World Without End

Unrelated stories that take place in a setting besides Star Wars...

Moderators: VagueDurin, Nichalus

Post Reply
Credit Cop
Posts: 2476
Joined: Sun Feb 16, 2003 7:59 am
Location: Dragonmount outside of Tar Valon

World Without End

Post by KetMaliss »

He could have sworn that the end have come for him. Again, that is. The dream was over, he knew, but the lingering effects of the fear he'd felt inside it were obvious to him. The warm sweat trickling down his forehead, the way the air cooled on his skin as it touched the sweat. The way his fingers seemed to dance to a tune of their own; he seemed unable to stop the shivering. Was he shivering, or was he twitching? He couldn't tell right now, but he knew what it all meant.

He was coming soon, and he would take him again. It wouldn't be a dream this time, either. He would be returned alive again - past experience had taught him that much...but he knew that the dying would be painful enough to last a lifetime. Not for the first time, he wished that those memories would be taken with death, as everything else was. His tormentor never did, though...no, he left him with the memories that hurt the most, and nothing else.

It seemed that he had no idea who he was anymore; he was only aware of what the stranger told him each time he was brought back. He knew that he had done something in a past life (and how many of those had he lived and died through?) to greatly upset this man, and he continued to pay for it with every breath that he took. The answers would come, he knew...but they would only come when it was time to die again, and he was so very tired of dying.

A fragment of a memory suggested that he had been married once; if he tried hard enough he could just remember the delicious curves of a soft body nestled in his arms, or the parting of soft lips as they met his. A circle of light skin on his ring finger reinforced the notion, but he simply could not bring a face to match the theory. The harder he tried to grab onto the fleeting images in his mind, the more like a surreal dream they became, sliding through his fingers like the last afterthoughts of a dream in your first waking moments.

How he wished that he could believe the stranger was also a dream. He knew in his heart that the woman had been real, and he ached for more than a shadowed glimpsed at her face. When he thought of his dreams of the stranger, a gut-wrenching terror overcame him and he knew just as surely that his dreams of this man were more than the whimsical nightmares of a paranoid mind. He could not define how exactly he knew...but he did know, and the knowing filled him with as much dread as the knowledge that he had a lifetime of information just out of his reach.

He slowly became aware of another sensation as his wits came back to him, and as he sat up the bed underneath him creaked. It was an old and torn thing, and springs poked up in more than one tear through the hard mattress. He looked around at his surroundings, and knew this room. It was small; perhaps twenty feet by twenty feet. Enough room to walk around in, but not enough to feel any sort of comfort in. The ceiling was a good couple of feet above him; he guessed that from floor to ceiling would span about fourteen feet, and he was somewhere just short of six. Maybe five and a half.

Sighing, he rubbed his temples and glanced down...there was so much he couldn't remember from before.

There was a small bucket in the corner closest to him, and he was sure he could figure out what that was for. A door sat recessed in the wall to his left, but it had no kind of window and he didn't have to try the handle to know it would be locked. He could remember having done just that several times before this life, and not once had it ever been unlocked. It would open in it's own time, he knew. For the moment, he was simply thankful it was closed.

There were no ceilings in this room, save for a pitiful little rectangle on the opposite wall just below the ceiling. Enough to let a little light into this box in the absence of a true electric light. The man wasn't sure how he knew, but he was certain he would have no need of a light anyway. He didn't think he'd be alive long enough to fear the darkness anyway.

His mind drifted back once again to the disturbing dream that haunted his waking moments; one of the few memories that he held onto with any success. The stranger stalked him through long dark hallways, and he always caught him. He was like something almost human, but not quite. In another life, he believed they probably would have made movies about him, and he would have become part of pop culture as an icon to scare children at summer camps (Whats a summer camp? For that matter, whats a movie?) In this life however, he was real...even in his dreams he was real.

He was roughly human sized, this stranger...perhaps a little taller, but his build was disturbingly large. Sometimes he appeared normal, and other times he was decidedly hulkish. From this, the man assumed he could take the shape of a human when he chose to, but in his true form he was rather monstrous.

In his true form he was brutish, and his skin was like some throbbing pink organism with pulsing blue and green veins spread irregularly over it. He had black beady eyes that seemed to stare into your soul and suck you dry, suck your life right through the very pores of your skin, perhaps. He had no hair to speak of, and no voice that he had ever heard. Instead, the creature seemed to speak directly into his mind, maddeningly echoing his thoughts and bouncing them around his skull. That seemed somehow more terrifying than anything else that was off about this monster. It's "voice" seemed gravelly and rough, but at the same time...it could be frighteningly soothing, almost hypnotic.

The creature did not have regular hands, as he did. When it reached out for him, it did so with fingers that were vaguely human, but instead of ending in his own dully rounded appendages, the monster's hands had something that were a terrible amalgamation of fingers and claws. They didn't look too particularly sharp, but he knew that they were deadly enough; he'd born first hand witness to the fact; he could remember that much.

All that was terrifying enough, but the man knew that there was more - he shuddered with the knowing, as his mind drew him back to his nightmares. He struggled against it, fingers clutching into fists on the hard mattress below him...but he fought as a swimmer fights the current dragging him into the deep sea. He railed against his own mind, but was powerless to forget the pain, the memories, that face...those teeth.

He regressed into himself, falling back against the hard wall and staring in fascinated horror at his mind's eye replaying his last death, over and over. The creature had come for him, as it always did, and as it had latched onto him it had come close, so close, and opened its mouth. There had been rows on rows of jagged teeth in there, but that wasn't all. The creature had segmented its cheek and jawbones with a horrible cracking sound and spread its jaw out horizontally, extending the entire mouth as it did so, and in one movement had engulfed his entire arm from shoulder to wrist. He had still been able to wriggle his fingers, even with the blood dripping down them and muscles spasming wildly, and the scream ripped from his mouth by the agonizing pain.

He had screamed until the monster had finally given a mighty tug and taken the entire arm right out of its socket, kept screaming as his arm went down that mouth, and moved in for his head.. As he watched the replay of that horrible mouth move in closer, he remembered the reek of the creatures breath hot in his face, remembered smelling his own flesh and blood, and he remembered screaming still. He saw himself try to run, but the creature was holding tight, and the grip was just too strong. And just when it seemed that he should be running out of breath with that single scream, the huge gaping mouth had closed in over his head, and he knew that there would be no suffocating, there would only be an ending.

He closed his eyes hard, so hard that he saw spots - and finally the waking nightmare ended. He realized with a start that he had been screaming here and now as he had watched his mental replay, and clamped a hand over his mouth, frightened eyes darting towards the door, fearful that the creature who lived here might have heard him, might know he was awake, might come back again. Heart beating wildly in his chest, he listened as closely as he could for footfalls, laughter, anything, but there was nothing. Only silence.

And this too, seemed terrible.
"The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest