Cellars, Caskets, and Closets
Inside a twisted rhizome of mutilated greyspaces through cellar doors, dripping with speckled layers of teal plaster and pulp, the awful smell of paint and wood scratched my nostrils as I lost my goddamn mind.
I found myself trapped in the gutted ramparts of my mind all the time, stranded atop a tower in the mountainous webs of brain matter and bile. No one to talk to, no way out. No kind or familiar voices to console me. Dark and distant shadows vibrated against my ears through petrified wood doors, rusty hinges swaying in the stale air. I caught passing glances of a world that could be, not this place layered in false judgments and licentious thoughts of insincerity.
“Leave me alone,” I cried, chains wrapped around my ankles.
The maze went on forever, and I had no way of knowing how long I was trapped in here. Those things of mirror and mayhem followed me. I thought I had eluded them, but to no avail. Under the piercing glare of their red eyes, they followed me into this place. Awash with a sense of terror, I knew they were close and would soon be upon me.
The maze seemed familiar, like the unfinished rooms of my childhood, splattered with paint cans and tarps. I wandered frantically through the corridors, the clanking of chains followed me from room to room.
A chill brushed down my spine, the chains even heavier than before.
“You’ll never escape this place,” came those dissonant whispering voices. “These closets will be your hell.”
“Leave me alone!” The casket behind my body grew more dense, their voices seeping out from the edges.
The Mirrored Ones had always been there, creeping through the walled lining of my life, wading in my cyanide dreams. I pulled my casket of iron and marble from cellar to cellar, tower to tower, voices chasing me inside my head, afraid to open the metal box, wanting to destroy it. The Mirrored Ones weren’t monstrous corporeal things wrought by some galactic calamity or creatures borne of stardust. They were worse.
“Why do you carry on?”
The banality of Mirrored Ones gnawed at the foundations of my mind, laughing in tones of abject sadness, towering over me in the immensity of black silence and subjective uselessness. Their bodies constructed in liquescent mirrors and thoraxes of neon and metal.
They were relentless. I couldn’t blot out their shrill cackles. Behind me, the lucidity of my dreams withered under the greyness and grandeur as the Mirrored Ones began to grind their iron teeth into the fabric of my thoughts, triturating them into dust.
I ran, heaving the casket as the laughter grew, a tidal wave of metallic sounds. Their rusty thoraxes screeched as they tromped closer, attempting to snatch the box, voices exhaling in a crescendo of corrosion, eroding my will. Towers, cellars, all was swallowed into the wading abysm of mirrored silence, where dark shadowy fingers grasped the edge of the casket. The raucous symphony of laughter shifted to howling moans. My head throbbed, sinuses clogged with the familiar scent of paint and wood as the casket disappeared, inside a twisted rhizome of mutilated greyspaces through cellar doors, dripping with speckled layers of teal plaster and pulp.
I lost my goddamn mind.
© 2020 Maxwell I. Gold
About the Author
Maxwell I. Gold is an author of weird fiction and dark fantasy, writing short stories and prose that primarily center around his cosmic and profane Cyber Gods Mythos. Maxwell's work has appeared in numerous publications including Spectral Realms, Weirdbook Magazine, The Audient Weird, Hinnon Magazine and Space and Time Magazine. Maxwell studied philosophy and political science at the University of Toledo and is a proud Columbus, Ohio native and currently is an active member of the Horror Writer's Association and the Dramatists Guild.