Vines of Hunger | ONC 2024

chapter eight | festering

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My feet smack against the pavement as I push through the gruelling aches shooting through my burning thighs. With each lunging step, I sprint through the empty streets toward our old complex that I've laid my tired eyes upon many times prior, always the same and never differentiating with each day that had passed.

But this time was different. This time Eliana was in danger.

My breaths are short and raw as the cold air grinds against the tender skin that layers my constricting throat. A tiny, dull light above the stairs leading up to the many apartments flickers, casting me out into the abyss of darkness each second it's gone.

Nothing seems wrong from the outside, just the same short steps I had climbed but a few hours ago. But something is different, it's quiet, too quiet for the vibrant chorus that usually collides within this building, the blunt words of fighting neighbour, the blasting of the static television and the rummaging stomps through floors are now gone, like someone just flicked a switch and it abruptly turned off.

Now I'm only left with the silence of a building and memories of what used to be.

What is happening? In all the years that I have lived here, I have never heard it be this quiet, not even at night when it should be. There is always something or someone to disturb the white noise within this building. Within our home.

With slow motions, I climb the dusty steps up to the blacked out doors and push it ajar, it creaks with the small pressure applied to the rusting hinges. The warmth that normally greets me is swallowed by the cold that seeps beneath the thin fabric attached to me. The breathly fog dissipates as I push through the mist and upward, the wooden steps groaning as it leads me up to our apartment, and to my sister.

I suck in a sharp breath as my light grey eyes widen as my rustic door number is hanging on by a sheer nail, comes into sight; twenty two. The door is half way open, no light inside to be seen, only the dark abyss taunting me with what could be on the inside and a dark red crimson smeared across the wood, the blood seeping into the cracked paint.

It's as though someone has their hands wrapped around my throat, squeezing their fingers deep into the flesh, a warm salty blur blinding me momentarily.

Eliana? She'd be okay, wouldn't she? I told her to hide beneath the bed, and she would have listened to me. She alway does.

The stench of rot consumes my senses, burning everytime I breathe inward.

With a muffled thud, I drop to my knees, a sharp sting running up my thighs with the sudden motion. My hand thrust into the bag that I just tossed on the floor as my fingers grasp at each of the sides of the flecking bag until they run along a cold zipper.

Found it.

Ripping it from the bag, I bring the wooden stub up to my face with a shaky grip and flick the tiny lever upward, metal against scraps wood as it flings out of the side, my distorted features stare back at me through the reflective surface of the blunt blade. Slowly, I lift myself from the floor and let my fingers tightly grip the handle of the knife, the rough wood grinding against the inside of my palm. With a glassy gaze, I turn my attention back to the door leading into our small home but stop, my limbs stuck, unwilling to move even an inch as it stares back at me.

Eyes white as the clouds themselves stare at me from behind the frame of the door, wide and unblinking, with nothing reflecting back but the hunger the festers within them. Their shadowed silhouette is hunched over itself, its arms dangling over the crouched legs as its deathly pale fingers reach up and grip the side of the blooded door, black nails digging into the splintered wood. Dark crimson veins bulge from the flesh, and twist up the shaking arm, disappearing into the bleak darkness that devours its body from within my home.