Tag: horror

Sound: A Short Story

I have a pretty nice room, and I’ve been told so many times by my friends and family who come through. It’s got a nice amount of wooden floor space, which I prefer to carpet, and the sink/bathroom/closet section is separated from the main room by a wall. The wall is cool, and is refreshing when it gets too hot at night. There are a couple of posters and several pictures on the walls that I find give a brief but holistic if not slightly abstract summary of me to the unacquainted. The window, overlooking the small balcony, lets me see out onto the garden and the trees. I like this very much. The sun fills my room during the day, and when it rains I leave the door open so the earthy and damp smell of summer rain calms  me. My guitars bask in the light, the rays bouncing off the tuning pegs onto the ceiling. People walk past below and the constant chatter of students reassures me. I have a nice room.

But there’s one thing in this room that I don’t really like – and the problem with this is that I don’t really know what that thing is. I call it The Sound. Somewhere, in this room of mine, The Sound is being made. It’s comparable to scuttling feet of a small animal, or dripping water, or creaking wood, or a rope slapping against a flagpole in the wind. The Sound is all of these things, and The Sound is none of these things.

The Sound fills my ears and drowns my thoughts.

The Sound doesn’t come from anywhere, yet it comes from everywhere. I once was lying awake at three in the morning, and I had convinced myself that I had found where and what The Sound was, but I was disappointed to find I still couldn’t find its provenance when I checked. It seems to exist solely to irritate me in full Dolby Surround.

The Sound fills my ears and drowns my thoughts.

The Sound is incessant. Its presence becomes synonymous with my room, which is pretty nice, and is always in the background no matter what is happening. As I sit in my room with The Sound, the rays of the May sun intensify and beat down upon me and the tuning pegs that now scream in agony under the glare of it. The ceiling is ripped apart by the blinding spots of light eating away at it like smallpox. The lamp hangs completely and glaringly misaligned to the walls, completely skewed in its positioning, The Sound is its laughter as I sweat beads under its absurd placement above me.

The Sound fills my ears and drowns my thoughts.

The Sound leaves no stone unturned. My room, which is pretty nice, is stripped of its dignity and The Sound reveals the scene of anarchy in my room that I cannot unsee. The single floorboard that isn’t flush with the rest of the floorboards protrudes like an unwanted erection and my eyes shift upwards to the shelves that dont sit equally apart from each other and I know i cannot adjust them because i dont have a screwdriver so they hang like a deflated accordion that will forever play the sound carrying my exhausted eyes rightwards to the curtains that dont shut completely flush to prevent the hateful light from reaching the dividing wall with that bastard dent below the wall light that screams at me every waking moment i lie in bed with its image branded into my skull

Perhaps someday I will find The Sound and be freed of this manic hysteria of chaos that drowns out my room, which is usually pretty nice.   

Insomnia: A Short Story

He didn’t sleep often. It was hard to switch off the millions of thoughts that raced around his mind all day. Finding that island of tranquility amongst his subconscious was harder than finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. When he did sleep, he was tortured by violent or surreal dreams that woke him up soaked in sweat every other hour. The word sleep became synonymous with anxiety and paralysing fear.

Days weren’t that bad. A constant high-pitched ringing followed his ears everywhere he went; it drowned out the white noise and he could focus in on menial tasks and mundane social interactions with those around. It was easy to think he was there, but in truth he was never there. Days flew by him as he watched from beyond his body, detached from it by the mere banality of everyday life. Evenings brought dread. He was reconnected with his body and the noise became agony. Voices, faces, epiphanies of violence, visions of unimaginable trauma, unfinished basslines and tense harmonies: the cacophony was resounding and all-consuming. What he was able to drown out during the day, he paid for dearly by suffering it at night. Hours and hours of random thoughts, their afterthoughts, and their after-afterthoughts, all sewn together in a horrifying lineup of semi-lucid goalless thought and terrorising dreams. Drowning out the noise with substance sometimes helped to calm the storm that kept him from sleeping every night, although he’d long since recognised the temporary and volatile nature of that solution.

But the deafening echo of his existence was nothing compared to the spiders.

Sometimes he’d hear them behind his head, their spindly limbs creaking as they stalked the perimeter of his consciousness. Other times, he’d wake in terror having seen something fall from the ceiling or heard the soft thud of a body land on his chest. Sometimes they were fat, black, hairy spiders that chased him out of his dreams to cast him back onto a soaked mattress, gasping for air. Mostly though, he never saw them. But the signs that they continued to hang around his mind were painfully constant – their webs veiled the questions spinning in his head, the sounds of their scuttling legs always ran away from him as he turned corners or opened doors within his dreams. Long shadows wrapped themselves around his eyes and around his tongue, keeping watch over his subconscious while he restlessly slept.

He didn’t fear spiders generally speaking. Seeing them in daytime barely triggered a response from him. But at night they would come again to crawl over his thoughts, and the terror of falling asleep would keep him up until the sun rose and his mind could take no more. The mundanity would kick in again and the day would begin, his swirling mind detached once again from his tired body until the cruel softness of the mattress swallowed him up and punished his mind with everything and anything he could possibly think about.

As he drifts away for the sixth time that night, the mattress wraps its eight legs around his body and spins its web of paranoia around the depths of his mind.