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writeanapocalae · 5 years

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A First Meeting

This may come as a surprise, but this is not fanfiction! It was heavily inspired by a conversation on a fanpiece between myself, @chibi--raiden, and @sebcastellanyes and I realized that it wouldn’t even work as an AU, so there are some similarities between this and the evil within, but it is not the same world or the same characters.

warning for gore, body horror, and adult language

The corridor was impossible to follow, all twisted curves and wavering writhing turn offs. It was a maze, branches leading to branches, feeding into itself, parts of it closed off. The doors sat on jagged broken doorways, the windows much the same, and the walls around them, while papered in the same old fashioned wall paper as before, seemed to pulse and bulge, as if the paper was trying it’s best to contain living flesh on the other side.

Doors led to rooms or to other, mirrored corridors, or to nothing at all. Jackson couldn’t tell which was worse. He didn’t want to enter the rooms, not the ones that had the sounds of sobbing inside of them, or the ones that had music distantly playing, or the ones with limbs protruding from the walls like tree branches. He didn’t want to go through the corridors either. He wanted to be done with this. He wanted everything to go back to normal.

One of the rooms, the one that he entered, was the cleanest of them all, was the safest. The walls were clean and white and safe and the floor was white and clean and tile that clicked under his shoes. There was no blood in here. There was no gore. This was a place that he felt safe in, at least for the moment.

The walls had images on them, beautiful and vibrant and framed, going from floor to ceiling, not that he could see what was on any of them, obscured as they were by the large drop clothes that hang from the ceiling.

Like a few of the rooms that had come before there was music playing here, simple and quiet violin music, soothing in it’s lack of intrigue, too calm to be a classic or much of anything, really. He couldn’t see where the music was coming from and he doubted that it mattered. There were walls in the way as well, the large room cut into smaller pieces by partial walls. It was like a small gallery of sorts.

Jackson was only half way around the first of them when he heard it, the snapping of a bone and the humming of a man, off tune and not quite with the music. He halted, feeling his chest freeze as he listened, knowing that he wasn’t alone. A monster, perhaps, like so many others, or a man, like himself, trapped in this place against his will? He didn’t know what to think, what to assume. He went for his knife, just in case.

He looked out as he heard another sickening crack.

There was a man, sitting on a short chair, his dark hair allowed to fall over his face, the sleeves of his once-white shirt rolled and pushed up past his elbows. He was facing away from Jackson, for the moment, to which he was grateful, because he seemed to be very focused on the task on hand, the loud cracking and the stimming of one leg.

Beside him was a pottery wheel, though there was no way that it could be used as one now, as there was a pile of matter on it, which was all red and oozing and bound in thread and gauze. It was just a shapeless pile, at the moment, a pyramid, of what looked like raw meat. There were once white bowls up plastic underneath it, catching the thick blood that seeped from the mass. Rising from the top of it, were arms, which had been twisted and shattered, the bones made useless within them, as they were braided, hands extended to reach out. The skin was stained red, regardless of what color they had been before.

Another snap.

Jackson took a step back. He was going to be sick. It didn’t matter the form of this thing that was before him, he was looking at a monster.

The music ended and the man scoffed, rolling his shoulders. He stood, tossing what he was working on over his shoulder, a half braided mix of three arms, and left his chair. There was no way that Jackson could have ignored the shine of the keys hanging from the man’s well-tailored slacks and he knew, with great disappointment, that he was going to need those keys. It was how this place seemed to work.

He glanced around the room. There wasn’t anywhere to hide unless he thought the man was blind enough to not see him behind the translucent sheets. There was a door across the room, one that he had to go through. He could go back, ignore the man and the gruesome nature of what he was doing, and try to find another route through that hall. He would need those keys eventually though. There was no point in waiting.

The music started up again, a different song now but the same lulling quiet tone, the man humming just as terribly as before. Jackson glanced back around the wall, finding the man cradling the arms like a lover, lazily dancing along with the somber tune. His face was obscured by his hair and Jackson was certain that he must have been disfigured or something other than human, something obscene.

The keys jangled on his waist.

Jackson pulled back when he started a spin, trying to duck out of sight. It wasn’t enough though, not when he heard the man, his voice deep and velvety and tinged with some dark yet warm accent, muse over him. “Is someone there?”

He could run. He could bolt for the door. He could get back to that corridor and down it, but he would make a lot of noise doing it. This man would follow him and he would catch him. Jackson wasn’t much of a fighter, he wouldn’t know what to do if he was caught. He was much better at talking his way out of things. But that was with people, not monsters, and definitely not monsters that made such mockeries of human parts.

“Um,” he breathed, his voice shaking in his throat. “Hi, sorry to bother you.” He stepped out from around the corner, letting himself be seen, allowing himself to be known. “I’m lost, could you help me?”

“Lost?” the man tossed his hair, forcing it away from his face. It settled around his features, framing him, and it became clear that the man was not terribly scarred or other than human. In fact, the man was handsome, with a sharp and angular nose and jaw, dark brows and lashes, and distinguished cheekbones. “What do you mean, lost?” Jackson laughed, trying to offset how nervous he was as he slid the knife into his waste-band, keeping it close but not too obvious. Now that he was more in the open he could see more of the man’s workplace. There was a large sledgehammer learning against something near his feet.

“It’s a maze out there. Could you tell me the way to the exit?”

The man pursed his lips in thought. His foot was tapping on the floor, double time to the music. “An exit. I see. I am afraid I have never thought to find one myself, not through conventional means, anyway.”

Jackson wanted to ask. He wanted to understand. He wanted out.

The man took a few steps towards him and, with each one, Jackson’s heart hammered harder, and his joints stiffened further, and there was a cold sensation in his lungs that told him to run. He wanted to run. He wanted to be gone. This man smelled of blood and whiskey and a hint of wood smoke. He still had those arms draped over his shoulder.

“Tell me, do you know much about the arts?”

Jackson shook his head. “Not really. I know what I like, that’s about it.”

The man smiled and it was like a gash in a canvas, wide and sharp and jagged. His teeth were almost perfect beneath those thin lips. “Then tell me, what do you think of this?”

He led the way back to the pottery wheel and the mound on top of it. Jackson followed, trying not to betray himself, to rise a hand to his mouth, to vomit, as he drew closer. What the sledgehammer was leaning against before was a bathtub, though there was no water inside of it. What there was were the remnants of what he wasn’t using. Bodies, cut into a carved down to the bone. Most of them were without arms and much of their flesh made up the base of the sculpture the man had been working on.

“It’s still early on in the process,” the man explained, excitedly, showing it off. “It will be like a massive wave, all of this hands reaching out, grasping for the light, much like you, for freedom. It is not my best work, no, it does not hold all of my vision, but a prologue to my greatest work!”

Jackson knew what he was supposed to say, that it was beautiful, that it was something inspiring, but all he could do was stare at it, in horror, and then at the rest. Had he killed all of these people? What was the point of it all? He hadn’t seen any other art here, not anything that he would call art, anyway, but he knew that if he didn’t make the man happy, he would become a part of it.

“It. It’s a really nice… start.” Jackson lied, swallowing heavily to keep his bile in his throat.

“A nice start?” the man asked, “And the concept? What do you think?”

“It sounds nice...”

“Nice?” the man sounded irritated. “Nothing other than nice?”

Jackson felt himself starting to shake. He thought that he was good at talking his way out of situations. He didn’t know how to get out of this though, not with his life anyway. “Is there. A problem with nice?”

The man moved fast, faster than he should have and there was a weight on Jackson’s shoulder as the arm was slung over it, squelching slightly on contact. He winced, wanting to pull away. The man was in his space, intimately, only a few inches from his face. He looked him over with steady gray eyes, moving his head more than them, lingering near Jackson’s neck as he licked his lips.

“What is your name?”

Jackson licked his lips, finding his tongue dry. He was going to vomit. He was going to do a lot of things. He wasn’t sure if he was going to leave this room alive. “Jackson.”

“Jackson? Hmm. Well, Jackson, a person only describes the work of another as ‘nice’ when they don’t have anything better to say, when they can’t think of anything. It is a shoddy way to appease someone, if you were to ask me.”

Jackson swallowed.

The man tilted his head in the opposite direction, his lips a breath away from Jackson’s. “So tell me, what do you think?”

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to do. There were arms, three of them, wrapped around each other and wrapped around him. There was a man, who was going to kill him, stealing his breath. He was sweating. He was sure the man could tell. He knew that he knew how terrified Jackson was.

“I don’t know. It’s not done. I’m having a hard time visualizing it is all. I’m sure it will be great.”

The man nodded. “That’s better, but still too bland, still without merit. What of the concept?”

Jackson glanced over at the work. He could see the shape that he intended, what it might end up looking like. “How are you going to ensure the hands stay in place?” he asked, not wanting to know.

At that the man’s eyes lit up and he danced away, back to the piece in question, taking the arms with him. “I was considering leaving that up to rigor mortis, but I understand your concern! There’s too much of a chance that the fingers would curl, too tight to react how I desire! So I’m going to de-bone them, once all of them are in place, and replace the bones with thin rebar!”

“You mentioned flowers?” Jackson took a step closer to him. His back was turned to him as he played with the fingers on one of the hands, shaping the positioning. It was like he was working with clay, not human body parts. It made Jackson want to run away from him, not get closer. The keys were right there on his belt. He could get them and flee, maybe grab the sledgehammer too. “I’m concerned it might end up looking like an anemone because of the way the limbs work.”

The man put a hand to his chin and pondered it, looking over what he had accomplished so far. “A nautical theme would not be the worst thing but I appreciate your concern. Perhaps if I degloved them them, made petals from their skin?”

That was too much. It was all too much. The way that the man moved, the way that he touched them, the way that he planned and demanded that Jackson give him critique. He couldn’t handle it. He had handled so much of this so well so far, but this was just another layer of disgust on top of the rest of it. He choked back bile and lunged forward, thinking himself close enough to grab those keys, to get what he needed and go. He had to get out of there. He couldn’t be around this man any further.

The man spun, catching his arm and he stood. He was just a bit shorter than Jackson but as he stood he seemed so much taller, so much more imposing, and he twisted Jackson’s arm as he moved.

“What do you think you are doing?” he asked and there was cyanide lacing his words.

His mind was racing but there was nothing, no excuse for what he was doing that would also allow him to leave here alive. “You’re hurting me,” he squeaked, trying to pull his arm free. The man was holding him steady though, keeping him there.

“Do you truly believe that I care?” he growled. “Do you even care? About the pain that I’ve gone through to get where I am? About my work in the least? You are not an artist, are you?”

He shook his head. “I care! I care! I’m not an artist but what you’re doing, it seems to take a lot of skill.”

“Skill is only a part of it! You do not understand! You do not have an imagination! You must think of me the same way as everyone else, that my vision is broken, that I am mad! But I am not! Do you understand that?”

He was mad. He was insane. Jackson was certain that he was going to be killed. “Please, let me go.”

The man looked him over, considering it a moment, he seemed to be holding himself steady though his anger fell from him in micro-expressions, one muscle relaxing after another. Slowly, he released Jackson’s arm and he took it back, rubbing his shoulder where it felt half torn from the socket.

“This is not my only piece,” he stated coldly, “just the most recent. Perhaps you would enjoy it more if you were a part of it, if you were made to understand my work from the inside.”

He reached down, grabbing the sledgehammer.

“Shit.” Jackson looked around. There was that door, he still had a chance at escape. But the man was fast and he was armed and he was coming. All Jackson had was a knife.

He drew it anyway.

“I don’t want to have to fight you,” he explained, trying to harden his voice, to sound more intimidating than he was. He was being honest though. He didn’t want to fight the man, he wanted to have nothing to do with him.

The man just laughed at that though, gripping the handle in both hands and raising it over his head for a strong swing. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to.”

He slammed the hammer down and Jackson jumped back, falling over one of the buckets of blood and landing prone on the tile. The tile was cracked, shattering from where the sledgehammer and, underneath it, crawling out through the cracks, were those long white hairs, weaving and crawling over each other like a million living wires.

He did his best to get back to his feet, rolling away from the cracks as the man drew closer to him. The hairs were reaching for him, catching him and tearing away as they gripped him. They left black lines where they touched, the skin and fabric bubbling as they ate everything they could. He grit his teeth. He kept moving. He didn’t care about the pain.

Jackson pulled back, turning and twisting as he skipped over the cracks, trying not to trip on them, trying not to let the hairs snag him. A few of them got the hems of his pants and burned through his shoes but that was minor, it didn’t matter. There was a man walking through them all as if they were electricity and his name was Nikolai. He was moving, fast but steady, and he was going to catch up.

Jackson almost missed it, looking over his shoulder, at how the hair was clinging to the mound of flesh that was the man’s art, how it dripped into the buckets, the strands going from white to red and plump.

The sledgehammer went horizontally, sweeping Jackson’s legs out from under him. He grunted as he landed, the pain of cracking his elbow against the tile far more painful than the hit on his legs, the brunt of the damage coming from the handle and not the hammer itself.

He turned to see the man standing over him, glaring, his lips pulled back into a snarl. “You are beginning to annoy me!” he complained, “With your foolish lies and your infantile lacking of comprehension, you are hardly worthy of being used for materials!”

He swung the sledgehammer again and Jackson didn’t have time to move out of the way, just spread his legs as fast as he could, see the hammer slam down through one thigh and the tile, breaking it up again, letting out more of those hairs.

Jackson screamed out at the pain of it, the muscle torn and cracked, blood pooling out from something that wasn’t even a patchable cut. “Stop!” he creaked out, “Look!”

He kept a hold of the wound as he threw out an arm, pointing, and the man actually bothered to follow his lead, to look over his shoulder, to see the way that the hairs were stretched and feeding off fo the remains in the tub, how they were leeching away the mound of flesh.

“No!” he growled, stomping towards, “No!”

Those hairs were climbing up from the crack between Jackson’s legs. He didn’t have much time. The man seemed conflicted, to keep going after Jackson or to salvage what he could of his work. Jackson doubted there was much left as it was. Still the distraction was what he needed and he went around the cracks as best he could getting as close to the man as possible.

He didn’t turn again until Jackson was right behind him, when he sliced through the belt loop that held those keys on his hip and took them. Then he swung wildly at him, his anger a permeating thing, a real, visible, thing, his veins dark under his skin.

“You did this!” he screeched. “It is because of you that my art has been destroyed! That what I have spent days on has been completely undone!”

He had a witty remark, for once, but the man was swinging that sledgehammer again and there was something wrong with him, he really was a monster. He brought up the knife, more to defend himself than to attack, as he brought the hammer towards him.

He sliced through the man’s arm.

He growled as the blood seeped down the limb and splattered onto the floor, but the pain barely registered in his movements or his expression. He took a hold of the hammer again, ready to come at him from another angle.

He didn’t notice the hairs reaching for him, going after his blood, starving for him. They coiled on the floor and wrapped around his right arm, staining themselves as they drank of him, yanking his arm towards the freshest cracks. They were going to drag him down into them.

Jackson didn’t watch. He limped to the door and shoved a key into the lock before finding that it was already unlocked. He pocketed the keys and made his way through/

#horror writing #my writing #writeblr #jackson #horror writeblr

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