Nobody At All - A Snippet

Another snippet I wrote as part of my prompt game. This one tried to go for a modern dark Gothic vibe, incorporating some of Edgar Allan Poe’s work as you can see with the note and the last 4 or so paragraphs.

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The message was still taped to my door when I returned. I half-expected it to be gone, as if by physically removing myself from my home and making a trip to the grocery store, I would return to find it erased from existence - to find that it had never been there at all. Evidently, I was wrong.

I read it again, still feeling somewhat lightheaded from the events of the night before.

And the cloud took the form

Of a demon in my view

Hark! You will face the storm

And in the morrow, be born anew

I recognized the first half of the note - those two lines from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe - but the second half was new to me. The handwriting was new to me as well, but then, I didn’t know if I’d have been able to recognize anyone’s handwriting, now that all of my correspondence and communication happened digitally.

With a sigh, I took down the note and pushed it into the small canvas bag, shoved it between the milk carton and the pack of cookies. I didn’t look at it again until later that afternoon, but for the entire day I kept thinking, mulling over the last night’s happenings, and trying to piece it all together in my muddled brain.

The thing is, I didn’t really believe in any of that nonsense. Grimoires and strange rituals - they were a thing of horror movies and urban legends. But the book I had found buried in the marsh the other day was… unsettling, to say the least. I still believe now that if I were to recite its contents - if I were to even describe it to you, I’d be putting you and your loved ones in danger.

I shouldn’t have let the woman in. I knew she was bad news from the moment she showed up on my doorstep the evening before and asked me about it, with those shrewd, penetrating eyes of hers - that vacant, cold expression. How she had come to know that I was in possession of the book was still a mystery - just as much a mystery as how I ended up allowing her to enter my home. Everything from the moment I opened the door to find her on my doorstep until I passed away into my fitful slumber was, in fact, a mysterious haze.

Images came in and out of my mind - slurred and muddled words repeated in the caverns of my subconscious, like a dream come back to haunt me - and the woman - always the woman, with the book in her hands - the strange items she had used - the bizarre and unnatural sensations that had filled my paralyzed corpse - the ice that seemed to freeze every muscle so that I could not move by even an inch–

Had that all happened in one night? More importantly - just what had happened last night? What was it she had done? What was it she had been saying?

Bewitched. That was the word my mind kept conjuring again and again - and I dared not consider it. I didn’t believe in those things. I could not believe in such things.

But all of this was now nothing more than an anxious fog in my head, and as I went about my mundane chores, my gaze kept being pulled towards the canvas bag, my thoughts tugging at my like an impatient child on their parent’s sleeve, and after a while I could ignore it no more.

I took out the note, sat on my chesterfield, and read it again and again and again. I must have lost track of the time, for when the knocking came at my front door, night had already fallen. A sense of foreboding fell over me.

Again, the words from the note fell back into the forefront of conscious thought:

Hark! You will face the storm

And in the morrow, be born anew

The rat-tat-tat came again and again, insistent and impatient and demanding all at once. I swallowed hard.

“It’s a visitor,” I told myself, whispered it quietly in the empty room. “That’s all.”

It was the woman - this I knew - and even as my body responded, as I rose out of my seat and followed the noise, as I turned the key in the knob, I told myself - “Or maybe it’s nobody at all.”