STORY: Fear Itself
A horror story. A young girl tries to deal with a crippling, unmotivated fear while on summer holiday in the countryside.
No objectionable content (other than, you know, creepiness).
As usual, if you liked this, check me out at my Patreon.
What had changed?
Yrla sat with her eyes fixed on the road in front of the dashboard. The sky above the road was grey and they didn't have the CD-player on. No-one in the car had said much since the pizza at an empty fast food place in Sala. There was nothing to do except sitting there and feeling the car bring her closer to the cottage.
Ruben was wearing his headphones. Sometimes she heard wisps of his music, so distant that she couldn't make out the notes, just a rustle like a trapped insect.
“Are you sick?” mum asked.
She said yes, otherwise she would have to talk about it.
“Want us to stop so you can get some fresh air?”
Mum's voice had become anxious. Yrla had to turn her head to smile at her and calm her.
“Nah, I'll be good. It's getting better now.”
But on the other side of Ruben's face, expressionless like a statue on a sarcophagus, she could see a little lake reflecting the sky. The surface was sharp with little waves, and the birches stood around it like clean-scraped beings. She pulled her gaze away before it could find its way into the dark between the firs.
Last year she hadn't minded going up to Carver Per's old cottage for the summer holiday. She'd raced Ruben swimming in the cold smoky water of Lake Siljan and sat on the porch writing while the air got the first scent of dusk: a springy and strong eleven-year-old who felt as alien now as if she had been someone else. What had changed?
Maybe it was puberty. When she thought about that she felt better, because in that case it was something everyone had to go through at this age, and it was going to be temporary. How long would it take? Everything must have stopped developing by age eighteen. Then the fear came back, because she didn't know whether it was ever going to pass. If she'd been certain she would have been able to cope.
Maybe it wasn't the cottage or the countryside around it that scared her. It had just been easier to deal with the fear back home in Mönsterås, where the suburb was modern and she had her PlayStation and all the books. Here she was exposed to everything that would leave its residue in her mind: grandpa's yellowing edition of The Divine Comedy with the man in Hell who gnawed on his enemy's head, or the slope behind the cottage that had been abandoned to weeds that had grown tough and withered to pale stalks. She didn't go swimming, because she didn't know what might live down there where the light didn't reach.
The day after they arrived they went down to the library in Tällberg. She took out stacks of books, mostly horror: Interview with the Vampire, Hotel Transylvania, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and some part of the Shannara series that she'd already read. She had nothing against horror novels. If anything, they might help. Vampires were something homely, they belonged to a pattern.
When the sun shone and Lake Siljan was a gash of sapphire in the landscape she lay on a warm blanket on the lawn with a fortification of books around her, while mum sat in the deck-chair reading some murder mystery. Ruben teased her that she only dared to read her vampire books in the daylight, but during that time she felt too good to get mad at him.
“But what are you scared of, Yrla Whirla?” mum had asked when she told her about it. “Of murderers? Of someone doing something else awful to you?”
She'd shaken her head. If mum had been able to understand, she would have told her that murderers and rapists weren't so bad. They were real. If you hit them, you would hurt them.
Every night she took a spoonful of the herbal medicine in its thick glass bottle that mum had bought for her growing-pains. It didn't have a particularly nice flavour, it reminded her of leaf-mould and the sweetness of rotting fruit, but she'd got used to it until she liked it. She kept reading in the upper bunk behind the stripy hanging. Ruben lay in the bunk below, so she could put her head out and see the light of his lamp. Next to the pillow sat the soft doll that her cousin Sune had made for a Christmas present for her when she was little. It was named Yarn-Fia and looked a bit like a caricature of her, with dark strands of yarn instead of hair. It had been a few years since she'd slept with soft toys, but as long as she had this, this disease, she thought she deserved to have something with her that she could hug.
She tried to read until she was tired enough to almost fall asleep over her book, but she'd still have to climb down to put it on the escritoire. She woke late in the morning and ate breakfast when the others were already finished, but every hour that brought her closer to the trip home was like a gold coin she'd saved up.
That was why she went out. The sun was still shining, Ruben sat and played on his mobile phone on the porch, and she could burn some time wandering along the country road. It was a ravine between walls of forest. When they got home she might play the pinball game Ruben had bought when they stopped over in Stockholm, or maybe play Day of the Tentacle again. It was just ten days to go. Soon they would be down to a week.
A tall bank of clouds drifted in between the birches. The oil gravel was sharp under her trainers, it would give good grip if she needed to run. The air was mild and smelled only a bit sweet with the meadowsweet growing in the ditches. She could hear a motorbike so far away it was no louder than the buzzing of a bee. Apart from that, there was nothing that couldn't have been here in the nineteenth century. Maybe not the oil gravel road, it was probably more modern than that.
To the left the trees thinned out, and on the other side of the stave fence she could see a meadow where the grass had grown tall with pale tufts of seeds. Far into the meadow stood a little building painted Falu red and with a tall stone foundation, too small for anything to live there. One of the times when they came here, dad had explained to her and Ruben that that kind of cabin was for storing branches and leaves for animal fodder, but she couldn't remember what they were called. It had a little white-framed window. It would mirror the grey sky if she got closer. It wouldn't be possible to see inside until her shadow fell over it, but something was going to lie stretched out in there.
Now she needed to get back. She turned and walked, gaze fixed on the end of the road as if she had motion sickness. If she turned her head once she would have to do it again. The fear flickered in among the fir trunks, it was looking for something to attach to. She raised her hands and twisted thick handfuls of dark brown hair between her fingers so that she would have to keep her head still. It helped. The stinging in her scalp gave her body a bit of focus, an outside enemy to work against. She counted the white lines along the roadside. How far could it be, one kilometre? As soon as she got back she would curl up in bed with the light on and lie looking up at the ceiling planks.
And if anyone walked past, what would they see? A large pale girl who walked holding her head with both hands, as if she needed to hold it to stop it from falling off.
She could let go, but wouldn't that mean that she let the fear control her? That didn't matter, it was many months since she'd had any pride left, but who was there to see her? The wind had started up. The faded grass in the roadside folded as if something invisible were running past, and now she thought she could hear footsteps. They were in perfect step with her own, so maybe it was just an echo. She tried not to listen. If there was anything there, it was better not to know. It was the same tread of rubber soles on the road, some fraction of a second after hers. And now she felt a warmth at her back as if something were sheltering her from the wind. It walked close on her heels. In a moment she would feel the other shoes treading on hers and the little hairs on the shins tickling against her ankles.
She ran until she reeled in the roadside and thought she was going to throw up. She didn't dare to look back until she was within sight of the cottage so that they would hear if she screamed. Of course there was nothing behind her.
She'd been little. It had been before the fear; all she'd had was a five-year-old's usual fear of the dark and of being alone.
One night she had sleepwalked. That in itself hadn't been scary, she couldn't even remember what she'd dreamt while it was going on. She had woken up in the hallway when she'd brushed against the textured wallpaper and felt how cold it was, almost as if it were wet. Her eyes had blinked open, and soon she'd seen the light from the lampposts outside the windows and known where she was. It hadn't been scary, just exciting, almost like falling into some fantasy world.
The fear came when she needed to get back to the bedroom. The ghost she was afraid of was herself, a long-haired form in a white robe, dragging its feet. Perhaps she had groped along the walls like something that didn't have eyes.
She'd run into mum's and dad's room and woken them up. They'd thought she was afraid because she'd woken up in the hallway, and she hadn't dared to explain.
She'd sat up with them in the living-room watching some action comedy, just to be together with them in a lit room, but when the film was over the others had started going to bed.
She ate a spoonful of the herbal medicine in the bathroom that was always colder than the rest of the house. After swallowing she glanced up at her reflection, too heavily built and dark to deserve her whirling name, her face long and thick. An Yrla ought to be tall and light, with flying hair and the tiny feet of a ballerina.
She let her gaze fasten on her eyes: brown, the most common colour. She wasn't hypnotised, but the face around the eyes had become too pale. If she managed to free her gaze, the face might have started twisting into something else.
The girls in school had told ghost stories about how if you knocked on a dark mirror and said “Bloody Mary” three times, you would see a face in there. It wasn't Bloody Mary she'd seen. It was her own face.
She brushed her teeth sitting in a corner, her back against the plastic-coated wallpaper. When she flushed, she didn't raise her face enough for it to reflect. She glanced up in the mirror and could only see the ceiling and a bit of the wall.
She washed the spoon in the kitchen while she sang to keep the silence away, any of dad's Bruce Springsteen songs that came into her head, and kept singing while she walked up the stairs to the dusk at the top floor. In the landing was a poster with a folk painting of the archangel Gabriel coming with the annunciation to the Virgin Mary. She'd thought it was unpleasant long before this started. Dad had never understood why, but if angels existed, that meant devils did as well.
She stopped singing in the hallway outside the bedroom, so that Ruben wouldn't hear it. She pushed the door open. The hanging in front of Ruben's bunk was pulled. It looked like the bed-lamp was lit, but she would need to get closer to see.
“Ruben?” she said.
The fear had taken her voice and done something to it so that it didn't sound the way it should. It was so faint.
“Yeah, what is it?” he called.
“I just wanted to check if you were there.”
Her voice had almost got its strength back. She took one of the books up into the top bunk and lay with the light on, but without reading. When she raised her head she could see her body lying straight in the old-fashioned white nightdress. She raised her hands in front of her face.
“I walk up to your bed when you sleep,” she said in her head. “I strangle you with my long hands.”
She took Yarn-Fia where she sat next to the board wall and pressed her in her arms. She wasn't going to turn out the light now; she would either sleep with the light on or lie awake till dawn. If it got dark she would see the face from the mirror.
“I am the other Yrla, and I live in mirrors and dark rooms.”
It didn't help, did it? It wasn't anything in the dark that she was afraid of. The terror was in the lit bunk bed.
Her pulse beat so hard it felt like there were someone else in the bed with her.
She must have fallen asleep, because there was a blink of darkness in her memory. Her left arm hurt as if she'd pressed something against her body for a long time in her sleep.
Disorientation came and almost threw her over, because she was standing up. She had to open her eyes to stop herself from falling.
There was a window in front of her. It was still dark enough out that the glass reflected the light in the room. In the reflection stood a white human figure with shadowy hollows where the eyes should be and strips of something coagulated and black hanging from each fingernail. She knew it was her. She let go of the doll, and the reflection's spotted doll fell.
Something cracked around it. Not the glass, the glass was still there, it was the spotless wall that shattered and fell away in splinters. She saw. The wall was bare boards, the floor was concrete strewn with hay. There was no car and no hedge outside the window, just a tangled deserted garden, then the solid darkness of the forest.
She was awake. You couldn't feel sick in dreams. She clawed at the splintery wood until it shredded her fingertips, and there was no real world inside. Someone had started screaming. It was so distant that it could have been in a dream.
She made herself turn her back against the reflection - it was all right, it couldn't do anything without her control - and reeled towards the stairway. The stairway was just a few sparse boards on a framework winding up to the black hole to the top floor. She hadn't got closer to the scream, there was some kind of transparent wall that separated it from her world. Shapeless shadows slid out from under the furniture when they thought she couldn't see them.
She spun around to see if the reflection was still there. She whimpered a little with each breath, not quite sobs.
The reflection whitened with a grin. She wasn't afraid. This was her world.
It took a step forward. Yrla didn't move. A shadow moved across her and blurred her eyes, and when she could see again the reflection was just an empty room. The other Yrla filled her teeth and lips and the spaces under her fingernails. When she tried breathing, her nostrils were filled with a new scent. She wasn't afraid any more.
THE END
No objectionable content (other than, you know, creepiness).
As usual, if you liked this, check me out at my Patreon.
What had changed?
Yrla sat with her eyes fixed on the road in front of the dashboard. The sky above the road was grey and they didn't have the CD-player on. No-one in the car had said much since the pizza at an empty fast food place in Sala. There was nothing to do except sitting there and feeling the car bring her closer to the cottage.
Ruben was wearing his headphones. Sometimes she heard wisps of his music, so distant that she couldn't make out the notes, just a rustle like a trapped insect.
“Are you sick?” mum asked.
She said yes, otherwise she would have to talk about it.
“Want us to stop so you can get some fresh air?”
Mum's voice had become anxious. Yrla had to turn her head to smile at her and calm her.
“Nah, I'll be good. It's getting better now.”
But on the other side of Ruben's face, expressionless like a statue on a sarcophagus, she could see a little lake reflecting the sky. The surface was sharp with little waves, and the birches stood around it like clean-scraped beings. She pulled her gaze away before it could find its way into the dark between the firs.
Last year she hadn't minded going up to Carver Per's old cottage for the summer holiday. She'd raced Ruben swimming in the cold smoky water of Lake Siljan and sat on the porch writing while the air got the first scent of dusk: a springy and strong eleven-year-old who felt as alien now as if she had been someone else. What had changed?
Maybe it was puberty. When she thought about that she felt better, because in that case it was something everyone had to go through at this age, and it was going to be temporary. How long would it take? Everything must have stopped developing by age eighteen. Then the fear came back, because she didn't know whether it was ever going to pass. If she'd been certain she would have been able to cope.
Maybe it wasn't the cottage or the countryside around it that scared her. It had just been easier to deal with the fear back home in Mönsterås, where the suburb was modern and she had her PlayStation and all the books. Here she was exposed to everything that would leave its residue in her mind: grandpa's yellowing edition of The Divine Comedy with the man in Hell who gnawed on his enemy's head, or the slope behind the cottage that had been abandoned to weeds that had grown tough and withered to pale stalks. She didn't go swimming, because she didn't know what might live down there where the light didn't reach.
The day after they arrived they went down to the library in Tällberg. She took out stacks of books, mostly horror: Interview with the Vampire, Hotel Transylvania, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and some part of the Shannara series that she'd already read. She had nothing against horror novels. If anything, they might help. Vampires were something homely, they belonged to a pattern.
When the sun shone and Lake Siljan was a gash of sapphire in the landscape she lay on a warm blanket on the lawn with a fortification of books around her, while mum sat in the deck-chair reading some murder mystery. Ruben teased her that she only dared to read her vampire books in the daylight, but during that time she felt too good to get mad at him.
“But what are you scared of, Yrla Whirla?” mum had asked when she told her about it. “Of murderers? Of someone doing something else awful to you?”
She'd shaken her head. If mum had been able to understand, she would have told her that murderers and rapists weren't so bad. They were real. If you hit them, you would hurt them.
Every night she took a spoonful of the herbal medicine in its thick glass bottle that mum had bought for her growing-pains. It didn't have a particularly nice flavour, it reminded her of leaf-mould and the sweetness of rotting fruit, but she'd got used to it until she liked it. She kept reading in the upper bunk behind the stripy hanging. Ruben lay in the bunk below, so she could put her head out and see the light of his lamp. Next to the pillow sat the soft doll that her cousin Sune had made for a Christmas present for her when she was little. It was named Yarn-Fia and looked a bit like a caricature of her, with dark strands of yarn instead of hair. It had been a few years since she'd slept with soft toys, but as long as she had this, this disease, she thought she deserved to have something with her that she could hug.
She tried to read until she was tired enough to almost fall asleep over her book, but she'd still have to climb down to put it on the escritoire. She woke late in the morning and ate breakfast when the others were already finished, but every hour that brought her closer to the trip home was like a gold coin she'd saved up.
That was why she went out. The sun was still shining, Ruben sat and played on his mobile phone on the porch, and she could burn some time wandering along the country road. It was a ravine between walls of forest. When they got home she might play the pinball game Ruben had bought when they stopped over in Stockholm, or maybe play Day of the Tentacle again. It was just ten days to go. Soon they would be down to a week.
A tall bank of clouds drifted in between the birches. The oil gravel was sharp under her trainers, it would give good grip if she needed to run. The air was mild and smelled only a bit sweet with the meadowsweet growing in the ditches. She could hear a motorbike so far away it was no louder than the buzzing of a bee. Apart from that, there was nothing that couldn't have been here in the nineteenth century. Maybe not the oil gravel road, it was probably more modern than that.
To the left the trees thinned out, and on the other side of the stave fence she could see a meadow where the grass had grown tall with pale tufts of seeds. Far into the meadow stood a little building painted Falu red and with a tall stone foundation, too small for anything to live there. One of the times when they came here, dad had explained to her and Ruben that that kind of cabin was for storing branches and leaves for animal fodder, but she couldn't remember what they were called. It had a little white-framed window. It would mirror the grey sky if she got closer. It wouldn't be possible to see inside until her shadow fell over it, but something was going to lie stretched out in there.
Now she needed to get back. She turned and walked, gaze fixed on the end of the road as if she had motion sickness. If she turned her head once she would have to do it again. The fear flickered in among the fir trunks, it was looking for something to attach to. She raised her hands and twisted thick handfuls of dark brown hair between her fingers so that she would have to keep her head still. It helped. The stinging in her scalp gave her body a bit of focus, an outside enemy to work against. She counted the white lines along the roadside. How far could it be, one kilometre? As soon as she got back she would curl up in bed with the light on and lie looking up at the ceiling planks.
And if anyone walked past, what would they see? A large pale girl who walked holding her head with both hands, as if she needed to hold it to stop it from falling off.
She could let go, but wouldn't that mean that she let the fear control her? That didn't matter, it was many months since she'd had any pride left, but who was there to see her? The wind had started up. The faded grass in the roadside folded as if something invisible were running past, and now she thought she could hear footsteps. They were in perfect step with her own, so maybe it was just an echo. She tried not to listen. If there was anything there, it was better not to know. It was the same tread of rubber soles on the road, some fraction of a second after hers. And now she felt a warmth at her back as if something were sheltering her from the wind. It walked close on her heels. In a moment she would feel the other shoes treading on hers and the little hairs on the shins tickling against her ankles.
She ran until she reeled in the roadside and thought she was going to throw up. She didn't dare to look back until she was within sight of the cottage so that they would hear if she screamed. Of course there was nothing behind her.
She'd been little. It had been before the fear; all she'd had was a five-year-old's usual fear of the dark and of being alone.
One night she had sleepwalked. That in itself hadn't been scary, she couldn't even remember what she'd dreamt while it was going on. She had woken up in the hallway when she'd brushed against the textured wallpaper and felt how cold it was, almost as if it were wet. Her eyes had blinked open, and soon she'd seen the light from the lampposts outside the windows and known where she was. It hadn't been scary, just exciting, almost like falling into some fantasy world.
The fear came when she needed to get back to the bedroom. The ghost she was afraid of was herself, a long-haired form in a white robe, dragging its feet. Perhaps she had groped along the walls like something that didn't have eyes.
She'd run into mum's and dad's room and woken them up. They'd thought she was afraid because she'd woken up in the hallway, and she hadn't dared to explain.
She'd sat up with them in the living-room watching some action comedy, just to be together with them in a lit room, but when the film was over the others had started going to bed.
She ate a spoonful of the herbal medicine in the bathroom that was always colder than the rest of the house. After swallowing she glanced up at her reflection, too heavily built and dark to deserve her whirling name, her face long and thick. An Yrla ought to be tall and light, with flying hair and the tiny feet of a ballerina.
She let her gaze fasten on her eyes: brown, the most common colour. She wasn't hypnotised, but the face around the eyes had become too pale. If she managed to free her gaze, the face might have started twisting into something else.
The girls in school had told ghost stories about how if you knocked on a dark mirror and said “Bloody Mary” three times, you would see a face in there. It wasn't Bloody Mary she'd seen. It was her own face.
She brushed her teeth sitting in a corner, her back against the plastic-coated wallpaper. When she flushed, she didn't raise her face enough for it to reflect. She glanced up in the mirror and could only see the ceiling and a bit of the wall.
She washed the spoon in the kitchen while she sang to keep the silence away, any of dad's Bruce Springsteen songs that came into her head, and kept singing while she walked up the stairs to the dusk at the top floor. In the landing was a poster with a folk painting of the archangel Gabriel coming with the annunciation to the Virgin Mary. She'd thought it was unpleasant long before this started. Dad had never understood why, but if angels existed, that meant devils did as well.
She stopped singing in the hallway outside the bedroom, so that Ruben wouldn't hear it. She pushed the door open. The hanging in front of Ruben's bunk was pulled. It looked like the bed-lamp was lit, but she would need to get closer to see.
“Ruben?” she said.
The fear had taken her voice and done something to it so that it didn't sound the way it should. It was so faint.
“Yeah, what is it?” he called.
“I just wanted to check if you were there.”
Her voice had almost got its strength back. She took one of the books up into the top bunk and lay with the light on, but without reading. When she raised her head she could see her body lying straight in the old-fashioned white nightdress. She raised her hands in front of her face.
“I walk up to your bed when you sleep,” she said in her head. “I strangle you with my long hands.”
She took Yarn-Fia where she sat next to the board wall and pressed her in her arms. She wasn't going to turn out the light now; she would either sleep with the light on or lie awake till dawn. If it got dark she would see the face from the mirror.
“I am the other Yrla, and I live in mirrors and dark rooms.”
It didn't help, did it? It wasn't anything in the dark that she was afraid of. The terror was in the lit bunk bed.
Her pulse beat so hard it felt like there were someone else in the bed with her.
She must have fallen asleep, because there was a blink of darkness in her memory. Her left arm hurt as if she'd pressed something against her body for a long time in her sleep.
Disorientation came and almost threw her over, because she was standing up. She had to open her eyes to stop herself from falling.
There was a window in front of her. It was still dark enough out that the glass reflected the light in the room. In the reflection stood a white human figure with shadowy hollows where the eyes should be and strips of something coagulated and black hanging from each fingernail. She knew it was her. She let go of the doll, and the reflection's spotted doll fell.
Something cracked around it. Not the glass, the glass was still there, it was the spotless wall that shattered and fell away in splinters. She saw. The wall was bare boards, the floor was concrete strewn with hay. There was no car and no hedge outside the window, just a tangled deserted garden, then the solid darkness of the forest.
She was awake. You couldn't feel sick in dreams. She clawed at the splintery wood until it shredded her fingertips, and there was no real world inside. Someone had started screaming. It was so distant that it could have been in a dream.
She made herself turn her back against the reflection - it was all right, it couldn't do anything without her control - and reeled towards the stairway. The stairway was just a few sparse boards on a framework winding up to the black hole to the top floor. She hadn't got closer to the scream, there was some kind of transparent wall that separated it from her world. Shapeless shadows slid out from under the furniture when they thought she couldn't see them.
She spun around to see if the reflection was still there. She whimpered a little with each breath, not quite sobs.
The reflection whitened with a grin. She wasn't afraid. This was her world.
It took a step forward. Yrla didn't move. A shadow moved across her and blurred her eyes, and when she could see again the reflection was just an empty room. The other Yrla filled her teeth and lips and the spaces under her fingernails. When she tried breathing, her nostrils were filled with a new scent. She wasn't afraid any more.
THE END