Severed: Chapter 1
Story by Russell The Fox on SoFurry
This is a personal project of mine, a sort of backstory for Russell. This was the result of a few strange dreams and a week of daydreaming about said dreams. I finally put the words to paper and just ran with it. While this is about Russell, there's no mention of his name. I was unsure of whether or not to name him directly during the first chapter.
Story written and edited by me.
It was just a normal day. A day where nothing was special, nothing of interest was going on. Nothing that should have caused anything. And yet, something happened. Something happened to me that changed everything.
My old job, I still remember it well. Just a lousy dealership job, decent pay but I was covering two positions. It had been a year and a half since our driver quit. In that time, no replacement was ever hired. I got used to driving, delivering parts to places both nice and professional to dingy and dirty. It did get tiresome, but I'm just a creature of habit.
Week after week, month after month, the same old shit. It got to the point where if work wasn't boring, it threw me off. Winter, spring, summer, fall...same routine in different seasons. But this summer just seemed so typical, so predictable and yet...it wasn't. The day seemed to be going so fine.
The highway, the main route of travel on and off the god forsaken island I lived on. The eastern sector of the highway was far less maintained than by the city. Concrete slabs, slowly being eroded away by rain, heat and cold. I've been down this sector so many times, I knew all the bad spots. But not this one. Not when they become bad right before your eyes. Not when you have no time to react.
The highway was empty, despite it being the middle of the afternoon. The stupid SUV I was stuck using had no AC. Leaving the windows down was the only source of comfort in the summer heat. I was along a four mile stretch between exits, a bridge slowly being worked on being in that stretch. I've been over this bridge before, probably hundreds of times. I knew I should have went into the middle lane, but I didn't. Before the bridge, I stayed in the right lane. I set the cruise control to 70mph like I usually do. But as I approached the bridge, the concrete slab failed. The front portion of the slab collapsed, the other end shot up like a ramp.
I couldn't hit the brakes in time. The SUV got airborne before I knew it, and being nose heavy, the front of the car dipped and caught the guardrail of the bridge. I remember tumbling, pain, then blackness.
The darkness consumed me. It was all around, inescapable. Distorted sounds of people, sirens, carnage, mayhem, all muddled together in one strange distortion of confusion in the darkness. I wanted to run, I felt like I could run, but I went nowhere.
Then silence. Faint images constantly coming across my eyes, but nothing ever constant. Distorted cries, screams, they haunted me. Tormented me. Every time I tried to run, the blackness would never fade. The cycle of cries, sounds, memories...first it felt like days, then weeks...months...years even. I felt my body starting to wither, the feeling of weakness overwhelming me.
For ages, the darkness surrounded me. I lost track of time completely. I questioned constantly if this was truly death, what the afterworld felt like. Among the images faintly coming and going, among the cries I could never make out clear, my own body was just never there. I wanted to cry, but no tears came, I wanted to hide my face, but I had no hands on which to cover my face. The agony and sorrow of the darkness was slowly consuming me whole.
When I thought this was my fate, when all was lost...in the darkness laid a path. It looked to be a dirt trail...but how? In here? I followed it. As I followed the trail, other things were up ahead, a forest of some sort. It was all mixture of dark blues, purples browns and greens. It was all blurry every time I moved my head to look around. I kept forward, more of the forest kept surrounding me the deeper I followed this mysterious trail. As it made a bend for the right, something I hadn't seen in eons it felt.
Light.
Hanging from a branch from one of the eerie and mysterious looking was a simple lantern. As I reached out for it, a hand came into view. My own? I didn't know. It did not feel like my own, but I controlled it's movements. I look down to see once more, a body. But it felt alien, borrowed, simply not my own. How or why this was happening, I did not know why. But I knew I had to keep going.
The trail started to twist and turn much more, then small hills, descents, combinations of all kept approaching me as I moved down the path. After hours it seemed, a structure was visible among the foliage. A dark brown building, it had windows but no signs around it, nothing to signify what it was, and why it would be in the middle of such a forest. The more I approached it, the more it seemed dormant. No lights inside, as I walked by, the door was not wide open, but simply a quarter open. Something still told me to investigate regardless.
The old door was a strange dark teal color. Moss grew in patches on the door, the door's window stained from mildew. I pushed the door slowly open, raising my lantern towards it's main room to see inside.
Candlelight.
The room was open, a few fancy looking couches and chairs laid about, gave me the impression of a waiting room. Ahead, looked like a library of some sort. More candles were lit in the room, but nobody was around. I walk further into the building, approaching the bookcases. Words on the binding of all the books were written in words I did not understand. I laid the lantern on an empty part of the shelf, and reach for the first book in front of me. It was blue, gold lettering of some sort. I open the book and whispers fill my ears. I couldn't make it out, but as I look at the first page, my eyes widen.
"You have to come back,"
I flip the page, in messy handwriting, all the pages said the same thing. Over and over again. I slam the book shut, take a deep breath and put it back where it sat before. Next to it, a white book, with green lettering. More words on the outside that made no sense, or even looked English. I open the cover and the whispers came back. I look down at the first page...
"Why aren't you waking up?"
Chills run down my spine. Every page says the same thing again. The whispers grow louder and more dense. I shut the book and place it back next to the blue one. My breathing is heavy, but why are these books written like this? What is going on?
Despite this, I'm just overwhelmed with feeling of seeing the others. I'm compelled to see what they say beneath their covers. Every book had more to say...
**"He's not coming back,"
"You have to come back!"
"Why are you not waking up?"
"I can't live without you!"
"He's gone,"
"We will make arrangements,"
"He cannot feel pain anymore,"**
I couldn't take it anymore. All I remember is screaming, throwing every book my hands would reach. Then, it surfaced. A creature much taller than me, it loomed over immensely. It was hooded, in pale grey, almost translucent. As it gazed into my own eyes, past the hood was the darkness I had run from. I tried to cry out, but no noise came. I tried to put up my arms, but my body was numb. The creature slowly put its spiny hand upon my face. As it pushed downwards, a sharp pain hit the back of my head, I felt it rattle my spine, then...nothing.