Asunder

Part 1

The noise was horrifying. It shook the walls, shattered every window in the apartment block, and reverberated through my very core. At least it felt like it should have been that loud.

It wasn't.

In reality there was no sound at all, except for people like me. There aren't many people like me. I'm a telepath, you see, and this noise was evidently not auditory in nature. Had it been, you would have expected to find a raging fire, in an orphanage for blind children, while the entire salvation army looked on, unable to act. It was an ear-splitting, earth-riving blood-curdling scream.

In my nineteen years on this planet I'd never heard such a roar. It's thunderous presence beat on the air, writhing through my mind and rendering my thoughts inaccessible. Interminable, it went on for what felt like forever. Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. The silence was deafening.

Hands shaking, eyes still screwed shut leaking small tears, I lay there, dwarfed by the vacuum left behind. I can't be sure how long it took me to rise, but by the time I rose unsteadily to my feet I was reasonably certain the shriek would not be repeated.

The unknowable, unwitnessed horrors emanating from that dreadful voice unnerved me deeply, but it seemed as if the moment had passed. It was over, before it had fully presented itself. I breathed a sigh of relief.

It was over.

To this day I am uncertain as to the scream's origin, and equally unsure of it's reason for cessation. However, this is something I am infinitely grateful for. I fear the day I myself meet such a cause for terror. There are some things a man must not know.

Some nights, though, almost once or twice a month, I wake up in the dead of night. I go to my bedroom window, somnambulant yet aware, and I listen. And although many nights this leads only to the hushed whispers of the solemn north wind, sometimes, so very rarely, I hear an echo of that insidious cry.

It calls for me.

I can't run.