Consumed- The Complete Works

by Kyle M. Scott

  And I tell myself that here in my room I am safe.

  Lying comes easy when you’re lying to yourself.

  There is no real sanctuary here. My peace of mind is an eggshell, already cracked, set to break wide open and spill forth a black, fearful yolk. I try to read. I try to play video games. I occasionally even try to write. It never works. My thoughts belong to the night, and to those awful things that dwell in the darkness, waiting for sleep to render me helpless, a fish floundering breathlessly on a ship’s deck.

  It is always the same.

  Yet when I wake in the darkness tonight, something is different.

  I do not come to my senses slowly as though from a peaceable dream. Instead, I am alert, absolutely and horribly aware of all that is around me. As always, I try to move my arms and my legs. I cannot. So I do the only thing I can do, which is to lie there, wait for, and then endure that strange unholy screaming that heralds the arrival of the shadow people.

  It does not come.

  Though I cannot move, the audio-wall of pure torment never rises from whichever black corner of my subconscious in which it resides. Something in this new turn of events somehow instills in me an even greater terror than the screaming.

  Somehow the silence that fills my bedroom in its absence is even more deafening. Were it not for the soft tapping of rainfall on my window, I fear I would lose what’s left of my mind forever, my rationale and reason pushed from my brain by the near- perfect, deathly quietude. The gentle sound of the crying heavens is now the only tether to my sanity, my shield against outright panic and dismay, for even though the screams within my head have tonight fallen still, and even though the door to my room remains firmly shut, I can still sense them…

  I try to close my eyes, and find myself unsure if I have managed to do so. The darkness of my bedroom is so complete this night that there might as well be no difference.

  And the things that come to me in the night are already here.

  This I know this because a new sound has pierced the darkness, one that is barely discernible from the gentle rainfall.

  They are whispering to one another at the foot of my bed.

  I stare into the perfect blackness, still unsure whether my eyes are opened or closed, my head locked in position. I listen as intently as my fear will allow.

  I have never heard them speak before.

  Whatever they are, they are usually silent.

  These shadow people…these nightly invaders…their visitations usually come and go without so much as an utterance from any of them. They merely tower above me as I lay there in terror, watching me, studying me, and then…

  …and then I come to my senses, my body is my own again, and it’s morning.

  And the world is once again sane.

  This night, though, they do not tower over me. There are no shadows within shadows, no sense of having my whole body scoured by examining eyes, no reaching toward me with near-invisible hands as the waves of my terror break and I disappear into an engulfing oblivion.

  This night, I remain aware.

  And in my awareness, I listen.

  The whispering is low, conspiratorial, and deeply insidious. The voices are impossible to discern as male or female, though one appears to be higher in pitch than the other. As I listen, the voices are accompanied by the sounds of movement - the rustling of a curtain, the scuffle of feet on carpet, the creak of a floorboard.

  They are moving around my room, though they do so with a strange trepidation. On any other night that these dark beings enter my bedroom, they do so with no seeming concern as to my awareness of them.

  But tonight…

  Tonight their business seems far less assured.

  Do they know I’m awake and conscious?

  It seems so, but can anything be sure in the dark?

  Do they know that I am still completely at their mercy, that I am still paralyzed?

  Do they know this?

  I force myself to concentrate, desperate to use this one chance I have while my mind is not completely incapacitated to learn something of these strange beings.

  There are two of them.

  I think there are two.

  If I could just make out what they were saying.

  If I could just understand.

  “You can’t do this. Not tonight…”

  I hear one of them.

  The voice is most definitely female. Perhaps it’s a case of my fugue state receding, or perhaps the trespassers are growing less cautious as they muse on this new situation, but I’m hearing them clearer.

  “We’re going to be caught!” the female voice implores to its unseen companion.

  My blood seems to freeze. My body, were it not already in a state of near complete paralysis, would surely shut down utterly as the hushed voice penetrates the crushing darkness and fills my ears and my mind.

  I know this voice.

  I think of night terrors. I think of all that I have learned of these evil invasions, and in the splinter of a second as that terribly familiar voice is met and answered by another, all becomes clear.

  “We’ll be fine. We’re doing this. Don’t you fucking dare try to stop me,” the answering voice hisses.

  A man’s voice.

  I know this voice too.

  Not monsters! my mind screams.

  Not invaders from the deepest darkest depths of the inferno or the great space beyond our Earth.

  And not, as my therapist would assure me, a phantom birthed from my own mind.

  One is a man.

  And the other is a woman.

  And the voices are two that I know almost as well as I know the taste of my own fear at the back of my throat.

  I feel bitter tears burn my cheeks, slicing through the numbness whilst their argument intensifies.

  “It hasn’t worked properly! There must be a tolerance developed. We’ll be caught!” she implores, almost whining.

  “I put enough of that shit in the glass to knock out a fucking bull! Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “I’ve been doing this for a long time…long before I met you and this little shit!”

  “Please,” she begs, “We’ll go to jail. Can’t you just stop this? It’s went on long enough!”

  “I’ll stop when I’m good and ready to stop. It’s fine.”

  “It’s not!”

  “I said it’s fucking fine!” he growls.

  There follows a silence that stretches on like feedback from a tortured guitar. I feel both sets of eyes on me, searching for signs that I have heard them.

  Though I cannot move even a muscle, I fear they will learn I’m awake. I feel a sickly tsunami of terror wash over me.

  What will they do if they discover I am conscious?

  There is more shuffling of feet, the footfalls are heavyset. He’s moving towards me now, coming around the left side of the bed. I close my eyes and try to relax my features as best I can. Whether or not my internal turmoil is detectable in my paralyzed state, I do not know. I’m certain he can hear the thunderous storm-warning of my heart.

  I feel his rough hands as he lays them upon me.

  I feel his breath upon my neck as he inhales and exhales all too quickly. He is close to panting.

  In my heart, I already know why.

  It is not fear or trepidation that catches his gin-fouled breath in his throat.

  It is excitement.

  To my right, close by my side, I hear quiet sobbing. It’s coming from her.

  He groans, low and rumbling, as his hands slowly move from my neck to my chest, down around my hips and then lower.

  I try to forget myself as he increases his ministrations.

  I try to believe in the legends, the horrors of otherworldly entities that invade and torment and fill the night with terror. I try and try and try and try, and when belief fails me I learn what it means to wish for death.

  His coarse hands do their work.
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  The sobbing grows in intensity to my right as he lowers himself upon me. I beg for the drug that has somehow infiltrated my bloodstream to work to its fullest, as it has so many nights before.

  When that fails too, I fight with the only gift I have – my imagination.

  In my mind’s eye, I try to picture a time when I was most happy. My mind conjures up a single memory, pure and true. .

  I am seven years old and my father is still alive. My world is safe and warm and completely without darkness. All I know is safety and comfort and the infinitely perfect knowledge that I am loved. Above all things... I am loved.

  My father’s smile is all-encompassing, brimming with good humor, light and open, like his heart.

  We are at the fairground and it is Christmas Eve. The air is filled with the smell of cotton candy and roasting chestnuts. Many of the rides are closed for the season – The Tilt-a-Whirl, The Big Dipper, The Log Flume - but I’m enthralled nonetheless. The Ghost Train, with its swinging plastic spooks and painted castle-stones, remains operational. Its doors swing wide open as cars made up to look like goblins carry laughing children into the darkness. Soft music drifts from The Tunnel of Love while nervous teenage boys and girls are ferried on the ride’s gentle waters into faraway lands. There are other rides operating, and though their carriages may be half-empty and the December wind chills to the bone, the kids that ride them whoop and holler with boundless glee. Screams of delight fill the air above us, coming from the one operational rollercoaster as its cars zooms down a steep dip and whooshes past the spot where I stand with my dad. We giggle together as we watch the frightful thrill-seekers whizz by. He holds my hand in his own, squeezing tightly. As our laughter subsides, he nods over my shoulder.

  “Here she comes…” he tells me, with unmasked happiness.

  From the candy stand further down the promenade, my mother approaches, beaming. I watch her stroll toward us, entranced by the way the wind-whipped fairy lights shine down on her, all the colors of the rainbow, blending, pouring over her perfect skin like a living painting. She grins mischievously as she walks towards us, clutching in her hand the biggest stick of cotton candy I have ever seen. My grin probably matches hers as she moves ever closer. Unable to control my glee at seeing the treat she has in store for me, I hop on the spot, from foot to foot, crunching the snow beneath my tiny boots..

  “You get a big enough one, babe?” my dad jokes.

  “I’d have gotten bigger if I could have. Nothing but the best for our little one.”

  She hands me the cotton candy. I gaze at it with wonder for a moment, then I lunge in.

  “I want to go on the spook train!” I declare as I bite into the sugary pink mass.

  “And what do we say when we’d like something nice?” my mother gently admonishes.

  I smile up at her, and I say —

  — “Please! Please don’t, Terry. Not tonight. Please.”

  The sound of my mother’s voice in the darkness - drunken, derelict, and broken - rips the memory to shreds.

  And I feel everything.

  Night terrors are real.

  In my case they are neither supernatural nor psychological.

  I would take either over the horrors I now understand to have befallen me.

  I awake this morning with a hurt in my heart that runs deeper than any physical pain that may have been inflicted on my body last night. My stepfather has been careful. I feel nothing down there that is alien, nor strange. I feel only a dull, empty pain that resonates from a far more spiritual place inside of me.

  A scar has been left that will never heal.

  Terry, my stepfather, is a monster – a night terror that is all too terrible and present. The stain he has left on my heart will never wash clean, but the real pain – the real agony that burrows down deep into my soul – stems from the betrayal of my mother.

  I want to blame it on the alcohol. I want to blame her awful choices on her unthinking instinct to climb inside a bottle of liquor and drown in its toxins. I want to believe that what she has allowed to become of herself, and of me, is merely a symptom of illness.

  Perhaps I do believe it.

  She was once a truly beautiful soul with a smile that could make the angels sing and a heart as big and wide as any ocean of the world. Her fall into bereavement after the loss of my beloved father is surely the catalyst for the misery she has inflicted upon herself and, in turn, upon me, her only child.

  Yes…yes, I believe it.

  I know that somewhere deep inside of her there remains light, however small and dying its ember may be.

  Still, that is not enough.

  It’s not enough to know that she too is a victim.

  She allowed this. She should have been stronger. She should have been there for me when I lost the most wonderful father I could ever have hoped for.

  She failed me.

  She failed my father’s memory.

  I cannot allow it to go unpunished.

  Finding the substance they have been drugging me with is easy. Had I been looking for it before, I would surely have found. Who, though, would believe such a thing could happen to them?

  I trusted Terry. For all his flaws – the drinking, the gambling, and the weaknesses so inherent in him that were nowhere to be found in my real father - I trusted him.

  Even pitied him.

  And my mother… well….she’s my mother.

  What she has allowed to happen is an abomination.

  I can still hear her pathetic pleas r while Terry did his despicable work. They ring in my ears, louder with every moment.

  I find the substance stored away in the bathroom cabinet, behind my mother’s anti-depressants, sleeping tablets and assorted medicines. The bottle is unmarked though I know right away that this is the drug that they have been slipping into my nightly drink.

  The bottle’s contents, I hide in my room, tucked away safely under my mattress in a small container of my own. The bottle they had been using, I fill with a harmless sweetener.

  When the sun goes down on this night, I’ll be fully alert and wide awake.

  The same cannot be said for them.

  As always, I spend the evening in my room.

  I no longer shudder at the thought of what is to come. My bed is just a bed again, no longer a black slab on which their horrors are perpetrated. I sit calmly by my window and watch the sun sink down over the hills beyond our street while downstairs they drink their liquor, watch their banal television shows, and unwittingly place themselves in my trap.

  It was so easy, spiking their drinks.

  So easy.

  The streets slowly empty of playing, capering children - called home by parents, I hope, that are far more worthy than my own - and as the stars begin to shine in the burgeoning night, I feel no fear.

  Monsters are only monsters as long as we allow them to be.

  So I wait, and I listen, and soon enough the sounds of their debauchery diminish.

  I hear them discuss something but I know not what they talk of, nor do I care. The mindless drone of the television shuts off soon after their discussion ends. There is only the sound of the late birds nestled in the trees outside my room and the whispering wind as it caresses the awnings of this awful place I used to call home.

  I hear their lumbering footsteps as they make for the staircase, slowly climb each step, and stagger into their shared bedroom. There is no nighttime ritual this evening, no warm cup of malt whiskey held in swaying, drunken hands by my mother. No slurred ‘goodnight’ from Terry as his form fills my doorway.

  No…tonight they head straight for the soft sanctum of their bed to sleep off their intoxication.

  They forget all about me.

  It seems the drug is doing its work.

  I enter the room quietly and only when I’m sure they are both asleep. My mother snores every bit as loudly as her new husband. Their guttural snorts poison the quiet of the evening as I peer into the room.

 
Two pigs, oblivious to the slaughter.

  I make my way across the carpet, careful not to step on any of the discarded wine bottles that litter the floor. The stink of old alcohol is eye-watering, but the smell of urine overpowers it. One or both of them has lost control of their bladder.

  Whether this is down to the drug or to the simple fact that they’re both drunken degenerates, I will never know.

  It doesn’t matter. The drugs have worked, and on top of the drinks Terry and my mum have imbibed, it’s no wonder the effects have been so swift.

  I make my way to the side of the bed.

  Terry’s side.

  From beneath my pajama top, I free the kitchen knife, being careful not to cut myself.

  It’s very sharp.

  I sharpened it myself, just for this occasion.

  I lean over Terry and take a moment to gaze down on this pathetic, disgusting excuse for a man. I watch the drool trickle slowly down from his lips and congeal in his days-old stubble.

  I think of my long dead father, and the man he was, as I study the wretch laid before me.

  Terry barely registers my movement as I pull aside the sweat and booze stained bed-sheets.

  While the drug always paralyzed me first, leaving me temporarily aware before the darkness and memory loss claimed me, Terry just seems out of it. He’s not around to appreciate what I plan to do.

  So I make sure he gets the message.

  He’s naked beneath the sheets. His shrunken member hangs loose, dangling between his testicles.

  Such a small, pitiable thing.

  There is no hesitation on my part as I lift his testicles up, cupping them in my one hand, and slicing them free of his body with the other.

  That’s done the trick.

  He’s wide awake now.

  Paralyzed, but wide awake.

  Much better.

  His eyes meet mine in the gloom, wide and horrified. He doesn’t scream, but his eyes scream plenty.

  I toss aside the bloody bits of meat and let his ruptured sack fall back between his legs. Blood pools out in a formless flower onto the mattress.

  I think he’s trying to shake his head.