Part two of some horror fiction.
The ride home was easy to forget, and Whitecotton did so as
soon as the driver let him out and led him to his front door. The cab was
nearly washed out by the heavy rains that had settled on the night, and the
scenery, Whitecotton noted at the time, although disremembered the moment he was in his home,
had transformed into a fluid, sharp black. The night lamps dotting the roadways
hit the cobble and reflected in the their own light and the ebbing puddles and
drain floods. The world was keen and whetted. The world was at large, and it
was washing away, as he had stared through the carriage’s window, his receding
hairline resting there. He did not delete the smell of barbecue from his mind.
Bolts of
thunder locked as he cracked his door bolt clasped. He stumbled through the
blackness of his lonely shotgun, grasping any vertical object for friendly
support. He tumbled to his kitchen, then into his anteceding bathroom and
stared out the closed window into his backyard. The coming down made splashes
and punctured the yard, carving craters into deadened grass highlighted by the
porch lamp. A briny foam rose from those pools, and the yard seemed to crave
him. He stared there, and hardened lines formed in his face from thought, or
attempts of, or from the patterns etched into the pane glass. The yard was
ballooning with the wasted leaves and the deadened garden, forsaken weeks ago
from lack of care and knowledge, pooled and overflowed, spilling black dirt
like bile into the lagoon that had birthed. There were whispers that secreted
from the bile, and the drowning mulch that caused Whitecotton to slip into the sink
of sleep near the stained sink adjacent his toilette.
The rains
continued to fall during that spell of ponderous slumber, grossly ruining the
yard, and knotting Whitecotton’s mind. He had crumbled into a crumpled position
against the wall of the washroom, and like a cat’s fit he twitched until hours
later he awoke, bewildered and hunched into a harshly curved spine. He slowly
took account of his surroundings: the profane drip of the faucet, accounting
time in regulated plops; the argent gleam of the candle bleeding the action of
shadow on the walls; the brumal wall, silting his face in a teeth-like embrace;
the icy corners underneath the sink‘s pipes; the rustic toilette, stamped in
indescribable stains and unpleasantness; the lullaby of pounding rains
occurring beyond the wall in the yard.
He noticed
he had removed his boots and socks, soggy, warm, raw and occupied, although not
by his feet.
And still
the whispers came from the yard, masked slightly behind the sloshes of drops
and puddles. Whitecotton knelt his head against the wall again, listening to
the dark rain that fell in the early morning. Ruminations of the ruin he had
caused at the get-together hours earlier penetrated his softened skull. The
morning still felt midnight, and the numb of dawn duly awoke his soured
demeanor towards the results. His own assurances needled him; another speaking
engagement funneled through the fuel of spirits and a fool, and again
barricaded in a bag of delusions. The cold wall felt this worry, and responded
with an increased bleakness. He felt a sickness, spawned by his own narcissism,
bred in a company of rancor and self-condemnation, and it tired his teeth as
his bones settled against the wall.
And again,
whispers shivered from the yard, seeping through the wall. The thunder ran in
decreased increments, allowing Whitecotton to feel the murmurs disperse through
his frame. He continued attempting to ignore their presence, but his
acknowledgement of the dogged perseverance of their existence only amplified
their sentiments, and volume. His eyes grew wide as they stared sideways down
the show of the wall, and he could no longer break his mind from its
concentration on the slight calls for his name. With a sudden and furious
shake, he was vertical, groping for the edges of the sink basin to allow his
ascent to complexities of a standing position.
His stance
swayed, and his balance balked, and as blood seemed to rush through his skull -
and not necessarily his brain - he squinted
and darkened. He paused to readjust to his new role, and to determine,
again, if tricks were in the works.
Is this a
bit too much rum? he ruminated. Perhaps the belated attack of a spoiled
condiment from the braai? A bite of underdone pork, or even a cold sickness
from soaking from the storm?
And the whispers made him green with
goosebumps, his heart fluttering like a tot. His name, from the yard.
He felt vindicated in his sanity and
perceptions, and began scrambling with his shed clothing, seethed from the
rains. The taunts of Rags scolded through him, prodding his reactions. I
cannot communicate the truth - oh the truth! - to others; and I cannot remain
angry with them. The frailty of their lives, and sorry wastes of thought,
cremate their ability for insight. If one cannot see the conventional
vulgarities of common life, and one works, marries, and dreams in only that
raped and lost state, how can one shed the daily bramble and understand the
grasp of actual truth and thought.
Those grandiose sentiments rang with the
thunder as he reached for his sock near the crack in the wall. Truth and
thought. Truth and thought. Truth and thought. Truth and--
The bite was real, and it was
shocking, and it was offensive in every sense to Whitecotton. His immediate
reaction was a knee jerk and a kick, then a pitiful, but drilling and
well-meant stomp against the worn tile of the floor, which increased the pain.
He attempted a scream, and at first failed, only delivering a scowling
open-mouthed swallow, followed finally by a savage but brief vocal report at
the ceiling, with clenched eyes. Swift reconsideration brought another
scramble, this time to remove the cause of the sharp agony, the sock. He was
instantly on the floor, ripping the worn clothing from his foot. His heel throbbed,
and there was blood. He examined his injury, unbelievably, as the shock
designed a confusion throughout his own truths and thoughts. Maddened, he
turned the cloth tube inside out, examining the cause, only to discover a
rolled, crushed, balled spider, nearly smeared into the soils of his footwear,
crumpled from the ill fortunes of its day. Another ruined web, leading to an
unexpected attack, and wholly undeserved death.
The poison
acted quickly as Whitecotton caressed, squeezed, wiped and patted his ruined
heel. He leaned his back against the sink pipes, as though awaiting another
assailment. His fingers gripped into his sole, and his eyes began to widen, the
whites overtaking the overall area of the pupil. The shock had brutalized his
already slipped mind, and he clutched his foot and the floor. Without moving
his head, he glanced all around him in a rage, ready for attack from angles
unknown.
A stiffness
transfixed his body, and a sweat began covering his neck and limbs. There
existed a numbness that outnumbered his bones, and he directly became deaf.
Except for
the whispers. His body tensed in the aftermath, and his heart began to bruise
his ribs in the stillness that became reality. And the whispers from the yard
turned to vengeful, raging vociferations that called inside him. There was a
taut moment, followed by an ugly authentication of crude action. The world
raced.
Whitecotton’s
body steamed as he rose, and his fever roiled, branding his intentions like
scars into his brain. He shook with violence and, grasping rigidly for support,
was again on his feet. With a weakened right heel, he sprung through the
bathroom door, through the kitchen and, with a fumbling from perspiring hands
on the lock, out the back door into the back yard. His movements were sporadic,
and he shook violently; a raw, water soaked shake that penetrated every jerking
step, every breath, every jolt of his eyes, still whitely rounded and widely
surveying the planet around him.
The yard lay
before him, doused and flooded, and
screaming his being, brine swelling, a heavy wind laboring the limbs of the
trees into his direction. He felt his blood clump in his back, and his fingers
swelled and turned a purple red. Whitecotton was aware of these things, but
concerned himself only with the mope of the yard.
Whitecotton’s
stance was an embellished slant, a slapping together of the leftovers of drink,
the pulsing sickness that was angling through his blood, and the madness that
gripped his heart. The yard’s call, fused within his mind and with the
simultaneous thunder, slid from faint calls of his name to unintelligible
sentences; perhaps instructions. Whitecotton had to lean forward further to
learn their meanings, and in the absence of plain sense, began silently
mouthing the words, regardless of whether his discernment was correct in the
non-negotiable noise of the weather. There come points when choices are made
among certain species that believe they have the capacity to consider; this
gift is mainly found in the breed called men, and especially those of a
mediocre caliber bent on paths of dishonest trust in their simple perceptions
of the world surrounding them. As with most braggarts prone to sweeping the
backstages of comedy clubs, especially those wrapped in self-defeat and touched
with a slight mixture of fever derived from an assured madness and clamored in
their own selfish intents toward nature, the choices are not difficult, and
nearly always incorrect. And so, without the safety of hesitation, Whitecotton
listened to his own dulled opinions, and took a step ahead, leaving the
confines of the wooden deck that separated him from the yard.
His bare
feet snapped into the pools of water, as the thunder drummed a snare-ish arc.
The dying weeds pushed into the mud as his step was steeped in puddles and
pollution. The water swam above his ankles, and was a dark green. Whitecotton,
nearly falling several times, followed the yard further, seeing only the end.
Only the
trees, and the yard, and the dilapidated garden, and all that is contained
here. I will write; I will produce, and reproduce; I will not perform for those
left in society, breaking all kind open. Yes; the cursed genius, in the yard,
simply put, pouring thought, pouring sod.
Whitecotton’s slow tread through the
streams pursued the yard’s voices, calling from beyond the uneven swing, and
the twin evergreens. He paused, and slowly glanced back at the deck, the house,
the lights from the window panes, and his temples flared, and trickles of
blood, brushed away by the rain, fell from his nose. The noise of the storm had
faded despite its audacity, and his voice and the yard’s yell pounded
unrelenting through his mind. A moat had formed between him and the house, and
his head slowly swiveled back towards the end of the yard, and the piles and
scrap and the tall black oak surrounded by haplessly strewn trash and overgrown
bushes of incalculable natures. The moat
swore passing an impossibility.
A mind
swept away, arranged in tomes no one knows, understands, comprehends. Swing,
saw, we heard them all, buried in plant,
Unsettled, but compliant, a
trespasser, he advanced through the flood, the weeds wrapping themselves around
his ankles. The wind, the rain, all warning and slashing through him, as he
hummed.
Trees,
trees, like tresses they’ll fall;
down the
guard, down the yard;
down the
guard, down the yard.
His feet were cut by the gravel, the
rusted metals, and the oak’s roots, black and hidden in the dark standing
waters. Whitecotton ignored the injuries, his fevers undetectable in the
whitewashes of the rains, and stumbled, and fell, and then wrenched a sharpened
object that had pricked his side, and stumbled and fell, and realized that it
had pierced his side. He flung the object as he stammered toward the oak. Whitecotton
cursed, unable to see, and unwilling to acknowledge, the blood from his ribs.
Godfucks!
He fell
forward, clasping the hard wrinkles of the oak, gripping and clenching the
steel hide of the tree. It bruised and bloodied his hands, and no shelter from
its branches stopped the storm’s squeezing wrath.
He held
against the giant, the yard silent now. The poison cued Whitecotton to vomit,
wrenching blots of blood from his punctures.
A pile of bricks sat undisturbed under a copse near the giant tree.
My words do
not dwindle,
words sound
simple,
here we
stand,
bark,
yard,
alone,
and.
A laugh trembled from him. And
he felt himself cry, and then the need to sleep.
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