Room without a View

www.goodaboom.com

I just sat here, thinking a short story might be a good idea for today in The Mighty Pen. I had a comment about one of my poems a while back comparing it, flatteringly, to the style of Poe, and I thought a Poe-inspired tale might be cool, so here it is, written in ten minutes, hot off the press, so to speak...

Room without a View

He watched the condensation forming on the filthy ceiling. Inexorably slowly, the moisture gathering together, re-shaping, forming, until it became a pendulous mass, depending from the roof, gradually surrendering to gravity’s sweet song.
It fell, down, down, growing, though the effect was illusory, as it continued unstoppable through the fetid air of the dimly-lit cellar. For the merest fraction of a second, a dull light shone on its surface…and then it exploded in a thousand tiny droplets on his forehead. He tried to force his tongue up to catch the precious moisture, but it always seemed to be beyond him. His tongue mocked him, immobile.

He had no idea how long he’d been here in this room. He felt numb. He felt…the slightest sense of being, like the brush of a feather or a lover’s tender kiss on the back of your neck, fleeting, ungraspable.

There was a sound in his ears, like a storm, like rushing water, unyielding. It seemed he’d always heard that sound. Then he heard it. Something else. The distant sound of a metal bolt being drawn. Footsteps on cold stone, The creaking of a rotten wooden door.
A face loomed over him, a sallow, corrupted face, wearing medical whites, no longer white, stained, bloodied, some bright red and fresh, others old, brown mute to the horrors they had seen.

The face drew close, smiling, rotting teeth like tombstones arranged in ghastly rows.
He spoke in a harsh whisper, like a death rattle.
“You lasted the longest.” He said, holding a grimy hand mirror up to his captive’s face.
The prisoner glanced at his reflection, wide-eyed and terrified, letting his gaze travel down his face…to the ragged edge of his throat, the hack-sawed remnants of his spine, muscle, fat and nerve endings protruding out from the bloody stump of his severed neck like a dead man’s fingers.
The man lifted the head and threw it into the flaming jaws of the incinerator in the corner, to the sound of a silent scream.

Copyright Kev Moore 2007