Pinprick

by Matthew Cash

  But Shane didn’t answer. He was free from his shackles but did not move. He was paralysed by the vision that stood before him. Terror had an ice-cold grip on his entire body; all he could do was stare at The Whistler.

  An ancient man stood before him holding an oil lantern that glowed with an ethereal light. His skin looked dry brown and leathery and blended in with his filthy tattered rags. Straggly white hair hung down from its scalp beneath the patches of moss that grew on its aged skin. Shane could make out a black gash beneath a white overgrown beard that may have once been a mouth. Bones showed through the places where the skin had split. It looked like one of the mummies he’d seen on the National Geographic Channel. This was The Whistler.

  It stared straight at him with two deep and seemingly empty eye sockets, but when he moved to one side, and it moved its head to look at him once more.

  All this time Morgan was screamed at him, demanding to tell him what he was looking at.

  “Tell me Shane!” Her face was inches away from his own and was red with frustration and rage. She was a child.

  The Whistler moved towards Shane and raised a claw-like hand in his direction. Its empty eye sockets absorbed his every detail and it opened its black maw wide and released a shrill scream. Shane’s tinnitus came back a hundred-fold, his head throbbed and the pain was almost blinding. The pressure in his head was so intense that blood began to trickle from his nose and ears.

  As The Whistler slowly raised a leathery hand and held his face, Shane realised with clarity what his fate was.

  The Whistler started to crumble before his eyes. He watched with streaming eyes as its skin flaked away like paint and its bones disintegrated. It dropped the lantern into the well just before it burst into a cloud of dust.

  As soon as The Whistler had vanished, Shane let his focus fall on The Pit behind it. As he stared into its darkness, he felt the same intense pull he had felt twenty years ago, when he’d stared into the well for the first time. It was just like an umbilical cord, attached to his insides, pulling him forward. It was almost impossible to resist.

  He suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder, it was Morgan.

  “Shane please, I beg you, tell me what you saw. Quickly, before it’s too late!” Morgan pleaded as tears of desperation poured down her pale cheeks.

  “Here I’ll show you,” Shane used every ounce of will power and strength he could muster to turn away from the Pit and face her. He grabbed hold of her head in his hands and pushed his thumbs against her eyelids. She screamed as her stitches burst open, tearing her eyelids to ragged pieces.

  In the struggle he fell over backwards into the darkness.

  Epilogue

  She was bound, tight clamps of metal dug and gouged in to her wrists and her ankles. In her dream she could feel as though it were real. Jennifer opened what she presumed were her eyes and immediately felt the psychological and physical pull the hole had over her. She wasn’t frightened, it was more ecstasy. Like walking for days in a desert to be greeted with the cleanest, clearest of lakes. Every part of her wanted to dive into the black pool before her. After fighting with all her strength against the restraints she felt herself give up and half collapse. Her body was not her body, it was her uncle’s, the clothes filthy and wet with god knows what. When her energy had returned slightly she fought again against the restraints and laughed hysterically as she was suddenly unbound. As she dived into the beautiful black abyss she let the darkness engulf her and marvelled at how real the dream was, the rushing of the slightly sulphuric air past her ears and she plummeted to unimaginable depths…

  Jennifer blinked and sat up.

  “You’re awake,” Mum sounded relieved.

  “The ambulance is coming!” Dad stood ashen faced in the kitchen doorway.

  Her face felt wet to touch and came away bloody.

  “You’ve got a nose bleed.” Dad unrolled a wad of paper towel and crouched down to hold it to her face. She took it from him. “Jen, are you okay sweetheart?”

  She felt dazed.

  “My head hurts,” she mumbled. “What happened?”

  She was really confused. Why she was sat on the floor in the kitchen with a nosebleed with everyone fussing over her? And what was that about an ambulance?

  August 2006

  The two men had finished the last layer of plastering and stood back to admire their handiwork. There was no sign that there had ever been a little doorway there at all. Brian Dury looked sorrowfully at the wall and then at his companion, Mark Somerfield, as tears of regret fell down his cheeks. The loss of two children would send him to his grave.

  “We should’ve done this years ago!” Absentmindedly, he wiped his trowel clean on a piece of old rag.

  Somerfield pitied his old friend and placed a hand on his broad shoulder. “The time wasn’t right and you know it. It would have sucked the good out of the land until there was nothing left, just a barren slag heap with a cancerous wound infecting everything.”

  Dury closed his eyes and tried not to imagine what else would have happened if they hadn’t got Colbert, or if he had died elsewhere. He had lost but so had many, many others in this cursed land. But now it had come to an end.

  The two men collected up their trowels, mud pans and the bag of plaster and left the cellar.

  “Do you think it will be safe?” Dury asked as he locked the door to his empty bookshop for the last time.

  Somerfield nodded, “Wartburg will no doubt fill the place full of cement when they start construction, just to make sure the foundations are solid. It’s over now.”

  *

  As Shane lay among the ruins of a thousand bodies he saw that, while some were centuries old skeletons with wisps of opaque hair, there was one who was fresher. Its mouth was stretched open in one last scream.

  He heard his bones crunch back into place and imagined them healing. He was completely detached from any feeling. Even though he knew the answer, he wondered how long this total paralysis would last; until there was another like him.

  “Which one came first The Whistler or The Pit?” he whispered. A nearby skeleton leaned in to hear him. A low continuous laugh came from his mouth as he lay there cradled by the stench of the dead. He laughed even harder at the prospect of a hundred years of total conscious paralysis. The skeletons were in on the joke and laughed with him. Their voices vied for space under the cavernous ceiling and echoed back at them.

  A long time later, his eyes rolled back into his head and he sank into the tormented oblivion of madness.

  Matthew Cash, or Matty-Bob Cash as he is known to most, was born and raised in in Suffolk. He has always written stories since he first learnt to write, and most, although not all, tend to slip into the many layered murky depths of the horror genre.

  He is a father of two, a husband of one and a zoo keeper of numerous fur babies.