Darker

DARKER 

                                                      A Tim Andre Noir

     It was 12:40 AM, on New Year's day when I   drove through the least populated town I’d ever been to. I sped down the dirt roads of Waterborough,  listening to the coyotes howl; at least… I thought they were coyotes.  I couldn’t see more than four feet ahead, not helped by the fact that one of my headlights was out. I’m a man of the law; I know it isn’t legal but given why I was there, I didn’t think the chances of me getting pulled over were high. Thirteen people, seven local cops amongst them, had disappeared, all within six hundred feet of a white house in the woods. Records say it was built in 2010, and yet most of the witnesses I asked said they saw cars going down the house's long driveway as far back as 1976. Jesus… I wasn’t even born yet. I turned onto the driveway and as I did, I thought about how damn funny it was that I was going down the same driveway six other cops went down before they disappeared to god knows where. Hell, some of the later ones were probably even thinking the same kind of idiotic stuff I was. 

     After what felt like… and maybe was hours of driving, there it was, the house everyone had been talking about. I’ve been all over, from Berlin to Seattle; hell, I’ve even been to the City of Eyes but the moment I drove over that hill I knew it. This house was the weirdest damn place I’d ever been to.  I got out of the car, lit a cigarette, and got to analyzing. The house was anachronistic for sure, with an architectural style looking something like Seventh century German, but it didn’t have the subtle wear and tear you’d expect from something of that era. It was smaller than I expected too. I turned around and reached back into the car to pick up my pack of cigs off the seat. I turned back around and returned my focus to the door as I prepared to walk in but now there was a man, a man I swear on my goddamn life wasn't there before I turned away. He was covered in blood, pinned to the door by a metal  spike in each hand. He didn’t seem to be one of the cops. He was covered in lacerations, seemed like they were from all sorts of different implements and judging by the ecchymosis around the wounds, he was conscious for most of them. I got closer to the man. I wasn't able to parse much more about what happened to him but I did notice “XX” carved into his forehead, and that he was missing all but Eight of his fingers. Whatever lunatic was doing this was real passionate about their work. I took my gun out of its holster. The killer must be close. After all, somebody must have pinned him to the door when I wasn’t looking. 

     It was 1:00 AM now, and I wasn’t any closer to figuring out what the hell was going on here. I walked up to the door, opened it, and tried to look inside. No dice, it was too dark. I started to walk in, and began reaching for my flashlight. Before I even touched it, the lights came on and I heard the door violently slammed behind me. I was in a movie theater, a movie theater that couldn’t fit in a house this small… could it? I walked down the aisle, staring up at the pitch black screen. The seats were taken, but not by people, or even corpses. There were white mannequins with  five black dots on their faces sitting on every seat. I heard the hum of a projector, and a ray of red light cast onto the screen. A leader, one of those old timey movie countdown things appeared on the screen, except this one’s background was red, not gray. It started counting down, 26, 18, 9, and the “movie” started. It was a close up of my face on a black background. I was twitching, looking back and forth, breathing heavy… I looked scared. Sometimes it would flicker to me smiling, crying. Sometimes I would be screaming, but there was no sound. And was that… a hand… on my shoulder? I never filmed this, that’s not me! What the hell was this guy playing at?! I walked towards the screen. I hated this “film,” but I was drawn to it. There was a door on the bottom of the screen, right where “my” mouth was. 

     I walked through the door and on the other side was a tall, cylindrical room, a library, bigger than most. It was so big I couldn’t even really  see the top. It was just… dark.  It must have  been seven stories tall, five too many to fit in the building I had entered. Maybe I had gone underground somehow. The bookshelves were black, the spiral staircase was blood red. There were no windows. I checked my watch. It still said it was 1:00 AM. Must be broken. I walked up the spiral staircase and as I went up I checked every book I could reach. Judging by the covers, the books were ones I recognized but the words were removed, replaced by… runes. Scribbled nonsense, like a signature written by someone in a hurry. As I walked up the stairs I noticed two of the books still had words left. The Midnight Club Still had every instance of the letter “T” intact. Dune still had every “E”. Both had severed fingers, belonging to the man outside by the looks of them, branded with the sole letters in the books slipped in at the 18th and 19th pages respectively. What the hell did it mean? I kept going up the library, the bookshelves stopped having books in them at all. Now there were seven more bodies hung from the shelves. They were  covered in lacerations just like the other poor schmuck I found on the door but their wounds spelled out words. Mostly just nonsense rambling about fate and heaven and living forever, typical cult shit. They were dead, I knew they were… but their eyes were open, and I swear they were moving… watching me. 

      As I kept walking up the stairs it started getting darker. I’m not sure when I stopped being in the library but at some point things started to move, shift, dim, and fade. I was on a stone catwalk walking through the void. It was dark as night everywhere I looked. I saw… things moving around me. My vision was filled with images of a towering machine surrounded by three people… or maybe just one. I heard screaming. There were words spelled out in white chalk all along the surface of the catwalk. I read as I walked. “we All know” The screams got louder. “do you know the Real truth?” The screams got louder. “it’s not a house, it’s a-” What was this place? “are you scarEd?” It was so dark. “We aren’t”. THE SCREAMS GOT LOUDER. “home is where the dark is” it was so dark “are you wAtching, hell?” The dark got darker. “none of This-” It was so dark I couldn’t see the writing anymore. I couldn’t see anything. I walked through the dark and plugged my ears. The screams got louder.  and after enough walking, I saw it, and the screaming stopped. A red stained glass window, probably about twelve feet tall. There were five black outlines of men, with their hands reaching to the sky, on the bottom  of the window, thick black lines, tendrils almost, connecting them to something at the top of the window. A giant hand covered in scrawlings in an alphabet I had never seen. The men had “III” “VIII”, “IX” “XIV” “VII” inside their heads. I didn’t know what this place was or who was doing this, but I knew I was about to find out, and I knew I was about to meet him. 

      I reached towards the stained glass. I didn’t know what would happen. I moved slowly. The moment I touched the glass, it shattered, I closed my eyes, and I was somewhere else. I was in a church, not a grand one either. It was small, pretty mundane, lots of white. No blood, or bodies, or cryptic symbolism. Not unlike the one I went to as a kid. I walked down the aisle. Kinda like a  wedding, with no music, no priest, no cheering, no suit, no rings, no flowers. Just me, and this place. I walked up to the pulpit, there was a man there. He wore a white suit with a white tie. He didn’t wear shoes. He had no face. He stared at me. I felt him in… my mind. He said “___ _______ ___ _________”. There wasn’t a man there. There wasn’t a church there.

     I woke up, lying in those same woods I found the house in. But there was no house. Hell, my car wasn’t even there. It was just me, lying face down on the cold ground, soaked by the rain. I must have been on some serious shit to dream up all that… 

This short story is a response to the prompt DREAMING… 

right?