A Cold Life

An experimentation in horror:

I live a cold life. This is not to say I live in Alaska or even keep my home at a moderate sixty-five degrees for most of the year, but rather I keep myself absent of emotions. I hide things inside myself, locked away in a box without latches. It’s a dark place, full of hatred and greed, full of things I regret, and full of memories a dare not bare. It’s a place where my childhood is kept at a distance, far away from the nerve center which I act upon. Yet it is within this dark place I find the will to accomplish what I must.

For as long as I can remember I have been like this. I am the oak in the middle of a field. I am the lone spider in the corner of the room. I am the watcher of world, though I try not to participate in it any more than I have to. I am nothing but a black spot on a white sheet of paper. I exist, cannot be denied, yet I am what everyone refuses to acknowledge. I am, however, not worthy of your time to remove, so I remain the blight society accepts. Fortunately, society doesn’t know me.

For those who have met me, I am far different than what I’m perceived as. I am the chill running up your spine. I am the hairs on the back of your neck when you feel something is wrong. I am the goose-bump which rises from your skin when the unexplained happens. I am the tense fear piercing your heart when something crashes in the night. I am the one who feels no remorse, though nothing can describe me properly.

What I can describe in detail is my victim.

I can tell you of the high-pitched muffled sound of scream I hear through the gag like a harpy wailing against the wind. The sound is full of hate and pain, of agony realized. It chills to the bone, reverberating terror on a level equaling death. It’s full of despair, desperate out of fear, and full of hated anticipation. It’s the sound of a hundred dreams dying spewing forth from an enraged animal knowing its life is ending.

I can tell you about of the sickly sweet aroma of blood, how it permeates the nostrils. How it slides between my fingers smoothly only to congeal into sticky blobs hindering movement. It runs like oil, slick with life, red with loathing until it realizes it won’t be replenished. It’s as if it intuitively knows death is upon it as soon as it escapes the vein like a baby gazelle wandering from the herd only to find a lioness waiting in the tale grass.

I can tell you of the bile, the revulsion, the gasping clarity of thought as realization strikes all at once. For I am no stranger to those I meet. I was once in their charge, given a chance for life where it had once been lost, but their caring was an illusion. It’s because of them my emotions became my illusion, played like a record for their benefit though without any internal meaning. Had they delved just a little bit deeper they would’ve seen the pain I locked inside myself. They would’ve felt the death of my soul. They would’ve grieved as my compassion died within me. And they would not have become the final nail closing the box around my heart.

Now, I can tell you I see her tears of regret for all the wrongs she’s committed against me. They leak upon the plastic covered floor in waves as I tighten the tourniquet just above her knee before the first stroke of my saw slices through her flesh to rasp against bone as a Siren’s cry breaches the air.

I bet she feels me now, though I can tell you I don’t feel a thing. I am numb to it as if frostbite has taken me. The only thing left is the tingling of dying nerves bursting as my flesh freezes, but even that fades.

This is what I mean when I say I live a cold life.