Anathema

For a prompt in a creative writing class when I was 15.

The midday sun beat down on my bare shoulders, balancing the cool autumn breeze passing across the lucid lake. Today, I knew, was perfect. All was balanced, and the world seemed to breathe in harmony.

But I was being was being watched.

The girl in black contrasted the peaceful scene, seeming to rip apart my perfection by the seams. She was a girl anachronism, dressed in a flowing, dark gown with lace trimming and leather, high heeled boots. Her hair was platinum, nearly matching her ghostly pale skin, and twisted loosely into an elegant bun. She looked as if she’d been torn out of a gothic Victorian painting and plastered carelessly into a bright, modern setting. Why did no one else notice her, and why did she only notice me?

Her eyes were captivating. They were dark and sad, like pools of murky shadow. She had long, thick eyelashes which closed slowly over her eyes, as if she was trying to detach herself, body and mind, from the world. And she succeeded. Every person around me seemed completely oblivious to her. I tried to mimic them. I leaned back against the soft blanket and gazed in the direction of the lake, taking in view of the happy couples that now enjoyed the balanced harmony of the day without me. Even though the girl was nowhere in sight, I could feel her eyes boring into me, searing through my flesh. And then, I felt the distance between us lengthen.

I turned around quickly, what I thought was surreptitiously, and watched as the girl walked over a hill and slowly shrunk out of sight. Again, no one seemed to have noticed she had ever been there. A thought occurred to me then: maybe this girl wasn’t human. Maybe, just maybe, she was a ghost. In broad daylight, I felt I had nothing to fear. I was intrigued, and decided to follow the strange girl across the hill before she disappeared to me completely.

I stood up and left my perfection altogether. The previous mood of the day was dead to me. The girl had nearly vanished from sight, but I could see a dark, almost translucent blur drifting toward the forest at the edge of the hill. Dead leaves swirled close to her feet. Or, did they swirl through her?

I didn’t have a choice now, I had to follow her. I was locked into steady motion, my feet moving without will, following wherever she might lead. I didn’t mind. This was what I had wanted. She glided between closely packed trees, only yards away from me. The dirt was left unstirred beneath her feet. Daylight slowly disappeared as the trees brought darkness and shadows to a shrunken sky above. I began to reconsider my decision, but all free will had abandoned me completely. These were no longer my thoughts to choose.

We had begun to run. Neither of us made any imprint on the ground; indeed, we nearly flew above the earth. I was moving in synchronized motion with her. Everything became rhythmic and I couldn’t really tell I was moving at all. It was almost like a trance, even though I was fully conscious of my surroundings. The world was a blur, moving swiftly past me. I wondered if it was running instead of me.

And then it stopped. We’d both come to a swift halt in front of a moss covered boulder and a shining, dark pond. The foliage from above speckled the pond, casting shadows into its clashing depth which seemed almost unfathomable. But, for some reason, it felt like home.

The ghost was staring at me again. Closer now, I could clearly see the expression on her face: hate. Pure, unbelievable loathing etched on every surface of her skin leaving her body rigid in what I interpreted to be disgust. Deep in my heart, I knew why. Deep in my heart, my own hate began to leak. Something, I knew, had happened in the past. We had met before, but when, I didn’t remember.

“What happened?” I hissed, knowing full well she understood and could tell me the answer if she really wanted to. She glared at me. I noticed that her eyes held no color. They were only black, devoid of all light. She smirked and breathed a short laugh.

“You know full well, you always do,” she said, shaking her head at my question, as if it was foolish to ask. Suddenly, I felt myself falling into her lightless eyes. I was being sucked in, letting the world submerge into complete darkness around me.

She had always deserved it, the mutt. That’s all she was, half my blood, half my spirit, tainted by that tramp. My father had lost them both, my mother and the tramp. My mother died from a kitchen fire. By accident? Not nearly. He set it himself. He let her burn and die right before my eyes. But this was not the image that had engraved itself so brutally into my memory. Now, I could only see the mutt’s expression. She sat there, eyes blank and merciless, as cold as her empty heart. She sat there, watching my mother scream in agony, and I watched her lip curl. She was smiling.

My father had killed my mother for the tramp. It wasn’t by his own will. He was simply a puppet in her game. She had used him, made him kill, only to run with his fortune a year after. But she had left the mutt behind as a miserable reminder. I woke up every morning to see the mutt’s empty black eyes replaying the death of my mother endlessly. My soul grew black with each passing day, filled with indescribable loathing, filled with vengeance. I knew what had to be done. Let the punishment fit the crime.

The memory sent a chill down my spine, turning it to icy fire. I screamed as it seared my heart. The mutt stood there, a ghost of my past, mocking my mother’s and my own existence. She stood there with stony black eyes, as hard as the coal that consumed her soul. Her face was stiff and rigid, filled with hate and repulsion. But, underneath her stony exterior, I knew she was laughing. Every inch of her was laughing and smiling, just like the day my mother was killed.

My body acted of its own accord. Shaking hands rose from my sides, gradually lifting to the throat of my anathema. The icy fire in my heart erupted in a chilling scream, tearing apart the fabric of the air around me. Fire filled the sky and the empty black pits of the mutt’s eyes. Once my hands had reached her neck, they gripped tightly, shaking and twisting around her throat. Her face was the picture of agony but her fire eyes betrayed her. Inside, she was still laughing, still mocking my mother’s death.

I needed to put out the fire.

I wrenched her neck one last time and threw her body into the depths of the dark pond. A fire burst over the surface of the water, spreading into a circle over the place where her body sank. To my horror, there were thousands of mutts, drowning with empty black eyes into the deep, unending water. Cold, pale ghosts laughed all around me, ripping my soul to shreds.

Then the hands rose.

Thousands of arms lifted from the water, clawing at every inch of my body. They pulled and dug deeply into my skin, dragging me toward the murky water. I screamed, fighting away the arms that clawed so painfully into my flesh. But it was no use. I began to sink, falling under the black surface, black as the mutt’s eyes. I was drowning. Hands shoved me deeper and deeper into the unending pit, leaving me no escape.

Then an epiphany hit me. This was my purgatory. Or was it hell? I had killed, and this was my eternal punishment. The mutt and I were both ghosts, forced to pay our debt for our pathetic lives. I had to relive the tragedy day after day, to sink deeper into the pit of darkness, only to naively wake up the next day into a world I foolishly believed to be “perfect.” Let the punishment fit the crime.

I sank into a darkness I didn’t believe possible. Terror filled every inch of my soul and agony consumed my heart. The mutt’s eyes laughed at me, mocking me, drawing me into a black whole of deep despair. And then-

The midday sun beat down on my bare shoulders, balancing the cool autumn breeze passing across the lucid lake. Today, I knew, was perfect. All was balanced, and the world seemed to breathe in harmony.

But I was being watched.