alistairmather

for the reading pleasure and brutal criticism of the unwashed masses, i present to you the hyper-textualized serial: The Adventures of Hunter Cartwright... though to be honest Mr. Cartwright will not in fact appear till the fourth or fifth installment. anyway, enjoy. and tell me how awful it is.


One

The bright flare of cherry red light, the sound of an indrawn breath, the thick, rich taste of tobacco, the slow burn of heated air in my lungs. A pause, the world waits suspended in time.
And then I exhale.
The light fades to a smoldering orange, the air comes out of me in a muffled rush, the air about me fills with rich, blue smoke. For a moment, there is a sense of euphoria, the heady rush of nicotine, and something perhaps just a tad bit harder, floods my blood stream and attacks my system. This feeling is gone quickly, overtaken by the jarring, rattling crash of my nerves.
I draw deeply on my cigarette again, and turn back towards the door.
The evening is damp as only evenings in New England can be. The sun has almost set, its swollen, oblate form a deep crimson that stains the sky and the clouds about it. Stains them the violet of twilight shadows. That deep pervasive color you can only find at dusk and dawn.
The street is starting to vanish in slow rolling billows of water vapor, pallid and clammy. The trees and grasses are vaguely luminescent, the clinging droplets of water catching the last light of the sun and the bright, electric light of the street lamps, bending it and throwing it back to the eye.
The door is still there. Still unopened.
I sigh, take a final drag off my nearly spent cigarette, and toss it to the cobbled walk. It strikes the stones with a brief eruption, tiny sparks thrown out into the shadows around the stair. I observe the quick white tendril of a tiny shuggoth as it snatches at it. There are the soft, wet sounds of it feeding, and then silence. It has been hiding in the shadows of the stair for the last hour, eagerly consuming all the cigarettes I have dropped it. Theyre deeply disturbing creatures, these amoeba like sacs of corpse flesh, but they keep the city sparklingly clean.
I stand for a moment on the empty street, save for my companion shuggoth, gathering my courage and quelling my nerves for yet another attempt. I take the marble stairs quickly, and approach the heavy wooden doors for the fifth time this evening.
I pause. The door is a deep walnut color, chased in silver, with a small, silver placard set to the left of it. There is nothing terribly fancy or impressive about the door. It is quite similar to many doors in this city. The door of a well to do, though modest professional. The door you would expect to find leading to a dentist or surgeons office. A perfectly ordinary door.
And that is what makes it so unsettling.
A cab clatters down the street, slowing as it nears me. The clop of hooves, the rattle of wheels, the jingle of harness and trace, all echo off cobbled streets and stone facades, drawing me back to the world without. It is rare to see a horse drawn cab in this city anymore. Most of the horses cannot abide the scent of the shuggoth or the strange hum of the new magneto cars.
On the other hand, there are people who feel the same as the horse.
It is an old dray horse, its coat shiny and gray with age. It has probably pulled a hansom, or wagon, or cab through these streets for the last fifteen years. In spite of its obvious long experience in the city, the bit in its mouth is still flecked with foam, its brown eyes, showing white all around, still roll wildly in their sockets. The driver seems oblivious to the panicked state of his animal, instead he is focused on the same door I stand before. He stares at it with the intensity of an artist studying his latest subject, or a worshipper at the alter of his creator. He tips his hat, an action that seems laced with the deepest of respect, as he passes the door, and then he is whipping his nigh mad horse back into a trot and off into the fog.
I sigh, knowing exactly how the cab driver feels, while desperately trying to tell myself there is no difference between calling on this house as on any other.
Across from me, in the darkened, dripping, luminescent park, a whippoorwill begins to call, It is soon joined by others of its kind in a hellish, trilling cacophony. Without warning, a whole flock of them bursts from the trees and begin to circle and spin wildly above the street before me.
I turn away from the screeching creatures and raise my hand to finally knock on this door that has daunted me all evening. My actions galvanized more by the abhorrent chittering of the birds then by any new found courage on my part. The sooner I am through the door the sooner I am away from their bean sidhe wails.
Before my fist can ever hit the door though, they stop. They stop with a suddenness that is startling, and without thinking, arm still raised, I turn to look for the cause of the sharp silence. All around me, on the trees and rails, on the porches and gutters, on the lamp posts and roof spires sit hundreds of beady eyed birds. Each one staring at me with the intensity of a predator stalking its prey.
I panic, a blind gripping fear squeezing my heart and chest with bands of steel. I turn to pound on the door, to claw my way in to this most prestigious of homes before these horrible little devils can fall upon me and pick the flesh from bones that are now made of lead.
And it is right then that the door explodes outward from its hinges as a heavy, rushing figure crashes into me and sends us both sprawling down the slick, marble steps.