Long time lurker, first time poster. Anyway, this is just a story, sort of, that I've been working on for a couple of days. It doesn't have a narrative as such, but I can't think of what else to call it.
So:
He hated everything natural. The trees stood, menacing, waiting to envelop him; the sun burnt his skin and pierced his eyes; even the clouds only sought to drown him in their dank excesses.
The artificial world was comforting though. The day could be hot or wet or dry or cold or dark or fog, but he could always take solace in the sunless recesses of his house. The basement was his favourite place of all, because it seemed so far from the world, a world which hated him just as much as he loathed it.
When he’d first journeyed downstairs after moving into the house – a lucky inheritance from an uncle he rarely saw, but for some reason had gained the impression that their was some sort of shared connection – he’d noticed a small window in the far corner, where slivers of yellow afternoon light snuck through the cracked panes to illuminate the dust-ridden junk that had been left there to decompose. He boarded it up: the gloom was better.
In the basement he had everything that he needed. A fridge, filled to bursting with generic brand supermarket cordial – lime flavour, and only lime flavour. The fridge’s inner light was broken, and if you peered inside from a distance it looked frighteningly like a miniaturised gathering of army soldiers. Luckily there weren’t too many visitors, so the observation went unmade. The basement also provided shelter for his notepads – of which there were many – too. Efficiently tattered, they gave the impression of perhaps being home to some mad work of genius. But they were not. Amongst the random quotations that he felt worthy at whatever time, drawings of horrible, imagined terrors were scattered. Sometimes the drawings seemed to correlate with whatever had been hastily scribbled alongside, but it was healthier for all not to make the connection.
He imagined himself, in moments of frighteningly active periods, where he drifted absently into his subconscious only to emerge with extraordinary bouts of inspiration, as a sort-of vampire. The word itself had never actually occurred to him – one suspects some semblance of humanity in that very subconscious had censored the word, worried that it might awaken something, and frighten him into some real or imagined murderous frenzy – but he revelled in the sense of mystique that he had convinced himself surrounded his living quarters and disposition. Somehow though, something was left inside of him from when he’d still – at least to the looks of outsiders – been a part of the normal human race, and it kept him from considering these things too much.
In a chest of drawers that he kept lodged behind one of his many hard-to-move bookshelves, he stored a collection of clippings from old newspapers over the years. If you’d captured him in one of his more lucid moments and asked him about these, he’d probably have denied any knowledge of their existence. And he’d probably be telling the truth, too. The clippings were only read, or added to, in the deep moments of despair which came on suddenly, and left just as quickly – his vampire moments. The clippings contained gruesome details of the kind of disturbing crimes that most people avoid reading about, and only seem to occur (or be reported) once in a blue moon, thankfully enough. The kind of crimes that are only committed by the types of people that cause nightmares. The once in-a-generation, button-down psychopathic types. The kind of crimes that cause gasps of horror when read in the company of others and exclamations like ‘have you ever heard of something so disgusting?’
Unlike their antagonistic affect on others, though, these stories intrigued him. Yet still they sat benign, filed away in some barely active, volcanic, dark corner of his brain, waiting lustfully to be awakened one day. He just wasn’t strong enough to deal with it yet.
So:
He hated everything natural. The trees stood, menacing, waiting to envelop him; the sun burnt his skin and pierced his eyes; even the clouds only sought to drown him in their dank excesses.
The artificial world was comforting though. The day could be hot or wet or dry or cold or dark or fog, but he could always take solace in the sunless recesses of his house. The basement was his favourite place of all, because it seemed so far from the world, a world which hated him just as much as he loathed it.
When he’d first journeyed downstairs after moving into the house – a lucky inheritance from an uncle he rarely saw, but for some reason had gained the impression that their was some sort of shared connection – he’d noticed a small window in the far corner, where slivers of yellow afternoon light snuck through the cracked panes to illuminate the dust-ridden junk that had been left there to decompose. He boarded it up: the gloom was better.
In the basement he had everything that he needed. A fridge, filled to bursting with generic brand supermarket cordial – lime flavour, and only lime flavour. The fridge’s inner light was broken, and if you peered inside from a distance it looked frighteningly like a miniaturised gathering of army soldiers. Luckily there weren’t too many visitors, so the observation went unmade. The basement also provided shelter for his notepads – of which there were many – too. Efficiently tattered, they gave the impression of perhaps being home to some mad work of genius. But they were not. Amongst the random quotations that he felt worthy at whatever time, drawings of horrible, imagined terrors were scattered. Sometimes the drawings seemed to correlate with whatever had been hastily scribbled alongside, but it was healthier for all not to make the connection.
He imagined himself, in moments of frighteningly active periods, where he drifted absently into his subconscious only to emerge with extraordinary bouts of inspiration, as a sort-of vampire. The word itself had never actually occurred to him – one suspects some semblance of humanity in that very subconscious had censored the word, worried that it might awaken something, and frighten him into some real or imagined murderous frenzy – but he revelled in the sense of mystique that he had convinced himself surrounded his living quarters and disposition. Somehow though, something was left inside of him from when he’d still – at least to the looks of outsiders – been a part of the normal human race, and it kept him from considering these things too much.
In a chest of drawers that he kept lodged behind one of his many hard-to-move bookshelves, he stored a collection of clippings from old newspapers over the years. If you’d captured him in one of his more lucid moments and asked him about these, he’d probably have denied any knowledge of their existence. And he’d probably be telling the truth, too. The clippings were only read, or added to, in the deep moments of despair which came on suddenly, and left just as quickly – his vampire moments. The clippings contained gruesome details of the kind of disturbing crimes that most people avoid reading about, and only seem to occur (or be reported) once in a blue moon, thankfully enough. The kind of crimes that are only committed by the types of people that cause nightmares. The once in-a-generation, button-down psychopathic types. The kind of crimes that cause gasps of horror when read in the company of others and exclamations like ‘have you ever heard of something so disgusting?’
Unlike their antagonistic affect on others, though, these stories intrigued him. Yet still they sat benign, filed away in some barely active, volcanic, dark corner of his brain, waiting lustfully to be awakened one day. He just wasn’t strong enough to deal with it yet.
