Ashen Snow

CW: This story contains implications, themes, or mentions of domestic abuse, emotional distress, violence, manipulation, and murder.

Stained with time and filth, a pile of rags resembling the shape of a human hunches on the polluted floor. In silent despair, he sits, closed off to all - except poverty.

A narrow streak of daylight pierces the putrid darkness, splitting the small room into two distinct halves.

Within that golden arrow, if focused, the ragged old man may observe floating sprites of dust before him. Pulsating and dancing in the draughts which he had attempted to shield himself from.

Beyond the narrow ray, a darkness (darker than the surrounding clutter) had coalesced into a shape, distinct, yet shimmering at its edges.

“Is that you?” Croaked the cave of fabric.

This darkness responded to the man with a more resonating abyss. A vibrating hum pulsed through the dust speckled air, surging amid every empty space in the almost derelict apartment.

In his foetid cave of threadbare rags, the decrepit old man saw and felt these changes in the atmosphere. As the dust pulsed in uniform through the glimpse of daylight, he soon felt the energy affecting him, in the same way, within his fingertips and toes. Like static running up his nerve endings at a rhythmic pace. A giddiness overtook him for the first time in fifteen-years. The first time since the death of his heart.

He tried to compose himself. His heart had forgotten what emotion was like and he hadn’t expected it to reignite so instantaneously. Especially not using a Ouija board, that was once belonging to his grandchildren.

“I thought I’d never get to talk to you again,” he snivelled, "I’ve been in mourning for years. I don’t even remember my last words to you… Not the real ones. The ones I would’ve wanted to say…” The crusted, peppery face turned further downcast, in a maelstrom of self-inflicted grief.

As he tried to conjure up those crucial, forgotten words, he had likewise hoped to have conjured his wife back to him.

Instead, he conjured up an evilly fused darkness, which, whilst facing the mewling heap, felt a giddy glee all its own. It had been very lucky to find a lonely old mortal as the conjurer. People are so much more fun to play with when they’ll believe whatever you tell them.

This man would be fun to play with.

The mewling quietened, as he made an attempt to get himself together, before speaking further.

“I need your help, as always,” he attempted a grim grin of nostalgia, aimed at the pulsating darkness across from him. The beam of daylight, streaming across the room, remained the only thing separating the two beings.

“You know what I’ve lost, and only you can return it to me. Only you can return and mend my broken heart. Forgive me for my sins and violence. I beg you.”

Even now, his stomach churned at the idea of admitting his wickedness aloud; just in case those thousands of people surrounding him day and night - those thousands who did not and have never taken an interest in him - suddenly decided to care.

“I need your forgiveness.” His eyes, glaucomaed and pustulated, glistened in a more penetrative way as he said so. He made an attempt to open them wider, hoping to see his beloved’s face come toward him out of the darkness and placate him with some words of forgiveness.

However, the shimmering abyss seemed simply to lean forward, as though keen to hear more.

The being summoned here had existed long before the maggoty little pleader, or his dead and unreturned wife, had even been conceptualised. This tempting morsel of a confession had added to the demonic glee. For once it had been met with no squealing teens, ready to abandon at a moment’s notice, nor the potent, mantric chanting of mages. Here, for the first time in a millennia, was an opportunity for true chaos.

This man, despairing in sorrow, was seeking forgiveness. Willing to believe his sins could be forgiven after a single apology - and to a demon no less! A demon who, at this point, had already decided to impersonate (if it can be called such a thing) the man’s very dead wife. His wife who would not be returning in any way, and certainly would not be forgiving him.

The demon had found a perfect plaything.

As it examined the endless disarray of the apartment, the mirth became an energy that was tangible. A pulsating wave batted relentlessly against the dusty sprites, who were now experiencing something like the beating of an ocean current, coming in to tide at the man’s bare feet.

“I lost you a long time ago, and even though you’ve always been nearby”, he glanced at a wardrobe as he said so, which dwarfed the void from behind, apparently hovering over the shimmering blackness, “I know I must have lost your trust. Please, tell me to do anything - I mean anything - to redeem myself, I will do it. I’ve become a ghastly old man. I lost everything the day I lost you. As long as I meet you in the afterlife, with open arms, whatever you ask me to do now I shall do it without question”.

The endless hum became all-encompassing, so that the cave of cloth trembled to its foundations. The stark pale flesh of an old man was revealed instead.

He was trembling with fright, experiencing something similar to a roar, yet not. Like a bomb with all of the aftershock, and yet none of the explosion. This was beyond unexpected. He wondered again about his neighbours, would this be the time they finally gave interest? Were they feeling it too?

“I’m sorry, I know you cannot still love me and I am a fool for asking you to, but it’s what I’ve lost and what I crave. You, the object of my desires, now and always. Please, forgive me. Please. I’ll do anything.”

The man furled into a shape similar to what you’d expect to see in a butcher’s market, and sobbed with heartache that poured from him like an unquenchable river, aptly surrounded by a quagmired bank of wrinkled clothing.

That energy, still surging through his every digit, drove him again to something like a standing position. Unravelling, into a posture that seemed to question itself: stooped overhead, with his face perpetually directed to the floor, he remained curled into a timid stance that seemed to be about to give way with the slightest tremor. Withdrawn into essentially nothingness at the waist, his weight was forced to teeter dangerously around a weak ballast of ankle bones and grotesque feet.

The vibration took on a rougher harmony: voice-like.

His beloved?

“Why should you be forgiven?” Unified in a whisper, what seemed to be a thousand voices spoke at once.

Unease crept up his already goose-pimpled flesh. The voices reverberated over and over and yet, all at once. It had sounded as though a court jury had heard his appeal, but only responded by mounting him this unified and unbearable question.

Hoarded for decades, images holed away in the forest of detritus surrounding him, now ignited in his mind. The images burned and refused to be smothered. He was forced by the entity to once again feel his own violent hands, and the seething rage that had locked in his wrists. Again, he felt under his hands her life fighting, and then relinquishing, to his powerful grip. Like water leaking through cupped palms, life spilled into nothing from within his hands.

In anguish, his fingers of papery flesh clawed at his face: desperate to extinguish the inferno of images. Like flapping air at scorching flames, he ended up only igniting it further. What he stood facing, he had managed to bury himself away from for a lifetime. Until now.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you!” The man screamed in indignation, “I was overtaken with such a fury that at moment, my brain and body disconnected. Your sweet face, your sweet neck… They were the closest thing for me to destroy. I’m sorry you were ever within my reach…” He sobbed into the darkness, his hands now limp at his sides.

The beaming boundary, previously splitting the room, was suddenly gone. Time bound: as daylight famously is.

All at once, the unfathomable, shimmering darkness lurched forward to surround him.

The shabby apartment now stood witness to a journey for forgiveness, that had gone monstrously awry. One could easily guess what crimes the man was seeking forgiveness for, and it was a delight to hear echoing vastness, ringing clearly within him.

There was fun to be had with this man. Euphoric with its opportunity, the demon decided that a fair price for the crimes of this man would be to expose him to his familiars; to those who he’d hidden himself from for so long.

He should, and could, lose everything.

One step into the daylight with that corpse, it had zero doubt that his mortal ‘companions’ would instead become the demon’s wilful abettors, in its cause to end this man’s life.

Fire would cauterise this festering wound of a building and cleanse the man’s crimes - once the ash had begun to settle.

A reflected thought sparked into being within the man’s own head, moments after the demon had planted it there. Imaginary flames once again licked around him.

What he still hoped was his wife, spoke to him once more.

“Since you’ve denied me a grave, your shame and dishonour shall be my epitaph.” The throbbing voice scolded with force. 

The golden hair of light that had suspended itself across the room was gone, and it was no longer split into halves.

“Where have you planted my things in this disgusting forest of yours? Surely, if your grief is as horrific as you profess, you will have kept this memorabilia close at hand? Or perhaps that all meant nothing. Other than my corpse, of course, for which you’ve so graciously lent me the wardrobe. I see little else though, other than the putrid remains of our life together; scattered in mouldy boxes, covered in rot. And a Ouija board is how you find me? You should’ve waited to die.”

Suddenly, the man was in darkness again. No more of the imaginary fire burned before him, he only felt hollow, as he looked around the murky room.

Pale ribs, stark against white skin, panted into the tepid, frozen air, which swirled with dust now invisible to his eye; as that thin source of light had disappeared.

An urge to forsake the vows, only a moment ago taken, surged through him; almost blocking the pulse of impenetrable blackness the demon bellowed forth.

Ornamented as delicately as a Christmas tree festooned in baubles, his beloved’s corpse hung against the wardrobe door.

Under the darkness’ bidding and hours of miserable searching, the ragged old man had covered her in her wedding dress.

There was no skin for him to pierce, so he hung her earrings within the crevices, under-toning (what used to be) his wife’s plump, pedestrian face.

As she was, presently before him, twinkling in the darkness, the skeleton appeared to be a morbid constellation in a murky sky.

Behind the man, the hostile, opaque frame stood sentry throughout the process. Brimming with pleasure, as the man cringed at every perception of its silent movements.

A whimpering tone had overtaken the man’s voice, as he caressed the silken fabric of his wife’s wedding dress.

“You looked beautiful that day!” he suddenly screeched into the darkness. “I never told you how beautiful. I’m so sorry…” his words now bumped against his dirty hands, muffling the delusional whispers.

“I’ll make you beautiful again.”

The hands now dropped to his sides once again, heavy, and pulling at the shoulder. His weepy eyes stared blindly into the darkness, as his fingers fluttered over the finer angles before him.

“What is beauty if it’s kept in darkness? What use is this to anyone, when light doesn’t touch a single one of my features? Take me out into the light. Now!”

The maggoty little man leapt into the air with fright, like a startled cat. The unity of whispering voices had struck him like a tuning fork, reverberating through his body and ringing with energy.

“B-b-but, the fire, I must burn this down… Must I not?” His tone lifted hopefully towards the end, as he saw a possibility of no longer adding torching the mouldy building to his list of criminal exercises.

The demon’s response was tangible without words. Anger plumed like a flower of fury around the pensioner and shuddered through the roots of the house.

An emphatic no. A fire will be lit.

With the beloved corpse strung over one shoulder, he grabbed a bottle of vodka from the pyramid he’d had propped in the corner of his kitchen for decades.

Splashing a fuse line from his darkened apartment toward the front door of the building, he stumbled down the stairs in a flurry of anaemic limbs.

Outside, the light had begun to glimmer in a new sky, as a new day of human agitation began again.

Bursting from the front door into the street, the man and corpse were flung onto the pavement amidst a baffled crowd. Turning on his heel, with the skeleton still swinging over his back, the ancient man and his demonic enabler lit a match frantically to the puddle of alcohol before the front door, which erupted in a satisfying instant.

Fire. Fire and more fire burst from the ignition and piqued along the flammable features of the building, until bursting with an explosion of heat above his head. The sparse hairs on his and other’s scalps fizzled in the temperature. Ducking lower to avoid the blaze, his wife’s corpse jolted and regained equilibrium on the arsonist’s naked shoulder.

Turning again, the street was facing him.

Every stranger’s face directed its way to him and his ignition point. He felt his righteous duty erupt within him, as words spilled onto the pavement before him.

“I confess!”, was all he said.

As eyes tuned into this novel street show, the demon’s glee overflowed. It’s puppet made of skin, in his tangle of fateful strings, was giving a glorious show of chaos, that tickled the demon into an overflow of frivolity.

“I killed her! All those years ago! And instead of confessing, I’ve been hidden in my home,” he flung his sinewy arm toward the blazing fury, “to hide from admitting my crime, I hid in there. I murdered my wife! Rage took hold and I reached for her neck and I strangled the life from her till she was gone!” He spluttered the confession forth, whilst he looked into the skeleton’s face. A note of caress still within his tone.

The crowd’s anger buzzed like a hive of bees, that grew louder as the flames grew higher. The demon’s delight reflected back at them within the blistering fire, as amongst the lapping flames the darkness was humming with a pit of blinding heat and unholy happiness.

In an instant, a metal blade had pierced right between the weeping man’s ribs. As he looked down, startled by a knife handle sticking from between his bones, he felt a wicked blow to the head that sent him flying, face down on to the floor; driving the knife further into him.

Rolling over, he realised his adorned corpse had been snatched by a thief, who had been taken by the jewellery and knew he could easily fetch a decent sum in a pawn shop, once having stripped the skeleton.

In a flurried frenzy of passion the descending crowd attacked the demon’s plaything, curled into himself on the pavement, now being rained upon by ash from the uncontrolled and ignored fire.

Within the fire, the demon’s glee blazed for hours, along with the remains of a life destroyed. Watching, as ash settled in the early hours of a winter morning. Settling like a grey snow, onto the blood that sat atop the pavement.

#ReedsyOctober