Love Me Not

Written for a Halloween contest. She was trapped in a room with the ghost that haunted her...

Picking the lock would have been pointless, bringing first her shoulder and then her foot against a door bolted from the outside. All of her strength barely caused it to shudder in its frame, and her voice was already raw from calling for help that would never hear.

She was the one who had ensured that she would be alone, and cursed that error in judgement as her hands closed over the door's handle again. Rattling it in vain, slowing to rest her forehead against the unyielding wood as her efforts proved useless.

“I'm not going to apologize.” Five sullen words that prompted no response from the being who never left her side. Always there, a step out of tune with her own and a cold hand closed over her shoulder. Always silent, greeting all of her words with the same stony condemnation. The quiet should have made him easy to ignore, but in moments such as that, his presence was what weighed most heavily on her mind.

Judging, callous. “I told you,” she made her case to him for what felt like the hundredth time, “It was the only way. Just- open the door, all right?”

It could have been her imagination, but he seemed so strangely cold that night. Veiling her shoulders despite the light that she'd turned on upon entering the room, a shadow cast by something that she couldn't glimpse even with eyes stretched wide.

It should have been such a mundane room, harmless surroundings. Bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling, chests of nondescript oak set between them. She'd visited it dozens of times before with hardly a thought, yet as she turned to press her back to the stubborn door, it felt half as large and bright as usual. He'd never been so close, obscuring her vision, fogging her breath in defiance of the temperate summer evening.

“You wouldn't listen any other way,” she elaborated on her previous argument, splaying her fingers against the wood at her back. As though in answer, the overhead light flickered and failed, plunging her into darkness in the time that it took to blink in surprise at the fact. “I didn't-”

Her voice was so much smaller in the light's absence, her eyes straining to adjust to what had replaced it. Far too many shadows, and a cold that seemed to constrict every vein with its approach.

“I didn't have a choice,” she repeated as part of her typical mantra, the words with which she'd risen and gone to bed for the last month. “You weren't listening, you were- you were ignoring me, just-”

Avoiding his touch meant sliding down to sit against the door, curling in closer on herself and embedding her fingers in her hair. Taking up as little space as possible and still finding herself in contact with the supernatural cold.

“You were going to leave.” Five words spoken in a far different tone, the choked quiet of unhappy recollection. Fingers parted enough for her to see where her feet would have lain, had she been able to glimpse anything apart from the shadows. “If you'd gone to the city, you would have- you never would have-”

She could feel it burning cold against her thigh, always tucked into the deepest pocket of her jeans. The narrow form of the switchblade that she'd taken to his house, that rainy night a month before. Somehow, she hadn't found enough courage to part from it since doing the deed, fearing what it could betray if out of her possession.

“I had to,” she whispered again, and the smallest of pained smiles found its place on her lips. She knew, but it was becoming clear that he wouldn't accept, and if he didn't...

Slowly her hands fell from her head, directing the weakness of that hopeful smile into the dark. The words that left her were less than a whisper, barely audible beneath the crushing silence that filled every corner of the room.

“I love you.”

A far different silence, a far different feel in the air. As though most of it had been sucked away, contained in a breath drawn by something unseen. A moment of unrest so great and maddening that it could only be expressed through stillness.

In its wake, the unseen hand of a poltergeist splintered wood to the left of her head. Warping the door in a way that did nothing to make it more passable, bringing her hands back over her head in the throes of shuddering reflex.

“Please,” she whimpered to that uncaring force. “Please, I love you.” Spending the words like currency in exchange for her life, drawing close against the frigidity that would muffle her. Far closer than it had ever been, a pressure against her throat that nothing would banish or force aside. “I love you, don't-”

But he didn't. That was clear to feel in the slow crush that ended her ability to speak, the heave of her chest in the absence of air. Hands first skittering against the floor, then grasping at open air in a futile attempt to end the utterly relentless.

Her hands would not be lifted from where they lay anymore, and as she realized that her pulse was no longer pounding in her head, the darkness became complete.