The Following - Part 9

            Hey everyone! I hope you're having a great week! As I said, this is the last part of The Following. It's a bit longer than previous ones but I didn't want to drag it out any more for you guys, and I'm looking to write some different stuff now. I've almost had enough of violence and blood for a while now. (Almost) So, with that in mind, I hope you enjoy the last bit of this story.

http://www.polyvore.com/bloody_butcher_knife_bloody_butcher/thing?id=11594980

             ‘Now, he’s told us his story – what’s your version of events?’ He seemed friendly enough, but I didn’t want to upset the old lady from downstairs by lying. I was also scared she’d hate me if I told the truth.

‘He knocked on the door and then he came in before I tod him he could and then we had a chat and then we had a fight.’

‘What was the chat about?

‘…His girlfriend’

‘What about her?’

‘I’m sure he told you.’

‘Yes, he said some things, but we wanted to hear it from you. What did he say about his girlfriend?’

‘That I’d been following her.’

‘Have you?’ I glanced sheepishly at the old lady next to me. She nodded her support, never ceasing to cleanse my wounds. I felt all the anger I’d ever felt being lifted from my soul as she wiped.

‘Go on, dear, it’s best to tell the truth. You’ll be respected much more if you do.’ I looked back at the policeman.

‘Yes.’ I muttered.

‘Why don’t you tell me about it? When did it start?’

‘I saw her at the train station and she looked really sad. I followed her to make sure she was going to be okay and she was. Then I kept seeing her around and making sure she was okay. Then I got used to going out when she did, and she didn’t seem to mind so I carried on.’

‘So she knew about this?’

‘Not exactly. Then one night I saw that the telly was flickering, so I climbed up to her balcony to watch it with her. I was nice to feel so close to her. I just wanted to be close to her.’

‘Did you ever approach her?’

‘No.’

‘Did she ever appear scared?’

‘She never noticed me.’

‘We’ll have to question her.’

‘That’s fine, I guess I’m going to prison anyway.’

‘It’s unlikely, especially if she was never fearful or apprehensive of any force. We’d recommend that you get some sort of therapy – this sort of behaviour is not healthy.’ I nodded at my knees. I felt like a child again. In a way, I felt like I was being rebuilt.

‘Are you kidding? He doesn’t get jail time?’ The intruder had a rekindled fire in his eyes and appeared to be steaming. I hated him. The policeman moved over to the guy and tried to calm him. The old lady finished cleaning my face and smiled at me.

‘How about a cup of tea?’ I smiled back, she was right, I did feel better after being cleansed. I felt stronger.

‘Actually, I think I’ll be fine now, thank you.’ I took the bowl from her lap and moved into the kitchen with it. She stood up, smiled at me and shuffled her way out of my apartment. I tipped the bloody water into the sink, enjoying the gurgling sound it made as the drain forced it down, choking on it. I looked up at him, I wished he’d choke on it.

I heard my neighbour from the floor above slam his front door, returning home from a tiring day at Burger King. His heavy footsteps resonated through my ceiling, making the lights flicker. The flickering caught something on the floor to my left and made it flash. I saw the knife and knew what I had to do; I had to kill him so I could have her to myself.

I took the broom from the corner and began to sweep the debris from the floor, making sure I took the knife with me. He looked towards me and his eyes widened.

‘Hey! No look at him! He has a knife he’s going to kill us!’ He was panting, I moved the broom over the knife and leant on it casually.

The largest policeman sighed. ‘I’m getting real sick of your tactics. Jordan, could you check that Mr Steadman doesn’t have a knife. Make it snappy - I wanna get outta here, my wife’s got a casserole cookin’’ The medium policeman walked over to me, his demeanour was cockier than the other two, I got the feeling he hadn’t been on the force long and still felt like he had some power. I shrugged at the man as he looked over the counter to the floor.

‘No knife, just wood splinters’ I bent down and took the dustpan and brush from the cupboard and began to sweep up the door fragments.

‘Okay, let’s get outta here. Come on.’ The largest policeman hauled my attacker from his chair and moved towards the door. I moved around the counter top and stood beside the open door. The smallest policeman went first – ‘Sorry about your door.’ He muttered, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. The largest policeman barged through the door after him, nodding to me and grunting something I couldn’t understand under his breath. It sounded like an agreement to the small one’s apology.

The intruder was being pushed along by ‘Jordan’, he was being difficult and as he was coming towards me he glared. I smiled at him as he was on the way past and plunged the knife into his gut. His eyes widened once again, this time fear overpowering the anger. I stared straight into his eyes as I twisted the knife, enjoying the pained grimace on his face. Jordan seemed oblivious to it, so pushed the man onwards, increasing his pain. I was still twisting, by now I was clenching my teeth and the policemen in the hall had started to turn. I pulled the blade back out and forced it into his neck. There were yells all around me and something warm was splashing over all of us.

My vision had started to blur and everything sounded as though I had cotton wool in them. I was no longer in control of my actions, or even my body. The rage had engulfed me, the way it always had. This time, it was different though – my heart was beating so fast that it frightened me, and I felt an intense pain in my right arm. I slumped to the floor beside my attacker, feeling my breaths becoming shorter and more desperate. I was vaguely aware of some shouting as my consciousness trickled away for the last time.

           Hope you liked it! That's been going on for something like three months now, so if you have any ideas for content you'd like to read about, I'm open to suggestions, so drop me a comment. I have no idea yet what Tuesday's review will be, so again, if you have any ideas or requests, comment on here, tweet me, all of that stuff! 

            Have a great weekend and thanks for reading! Laura

                                                                                      xoxoxox

Flood

            Well Hi! I don't remember the last time I posted, I just remember lying to you about how I was going to tell you all the things I'm crazy about. Anyway, I wrote this piece a while ago. We were told to write 'a horror story', and I didn't feel like writing about blood, so I took a different spin on the term 'horror story'. I tried to make it really sentimental, and it's actually really close to my heart because the story of the flood behind it is true. I have also been to the place where this happened countless times, and the local people still seem to be reeling from it, and are happy to tell you all about it. It's a small, seaside town in England called Lynmouth, in Devon.

The rain started an hour ago. I can hear the river rising, and from my chair, I can almost see the top of it. There are reports on the news that we’ve so far had about a months-worth of rain, and it is showing no signs of stopping. This seems so unreal. I look at the calendar, checking the date. 15^th of August, 1952. How can it rain so heavily in the middle of the summer?

                There is no-one outside, understandably. The atmosphere is dark; I don’t just mean the mood, I mean the actual air. I think if you caught some air from outside in a jar, and held it under a lamps, you’d see dark blue and grey swirling around inside.

                The sound of the water hitting the roof and the windows is deafening. I can’t hear the television anymore; I’m not sure I want to.

                I can hear something louder than the rain coming; a roaring, angry sound and it’s coming for all of us. I can hear what sounds like walls falling – almost exploding – I want to look out of my window and make sure the village is still intact, but I can’t move from my seat.

                In seconds, I’m glad I didn’t move from my seat; the river has fought its way out of it banks, and is raging through the village, pillaging. My front wall moved away from its foundations and exposes me to the elements. The wind punches me in the gut and throws my photos from the walls. Memories lay scattered on the floor, a flurry of rain is also brought in and speckles the broken glass.

                A tear rolls down my cheek. I look to my wife who is sitting in the armchair beside me, she places her hand in mine and squeezes her eyes shut, letting a tear roll down her wrinkled cheek, mirroring mine. I look at our hands, seeing in every wrinkle and little brown spot, all of the times we laughed, cried, sang. I notice how her wedding ring is still in pristine condition; it’s so true of her character.

                The water level is rising across our living room and I can hear another onslaught coming, from further upstream. I look to my wife again; her eyes are still closed and I think she’s praying. I raise her hand to my lips and kiss is gently, one last time.

                The river rushes into what is left of our home, taking the television, the coffee table, my wife and I.   It feels like a betrayal; the river we have lived next to for the last thirty years, and have loved all of our lives is ruining us. It saw our love blossom, saw our children born, raised, married. It’s taking away everything we ever had. It can take whatever it likes; I won’t let go of Mary.

                                                                                 ***

                The next morning, when the rain had stopped, the clean-up began. Thirty-nine buildings had been destroyed, leaving thirty-four people dead. A single policeman had driven for miles in the night to get to the nearest phone, calling in reinforcements. The people who survived came out of the buildings which still stood, and began to pick up the people and buildings who didn’t. It was thought that the little seaside town had experienced over three months of rain during the night, causing devastation which would be talked about, fearfully and speculatively, for over sixty years after the event. The damage can still be seen along parts of the river, with small front walls, and steps up the side of the bank; preserving the memory of the people who were lost in the flood. 

             Drop me a comment if you liked it, or if you didn't - I changed the settings a while ago so that anyone can post comments - not just people with google+ accounts, and I'd love to hear from you.

             

            Thanks for reading, Laura!

                                           xoxoxox

Silence

     Hey! Here's a horror-y piece I did last year. I should clarify that when I say 'last year' I mean the last academic year. Actually, this piece was for the Hallowe'en week, so it was last year in both senses...whatever. Anyhow, I hope you like it, I was, and am, pretty pleased with it.

‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown’ – H.P. Lovecraft.

  

He crouched, in absolute quietude. It was so deafening that he could barely form a thought. After a moment or so, he became aware of small sounds, which would usually be an irritant to him. The plink, plink, plink of a cheap, ill-fitted tap over a presumably cheap, ill-fitted sink. There was laughter from the room beyond, and the sound of cutlery being made to dance over bacon and china. In a way, this indication that human life was so close was a comfort to him; however they didn’t take away from the fact that at any second, he could be ripped from behind the iron curtain in which he had found sanctuary.

                The world went dark; it had been for quite some time when finally, he awoke; stiff from crouching for so long. He wasn’t sure what had roused him at first, and could not completely remember why he was there to begin with. Then he heard the wailing of hinges as heavy footsteps entered the room. He held his breath. Eyes wide; sweat beginning to escape his pores. His limbs shook violently, threatening to throw him off-balance, revealing his position to whoever belonged to the footsteps.

                The being stopped almost right outside the stall he was occupying and, evidently unaware that he shared the space with anyone else, began to whistle something which could have been anything, and was quite clearly out of tune.  The sound was comforting to him, aside from being almost intolerable to the ear. His lungs released the stale air from within themselves, grateful for the fresh oxygen which was now filling them. The whistling stopped, The gentleman outside his dingy asylum zipped up his trousers and exited. Not bothering to wash his hands.

                He breathed a second sigh of relief, he was alone again, or so he thought. He took a moment to survey his surroundings. The room wasn’t well lit, mostly due to the fact that he was sitting inside a small cubicle in a dark corner; the whole bathroom had one broken bulb, one flickering bulb, and one dim bulb. The tiles landscaping the walls were at one time white, however they were now a murky colour somewhere between grey and egg-shell blue. The floor wasn’t any colour he’d ever seen before, but more an amalgamation of white, yellow, brown and most disturbingly of all; red.

                He began to relax a little bit, fidgeting to try and make his position more comfortable. That’s when I decided to alert him to my presence. I could tell he wasn’t expecting it at all, after all, I don’t make much of an entrance, and I can remain in the same position for hours, blending in with the surroundings, appearing as only a ripple in the light or a shadow in the darkness; sometimes people do a double-take, and on the second glance they scrutinise my general area as if they expect me to wave. As I dropped I gained substance, I landed on him with quite some weight to me, I felt him become rigid, felt his muscles tighten and his blood run cold. All the hairs on his body stood to attention and he tried to scream. The scream failed and all he managed was a squeaky whimper, and a tiny amount of urine escaped his bladder. He knew what to expect; we’d made our feelings clear to him from the start. We don’t do favours for free. He should have known that he can’t escape us; we see all, move through time and space, move through walls and mountains, pass through the core of the earth and feel no pain. We can tear a man limb from limb, and never feel remorse. So this is what I planned to do: take him out into the main part of the bathroom in which he’d taken refuge, and tear him apart, piece by piece, as if he were a simple child’s toy.

                ‘Please! Please, no!’ he wailed, as if it were going to help. I merely sneered in reply. His eyes were bulging now; I could see the terror mounting and feel it too, coming from his very heart, his veins, his sweat. He panted panicked pleas, apologies and empty promises. It was too late for all that. I began bounding his body to the air around him; stretched him out like the Vitruvian Man, he struggled against my invisible bonds, looking to his left arm, then his right, eyes ballooning as he felt my ropes boring into his wrists; seeing them draw blood even, but not actually witnessing them do the work.

                I was enjoying this. I fed off of his fear, turning it into pure ecstasy. He writhed and wriggled, trying to free himself from the trap I was creating just for him. I summoned some of my fiercest and hungriest demons. They gnashed their jaws at him, salivating. He howled, the way that humans so often do. Nobody in the room yonder heard a thing, nobody came to his aid; they were all too busy pouring bitter coffee into their already over-stuffed bellies.

                 I began by tearing open his shirt, revealing his fast inflating and deflating chest. Then I made small lesions, allowing his blood to escape, driving my minions to distraction, they began giggling with the anticipation of sinking their teeth into fresh human meat. I then began breaking the bones in his fingers, turning them to grit; I continued this all the way up his arms, through his chest and down his legs. I left his head alone, I wanted him to see this, actually feel and bear witness to the consequences of his betrayal. He vociferated his pain, as if it would make a difference. He was becoming desperate now, trying anything to make me stop. I considered it for a moment; leaving him there on the floor of the dirty bathroom, all his bones crushed to dust and bleeding from his bare torso, for some innocent person to find him, and probably vomit, ending up mentally scarred for the rest of their life. But I didn’t have any desire to upset innocent humans, so I dropped him from his shackles, giving my followers the signal that they were to begin their feast.

                They tore him limb from limb, spraying blood across the bathroom floor, intestines and bone dust leaked out, he screamed the entire time. Eventually, there was silence; apart from the plink, plink, plink of an ill-fitted tap, over a very ill-fitted sink.

            Hope you liked it! I may be a bit more absent than normal for a while; deadlines and whatnot, you know how it is.

             If I don't post between now and Christmas, MERRY CHRISTMAS GUYS! And happy New Year!

                                 Thanks for reading, Laura

                                                                xoxoxoxox

http://www.free4down.net/search/christmas-animals/

Blood

              Hey, everyone. I say everyone, I doubt anyone would wait this long for a new blog post. Let me apologise, first of all, for my absence. I've juggling the start of my 2nd year at university, as well as my birthday, and various other things. I also lost my USB stick, which had everything on it, so it's lucky I took a back up. 

              Without further ado, this was a piece  I wrote in my first year of Uni. I think the assignment that week was to write specifically about a colour. So I chose red, because of its many and varied connotations. (Anger, love, passion, aggression, prosperity (in India), power, etc.) 

                

                                                                 Blood.

Red; The colour of love, anger or passion. I would say that when I think of my mummy, I see red. Red because she loved me, red because she was a vibrant, confident and happy woman and red because it was the last colour I ever saw surrounding her; on the floor, ceiling, and everything in between. It drenched her clothes, caked her beautiful, pale, clear skin, when I found her it was mostly dry and her skin was already a greyish colour. The coroner said she’d been dead for at least 8 hours.

I was eight when I found my mummy lying dead in our kitchen. I’d been at a sleepover, wearing red pyjamas, and I got a lift home from one of the other boys’ mothers. She drove a red car. I should have known something terrible was going to happen that day, because of all the red, almost like every time the boy in ‘The Sixth Sense’ sees a dead person, there’s something red in the picture.

I let myself in, mummy keeps a key under the flower pot. I was wearing my denim dungarees and my favourite red T-shirt, the house was submerged in an eerie silence. Nothing has ever been as quiet to me as my childhood home when there was no sound of my mother singing in the kitchen.

‘Mummy?’ I waited for a reply. Perhaps she was in the garden. I dropped my red and black back pack at the foot of the stairs and kicked off my shoes. My feet made no sound as I moved forwards towards the living room, adding still to the deafening silence which should have been serene, but terrified me intensely.

I don’t remember our house having any colour inside it. In my head, it’s like a drawing somebody has done but not coloured in, the walls are white, the floor is white, the furniture and the ornaments are white. Perhaps because the red was so vivid that all other colours faded into oblivion.

It wasn’t the red I noticed first, though it should have been, it was the way her hair had fallen. It was as if she’d placed it herself, flowing around her shoulders and across the white floor tiles, slightly curled at the end, the way it always was. She didn’t have to ever do much to make herself look pretty, her lips were a beautiful colour, somewhere between rose and coral, and her cheeks were naturally dusted with the same shades. I remember people saying she was ‘a real English rose’.

I knelt down beside her, not knowing what to do. I did all the things she’d do for me when I was sick, so I put a damp flannel on her forehead and held her hand as I read her a story about ‘Whinnie the Pooh’ after a while, I thought that perhaps I should go and tell my neighbour that mummy wasn’t very well, and see if she could do something. I went and knocked at Mrs Hodge’s house, she lived next door and she and mummy used to drink cups of tea and laugh together.

I don’t really remember what Mrs Hodge looked like, except that she was shorter and tubbier than mummy. She had rosy cheeks all the time too, as if she’d been running up and down the stairs. And I remember her smiling. But she didn’t smile on that day, she screamed. Her scream scared me, but it alerted me to the fact that something was really, really wrong, and mummy probably wasn’t going to wake up and cuddle me anymore.

Mrs Hodge made a phone call, she sounded frantic, but at the same time she was trying to stay calm so that the person on the other end could understand what she was saying. The time between her hanging up the phone and there being a knock on the door seemed like hours; neither of us said anything, Mrs Hodge stared at the floor in what I think might have been disbelief, and I looked at her, wondering why she thought making a phone call was a good idea when the kitchen and mummy were all messy.

Eventually lots of people knocked on the door and all came in at once. Some of them went into the kitchen; two of them sat Mrs Hodge down and spoke to her quietly, offering her tissues. One of them came over to me.

‘Hey, champ, my name is Robert, can you tell me your name?’ Robert had squatted in front of me so that I didn’t have to look up at him. He had a kind face; dark hair, dark eyes, smooth looking skin. He smelt like coffee.

‘James’ I replied, meekly. Robert smiled, still looking concerned.

‘So, James, why don’t you tell me all about your day today?’ he crossed his legs and sat in front of me, and listened to everything I had to say. He wrote some of it down so that he could use it later on, he said.

It was dark by the time all the people left, they cleaned the kitchen after they’d taken lots of pictures of everything. They put mummy into a black bag on a table with wheels and put her into the back of one of the vans that they’d come to my house in. I was about to go back inside, because I thought it was probably nearly my bed time, but one of the policemen took me by the hand and said i couldn’t stay in the house by myself.

I don’t know where it was they took me that night; I never saw the outside of it. But it was cold, and everything seemed hard. I had to sit in a huge chair while the policeman told the lady behind the desk what had happened. After a while, another lady and a man in a white coat came out of a room, and invited me inside. They also talked to me for a long time and asked lots of questions; they weren’t nice like Robert.

I’m still not sure what this place is, but I’ve been here for twenty years. I wonder when they’ll let me go home…

 So, bit morbid. But the week before I wrote a comedic sci-fi piece, hence the polar difference. I'll put that one on soon! 

Thanks for reading! Laura 

                                 xoxoxoxox