a light that outlines the shadows of fey that lurk within the dusty corners of my imagination and dance unseen just beyond the limits of my vision; this illuminance so simply conjuring things that could not be, so simply adding age into the lines of my palm.
Flitting once more and then fading from radiance, the gaslight dies, and darkness consumes the street below.
The night was cold, I shivered and blew warmth into my hands as the faded fabric of my window’s curtains seemed only a slight rebuff against winter’s callus grip: A winter that crept across the night air as if it were a claw of death, reaching outward to drag me into the earthen clay, entombing my home beneath its stilted hollows. The air that cruelly cracks and snaps a shiver into weary bones that cuts into conscious those who lay still awake in this hour; A wind that whistles through many a crack and seam, one that is patient, one that will linger.
The slow ticking of my radiator did little to kindle any illusions of warmth that could fill this night of stirring dreams. And so, I stand in stretch and gaze out past the soft snow that falls upon the slate tiles of my window; the street beyond appears a picture of stillness, dappled only by the moonlight that stretches off into nevermore.
Beyond further study, I extinguish my candle and make for bed; a day spent deciphering an impenetrable language held by forgotten tongues, had burdened my mind with thoughts of the unknown and so as I trudge across the frost-touched floor, I close my bedroom door and forgo any prayers before I lay to rest.
Lowering my tired frame downward, I start with a yelp of surprise as something gently brushes against my ankle from within the darkness.
In panic I jump upward, catching a faint gust as if something had clasped, in vain, at the air below my heel; a specter of invisible malice reaching outward, drawing to crush me like a child would a mayfly.
Dread clutching my heart, I steel myself and glance into the nothingness.
Lines of wooden floorboards lay below, each board holding no trace of any forbodence in their varnished grain, no lurking evil waiting to ensnare me within its jaws and consume my wailsome call. I wait for some time until I can bring myself to look under the bed. Gathering my fragmented bravery I peer downward and see but only dust.
Good, a wild imagination just teasing my nerves, It is no breaking of reason that I should be afraid of the dark, no folly of will that I should be jumping at hidden nothings. I wait for a moment and then move to lie down.
A knock…
The single rapping of knuckles upon wood shatters the silence and cuts my resolve to ribbons. With shaking hands I strike a match and colour returns to the room. Outside the wick of this small flame’s fleeting glow, the darkness takes on a bluish radiance that alights upon the air as if mismatched in a hue of unevenness.
I see no foul creature looming, no spirit paused to assail me in this moment of weakness. I see my chambers, no item out of line or askew; I see only a startled fool jumping at his own absurdia.
A shifting of the roof I decide, yes the wood creaking along with the sudden cold snap that has so entangled this night along with the superstitions of a tired mind that I am not normally so addled by. The match burns out and I climb under the bedsheets.
Surly nothing, the fancys of devils and demons play with men of story but their fabric is intangible. I should fear the hidden night as much as I should fear the receding tide on some distant shore. Logic–my shield–seems to warm me as my bedchamber returns to its familiar aura, shadows no longer hold hidden daggers of obsidian, my thoughts drift no longer to the unseeable flash of what is indescribable.
I am safe here.
Near slumber I hear a creak.
My closet hinge, binded by cold and seized with patina, wails with a guttural howl alike some mindless banshee calling horror into the dead air. My eyes fighting the darkness look toward the door as fear holds me in place, a quiet dread that turns my very soul to stone and weighs me down in seas of abject terror, I see them, even in the darkness, I see the long fingers slowly easing the closet door open as if they had emerged from a coffin, one so swollen by rot that no life could have emerged from within.
An arm, gnarled and impossibly long, slithers from the crack of the closet door and stalks with serpentine silence across my floorboards. A void of encompassing blackness shrouds this horror and pulls the fleeting light toward itself, consuming colour with an unending hunger. A shadow, not of true life but tangible in its inconceivable existence.
It strikes faster than any demon or creature of legend, it lashes out at me with whiplike venom and clutches at my chest before I may start or cower. The grip turns to iron as it holds me still, forcing a cry from my lungs and stealing reason from my voice. I scramble against the binding terror in effort to break its grip, a primal fear emanating from within me that screams to run, that screams to escape into the night and free myself from this waking nightmare.
A face regards me with sightless terror from the depths of the closet.
A door that must forever stay closed lies fully open now and from within…
And in this moment, night darkens my study once more.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 