NECROCITY TIMES - Issue #1 - HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

The Projection - @memorableusername

He was shuffling down the dirt path to the house, a skinless skeleton bloated by the wind, sifted through its careless currents, as if it did not know he was there in its swell. Returned to basics, no electric thoughts, he was smothered in the soft tall of the breeze.

Ignorance? Perhaps. For there on the wall were bars cast by the steel boughs of the concrete colored tree. They rattled as the leaves rattled, but sometimes, when the unidentifiable willow was still, they continued to shake, more adamantly at the pillar's inattention.

A thump, someone had fallen. He had entered the house.

No. No, there were no steps taken, no knocking of an arm on the floor for help from the person who had pushed it down.

"Hello?" He expected it to respond, a feminine greeting, high-pitched (Hello!), something sharp and white, a blade, blended into her dull pallor. Her dress was white, as if she believed ghosts had to be draped in bed sheets, or that the unnatural bleach could somehow shine in the night and protect her from being forgotten when light could no longer reflect off of her skin. "Are you home?"

It cracked against the floor. Whose skull had she used to make the sound, to strike against the wood?

No, it was him! Hunched, the man walked through the dusk pooling on the planks, less meat on his bones for picking without the night bloating him full. She had pecked him wane! The town had pecked him wane.

"Dad?" he asked. Was it her? Was she hiding in there?

"I just got back from town. They won't change it. God, and after everything!" Why not help you? You are alive.

His son's face drooped like the sun succumbing to night, falling like condensated smoke from his bones. "You're not supposed to go there without me." And for what purpose? Each day he wandered along the streets, as if looking for something he could never acquire.

The father's back straightened into a knife, gleaming through the dusk. The gloom was snuffing the barren landscape of hardened sin-black pools, to sink into the ethereal world, natural trunks withered to slate, too brittle to grasp onto- it had to be put out of its misery. Spirits could come through the medium, ghosts through the pools- thick rubber blackness, false night.

"Go to your room. I'll have supper done in a little while." His back tensed, then shivered with the dank air. He wanted out of his body. And he knew why. It puckered, as if that woman were punching the point of her blade inside his hide, stretching the waxy skin. Clean it instead! But the wounds only healed with more layers, soul unable to navigate the levers of his arms, his legs, around the sticky filth.

But his fear- it made the boards creak with the weight of her step, so heavy, so heavy with her significant consequences, it doubled her pull to the worldly house. His father's lip writhed. Was he in need of an exorcism, or had he heard her?

Oh, he could not stand it any longer, living in his father's stalked house! For the first time, he inquired after him.

"Who is she?" he asked, voice as soft as a whistle from her imagined nostrils behind his ear, white, stapled with white scraps of cloth. Was that what a ghost was, in truth? Yes? The appearance was tame, harmless. Pull the drapes from the row of each person's ghosts and find blades, another sheet-stapled face, blood.

"I don't know-" He paused- the boy was confusing his mind, searching for a problem that was not there to him. "What are you-."

Silenced. "You don't know? How can you not know something that's been trying to kill you?" A blot on his eye. She had moved to the corner, her face slack (the staples must have slipped), as large and eerie as a corpse bloated to five times its size, staring, staring, no images to see behind the lenses. "You have to stop projecting it! It's hurting me, us! It's changing our house." He wrung the collar, a noose, around his father's throat, fingers bled yellow.

"There's nothing there! You're mad!"

"Don't you dare blame this on me! It's your fault!"

"My fault?" He then looked misunderstood, face a duality of innocence and anguish from an unknown source- two wax contorted visages splitting from the skin of his head. "I never did anything to cause it!"

"You're pathetic! I'm going to fix it, because you won't."

He silenced him before he could protect himself, punching the knife, fallen from the woman onto the floorboards, through the rotten skull.

----

With the soiled brain gone, the environment was somehow serene to him, the ghost water was dried, the dead forest empty and silent as all was then dead, nothing else living in the lost house, dead with age, on the outskirts of town.

Until a scream sounded, heard only by humans, a sharper blade to inflict notice, to deafen him for the rest of his life to that one sound made eerier by the years, by his fallible mind, unable to recall it exactly, for a want of feeling, noise.

He shot upward in bed, as restless and sharp as the axe he had wielded.

~*~

I'm Kaitlyn, an English student at a university. I write mostly horror, sometimes venturing to write dark paranormal works or dark paranormal fantasies. You can find me memorableusername on Wattpad where all of my stories are published.