Recommended Song: Me and The Devil by Soap&Skin
Clouds rolled heavy overhead, a storm threatening to roll through and tear up some roots and brustle branches. Regardless, it was a warm Spring evening with quiet winds-- a calm before the storm, in a way. Graduation was but a few weeks away, and Vance Blackwood felt his academic stress fading away the moment he stepped into the cool air that caressed his skin.
He was a pale boy yet with an olive touch to his skin, his hair black as night and his eyes a stark emerald color. Funniest part was that his parents were both white as snow and brunettes, his father having blue eyes and his mother brown. Not a single person in his family had hair as dark as his or green eyes bright as a gem-- and even his sister looked far too different from their parents, yet her eyes were a mysteriously matching green.
Vance kept the belief that he was adopted quiet, for he knew his parents would entertain it. At this point, who cared? He was eighteen years old, just on the verge of graduating high school and moving on with his life. The bland days of daily education would soon thin out into college, and only God knew what Vance would be doing then.
All he wanted right now was to graduate successfully- which, unfortunately, meant he had to pass calculus-- and to rid himself of the various people in his lives that loved to declare themselves his friend. Oh, he certainly adored being popular in high school, but that came with a consequence when people became so pathetic and fake, striving for impossible dreams that only a deal with a devil could come true. An actress. A famous singer, auditioning for those talent shows only to fall flat in the first round. A CEO (that was the funniest one because Roger, the boy whose father had three failed businesses under his belt, had cheated on all of his business class tests).
Bold dreams were fine, but these people were never realistic, nor were they real with one another. Vance was steadily becoming a bad guy for his apathy, so he blamed it on the stress of upcoming finals.
When the light wind brushed a strand of his hair aside, opening the wide outside world to him as he descended his deck stairs, Vance found himself smiling. No stars in sight made the clouds feel as though they held an oppressive grip on the world, closing in to confine. Oddly, he felt easy with this, always enjoying crowded places-- not with people but with things-- among enclosed rooms. His sister thought he was weird being the total opposite of a claustrophobic, yet she denied the truth that she was exactly the same.
Perhaps it would be a nice late walk, everyone asleep and the darkness consuming the street save for the street lights. Where Vance lived, there were two roads that came together to make a wishbone shape, the end circling back around so it was a pretty definite neighborhood, equipped with children playing about their yards and all.
Ah, and there was a sewer grate in the middle of where the two roads met, and right now the secluded neighbor that hardly anyone saw was standing over it as if she were in a trance--
That… was not normal.
Vance was scarcely at the end of his driveway when he finally noticed her amongst the shadows where the streetlights did not extend. By this point, he was a mere twenty feet from the woman and his vision was adjusting to the shade that lingered in the area, a full moon silenced by the thicket of clouds.
He frowned. “Hey,” Vance called, taking only a single cautious step forward. His neighbor continued staring at her feet. What was her name again? “Hey are you alright, Miss- ?”
Seriously, what was her goddamn name?!
There was no response, so he took another couple steps closer until her eyes seemed a bit more visible. His body turned to stone when her eyes looked as pitch black as could be, not a single speck of white or anything. Her expression was blank, nearly heartless, and she looked awfully pale, more so than normal. Though, Vance did not see her outside of her home often anyways.
He told himself her eyes were like that merely because it was dark, and he tried to dismiss his memory reminding him that she had light blue eyes. Nothing that would look this dark. And her skin was usually a light brown, but it looked more like the muted olive tone of his own skin.
It was just the lighting, that was all.
But then the screams came, and Vance stumbled backwards onto the ground. His palms pressed hard against the driveway as his neighbor began screeching louder than a child in summer time. Her head lifted and her voice bellowed from her lungs as though she were crying out for the last bit of her life.
The woman’s right arm began twisting around like she was turning it, yet it did not stop as it gradually began to dislocate from the shoulder and bend around her back. Vance nearly vomited as he watched her other arm match the same, the both of them dislocating and cracking loud as a broken tree in the woods. Her legs soon followed suit until her body crumpled to the ground and twisted about like worms writhing in the dirt, as though her limbs had become snakes still attached to a husk of a body and wrapped around to suffocate prey.
Jesus Christ, was he really that sleep deprived? No, he’s never hallucinated something like this, not even in his fucking dreams.
Trembling rooted itself in the ground not even seconds later, and the clang of metal chimed through the air was what appeared to be iron chains shot upwards and embraced his distorted neighbor’s mangled corpse (as she could not still be alive with her neck snapped as it was). Confined like a beast, she suddenly was pulled into the ground like it had been a deep puddle, a sinkhole perhaps.
Vance shook his head and stumbled forward on his feet. She was gone. Maybe it wasn’t real? He continued onwards as his breath seemed to shorten before the sight, a pain starting to throb at the back of his skull. For a brief moment, he thought his vision had gone out, like the darkness consumed him as well, but it cleared as he reached the sewer grate.
Stomping hard on the ground, he tried to find an explanation for what happened. There was no way she was in the sewer, for when he tried to pull it up with his fingers, it was most certainly sealed tight. A couple seconds passed, and not a single sound echoed in the air, even the wind having become a deafening silence.
The world muffled around him, and even Vance found himself mesmerized by the ground-- yet not in the way that his neighbor was. For him, he was totally aware of what he was doing. Someone else might not see it that way, but it was a few minutes shy of midnight on a Tuesday evening. Who the hell would be looking outside?
Someone like him, maybe, but Jesus Christ he had to be hallucinating. “I’m fucking gone,” he decided, smacking a hand against his cheek. The haziness in his mind did not appear to clear.
He began to laugh then, a sound of pure exhaustion echoing from his lungs as his head fell back. Whatever he had just seen, it felt too real to be a dream. Maybe he was hallucinating. Perhaps the “exam stress” really did take everything out of him, but if Vance was to be honest, he was a little too apathetic to worry about upcoming exams, save for Calculus. The teacher loved him though, so there was no way he’d let Vance fail.
The clouds appeared frozen overhead as Vance breathed in and out, trying to slow the rapid pace of his startled heart.
Something grabbed his foot. He rubbed his eyes and tried to walk away, but he was tripped to the ground. Concrete slammed hard against his arms and he cried out before turning to see what in the hell had tripped him.
A clawed hand appeared before him, the broken streetlight overhead suddenly deciding to flicker on and off like a horror movie tease. Leathery skin and black nails gripped tighter around his exposed ankle, forcing his eyes to freeze wide. A dream. As real as this was, he was definitely dreaming because that hand-- it came from the middle of the road, not even the sewer hole, which was shut.
Then he was pulled down, arms struggling to grab onto something as though someone were trying to drown him. The last thing he saw was a light in his house flicker on before he was swarmed with a weirdly claustrophobic feeling.
It wasn’t like a crowded room or a cloudy night but rather his own breath was escaping him, a material running along every inch of his body as thought squeezing him together. With a bumpy texture, he felt like he was being dragged through dirt in the underground itself, and maybe he was? Who even knew at this point, for his mind was nearly gone in his heart’s nearly stopping fear.
Darkness filled his eyes, and Vance could not move even an inch, his lips sealed in a cry as dirt filled his mouth and lungs, consuming him as suffocation began to take hold of his brain. Even the thoughts in his mind were waning, the panic settling for a resting state as he slowly, gradually felt his mind drifting… fading… He was tired. So… tired.
And then even his mind turned off.
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