Strange stories

The island - part 2

A curdling scream sounds off. Then a "shunk" sound followed by a gurgle and the sound of something heavy falling over. And then a slow dripping and a deeply pitched sobbing noise. Something very off is happening. I lay still paralyzed in fear and I notice that the cat is also wide awake, its ears pointing at the door and its large plate sized pupils staring dead ahead. A heavy thumping noise starts sounding off in the house accompanied by the deeply and wrongly pitched crying noise. As if some girl has fallen down a well and inhaled some terrible gas to lower her voice. With each thump the next one comes closer to the door and with each thump thereafter the sobbing sound becomes more distorted. I finally am freed from my paralysis and sit bolt upright. The cats hairs are standing up again and it is backing away towards the window shaped hole in the wall. I reach for the still moist burlap sack when I am absolutely assaulted by a deep thirst and painful hunger. I moan audibly and fall against the windowless wall with the blanket clutched in my left and the sack in my right. The wailing in on the other side of the door stops dead. I sharply pull in my breath. The thumps sound until whatever is causing them is standing directly on the other side of my closed door. I hazily slide up the wall and place my arm on the windowsill, staring daggers at the door.

Something moans on the other side.

I decide it best to remain as quiet as possible and start to climb out through the window. The door handle turns ominously slowly and clicks. The door is gently pushed open. More and more. The door eerily whines. Forever the door grinds against the rust holding it on the hinges until the form on the other side of the door is now exposed completely to me.

My eyes go wide and my blood freezes. I gurgle a wet cry in utter terror at the sanity demolishing sight and the cat hisses and growls violently for on the other side of the door frame is what was once the farmers daughter.

The hideous beast was mautated beyond almost all recognition. What was flesh had now become slimy and bloated and grey and looked almost rotting. There were no eyes and no nose. No face nor head. Only a drooping and ajar mouth with needle like teeth with large gaps between them and a clear and water like substance dripping from it. It was as if the torso extended to past where the skull should be and swallowed all features. The left arm of the beast was like one of the circus strong men only terribly lumpy, but In the place of a right arm there was only a sharpened, knife like limb reflecting the light of the moon from the window behind me. Reflecting also the blood along the length of the sharpened carapace. The whole being was standing on two almost human legs had they not been grey and slimy. The only way I distinguished it to be the farmers daughter was the floral skirt she had worn, now stretched hideously over this mutant's terrifying form. The terrible thing moaned and stumbled viciously towards me, its knife arm outstretched.

The impact of the hideous monster pushes me along with the cat fully out of the window frame and onto the dank and cold grass. The clouds had parted and now the full moon was wholly visible. Without a second thought my broken mind orders my body to scoop up the limping cat and the sack with the blanket in it and make a beeline for the train station. All thoughts of the operator die along with any hunger and thirst i had been carrying along. The appalling form utters a loud moan and lurches at the window. It struggles with climbing through giving me a head start. At that moment, a light breeze started up.

The longest run of my life happened then and there. It felt as if I was sprinting full speed for hours. As if the station just kept staying as far away from me as it was when I was at the house. I jump a fence and find a dirt pathway straight towards my goal. The cold stones on the path stab and tear painfully into my bare feet, but before long all pains become numb on my endless run.

Eventually

Painfully

I arrived at the station.

If you could even call it that.

The "station" was nothing more than train tracks lain over a grassy terrain under a slanted roof with a raised platform on either side and a withered little wooden booth on the closest platform with the text "tickets" written on it in too-old paint that had started to flake off. Gas lights fueled by inexplicable sources burned with an audible hiss on the ends of poles planted on the raised platforms and groups of insects were gathering around them. And then I heard it again. Like a moth to a flame. The wind picked up and started blowing through the station.

A moan that made my knees turn to mush and my blood to ice. The cat started to violently shake in the bag but I kept the straps firmly tightened. I looked around and finally came to my senses. There was no train here. There could be no train here. This was an island that I had washed up on only the morning before. There were not even tracks past the roof of the whole structure! Thumping behind me. I spin around to greet the hideous monster from before but now it seemed to loom taller and even bigger than before. The knife arm almost seemed sharper and the body deader. I step back. This was truly to be my end. Even if I did not know the water would so such a thing I was thankful now for the little monster cat to have saved me from this terrible fate twice now. Another step back. There was nothing I could do. The beast was far too strong for me to have any fighting chance. The wind was howling crazily now. And then I had one final step back and on that one last and final step, I tripped and fell backwards over the gap in between the raised platforms. I closed my eyes...

...and thudded onto the floor of a train car. I sat bolt upright and saw that I was sitting on the floor of an empty one car train with the doors closed before me. A moan sounded on the other side of the doors, yet I felt an inexplicable safeness. A horrible sound of metal tearing snatched that feeling away in an instant. I scrambled to my feet and saw that the monster truly was on the other side of a pair of sliding train doors. I dared not to look at it. I snatched up the bag with the cat in it and the blanket next to it and quickly gazed around. Then I felt the train move a little bit.

And then a bit more.

And then even more.

I looked back at the door and saw that the monster was now a good few meters further along the train, smearing its mouth across the moving window of the train. Confusion fills me and I turn to the rotting wooden booth. The lettering that was once peeling off and old and that said "tickets" now read "Go". I could almost make out the faint silhouette of a stout man in the booth. The howling wind sounded like a slight gust from within the interior of this ghost train. In shock and still horrified from the ordeal with the monster I fell down onto one of the aisle rows of chairs, pulled the blanket over me and let the cat out of the bag. It snuggled up beside me and the train pulled away from the station.

Almost immediately the train passed through a dense fog that filled the train inside and covered it outside.

And a sound sleep took me.

The next time i awoke i found myself in a train car of the same design but fully populated and still. The inhabitants staring at me and my tattered clothes and tattered blanket and malformed cat and were astonished that i was let on in the first place. I was told to disembark. And I found myself to be in a very familiar train station. The very station next to my humble apartment in London.

Every night afore sleep takes me to the morning beyond I am reminded of how I almost perished at the hands of such a daemon, and sometimes i feel as though i simply dreamed the entire story. When this becomes the case, I always look to the cat with the malformed leg that i found alive in the bag on the nameless beach on that fateful day who still lives with me to this day, and remember it to be very unfortunately true.