In the Dark Page 2

win. You must not win.

  I must retreat to memory.

  Elena…Anna Marie…lollipops…laughter. This moment is so joyful that it feels like liquid sunshine in my soul. This was, of course, before you caged my soul.

  The memory…the memory…there was joy. Then, suddenly, there was fear.

  Oh dear Lord. I was so afraid for them in that moment. It all changed so quickly. One moment was laughter and lollipops and the next was screeching and screaming. I looked away from Anna Marie in the mirror. I wish I hadn’t. I wish that my last memory of sight in this life had been my daughter’s face.

  Instead of my daughter’s face, my last vision was a large rusty red truck travelling the wrong way on the highway and plowing into the front of our car. The noise of screeching tires, and my Elena’s screams died away in a roar of crumpling metal and tinkling glass. The vision of the truck disappeared in a sudden flash of light. Then I stood upon the Threshold of Heaven.

  I felt no pain. I suffered no sadness. I felt only joy there on God’s doorstep. I could see the entrance to eternity, I could feel the love radiating from within and I could hear the angelic chorus as it flowed from inside. I felt eternity calling me, and I was ready to answer the call. But then you came in to torment me.

  I stood on the threshold and felt the jolt as you passed current through my corpse. It hurt and I cried out. The Doorstep of Heaven grew cloudy in my sight. Another jolt. My vision grew hazier still. The pain was excruciating.

  One more jolt and the sight of the Threshold disappeared completely, replaced by the darkness of my closed eyelids. The song of worshipping angels was replaced by your cold voice.

  I heard you declare me dead. You were wrong! I was no longer dead. I was only half dead. You called my awareness back to my body but failed to bring back my life force. I was alive for all intents and purposes, but my body remained dead.

  I could hear, I could see, I could think, and most of all, Doctor, I could feel.

  I heard you declare that I was an organ donor. I heard you state that the rest of my body was to be donated to science. I tried to scream at you, but you could not hear. You pulled me from Heaven and sent me to the knife.

  My last vision in life was a truck. My last vision in half death was a scalpel cutting my eyes out of their sockets, Doctor. I could SEE, I could FEEL. I wish you could know the horror of feeling your eyes being cut out of your skull, for this is what you condemned me to.

  There was pain unlike any I’ve ever known and the sight of red blood glistening on silver steel. There was one final glint of light off the metal and then there was eternal blackness.

  You brought back awareness, but left my body dead. My body cannot heal, and therefore the pain never subsides. The pain I felt as they cut out my eyes is as fresh now as it was then. And yet I have avoided madness. I am stronger than you. You would have gone mad.

  If only they had stopped with my eyes it would have been easier to bear without hatred, but they didn’t. I was an organ donor. I could not vocalize my screams of pain and terror as I felt them cutting through my sternum with a saw. I could not pull away as they cut my heart from my chest. I felt every move of the scalpel as it severed my pulmonary veins and sliced through my pulmonary artery. The steel felt cold as it carved my superior and inferior vena cava, Doctor.

  Imagine for a moment, you sadistic Bastard what it would feel like to have your heart cut out from your body. You have condemned me to feel this pain for eternity, never to heal, never to escape it.

  But they were not done yet, Doctor…no, no…they had much more torture in store for me. They carved me up like a thanksgiving turkey and I listened to their menial conversations as they did it. The carvers were insipid conversationalists as they worked me over. I am not certain if the pain or the conversation was more torturous.

  They took my liver, my lungs, and my kidneys, all with my full awareness. Every new slice into my flesh was a new slice of Hell for me. You took me from the Threshold and gave me awareness, you Bastard.

  My torture did not end there. They took what they wanted from me and sent me off “for science.” In the lab they finished the grisly work that the surgeons started. They drilled out my ear canals, they cut out my brain, they removed my tongue, they cut off my feet and they took my hands, one finger at a time.

  I felt all of this. I still feel it as though it were yesterday. But it was not yesterday, now was it, Doctor? No. It was years ago. I have had years to endure this torture and one more. I am perhaps the only miserable wretch in the history of humanity to know what it feels like to decompose.

  I know the pain of putrefaction. I know intimately the sensation of liquefying flesh and tissue. I know how it feels to have maggots squirming through your intestines as they eat you from the inside out. And I’m intimate with the smell, Doctor. The Bastards did not take my nose.

  And the pain never stops…

  But I must stay away from madness. I must not succumb. I will lay here until the dust of my bones is called back to the Threshold. Even in my misery I have hope. Gabriel will blow his horn calling forth the living and the dead—and me from somewhere between the two.

  I will stand before God and I will bring my case before Him. And in that day I will be reunited with my Elena and my Anna Marie and I will see you cast into the darkest depths of Hell, Doctor.

  I will win.

  I will not succumb to the madness.

  Is it dark in here? I can’t tell. I can’t see.

  The End

  Thank you for taking the time to read In the Dark. This story was a real pleasure for me to write because it was a request. I was contacted on Twitter and asked if I had any previously unpublished short horror stories, to which I replied “No, but I bet I can scare something up.”

  I sat down later that same evening and whipped out this story. I wrote it over the course of a couple hours and there was very limited editing done to it after the first draft. I was shooting for an Edgar Allen Poe sort of a feel and I truly think I succeeded.

  The story was subsequently submitted to The Scareald Magazine and was published in their first issue, in July 2012. If you enjoy horror and the paranormal, I recommend you check them out at www.scareald.com

  I have one request of you, Dear Reader; if you enjoyed this story, I’d love to get some feedback from you. You can reach me at:

  On Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/Corkster32

  On my Website: https://www.coryhiles.com/

  Email: cory@coryhiles.com

  Or, alternately (and maybe even preferably) you can go back to wherever you downloaded this story and leave a review.

  Thank you once again for reading!

  Sincerely,

  Cory Hiles