The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Collector    
by Kathleen McCluskey 

It looked like a marble, an ordinary blue marble. Just one small, glassy blue sphere laying at the base of the well where the Peterson girl had disappeared.

The rescue crew found no body, no blood, only that single orb, pulsing slightly. It looked out of place nestled in the mud. Sheriff Harlow picked it up. Felt it pulse in his hand just once, like a heartbeat.

That night, he went home, locked all the doors and gouged his own eyes out with a spoon. They found him sitting in a pool of blood, screaming. “Too many eyes! TOO MANY EYES!” Then his vocal cords snapped.

The orb had vanished.

Two days later it showed up again. This time in the throat of a hunter dragged out of the Black Hollow Woods. His body was hollowed out from the inside. His face was gone, peeled off and left intact nailed to a tree like a trophy. Flies were already nesting in his nostrils.

Inside his cracked open jaw, resting between split cartilage and shattered molars was the orb. Wet, slick and watching.

The coroner touched it once. She began convulsing, skin bubbled and her mouth distended with a crunch as her jawbone cracked open. Her swollen tongue lolled out. She bit off her fingers, one by one, before she collapsed, chewing.

At the hospital, they kept her in restraints. She now smiles into the void when no one is looking, her eyes blank. She whispers with blackened gums, “Feed the circle…”

The orbs multiply now. One was found inside a dog’s stomach. The animal was still alive, howling as if something was clawing its insides. When they cut it open, the dog was already decaying. Inside it wasn’t a blue marble, it was an eye. Glassy. Blue and still twitching.

Children began dying from blue welts that would develop under their skin. During autopsies, the kids would be rotten on the inside. When the scalpel would cut too deep, slick blue marbles rolled out, like eggs being birthed forth from fetid flesh. One girl vomited up seventeen of them before collapsing in spasms. Her jaw distended with such force it broke her neck. Her head rolled back, her eyes staring but not seeing. From her open throat came a voice that was not hers, like grinding glass. “The circle nears…”

The town had turned feral. People went missing. Some were found folded into themselves. Their legs stuffed down their throats, faces locked in silent screams. Always, near the body, the marbles. In basements. In bathtubs. In cribs.

A family of five was found crucified to their own living room walls. Each member had their mouths sewn shut with wire, their skin flayed around the room like offerings. The cursed marbles sat in blood that was pooling beneath them, quietly pulsing.

Now I sit and wait for my turn. The others are gone. Peeled, torn and emptied. Some were torn apart in the streets, others dragged away screaming into the dark by unseen hands. Faces that I knew were split open, and filled with marbles.

I can hear the soft click of glass rolling along the floorboards at night. Sometimes they whisper my name from inside the walls. The orbs are coming for me, just like they came for the rest. And when they do, I won’t scream, that’s what it wants. What it needs. I’ll open my mouth and let them roll in. I am ready. All that I’ve ever loved is gone.

He is coming. The collector is coming. I can feel it through my feet. The pulsing. The slow grinding of something massive beneath the surface. The orbs were just the beginning. Eggs maybe. Eyes maybe, or teeth.

They said that if you see one, you’re already marked. That it sees through you, wears your thoughts like clothes. Learns your smell. Your voice. Your soft bones. What scares you. They don’t kill you quickly, they show you what you fear the most. Drag it out of the corners of your mind and use it to tear you apart. It seems to feed on fear, growing stronger with every scream. I know what scares me and I’ve made peace with it. When the marbles come, I’ll be ready.

When the circle is full, and I am dead. He will rise.

And he will be hungry.

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!