Haunted – by ROB TRUE

Haunted

Alone for fuck knows how many days and nights, no sleep, no peace.  Awake since the last time, nights and days at the window watching, waiting, haunted, afraid, until I collapsed and woke again with unexplained tears of torment and grief.  

Another day to begin once more, the endless blur of days and nights.  Sat there in a bleak room, staring at nothing, thoughts racing with strange understanding of things I now can’t comprehend, when I realised there was someone, or something, sitting next to me in a chair which was until just a moment before, certainly empty.

Horrified, cold fear to the marrow creeping in my bones.  I knew it was there, right there close, but was frozen with terror and too scared to look.  Summoning courage, I turned fast, standing as I backed away.  In the chair I saw nothing.  It was still there.

“Who’s there?  Show yourself!” I shouted with false bravado, the same magic I once invoked as I squared up to a massive geezer I had no chance against and roared, “Come on then, lets fuckin’ ‘ave it!” He came at me and I knocked him out with one punch.  Not this time.  The magic failed.  I didn’t feel so brave.

I grabbed my machete and when I looked back, I wasn’t sure where he was.

I could still sense him in the room, but I couldn’t tell if he was still sitting there, or if he’d moved.  Gripped by fear, not knowing what to do, but knowing inaction would destroy me, I did the only thing reasonable at a time like that.  I went fucking mad.  Screaming and shouting, with fear and aggression, swinging my machete round in great arcs, until I couldn’t take it anymore.  I ran shrieking from there, fired out by the intensity of it all.

I bolted into another room and slammed the door backing away from it.  I could feel the bastard, invisible creep on the other side of that door, making me wait, growing stronger, feeding off my rising terror.  The dog was in there with me; he would protect me.  Looking at his face, I knew he was in on it someway.  It was in the dog!  I grabbed his collar, opened the door, launched him out and slammed it shut again.

I sat down, machete held across my lap, rubbing over my face and head with my other hand, like I was trying to wipe the flesh off my skull, trying to work out how the Hell I would survive.

What am I gonna to do?  What am I gonna do?  What am I gonna do?

I sat there rocking back and forth.

I gotta calm down!

Deep breaths didn’t work, panic rising.  I fell back, half lying, the machete still held tight and then slumped, delirious.  A pressure built on my chest and I couldn’t move.  Paralysed, trying to scream.  Nothing came out, just my jaw opening and closing like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Silence.  I strained for movement; all I achieved was frantic wriggling of my toes.  Putting all my strength in one last effort I managed a slight tilt of my head to see, as a terrible face, large and monstrous appeared outside the window, pushing against the pane.  Constructed somehow of translucent geometric shapes the scowling mask looked as ridiculous as it did frightening.  “Oh God, please help me.”  I said out loud and knew of course that he wouldn’t.  Why would he?  If there is a God it’s either powerless, lazy, evil, or doesn’t give a fuck!  Asking for the help of a God like that is a pathetic moment of helplessness.

The face melted through glass, paused and then screamed, flying towards me, stopped at my face and dissolved into me.  I dropped, falling into the abyss, strange and terrible darkness, another dimension through layered transcendence.  Black nothing split by crack of light, a tear opened, illuminating a special scene.  I saw me standing there in a dusty nowhere, grinning idiot, tiptoes on a pointed rock, arms stretched out like rotor blades, spinning.  Surrounded by wasteland, desolation and cracked concrete.  The summer rain came down, to clean me.  I looked up at the blue, my home, shouting at the clouds, “I am nowhere!”  The thing inside that was me had gone.  Empty shell left behind.  Nothing is real.

***

Rob True was born in London 1971. He left school with no qualifications, dyslexic and mad, in a world he didn’t fit into. He got lost in an abyss, was sectioned twice and spent the best part of a decade on another planet. He returned to earth just in time for the new millennium, found a way to get on in life, married a beautiful girl and lived happily ever after. She taught him how to use paragraphs and punctuation and his writing has been a bit better ever since. Find him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/robjtrue