Page 6 of Threads Of Madly Whispers

The door slams open with a violent thud, and I flinch as though the sound has struck me physically. A shudder crawls up my spine, a cold, slithering thing, and for a moment, I can not breathe. His footsteps are heavy, deliberate, and then a low mutter fills the air, low enough to send a shiver through the walls. His phone rings, shrill and demanding, and I hear him pick it up, his voice drifting in from the hall, smooth as poison, low as sin.

“Hello…” He pauses, his words hanging in the air for a beat. “Yes, it has been taken care of.”

His words slither through the thin walls like something unwanted, unwelcome. I try to close my ears, but it’s impossible. The sound seeps into my mind, staining my thoughts with every syllable, every breath. And then I remember it, the moans, soft and languid, that always seep from his room. His name, a name that tastes like bile, said in tones that make my stomach churn and burn my throat. The bile rises, hot and bitter, threatening to surge up and choke me, but it stays lodged there, as if it, too, knows that there’s noescaping his late night disrespect. When he brings a new stranger to his bed.

He grumbles as his voice grows louder, the sound of his steps dragging him closer, until I can feel him in my very bones. And then he stops. Right outside my door. My breath catches, frozen in my chest, and a chill coats my skin like ice. A terrible pause fills the air, and in that silence, I feel it. The vice, the horror, the cruel grip of terror that makes a home in my ribs. My nails bite into my palms until I feel the sting of the skin breaking, the blood rising, but it’s nothing. Nothing compared to the fear that claws at my heart.

I try to avoid him, to slip past him, to pretend he’s not here, but avoidance is a sunken thing. I do not just avoid him, I flee. I flee like a thief in the night, a stray animal avoiding the scent of death. Most days, I can bury him at the back of my mind, lock him away in a corner of my thoughts, but other days—other days, his mere existence fills me with trepidation. He is a cloud, dark, roiling, without even the faintest hint of light to break through. They say in darkness there is hope, but with him, there is only an abyss.

He is the kind of darkness that drowns everything.

I wish—I ache to believe—there’s something that could explain this, some sickness that has made me this way, some disease that could be cured. That the terror coursing through my veins could be something tangible, something I could name, something that could be treated. But no. No sickness could breed this kind of fear. No disease could carve this kind of terror into your soul. It’s him. He’s the parasite. He’s the illness, the darkness, the source of the nightmares that haunt me awake and asleep. The terror that leaves me breathless in the night. He is the reason for the tears that stain my cheeks, for the bruises that mar my skinlike ghosts, for the silence that fills the air when I can not scream anymore. And still, I stay, frozen in the web he’s spun around me.

And perhaps that is the greatest horror of all.

“Odessa,” he knocks

Please leave, please, please, please.

A second goes by — asecondI feel myself falling into his torturous hands, a second I feel trepidation swallowing me — asecondbefore he walks off to his bedroom and the door is slammed closed. Tears spill from my eyes, and my body shakes violently as images of that day splash behind my lids.

Remembering a train wreck feels similar to falling off acliff.

“Uncle Callum, what are you doing in my room?” my hands scurry to cover myself with the blanket. I’m not naked but I am not decent either. He stands in the dimly lit room, his eyes unwavering but his breathing is erratic. The lack of light provides less clarity on his appearance and dire in me. Goosebumps blight my flesh as the hairs on my skin stand.

I could not shake the feeling of eyes on me, but that was until I pulled my head up from my pillow and found him. Standing in the center of my bedroom with a haunting stare and the malodorous foul pong of booze wafting the air, and a fear so paralyzing gripped me. Twenty days had passed since the incident and, as of late, he has been acting strange.

With glares that boarded abhor and abhorrence, forced smiles and tight-lipped acknowledgements, I have been picking up the words my uncle hasn’t been gracious enough to offer me himself.

“Uncle Callum” I call out once more, and for some reason something feels immensely wrong—mightily wrong. Ipull my legs to my chest, my breathing becoming fitful with each second that passes us.

I feel like an animal about to be slaughtered. I feel like a goddamn chicken. You know how you can hypothetically feel the shoe before it drops, how the thunder sings, promising rain in its wake, how in those horror shows there is always a quiet moment before the uphill begins, or in that case before a monster pops out. Yeah, well, I feel it. I feel it so bad that I can almost taste the impending actions about to untangle.

I’m not sure if my mind slowed or my heart did, but something undoubtedly panicked and forgot how to function, because before I can comprehend what is right in front of me, Callum lunges at me.

A scream so loud breaks through the air. And everything happens so fast. One moment I am on the bed, and the next my back is hitting the cold floor, with my uncle on top of me. My hands and legs push and kick back as much as I can, but I am no match for his much larger form and from the position we are now in, I can see his bloodshot eyes and seething face.

Oh God.

Somehow, I manage to kick him off me and crawl to the door, but just before I can reach for the handle, I am gruesomely dragged back by the hair.

“Stop, please stop!,” I beg, as tears fall from the oceans in my eyes. We turn to a puddle of cries and kicking limbs. And try as I may, he still triumphs at stopping my efforts to get him off me.

“You wench! You’re just like your no good mother,” he spits!

Many bells ring in my mind. Is my uncle trying to rape me? Not in a million worlds did my mind ever blur this image of me on the floor wrestling with him to unhand me. But as soon as those thoughts burst through me, they arequickly hushed when a smack lands on my cheek that rattles my head.

My body turns to muddle as I try to understanding what just happened, but even then I do not get the moment to before another heart-wrenching pain sears through my other cheek, the sound so deafening that I think I might have lost my hearing.

The insufferable pain hits like a ton of bricks. Heavy and rough.

A sinister smile crawls onto his mouth.

“You are nothing in this world” His hands come down on to my face, arms and stomach unapologetically as his slaps turn to piteous fists. The stinging throb scalds through me like a scorching wildfire.

My eyelids grow heavy, with my vision softening as copper tastes on my tongue. Even then he doesn’t stop and as everything fades I think he just might kill me.

If only I knew that was one of many moments my uncle and I would share.

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