Cast Into the Lair

 

The initial excitement created by my first assignment for The Post’s “Paranormal Column” quickly waned as I lumbered up the crumbling stone steps leading to a Goliathan wrought-iron door. If ever there was a vampire, this was certainly the sort of place it might choose to die through it’s days.

A vampire? 

Ha! As if. So convinced, I rapped my knuckles with an unfelt boldness upon the door.

He is playing up for high drama as I enter, spotlighted amidst what has the reverberating feel of a cavernous room, the entire space pitch dark but for some unseen trick of light which projects upon him from some hidden place, as there is no visible beam shining from either above or below. The effect is as if this illumination emanates from within. It is a swell parlor trick. I must remember to ask him how it is done during the interview’s debriefing, though I am still too curiously, excitedly apprehensive to take time to jot down that tid-bit in my notes.

There is the shuttering of the door latch behind me and we are alone, although the impressed sensation is that there is no “we,” but only me.

His face is pale in the spectral glow, the features which should mark it’s humanity sublimely closed. It is the only part of him visible, his face, and it appears comfortably at rest, despite the unnerving silence of an obscurity which screams into my ears; a beat-less, breathless, muffled-under-dirt, grossly tenebrous silence concealed under utter blackness. I speak, hoping to move things along, as the theater of the whole thing has, almost comically, rendered my nerves. Almost… comically.

“Hello there, friend?” 

Nothing. 

“Did you remember that I was coming? Our interview?” 

His gleaming countenance lights the room no further than his features, which are thin, angular, and sharp. His sallowed cheeks and socketed eyes contrast with full, girlish lips which somehow appear rosy beside the other marbled and grave features. I remain restlessly still, waiting, trying to make out the room through the blackness. But as nothing transgresses, neither light nor life, I begin to edge around, feeling in front with a cautious toe while also extending the tell-tale hand of the blind, though my still functional eyes never leave the illuminated face, as I am no fool. When cast into the lion’s cage awareness must be the rule, not the exception. And as my hair has begun to raise, and my skin to crawl, there follows an instinctive perception that this oversized mausoleum is, indeed, some sort of lair. 

Strangely, as I venture ’round him, the attitude of his features remains fixated upon me as though his closed eyes were following my movements, similarly to the way the eyes in the portrait of a some staunchly Victorian prince might do. When I have taken three steps more around to his right his countenance is still unchanged. I cannot find a profile as I venture, though nothing on him appears to move; not feet, nor waist, nor neck, and all the while the sheen from his darkened cloak drapes as nervously still as the skim-coat of reflective veneer rests atop deep and windless water. This realization produces a chilling tingle on my spine, though no shudder… yet.

I want out. This is a stupid assignment. It was some trick got me here, just as it is some trick which keeps me. It is good magic, but I am over being it’s huckleberry. Gathering my nerve I turn and falter away from the face, my hands feeling their way, wanting either the door or a wall to give it bearings. Yet, having “him” out of sight behind me fills me with imaginative worry, which promptly evolves from anxiety to a panic-like state which hurries and scurries me mouse-like hither and thither, and I daren’t look back for fear I might never find the strength to look away again. 

Flush now with exercise the room has grown warm, almost hot. Perspiration tickles downward, rolling ’or my highly-strung nerves, and stinging my ever widening eyes. Damp now, the back of my neck’s skin feels the source of the warmth upon it; a puff of thermal air, perhaps? Or more likely a tepid, fetid breath!

It is the most peculiar thing, paralysis. I could think well and good enough, but some form of shock overcame me, locking me in place, medicating my brain with the endocrines and adrenalines which would lessen the pain of… of what?

There came then to my perception the lowest rumble, as low as the rumble of a nearby sleeping elephant, or some other giant thing, waking. The distress caused from turning was immense, painful even, but I must. I must see. I must, I must, I must! But the necessary muscles resisted. I felt them ripping and tearing as I forced them, screaming for me to desist, but some hidden, secreted will pushed them ever so purposefully, and ever so slowly, until ever so dutifully my eyes found him again.

The light which emanated from his visage had fully mustered, withdrawing itself into his now opened eyes, those eyes apparently requiring every molecule of that lucent energy. Like Kipling’s wolves those “Jungle Book” eyes peered out from the darkness; slanted green, and hideous. Only the eyes though, only those bridges to a hungry and unfulfillable soul, if not an evil one. But no, they seemed only hungry, but what really is the difference between ravenous and malicious, pray tell?

The eyes slithered about the darkness in a harrowing tango, closing here and opening there, luminescent fairies of death sprinkling the air with sulfer and brimstone. I wondered that it was just a short hour before that I had been drinking coffee, bemused by this day’s seemingly infantile assignment. There is nothing amusing now, though. “The Post” has gone too far.

I began to pray. 

How I did pray that this was some trick, some sort of cruel hazing that all young journalists at The Post must endure. Perhaps at the end of the day my co-workers and I would drink our beers at “O’Malley’s on Main” and laugh at how I had scurried about so upon trembling knees. It might happen that one day I would be able sit and chuckle knowingly as some other arrogantly young reporter received his come-uppance, but not now. Now the eyes danced, hypnotically drawing me in, while the lair breathed it’s warm breath upon what was now trembling skin.

And so it was that I awaited the end, the mouse frozen before the cat, praying, hoping against hope, wishing myself far away, but…

My career as a journalist was regrettably short lived, though tomorrow my unfortunate story will swell the public’s sympathy and esteem for my employer when my first and final byline becomes “The Savannah Post’s” only Pulitzer winning headline… and at what small a cost came their reward?