Occult
You were never perfect. You would never claim something like that. But you thought you would mean something to someone. That was never true. You found out about it in a cruel way, watching as they picked apart your life, arguing over stupid things as they tried to take the material possessions left behind by you.
But you weren’t dead. You looked at them through the looking glass, trapped in the world of opposites. It was your own fault. You should have never experimented with the occult. You turned your back on the world where you should exist and faced the land no one had dared to enter. The world of long shadows, twisted buildings, and bone-colored ivy that took over every inch of the place.
You took a step away from the looking glass, knowing that the mirror wouldn’t break, letting you back into that life where you were too consumed by yourself and who you were not to notice others around you: those who were supposed to love you, those who were to love.
Your mouth tasted dry, your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth like a big slap of rotten meat. You clutched the book that had taken you into this world—a world void of the living. You had seen nothing but the morphed willows and the ivy, climbing the mansion that looked like your family home, but a haunting version of it.
You had read enough books, enough stories, to know you would find answers here to all the questions that had tormented you inside that mansion. There, everything would be revealed. You glanced back at the looking glass. The warm glow of the gas lamps made your family into dark figures that didn’t exist. Not here and not in your memories. They were vultures, and if you ever returned, you would send them to fend for themselves in the real world, and see what their greed would get them.
The ground crunched under you. The sound sent shivers up your back, making your teeth ache, and your body convulse.
Every step sounded like you were walking on eggshells, hollowed out of life, sucked by something or someone that ruled the desolate land of ivies and bones.
You licked your lips to moisten your mouth, but it did nothing. Your tongue tasted bad, and you could smell your breath: dead animals and sewage water.
Maybe your family was right; maybe you had died, and not just been transported to the source of your magic.
No. It was this world lying to you. You pushed past the sound; the crunches and the hollow silence governing the mansion and its grounds. Your grounds.
The stones that led to the building were cracked with time. Ivy had pushed into those cracks, trying to tear the building apart. You stepped over the bone-colored maggots, coiling around the ivy.
You didn’t like the sight of them. There was life, life that had spikes, blackened eyes, and life that ate other life. You expected a howl, or something else to freeze your blood. There was only silence and your boots swaying on the doorstep, undecided, unwilling to go in and face whatever was waiting for you inside.
Yet you stepped in. The life you had created under the glow of the gas lamps was not for the weak.
The ivy had pushed inside the mansion, blooming at every inch of it. It had taken down paintings that should have portrayed your ancestors, but instead there were deformed creatures, only remotely human-like.
The air inside the mansion was hot and moist, unlike what had been there outside, where there had been no air, just an idea of it. But here, something lived. You could feel it. It was pulling you in, whispering questions you barely heard.
…
—
Oh, sigh. I wanted to finish this one, but I’m pressed for time. I have to leave for work soon. I wanted to see where this would go. I had an idea of sorts: the protagonist would return to the real world, but they would take something with them from the mirror world, something that would hitch a ride, something that had pulled them in in the first place.
What I got today was a lyrical horror about a voyage-and-return written in the second person. I had fun writing this one, and seeing where it would go, trying to find the right words, trying to push past the first ones that came into my mind. Not an easy task, especially since I sometimes have words lurking in my mind and I can’t hear them in their true form, and I sometimes have no way of finding out what they are. Ghost words. Ideas of words and concepts that torment me.
Thank you for reading! Have a day of utter, delightful horrors of your choosing, and see you tomorrow ❤
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