terminalstation

Lewis Rebhan – Story One

I am a cripple’s fictitious backbone, all soft light and dull. A mooring for ghost ship limbs, a sea of wrath and envy. A tide turned towards those who did not survive this. And these bloody tears are beacons, iridescent light, like some hollow whisper of solitude burning brightly. And these blackened streets are veiled in darkness, a red, grey precipice like blood when the sun sets…..

And I wake to this.

Everyday I wake to this, searching every back road for a heart beat. But this world is barely breathing, a husk upon which land masses collided, but now these blistered feet are the only beat reverberating through these pavements. I fill these empty grey spaces. A fading vibration in a moment in time. Some poignant moment in history. A relic. A stand-alone monument crumbling slowly before its very own eyes.

And I see crows migrating east, fleeing the very air, which envelops them, flapping wings incessantly, berating the poison skies with endless piercing screeches. And although they are the last to leave, they were the first and most obvious of signs.

And…

The black ashen hand of the wind strikes my face and I waver. Silted drifts cover my cheeks and feet in powdered bone. I am still for a moment, then stable, whilst the landscape around me groans and rumbles. I sense movement in the overgrown verges beside me. Rats with sharp eyes and hammering pulses. But they are no concern of mine, and so I move on. My road is paved with uncertainty and goes onwards. I place one foot in front of the other and give this dying old road a reason for being.

Some days I come upon houses. Old battered wives of a long dead world. Black eyes on the face of something. They loom upon the road, hulking, creaking, and ageing shadows with eyes. I cough black phlegm onto my hand, spit on the floor and lick my teeth and lips. I listen to the wind but there are no people here. There is sorrow, laden, these days, in all of the winds chilling voices.

I walk, low to the ground and cautious, grit in my face and bellowing as my rags flap and flail. At every house I approach with this pensive caution, the tips of my fingers buzzing, eyes fixed, teeth clenched and waiting. But once again, nothing. No talking, no touching, no light. I close in on the faded boards of this shelter, fingers grazing the long dead winter grass. I step carefully for traps, for I have seen them, old rusted jaws in the turf. On the walls of the house there is writing. Red splatters of panic in the grey fog of night. Messages for relatives long dead. Warnings to those who never came. A reminder of life on the skin of a corpse. I am the first to read these in a long time. The first to see the panic and the fear. The first to hear the dread in long dead voices. I feel the house stand over me, another rock under which to spend the night. My breath hits the dirty window as I look inside. I see bodies under blankets, decomposed and shrouded, buried in dust and memories and time. And I watch and wait for something, for time to wind down further. As with every house, I feel a pulse radiate, a resonance of other times. I trudge across the splintering porch to the door and wait. I notice my footprints in the dust behind me. If someone comes behind me they will recognise the signs. I lower my head and listen, faint sounds as the building stirs restlessly. I am certain that I am alone. I feel no eyes watching, no presence, waiting to break this endless, weary silence. The paint on the walls is flaking, slowly giving in to countless rains and winds and beatings. I brush my finger tips over the flakes, sharp on my skin and draw blood from a splinter. The blood trickles over my callous finger like water over desert sands. It cuts a path through the dirty years of dust and shit that have grown slowly upon me, hesitates at the webbing of my hand and drops onto one of my feet. I see there is still colour in this world, still life, and I am still justifiable to myself and everything around me. I would stop this very night if I did not believe this to be true.

And how the silence and the starless nights are clamouring, a leash of rust and nails around my neck and skin. Gods own iron maiden, a torture devise I wear regardless. I cannot shake this off, this cloying, like a shimmering army of blackened hands, slipping over my eyes and throat and mouth to hold me. The house seems to move with the wind, emitting endless stuttering groans, its grey wasted face observing. This house is part of the illness, a symptom of the infection, and for this house, this body, there will be no cure. I wipe my bloody finger on my shirt and enter.

My arrival disturbs the nothingness that has been waiting here for me, a reception laid out for the dead. I do not fear this dwindling of time because I fear it will be endless. The room I enter is brown and coated, years of just being having deadened any colour it may once have held. There are pictures on the walls, faded. A great chair in the corner. Tables and lampshades, shelves and bones. This was a home. A safe place to come once the nights had unfolded. I step into the room slowly, eyes twitching back and forth, breathing slow and laboured. I feel my canvas lungs rising. My heart is screaming in my chest and I am afraid. Sweat lies upon my face and forehead, matting my dusty hair. I move around the room, slowly taking in the layout of this man made tomb. Thunder rumbles in the distance, raking the cloudy skies above me. I lean with my back against a wall and exhale, a long snaking breath of panic. My white knuckle hands are shaking, fear of not knowing, crawling up my legs and gripping my useless testicles and stomach. It sits in me. Sits in me and sees shapes in darkened corners and shadows lurking at windows but there is no other here but me. I look across the room at the bodies hidden away under heavy covers but know that I must not go near them. This could be a trap. I have seem them, people murdered by their own curiosity. The fading light outside highlights the dead features of the bodies lying by me. Some, surely, look to be children, put to sleep when the plagues came, waiting here even now for the sun to rise so that they may wake.

And the pictures in the room are soiled. Unrecognisable with decay and age. A room full of black canvas skin laid out in frame. There are stories in this room, I am sure of it, but at this moment in time these walls are not talking. I sit on the floor in the corner and watch the night creeping in, prowling across the room for victims. There is a door to my side but I dare not go through it, not whilst the light outside is draining. At nights, I have found, it is better to sit in one place and be silent. I cannot let this fear take hold of me now. I huddle back into the shadows and wait; sleep will come over me eventually. I listen to the wind and light tapping of rain, syncopated beating on the wooden roof of this place. The darkness will come and I will be hidden away, safe, if there is still a god in this world.

I hear animals scurrying about me, flitting between each creek and whine of their habitat. I cannot stomach these pests. Rats are the worst. Beady red eyes that do not waver. Fearless minions of the dark, bastions of this plague riddled world. I pull my legs up to my pitted chin and chest, shiver and close my red rimmed eyes. The sounds outside begin to meld into one, a rhythmic pulsing lullaby, and the voice of a new world. A world in which few men now survive, a world where fear dominates the days and nights, where death is most prevalent, where life is an unwritten page on a book that will never exist, where the times in which we live will soon be forgotten, wiped out by something that no one saw coming. Death is draped over our lands. Some heathen disease that we, as a species, had neglected and ignored for generations, until it crept back up on us in the night and wiped us out in heartbeat. But I survived and cannot be the only one. Cannot be walking these blistered roads alone. I have seen the signs, but what age they are, I do not know. These thoughts spin in my head as I fall towards some kind of sleep, some kind of respite from this sprawling land mass of misery. But this sleep will be uneasy, always in the back of my mind, petrified, that when I finally wake, it will be in this reality instead of the life I know I used to live. In this darkness something is coming, I can feel it.

Awake.

And the night rushes in all around me, from every angle darkness forces itself around my face and eyes and neck. I am lost for a moment, floating in this shivering void. I open my eyes and take in my lungs to breathe. My lungs stop half raised and my heart freezes in my chest. I feel icy hands pouring themselves over me, touching me with slick icy fingers. I push myself frantically backwards, trying to force myself further into the darkness. My legs and feet beat and scrape the floor as I scramble. A sound crawls over my lips into the night, escaping. I breathe out a stuttering whimper, eyes searching the blackness for something. There are no sounds, no movement. Everything it was when I came here. I breathe again, slowly, more controlled this time. I drop my head into my hands as my eyes adjust to the light. The front door is ajar, slightly cracked, inviting in the dull freezing grey of outside. It moves, croaking in the wind, a slow light tapping against its shaking frame. This is what woke me, but not what has dragged this heavy sheet of panic over my face. Many times I have woken to open doors and windows, victims of the spindle thin fingers of the wind. It is not this intrusion of the night I am afraid of. I glance to my side. The door that was closed now open. Wide open, spewing everything that was once behind it into this room and my life. I dare not move, not now. If I am lucky, whoever came through here has not seen me, was never aware of my existence. I have to wait. I have to wait for daylight. I have to wait for the panic and the fear to subside. This black handed terror is all over me, over my skin, crawling like ants over the carcass of some long dead dog. I place my hands on the floor just to feel it there. It holds me in reality, brings me back to this place and time. I will wait it out, eyes open in the dark, just waiting.

But this moment is tingling all over me, a voice, distance and cold inside of me, luring me to my bare skinned feet, controlling me. But I will not move. Fear larks about my ribs and chest and chin, like some black tar gravity, pulling me closer to these long forgotten floor boards, dragging me willingly into shadows. I slump further into these, hands in my lap, clenched, shimmering I the silhouetted light like snakes. I feel time all about me, a swirling thick fog of menace, reluctant to drain away and birth me once again into the daylight. Things are standing still. Things are waiting. But I give them no reason to stay. There is no reason for time to drag like this, to curd around me, to sit in my lungs, a viscous liquid. The worst thing about this plague is the waiting. But I have become attuned to the monotony. Attuned to sitting through the panic, to letting the sweat itch down my forehead, into my eyes and mouth. I can taste the waiting, taste the viciousness of this situation, and feel it sitting in my guts like a blue skinned child.

The night outside is subsiding, crows cawk and growl and menace some far off corpse or animal. I raise an eye to the door, to the outside. This house lumbers over me like a shell, like a skin I never wanted. I peer around the room again, chase the dust suspended in the rising light. Grey clouds sits heavy in the sky, dashed with dark greys and blacks. Another day. A muddy light sneers through the open door to my side. A window somewhere. Another entry wound upon the body of this tiered standing wreck. A way in. I heard no braking glass, no footsteps, no breathing. Perhaps this passer through was never here, thrown up instead by my own subconscious imagination. A phantom, bred in my head, raised and sent out into some cancer riddled world I had imagined. I will be able to check soon though. Once the sun grazes through the black spittle sky.

 

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

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