The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Archivist’s Curse   
by Kathleen McCluskey

The storm had driven him into the ruins. Water dripped from his sleeves as Edwin Langley, archivist and historian of ancient texts, stumbled through the rotted doors of Sorrowmoor Monastery. Moss crept up the stone walls and the air was thick with the scent of decay and forgotten prayers. He shook the rain from his coat, eyes falling on a bundle half buried in dust on the altar.

A scroll, wrapped tight in cracked leather and bound with a seal older than language lay among the filth. Beside it a journal lay open, brittle soaked pages whispering secrets in faded ink. A name was scrawled across the top, Brother Caldus.

Edwin’s hands trembled as he unrolled the scroll.

It wasn’t Latin. It wasn’t Greek or ancient Sumarian. He squinted his eyes and looked closer, not Aramaic, it seemed to be something far more primitive, almost wrong. A long, slow shiver ran through his body. His fingers, driven by a hunger he didn’t recognize, pulled his pen from his satchel.

He began to copy. One name, then another and another. They flowed like water through his pen. As he wrote, the wind howled louder. Drops of rain began to drum against the parchment but the ceiling above hadn’t a single hole. By the tenth name, the ink had changed.  No longer black but red. As if the scroll was bleeding through his pen. He paused.

And then he heard it.

A breath, too close. A footstep, behind him. When he turned, there was nothing. Only the ruined chapel and the dark forest beyond its shattered windows.

The journal beside him flipped on its own, revealing a final, desperate entry: They are not names to remember. They are names to forget. Each one is a door. Each one is a lock, until you speak them aloud.

Edwin’s pen clattered to the floor.

He had read every name. Silently, but had mouthed them, shaping each cursed syllable with his lips. The rain intensified.

A cold hand touched the back of his neck. He spun, flashlight flickering wildly. Shapes moved just beyond the edges of the beam. Too thin. Too long. Their forms shifted, slithering between the raindrops. Dozens of eyes blinked open in the darkness, each watching, each waiting.

He ran. Out into the storm, scroll tucked under his arm, the journal soaked and forgotten behind him. The names burned into his mind, tattooed across his thoughts like brands.

He made it back to his flat in Cambridge by dawn. Locked every door. Lit every light but the shadows moved and the names, they wouldn’t stop whispering, in every drip of water. In every creak of the floorboards. He tried to write them backward, to cancel them out. But it only summoned more.

On the seventh day, Edwin vanished. His apartment was found in disarray. His journal laid open on the desk, the pages torn and nailed to the walls like warnings or protections. Each one with the same desperate message scrawled across them: DO NOT READ THE NAMES. DO NOT SPEAK THEM.

But someone always does, especially when the rain begins to fall.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!