No Regrets
Death has a sound and it sounds like this, Click.
To any normal person it is a normal sound. A sound any normal person would make when they click their finger.
Or snap them even.
But to the likes of those like me, it is not a normal sound. Whenever I click my fingers, it is not me engaging in a normal act, but me marking the passing of another soul for once again Death has come and another human life has ended.
Click.
There goes another one.
There are those who would consider my clicking to be morbid, but to those who know better, they know I do it because I have to.
It is part of the condition I suffer from.
A condition I was born with.
Ever since I was a young boy I had always felt too much and it wasn’t till a few years later did I discover that I was born with the psychic ability to feel the feelings and emotions of others. But my skill was not limited to just feelings for my ability to read others pain and happiness was just the beginning.
I soon learned to develop it and become the all-powerful person I am today, all thanks to the Death’s Door Brigade I guess.
I gave my life to them and in return, they gave me death. Yeah I probably should have mentioned that bit of information first.
The fact that I am at this moment in time laying on a cold stone slab floor, in a darkened room bleeding to death.
I can feel my crimson blood gushing out of the knife wound I’ve sustained to the abdomen and even now as I lay here dying, I can’t help but think one morbid thought.
All my life I have been able to mark the passing of others, but the one death that is most important to me, my own, is the one death that I won’t get to click.
It’s sad really that even now as I lay with closed eyes, seconds away from death that I still think about my own inability to mark my own passing, but then again it is what being a Death Reader is about. Devoting your entire life to reading, feeling and marking the deaths of others.
I can remember the early days. Before I knew what I was, I was a young lad who would feel his heart stop beating inside his chest and it wouldn’t resume until I clicked my fingers.
I didn’t know why I did it, I just knew that I had to, the same way we all know we have to click.
Only difference is unlike most Death Readers, even then my abilities are without limits. Most of us can only feel lives ending in a 200-mile radius, but me, I could feel people dying all over the globe. It got so bad I would be snapping my fingers five times an hour of every day. Even when sleeping my fingers would snap.
Thankfully it was the constant clicking I made that caught the attention of the Death’s Door Brigade, they took me in, trained me and I rose through the ranks.
As a secret society, its origin dates back to the dark ages and they are the oldest organization dedicated to Death. We feel it, we uphold it and we inflict it.
Essentially it is a cult, a cult made up of Witches, Reapers and Readers and I have been with them for the last two decades, serving as a guardian to maintain the balance, but something is afoot.
Some members of the DDB have taken to serving a new Master, a Master who wishes to bring about the end of us all, which brings me to the reason why I lay here dying. I tried to oppose them, to stop them but they are too many and too strong.
A Reader like myself is no match for a Reaper. Sure they’re mortal and bullets are effective, but they’re strong, instinctive and for some reason, harder to kill.
Born survivors.
Born killers.
Having lost the fight, the Reaper threw me in a cell, chained me up and whipped me for days on end.
After two weeks of relentless torture, a Reaper ushered me into this dark cellar, tied my hands together and shoved me to the floor before at last he rammed the blade of a sharpened dagger into my abdomen.
To be honest, it pleased me to suffer such fate.
After what they put me threw, death is the only freedom left too me.
Now, my would-be murderer could have left the blade inside of me, but he didn’t desire that, so he eagerly yanked it out.
With blade in hand he soon vacated the room, leaving me to my fate, but I know he’ll be back.
Back when the last drop of blood has vacated my body and I am unable to breathe, for like my heart, my lungs will cease to work. I can feel it now, the cold hand of death behind me. Ready to place itself upon my shoulder.
It won’t be long now. I will soon be with the ones I’ve lost.
At least I can take some comfort in the fact that somewhere out there, in the world we live in, there is a Reader, ready to read my death. Ready to click their fingers before I succumb to the end that awaits me.
But at least I can say that I die with no regrets. There is not a single thing I can think of that I wish I had done differently, for I know that my murder will soon be avenged that someone out there will discover the truth.
They will track down and stop the mutinous DDB members, so with a smile now I must part.
My time here is done, so get ready to hear a click because here it comes…
Click.
To be Continued?
Embers of Webber Street
Karen J Mossman
Ghostly Writes Anthology 2016 Page 12