Chapter 3 The Slithering Voice
1036 Words
"No one truly understands this world,
for no one has seen its essence.
We are forever blinded by perception,
trapped in the carefully laid snares of 'truth,'
clinging to faith,
speculating about the existence of 'gods.'
In the narrow crevices of time,
I've felt it—with visceral certainty—
that for one fleeting moment,
I am the world,
yet the world... was never me."
The keyboard clacked as Caleb finished typing. His fingers froze mid-air as his eyes glazed over. The study—once familiar—now felt alien. Dark shadows pulsed from the corners like living things, and from their depths came a sound—
Schlick-schlick. A wet, gurgling dissonance, part dying whimper, part drunken slur. Thick with unnatural weight, as if the speaker's mouth overflowed with viscous saliva. Each syllable oozed, sticky and foul.
The moment it hit his ears, Caleb's body locked up. He jerked upright like a puppet yanked by invisible strings. His limbs twisted violently—elbows bending backward, fingers splaying at impossible angles. His face contorted into a grotesque grimace, his body resembling a lightning-struck tree with limbs splayed at unnatural angles.
The slithering voice swelled, a tidal wave of sound gluing him in place. Had his mind still been his own, he'd have fled. But now, his thoughts scraped empty—a hollow vessel—he stood paralyzed. Only those mucous-like whispers remained, worming deeper into his skull with each repetition.
And still it came—each pulse peeling away another strip of his consciousness. He tried to claw at his ears, but his hands refused to obey. The voice wasn't just heard—it infested him, squirming through every neuron. No escaping its tendrils. No shutting it out.
Time warped and stretched endlessly before Caleb's convulsions finally ceased. His jaw unhinged as he crammed fingers down his throat, retching violently—the sole proof he hadn't completely surrendered. Though his body rebelled, he kept digging until a tidal wave of nausea hit. With one final heave, stomach acid splattered the floor, followed by a dark, pulsing mass that oozed from his throat like living tar.
Caleb exhaled as if freed from chains, yet his eyes stayed glazed and hollow. He ignored the twitching thing on the floor, collapsing back into his chair. His fingers erupted across the keyboard in a demonic frenzy, birthing a storm of characters—some recognizable, others twisted into eldritch glyphs that squirmed on the screen.
Hundreds of thousands of symbols vomited forth in minutes. When the final keystroke landed, his life force seemed to evacuate his body. Skin shriveled like mummified parchment, hair became straw, and the veins in his eyes throbbed like live wires beneath glass.
He attempted to rise, but his atrophied legs betrayed him. The chair shot backward, sending him sprawling across the floor. Yet as the whispering darkness swelled louder, some unholy vigor seized him. And yet—staggering like a marionette with severed strings, he lurched toward the bedroom.
The hallway beyond had become a living nightmare. Seething shadows that had metastasized from the corners now devoured all light, stretching the short passage into a bottomless void. The air itself dripped with that same guttural murmuring—thick as congealing blood, clinging like a second skin, each wet syllable slavering against his eardrums.
Caleb lurched forward like a man possessed, plodding through darkness that stretched like an Olympic track before the bedroom door materialized from the void. His skeletal fingers trembled toward the knob—when a baby's piercing wail sliced through the shadows. For one crystalline moment, he froze, awareness flickering behind his bloodshot eyes.
Then the honey-thick whispers came slithering back, smothering the infant's cries. Caleb's face went slack again, empty as a gutted puppet. The door creaked open to reveal their sanctuary-turned-charnel house: the conjugal bed, and the crib where their eight-month-old slept.
The hinges' screech jolted his wife awake. She blinked up at the skeletal shadow looming over their bedsheets—and choked. The thing wearing her husband's face had cheeks hollowed like a famine victim's, eyes webbed with ruptured capillaries.
"Caleb?" Her whisper cracked. He stood motionless, hewn from the same cold marble as graveyard angels.
Ice flooded her veins. She scrambled backward just as his hands—still reeking of typewriter grease—lashed out. Steel-cable fingers locked around her throat with a sickening crunch of buckling cartilage.
Her manicured nails raked bloody trenches down his arms as black spots bloomed across her vision. Why? her bulging eyes screamed. But Caleb might as well have been a granite cliff weathering rain—her desperate blows didn't even register.
And so she learned true despair. Each weakening gasp carried fragments of wedding vows, snuffed out by the hands that once cradled their newborn.Within seconds, the poor woman's life slipped away in her husband's grasp, her eyes frozen wide—unblinking, wordlessly demanding answers from the man who'd loved her.
Caleb stared at his wife's slack-jawed corpse, those terror-filled eyes piercing his soul. A fractured sliver of his true self stirred beneath the darkness. Though his face remained eerily blank, thick, inky trails carved down his cheeks. In the hungry darkness, it was impossible to tell whether they were tears or blood.
The voice grew louder, more insistent, hammering three relentless words into his skull:
"Kill her."
"I already did!" Caleb howled mentally.
But the voice warped, morphing into a new command:
"Not enough."
"Not enough?! I killed my wife—isn't that enough?!" His psyche convulsed, body trembling violently as those inky streaks deepened. The voice surged like a tsunami crushing a paper boat, rendering his resistance pathetic.
Yet Caleb refused to surrender. He frantically gathered every splintered fragment of will, clinging to the last dying ember of clarity—anything to spare his family further horror.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the voice receded. The trembling stopped. Caleb stood motionless, an emptied vessel. The darkness itself held its breath, uncertain who'd won this battle.
Gently, he lowered his wife's body. With trembling fingers, he closed eyes that would never see again. Then, pivoting slowly, inexorably, he turned toward the crib where his infant daughter slept peacefully...
"*Still... not... enough...*"
- Writer
