As I walked over this lonely stretch of road, I counted my steps and watched the moonlight flicker among the trees. A fog crept over the asphalt, stirred by the wind, making it hard to discern where I was going.
Where am I going? I don’t know. I’m just walking…
Maybe it was the night, but I felt adrift in the shadows with no direction, the smell of autumn’s decay around me, the hard gravel of the roadside under my feet. Nothing but a misty horizon of desolation as my destination.
Am I eternally doomed to walk this long road?
A sound. The humming motor of a car. I turned. Headlights illuminated the night.
They’re slowing down. Stopping.
The passenger side window whirred open, and a young man leaned over the seat and smiled at me. “You need a ride, pretty lady?”
I smiled back and nodded, so he popped open the car door. Slipping inside, I sank into the seat and closed the door. The car remained idling. The driver leaned in, too close, his hand on my leg.
“How did you get stranded out here? Not the place to be walking alone. Especially at night. It isn’t safe.” He smirked.
Scooting closer to the door, I replied, “I was left out here. Can we get going?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” The car lurched forward, back on the road. “Good thing I came along, though.” He reached over and patted my knee, his fingers squeezing. “A sweet thing like you shouldn’t be neglected. You needed a big, strong man to rescue you.”
“From what?” I pushed his hand away. He moved it back to the steering wheel.
“Guess you’re not from around here. This is Applewood Road. Known for car crashes, disappearances, people wandering with no memory. Legend has it that a ghost haunts the area.” He chuckled. “Just superstition, of course, but this road isn’t always safe.”
I smiled again, this time with a hint of fang. “I’ve never seen a ghost.”
Grabbing the steering wheel, I yanked hard, simultaneously unlocking his seatbelt.
He screamed, “What the hell, bitch!” and cursed as the car careened into a ditch, crumpling the front end. The airbag prevented him from going through the shattered windshield, but he smashed his head against the driver’s door.
Unbuckling my seatbelt, I wriggled from underneath the deployed airbag and pulled his unconscious body closer. I sank my fangs deep into his neck and drank my fill, savouring the sweet nectar of his blood until his heartbeat slowed, then stopped. I shoved his corpse back into the driver’s seat and licked my lips. The final touch was collecting a shard of glass from the dash and shoving into his neck to cover my bite mark.
Clambering out of the ruined car, I dusted off my clothes and climbed back to the road. I glanced back at the wreck.
“You were right, this road is dangerous.”
I laughed and started the long walk back to town. I had to inform the sheriff the job was done, and he had another death to cover up.
And one less predator roaming Applewood Road.
Month: December 2025
Splintering
I pound my bloodied and torn fists against the sides of the box that I find myself trapped in, but it is a useless effort – there is no way out. Scratching, clawing, even chewing at a tiny splinter I may have created in my mad scramblings does me no good. Bloodied and raw, I fill with a pressure that threatens to burst from my filthy being, further contaminating my raw and polluted soul.
There is no way out – there is no escape from the physically crushing, mind bending weight of this prison. I beg to be saved from this anguish in which I languor; but there is no salvation, not for me, not for one so undeserving, so uncherished, so unloved. There is only the false glimmer of light my inner demon allows me to glimpse so that I may be tortured further.
Bloodied, scrapped, tattered and torn, a thing not palatable to any other, I slide to my scuffed and rent knees to become a pile of bleeding flesh that has been ravaged by the walls that surround me. I bend forward clutching at the only thing I have left, myself, and allow the wailing to erupt from my stricken lungs, my raw throat; I bellow the moan I’ve been containing for so long.
My demon laughs; he finds my horror of an existence a great delight. I am a toy to be played with to pass the eternal time in which he shall dwell within me. I can not escape him, though I try – all the more to his amusement. He watches me struggle so futilely; he basks in the tightening of breath that can no longer escape my burning chest; he hears my moans of agony and licks the salty tears that streak my filth ridden face. He is my tormentor, he is my key, he is my only chance for salvation – though he shall never grant it.
The walls of the box are by now so raw with splinters from my scrapings that no matter where I lay my broken body for comfort, I find none. There is only jagged surface to be found here, a prison so impenetrable no one but I shall ever glimpse it, nor shall I ever be released from it. I have no false hope, only a fool would hope for mercy from such a beast. Though a fool I am, I am not that fool…
Laying weeping in a pool of my own tears, blood and shattered dreams, I can find no blame other than my own. My demon chuckles as he reminds me the box is of my own design, made impregnable by my own failings.
Yet still, I rub my ragged and blood caked palm along the wall hoping to find the smallest fissure, an mere indentation, any sign at all that can offer me even the falsest of hopes that someday I will break free – but there is none. There never has been.
In this box I feel my deepest desires turned to dust; my most cherished dreams denied; my fate sealed. In this box I find my demon observing my anguish, relishing its unending torture and its most exquisite pains. Here I am me – I am this quivering thing that lies upon the floor begging for a mercy of freedom that will never come; just a small measure of what others are granted, but no – not me. I shall never have the experience of those things, for I am destined to scrape and scratch and gnaw away at this unyielding box that is both miniscule yet cavernous at the same time.
Why will it not swallow me and end this pathetic shadow I have become of my former self, I do not know … so that my demon may have a thing with which to entertain itself? Consume me I beg of it, but it will not – what use am I to the box if it has no grief to feed from; no pain to color its darkened walls with; no feather left to pluck with which to brush itself clean.
My demon wants me locked in this box of misery and pain, perhaps only because it seeks the same thing I do – a companion of equal measure. It lives a lone existence as well, though I believe it was meant to, whereas I am meant for more, I am meant to be freed from this punji ridden hell of eternal despair.
But that is yet another false hope; another path to mental depravity that I shall have to avoid for as long as I can. Just one more shattered possibility in a world filled with tightly sealed boxes. Yet without these boxes, would I not be an empty shell? Another harsh reality to be born on the back of so many other realities I wish were not mine. But the lie told children that wishes will come true is just that, a lie; and the box containing my soul is shoved just a bit farther out of reach, the desperate moaning a bit more frantic, the laughter of my demon that much stronger – with a promise that one day I will succumb to its crippling madness.
∼ Nina D’Arcangela
© Copyright Nina D’Arcangela. All Rights Reserved.
The Hunter’s Heart
They told tales of her heart. They said she was a wild woman, a hunter, living off of the flesh of her traps. In life, she was little more than a dark spectre moving in fleeting glimpses at the edge of village life. In death, her sightings were all the more thrilling, her tales all the more chilling.
No one quite agreed how she died. Some said it was her own traps that caught her, leaving her prey to the appetites of the wild. Some said it was a human beast that preyed upon her, a lover turned wild by her feral influence. Still others said it was her own dark dealings, dues collected on devilish debts. Yet every story told of her heart: of it beating, even now, out in the shadows of the trees.
He had heard the tales. He had scoffed, yet also wondered. And now, out among the trees and darkness, the stories came back to him. The stories, and the sound. The pulsing thump-thump that seemed to come from all around. From the shadows. From the very trees. Steady, but growing louder. He felt the fear of prey, felt the dreadful certainty of a hunter drawing near. He stood frozen, as though stillness would save him.
But when the pace quickened, he knew too well that the hunt was on.
∼ Miriam H. Harrison
© Copyright Miriam H. Harrison. All Rights Reserved.
Pen of the Damned 