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short gothic story for exam prac! feedback pls!!
7 years ago
Noah reluctantly peeled open his tired eyes to be met only with darkness. It was a thick darkness, one that stifled the whole town of Bristol. ‘What time is it?’ he thought blearily. In answer to his unspoken query, the grandfather clock in the hall chimed, three times. 3am. Why had he woken up so early? Sighing, Noah closed his eyes again, but shivered as a whisper of cold air tiptoed across his face. His gaze flicked over to the window that faced the street, the window that his maid had definitely closed before she went to bed. Somehow it had slid upwards; it was undeniably, offensively open. The whisper of wind grew louder, escalating to an under-the-breath mutter like the one the old crones used in church.
Noah didn’t appreciate the disturbance of his sleep. He swung his legs out of bed – or he tried to. Something wasn’t right, he thought. Why couldn’t he move? He focused on his toes, tried to wriggle them under his wool quilt. All he felt was a slight tingle, an unsettling tickle that suddenly blazed over his whole body. He was trapped in this spot, unable to move an inch, his eyes the only thing to be left uninhibited. They darted left and right crazily, synched with the uneven thumps of his little heart. ‘I’m not scared.’ He thought to himself.
Suddenly, the frenzy of his eyes was cut short as a movement by the window caught his attention. His window had been open only a few inches, just enough to invite the bitter fingers of cold a warm refuge. Now as Noah watched, he could see, with utmost horror, that the gap was becoming wider as the window climbed upwards. The slow scraping of the window sent tiny snowflakes of paint floating to the floor and let out a timid, groaning creak, one that seemed amplified in the silence of the night. Noah tried to look away, to snap shut his eyes, but his authority had been stolen from him. The best poor Noah could do was recite the Lord’s prayer in his head, stumbling through the lines and thinking at the same time that there was no godly explanation for this. He wasn’t scared, though.
The window halted its movement with a squeak of protest. The wind was now utterly liberated, and rushed in to spit on the face of the boy who had tried to defy the elements.
Something else, something different rushed in with the wind. Noah was fortunate not to notice. A small thud on the floorboards near the window managed to attract his attention, however. ‘What was that?’ Noah’s prayers increased in intensity. His mind rushed to complete verse after verse, as if every stanza bought him closer to safety. Interjected with his Hail Mary’s, his mind kept circling back to the same phrase – ‘I’m not scared, I’m not scared.’
He couldn’t be scared, he told himself. God had a plan for him, and there was no force on Earth that could change that plan. If he were scared, that would be like doubting God. Noah knew that doubting God was a sin, and it would lead him to Hell. His father had told him many times of the horrors of Hell – eternal suffering and flames and damnnation beyond any human reasoning.
With great effort, Noah wrenched his eyes from the window to the cross hanging opposite his bed. As long as he kept watch on the cross, the demons his father told him about could never grab him and drag him down to Hell. He would be safe, as long as he listened to his father.
Noah found that his concentration had slipped, and he had unknowingly paused his desperate cries to God. He refocused on the cross, eyes straining in the heavy darkness, but something in the back of his mind piped up in protest. Something was wrong, there had been a change in the chilly atmosphere of Noah’s once-safe room. With a start, he realised that the cross, his only comfort, had moved. It was sinking, ever so slowly, towards the floorboards. Or was it? It was hard to know for certain in the maze of shadows and crouching things hiding just out of sight, teasing him from the corner of his eye.
Noah squinted uncertainly at the cross. It had jumped back to its original position while he wasn’t looking, and now it was pretending innocently that it had been there all along. He didn’t know what to think, his prayers had been forgotten.
A single thought screamed through his head in circles, an endless mantra of “I’m not scared, I’m not scared, I’m not scared, I’m not...’
He shifted his gaze to his toes, which had become frozen even under the blanket Noah willed himself to move, begged his legs to cooperate, to answer his pleas. No matter how he tried, though, his prayers went unanswered. His heart seemed to be the only movement he was capable of, the beats becoming louder and wilder and even louder... The sound almost echoed off the walls, it was so obvious Noah was sure that his whole house was listening to the torture.
In fact it was quite loud, and while the noise did not wake any of Noah’s family, something else was excited by his terror. Out of the darkness, something thin and pale curled around the foot of Noah’s bed. He squinted his eyes helplessly, trying to make out the thing, still unable to move a muscle.
Suddenly, horribly, he realised – a finger. Noah’s eyes rolled back in his head and his mind went black. He couldn’t take it, he passed out before even venturing to consider what this talon could be attached to.
After an undetermined period of time, possibly minutes, possibly days, Noah came to. He immediately wished he hadn’t. Squatted on his chest, pinning him down completely was something that could only be a demon. Noah had never seen a demon before, but this dark, seething figure emitted vibes so terrible it could only be from Hell. Peeling, cracked skin stretched tight over the demon’s thin frame, spotted with blisters. The demon had hair, long, inky tentacle that clung to Noah’s arms and neck, wriggling and squirming like they were alive. The demon opened its pale lips, ran its slimy tongue over a row of blackened teeth. Hot breath strangled the cool breeze and caressed Noah’s shivering face.
“Are you scared, boy?” came the almost unintelligible rasp from the creature’s throat. Noah thought of god, and how everything happened for a reason, and how his father said sinners would get dragged to Hell. He tried to look away, tried to look somewhere else, anywhere else. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the cross on the wall suddenly plummet to the floor, cracking loudly as it hit the wooden boards.
He looked at the thing sitting on his chest, straight in its eyes.
“I’m fucking terrified.”
The demon’s eyes widened in fear and confusion, and Noah noticed that they strangely human-like. It was in the reflection of these eerily familiar eyes that he noticed the glint of the silver cross that hung above his head. Without pausing to think, Noah reached back, wrapped his hand around the cross’ base, ripped it from the wall and bought it down hard on the demon’s head. The impact rattled his bones, made him grit his teeth and squeeze shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was alone in his room. The window was closed.