Birth (a short story)
Below is a short story I wrote based on a dream, as part of a personal challenge of mine to emulate the style of H. P. Lovecraft. I hope it tingles your spine. Just a little bit. Enjoy!
I have one hope in writing out this terrible event: that somehow the fears within me it inspired will remove themselves from my mind, and be transferred upon this paper which my eyes, under no condition, will ever behold again.
It was a December night when the winds outside carried fearsome velocity and spread themselves through the walls of my house themselves so as to chill the interior of my dwelling to a terribly uncomfortable cold. And thus I lay in my bed, huddled in desperation of warmth, not able to sleep. My inability to fall into slumber was not only because of the cold; the wind itself was filled with such personality that it seemed only to wrack my house on the grounds of some personal vendetta, and I feared what terrors this imagined life inside the currents could bring.
And so the everlasting toil of the wind kept me up, until in the smallest hours of the morning, my eyes closed involuntarily, and for a moment I was asleep. And what happened next was against my will. The terrors in the wind did indeed bring a force to my abode, and this force sabotaged my conscious, and awoke me from my sleep halfway to a sort of somnambulism. And in this state I was pulled unknowningly towards what would soon be a terrific fate.
The force drew me out of my bed deliberately and I floated against gravity aloft from the ground. My body prone, immovable, and now wholly awake, left my bedroom and floated ominously down the staircase. At this point, terrible moans from another dimension of sound entirely beat my eardrums and destroyed any composure still left in me. It was with these dissonant moans that my screams attempted to come. From my throat I tried to squeeze any cry for help I could, but it would not come. My mouth was open, but no sound emitted from it. As I attempted to shout further, the moans increased until dischordal screeches echoed throughout the halls of my house, rattling china in cabients, shattering the glass of my doors and windows. These echoes continued as I rounded the halls of my house, the floating force guiding me closer and closer towards what I certainly deduced was my death.
The force brought me to my kitchen, which glowed from a central source of light. This light was crimson in color, but sinister in mood. It pulsated with frightening undulations, each larger than the last, each bringing with it definitive increases in the volume of the screeches. It was against this unbearable noise and soon, unbearable light, that I stood against my fate. The force raised my body higher until I was touching the ceiling, and turned my body over so that my chest faced the floor. It was at this moment that I suddenly discovered the ghastly source of the sound and light.
Upon the floor lay a prone body of an unborn infant, a severed umbilical cord trailing across its chest. It was stiff, but definitely alive in some terrible fashion. Its face and body were covered in the characteristic blood of a newborn, but in addition, the internal organs of this unfathomable being glowed with the brightest and most horrific red hue any man has ever observed. And from this detestable creature emerged the ear-splitting screech, and the dissonant howls which infected my mind and terrorized my conscious. The being seemed to be able to scream an entire spectrum of pitches, which created a disturbing sensation in the ears.
And although the unbearable sound and light emitted outward, yet the force drew me near to the creature. As I grew closer, I saw its mouth become lined with sharped teeth, and more and more wide the aperture grew, until its jaws were several feet apart, and several feet in diameter. The teeth grew into foot-long gleaming pikes which dripped with saliva as I, its meal for the day, traveled nearer. The mouth was soon a circle two yards in diameter, and as I drew to the verge of this being's mouth, a wind not unlike those icy gales that pounded my house relentlessly sucked me in. Only the gravity of my own dimension held me from being imminently devoured.
When the wind had reached its zenith, its pinnacle of force, the mouth suddenly closed, and with a sinister grin the bloody infant gazed at me, as if with warning, and I fell upon it. My eyes shut and for a second I was enclosed in the black void of sleep. I awoke from this state with a start, and found myself in a pool of eerily viscous red liquid clinging to my skin and forming upon my forehead a sinister, crimson-red scar by which the evil creature reminds me of its presence as each waking day passes.
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