Ides of March

Tommy Taffel made his way home after a night of drinking with his colleagues. Pleasant thoughts about his wife, Jessica, and their daughter, Sophie, riddled his mind. He swam in his pleasant thoughts as he stumbled, nearly tripping over his own feet. Tommy’s night, in his mind, was going to end with a kiss of his wife and the descent into their soft, soft bed. Instead, he stumbled into a misty alley where he could no longer see anything farther than a foot away.

Not thinking much of it, he kept on walking forward. The Booze in his system clouded his judgment. He marched on through the lightless alley without concern. Sure that he’ll be out of the foggy passage in no time. Yet, the seconds rolled into minutes and the pathway wouldn’t end. There was no road crossing the alley. Only an endless tunnel of unbridled darkness. With no ending in sight. The minutes started blending into each other and, soon enough, Tommy had lost track of time and location. He was lost. Yet he kept on walking forward, mind still clouded.

Only when his shoes touched the water that the influence of the alcohol had faded. The presence of water was strange. It was summer. The sewage was fine in his neighborhood. Something felt amiss. Tommy looked back, but couldn’t see anything. He thought about turning backward but something caught his eye.

A moving shadow, massive, and apparently growing, was rapidly approaching. A dry raspy laughter echoed behind Tommy, forcing goosebumps to run down his skin and hairs to stand up. The shadow drew nearer and the sound of heavy boots boomed all around Tommy. His mind was clear of the influence of alcohol, yet tainted with sheer terror forced his body into a state of heightened alertness and awareness. As the shadow got nearer and the marching became unbearably loud, Tommy opted to head straight into the murky water ahead.

His legs moved on their own. He ran without ever wanting to run. The longer he ran, the deeper he found himself in the water. In no time, Tommy was waist deep in a mysterious liquid that smelled like spoiled eggs and rotten meat. Yet no matter how much ground he covered, the boots were still booming behind him, somehow, as they splashed the water behind him violently. Tommy occasionally looked back, but there was nothing but water behind him.

An anguished scream somewhere in the distance bombarded his eardrums, causing him to stop dead in his tracks. He looked around him and yet he couldn’t see anything other than impenetrable darkness.

The laughter from earlier had followed the scream before a gunshot thundered painfully close to Tommy. The sudden noise caused him to fall into the waters. His sudden descent made him dizzy, and he twisted and turned in the murky liquid. A deathly panic washed over him as a bit of the disgusting, salty, metallic substance found its way into his mouth. He thrashed and pounded his limbs against the waters until his arm hit something. A metallic wall.

The cold, solid sensation of the wall restored Tommy to his senses. Realizing he wasn’t in any danger of drowning, Tommy gathered himself and rose back up to his feet. Looking around cautiously, he realized he had been walking inside what looked like some underground sewage tunnel.

Gurgling sounds echoed loudly through the darkness, forcing Tommy to stop looking around. His legs once more ran on their own accord. He ran until he could no longer run when his lungs caught on fire and his legs began cramping. Once he stopped, he could see a light.

One that shone from above, just like the moon. Excited, he found new strength and began running towards the source of the light, delighted his strange trip through this chthonic part of the city was about to be over with. He ran until he was mere inches away from the light at the end of the tunnel. Just as he was about to get out of the strange maze of disgusting water and pipes, a terrible pain shot straight through the back of his thigh.

A pain so terrible Tommy thought he was going to lose his leg. Before he knew it, he found himself on the ground, clutching at his leg. He screamed and wailed at the top of his lungs. Looking back, he saw the shadow again. It loomed over him; an old German military uniform draped over a gigantic frame. Under the helmet was a decayed old face contorted into a terrible smile. Yellow and brown teeth crooked and broken in several places adorning the thinly stretched mouth that laughed deeply at Tommy’s suffering. Black eyes, darker than anything ever seen by man, stared into Tommy’s soul, penetrating, violating.

The wounded man begged and pleaded, but the ghoul just stood there, laughing. Tommy tried crawling into the light, hoping that the thing wouldn’t dare to follow him into the light. Just as he poked his hand through the darkness and into the moonlight, another wave of unimaginable flaming pain tore through his body. A stone wall had crushed his hand. It fell from the skies right before Tommy could escape.

Just as a man let out an agonized scream that tore through the heavens. A set of shadowy tentacles penetrated the darkness and grabbed the crippled man. They tore him away from his crushed appendage throwing him into the uncharted emptiness. As he flew, everything turned black.

If Tommy Taffel had thought this was the end, he was painfully mistaken as he found himself in a puddle of mud. He was practically drowning in it until a mortar landed just beside him, throwing him into the air with a loud and destructive blast.

His ears were ringing and eyes were watery, his entire body ached and shook, he couldn’t feel his arm or leg. Just as he was returning to his senses, he heard machinegun fire go off in the distance, followed by more explosions that left his ears ringing and body shaking. A burst of painfully familiar laughter echoed behind him. Tommy turned on his back to see the ghoul standing over him, barbed wire protruding like appendages out of its body. He tried crawling away, but his body won’t listen while the creature’s wires shot into Tommy.

The metal tore through his skin and his muscles burning and ripping apart everything in their path. Tommy roared in pain, begging for the ghoul to stop and let him go, but the creature merely mocked him but repeating his words. Once the creature had been satisfied with the depth of the wires inside of Tommy, it touted and maneuvered him like a marionette. Relishing in the anguished cries of the man, the creature tossed Tommy into a cloud of poison gas. It forced him to walk slowly around the cloud as it ate away at his flesh. The screams of the tortured men became almost inhuman, as the gas had its way with his soft tissues. Burning and cutting deep into him.

Once satisfied with the steaming Tommy had endured, the creature tossed his human puppet into the line of machinegun fire. Enjoying every moment of Tommy’s body being torn to shreds as each bullet tore another chunk off Tommy’s body. By the time the barrage had ended, only half of Tommy’s head and torso remained with one arm. The rest was bloody paste sprayed across the muddy battlefield.

Tommy was still alive, somehow, kept intact inside his shattered mind, drowning in unreal and unimaginable oceans of pure agony. Everything had gone black long ago, and yet Tommy could feel every last ounce of pain. Every ounce of lost tissue left its mark on his psyche. He could no longer feel anything other than unadulterated agony. Every cell screamed, begging for a release.

The pain stopped. A renewed feeling of horror washed over Tommy’s torn body. A scream, a familiar scream… and then another… and another… soon enough, all Tommy could feel was the sound of screaming bouncing off of his eardrums and crushing dread.

A vision interrupted the darkness.

Tommy heard himself gurgle as something forced him to watch his wife and daughter, each nailed to a cross, being repeatedly stabbed by an armada of shadows. He was screaming internally, but his organs were too broken to produce a proper scream as the vision got closer and more detailed, Tommy tried to do anything he could to return to the darkness, but nothing made the awful sight of his loved once being repeatedly penetrated by hell-forged steel go away.

The ghoul laughed again, and Tommy felt himself slipping back into the darkness. For a moment, he was relieved that the nightmare had ended. Even if it meant death for him. This was better than witnessing the ones he loved being tortured.

His joy was cut short, however, when he found himself falling in a downward spiral. He ended up falling into his bedroom. Opening his eyes, he found himself to be unharmed, but covered in a warm, thick liquid. Something in his arm, as he was trying to figure out what had happened, he touched something cold. A sensation that caused him to fall backward.

The clouds overhead opened above him, allowing moonlight to sip into the room. The illumination made Tommy’s heart twist itself into a knot as the dread and horror paralyzed him, turning his body into a living statue.

Before him, dead, eviscerated, and vivisected, lay the remains of his daughter and wife. Their blood all over the bed, their clothes, the floor…

His clothes…

A blood-stained knife clutched firmly in his hand.

The images swam in his head, the shadows repeatedly stabbing his wife and daughter… the shadows… his shadows… his hands… his…

All the pain had returned, and Tommy fell to his knees, screaming and wailing as the images got more and more intense, more torturous, more painful. The vision of him tearing repeatedly into the bodies of his loved ones became more and more violent, stripping every last bit of sanity he had left.

Tommy stared at the knife for a moment, the visions temporarily fading while his psyche continued hemorrhaging. Everything became painfully clear. The solution to his problems was right there. In his hand.

Robotically, Tommy stabbed himself over and over and over again, taking every bit of himself he could before finishing the act. Sixty-five times did he stab himself all over his torso, shoulders, arms, and legs before the pain and blood loss were going to take him away. Feeling he’s about to collapse, Tommy drove the knife into the side of his neck. Everything started fading, but somehow his body was kept in place, on his knees. Something was keeping him upward.

One last surge of agonizing fear shot through Tommy, quickly sucking the remnants of air out of his lungs as something indescribably black dragged the knife across his neck.

A terrible dry and raspy laughter echoed through the darkness as Tommy’s body collapsed lifeless, in a pool of his viscera.