The Map
The pumpkin sat mouldering on the door step, it had been a carving of extreme beauty, it had shown a celestial skyscape with each pin prick etched star a different depth so that it would glow with the correct intensity. Now it was slumped and slimy and in some places furry.
Fake spider webs were tattered in the wind and beaded with rain, they where matted and grey clumps hung from them like rather large swatted flies.
Time had just kind of slithered by since the autumnial feasts of fear and death and people just did not seem to have the energy that they once had had. Maybe it was the lack of summer, something that would pass in spring, something they just tended to forget about each year when the warmth and flowers arrived.
But in truth the sun had not dimmed though the sky was somehow greyer and the miserable mist had been falling on and off for what seemed like forever.
And no one had thought to check on the basement flat with the rotting pumpkin outside and if those above and next door had noticed a smell – well there was a rotting pumpkin.
Not that there was much they could have done if they had checked, other than hastened the ended by several weeks.
For inside the flat as neighbours where soon to discover was a scene of devastation and carnage, it had been a party once, with tacky witches hats and face paint, now not even the flies disturbed the dismembered bodies that lay about the place like discarded confetti.
It was not the alcohol, not even the absinth, nor was it the food colourings on the cheap and vivid sweets, or even the drugs two of the gate crashers had brought. No it was the unexpected, accidental guest that had reeked destruction, it was still being the life of the party, having consumed all the souls or at least the energy from the party goers.
It sat gelatinous and pulsing in the corner, a sort of washed out beige-pink with octopi tentacles undulated around it. The suckers glowed a pallid off white and looked like mushrooms starting to slime in the fridge. If anyone had seen it they would have been put in mind of bloated corpses and decay.
It was feasting still, slowly shredding every piece of now putrescent flesh from bones and then splitting and crunching the bones to suck out the marrow.
And it was growing.
They had summoned it, unwittingly the revelers had called forth a monster from the deep cold of time and space, the creature had been plucked ancient and wraithful from where it dwelt. And it was all the fault of a pumpkin and a book of horror stories.
The book still lay grasped in one tentacle, the claws had grazed the leather cover but it had not been a normal book and the binding was even less normal where the leather was concerned. But the kids who’d picked it u,p had just thought it was a laugh to read out loud on Halloween, and the name they all recognised was embossed in gold leaf on the front – H. P. Lovecraft. It was a huge tome and claimed to be his entire works, it wasn’t but that did not really matter.
It had been pennies, it’s ultimate price however was the universe.
Bound in the flesh of sacrifices, flayed alive and screaming, it alone, still would not have been enough to call forth the horror that now lurked in the flat in the middle of suburbia.
No for that there needed to be a map, something that showed the entity how to reach through time and space, to the exact location.
Like stars carved on a pumpkin.
Posted: Saturday, October 18th, 2014 @ 2:22 am
Categories: Flash Fiction.
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