Dread
He slid a bruised thumb down the outside of his spine. The nail catching on the itchy spot he’d been trying to reach for hours.
His shoulders didn’t want to rotate without a horrible breakfast cereal anthem of snaps and pops.
He ran his dry tongue over cracked lips. A tickle perched in his throat for two days now.
He’d hope for a camera crew or EMT to burst through the door, but the shadows had disabused him of the notion of rescue.
He clung on the frayed bits of survival that rallied his soul. Even those had started to slip.
A man needs the light. Hell, everything does except whatever lives on the ocean floor. Be it sunlight or moon, it didn’t matter. He needed something to break up the checkered pattern blanket of darkness that flirted with the growing insanity of his mind.
Terror didn’t explain the feeling.
It was an older than terror. It was entropy plucking at your mortal coil— its name was dread.
The last time he had felt it had been a lifetime ago.
He’d been a young boy on an early summer morning. He’d awoken to a quiet, sunny house. He breezed through it in a lazy search for food.
The search took him to the cellar. A cement floor and flimsy wall dividers divvying up the sections of old family members items and various furniture pieces.
The icebox held the answers for him that morning. Or so he’d thought.
But as he rummaged through the two plywood cabinets for snacks, an uneasy feeling fell over him.
He realized he was standing alone in a dark basement— but it didn’t feel as though he was the only one there.
He slowly crept back to the stairs. His bare feet reached the wooden landing and as he stepped up the main staircase, he heard the heavy sound of boots behind on the stairs. He shot up the remaining ten steps like a reverse lightning bolt— he lunged through the doorway into the living room and scrambled out to the porch before he looked behind him to find… nothing.
No one was there. He waited. He crept back silently. Tears falling down his face. But no one was there.
The boom of the heavy boots on wood. The fevered pace behind him. Nowhere to be found.
Sitting in the shadows— now he was what was nowhere to be found.