A Nightmare Fresh Begun

This is the opening to a short story, written for an anothology published by my creative writing class.

As I sit on my warm bed, the gusts raving and ravaging outside my window, I felt the once-familiar slithering down mine spine. The very tips of my extremities began to tremble, and I clenched tight my jaw in order to try and contain the horror within myself. My eyes flittered from side to side, looking into the depths of the black corners contained within my sparse room. A high-whistle of the wind, a murmur in the wilderness outside, sounded to mine ears like the incessant whisperings of a madman.

            And a madman I felt, as I stared wildly around my room, half-expecting a form, a shape, anything indeed, to arrive from within the depths of hell itself. The hollow gasps of the wind almost seemed to be blowing from and through my mind itself, rather than the phenomenon of air on air outside the house. Unable to withstand the tension coursing throughout my muscles, I at once jumped up, and bolted to the other side of the room, flinging mine physical body against the door, having left my thoughts and metaphysic workings on the bed. Without a mind or cognitions, the body is no more than a mere cadaver, reacting purely from instincts, which was the sole wild thought left to me as my seemingly disembodied hand slapped onto the light switch.

            Taking many-a deep breath within myself, I eventually managed to control and maintain a singular heart-beat, my ocular organs constricting and tearing up at the sudden luminosity. Sinking down to the floor, I once again tried to regain some semblance of sanity and calm.

            What joke! What fool I am to believe that such a thing could ever again be contained within me, at thought of the nightmarish erudition now pertained to me. I am now beginning to regret much of the content of my life, for has been spent looking much into a matter which had once been of much interest to me. However, this source of my life has now become its scourge.

            What a curse paranoia is to the sanity of the human mind. ‘Tis but one of many ailments of the human. What a weak species we are! How frail is our nature, that we are susceptible to the most numerous amounts of ill? By physical, by mental, by emotional, by sexual, by spiritual, by each and every way that ever belongs to man; every aspect of man"nay, of man, of woman, or of child, and each of the nether stages in between"may be attacked! Attacked from each and every angle, for no section or us is safe! No part, no man, can ever be free of the momentous possibility of ill.

 

            Forgive me, dear reader, for there has been much digression on my part. Pressing my back to the door as if ‘twere a safeguard against the skitterings within mine troubled head, I persuaded my fearful and knocking knees to unlock and push me to my feet. I scurried like a bug over the round carpet in the room’s centre, and flung myself onto the bed, upon which I crouched.

            Pushing open the windowpane, I thrust mine head out into yonder darkened night, noting the weather had calmed, like Cerberus to the music. There was only the soft breeze, ruffling the trees behind the house; ruffling, no less, my hair. Small pattering rain struck the face mine mother and father gave to me, causing my eyes to blink the sharpness away. Unawares of the whim that then overtook me, I clambered onto the windowsill, looking down to the bottom of the house. A wild fantasy occurred to my troubled person; would it be possible to for I, like Dracula himself, to crawl down the outside of the wall, using only my extremities to do so? Leaning forward, I found myself moving as if to try"how odd, how unprecedented, how intolerably irrational!

            Then Aeolus himself thrust forth another deep breath from his lungs and I, screaming like a babe, threw myself backwards, pulling open the door in a panic possible only to that of a panic-stricken wreck such as I, and running down the stairs of the dark house.

            Ran, did I, straight through the cooking-room and down into the dingy basement, whereby much of my hellish research lay upon a desk containing an inch-thick layer of dust, grime, and spilled candle wax long since gone solid.

            “BEGONE FROM MY LIFE!” I cried out senselessly to the jumble of books (which were in a state of heightened disarray from panicked page-turnings and desperate attempts to remove this curse from upon myself). Aye, I shouted to these and to the many scrawlings upon paper that lay such, like dead things, on the loathsome desk. “BEGONE, OR MY SANITY MAY SUCCUMB--Nay, will succumb--to thee!” Bellowing, I swept mine papers onto the filth-encrusted floor. Upon doing so, the misbegotten tome which had begun this reign of terror within myself, landed at mine feet.

            Indeed, ‘twas the book which suggested at the possibility of calling forth the gift-curse of immortality.

Author's Note

My first piece of Gothic Literature... feedback would be welcomed :)

Reviews

[Unwelcomeguest]

Excellent ideas and a masterful use of language. If I had one point to make it's that maybe you have too many ideas. I think you should have saved some for other stories because all crammed in at once they lose a little of their affect. Just call it an economy of genius. Then again it's entirely plausible I've missed the point entirely since this too is my first ever gothic story. Keep writing.

[Larry Dyson]

very nice ..love the images conjured!