Chapter 6 - Small Village Horrors #2
A dark, small-town mystery steeped in folklore. THE STUDY OF QUIET THINGS is a serialised fiction drama shared one chapter at a time.
This is a serialised fiction. If you haven’t read the previous chapters, you’ll find them here in order, so you can dive right in.
I woke up on the edge of the woods this morning.
Which makes no sense whatsoever.
I remember the long grass all around me, wet with morning dew. At first, I thought it was the grass tickling my skin. But it wasn’t grass. It was ants. Millions of them, covering my entire body. I jumped up and screamed and tried to flick them all away. They peeled off like a second skin. It was disgusting.
Even now, hours later, I feel their scratching legs on my body, my scalp, beneath my clothes. Of course, they are not really there, not anymore. They are only in my mind—my mind that feels like a deep crevice, the crack deepening each day.
What is hiding in the back of my head, waiting for me? I feel like whatever it is, is waiting for me to sleep when I can no longer watch my own thoughts.
And what happened last night? How did I get to the woods?
Last thing I remember was arguing with Mam. I asked her if she could hear it? She looked at me like I was flipping nuts, but that’s not unusual.
‘The sound,’ I said. ‘The static sound?’
She screamed at me to shut up, shut up, shut up - and it made me think of the fresh graffiti in the park ‘there is great power in silence’ - only the word silence is spelt wrong.
Why is everyone so silent? Why am I the only one who wants to talk about this strange feeling in this godforsaken village? I mean, something’s not right. And you don’t even have to look that far into the past to see that strange things happen here, again and again and again.
I know storming off to my room and slamming the door stinks of teenage clichés, but it’s a cliché for a reason. When you have nothing else to do, no power, no way of showing your anger other than slamming your bedroom door as hard as you can, well, that’s what you do.
Unless, of course, you’re Joe. Then you just scrape knives on your skin where you think people can’t see them and hope the pain in your body overcomes the pain you hold in your mind.
But I’m not Joe.
I’ve turned off my phone because I think it’s listening to me. I think everything is listening to me. You know that feeling you have, the moment before you’re about to share a rumour you’ve heard but don’t know if it’s true or not? Or, worse, when you’re about to share someone else’s secret told in trust?
It’s a feeling that has you looking over both shoulders before you speak. Fear of being overheard. And for a moment, your lips curl around the words to keep them inside. There’s a part of you that knows you shouldn’t say—but an equal part in your gut is compelled to do so.
So yeah. It feels like the entire world is waiting, listening for me to mess up. The wind, the trees, the flipping relentless rain that never stops in this shithole, everything.
Even as I type these words, I feel like being watched by a stranger, you know, that prickling on your skin that makes you turn around? Difference is, when your eyes clash with a stranger, they divert their eyes as if they never stared in the first place. All embarrassed and all.
But when I turn around to this prickling sensation, the feeling of being watched doesn’t disappear. It deepens, as if whatever it is, is looking into my soul, probing at the dark bits inside of me where the light can’t reach.
Even the static TV screen seems to have hidden messages aimed just at me. And that’s what I remembered thinking, about the voice in my mind, and this static sound trying to sooth me—calling me—as I dropped off to sleep.
And then I woke up.
With the ants.
In the woods.
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