The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Perfection
by Bailey Hunter

It isn’t like they said. It doesn’t come with a scorching blast of brimstone and fire. It doesn’t offer a bright light and open arms.

It’s simply empty. Empty, cold, and dark – just like this room.

I wish it were silent too, but it’s not. It’s loud. It’s beyond loud. It surrounds me in screams and wails, pleads and sloppy, wet gurgles.

I keep searching for that perfect final moment. I have been searching for years. I’ve found the purest of pure and the blackest of evils. Not one has even come close to what they say it will be.

The hypothesis is sound, the procedure well planned, and the method unquestionable so it must be the subjects.

Perhaps this time.

It’s a labor of love I suppose. The pursuit of perfection requires all my energies if I am to succeed. And I must succeed or it is all for naught.

I can’t entertain that thought. I have work to do.

The subject remains strapped to the table, its blue eyes wide and alert. I had to cut its ashen hair off on the second day. It was much too long and sticking to the face, obscuring its responses.

Blood is such a messy by-product.

The subject is now on day three of the experiment and its noises have finally begun to subside to quiet whimpers and burbling breaths. I am grateful for this. I’ve tried using gags in the past to muffle the noises, but found it limited the full impact of the results. I cannot let my own personal discomforts get in the way of such delicate findings.

I’ve been carefully logging its progress to these final moments, as always. Even the seemingly most insignificant detail is important. It is within these minute nuances that I am certain I will find that moment.

It’s coming. The eyes are beginning to fade. The twitching is slowing…

Nothing.

Damn! Another failed experiment.

I won’t give up. I can’t. The perfect final moment is out there merely waiting to be discovered.

Fiction © Copyright Bailey Hunter
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More about Bailey Hunter:
Bailey is a publisher with Dark Recesses Press.

D.R.E.X. Blackout

After finding his family murdered, Matthew Burke is arrested and sentenced to life in prison. The next day he is mysteriously released and given a briefcase of money. Needing answers, Matthew finds a pile of old documents in his house and discovers his wife was once part of an organization called D.R.E.X, who were responsible for hunting and killing supernatural creatures. Even though D.R.E.X had been shut down for years, his wife was murdered just after she tried to reach them. Matthew reluctantly joins with the remnants of her old organization and investigates a new problem arising in France. But the more he discovers, the more he realizes how few people he can trust…

Available from Dark Recesses Publishing