Unheimlich

Hello!  This is my first attempt at a horror story of this kind that I actually liked, and so I decided to throw it up on my blog.  Take a look at it, and go ahead and comment and tell me what you think!  I loves dah feedback.

It is currently Sunday at 5:00 pm. The last arrows of weak light from the dying winter sun are piercing through the gaps in the blinds of my bedroom window. Dust motes lazily float in the warm air inside of my house while outside already freezing temperatures begin their spiraling descent into the deep chill of the night.

Dusk is the worst time of day. With the setting of the sun, a peculiar emotion filters through my body. There is loneliness, to be sure—something about the light sliding across the land, away from the rushing darkness. I feel something else as well; something that I cannot put my finger on. Something that gives me pause whenever I feel it, though I do not know why. As if I am not at home—uncomfortable and peculiar—even in my own skin.

Everything in my house is quiet, save the low hum of my computer and the background drone of warm air rushing out of metal vents near the floor, like hot breath being expelled from some primordial creature. It is comfortable now—I've drawn the curtains, the grating sound of metal rings on rusty rod sounding out in the calm.

I choose to live a life of solitude. My deformity has never, and never will, garner any positive attention for myself.

While I keep in contact with the world around me from afar, I do not envy nor do I emulate the social life that others live. I enjoy peace, and most of all, quiet, and I've quickly come to realize that that can only be attained by avoiding contact with most of the populace.

As I sit at my computer, I become drowsy in all of the warmth, like a contented bumble bee. Heavy with nectar, I buzz over to my bed, easing my body onto the soft sheets. Currents of heated air and the song-like silence of the house whistle me into a stupor. I open my eyes one last time, gazing at the snowflakes gently falling outside, and fall into a deep sleep.

Everything's bright. Hard to see. There's something dark in the corner of my eyes, but I can't focus on it. As I squint around, trying to get my bearings, darkness falls around me. Easy to see now. Shadowy figures towering over me—I'm sitting indian-style on a dusty patch of ground, twigs and rocks around me.

“Get up. We've got something to say to you,” said one of the shadows. Rough hands grab me, haul me up onto my feet. I'm sweating. It's so hot. “Nobody here likes you, 'cause you're so weird-looking.” The shadows grow even larger, eclipsing all light in my vision. Deep voices bellow at me, shaking the ground, shaking me to my very core. One word constantly repeated: “Why?” “Why?” “Why?”

Walls of black collide with my face—pain shooting through my body parts from every direction--and I fall to the ground: except that it's not there anymore. The shadows dissipate, bright light blasting everywhere. Can't see. Except there is something here. The silhouette of a small figure—I can't see it but I know it's there. It's staring at me, in silent judgment as I fall out of my body. Sweating so much, stinging my eyes. Dull roaring in my ears. The harsh grating of metal on rock, over and over again. It's so hot, I...

Wake up now, breathing hard. It really is hot. I think the heat is up way too high. I take a quick glance outside. The weather has changed abruptly, harsh wind slamming itself against my window, ice whirling itself into a frenzy outside, fingers of frost growing on the cold panes.

I sit up in my bed now, shaking my head in an effort to free myself of the terror that I had felt. I've had many dreams like this one. Always in the end, the figure would be staring at me.

I normally can't get back to sleep after these dreams, so I stand up, stretch, and go back over to my computer. I get that strange feeling again that I mentioned before. That uncanny feeling that I don't belong where I should be. As the boot-up screen appears and dull light floods onto my face, I catch a glimpse of something behind me in the mirror above my computer. My heart begins to race.

I whip my head around in time to see a brief flash of something pale sticking out from my slightly ajar door before disappearing, though there was no mistaking what I saw in that short moment.

It was the face of a little girl, peeking around the corner of my door. She had been staring at me.

I start breathing heavily. No other human being has set foot inside of my house since I first bought it. How could there be anybody but me here?

Pushing myself out of my chair and walking as quietly as I can to the door, I look out into the hallway and listen. I see nothing but the dark floor stretching down into the living room, and only hear the chilly battering of the wind on my house outside.

I call out into the confines of my house, for once actually hoping that there is some kind of human life nearby.

“Hello? Please show yourself. I am trying to sleep. I understand if you're scared of the storm and somehow got in here to keep warm, but you cannot simply break into a person's house,” I said in what I hoped was a reasonable voice.

My plea fell upon seemingly deaf ears. Receiving no answer, I shuffled onto the unpleasantly cold wooden floor of the hallway and into my living room, where everything, though considerably creepier in the dark, looked normal.

I look around for any sign of an intruder and see no girl or person of any kind. I glance over to the kitchen, which is connected to the living room. Finding nothing, I allow my body to sink down onto the couch, calming my quickened heartbeat.

“I must have just imagined it... I'm still on edge from my bad dream,” I thought to myself.

Just as I begin to relax, I get that queer feeling again, starting in the pit of my stomach and raising up to the very edges of the hair on the back of my neck. I hear a noise sounding like a “sigh” from behind my back, swing my head around and see the same pale white face from before, just inches away from the back of the couch. I stand up and back away as fast as I can, wheezing breath into my body in terrified spurts. She is very small, her head coming up just above the couch, wearing a tank-top with a sunflower on it and a small pair of jean shorts, smeared all over with dirt, as if it were summertime and she was playing in her mother's garden. She looks at me with liquid, tear-filled eyes and I stop backing away

“Hey, there. It's okay... Why are you here? Do you need help?” I said politely to the girl.

She shook her head and frowned.

Suddenly, her tiny form seemingly filled with rage, her eyes flashing. She pointed at me. Angrily, she walks around the couch, jabbing her finger at me, and I back away from the strange child. I knock the back of my head into the pointed corner of my television cabinet and fall unconscious.

Darkness. Unending darkness.

I slide further and further down. Now white strips of color, speckles of yellow. I'm outside now, it's not cold. It's in a park. The park nearby where I grew up, specifically by the playground. The sun is out. I cannot control my body, though I seem to be following some kind of action.

I see a little girl, different from a few moments ago, and she's with her father, happily running around him and chanting his name in a singsong voice.

He leaves now, telling her to play with the other children on the playground, and that he “loves her very much.” She looks sad for a moment but then runs off to the swings.

I see a young boy by himself on the swings where she is running to. He has tears in his eyes, and struggles to condense into a ball, hiding behind his shaggy, dark hair, trying to keep away from the rest of the world.

The girl comes over and sits next to the boy and starts swinging, humming a bit of a nonsense childhood song, before noticing the small, dark form.

“What's wrong, kid?” she says as she drags herself to a halt on the mulch underfoot.

The boy wipes his nose and says, “Nobody wants to be friends with me. Everybody says I look weird and act weird and that they don't want to be around me.”

“Well that's silly! Everybody's gotta have a friend! And I'll be yours, kid! Come on, lemme see your face, stop hiding it under all that hair! I'm sure you're not that weird at all.” said the girl in an upbeat voice.

The boy raised his head up to the girl, smiling through tears now, so that the sun could shine on both sides of his face equally, the good part and the bad part.

The girl looked at the boy for a moment, at his imperfection, at his strange deformation, and screamed and pushed herself away from him. “Gross!” she howled as she sped away to the sandbox where the other children were.

Anger, sadness, and indignation showed on the child's face as he looked away from the girl's receding back. He looked as if he were about to explode, his tiny body shivering with unexpressed emotion. And then... nothing. A blank look washed over his face.

It was as if nothing had ever happened.

I wake up now from the living room floor, feeling the sore back of my head and pulling away with wet blood from a cut on my skull. I look around in terror, searching for the vengeful girl that had just been here, but she seems to have gone. The wind outside is still shrieking and it seems to be hotter in my house, if that was even possible.

As I begin to woozily stand up and get my bearings about me, colors flash across my eyes. I hear a scream from what sounds like far away and as my legs suddenly stop working I fall to the floor again. My brain collapses in on itself and then reactivates, but something, some lost memory, comes rushing into my head with the force of a tidal wave. As it crashes, I'm transported again.

Time flashes by in an instant. The boy was older now. Not a boy at all anymore.

He was walking through his high school, harassed occasionally by those around him. Some jeered at him and one boy kicked him and sneered, while others just crossed to the other side of the hall to avoid him.

As he was leaving school that day, with the same blank look on his face that he had found so many years ago in the park, he passed a mother and her young daughter walking by him on the sidewalk. It was in that instant that time froze. It was the little girl from my house. The girl turned in her frozen state, and stared at me with accusatory eyes, flashing with imagined fire.

Fear arches down my spine like lightning.

The scene unfroze and the girl was normal again. She looked at the young man as he passed by and said in a loud voice to her mother, “Why is that kid so gross-looking, mommy?”

The young man's careful facade momentarily broke. In the passive blank wall that was his exterior, a flicker of hurt rage and anger spluttered across his features. He waited for a moment, and then followed the pair home, making sure that he himself was not followed.

He came back to their house every day, sometimes just watching the little girl play in the back yard. It was as if a switch had been flipped inside of him. He was still blank, but it was as if his interior now matched his exterior. He now genuinely cared for nothing.

And one night, just before he knew that she would be called in for dinner, he grabbed the little girl, covering her mouth. He took her from her home, bound her mouth, and carried her away in his parent's car, to a partially constructed house far out of town, now abandoned due to lack of funding. He tore the gag off of her mouth and screamed at her, “Why do you think I'm gross? Why would you say that to me in the park so long ago? Why wouldn't you leave me alone? Why did you have to say it again!?”

The girl looked up in abject, confused terror, and said through choked tears, “I don't know what you're talking about! I'm so sorry, mister, please take me back to my mom and dad...”

The young man no longer operated on reason. On the inside, his brain blazed in a crazed, jumbled mess of repressed anger and horrific sadness. His impassive face denoted no more emotion, and his form dwarfed her as he crawled over the console of the car toward the girl.

He fell into a deep sleep, and remembered nothing of the night before.

I wake up now, all of the emotions of decades rushing into my body, sucked in by the aftermath of the typhoon that had hit me. I stand up and know what I have to do, tears flowing down my cheeks. Remorse and shame pit together in my stomach. And sadness. For what I did. For how I could have been. For how I was treated in life.

The scarred man rushes to the door and flings it open, the waiting blizzard accepting him, razors of wind licking around him, greeting him like an eager dog around a new visitor.

He trudges through the snow, his tears freezing on his face in the bitter cold as the wind slashes his body, the tempest singing an unearthly dirge. The house quickly becomes invisible in the darkened white of the night, but the man seems to know where he's going.

Suddenly, he slams his body down onto the nearly-frozen ground and scrabbles fiercely at the snow and dirt like an animal. His nails split and his blood spills on the ground, but he continues to attempt to dig into the ground with a feverish passion. Minutes pass by and the storm does not abate, surrounding the small, huddled form of the man as he pulls at the unyielding ground until finally he collapses onto the ground. He wheezes and attempts to scream his lament to the uncaring, unseeing world around him.

He lays still for a while –corpse-like and unmoving—but in a last burst of energy claws chunks out of the frozen ground with superhuman strength.

He sobs when he finds what he was looking for, grabs hold of it, and finally lays still, his hand clasped on the object. He rasps something to it, something that is lost in the whirlwind of ice.

Snow quickly covers his lone body, his hand still holding the thing in the ground.

Days later, when the snow drifts melt away slightly and the local mailman is able to drive by to deliver the first mail of the spring, he sees the body of the man, the sun shining on it.

He hurries over but immediately steps back in horror when he realizes the scene. The man's huddled, still-frozen body.

His unseeing face stuck in a final look of tortured sorrow at what he had caused.

A small, bony hand sticking out of the thawing ground, clasped with the scarred man's in a rigor mortis grip.