My basement had a lingering scent of oil, it accompanied me every time I slept. But not this time.
It was cut off suddenly, by the cold atmosphere of a stone dungeon.
I was standing on cobblestone, the chill shot through the soles of my bare feet, up my spine, vanishing as it reached my brain.
The dungeon was eerily modern. Smooth stone walls, slick with a condensation of a liquid that couldn't be called water.
There was no smell in the air, a complete absence of life.
And in the center, under a single, sourceless pale light, was the man.
He was pinned, crucified but on the air, suspended in the middle of the room. Thick, black chains, the same oily gloss the walls had.
Each was speared through the meat of his limbs.
Through his shoulders, thighs, and calves.
They held him in place, down to the bone, like a bug in a collection.
He was bare naked, his skin covered in scars and fresh lines where the chains bit.
His head hung forward, a curtain of matted, dark hair hiding his face.
Everything about his appearance screamed despair.
The slump of his shoulders, the trembling in his strained muscles.
Torture would be tame. What I was witnessing was the eradication, the meticulous unpicking of a human soul.
I couldn't feel my body, like an astral projection. But I could feel him.
His body emanated a thick pressure, pushing at the edges of my mind.
The air around me wasn't scentless, it was simply the smell of grief.
My feet moved without me telling them to.
The cold stone seemed to pull me forward against my will, one step, then another, into that cone of light.
As I stepped closer towards him the pressure grew. It invaded my body, giving my mouth a sour metallic taste, my breath hitched, trying to find clean air that simply didn't exist here.
I could see the individual links of the chains, their dark paint absorbed the light. I could see the way his skin strained around the metal.
A thought, clear and cold in my own voice, cut through the static of his aura.
I have to do something. I have to get him down.
One step.
I was within arm's reach. The negative energy was a hum. I could see the dust motes, frozen in the light around his form.
My hand, scale-dusted, lifted. It felt heavy, like moving through thick molasses. My fingertips were an inch from the skin of his shoulder.
He moved.
His head snapped up.
The matted hair fell away.
And he looked at me.
There were no eyes. Not as I knew them.
Where they should've been were two pits of swirling gray and white.
They didn't focus, they were clouds of an inner chaos, escaping into the world.
He wasn't looking at my face, he was staring right into my soul.
In that gaze was the essence of the room.
The silence, the cold, the chains, the solitude.
- - - - - - - - - -
I woke up.
It was a rupture.
One moment, the dungeon. The next, the familiar, low ceiling of my basement, bathed in the orange glow of my heating lamp.
My body hit the thin mattress with a jolt, as if I'd fallen onto it from a height.
A sound tore out from me, a ragged gasp that scraped my throat raw.
My lungs burned, begging for air.
Hot. Hot. Hot.
My whole body burned. Something, a fire within me had suddenly awoken. And it was tearing me. Every nerve screamed as if I was standing right below the scorching summer heat.
I stared straight up, unblinking. The afterimage of those eyes, no, whatever they were, they couldn't be refered to as such, was seared onto the darkness of the ceiling.
My heart was rapidly beating, trashing against my ribs, as if trying to smash its way out like an encaged zoo animal.
Slowly, sensation trickled back.
The creak of the bed. The faint, ever-prescent smell of oil.
The soft, mechanical hum of the lamp.
Normal things.
The pressure was suddenly gone, but in its place was new presence. It wasn't in my head, but out there. It was the weight of the air of my own bedroom.
I lay perfectly still.
The house above me was silent.
Yet, I couldn't help but feel as if the wood was pulsing with what stood behind it.
...
It took me a moment to stand up. The stone floor of the basement resembled the one of the dream dungeon, but the atmosphere made a difference.
A more calm feeling surrounded me, the air was cold, but at least not stale.
I rummaged below the frame of my bed to find my boots, usually I wouldn't bother to wear anything on my feet. But the flooring from the upper floors had splinters, and I wouldn't risk it.
Their worn leather was a familiar shape. I shoved my feet in, not bothering with the laces, just tucking them on the sides.
The door to the main house was above me.
I placed a hand on the cold wood and turned the knob. The hinge gave its usual low creak.
And I ascended from my basement full of tools into my home. Or rather, my family's
The living area was dark shadows I couldn't quite make out. The only light spilled from the open door of the geothermal heather, a faint, pulsing orange glow that only highlighted how dark everything was.
There was a table at the center and mismatched chairs.
My father's scriber was left on the counter.
Next to it was a drawing my younger sister had made.
It was a fantastical bird with too many wings, her pencil laid beside it.
I should go to their room, just to check on them. I thought. The presence of other people always calmed me down, especially the one of my siblings.
Their younger age gave them a bright light, as if warm emanated from their soul.
I turned towards the bedroom my siblings shared. My boots made a soft, gritty sound on the wooden floor. I pushed the curtain aside.
Jiran's side was a rumpled nest of blankets. The little holoscreen on his crate that would usually tell the time without stop was dark.
His toys were scattered across his makeshift desk, exactly as he'd left some hours ago when I tucked him in. But he wasn't laying on his bed.
He wasn't on the floor.
Or anywhere I could see.
Misha's side was worse.
Her blanket was neatly folded at the foot of her bed. Her stuffed lizard was propped against the pillow.
The bed was empty.
Air left my lungs in a slow leak.
No.
I was moving before the thought finished, a stumble back into the main room, toward my parents' door at the far end. My boots slipped for a moment, I couldn't process what I had slipped on in the heat of the moment. My heartbeat was deafening.
Their door was slightly ajar. I shoved it open.
The bed was a chaos of displaced covers. An antithesis of their clean, organized routine. It looked as if two people had bolted upright and out of it in a hurry.
My mother's shawl was draped over the footboard.
My father's reading glasses sat on the nightstand.
The room was empty.
A terrible, hollow ringing filled my head.
I backed out, my breaths coming in short, sharp gasps now.
Outside. They must have gone outside.
But at night?
The logic was brittle. Going outside at night was a death wish to most.
Unless.
Maybe a monster somehow got in the house.
They'd have run.
They'd be hiding in the fishmen sheds by the shore.
I needed light.
I lurched to the shelf and grabbed the storm-lamp, my fingers fumbling with the ignition switch.
A spark, a clean, white propane flame bloomed behind the glass.
I lifted it, and that's when I saw the floor.
Wet.
A vast, glistening blackness.
Streaked and smeared.
Radiating from the center of the room towards the main entrance.
It pooled in the low spots.
It shimmered under my lamp's beam.
It was on the legs of the table.
It was sprayed in abstract arcs across the base of the wall.
Blood.
So much blood.
My boot was planted in the middle of a wide, dark pool.
I hadn't felt it. I'd been walking through it. That slip.
It replayed in my mind.
I gagged and placed my free hand to cover my mouth as my eyes widened and I looked up trying not to think about it.
The lamp trembled in my hand, making the shadow of the blood leap and dance.
The coppery, iron scent finally broke through my nose.
My family was gone.
The floor told the story of why.
In violence.
The lamp's light traced the darkest of the smears. They led across the room, under the heavy wooden front door.
I pat at the sides of my thighs, checking if I was carrying a weapon.
Without a sound, I followed the smears.
I turned the lock and pulled the door open, stepping out into the star-scattered, freezing desert night.
My lamp was held high against the immense, bleeding dark.
The cold desert air hit me like a slap.
It was a clean, dry cold, scoured of the mineral tang of salt, coming from the beach.
The lamp's light was weak, swallowed by the enormity of the night. It barely illuminated the ground at my feet. But it was enough.
I walked along the smears that didn't seem to stop.
They painted a path across the earth of the year, a brushstroke of darkness leading away from my house.
My boots crunched the sand and pebble below as I walked.
The path led down the gentle, rocky slope toward the coast. The vast, black plate of the ocean opening up before me, stretching to a horizon that devoured the stars.
Above me was the starry night sky, almost looking like a solid.
A slivr of a moon, pale and a bright white, casted a thin sheen on the water.
The waves hissed against the shore in a steady rhythm, echoing across the entire coastal area.
Salt was all my nose should be registering here, but it didn't wash out the iron scent from my nose.
The trail led right to the water's edge.
A last, broad smear of darkness vanished into the wet, compacted sand where the latest wave had just receded.
My lamp beam followed it, illuminating a few feet of churning water before being swallowed by the black.
I stared.
The sea held nothing for me. It was just, immense, cold, in perpetual movement.
It had taken the trail and my entire world into its dark stomach.
The stars watched from above.
The lamp grew heavy in my hand.
The weight of my desert eagle at my hip, my namesake, the thing I was "of," was almost the only real thing left in the universe for me.
My thoughts didn't race.
They stood in place, like stones at the bottom of the ocean, unbothered.
An empty house.
An empty sea.
An empty man.
My hand opened. The lamp thudded to the sand, its flame guttering but not dying.
The desert eagle was in my hand. The worn grip felt familiar. The metal was cold.
I hadn't raised it. It almost stood up on its own, my arm nothing but a piston.
The taste of salt was now on my tongue. All I could hear were the waves.
I angled the muzzle up.
Right on the roof of my mouth.
The cool ring of steel pressing into the hard tissue.
I looked past the gun, up at the moon.
My finger found the trigger.
I pulled.