Category : Stories

Sub Category : Suspense/Mystery

    There was a hideous parasite lurking beneath her skin, worming through her congealed veins, scratching restlessly at her crumbling chest cavity. The hot, pulsing coal sucking the heat from her blue lips and color from cloudy, glazed eyes wasn't physical, but a feeling--the only feeling she could conjure since the curse had ripped away everything she once was.

     At the curse’s molten core, it was a hunger that’s fiery tips licked at the edges of her being in a tantrum of need and desire. It was death and life and yearned for something she hadn’t been able to reach in far too long…. 

    the phantom of the backroads gazed dreamily at her decomposing, translucent fingers in disgust and agony as she contemplated the hollow pit the curse had yawned open within her.

     She recalled the first passing of the plague tethering her to this hellish limbo; The light had caught the young man's cascading, golden locks as his hair flicked around like a whip in the escalating wind. what had been a light breeze picked up speed until it was howling in the phantom’s ears and racing across goosebumped flesh she couldn't feel--a storm brewing in the area between the two starkly different beings upon locking gazes. The man’s murky eyes rounded into muddy ponds frosted over with terror and he was struck paralyzed where he stood on the country backroad. “You’re bleeding.”, he stated in dumb shock as he balked incredulously.   

     The phantom involuntarily moved her stony lips while nearing him, a gesture she knew in the back of her mind should have produced some sort of sound beyond a wet gagging that nagged at the subtle sting in her throat, and he paled. “Do you need help?”, the golden-haired man asked; a naked whisper blanketed by the whistling storm. 

    She nodded slowly; hope battling desperation in a civil war battling within her knotted stomach. At that moment, she had finally recognized the parasite for what it was; an ache bruising her soul and wrapping her in an embrace of melancholy, a clawed beast ravaging her sanity; gut-wrenchingly powerful loneliness. She reached out an ash-painted arm and the bewildered man jerked away from her in an uncoordinated jerk of flailing limbs. The fire-ache-feeling sparked in her and grew, mutating into a starving need driving her forward until her icy fingers were curled around the man’s face and the world was drained of color; golden blond shimmering to white and pink lips turning as blue as her own. A weighted mass dropped to the ground while it’s translucent life source remained vertical and the body’s final twitch went unnoticed by it’s ghoulish spirit. The phantom of the backroads shuttered at the cool, welcome rush of electricity; the sensation of human contact for the first time in decades, and the need died down to it’s usual constant throb of heat. The now white-haired man crooked a befuddled eyebrow and turned his wet, empty eyes to the stretch of road before him. He shrugged off the phantom’s weightless hands and walked until he was only another blink of light suspended in air. The man’s corpse remained tethered by gravity to the cracked asphalt of the dually haunted road and the curse trailed after it’s new victim--the next phantom.