by Alistair Marquise

Created on: April 14, 2011   Last Updated: May 08, 2012

The palsied fluorescent tubes struggle anemically to maintain their relevance, attempting to flood the peeling, ashen corridors with the alabastrine essence of their former glory, but succeed only in choking the already horrid passages with a pallid, flickering miasma, casting emptiness upon the lifeless- gray upon gray.

It is in these dying halls, born of the diseased light, that it appears; a nude, stop-motion phantom that passes in unnoticed jerks and fits over the mold-steeped vinyl floor.  As if separated from the diaphanous cobwebs of the lifeless atmosphere it self, its flesh shifts loosely upon its brittle skeleton, falling down into the hungry spaces between bones.  With eyes like terrible, moaning voids, it makes its way toward The Call, its beacon of singular purpose, and twitching like a rotted puppet, it drags a withered hand along the wall as it moves, accumulating bits of paint and filth under fingernails that bend in chipped arches from raw and bleeding beds.

It hears the cries that creep painfully from desiccate throats, accompanied by the useless flashing of red lights that pulse through the gray hell like atrophied hearts, never to be answered by a caring hand, and though it finds their consignment to oblivion quite tantalizing as it passes by room after mephitic room, all long dismissed by daylight, it has only come for one.

Approaching the end of the quivering tunnel, it is pulled to the final room by the snapping of a thousand porous bones and the pain of a million turned backs.  With a twitch, it enters into the fetid pit, approaching a damp, tattered easy chair where a small woman sits drooling, crippled in lonely silhouette against the damning glow of television static, her voice lost, her life without definition.

Bent with age and neglect, she raises her eyes to the paralyzing apparition, realizing that the horrible thing before her is the answer to her Call as a tear is quickly captured and channeled away from her face by the dry creases of her cheeks, landing upon her trembling hand in broken thanks.

The phantasm stands before her, its head cocked unnaturally to one side, its eyes swirling pools of nothing, and as it reaches one grim, angular hand to her mouth, there comes a voice like a supernatural, shattered wind.

"I have heard your Call," it weeps.  "And I have remembered."

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