Chat0yant wrote:
(it's under 1k words i swear, i'm sorry it's long)
A heavy rain poured through the murky darkness as the man opened his front door and haphazardly tossed his keys on the console table. This wasn’t the first day this week that he’d come home late after working overtime. He was getting used to starting and ending his days away from the sun. Sometimes, he almost missed the light and warmth of the blazing day, but it was for the best. He had learned that having time to think about things never ended well.
Although he took solace in keeping himself busy at work, the threads of his dark, empty apartment were starting to tie him up from a distance. He was tired. Not only from keeping himself busy with work and chores, but from his strange nocturnal visions.
It started last week. As he lay down and covered himself up, a red apparition had appeared at the foot of his bed. Had he already fallen into the abyssal embrace of unconsciousness? He waited, half asleep, to see what she would do. But all she did was cry. Crystal red tears silently streaked her umbral face as she looked near—but not directly at— his own. By the time the man had processed this oddity or considered speaking to her, he would blink and it would be morning.
Though this was very odd, he dismissed the phantom as a dream. For the first night or two, anyway. As the days passed and her visits continued without fail, a sense of tired, aching dread had taken root in the shadows of the man’s heart. Who was she? He wanted to ask or analyze the presence, yet he dared not think on her form for too long. When he did, those roots started squeezing his chest, threatening to bring light to comfortable shadows he dared not dispel.
“It is better not to think too long on such things.” He would remind himself.
Despite his daily reminders, it was getting harder to ignore the shifting murkiness in the back of his mind. Every day, he’d remember earlier and earlier that after his work and errands, he would return to his hollow abode. He would be alone.
Except when he lay down to sleep. Then she would be there.
He was starting to dread his own house. Dread going to sleep in her presence. Dread waking up without having the faintest idea where she had gone. Dread the charade of normalcy and monotony of daily life that pretended to give him hope. Hope that his life was alright. Hope that he was alright.
Maybe he was losing his mind. Maybe that was the preferable explanation. Go to the doctor, get some drugs, and move on. Yeah, that was easy and realistic and normal. Being insane was far better than being...
He had no more time to continue writing that form letter of a plan. It was time for bed. His pajamas were on and his teeth were brushed. There was no choice. The inevitable action was for him to walk to his bed and lay down. And thus he did, as one under his own power while simultaneously being wrenched through his anxiety by a cruel cold hand.
This was the seventh day. He had seen the scarlet woman appear in his dark room for the six days prior. The shadowed alarm bells in his head had given up ringing. He knew not what his fate was, but he knew deep down that it was sealed.
And there she was, right on cue. A luminescent, crimson wraith in the blackness of his room. A woman that had no humanity left in her. A woman he didn’t want to look at.
Presently, she spoke, in a soft, whispered cadence that brought tears to his eyes and chills to his spine. “Tonight’s the night...” she stated. “But, you already knew that, didn’t you? Tonight is the night of your death.” She didn’t say it maliciously or passionately. Instead, she said it quietly and apathetically, as though stating a basic, methodical fact.
The man’s mind wanted to race, to storm, to respond in a myriad of different ways. Part of him wanted answers, wanted to know what was going on. But the deafening silence rung in his head, restraining any such habits. She was right: he knew. There was no point in questioning further.
“I was supposed to torment you...” the beautiful shade continued. “That’s what banshees are: lost souls that scream and alert the living of their impending destruction. But...” She trailed off, the scarlet streams languidly appearing down her face.
Part of him wanted to reach out and wipe her bloody tears off of her ethereal cheeks.
Part of him just wanted it to end.
He deserved no solace, no mourners, no compassion, and he wanted none. If this was his fate, he would lie down and accept it. It’s what he’d always done when the darkness threatened to consume him. He knew this time, though, it wasn’t a threat. It was reality.
As the shadows of eternal sleep started to tear at his consciousness, she turned so that he could see her face illuminated by the faintest moonlight that broke inside the empty room.
A face he’d loved so much when she’d been alive.
A face he didn’t deserve to see again.
—
His landlord would find his body laying serenely in his bed, his arms crossed, on a bright, sunny morning a few days later. The examiner would label his cause of death as a heart attack as he slept. Odd, for a man his age, but not suspicious in any way.
If the man had been in that deserted bedroom any longer, he would have laughed, as long exhausted tears worked well worn trails down his cheeks.
“My heart broke and my life ended when my wife died. My body just kept moving for a few years longer.”
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