[Formerly Featured/Historical Horror] Masquerading as a gentlemanly bachelor living in Victorian England, Joseph Redding is a fraud amongst the living. After splitting from his partner in unspeakable, underground crimes, he must now pay the price fo...
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What noise escaped my throat was alien to me – a half-screamed roar so harsh it tore at my larynx.
The wraith's blank eyes shone stark against the blackness. Her mottled skin was blue and black, curving inwards to where her lips should have been.
Her wailing crescendoed into a scream, urgent and shrill as her face broke through the veil of mist, lurching towards me.
I tore back from the apparition, rocking the cab as I snatched both feet up onto the bench. I curled up, arms splayed, trapped inside the small space with some otherworldly evil bearing unknown intentions; locked in indefinitely with no way of knowing what she wanted or where I was headed.
But after that, I saw nothing.
I did not move nor relax right away; to do so would have been impossible under the government of inherent fear. Each breath I heaved came in violent, panicked bursts of the likes I had not yet and never since experienced, and nor should I like to. I convinced myself in that moment that it was the end for me; that I would meet my eventual fate out where nobody could hear me scream.
The stillness lengthened, but my heartbeat did not slow. Almost too much for me to bear, a crazed compulsion possessed me. I find it hard to fathom why then I should look, though a mild comparison might be the curious urge one feels when a hot object is set before them, and despite warning, one serves only to prove it by touching it. Bereft of sense and sanity I knew that I must look, though what rational part of me that fought against this impulse urged me that I should not.
I would be lying if I wrote that the very thought of seeing her ghastly face a second time did not frighten me immensely. What I felt in that half-mad moment was not courage. It was not determination. It was some intense, inescapable magnetism. In spite of my experience in the paranormal, to encounter one in proximity unhinged me as much as the next man – of that, at least, I pen with confidence.
But still I peered over the edge.
Only the hansom's thin, soiled lining came into view. There remained no trace of the black mist, and the face in the floor had altogether vanished. Still, I did not yet find the nerve to lower my feet again, and the driver carried me further into the countryside without another word exchanged between us.
The wraith's absence did not comfort me as I had hoped. I grew mindful that she still lingered in the carriage with me and had done so from the moment I boarded. In this knowledge I hardly troubled myself with what might become of my destination. After all, one would have to survive the journey to arrive there. I curled on that tattered bench for what felt like another quart hour, staring into the swaying lantern flame for fear of what else I would see.
It is with great insult to my pride that I write this part, for it is uncommon of me to lose my composure. I truly wished for nothing more than to bolt out into the night, uncaring for whatever muddy back lane I found myself in. I would sooner leave the driver every coin I had in my pocket if it meant that he would halt his horse and release me from this tiny haunted prison, but he had not yet spoken a word or listened to my demands. I was alone ... But similarly I couldn't shake that I was not. And for the first time I wholly knew of the dread that had unnerved Viola Harold and Frederic Emory so drastically that even in the daytime they were no longer much like themselves.
