The #Broken_Dagger Forum

AYAN'TE MAELHIM KHORUN T'SETH VA
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They say in the beginning there was only darkness.

It was a two-storey house, an ugly block of a thing with a thatched roof and a set of rickety stairs that led down to the lower levels; the walls were pitted and stained where the ceiling had leaked. It was no place for the wee one, Thelda knew, but it would have to do. It would have to do...

They say it was there before the stars were born. Like a great sea without a sun to cast reflection on its still surface...

She didn't want the child. She'd told Thelda two days after the birth; and even the hearty nursemaid had to admit a certain part of her didn't blame the woman for it. There was something certainly strange about the child. The wide black eyes. It hadn't laughed, cried or smiled since it was born. Its lips were always set halfway on the way to a smile but as if it were keeping it back.

As if it knew something.

They say the dark was silent, that it was a nothingness. Hollow, null, and void...

The night was neither dark nor stormy; and in that there was inherent for any superstitious woman of Thelda's ethnicity and vintage a certain implaceable dread. Too pale was the moon's gossamer gown, though it did little to shed light upon the surrounding hamlet save for the jaundiced skin of plaster walls and thatched roofs spread like tightly-packed spiderwebs. And too still; the crickets had abandoned their comforting drone, the wind its familiar rustle. It was silence stillborn, a bloated and terrible thing waiting to burst.

Thelda stood in the kitchen, roughened hands wiping the last few dishes up over the old wooden bucket filled with soapy water. It was a waste, but she insisted on cleaning the implements, lest they rust, lest the child's health be put into risk.

She whistled as she worked, a sound normally cheerful and alive with the rotund woman's effervescent spirit; it warmed the hearts of many who'd heard its trill through the narrow halls of this twin-layered hovel, even to the neighbours, who never complained if they knew what was good for them. They all knew the family. The whole neighbourhood knew the family. They were well-liked, for what it was worth.

But tonight the friendly sound lacked. Tonight, its merry tune was a dirge; it rung out in the silver-white void and bounced thin and tinny from stained walls and windows of dirty and aged glass.

Thelda's face was grave indeed, her jowls, no stranger to plump smiles, hung like empty sacks upon her cheeks; their weight was a palpable presence on a face not used to frowning. The purse of her lips drove forth the sound, but it seemed hollow, now, drained of its mirth and gaiety...

Cold. Too cold. Even with her bundled attire, even with her hands in dishwater that had been warmed over the now-dead fire not so long ago, it was cold.

It's a night coming into spring. It shouldn't be this cold. The snows are melting.

They said the dark was empty, before the light came upon it.

As Thelda worked she found her thoughts straying back to the child with the strange black eyes. They never looked at you directly, she thought, no, they stared through you, they glistened. If she were a more scholarly sort, she might have described them as depthless, as impenetrable as the surface of a peat lake in winter. As it was, she could muster a murmur of "s'no' roight...s'no' natural..." and recall the desperation with which the mother who now slept uneasily above with the babe had spoken of terrible dreams before the pregnancy, the span of which had in itself been difficult.

Why did they lie?

She became aware of a sound filtering in beneath the weakness of her whistle. The whistle died away, leaving only its unwelcome undercurrent to dribble from the stillness.

Laughter.

Burbling, giggling, the sound echoed down from above. She shuddered, and became vaguely aware that she had cut her finger upon the knife she had been washing at the time. She stared at the tiny slit, and the blood that steamed upon the frigid air.

The sound came again. The child. Surely, it could only be the child. But gods, what a sound; there was something about its garbled repetition, its depth, something wrong.

She didn't quite know why she kept the knife in her hand as she ascended the steps; she found herself dreading each step. The stairwell stretched onward into infinity, elongating itself like the spine of a dead snake. But Thelda's feet, forced into shoes that made her ankles swell, continued their relentless crusade; though her heart fluttered like a canary in a cat-watched cage, she could not will herself to stop.

As she reached the door, she became aware of another sound; an accompaniment to the child's giggle, and this sound chilled her more than ever that spawned of mortal throat could have mustered.

It came as a series of thin, pulsing whoops; if Thelda had known the yip of a hyena she might well have likened it thus, but it was too hollow, too smooth, and punctuated by insectoid clicks and rattles echoing in the stillness; but it was the sensation of the sound that birthed its terror; for it stirred something primordial in Thelda's heart, a childhood of screaming in the night, of reflections and shadows and grandmother's half-serious tales of bogeymen and spirits...

The dark was never empty

It was already looking at her when the door swung open.

She saw the horrid tableau all at once. The pale forms of mother and father stretched upon the bed, coiled and twisted in frozen throes of terror; their faces...

The window shut, no sign of broken glass, no sign of violent entry.

Their faces.

The shadows on the wall moving; the pulsing sounds emanating from them; the shadows coming alive, flowing across the walls, the floor, the ceiling, like schooling fish.

The shadows rippling, their surfaces broken by long, lean black arms, spidery black fingers; moonlight painted on glistening flesh. A forest of arms, like bent tree-limbs made fluid pawing at the corpses, sapping them of an unseen ambrosia.

And above the crib...

It was looking at her.

...crouched, doubled over the crib, a form like a man; but as it straightened, she saw the proportions; all wrong, a thing of angled madness, of planes and surfaces translucent; she saw the window behind it, through it, she saw its flesh as pale filmy liquid, and she saw within the network of veins, thick and black. No other organs, only that black network of grape-vines bearing their plump fruit to float in the abyss of the horror's body; kidney-shaped blotches silhouetted at the end of each branch, bumping against each other placidly in the horror's motion.

Thelda felt her world drawn into the thing, and could not turn away, not even when its hands lifted from the crib, and she saw the baby's pale soft skin pricked and bleeding from the wicked fish-hook claws that burst from those fingertips. Not even when the thing lifted the child to its chest, and she realised as the slick outer membrane parted and swallowed the infant's body inside that the floating objects were not fruit nor organ but children, infants, babies, like the one she had nurtured for weeks now...taken by this obscenity.

But she could not forget the smile on the baby's face; the twist of innocent lips into such a smear of absolute malevolence that there and then her black hair turned white; that even as the terror pulled the child into itself, its laughter still continued...

Then her gaze was drawn up, and she saw Its face.

They were always there...


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They found the bodies a week later. Two women and a man, twisted and convoluted in their posture as if they had been writhing in some mime's mad act at the moment of death.

Not a mark upon any of them.

A neighbour had gone into the house; he couldn't remember why. He wouldn't speak about them, but only shuddered and made signs of faith to ward off evil.

He hadn't been a religious man until he found them.

Their eyes were wide and staring, their hair was bleached white. Their mouths were contorted, distorted; widened impossibly, as if all the air in their lungs had been suddenly pushed forth in a scream so terrible that their jaws had dislocated simply to force it forth. But none of the neighbours recalled hearing a sound that night.

In fact, none of the neighbours could remember anyone living in that house in their lifetimes. Even the eldest shook their heads. There were no records of their purchase; the house had been found empty even of physical belongings, as if everything these people had been had simply up and vanished.

None left the village mortuary unshaken. But none could identify the bodies. They were noted, written off, and buried with little ceremony. Ghosts before their deaths. The few villagers that stuck around to see the coffins lowered murmured and cast furtive glances between each other. They made excuses, and filtered off; to home, to work, to drown that uneasy sensation in a mug of warm brew. They had their reason.

It had been a cold night.

They will always be.