Alive

Shallan was cold.

When a too-pale morning sun shone lazily through the withering autumn flora, her apartment’s cramped dimensions turned oppressively silent, its air stagnant. Shallan didn’t like that.

She needed to wear something bold, something with strong colours and sharp edges to cut through the rusty, monotone landscape she had before her. After that, she’d go to the loudest place near her to burn away that hard silence.

She dressed in a jaggedly abstract shirt and jeans - cuffed, of course - and stepped outside.

Apparently, people don’t wear t-shirts in late October for a reason, so as her breaths froze into white puffs, Shallan instantly regretted the shirt.

Whatever, cold clears the mind.

Shallan made her way to the park fair, the lights there glared. Forcibly lively music aggressively resonated across metal structures painted with garish paint, a rainbow-colored scar on the wilting, yellow grass. Laughter erupted somewhere behind her, a group toasted and drank.

She tried to smile, but couldn’t find any mirth in her to do so. Everything felt so off, so broken, unreal, unnatural.

The cacophony of the fair wasn’t any better than the stifling silence of her apartment, and so as it swelled with the oily odour of overly-creamy ice cream, Shallan decided to leave.

She started at a hasty pace, past the greasy ice cream, the red-cheeked, cheering drunks shouting too loudly, the forcibly lively music, the aggressive metal structures…

An empty amphitheatre?

She could’ve sworn that it wasn’t there before, and curiosity got the better of her. She peered in, and it was indeed empty, save for the man on the stage. He was juggling, the five apples thumping on his palms each time they were caught.

Thump, thump, thump...

The buzz of the fair faded as she descended the steps, the man becoming clearer and clearer. He wore a stark white button-up shirt and suspenders of a shade of dark red she couldn’t quite place. His skin was pulled and strained over his sharp cheekbones and chin, veins and sinew showing through on his neck. His smile seemed welcoming at first, but as Shallan neared, she wasn’t so sure - it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

Oh, and his eyes.

They gleamed with joy as she sat down, but in that joy, something was so wrong, something she felt she understood but couldn’t place, something perhaps she did not want to place. They were far away, yet gleaming with intelligence, the intelligence of something ancient and cruel.

She was so caught up in the thought that she’d been staring without looking, and as she refocused her gaze. At that moment, his eyes met hers, and she saw that the flakes of obsidian which were his pupils contained no emotion.

It was almost as if they were dead.

The hairs on her arm stood up.

As if in console, the clown cocked his head, widened his eyes in an innocent expression, and grinned.

This time, it did reach his eyes.

The inside of his lips was too dark, his teeth too white and too sharp, and his eyes filled with the vigour of a wolf tearing open his prey, with something akin to pleasure, the screaming of a thousand tortured souls.

Shallan couldn’t tear her eyes away from that face, the face of something so wrong, and she drowned in that wrongness, the redness, so dark, almost like-

Blood.

She fainted.

---

When she awoke, a mist had settled into the amphitheatre, bleeding from shadows.

The stage was empty. No juggler.

Shallan felt an icy prickle on her left arm which was touching the metal of her chair, which had - for some inexplicable reason - frosted over.

The sky was a tortured, murky grey, with no sun and no moon, she couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. The clamour of the fair has completely disappeared.

She stood up, frantically glancing around, calling out for any sign of another person. As if a decade has passed, the paint she thought garish had darkened, moulded over. The metal structures’ joints were rusting. Somewhere behind the stage, there was the sound of something dripping, echoing off the empty space.

At this point, her back was to the stage, and she heard the noise.

Behind the stage, other than the dripping, a faint, yet clear and rhythmic thumping emerged…

Thump, thump, thump.

She’d heard that somewhere, hidden in a clouded memory.

A man in suspenders juggling apples, grinning with too red lips and too white teeth, with eyes glistening with knowledge, knowledge of the howls a tortured man makes.

So she stood up on her chair and looked.

And there he was - or, at least part of him.

The upper half of his face peeked out from rusted scaffolding, looking directly back at her.

She couldn’t see it, but he was grinning.

A scream gathered in her throat, her eyes went wide-

Shallan calmed herself, she must have been hallucinating. She pressed her palms to her eyes and opened them again. He - it was gone.

She jumped off the chair, taking deep breaths, deep breaths, to coax her pulse down, yet it betrayed her. She walked at a brisk pace - not ran, for she did not want her panic to show, lest something was watching - to the stairs, putting one foot in front of the other, up, up.

She stopped.

Thump, thump, thump...

The noise, much closer this time, no more than twenty steps behind her.

She kept climbing, not daring to look back.

One step in front of the other, keep moving,

The thumping stopped.

Shallan turned.

And watched in horror as the man’s face, grinning, crumpled to dust, then his neck, torso, arms, legs, the apples dropping.

She expected something to happen, some explosion of noise or color, but there was nothing when they fell.

Then, the final one, blood red and oily, fell into the pile of ashes.

And it was as if sensing something was wrong, the back of her neck facing the other way prickled.

Something was breathing down on it.

Shallan didn’t want to turn, but she could see the humanoid shadow being cast over her and the ashes, she could see it leaning closer and closer to her, the head now nearly touching her neck-

She had to move, she had to do something.

So she lashed out, screaming the desperate cries - heard so many times in the world of old - of something cornered by a predator.

The screams would never be heard, of course, for by the time any sound was made, she would have gone.

The apples would sit there, glistening a darker shade of red, its surface a bit more oily, a bit more immortal.

Nothing much changed in the world, another one, gone, dissipated into nothingness, lost to whatever evils and shadows there are.

Another one, lost, fallen without meaning.

And those ones, the ones without purpose, the ones who keep telling themself that there is nothing in the world left, they will keep wandering. They will keep seeing the amphitheatre.

Some of them, having forgotten themselves, would one day step in and never step out. Some would see its darkness, smelling the stench of those torn apart which pervades throughout, yet walk in anyways.

But there are others, they will never walk in, however tempting its cloud of deathly calm and silence may be. To them, the intoxicated men, the cheerful music and the vibrant colors - perhaps undignified, perhaps forced, perhaps garish - will always mean more, feel more lovely and warm.

More alive.

Image from the Ploughshares blog.