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Lewis Rebhan – Story [Part Two]

The day is a dirty grey silhouette.

The fickle, stippled light is fading, hanging shadows down all around me like a condemned man. I stand at the upstairs window, staring past the cracks and dirty handprints. A ragged grey curtain obscures me slightly from view, makes me the apparition I feel that everyday I am to become. The damp in this room is encroaching. The walls are moving. Shifting. The heart of this tortured carcass, still beating. It runs through my feet, up my spine and I feel it, am woven into it. Will become it. And time passes me by, hides in the corners to avoid me, waits at some safe distance behind me. And I have felt like this before. Before all this. Before god had turned his back on us and left us to fend for ourselves in a world which we could no longer understand or contemplate. Before we all began walking away from something and towards something else. And so the world had moved on. And in those days I had turned to god though he had abandoned me. Had spoke to god but he did not remember my name. And so, lost and alone, like everyone else, I found the safety of the shadows and walked on.

But now, all these years on, when the house of god is empty and ruined, I have found something else, and all of a sudden I feel my heart beating again.

I lean forward and rest my forehead on the cool glass of the window. I feel the grime between the glass and my skin. As I begin to slide my head down the window, sinking into the beating of my surroundings, my eyes catch something in the distance, and my heart squeezes my lungs so violently I see beautiful black butterflies materialise before my eyes.

They told me he would come this way.

They told me that the worst part was the waiting.

I watch him move forward, one step ahead of the night. I watch as he stumbles in the long grass. For a moment I fear he has been lapped up by the sly rusty teeth buried beneath the earth and I feel a hot flush of blood slide up the back of my throat to coat my tongue and teeth. But he is up again and moving before I can swallow the panic and he is low to the ground and stalking. He glances up straight at me but the nearly brown windows disguise me well enough. He is cautious and slow. Annoyingly delicate in every movement, every gesture, but he steadily begins to draw closer. I sense his fear all over him, contorting his face in the wind. His hair and his clothes flutter out behind him. He reminds me suddenly of sketch, rough lines blurred and distorted. He bends forward against the wind, low to the ground like he is grovelling. As he draws closer I see his face is almost black with dirt, his teeth black with decay, his eyes black with fear. He is the very picture of what the world has become since god had turned his back on us.

I move slowly from the window and pull my cloak about me, shadowing myself from all but the most prying eyes. I look down at my crotch and utter a prayer to god. I have not been this excited for a long time.

I leave the black lung room and turn into the corridor. My shit litters the floor, silhouetted from the thick dust by the dying light from the landing window. The floorboards moan beneath me. I move quickly but carefully as I descend the stairs into the hallway below. To my left is the thick heavy wooden door into the main room of the house. I pull the handle sharply to check it is firmly shut, then scurry to the other end of the corridor to the broken window where I entered this sorry building. I stop in my tracks. The wind is a low howl about the house, scratching the walls with bloody fingers. I breathe deep at the fresh air which sails in through the broken window. My mind rushes. In my head I pour over everything they told me, every detailed instruction they granted me. All is as it should be. The people where here like they said they would be, hiding, shivering and starving to death, crammed under the rusted iron bedstead in the room with the window. They were naked, emaciated, like pictures of the war prisoners we had seen in books as children, when we could understand the words on the pages before us. At first, when I had crept into the room where they were hiding, they did not see or hear me, such was their state of distress, and I bled into the shadows of the room quietly to watch them. They would shiver and moan, and occasionally one would wail out loud briefly before turning back to there former snivelling ways. I watched them all night, fascinated. I could not understand how they had survived like this for so long. There were six of them; all huddled together like a mound of pulsating bones under the bed. They breathed as one, there shattered lungs rising in harmony, up and down, up and down, laboured and painful. Soon the morning began to crawl back in and slowly their eyes began to open. I stood still, barely breathing, and at first they did not see me. Then, from nowhere, a foul, high-pitched scream filled the room and the house was filled with scraping and clawing as they tried in vain to drag their bodies out from under the bed, scratching and cutting each other in their own desperate attempts for freedom. A smile sliced my face in half and I moved towards the door, blocking there only way out. I felt like a god as I towered over them, my looming shadow hemming them in from all sides. I noticed that there were two children and my heart bloomed like a fire inside my chest, for I had not seen any children since I had began my long walk through the wastes of humanity. But these children were ruined. There tongues were missing and there bodies were slack and purple with wheals and bruising. One by one I took these ghosts down stairs and held them close to my body, slowly, quietly, sending them back to sleep. The work was quiet and soothing, and soon all six lay on the floor of the lounge room in silence. I stood over them again in awe. How far would a person go to survive in a world riddled with misery? They had chewed off there own tongues, and cut off there own toes and genitals. I can only imagine that they had eaten them, although it would seem now it had all been for little reward. But they were to serve a greater purpose in death, and so I set about preparing their bodies for what was to come.

A creaking outside brings me back from my daydream. He is outside, walking across the rotten porch. He is unsure, afraid, I can feel it. I move down the corridor, around the corner, into another, smaller room. This room to is filled with decay and faded memories. I sit in the centre of the room, cross legged on the dirty wooden floor. Now, once again, the waiting begins. I hear the porch floor creak again, followed by a moment of silence, and then the heavy click and drawn out creak as the door to the house slowly opens. My heart thuds like a galloping horse in my head. I feel a sudden burst of warmth around my thighs, and realise with a smile, that once again the anticipation has got the better of me. They said it would happen this way. At first I was reluctant to believe them, but so far everything of which they have told me has been true. I grin menacingly under my heavy black hood as I feel his panic radiate through the walls all around me.

Lewis's work can be downloaded here as viewable .pdf files

Story [Part Two].pdf
Story [Part One].pdf
Three Short Stories.pdf
Two Short Poems.pdf