Disclaimer

The following is one of many installments for a story designed specifically for my blog.  While it does step out of my usual genre, there are some things still not suitable for a younger audience.  Violent/Graphic descriptions, strong language and sexual situations may be found through different sections.  Each entry will tell a small portion of the story during different times and may not directly follow the one prior to it.  

This story follows the direct interactions, as well as the deteriorating thoughts of a young man who is struggling not only with the relationships he has with those around him, but with the relationship he has with himself as well.

Finally, all work is strictly fiction and does not reflect the views of the author.  Any resemblance to actual person(s) is only a coincidence.

If this isn’t your cup of tea, then avoid these excerpts and hopefully I’ll see you around my other posts and webseries!

———

The room was exactly as he expected it to be, dark and undisturbed.  The door to the basement remained locked from the inside and only a battering ram was going to bring it down.  He slowly pushed the false wall open, careful not to let the hinges squeal.  There were at least two people in the house.  He could hear their voices through the floor, but it didn’t matter who they belonged to anymore. His mother? Megan?  The police?  They were all just faceless shadows to him.  He only wanted to finish what he had started.

His movements were slow and deliberate.  He wasn’t trying to be quiet.  There was enough activity on the floor above him to cover any small sounds that he might make. He crept across the room because at that moment the ‘other’ faltered.  He felt its will slip away, leaving him completely vulnerable to the death creeping outward from his injury.  He felt every ripple of his shirt, every grain of dirt beneath his feet and for the first time since watching Lucy go over the balcony, he wondered just what the hell it was that he was doing.

“Uhn,” he groaned for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“Scott?”

He froze.  The voice came from the other side of the door to the basement.  It was whispered so softly that if his senses hadn’t been so finely strung, he might have missed it.

“Scott, please!  Open the door!”

He recognized her the second time, and if he didn’t act quickly, her voice was going to alert those above them.

“Are you alone,” he asked.  His voice was gravelly, foreign to his ears and he couldn’t recognize it to what he knew he should sound like.

“Yes,” she answered.  The relief was apparent in her voice.  For the first time since they were children, he sensed that she was genuinely worried.  As his hand settled on the lock, he paused and repeated his last question.

“Yes, yes dammit!  Now please open the door,” she begged.

Seconds passed as he waited for any sign of the other to reappear and when he was convinced that there would be no interruptions, he flipped the latch.  The door all but knocked him back as she shoved her way through and into his arms, catching him as he began to collapse.

“Oh Scott, I’m so sorry,” she blubbered.  A spew of words flew from her mouth about how she saw what happened to Lucy on the news and about how she was sorry for being such a bitch to him over the years.  Any other person might have missed most of what she said, so fast were the words as she spoke them, but he heard every single one.  As she sobbed into his shoulder, he looked over hers with cold indifference.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, stepping back from him.  Her shirt peeled away from his bloody abdomen with a wet, sticky slurp.  With the other gone, his wound had begun bleeding again in earnest.

“Oh my GOD,” she shrieked.  Her voice was so high that it barely made a noise and her hands shot to her mouth as she turned, bent over and threw up next to the door.

Scott looked down and noticed that the blood had caused a patch of duct tape to peel away from his stomach.  A small length of his intestine was beginning to peek its way out of the wound, pulsing in and out of his body every beat of his heart.  As before, he shrugged and pushed it back in, pushing the tape back over to help keep it in.

As she continued to retch against the wall, he turned and walked over to the table where his project still lay and looked down at it with the tender affection that a mother would afford her newborn babe.  Slowly, his hand reached down and caressed the cold steel beneath his fingers as he trembled with exaltation from its touch.

“Scott?”  Megan hadn’t moved from where she still hunkered with her hands supporting her against her knees.  Her voice was scratchy and trembled as if the effort of speaking was yet too much.

“Scott,” she asked again when no answer was forthcoming.

“What.”  It wasn’t a question, but rather, more of a pained grunt.

“What happened at Lucy’s house?  What happened, Scott,” she asked fearfully.

“She stabbed me Megan.  She took this knife,” he said as he pulled the butcher knife from where he had it hidden, “and she plunged it into my stomach.”  As he spoke, he thrust the knife in her direction for emphasis.

“But…but, why?!”

“Because I threw her off a balcony,” he answered coldly.

Silence filled the room as he lifted the chainmail shirt off of the table and pulled it over his head.  The pain was excruciating, but as the weight began to settle on his shoulders, the ‘other’ also settled back into his nervous system.  As his head popped through the opening at the top, a dark, malevolent laughter erupted from core of his being and the suddenness of it caused Megan to scream.

Disclaimer

The following is one of many installments for a story designed specifically for my blog.  While it does step out of my usual genre, there are some things still not suitable for a younger audience.  Violent/Graphic descriptions, strong language and sexual situations may be found through different sections.  Each entry will tell a small portion of the story during different times and may not directly follow the one prior to it.  

This story follows the direct interactions, as well as the deteriorating thoughts of a young man who is struggling not only with the relationships he has with those around him, but with the relationship he has with himself as well.

Finally, all work is strictly fiction and does not reflect the views of the author.  Any resemblance to actual person(s) is only a coincidence.

If this isn’t your cup of tea, then avoid these excerpts and hopefully I’ll see you around my other posts and webseries!

———

It hadn’t taken him long to get to the secret entrance.  After leaving the shed, he followed the alley to the end of the block and cut across the back yards of two houses before coming to where the door was buried.  With a groan, he bent down and swept away the leaves covering it.  He hoped that the grease in the hinges was still active, or getting in through here wasn’t going to be an option.

With a quick look around, he began to pull.  At first, nothing happened.  An unintentional “oof” slipped past his lip.  The tape on his midsection crackled, and fresh waves of pain lit up every nerve on the way to his brain.

The muscles in his arms shook.  A tendon stood out on his neck, and just when he was about to give up, it gave.  It gave with a ‘crack!’, sending him stumbling backwards when the door suddenly flew up in front of him.  His eyes bugged out in surprise, half expecting his mom to jump out of the hole screaming, but the only sound was that of the birds overhead.

A full minute passed before he pulled himself to his rebellious feet.  Somewhere deep inside, an internal struggle was wavering.  The strength of the other faltered for one brief second and he nearly fell head first into the darkness below.

“Perhaps for the better,” he thought to himself.  At least then this terrible nightmare would be over.

But once again, it was his feet that took control of matters.  Even as he pondered the events of the last twenty-four hours, he descended into the darkness below, pausing only to pull the rope on the underside of the trapdoor.  Once it had settled into place above him, only then did he flip on the light switch.

An electrical buzz filled the silence of the tunnel, chasing away the ripe bits of imagination that were forming in his mind.  The bulbs weren’t very bright, shining only forty watts into the darkness, but it was enough for him to see his destination.

As his began to close the distance between him and his den, his thoughts traveled back to the last minutes in the shed.

……….

“All I ever wanted was to be your friend, Scott.  Was that too much to ask?”

“Fuck you Arnie.  I never wanted your friendship.  I just wanted to be left alone.  Don’t you get it?  We never hung out.  We didn’t have any classes together.  For fuck’s sake Arnie, why the hell do you even care?”

He continued to stand at the exit to the shed, head lowered with his open hand against its wood frame.  He didn’t dare turn around.  The old rage was returning.  He could sense the ‘other’ tensing up inside of him and already, there were dark thoughts manifesting about the various ways he could use some of the tools around him.

“I…  I lost my father once, too, Scott.  Like you, I was alone.  Everyone had turned against me, even the ones who professed to being my friends.  I couldn’t understand why he would bring me into a world like this, teach me to be the way that I was and then seemingly abandon me.”

Arnie’s voice was soft, but full of passion.  He could feel the tenderness coming from it, spreading over him as if a blanket had been wrapped around his shoulders and for just a moment he began to doubt his actions.

“I could have easily gone the same route as you.”

“Why didn’t you,” he had asked, near resignation.

“Just as I was about to give up, I found someone to confide in, and he reassured me that it wasn’t too late.”

Scott laughed bitterly, a dark sound completely devoid of humanity.

“And what about me?  Is it too late for me,” he asked with a voice full of sarcasm.

“It’s never too late to ask for forgiveness Scott.”

……….

As he approached the entrance to the den, he shook the thoughts from his head.  A small frown appeared on his features as he tried to remember the last thing that happened before stepping back out into the world, but either he had blocked it from memory or the ‘other’ wasn’t allowing him to recall it.  Either way, it didn’t matter.  Slowly, he flicked the latch that would allow him to push open the hidden wall.