A Story by Curtis Graham III
He lay in his bed, still as a corpse, afraid to move; shallow breaths were all he would allow his lungs to take. He didn't want it to know where he was.
It would undoubtedly crawl out from its spot under his bed in a moment or so. Trembling, he stole a quick glance at the watch strapped to his wrist: less than a minute until the clock struck twelve, midnight. Yes, It would be making an appearance anytime now.
He closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited. He could hear a clock ticking away the seconds in his mind. The echoing sound it made was both comforting and unnerving. He compared that sound to the beating of his heart when he was anxious: soft, quiet, mysterious…disturbing.
He listened for some sound - any sound - to break the cloud of silence, which had enveloped the air in his bedroom. There was nothing, save the beating of his heart within his chest and the ticking of the mental clock in his mind. He opened his mouth to speak, and thought better of it.
Why isn't it here yet? His mind had been replaying this question over and over, pondering over it, trying to come up with a perfectly reasonable and sane answer, unable to. He didn't have to look at his Girls of Maxim calendar (Amanda Marcum gracing the December page) to know that in about fifteen seconds it would be Friday the 13th: It only appeared on Fridays that happened to fall on the thirteenth day of the month. This past year had been a pretty good one: there had been only two instances of an unlucky Friday - one had snuck up in September like a cough in the back of his throat; the other would begin in just about -
The soft chiming of the grandfather clock in the hall announced the midnight hour as tomorrow became today. Its soft booming voice would usually give him a sense of relaxation and a feeling of peace…except for Friday the 13th. Everything became shadows in the dark on Friday the 13th: a vampire watching silently from the dark of the night, waiting for the moment when it would reveal itself to sink its incisors, wicked sharp, into the soft flesh of the neck; a werewolf full of burning hatred and lunar fury, barking at the moon, hunting out a midnight dweller to devour, satisfying its hunger; a zombie lurching through the graveyards during the night, its body a dead cell, flesh decayed and rotted, its only thoughts being that of cannibalism, longing for the flesh of the living. On Friday the 13th, when it was midnight black outside, images you think you see - tree branch shadows, piles of clothes in a corner - become something frightening and all-together dangerous, full of malevolent will and evil spite.
He looked down at his wristwatch. It was six minutes late. It's been six minutes already? Where is it? He didn't dare move a muscle, harried that it would spring from its spot underneath his bed and slash a horizontal gash across his stomach, spilling his innards in his lap. So he waited. And waited. And waited. After some amount of time (just how long he didn't know, and, frankly, didn't care) he couldn't take it anymore: the Irish in him surfaced.
"Wirra!" he cried aloud. He was immediately sorry for doing so. The light pitter-patter of the rain upon his window became heavy thudding, as if a monsoon of hailstones had begun. Blinding greenish-white light spilled across his vacuumed floor from under his bed. A heavy fog suddenly covered the floor, making his carpet impossible to see from his position. His oeuvre of Ludwig Von Beethoven fell from his nightstand and to the floor, immediately swallowed in the blanket of fog. He sat up suddenly, his fear rising up from the pit of his stomach to his chest, making it difficult to breathe. A section of the fog began to rise up into the air, taking the shape of some figure…not that of a man, but of something that was more than man. He could see legs and arms, chest and shoulders, a head…and was that horns sprouting from the sides of the cranium? It was. It was! Never before had it gone this far; of course, he had never cried out before. He tried to think of something to identify what it was he was seeing -
(Oh my God, it's Beelzebub! Lucifer! Satan! The Devil! It is something which has no real name, something which you hear children whisper in the corners, something which adults condemn from their lives, something which had been outcast from society long ago…something, someone…oh God, it was - )
What was it? Exactly what? Light - bright, blinding white light - filled the entire room. Black spots dotted his vision, and he looked towards the center of the room.
Standing amid a river of bones, an aura of death, was the god Odin; He
(It)
gripped a great sword, blazing blade of the brightest azure, hilt of the finest mahogany, rubies and emeralds embedded within it, in His
(Its)
armor-clad hand. Odin's eyes were black…midnight black. His-Its ancient armor seemed to float off of the body, as if there was nothing beneath except dark air. Odin raised the sword high above the mortal's head, and as his sanity was destroyed at the spectacular sight of this god, Odin brought down the sword Zantetsuken. The mortal witnessed a flash of everything taboo in his life - it lasted less than a second - and he saw the arc of blue, and knew no more.
The god didn't express any form of emotion; He - It was tacit.
Copyright 2002, "Little" Curtis Graham
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