The Scream

The Scream

A Short Story by C. M. Oguz

          The massive silhouette loomed ahead of me, like a monolith of darkness, blocking the murky skyline. It was known as the Citadel: a towering police-structure of security and surveillance, forever keeping the ground level down in its place. Rain drops were entering small cracks and dents in the antiseptic, metal sheets that covered the underside of the upper deck carriage-way, only to drip on me. The downpour must have been stronger than usual today. I could feel it corroding the plating along my cranial augments, cheap side-alley implants I had plundered from discarded upper-level material. A corrosive residue was dripping down my nose. I had to shelter, fast.

I felt a ball of ice building inside of me, a perfect crystalline sphere of despair, slowly navigating up the axial sensors along my neck. As the ice dissipated the heat of panic started building up exponentially. My heart was racing, I could hear its ominous thumping, deep down, as dilated blood vessels fluttered behind my ears. Without much thought I dashed through the metallic drizzle towards a large neon signpost, pried the nearby door agape, and found myself in a derelict old bar. I was immediately hit by a damp, warm smell reminiscent of lower rot. The smell of home.

Even though I recognized nothing, my surroundings felt eerily familiar. I approached the bar like an eldritch hopper fleeing a long-lost tale, weary and beady-eyed. My hand kept twitching, visibly and without relent.

An elderly, handsome looking man turned around. His hair was plastered back with Bel-Fusion, that ultra-powerful gel that revolutionaries loved smearing all over their head. And I knew it was fake hair. We all knew.

“Foster? Haven’t seen you in a while.” He said, as his eyes sunk deep into mine and lingered there for a few seconds less than infinity. I noticed his face looked awfully bashed around, likely from a recent elevator skirmish. This was red territory after all.

I realized that my memory must be failing me again, for as the man continued speaking I slowly began recognizing him. My SNR port must have got damaged outside, probably causing a synaptic delay in sensory processing. I needed to get that shit fixed, ASAP. It was dangerous.

“Hey, Kevin.” I said, finally registering his name. “You know what the fuck is going on with the weather?”

He paused for a moment as his internal blinker lit up like a rainbow. He obviously felt quite strongly about the situation and I’d struck a vein.

“They say one of the large sulfuric acid vats in L2-C5 ruptured due to an ‘engineering flaw’, somehow making it much worse than usual.” He said, with a mocking tone and skeptical laugh.

“But, you know, it’s clearly just some ploy to reverse the SNOX regulations. Damn corporate vampires…”

I had, of course, heard about the SNOX regulations, a set of laws on electrical plants to limit sulfur dioxide emissions, as the recent increase in acid rain was leading to more and more ‘illegal’ immigration attempts from ground-level to the uppers, where the privileged lived in seclusion, where they got to see shades of color that we lowers could scarcely dream of: light blue skies, white clouds, green foliage, bright sunshine… I began drifting.

“Could you wait just a second.” Kevin suddenly exclaimed, as a young woman pulled up a stool a couple of spots to my right.

Feeling uneasy as the woman smiled at me, I plunged my hands into my pockets, as if I was going to do that anyway. I waited for the circuit delay in my sensory input to register, hoping that I did not actually know her from somewhere, as I had not smiled back.

After a few seconds of nothing registering, I felt my mind unclench. But I had this pressing feeling that I had something very important to do, like a pressure ulcer throbbing against the cobwebs in my head.

“So, you were saying?” Kevin’s voice startled my reflective stupor away.

“I don’t know, can’t remember.” I said as I didn’t know what I was saying or doing. “Say, what happened to your face?”

“Trust me you don’t want to hear the story behind that…” Kevin beamed, in a tone louder than was necessary, glancing towards the woman with a slimy grin.

Just then a young man entered the bar, stealing his attention again.

“Won’t be a second.”

The metal door slammed shut behind the newcomer, filling the air with the cold echo of steel against steel for a fleeting moment, conjuring a brief illusion of serenity like a small particle at the apex of vertical motion. I felt stiff; I just sat there in the ensuing silence waiting for Kevin to return…

“Are you new around here?”

A shiver went down my spine as warm air tickled my ear. I automatically swung around to be greeted by a pair of fascinatingly dark eyes, gazing at me with scintillating curiosity. Her face was uncomfortably close to mine, lips glistening in the half light.

“No, I’m old, about a decade old.” I said, basking in her crystalline voice. Her eyes looked beautiful, if it wasn’t for the fact that they were framed in a black smudge of colour, as dark as the rest of her attire.

“Then how come I haven’t seen you here before?” she whispered in the flicker of a memory, as neon lights washed over her glass-like cheeks in harmony with the rotating disco ball. She stood up and slid her stool closer to mine.

I felt devoid of the capacity to answer. I’d been in the red district plenty of times before – she was the new one, I thought, indignantly but without excitation.

She crossed her legs to assume a more comfortable position and placed her right elbow on the bar, still waiting for a response. Her movement seemed to dictate my attention, I found myself gazing at the huge metal boots she had on. How could she even walk in such structures…?

“You’re awfully shy, aren’t you?”

Her voice shocked me back to reality, firing up an array of receptors along my spinal cord, like receding blinkers. I realized I had completely forgotten what she’d asked. Was it important?

“Sorry… I must’ve blanked out for a second there.” I said, feeling my life energy ebb away as the woman appeared to be placing a heavy demand on my already lagging processing system. Despite her pleasant composure, I wanted her gone. I needed her gone.

“Oh, that’s fine, happens to me all the time.” She said, sitting up straight, as if suddenly uncomfortable. She grabbed her ponytail and let it loose. Long black hair draped down her half bare shoulders, concealing them. She smiled at my obvious fascination. I felt the radiation in my blood churn; years old scars began aching anew. 

“Leave me alone” I managed to say, struggling not to look at her anymore, but seeing her nonetheless. She was too imposing not to see, like the sun. Her menacing allure terrified me, and I felt really, really tired.

To my surprise she left instantly, without a single word, stomping across the tiled floor, likely annoyed by my insectile fear of her glassy radiance.

But after blinking a few times, I noticed, to my astonishment, that she was, in fact, still sitting right beside me.

Was I going mad? The noise of her boots thudding against the floor, leaving me behind, echoed inside my head. But she was still here… apparently. Was I dying? I’d never died before, I didn’t know how it should feel.

I noticed her lips were moving, or squirming. Was she talking to me? An eerie silence bathed in the moldy air as I listened to my inner anguish thumping from within, forcibly caged in like a feral beast waiting to erupt.

I interrupted her, I hadn’t heard a word she’d said anyway. I was looking through her, rather than at her, for some reason. But I could not focus on her at all, however hard I tried. It felt like my eyes were grasping at a gossamer filament in human outline, a shadow alive only in the shutter-speed of my memory.

“How exactly is it?” I said, trying to ignore my visual field eroding away. I had put no conscious thought into formulating this inquiry.

“How’s what?”

Finally, I could hear her. She looked puzzled, head tilted slightly to one side, seemingly lost at my question.

“After we die.”

She paused for a moment.

“However you want it to be.”

Her statement failed to augment my morale. I sat there on that uncomfortable stool staring blankly at her phantom visage. I surmised that if I died, I would be nothing… but, somehow that didn’t sound right. There would be no “I” to be nothing. I wouldn’t be. The thought scared me; I felt bound to the body I was within.

Exiting the void of thoughts that gnawed at my brain, I noticed the woman who still seemed to be sitting next to me, gazing at me in fascination. But as I looked more carefully, to my horror, I noticed that her eyes were slowly running down her face, like black yolk, terrified of their sockets. Two perfectly black spheres remained where her eyes used to be, pulsing in vacuous rhythm, creating a mismatch with the dark red smile spanning her lower face. I felt sick.

Assuming multiple system failures, I tried to retain sanity through disbelief. But it didn’t really work. A murky haze began engulfing my peripheral vision, further tunnelling my attention towards this spectre of formless horror.

Her mouth is too big, I thought in disbelief, before realizing that I could actually see her entire throat, agape like a maw of darkness. A terrifying crimson tunnel leading into my future. It looked raw and ravenous, serrated with red hooks and fleshy appendages, squirming in slow-motion.

I began shaking in fear.

“You’re the devil!”

I quickly made the sign of A.N.T. in utter desperation, before yelling “BEGONE!” as loud as I could.

But my fright only seemed to echo and tumble down her throat, preparing her quivering shute for my physical form.

Above the encroaching mouth, I could see nothing except for two tiny black dots that I assumed were her monocolored pupils, sunken with hunger. A hunger forged beyond this world and unsatiated for aeons.

“I’m not the devil, silly.” Her putrescent maw creaked with an unusually shrill voice, pulses of necrotic bile dripping from its beautifully enlarged rim.

“Well than what the fu..“

“I’m HIS throat.” She screamed from beyond the gates of darkness in such a horrifyingly guttural roar that it drowned out my own voice before I could even complete the sentence.

Her lips glistened and glistened, further and further apart from one another. She was ravenous with hunger, I could tell. I began squirming to block her approach. My face felt moist. I closed my eyes.

..

Everything around me was spinning, the thudding noise in my head stopped at a very specific note, and began ascending in pitch until it was a shrill screech penetrating my brain. I began twisting around in pain.

“What’s going on!” I screamed with all the energy I had left, acknowledging the misery that had boiled up from inside me. Madness beckoned me like a dark angel, whispering my name.

I finally exited my own shell and greeted her, completely and without any barriers. Her raw form collided with mine, absolutely unobstructed.

“Mr. Foster, all will end soon, just relax.” 

The voice seemed to be seeping through the walls, hovering in the air, booming through my brain.

“Just give me an explanation.” I said, in a barely audible voice.

“You’re not, what in common language is called, alive.”

A horrible sense of dejavu struck me very briefly, as I finally realized where the voice was coming from, it was inside my head. I was completely lost, distress rolled down my pale cheeks.

 “Someone who doesn’t exist cannot be lost Mr. Foster.”  The voice was reading my mind.

“I’m here, I exist.” I yelled feeling so angry and confused that I knew I would run out of all sort of energy soon. The woman had completely disappeared; I groped around at the area she was a few seconds ago, nothing.

“Ah, Mr. Foster that’s what you think, but the thing is you’re not real. You’re a mere puppet in my consciousness.”

“And who the hell are you, may I ask?” I muttered to myself, unable to properly comprehend what was happening, everything around me was still spinning.

Bright colours of red, yellow and orange swirled around my vision, monochromatic hexagons of perfect shape, spiralling inwards. This visual matrix was accompanied by shrill screaming voices, ringing in my ears like an endless metallic resonance, as storms of static electricity raged behind my eyes, vibrating through my bones. Pronounced in this scarlet mist were the dark shadows that had begun hurling themselves at me, relentlessly.

“I’m your best friend… I’m you.”

Feeling sick I yelled “What?” as tears trickled down my cheeks, I began shivering, shaking vigorously… Looking through the small gap that opened in my vision, I noticed what looked like the silhouette of the woman I was just speaking to, dark like a shadow lost in time. But, the surroundings were my own bathroom.

“You’re not me!” I yelled in chaotic fury, realizing in horror that my sensory network must’ve finally caught up to the synaptic delay it had been experiencing. My tear ducts seemed to rupture open as droplet after droplet of fluid glided down my pale cheeks. An agonizing pain began rippling up my spine, I felt something warm showering out of my neck.

Reality suddenly struck me, dispersing all confusion, as I gazed into the mirror, the mirror I shaved in every morning. I saw a man, an abomination of a man, with a razor stuck in his neck, shrivelled dark eyes, glassy pale skin, dying in front of me. The propulsion of pressurized blood exiting my jugular vein had created an arc of red across the mirror, its shape resembled a disturbing grin.

I fell in a heap on the floor. My nerve pulses grew weaker with each decelerating breath. I was disintegrating, the voice of death echoing in my ears, as a halo of deep red overtook my optic field.

“Good-bye Mr. Foster, we seem to have reached the end for both of us.”

That voice was the last I heard; the last whisper of psychosis. The putrid tubes of life finally spat out my frigid soul. My existence dispersed into the tiles of my bathroom floor as I died of blood-loss in my own bathroom.

What a mess I’d created.

My beautiful, raven-haired wife soon found my body, her beautiful mouth agape with shock.

Far, far away in some gossamer plane beyond existence, I wondered: How ever would she clean me out of that bathroom? My presence now filled the room more than it ever had while I was alive.

**

Cover Image: Chiaroscuro illustration by M. G. Kellermeyer