Hear
Specters weren’t supposed to exist, but suddenly, they had appeared in Matt’s life. First as shadows at the corners of his vision. Then crawling slowly into clear view. These were not your dead loved ones nor some memories of the departed ones. These were something else, more like the darkness left behind by the bad and nasty.
Matt had first wished them away. Then, he had sought out professional help from both sides: experts who knew all about the mind, and then, when that and the medication didn’t work, he sought the mediums and all those professing to know a thing or two about the occult. Nothing had helped—all quacks. So Matt’s only course was to think either we had gone gradually insane or find out what the spooky wanted from him.
He didn’t like the idea of going insane. It scared him shitless more than the specters did. So the only other option was to find out what in the corpse-riddled world was going on.
So here he was, in the worst possible place in the city, in the worst kind of setting he could come up with. He was inside a murder house abandoned twenty years ago, sitting in the middle of a huge-ass room with broken windows and defiled walls, with just one candle lighting his existence. He waited for the specters to crawl their way out of the corners and cracks, and he would address them head-on with what the fuck.
As soon as the darkness engulfed the outside world with its thick, unkempt yard and driveway, where his shitty Honda stood waiting for him if he had to bolt, the shadows came to life. All the bogeymen that had followed him around for the past month or two now headed towards the light.
Matt swallowed, ignoring the urge to run the fuck out of the murder house.
“So, boys and gals, dish it out or be gone,” he proclaimed.
If an absence of sound could exist against a backdrop of nightlife, that was what he got. Utter silence from the specters and a chorus of night from the crickets.
“This is it. Speak or fuck off.” Matt’s heart drummed against his chest, like a jacked-up rabbit on speed and adrenaline.
The specters congregated just outside the light. They swayed like those bastard Hattifatteners from his childhood cartoons.
“One of you has to state what you want from me, or this will not work.” The Honda was still outside, and he only had to knock out the candle and flee, but he knew deep down it would solve nothing.
He waited for the specters to fill the void his words had left. And gradually, they did. It was more of a rumble than a growl, a wail, or anything like that. It reminded Matt of the ground rolling down the mountains.
“Words, man, words!” he shouted over the rumble.
The rumble turned into a sentence. “Hell will come.”
“Yeah, fuck this.” Matt jumped up to his feet and ran to his Honda. The specters didn’t follow him out.
—
Would it be possible for the spooky season to stretch for the whole year? I love how the nights are getting darker and the air colder. I would have liked to keep the autumn leaves on the trees, but the wind already took them away. Now, I just have to wait for the snow to come. The air doesn’t smell like snow. It will be weeks of this muted, wet grayness until there will be a sparkle of the frozen landscape.
Anyway, what I got today was a period horror quest written in limited third person. Actually, I got dystopia first, but I re-rolled as I’m all done with dystopia for now. There is nothing new I can give it. I wish I could push out my novel already, but my cover artist is still working on the cover.
I’m reading the third book of the Stranger Times: Love Will Tear Us Apart, and it is as wonderful as the first two. I hope C.K. McDonnell keeps writing the series. I still have two books waiting for me.
Thank you for reading! Have a spooky late autumn day, and see you tomorrow ❤
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