Short Tales of Abominations

She Lied

I could tell you it wasn't me. I could sit in this rotten cell fashioned of ivory walls, in this ivory tower crafted for your liking. In your damned sophistication you couldn't imagine the things that hide behind the curtain of our comprehension. These things... these things that are simultaneously there and not. You wouldn't believe me if I told you.

I saw them. Standing over her. I wouldn't know it at the time but they meant something. To her. To me. They towered over me, as I lay in the state between dreams and reality.

It was like any other day. So normal. I went to work, cut up with my friends, came home, kissed her cheek, had dinner, watched a movie with her. We went to bed. As I began to drift away, they revealed themselves.

I could hear their steps across the floor, but they emerged from the air. It was a trick of perspective. They seemed to have come out of the wall, but their position in the room indicated otherwise. My brain must have forced the perspective as some way to cope with it's instantaneous arrival. The other appeared away from me, outside of the scope of my attention.

I can't even begin to describe how they looked. Like men but also a perversion of us. As though they had been watching humanity from their shadows and fashioned a costume out their idea of humanity. Only... the details weren't right.

Their mouths were devoid of teeth and gums with lips akin to worms to in texture. Their skin looked cracked yet compressed like the patterns of a cinderblock. Appendages of varying length as though they eyed our measurements and symmetry, but the eyes... they were porous...

They stood over her and jerked and twitched. As if cringing at the very sight of her, lightly poking and prodding her, yet still she lied. I can't recall if she had been awake or asleep. If she WAS awake she stayed incredibly still.

Once they had collected the information they seemed to probe for, they put a hand upon her. I could not move to fend them off, instead watching helplessly as they stroked her forehead. Had they not been intruding, I would have guessed that they were loving petting away a fever. So innocent it seems.

When I awoke, they had gone. At least in sight. I could still hear them as the air shifted in their hazing twitches. As if the slightest movement was so violent that it could create a pocket vacuum in the space they occupied.

I shook her. At first she didn't respond. I could see her chest rising and falling with breath. They must not have hurt her. So i thought.

When her eyes opened she began screaming. Horrific, bone-chilling screams that pierced my heart like daggers, for she was screaming at the sight of me. I left the room and she calmed to a low whimper.

I was scared, yet simultaneously furious. Who was going to believe me? How was I to help her from this miserable state of panic. She could not look upon me, for the beings had concocted a falsified image of me in her mind. At least, this is what I theorize.

I was met with a terrible reaction everytime I stepped out to try and comfort her. With each failed attempt, I could hear them. They taunted me. Distorting the empty air into orbs of pulsing haze as if laughing at my struggle.

Then I made my mistake. In my panicked mind, I thought it smart to force exposure upon her. To dart into the room and grip her shoulders and shake her loose of this hallucination that created the border between us.

I was met with violence. The lamp on her bedside, lined with pearls at its base and a modern artist's twisted shaft, a gift from me to her, had been turned into her salvation from my desperate pleas of recognition.

I woke up in the back of a police car. Her hysterics had convinced them that I had been the aggressor. I only wanted her to see me as me and not what they had displayed me as. It wasn't her fault, but she lied.

So that is my story. I don't expect you to believe me. If they come for you as they have me, leave your loved one be. Try to find a cure for their defacing alterations placed inside of the mind. This is my warning to you. They are cunning.