The Silver LIght

The break in the floorboards gather dust.  I blink and the dust stirs just the tiniest bit, lifting and then falling again into the crevice.  Soon the silver light will come and spotlight those sedentary specs of dust in the floorboards and when it comes, this time, I will sigh and make the dustmotes dance a fluttering ballet.  Maybe some of them will escape the crevice and make it as far as the smooth surface of the hardwood floor.  Maybe some of them will be blown away into the real world when the b******s return and bring the wind in under the whooshing door.

 

It's too soon to think about the silver light. 

 

The b******s announce themselves in anxious stomps and muttered curses.  Old creaky floorboards groan then squeal.  The boards beneath me hum in a sympathetic misery of wooden moans and unpolished groans.  The dust in the break becomes leaden as if afraid to dance within the crevice.  In my mind's eye I am tracing the line of the silver light, following it up a stair-step of dust speckled pure ether with the long reaching fingers of my mind, and...just a little further...

 

Just a little...

 

It's too soon.  There is no light.  There is only the soft creak of hardwood beneath me, the suffocating pressure of the bedsprings coiling above me and the ever nearing, ever clearer ghoul grunts of the b******s approaching.  I feel my heart beating against my bare breast, hard enough to reverbrate in the coils pressed against me.  I pray for the silver light.

 

They move like shambling things--all hanging arms like slabs of pale meat and long legs stomping, stomping.  I snap my lids over my eyes and pretend to be blind again - I have never seen their faces, never hope to see their faces. The door whooshes open, closed, and they are upon me.  I can't feel their hands but I can feel the skin of my back sliding along the wooden floor and splinters piercing old splinters while dusting new drawn blood, the bedspring coils tenderizing the meal.  They laugh the way wolves howl.  Their breath is all heat and menace, scraping against my cheeks like the tines of a fork.  I'm going away, I'm going.  Blind, I can't see.  I don't hear them.  I don't.

 

It grabs my face in its hands as it always does--talons piercing the blush of my check, draining the color--and shakes until my eyes open.  It looms over me with teeth like yellow stones and whispers, "Trick, or treat?"

 

Screams rip my throat until there is naught left but pain.  I did not see its face, I cannot see its face, I didn't, I didn't!  I can't!  Screams fill my mind with blinding sheets of blood.

I have never seen their faces, never hope to see.

 

And as I feel the screams slowly die and melt away into the gray of nothing I feel only the severed ends of my legs just below the knees tickling and the cold numbness where my fingers used to be.  I guess that tickling is the dust dancing a dervish in the crevice below me where the floorboards break apart.  There is a snatch of music playing softly somewhere in the gray and I know it...I remember it...a car radio playing, the windows steamed blind by the processes of life, a rude interruption and the point of a gun...that same bit of music over and over and if I could find that song if I could remember that song I might sing it through and make it finally stop...

 

When the b******s are through they shove me back beneath the bed.  The gray dissovles but I am blind, blind.  I have never seen their faces. I never hope to see their faces.  I feel nothing, not the fresh blood pooling beneath my legs and back nor the ache of the oft used center crushed and polluted by...I feel nothing, I feel nothing.

 

There is the sound of an engine turning over and I wonder inanely about fictional wonderland bullshit like license plates and missing persons cases.  A blast of light spotlights the break in the floorboard - a silver light - I reach out to it, grasp after it...take me to the stair-stepped ether!...the silver light pools and then narrows and begins to run away along the floor until it is gone.  My throat will suffer no screams so I only sigh, too late to watch the dustmotes dance their tired ballet.

Reviews

[yinseriv]

I was able to feel the soul numbing desolation of being trapped as I read this story. You were able to dance the line of giving just enough detail that my mind made the story real and my own.

At the begining I was wondering how the light was going to tie into the story. To read at the ending how it is a savior because it announces the ending of that round of torment was a neat tie off. It added to the desolation.

I will put in a couple notes about some minor grammar.

[Larissa G.]

Wow.
Different from what I normally see. It's so vivid, and terrifying. I was a bit puzzled by the characters, and personally I would have liked to see more characterization within this simple narrative.
But still. Quite powerful.
Well done.