The Dark.

CuLT

A (very) short story.
I always have a little burst of an idea every now and then throughout the day.
Generally they go away, but this one stuck in my head, so I decided to write it.
Here goes:

He was an average 21 year-old.
But he wasn’t 21. He wasn’t even one year old. In fact, he could only remember a few hazy months of existence. It bothered him a bit, but not too much. He felt he would have been more comfortable in the social climate of the college he attended if he could remember anything about his life. But he couldn’t, nor could he place exactly where his memories began.
He supposed himself less than one year old because of his limited memory, but logic dictated that he must be roughly 21. Logic he had no real grasp on. Was he even sure what logic was?
Vexed. He was becoming vexed. Really, though? How could he be sure that he was vexed? He had little personal experience to extrapolate from. Around him his “friends” chattered, he wondered what about. This was how he was building up a memory beyond that which he could call personal recall. He listened to stories and events, carefully storing each new, or old, piece of information into a mesh of memory sorted by time.
His mind was like a long dark strip, with pinholes of light scattered throughout at random, except for one end, which gave a dull glow inside his skull. That was how he imagined it anyway.
Perplexed. Why could he not penetrate the darkness? Why did that long black strip exist?
Why did he have to poke tiny holes into it to piece together the past? He had been reading a book on psychology, maybe this was a mental block of some kind. Maybe he was hiding from himself, his past. What had he done? What was so horrific that it had to be shrouded in a veil of thick mental cobwebs? Cobwebs that he couldn’t scratch at. All he had was a small laser-pen that he could only use a distance from the web.
It had just enough energy to pierce the web. But he had ample supply of energy for this tool in the form of the College. Knowledge powered this tool.
A cry. Where from? It seemed there was something happening on the steps about 30 metres from him. A crumpled heap on the ground. Why? She wasn’t moving. Nobody else had reacted to the girl’s cry. He should go to her. He should help. But he wasn’t moving. Nobody was. Peculiar, he couldn’t remember this ever happening; something new to store.
A noise, like a distant siren blared on the fringes of his consciousness. Then the birds were singing and people chattered around him again. The girl was gone, if she had ever been there.
--

I'd like opinions, it's a new way of writing for me, I usually spend ages working through exact phrasing and what ideas to get across.
I guess it's "freeform" or "consciousness stream" or something like that.
In advance, thanks for taking the time to read it.

luckat

Well, go on, go on, what happens next? Enough faffing about wondering what style it is, what's going to *happen*? I'm interested!

CuLT

Continued - :

He rose slowly, walked cautiously towards the place where the girl had been. Nothing. His friends hadn’t noticed his absence; they were still talking to each other animatedly, laughing. He leant down on his hunkers and reached out slowly towards the weather-beaten concrete that the girl had occupied only moments – was it only moments? It could have been years – before. His fingers touched the warm, smooth step; he drew his hand across the step, where the girl’s crumpled form had lain. There was nothing here.
He stood and turned to go when suddenly he became disorientated, woozy. He stumbled, refocusing; and then he saw them.
Hundreds, thousands of people, but they weren’t people, they were more outlines than anything else. They hurried alongside the more substantial forms of his friends and those he knew from the College. It was as if someone had overexposed a photograph, overlaying one image on top of another. But it was real, very real. His hearing had also degenerated; it was like he was hearing the world from underwater. He felt a prickling at the base of his neck. What did this sensation mean? He felt shivers slither down the back of his arms and he had the urge to turn around. This was definitely something he hadn’t experienced before, or at least in his recent past. Though there was a shocking sense of familiarity associated with it, but he couldn’t place it, he had no conscious memory of such an experience.
Slowly, he turned. He didn’t want to, he had to.
The silhouette was looking directly at him. Its monochrome complexion reminded him of a wisp of cigarette smoke winding through still air. But this did have form, not an entirely defined form; the borders of its being seemed to waver as though a light zephyr were winding its way around it, unable to penetrate.
It seemed confused. None of the other phantoms paid him any attention, they drifted hurriedly along their route; unheeded, apparently, by the solid entities about them. Unaware?
They stared at each other for what must have been an eternity before the silhouette opened its mouth, lifted a spectral arm –
But then it was gone. They all were. His hearing returned to normal. He hadn’t read about that in any of the books.
--

And thanks luckat .

Diabolus

Brill..
Continue..

CuLT

A bit of a longer update.
Also, um, reader discretion advised. (no kids).
-
This time there was no question. He know nobody else had noticed anything, nobody that is, but the solitary silhouette. A gulf had been breached, he felt. A vast distance – space, time... psychological? – had been traversed for a few moments. A connection had been made. It was interesting; and considerably puzzling.
Then it occurred to him; where did this fit in the mesh? Was it past, present, future?
No. He couldn’t tell. The best thing he could do would be to file it as “abstract”, but many things fit into abstract; dreams, alcohol and drug induced hallucinations, sickness induced hallucinations, esoteric philosophy; it would be best to create a new subsection for it, Incongruous Fragment Psychology. Here he could store all forms of strange, disjointed memories and experiences.
He had only recently come to understand that there were probably few people in the world who had his mental ability. The psychology book informed him that a perfect photographic memory was rare and he had deduced that since his memory bore little resemblance to this comparatively unsystematic form of memory, that he was a rare phenomenon. Perhaps unique. There was no mention of his particular mind form.
He felt no compulsion to announce this to the world, or his friends.
Nor now did he feel any compulsion to relate his unusual experience to anyone. He had to analyse it. Understand it. Dismantle it and reassemble it into a coherent structure, before he proclaimed his own complete and irrefutable insanity.
That was one of the solutions to the equation which troubled him. The equation was his mental ability and state, combined with his perceived experiences; totalling up to an answer. He didn’t particularly like entertaining the thought that he was insane, but it was one of the few answers that resolved the equation completely.
He had yet to find records of someone matching his physical description escaping from a mental asylum; but that proved little more than that his “guardians” had not publicised his escape to any great extent. Anyway, that was all conjecture. He dealt with facts. He could only deal with facts; postulation and guesswork would degrade his memory, making the solving of his predicament more difficult.
The first thing to do was start off with a statement that would allow him to solve this equation along a specific thought train: He was not insane. A significant presumption, he realized, but a necessary one none-the-less.
He now ran through his thoughts just before he heard the cry. He had been going over his particularly peculiar psychological conundrum – then he heard the cry. No, that wasn’t it entirely; something else had happened, something very strange indeed. It had only existed for a fraction of a second, but it had been there nevertheless; the sensation of falling.
For a few microseconds he had been in complete freefall.

Now he was excited. He hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time, but now that he thought about it, the exact same thing had happened just before the spectral realm had been revealed to him. What did it mean?
His mind was electrified with thought, it buzzed with information, hypothesising and disposing of ideas within a second, comparing, analysing, deliberating.
He began to walk back towards his friends as he pondered the situation. He was mulling over some of the more likely possibilities when he felt a niggling necessity to be aware of how much time had passed since he had heard the girl’s cry. He checked his watch.
Three minutes. He didn’t think it was odd, yet there had been an urgency behind the notion. Why?
He reached his friends. One of the guys turned to him,
“What’s up man? You look a little dazed.”
“I... I just haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately” came the thoughtful response.
“Cloud cuckoo land, my man, what’s on your mind?” asked the now attentive philosophy student.
“Nothing, really, just trying to remember something that could be important”, my entire life, he thought. “Listen, I have to head back to the apartment, I need to look something up, see you guys later, ok?”
He received a reproachful look from John; John wasn’t a big fan of these brief, functional chats.
“Sure” he sighed.
“Ok, see you” said David absent-mindedly; he was absorbed in a book.
“Bye-bye!” said Kathy, lightly.
“Talk to ya later hun”. That was Ashley. She had taken to calling him “hun” recently. She was nice, he liked her.
He turned away, the warm sun shining on his back, and started back towards the apartment; it was on the College campus, which was useful.
It meant he didn’t have to go far for the short breaks he took for sleep between his studying. He glanced at his watch, nearly eight minutes.
Suddenly a brilliant flash of light enveloped him. He heard screams, so many screams.
The world was very bright; colours danced around his vision, a kaleidoscope eclipsed everything for a few seconds. Those that had been facing the sun had had their retinas completely burned, they were totally blind.
The lucky – or unlucky – people who still had the power of sight were presented with the unequivocal horror that was the exact depiction of the apocalypse.
People lay on the ground screaming, bleeding from their eye sockets; others ran frantically, slamming into walls and tripping over curbs and debris in the streets.
Cars careered into each other and milled down pedestrians as the incapacitated drivers lost control of reason.
The sky had darkened.
And then he knew. He knew what had happened. He knew why he had seen the phantoms, knew what had happened to him. He knew who the girl on the ground was.
Then, he fell.
--

There is more, but I probably won't be able to post it until Friday. Thanks for reading .

Diabolus

Oh my god,

Im still stuck in my seat.. Please post before then! This adds so much to my increasingly peculiar picture in my head. He fell! FFS! Its the ending from the Fellowship of the ring... the unexpected "To Be Continued..."

Yours Creatively,
Diab

Ivan

Excellent so far. Please finish it soon

I wish people would only post stuff when its completely finished, the suspense is killing me

Moonbeam

Looking forward to readng the ending:)

CuLT

I'm working on something else at the moment, so here's the conclusion to my uncreatively titled "The Dark" : -

He stirred, rousing his mind to consciousness. The warm glow surrounding him turned sharply into a harsh white light as he opened his eyes. That sensation of falling before unconsciousness...
He was lying on his back. Dazedly, he propped himself up onto his elbows, wobbled, then gazed around in confusion.
White. Everything was white. The walls, the floor… in fact, the walls and the floor were everything. The padded surface which he lay on was comfortable, soft. Someone was watching him. He could feel it. There was a familiar tingling on the base of his neck; this sensation he knew.
The girl was watching him from a small circular window embedded in what appeared to be a door of some kind. He stared at her, blinking; that girl… the steps… it was her!
He knew her. Couldn’t quite place her, though. Damn, who was she?
The girl looked in at him sadly and put her hand against the glass. He stood. He walked over to the glass and placed his hand opposite hers. There were tears in her eyes; “no baby, don’t cry! I’m still here!” he thought, suddenly mournful.
Tracy drew away from the window, drying her eyes. She looked earnestly into the Doctors eyes,
“Will he ever remember me?” she asked, almost pleadingly.
“I’m afraid that’s completely up to him” the doctor told her, trying to be sympathetic, “it seems that he just can’t forgive himself; he’s taking the burden of that entire city on his own shoulders, he won’t let us relieve it.”
“All those souls…” Tracy murmured, distantly. “Let me explain it to him, I love him and he loves me.”
The Doctor looked at her, she was so utterly miserable when she visited him; it had to be hard to be her, the wife of one of the world’s most brilliant men – he simply hadn’t been able to cope mentally with the strain: the realization that his dream creation, harnessing the power of nuclear fission, had been put to such ghastly, genocidal use.
Hundreds of thousands had been vaporised in the apocalypse which followed Hiroshima, and he had borne all their deaths.
The patient profile had all the symptoms neatly summarised,
Self-induced amnesia, flashbacks, recurring nightmares of what he knew his bomb had done. There was also mention of the patient’s hallucination of a ghostly apparition raising an accusing hand at him. He was caught in a loop; he seemed to attempt recovery, but as soon as he experienced the blast and regained his identity, he buried his memories and demons once more under a veil of darkness, an unending cycle of self inflicted anguish.
The gods could do no worse.

--
Thanks for the replies, all positive (thank god )
I'll be posting a new one soon. Thanks for reading.

(incidentally, I hope this all fits together for people reading it)

Ivan

Nice job.

ll=llannah

keep writing, excellent stuff



~ Hannah

CuLT

Great! Thanks, glad you enjoyed it .

Hopefully what I write in future will be good enough to be recieved as well.

DriftingRain

Ohhhhh Cult.....Nice Job!!!!

This was great! Soooo full of suspence and it was GREAT!!!! I repete myself again!!!


~DR~