Mortala: Horror Story Collection

The Thing that Light Repels

Is always there with one foot in Hell

Even when you can’t see her

The victim’s spirits will concur

Three knocks on the Northern Wall

When the light post turns on, you’ll hear its call.

Everyone grew up with the poem. In our town, it didn’t matter who you were or how much money your family had. Nothing could save a kid once they went missing. You can’t use bullets or pitchforks on something no one has ever tracked down or seen. In Erdem, everyone feared the dark.

There were theories, of course; some claimed it was divine prophecy, some believed it was the devil's work, and others swore it was just a bear or a wolf. It didn’t really matter what anyone believed, though. The belief was all but irrelevant, but the fact was simple; everyone was scared that their child would be the next to die.

For fifty years we’ve hidden ourselves away. Word spread about our situation, and we stopped getting visitors early on. No one wanted to risk being in town after sunset. Who could blame them? No one knew who, or what, it was that was killing the children, and no one was brave enough to try and find out.

My father told me stories of how people tried to leave the town when all of this started. He talked in detail about how their bodies were found outside of the town line - mutilated, beheaded, and ripped in half. But it was only the townsfolk, and never the visitors. It seemed that the town visitors were able to come and leave as little, or as often, as they pleased.

The Thing, as we had begun to call it, only attacked the adults who got too close or tried to leave. Its primary target was the children. No one under the age of eighteen was safe, but the kids twelve and under were in the most danger. The younger, the better.

One would think a situation like ours would prevent people from having more children, but they would be wrong. That’s why they created the Poem of Persephone. “Instill fear in your child to avoid a situation that they’re too young to understand,” is what my father always said. “Live by the poem, and stay inside.”

“Ricky!” His voice echoed into my room, authoritative and degrading, interrupting the simple beats playing through my cheap plastic headphones. “Get down here now!”

I didn’t answer. I refused to respond to his slur of drunk words and cruel manners. With a heavy sigh, I turned up the volume of my music and closed my eyes.

He wasn’t always like this. I knew why he was the way he was, and I tried not to hold it against him. I tried my best to be a good child. I tried to listen and obey, but sometimes it was just too much. Deep down, there was a part of me that hated him.

He blamed himself for losing them. I suppose that most men would in a situation like his. The lungs that once held him up with pride now weighed him down with each breath and filled him with shame. His spirit died with them. He couldn’t function - not sober, anyway. He was just there - lost in existence - the empty shell of a man with a bottle of beer to replace where a soul used to be.

I was asleep when the knocks came. I've heard them many times in my life, but I didn’t hear them that night. Ethan did, though.

He was three years older than me, he should have known better. “Live by the poem and stay inside.” I guess curiosity got the best of him. My mother must have heard him leave the house because both of them were gone when my father and I woke up the next morning.

The front door was wide open, and one of my mother’s shoes was in the driveway as if it had fallen off. They never found her body, only bloodied clumps of ripped-out hair in the woods. The town searched for days, but there was no sign of her anywhere. It was easier to believe she died during the night rather than cling to any hope that she might still be out there.

They found Ethan’s body quickly. The trail of blood and intestines stretching through the treeline was hard to miss. The buzzing of insects that followed down the two city blocks was nothing new or unsettling. Children died quite often, so no one was too alarmed by the apocalyptic hum.

My father ran into the woods screaming and crying. He was frantic and hellbent on finding his son’s body. I could barely keep up with him. Within minutes, over leaves and debris, sticks and thorn bushes, the trail of blood turned into puddles, and those puddles turned into pools.

I noticed Ethan’s head first. It was torn from the rest of the body as if it had been ripped apart by brute strength, leaving jagged flesh to hang over his severed neck. Part of his spine was still attached and sticking out through the muscles and mutilated pale flesh. His green eyes had been smashed in like fruit, leaking blood and vitreous humor down his dirt-stained cheeks. A colony of ants had begun to fill his agape mouth, overstretched from what looked like screaming. His nose was still scrunched up the way it always was when he was scared.

“He’s only ten! Damn you,” I remember hearing my father scream in sorrow. His voice trembled and his vocals strained. Whines and sobs replaced breathing, and all I could do was vomit.

My father collapsed on his knees. He landed in a puddle of blood and dirt, splattering up at his face, and marked him with regret.

The rest of my brother was slashed open at the stomach. Limp, gray, and unmoving. His legs were bent forward, broken, and smashed. No one's feet should be able to touch their chest, yet here it was, a nightmare come true and tragedy to behold.

Ethan's organs were scattered across the ground, and pieces of his favorite blue pajamas were caught on bloody branches twenty feet in the air. It was senseless violence. The way his body was dismembered was barbaric and cruel. I could only imagine how he suffered and begged for mercy but found none.

Was our mom there with him when he died? Had she seen what happened, and had she died trying to stop it? My mind swirled, and my eyes darted at the pieces of flesh on the ground.

My skull tightened, and my eyes strained. My world began to spin and I felt weightless. I had no sense of balance or control over my body.

I was petrified. Fear gripped me, tightening my stomach, and forcing me to puke until all I could do was dry heave. Ethan was gone. My mother was gone. Our family was forever broken.

That was seven years ago, and my father has never been the same. Sometimes I feel like he wished I had died too. Maybe I was just a permanent reminder of everything he had lost.

Everyone lost people in this town. In a place plagued with so much death, no one acknowledged how hard it was to move forward and keep living. No one talked about the aftermath of the burials or how it beat you down into nothingness. Whether it be a daughter, a brother, or a friend, The Thing showed no mercy.

“Ricky!” My father exclaimed again. His voice was muffled, but still not muted through the blaring analog synths and piano orchestra playing through my headphones.

I was frustrated and annoyed. I knew he was drunk and I didn’t want to deal with it, but glancing down at my cell phone, the time read 7:56 a.m. It was time for me to get up and walk to school.

“Please don’t start anything today,” I muttered in exhaustion. “Just let me get out the door without any problems.”

I grabbed my beaten-up superhero backpack and flung it over my shoulder. It was old and broken, being held together by the miracle of duct tape. I’d had it since the sixth grade, and it was too small to fit most of my school books now that I was a high school freshman. But my father refused to buy me a new one.

Slipping on my blue tennis shoes, I ran down the staircase as quickly and quietly as possible, hoping my father was drunk enough not to notice me. I should have known that the old wooden steps would be too squeaky for that.

“Where are you going?” The voice was angry and out of breath.

I came to a quick stop as my feet touched down on the carpet of the living room. “What do you mean?” I shouldn’t have responded.

My brown eyes met my father’s. He was tall and inhumanly thin. His shirt was unbuttoned and unkempt. Dark circles dug trenches under his eyes, and his beard was uneven from a drunken attempt at shaving. His knuckles were bloodied and bruised like he had just been in a street fight. A perfect picture of poor health.

“I said, Where are you going, boy?” His voice demanded respect, but his dirty blonde hair, hanging in knots at his shoulders, made it hard to take him seriously.

I shifted my weight and re-adjusted the bag falling off my shoulder. “School,” I muttered. “It's Friday, Dad.” My heart was racing and fear mocked me, but I did my best to hide it. “I have tests.”

He nodded that familiar, slow, judgemental nod with a bite of his bottom lip. He gave a slight pop of his tongue against the roof of his mouth and gave that damn nod he always gave when he was just told something that he didn’t want to hear.

“You know the guys are coming over tonight, right?” He sneered, as if I had no right to be going to school on a Friday morning. “You know,” a sudden belch escaped him, “ever since your brother and your mother died, hanging with the guys has been the only thing to bring me peace?”

There was an awkward silence, one of shame and longing. “I know,” I finally said with a forced smile. I’m right here, Dad! I’m still alive and I’m in just as much pain as you, is what I wanted to scream. But the words never left my lips, instead, their echoes stayed lost in the darkest shadows of my mind. A discomfiting scratch of my throat, and I squeezed past my father and made my way to the front door.

“You better be back by 4:30, you hear me?” My father shouted back with unnecessary volume.

I paid no mind to him as I left the house. I didn’t have friends, and I was home by 4:00 every day. My father knew that. I wasn’t a popular or outgoing kid, so I never went anywhere. Where would I even go?

Our town wasn’t necessarily small, but there wasn’t much to do unless you had people to do it with. When Ethan died, I gave up on the idea of friendship. There was no point in making friends with someone who was, more than likely, going to die. So I kept to myself because life was easier that way.

The only time I left home was to go to school or the store. Beyond that, I spent my time listening to music in my room or being yelled at by my dad in a fit of drunken rage. It wasn’t exactly fun but it passed the time. The synth beats often quieted my anxious mind.

I would often find myself humming the tunes throughout the day. I couldn’t help myself; they were catchy. It was much better than music with lyrics, in my personal opinion. Nothing could beat the Lo-fi synth vibes. It was one of the few things that my brother and I actually agreed on.

“You don’t need lyrics to make good music. You just need an awesome beat and cool instruments,” is what Ethan would tell me. And he was right.

The walk to school was boring. The weather was decent enough, with cloudy gray skies and light sprinkles of rain. I noticed that it often rained in Erdem, despite not raining in the surrounding towns. It wasn’t strange to me anymore; I didn’t know anything different. But people on the internet seemed to find it an “odd phenomenon with no cause or logical explanation.” I suppose there was no cause or logical explanation for the child-eating terror in the woods that kept us trapped in our town, either. But what did I know? I was just a lonely kid.

I got through first period English just fine. I had a simple five question test over the chapters we read in class that week. But I was actually enjoying the book for once, so I aced the test without a problem.

My next class was a three minute walk upstairs, on the other end of the school. I usually ignored the school gossip and chatter as I squeezed my way down the overcrowded halls, but today I couldn’t help but pay attention.

“She’s lost her mind, dude!”

“She said she was going to kill herself.”

“Think about life from her perspective for a moment. She’s underpaid, overworked, and she just lost her child to The Thing three weeks ago.”

“Honestly, if Mrs. Barker wants to kill herself so badly, she might as well do it. Her husband is cheating on her anyway.”

Seeing as I was on my way to Mrs. Barker’s classroom for my second period, I had no choice but to stay vigilant and take caution to the rumors. The last few weeks in her class were rough. I saw the same distant stare in her eyes that I saw in my father’s. We hardly did any learning, beyond algebraic formulas and equation worksheets that we had already done.

Did she really say she was going to kill herself? Mrs. Barker was one of the sweetest people I had ever met, so I didn’t want to believe that she would ever say something like that. But at the same time, I had seen this same behavior play out before with my father. Distant stares, a lack of focus, and no motivation to do what they enjoyed.

My heart skipped a beat, pounding against my ribcage, drowning out the noise of my music as I inched my way closer to her classroom door. I felt sorrow and remorse for her situation. Like many others, I knew the pain that she was going through, but who was I to try and help? “Learn your place, boy. You don’t know the half of it,” is what my father always said.

I entered the class and silently took my seat, trying not to be suspicious about the situation. The rest of my classmates were a different story. They laughed, pointed, sneered, and mocked as they entered the classroom. It’s like they didn’t even care about her.

Mrs. Barker had her ups and downs, like any other stressed-out high school teacher, but she was caring and kind. She was human, and a good one at that. She didn’t deserve this kind of harassment.

I waited for the bell to ring and the laughter of the classroom behind me to die down. I realized then, that I hadn't even looked at Mrs. Barker yet.

“Good morning class,” Mrs. Barker spoke slowly. Her voice was grave with a distinct guttural tone. It was stern yet, manipulatively inviting. The way her pitch fluctuated and twitched sounded like she was trying to force herself to appear happy, or at the very least, appear content with her own life.

I looked up from the speckled white tile of the classroom floor and over at my teacher, who stood at her desk by the window. She was short, middle-aged, and usually well-put-together, but today was different. Her hair was in a sloppy bun instead of her signature braids, and her mascara stained black trails down her cheeks from crying.

Mrs. Barker’s arms were folded neatly behind her back, but I could tell that she was shaking. She was barely holding on. Her pale lips quivered, and she looked like she hadn’t slept. She was fragile and hopeless. At any minute she could crumble under the weight of the world’s cruelty.

There were gasps and stares across the room at our teacher’s appearance, but no one directly brought up the rumors. All I could do was hold my breath in anticipation of what was going to happen. Mrs. Barker was a wreck. I had never seen her like this before, and I didn’t know what to expect. She was breaking.

“Are you okay?” Someone finally asked.

Mrs. Barker’s first response was not with her words but with her body. A tremble. Her body jolted like a chill had gone down her spine. “The Thing that Light Repels is always there with one foot in Hell.” Her words were soft and slow, almost lost in the pitter-patter of the rain against the windows. “Even when you can’t see her, the victim’s spirits will concur.” A single tear and a deep-chested moan of grief. “Three knocks on the Northern Wall, when the light post turns on, you’ll hear its call.” She brought her arms in front of her.

“Oh my gosh,” I whispered as my eyes widened at the sight of the knife.

“You are told this poem day and night!” Mrs. Barker erupted into a heartbroken shout. “Live by the poem! Do you understand me!? If you do not follow the poem, you will die!” She couldn’t hold in her tears any longer. “My baby boy had something to live for! And now he’s gone forever!”

Mrs. Barker’s aura spilled through the atmosphere of the room. No one dared to take their eyes off of her. I was scared and confused. We were just kids. Hadn’t we seen enough death? Was she really about to kill herself in front of an entire freshman class?

Like everyone else, I was too scared to move or to speak. One wrong word and she might try to kill us too. I hoped and prayed with every part of my soul that another teacher would hear the commotion through the walls and interrupt the situation before it went too far.

“I can barely sleep,” Mrs. Barker continued. Her words were lost behind her trembling lips dripping saliva down her chin. “My husband is too busy screwing the slut next door to care that our child is gone! I can’t even sleep at night because every time I close my eyes I see the face of the Devil in Hell with my son! He mocks me! He mocks my pain! He mocks my suffering! He mocks my life! Do not ask me if I am okay!”

Before I had time to process, Mrs. Barker held up the knife, and with an ear-piercing shriek, she stabbed into her throat. Once. Twice. Thrice. Again and again, she stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. It was an impossible task, but she was doing it.

My eyes widened in shock at the horror. The way her arm moved like a puppet made it hard to tell if she was even in control of her own body. How the hell was Mrs. Barker still standing? Where had she found the strength to force the blade in and out of her slippery, sticky flesh? She made it look so easy.

My vision went red as her blood splattered like a bucket of boiling grease, hitting every surface in the classroom. The walls, the door, the window, the desks, and my face. Warm and metallic, the scent hit my nose like bricks being thrown through a window. It was pure savagery.

Hellish and inhuman gurgles of pain exploded from her slashed throat until she couldn’t cut anymore. She choked and coughed on her blood, gasping for air until her arms fell limp. The knife finally became lodged in her throat and her legs gave out beneath her. She slipped on the blood leaking rivers down her frail body, and hit the floor with a sickening thud!

It happened quickly. All anyone could do was scream when the Angel of Death fell over the classroom.

Flashes of my brother’s body flooded my mind. Thinking about what happened to her four-year-old son was too much to bear. I couldn’t take it.

A strange and unannounced numbness washed over me, like nothing I had ever felt before. My thoughts went silent, overtaken by a ringing in my ears that served to drown out my classmates' desperate cries and screams. Was this how it felt to be alive, but not living?

My mind was quiet, yet busy. All around, people came flooding the classroom, screaming and shouting, but even the most simple words were lost in the senseless daze I found myself trapped within. In one ear and out the other.

What was going on? I couldn’t make sense of anything. It was like looking at the world through the eyes of a baby too young and underdeveloped to understand what was happening.

I don’t know what came over me, or why I did what I did, but I left. I just left. I didn’t grab my backpack, I didn’t call the police, I just left.

Without saying a word, I walked out of the classroom and shoved past gathering crowds in the hall. People shrieked when they saw the blood that stained my face and clothes, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was to go home and sleep.

I walked. My body moved instinctively. My vision blurred in and out of focusing on nothing and everything as the rain left me soaked. My feet hurt with each step. The downpour on my socks made it feel like my shoes had gotten impossibly smaller.

As for my mind, it was silent. I didn’t have the strength to think or feel. A wall now blocked my mind and my heart, separating them from each other to avoid a war. There was nothing inside of me but numbness.

I don’t know when, or how long it took, but I finally returned home. To my relief, my father was passed out on the couch in the living room, so there was no chance that he would yell at me for not being in class. I don’t know if I could handle another one of his outbursts after what just happened.

I was so tired. Exhaustion had overtaken me. I knew I needed to wash off the remaining blood that the rain failed to remove, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had to sleep. I just have to sleep, I thought as I crawled into bed.