At the Crossroads

At the Crossroads

Into how many vistas of hallucination and despair can a person delve if he or she took the wrong turn at an intersection is incalculable only by a few, of whom I am one. Indeed I do now wonder whether the strange occurrence on the 17th of January was merely an illusion of the mind; or a hint that bespoke of horrors which we as humans are ignorant to.

Being since my childhood a man with a natural distaste toward social activities, and yet who admired nature in its quietest, I adopted a habit of having a nocturnal stroll through the suburban streets of Cambridge. My strolls usually began in the midnight where only few straggling people walk the streets. I usually began from my house; pass by Orchard Park, then in to the abandoned railway track; where even the street's lamps are devoured by a very tangled stretch of trees, in which a man scarcely can see the outlines of his hands.

On the 17th of this month, I started the course of my stroll as mentioned before. The gibbous moon above gave everything a subtle iridescence. I walked slowly, humming to myself peacefully when I came upon the railway track. As I memorized the path rather than saw it, I kept walking forward when I saw another darker intersection which I had never remembered seeing before. And so propelled on by the sort of curiosity that wrecks the life of a youth, I entered the small avenue; and so I paid a price greater than Orpheus, he who looked over his shoulder.

I crawled onwards slowly, not a thing stirred. Then I saw it. From a window of a dilapidated house nearby me, I saw a hanged corpse with a rough spun sack on its head, where clotted, congealed blood trickled down the sack. Just a flicker and everything returned to the pitch darkness the street was.

I uttered the most girlish squeak that my male organs could muster, and yet instead of succumbing to fear and retreating from whence I came, I found myself irresistibly drawn toward that particular house. I advanced to the porch, where I saw that the house's number was 1\3, in the ancient style that English houses were numbered in. I pushed the creaking door, and turned on my phone's flash.

I felt rather than saw a body creep beside me. Thus, when I turned the light on it, I saw a starkly-naked humanoid being- for it is certainly no man- with hunched shoulders and reddishly-purple body. Being no more than 80 centimeters in length, it walked on its hands and feet, ignoring my presence completely.

I froze in my place as another of those beings crawled past the open door. Instead of going upstairs, as his kin did, he went to the kitchen and I followed him with a strange spark of fascination that fed my dark fantasies. The kitchen was dark as darkness is capable to be. I turned around looking for that hideous beast, yet saw nothing. Suddenly, I saw the flicker which occurred to me before, and this time, I saw a woman – where I swear in God's name thrice that there was nothing of the sort before!- with her internal organs spilled on the ground, and the latter beast hunched over her entrails, slowly devouring them. And the flicker dissipated.

In a moment, my former humanity returned to me, and as I grasped the meaning of all these things, I fled as fast as I could, yet a sort of delirium blinded my senses; and I found myself going unconscious, as sky and land both became one.

In the following day, I woke up to find myself in the hospital, where a nurse confessed to me that a passerby saw me sprawled on the railway track in a deep coma on the morning. As to house 1\3, I made many inquiries concerning it, where a retired police officer told me that about 50 years ago, two deformed children with mentally malfunctioned brains butchered their parents; one killed the mother, whilst the other hanged his father by means unknown. House 1\3 was destructed years ago.