writing_shadows

It was the final insult. In life, they had mocked him. They had thrown litter outside his little shop, burned out the bin on the corner, spat at him in the street. They had gone past on their skateboards with their ghetto blasters and fancy music, wearing gold chains and large, oversized clocks, trousers hanging out ridiculously. They had taunted him, faces smothered in slap, hair jutting out at odd angles thanks to a toxic cloud of CFCs, dressed immodestly in short skirts and low-cut tops.

And now that he was dead, his body left to lie in eternal slumber, they continued to torment him. He stared at the defiled gravestone, the girl and boy writhing on top of it in an orgy of lusty hormones fueled by drugs and alcohol. They were 'making out' on the sods of earth that marked his final resting place. They would pay.

Woolston had been such a nice place once, he mused, his mind clouded by sepia-toned visions of bygone days, his thoughts a flimsy cellophane copy of the cognisance he'd held in life. But recently the whole area had begun to crumble to the ruinous rule of the teenage hoodlum. The streets had filled with petty violence and meaningless, random crime. Kids had stopped going to school, instead fixated on the latest Atari or Spectrum games. Drug dealers had taken root, polluting the veins and arteries of the area with their dirty white powder. Saturday morning's sunlight revealed Friday night's scars, the pavement covered with discarded junk food, empty beer cans and the stains of binge-drink vomit.

All of which could have been forgiven and forgotten, if it were not for the atrocity before him.

He returned his focus to the two teens, sharing themselves on top of his earth, heads nestled against his headstone. The boy muttered something and rolled off, retrieving some kind of mobile phone from his pocket and walking off into the night. The intruders were separated, vulnerable. He struck.

---

The boy first. He drew himself into his consciousness, penetrating deep into his thoughts, shoving them aside and implanting his own images insidiously into his target's perception.

To the boy, the phone suddenly stopped working. He looked at it in confusion, hitting a few buttons, wondering why his conversation had been cut off. He raised the phone up to his ear again.

“Hello? You there?” The voice on the other end was not his friend's. It was hollow, wheezing, a voice filled with lingering, rattling death.
“Nobody is here.”
“Gav? That you? Hello?” The voice returned, cold, simple, matter-of-fact.
“I am coming now.”
“What you say? Hello? Who the f...”
“You,” the voice rasped, “are going to die.”

The phone cut off. The boy looked at it for a moment, astonished. Then he saw his hands. Saw the skin begin to blister and peel. Saw as some invisible death burned through his hands, incinerating flesh in a silent, progression of corrosion, eating through his fingers as easily as concentrated acid. He looked in horror as his hands dissolved into bloody stumps, words failing to emerge from his lips. He tried to yell, but his throat burned with mystic, arcane fires. There was nothing else to do but run.

---

The girl smiled, rubbing her hands over the warm presence on her shoulder. She closed her eyes tight, murmuring sweet, sentimental love notes, rubbing her hand and neck against what she thought to be the arm of her lover. Then she realised it was coated in a thick, viscous slime.

Her eyes shot open and she twisted away instinctively, watching as the large eel slithered over her shoulder, its scaly body gliding over the fibres of her jacket, dead eyes staring up at her. She tried to scream, but the smell of rotting carcasses and dead fish overpowered her, the stench curling in her nostrils. Mind overcome by waves of nausea, she began to choke.

Then it hit her, her body turning ice cold as she realised it wasn't the overwhelming, putrescent foulness that had caused her to gag. Something was in her mouth, wiggling, tickling and torturing, coursing its way out from within, twisting up like tentacles emerging from the deep. Eyes wide with horror, she watched as tens, hundreds, thousands of thin baby eels forced their way out of her mouth, a seemingly endless tidal wave of slithering bootlaces cascading out in one mass of writhing horror, bursting free from her throat through her mouth and nostrils. She tried to scream, but the endless river of oozing creatures wouldn't let her. There was nothing else to do but run.

---

The ghost watched as the two trespassers ran, both in opposite directions, desperate to escape from his clutches. By the time they realised that it had all been in their mind, that it had been a game of supernatural trick and illusion, the lesson would have been learned.

Those meddling kids, with their Vanilla Ices and Sega Megadrives, would not be defiling his gravestone any time soon.