Young Writers Society

It Waits

It’s out there, forget what the unbelievers say. It doesn’t need their belief. It doesn’t want their belief. Its lack of evidence is Its armor, a cloak that turns It invisible despite Its presence. You never see It, and you never will – not until it’s too late. What you once thought unthinkable, preposterous, lacking sound reason, will consume you.

It will come at your darkest times, when your drawbridge is lowered, the gates battered and broken down, the town watch scrambling to know where to defend, who to keep out, and what to protect. They will be overwhelmed, hopelessly so, and It will waltz in with a smirk. It doesn’t need your belief or even your fortitude, It just needs an opening. And when It sees that opening it will pry it open, slowly if it must, like a whisper in your mind, raising doubt, suspicion and fear, but never giving it a name.

It doesn’t need to do much. Life does plenty to you. It only needs to give a slight bump, a nudge here and there when you are confronted with realities impartial choices, and soon you are headed down the path unwittingly, Its eyes on you, Its soul hungry for yours. It doesn’t seem right that you should do so much of the work, that It should sneak in like a thief in the night at the eleventh hour to claim control, but that’s just how it is.

And what’s worst, is that in the end, when you do give in, when suddenly the horror has a name and coils before you in the light, unabashed of Its hideousness, it won’t matter at that point. Your soul will no longer be your own, and It will begin to feast on it, your fears dripping down Its chin, your angers filling Its belly, your sudden horror at the realization as what you have done strengthening It enough to turn from misty shadows to flesh and bone.

The infestation will begin. Your mind will cloud, already turned over to the darkness. Your bones will ache and your skin peel and burn. Your nights will be full of sleep but offer no rest, and your waking hours will feel like a blur between the lines of consciousness and utter darkness. When you give something to It, you can’t easily have it back. A battle must be waged, one you are woefully unprepared to wage. One that you could have prepared for, but that was when you did not believe in It. When you thought It was nothing more than a scary story to unsettle feeble minds. You thought yourself above them.

Oh, how you are so very feeble now! How you succumb to Its wishes, committing Its acts for It, if you can even take the credit for those, decrepit as you are. You are no less than an empty vessel, filled with the vilest of illnesses, one not originating in this physical world, but the world beyond, the place you put so little emphasis on, the place where strength was most necessary. Your mind palace was no more than a children’s forest hut, a disheveled heap of sticks and old, pock-marked tarps. How pathetic you were there, thinking your physical body could endure so much, not realizing that It wears you down where you are weakest.

It is a coward at heart, but a devilishly cunning one. It doesn’t play by your rules. It doesn’t care for your morals. A cheap victory, bad sportsmanship, isn’t in Its playbook. It cares only for your soul in the most twisted way It can, another vessel for It to inhabit and dominate.

And when It is done, when It is found out or bored – whichever comes first- It will leave unscathed while you crumble to the earth a blubbering mess. If there is anything left of you, it will forever be scarred, inside and out. You will never be the person you were before. You will be changed, hollowed out, trying to find things to fill back up the void It left, but those things that you used to gorge on will matter no longer.

It is out there, and if you have the stamina and fortitude to recover at all, you will seek to spread the word to anyone who will listen. To warn them with fervid conviction of the horror that is out there waiting for them. And then they will laugh. How silly, they will say. They will brand you insane, blame anything they can but the truth. Whatever happened to you in that time, your loss, your grief, your physical torment, that is what they will blame, and your mental anguish will be the repercussions of those trials in their eyes. When you try to shift the blame, to unmask It, they will simply call you too weak to face your own reality, not knowing how ironic that is. They won’t believe you. They won’t want to believe you.

And that’s the way It likes it. You become more evidence to the contrary, that this mortal life, these tribulations on the material plain are the cause of our problems, that people only blame the ethereal when they cannot confront their own reality. In your quest for sincerity, your attempt to spin something positive out of this tapestry of horror, you will only weave It into the fabric of mythology and absurdity even more. And there it will sit, but not idly mind you. It will wait in the dark dyes of the cloth, biding Its time for a tear in the fabric once again, where It can thread the needle and begin the terrible cycle once more on another unsuspecting victim.