Read Carved in Stone: Monochrome Destiny Online
Authors: T L Blake
Carved in Stone: Monochrome Destiny
Monochrome Destiny
Carved in Stone
By T L
Blake
Copyright © 2015 by T L Blake
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the express written permission of the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.
Published in the United Kingdom
First Published, 2015
To those lovely ladies who have been
astoundingly patient whilst this story has slowly come to life. Know that
your input has made this tale what it is today and without you it would likely
never have made it to print.
Why did
everything have to take so long? He‘d only meant to be about an hour, but
now half the bloody day was wasted. It would be fully dark before he got
back.
“Shit.”
He depressed the accelerator down further and cursed himself for his
failures. He’d lived in the sleepy town of
Porthmollek
long enough to know that getting to civilisation and back took longer than an
hour. He should have left earlier and now he’d pay the price.
Waiting
for him at home was an enormous pile of practice exam papers. He’d
promised to give out the results tomorrow, so had no choice but to get them
marked tonight. It wasn’t how he’d planned to spend his evening, but that
couldn’t be helped now. The match was set to be recorded, just in case,
but he didn’t want to watch it tomorrow. One or more of the bloody kids
was bound to bring up the game and ruin it for him.
He
glanced at his watch and calculated that he might just have time to finish the
marking and watch the game if he got home quickly enough. He depressed
the accelerator further and sped down the twisting narrow lane that led into
town. Hemmed in with high banks and, in places, barely wide enough for
two cars to safely pass each other, the road certainly wasn’t what might be
called a thoroughfare, but it was all that
Porthmollek
had.
The
yellow twinkling hue of the town lighting up for the evening came into view in
the distance. “Nearly there, come on, you can do this,” he spoke to the
car and tickled her a little more.
Rounding
a bend overly quickly, he gasped when he saw a figure standing in the centre of
the road. He slammed on his brakes in kneejerk reaction and swung the
wheel hard to the bank.
The
car spun.
He
knew he’d been going too fast and that there was now no way to avoid a
collision, but at least he swerved around whoever was in the road.
Seconds
elongated as the car bucked beneath him. It hit the unyielding high
roadside bank with such force that it lifted into the air. He felt his
seatbelt snap tightly just before a momentary feeling of weightlessness.
The car then flipped, rolled up the bank, caving the roof in like paper and
then ricocheted back into the road. The noise was horrendous, but he
didn’t hear it for long. His head smashed into the crumpled roof despite
the airbag inflating and he was knocked unconscious.
When
he came to, pain sliced into his temple as he opened his eyes. The airbag
hung limply from the centre of the steering wheel and the windscreen was
smashed and mostly missing. He was crumpled over the steering wheel like
a rag doll.
To
his surprise, the car was upright again and facing downhill. The twin
beams of the headlights, miraculously still functioning, picked out the
desolate stretch of road that led into town. He could see the red rimmed
speed limit signs glowing further ahead despite rather foggy vision.
Something
wet trickled down his face. He tried to lift his arm to touch his temple
and judge the damage, only to find that his muscles didn’t seem to be working
properly. Either that or his arm had somehow turned to lead. He
knew this was bad and he blinked to clear his vision before slowly leaning
himself back and groaning.
Oh
God, the person in the road!
Panic seized him. He
couldn’t bear to think that he’d hit someone. He tried to turn to see,
but the pain from his battered body was excruciating. He began yelling,
and to his relief, heard footsteps running to the side of the car.
“Oh,
thank God.” Slowly, turning to the side, he met the face of his
saviour. “Help me, please!”
“Help
you?” The voice taunted in reply, scratchy and unexpected. “Help you,
help you,
help
you?” The figure danced, skipped
perhaps; he wasn’t certain. The steps were too light to be real and the
words were a song, a child’s song, ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’.
He
had to be dreaming, or he had hit his head really hard and was hallucinating.
“Please.”
He managed on a sigh, the effort to stay awake suddenly more difficult.
He knew enough to know that he was seriously injured, knew that his body was
shutting down, and he fought, he really did, as the dancing figure both taunted
and frightened him.
“Did
you like your trip?” Its voice was high pitched and screechy. “I
liked it when you flew. What was it like? What was it like to fly
without wings?”
The
words were fast and garbled. He struggled to make out what was being
said. It was barely comprehensible and he couldn’t be hearing correctly.
“Call
for help, please.” His eyes rolled and he knew he was losing the fight to
stay awake. Losing consciousness was bad, very bad.
“Help,
help, help, help, help.” The figure kept on and on, dancing in wide
circles, lit occasionally by the headlights, but otherwise shadowed from the
dying sun.
Tears
ran down his face.
The
figure darted to the car, placed two hands on the doorframe, the window long gone,
and leaned in. He knew he was hallucinating now, for whoever it was,
leaned to his face and licked him, from jaw to temple.
“Hmm, yummy, yummy.”
It said
in that eerie screech before the voice deepened and darkened. “I want
more.” It was a demand, said with the voice of the Devil himself, a voice
that could turn muscle to ice, bone to stone.
I’m
dead
,
he realised. This was hell. He hadn’t survived the wreck and
destiny called him down, forever down.
Funny,
how he’d never been a believer. Not once in his entire life had he
thought that heaven or hell truly existed and yet now, here he was, trapped by
his past and facing his eternity of damnation.
It
had been many years ago that he’d gotten in with the wrong crowd, the very
wrong crowd. Many years ago that he’d been there, in even the smallest
capacity, to watch a man being beaten to death. He’d tried to make up for
it. He’d changed his life, become an inspiring teacher and fought to keep
others from the same path that he had once followed. But he never had
repented, had he? He never had asked for forgiveness and now it was too
late.
“No,
I’ve changed, please.” Fear gave him the energy for words. “Are you going
to punish me for one mistake?”
“Mistake, mistake, mistake.”
The
figure, back to screeching and dancing, taunted him again. “One mistake
is all you get. One mistake is all you get. One mistake is all you
get.”
Anger
seized him, boiled from somewhere within. “No, I’ve made up for it, damn
you. I don’t want to go to hell.”
The
figure stopped skipping and stared at him. Cocking its head, it
scrutinised him for an age before bursting into high-pitched laughter. As
its cynical hysteria subsided it came to the window once again. “You’re
not dead. I’m not here to take you to hell.”
Confused,
pain dulling his mind, he could only ask one question. “Then why are you
here?”
“To finish you, of course.
Can’t
have you meddling, meddling,
meddling
. Calling
hospitals is bad. You should have gone straight home. We did ask,
did ask,
did
ask.”
He
stared in disbelief. He’d only made one phone call recently, on
Friday. He’d been going to enquire about it tomorrow. “I only
called to see how she was doing. Any good teacher would.” A year 11
pupil had been taken out of his classroom on Friday, all but unconscious.
He’d assumed, from the swift onset of her illness that it had been meningitis,
so he had called the hospital to check on her condition, and to see if his
assumption was correct. If one went down with meningitis, the chances
were that there would be more. He’d been surprised that she wasn’t a
patient and from the tone of the person who answered the call, she never had
been. He’d been planning to do a follow up on Monday, to see if her
parents were supporting her.
“Told
you not to, told you not to, told you not to, told . . .” It went on and on and
on. His ears pounded as each shrill word drilled into his bruised brain.
“Stop,
please stop.”
The
figure clamped its hands on the car again and stared. “Time’s up, Mr
Teacher.” It had no smile, he realised, despite the words sounding full
of menacing glee.
“Are
you going to kill me?”
He
watched it cock its head again before it stilled. The long uninterrupted
silence that fell over them was more terrifying than all the taunting had
been. For such a previously animated figure, it could stand so completely
still that it could easily be a mannequin.
One straight
from hell.
Then
it finally spoke.
“Oh
no, we don’t want you dead . . . yet.”
From
out of the gloom several other figures moved with ethereal grace and circled
the car. As energy seeped from him, just as the blood seeped from his
wounds, he had a moment to consider that they all looked alike, featureless and
dark, before unconsciousness pulled him under for the very last time.