Trembling With Fear 10/01/2017

Shackles

Emily felt for the lock in the dark, scrambling for the deadbolt that barred her passage to safety.  Stillness permeated the air around her, the shape of it thick and stale inside the hallway.  She pulled hard against the door, wrestled with the knob.  It was the only sound in her ears, but there was something else there.  Something deeper churning at the space between her bones.  She could feel her soul tingling against it, buffeted by sights and sounds unseen.

The lock, the lock, the lock.  Where was it?  It should’ve been here, right above the knob.  She’d seen it when she walked in, she was certain.

Clenching the knob with her fist, Emily, placed her other palm flat on the wood above it.  She slid her hand straight up over the lacquered grain, feeling for the metal plate bolted into the heavy oak frame.  Up, up, up.  Empty.

Gone.  The lock was gone, vanished like moonlight at dawn.  But something held the door in place, something Emily couldn’t see or feel – something outside her senses, beyond this realm and into the next.

“Okay, okay, okay,” she whispered to herself.  “Calm down.  You need to focus.”

For the briefest moment, Emily reached out.  She Touched, rather than touched.  She Saw, rather than saw, and truly Looked upon the door for the first time.  The old wood was rife with symbols, ancient text far more convoluted the handful of wards that she’d gleaned from her grandmother’s old journals.  When she placed a hand against the door, those old words flared, arresting her momentum so that the door held firm.

Emily didn’t recognize the words, but she recognized the handwriting.  This was gran’s work, the work of a master.  That’s what they’d called gran, before old age took her memory, before she was too self-absorbed to keep Emily away from her old journals and out of the east wing of the manor.

The faintest whiff of sulfur caught her nose.  Emily glanced over her shoulder, down the long corridor running the length of the east wing.  Doors lined both sides of the hall, leading to other rooms, other horrors, other worlds.  At the far end, the series of wards she’d scrawled into the doorframe glistened with silvery light.  She stared.  That light rippled, stretched, warped, as something surged against it.

It was coming for her, something to wring her spirit from her frail body and crush it into oblivion.  That was the term she’d seen scrawled inside those weathered pages.  Oblivion.  Emptiness.  An inescapable prison beyond the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

A knock exploded against the opposite side of the door in front of her.  Emily yelped, jumped back, stumbled.  A shadow appeared beneath the door.

“Emily?” her grandmother shouted through the wood.  “Are you in there?”

“Yes, gran,” she managed.  “I can’t get the door open.  Can you open it from the other side?”

The knob twisted once, twice.  Then: “No.  What have you done to the door, child?  You come on out, now.  I’ve always told you that this part of the house is dangerous.”

“I know, gran.  I just—” she paused, thinking.  “I need a minute to find the lock.”

“There are no locks on this door!  I’d know if your grandfather put locks around here.”  Her voice tailed off while she rambled.  “Always told him that he shouldn’t be messing around this old house.  Bad for his health.  What was I saying?  Ah, Emily?  Are you still there?”

Down the hall, the wards blazed like a magnesium flare.  Wood groaned, struggling against the weight of a creature it had never been built to maintain.  Somewhere behind her, Emily heard a howl, wild and chilled like the storm winds rolling over distant hills.  Fervent.  Hungry.

It was coming for her.

“I’m here, gran.”  Tears wet her eyes.  “Just open the door, okay?”

Beneath the door, gran’s shadow faded as the old woman walked away, muttering to herself about better things to do than deal with teenagers.  As she listened to the old woman’s footfalls fade to silence, Emily blew out a shaking breath.

It would be on her any second now.  She was running out of time.

Emily closed her eyes, drawing from the power in her own blood, and ripped at the shackles that bound her spirit to her bones.  Her nails and eyes bled, the scent fresh in her nostrils, as she tore away each chain in sequence, one after another until her soul floated free.

As her fresh corpse crumpled to the floor, her panic eased.  A sense of calm enveloped her, cradled her.  With her dying breath, she hurled her frayed soul up, up, up, out of the hallway, out of the manor, up toward a thousand spirits coalescing like starlight in the skies above the earth.

Far below, far away, she heard the wards shatter.  The doorframe splintered, and a hulking terror surged down the hall toward her empty remains.  She watched those ghastly claws rend her body apart, splitting sinew and bone and blood as the nightmare sought to drag the barest fragments of her soul into endless oblivion.

Adrift among the stars, Emily knew peace.  That terror could not follow her into the next life.  She turned her mind from her past and prepared for long voyage between death and rebirth . . . when she found that she could go no further.

She looked down and noticed a thin chain, no larger than a thumbnail, dangling like a loose thread at the edge of her being.  Emily tried to reach for it, but a powerful tug along the length of the chain whipped her flat.  Far below, wrapped around a long claw steeped in blood, she spied the other end of her shackle.

Terror smiled back at her and began to reel her in.

END