Red - The Beast This Night Doth Come

That chanting rhyming verse playing over and over in your head, the dark sin lined city street, the blanket beneath which you cower is not match for the beast...within

Red

The Beast This Night Doth Come

 

Darkness carves an unrelenting scar on my mind; deeper and more intrusive as I feel every slice of its rusted and dull blade. Sinister thoughts play their indecisive tricks on my brain as I imagine I can see many things that I cannot. For this I find is not a dream, but a nightmare which grips tightly while I am awake. To breathe is difficult, as is this life; this predicament I now find has engulfed the very soul of my existence. Hovering in a flowing cloak of coal black night, the beast waits for even the slightest movement to know that here I lie. Not a blinking of an eye or a twitch of some offended nerve shall I allow to reveal my blanket encased haven. “For in this haven I now lie, if found this darkness I shall die” This I repeat over and over again within my brain, as if a recorded cylinder on the Edison Phonograph runs gouged, holding its needle securely in the same groove, spinning repetitively while never truly ending its cryptic cycle.

 

Upon the curtains flashes a monotonous beating rhythm of red: the color of sin, the color of evil, the color of" blood. So bold is its depth that I can taste it; the beast tastes it as well. I flinch. I should not have flinched. The dark figure notices and quickly grasps me. I am no longer hidden as I lie before its death-laced stare, drenched in the color of my undoing. I cannot fight it, as it finds me, once again, with eyes of deepened focus and unrelenting hate. I am powerless under its spell. I dress methodically at its command"while unspoken"I still hear it clear.  

 

The fog is heavy this night as we, the beast and I, lurk within the shadows of the Whitechapel district; the red light district as painted by the press. Red,appropriate we think. The stench of vomit and urine hangs like an old dampened undergarment long in need of a good cleaning; repulsive as it breaches our nostrils searching for a place to make its residence. Cobblestones wet with the sin of a thousand nights reflect our movements in a blurred and untraceable fashion, when the doxie appears. Hair red as the fiercest fiery flames, lips painted crimson, neatly edged and formed to produce a garish resemblance of what they truly are not. Fingernails, the hue of the finest rubies, flash beneath the gas lights flickering. Her  dress, flowingly draped, trimmed in exquisitely patterned lace, yet with breasts somewhat conceled yet temptingly exposed and smooth as that of a newborn babe, flaunting as is her sin, her red godless sin, it taunts us. I fight this urge, this desire to repent her soul, to take from her all that is evil and dispense with the lies dancing within her eyes.

 

Shuddering from the cold, I watch her approach as if she has not a care. Indeed, there must be and will be a care and this we shall provide momentarily. I think back to the safety of my bed, the warmth of the flannel which earlier I lay beneath.  “For in this haven I now lie, if found this darkness I shall die,” sings its haunting melody in my brain. The beast hears it, too, but easily ignores the warning it broadcasts. I search deep within, but cannot find the strength to resist. The beast controls me now as I harbor all that is good within my hands.  She enters the alley and we swiftly move to take her. I follow my orders as directed; cutting, slicing quietly and quickly like the darkness of this dreaded night. When I am finished I stare. I cannot help myself, the scene so gruesome as to make me sick, though digesting the goodness of what needed be done is soothing. Blood, deep red blood, flows into the gutters this night as I make my way home. The streetlights cast our shadows; there is only one upon the pavement. The beast, the ripper, as the newspapers have named it, feels no remorse, yet I do experience pain. My work this night is done, but tomorrow the darkness will once again fall and the beast, now sleeping soundly within me, shall rise. Once again I will recite, “For in this haven I now lie, if found this darkness I shall die,” but it shall be to no avail. It will call me from my sleep.

 

“Jack,” it will growl. “Wake, the red still flows.”      

 

 Jack Ivey

Author's Note

Read with the lights on

Reviews

[Salar Majak]

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
this is so very chilling!!did anyone tell you that you write like Edgar Allan Poe??????you have his haunting style to keep the reader attached not even wanting to blink so they wouldn't miss a thing!!!!! i am so ceeply in love with this story!!!!!!!

[Jack...]

Thanks so much, I thought you might like it, being a Poe fan.

[Salar Majak]

:) yup yup, he is amazing!!! and this story is ammmmmaazzinng!!!!

[KAOlmsted]

Cheers, mate. Good on ya. Put my neck hair up ;-)

[Jack...]

Thanks so much

[KAOlmsted]

Always my pleasure.

[David Lewis Paget]

A nice Ripper tale, very much in the style of Poe's 'The Black Cat', or 'The Masque of the Red Death'. As the tale is set in London I kept a lookout for any Americanisms that might creep in there and give the game away. There was only one, 'God-damning', which hit me in the eye. Not a London saying. But very well done, kudo's.

[Jack...]

Thanks, this means a lot coming from you. What phrase should I have used. I did no research, just wrote it as it came.

[David Lewis Paget]

Godless, and the prostitutes of the era were known as doxies, strumpets, hussies etc. I found the line 'Her mode of dress, as scant as a newborn babe,' as probably too modern for the 19th c. They wore long garments but tended to expose their breasts.