Just a quick note that this short story is a bit more horror-y than the normal Sunday Short Stories vibe.
Always remember to make some time for yourself. 👍
It’s late.
Slumber’s bow creaks upon frigid seas as the familiar tremble of an approaching migraine crawls from the deep like something formless and unknown. I lay still and know that respite will not return to me. It is one o’clock, less than an hour of sleep.
Kicking the woollen blanket from my legs, I sit for a moment upon the side of my bed and feel the cool of the night’s quietude coil around the floorboards of my room. As if like a fog, the air around my floor has a dampened sheen in the arc of the moon that shines across it in a solitary beam. It is a silver mist composite of rime, a vision of the limbo between being and not. The air stirs and I presume the radiator to have failed again.
Standing, the frost of the floorboards rouses me somewhat as each joint in my feet cries out in ache as the memory of the day’s work and the one ahead becomes more acute. My eyes are rasp dry; had I been crying?
Two pounding thumps are a sudden shock to my temple. A distant ringing begins in my left ear as the loss of balance preludes another migraine’s appearance. I fall heavily upon my hip as if pulled sideward by the pain, my back begins to shudder with fatigue. Two weeks without an excavator, two weeks of digging by hand, things that needed to have been completed, things have been forgotten. Had I eaten today?
Vision returns from blur and a hacking cough shakes each last drop of resonance from the departing attack. It was a short affliction but unguided by the hand of mercy. I cradle my head and rise, the air is sharper now, the dull green of a digital clock paints the corridor towards my kitchen weakly. I try to turn on a light but cannot find the switch. It is dark; I walk wearily forward.
Water tumbles from the faucet behind the echo of a groaning pipe. I take two aspirin and struggle to keep the harsh water from creating another attack. A tension of death’s grip twists and tears within my head but, thankfully, abates after a moment of tremor. I breath and hear the engine of a car outside fire into life.
My kitchen is a small and feels lonely in the lateness of the hour. White tiles and crumbling grout, a chipped benchtop, and four rendered walls that enclose me from the outside. There is a window to my left wall, locked, but installed high enough that it is of more use as porthole for natural light than for a view.
Upon the wall hung a picture but now only the frame remains. A memory both empty and mocking of what it had once held. A grain of something, a tiny sliver within me remembers what once lived inside that frame but the migraine prevents me from replacing it. I left it empty; it is a forgotten memory and an admission.
I look into the frame and see my reflection within the glass. I am old, a figure trapped by the outlined boarder of lacquered wood. Passively, the figure stares back toward me, moonlight now cast across its face so that I appear as a stranger. It is draped in white, a harsh white almost despairing in its impassivity. The figure smiles and regards me with unblinking eyes. There’s a deadness to its expression, one of judgment and finality. I pull at my hair in nervous habit and the figure does not. As if a portrait it remains still and its smile takes on the appearance of a scowl, a grasp of menace aligning it crooked as the frame glows in the moonlight.
It exhales as I breath in, a glint within the dark side of the figure’s features shines like a knot of hidden gold and stares from behind the shadow alike no eye that could be described as human.
Without warning a shaking rumble begins at the nape of my neck and spiders across my skull with the cracking of glass. Agony, both white and hot, instantly draws me to sweat despite the cold and I sink to the floor unable to escape the weight that forces me downward. Every heartbeat felt as though a thunderclap. A klaxon wail of ringing assails my ears, it wells greater and greater, it focuses the pain into vividness. The migraine turns its jaws, it tightens, compresses my thoughts, it screams at me in hostile anger that the choices of fight or flight no longer hold meaning.
The figure in the frame is laughing now. It elongates and spirals behind the cracking glass. Fingers bending back upon themselves and popping from their joint, they snap back into place as figure flourishes a hand towards me in a mocking offer of help. Its jaw unseats and hangs loose from laughter all the while maintaining its half features of shadow. I wish to shout it away but no words can form. I pray for the strength to cry but am abandoned of spirit. I watch as the figure reaches from the frame.
It sways serpentine and slithers in ever shifting movements.
A shatter and the glass breaks.
It crawls to me with blood-soaked hands.
The figure becomes a coil, and a spiral of black follows behind, illuminated only by moonlight. The vortex, that is the name that I shall remember it by. It approaches nearer and nearer until all I can see is a cutting fear both pure and encompassing. It envelops me as the migraine takes full hold. I lay on the floor, unable to think, unable to stand. All I can do is look to my own bloodied hand and feel the sting across my knuckles from where I had broken the glass.
This memory cannot continue. I must somehow find rest.
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 