Gothic Short Stories

Immersed in a labyrinth of timbers sat a house. Not a soul dared to venture near the decaying exterior, but the one who claimed the eerie dwelling as their own. Some accused the owner of witchcraft, believing a home that demented could not exist without the aid of the supernatural. Most were too petrified to believe in such fantasy, blaming the lethargy and peculiarities of the resident for such an abomination of a home.

Surrounding trees snaked from the soil into the arms of the obscure sky, the serrated wood conceiving faces in agony. The individuals fond of superstitions would whisper to you that the trees were actually in pain, mustering up noises enough to rupture the eardrums. Not a blade of green grass or life, for that matter, grew

in the perimeter of the atrocity, producing a feeling of death. One glimpse of the structure would wrench all guts with fear, all but mine, the sole inhabitant.

You could deem me mad or completely bonkers; what ever suits your preference. I assume my home, one that breeds uncertainties, mirrors my mental condition. According to my psychiatrist I am psychotic, and quite frankly, I fathom that now. Now that the contents of my cranium have messed with me, frolicking in my thoughts and dissecting them like a child would a frog. I know now.

It all began when someone left the window open. Who that someone is, I am still not entirely aware of. That day was glum, bleeding the blue of melancholy literally and figuratively. Rain unexpectedly caressed my cheek, leading me to face its origin. There, the window stood gaping at me in the room where doves flew.

The room resided on the second floor of my home. It was quaint, actually relaxing, the dove’s symbolic meaning of peace therapeutic. But now, all the room shrieked to me was the unknown and a pain that burdened my body of all its frightening flaws. It was like the sun of my psychotic mentality, the source of its being.

Of course the doves were permanently fixated onto the wall, but that night they fluttered their pallid wings for the first time. The less cracked portion of my mind screamed the blatant impossibility of the scene unfolding before my eyes, while the largely berserk majority rooted it on. A dove glided directly out of the window, another coursing behind it, a velvety feather settling on the sill. More and more joined the two, soon leaving only a dull-vined design upon the wall.

Bewilderment clouded my vision, I was certain my eyes deceived me and my brain had fibbed to me. There was no likelihood of flying wallpaper, better yet flying wallpapered doves. For a look of reassurance, I inspected the room’s every inch only to discover the lone feather. Not another smidge of evidence existed in the now barren room.

This, this horror could not have just ensued. My cerebrum was throbbing, buzzed with improbable causes that could merely be described as absurd. Internally, it ached with the utmost pain. I desired to unscrew my head like one opens a water bottle, oh how I wised to reach inside and yank out my slimly gray matter. Maybe then my mind could be at ease.

Unfortunately, without inducing my demise, a brain removal could not be performed. It was slightly depressing I even thought of such an action, but my head was a swamp oozing of bizarreness. I didn’t even have one indication of the dove’s whereabouts. Technically, they were still paper, right? The downpour would disintegrate them; it had to.

For the sake of my sanity, I envisioned potential scenarios where I’d come out of this situation stable. At one point I believed deep breathing ought to relieve my tension; the naivety I possessed toward my condition was incomprehensible. I replayed the entire ordeal infinite times in my head, still at a loss of its initial cause.

There wasn’t anything unconventional about the doves. They always seemed to be content with a lifetime on the room’s wall. Well, as content as inanimate wallpaper can be. Oddly enough, I used to suppose the luscious vines behind would entrap them, disabling them from fleeing. It never occurred to me how seriously incorrect my assumption was.

Total darkness occupied the sky the next time I had erupted from my dove contemplations. Still, no dove appeared in sight. Fear consumed me, fear devoured me, and fear had hacked me into tiny fragments of bite-sized food for dinner. Where were those wicked doves?

I had grabbed the tip of insanity and embraced it warmly with my dove obsession. Yearning to alleviate my mind’s fixation, made me even more crazed. As hours elapsed, I welcomed demented thoughts that previously lingered.

A craving to scrape out my rabid red eyeballs, scrape them until there remained nothing but vacant sockets, flowed through my veins. Maybe remove my legs, they shrieked in agony. Next the arms, oh how my arms silently suffered from holding on to my final piece of sanity. Yes, then the pain, that brain smothering pain, would leave.

I cackled.

More ideas of harm had slithered their sly way into my thoughts. I cackled again, louder this time. And again, and again, with each increasing in volume. Tears rolled down my cheek as my stomach scrunched, my legs in the air like a cockroach.

Crazy had officially struck me in that very moment. From the deepest portions of my soul I knew it to be real. My thoughts that never availed, their scheming ways had tricked me. I, the victim, fell head over heels for the ploy, completely unaware of my brain’s deception.

A large-scale famine transpired inside my mind’s many lands. My thoughts were ravenous and thirsting. The mental stability crop had perished due to the looming jaws of the instability animal. The famine wouldn’t cease. It obliterated any surviving shard of sanity I previously had. Now, my thoughts operated on pure pandemonium. In simpler words: insanity.

Day after day a persisting dispute fooled around in my intellect. To try to believe the dove incident or to blame my organ clearly incapable of actually thinking; I was unable to decide. It pirouetted through my crevices, a type of waltz: up and down, tearing at their irreplaceable rationality. My hands gripped my hair in fury, as if to say stop. It was my eternal inferno, burning just to view my personal

misery.

Nothing seemed to compensate for my head’s trickery. With all my might I attempted to cleanse my head of the doves, but they wouldn’t soar out. They had attached themselves inside me, a permanent institution for my madness. I could not exonerate the actions either, I could not give the side of me saturated in deceit its satisfactory apology; although I yearned to.

How could wallpaper impose such a horrid problem on me? A wallpaper bird of white everlasting peace was actually a fiend, black at the soul. How? It was a question I was inept from fleeing and one that rang on for years to count.

I absconded from exiting my house, minus the sporadic visits to my psychiatrist. She prescribed medication; I refrained from taking such chemicals that would not better my situation. Laying in a corner, furiously sweating, eyes searching, body trembling, was my new definition of normal.

Necessary maintenance to save a house from unpleasantness has not been performed on my house for approximately 5 years now. Likewise, it has basically crumbled from what is considered decent. It does not even deserve being titled a home now; the horrors have grown too far and great. I have already spoken to you of its hideousness: the external appearance enough to confirm my insanity, while simultaneously manufacturing fear inside outsiders.

People linger just beyond an area of the atrocity invisible to the naked eye and lurk. They hope to get a good glimpse of me: the witch, the loon, the monster even. But, they won’t and they never will. The world beyond my little corner is an unfamiliar burden, one I wish to never encounter again.

Now, I write from a cranium diseased with psychosis. I write from a mind brimmed with peculiarities. I write from a realm of instability. A massacre of the ordinary from my brain’s treachery has altered me into a state of what I like to refer as my ‘me’ state; a state of my true self.