Ignore It
written by: Skylar Sturtevant
“I know you see it too. It has followed me for a very long time and I know how much it scares you, but if you ignore it, it won’t hurt you. I’m so sorry. But there is a way to escape it.”
Those were the last words ever spoken in this house. Our mother told my sister and I that soon before she went catatonic. She has sat, mouth agape, in that same decayed oak chair for six months. Ivy vines crawled up the back of the chair and constricted her chest and arms like a python. The needle was still jammed into her vein; the thick, black, liquid remained frozen with her in time. Flies surrounded her and slowly crept into her mouth as I watched in horror. I wanted to bat them away, cry out, and end the madness, but I couldn’t. The thing stood in the corner of the room and watched me with malice as I pretended it wasn’t there. My mother’s last words have haunted me ever since- ignore it.
When I moved my hand away and put my head down, it shifted its spiteful attention. The unnameable, as I had begun calling it, turned from me, walked towards my sister, and grabbed her long black hair. It lifted the matted and unwashed mess with clawed fingers and breathed down her neck. She looked at me with cold, dead eyes as she lifted the snow on her plate to her face. With a strong inhale, her blank stare widened and turned into pure ecstasy. She ravenously devoured the rotted meat and insects it had placed in front of her. My bottom lip quivered when I watched her lift a cockroach to her mouth and bite it with a loud crunch. She smiled and laughed as she offered her plate to me. I felt violently ill.
When I first used the magic to escape this world, like my mother and sister, it was Heaven. My anxieties left me and all of the weight placed on my shoulders fell away; it felt like I was Atlas and had just dropped the Earth. The food tasted better, the air was cleaner, and my senses were sharpened. The indescribable horror in the corner went away for four hours my first time. Its inhuman eyes had just vanished into nothingness when I swallowed the capsules. My mother’s choice of magic was the needle and my sister’s was the powder. I was afraid of needles and I didn’t like things going up my nose, so I chose the one that tasted like candy. However, each time I’ve used the magic, the effects became lesser and required more. I could get away with one or two capsules, but now it felt like I needed half a bottle to feel anything.
I shook my head. The aberration turned from my sister and looked at me with inhuman and hateful eyes. It slowly crept across the table toward me. It then shoved its voracious maw into my face and I regained my feigned composure and looked down at the table. Insects crawled over two severed fingers on the plate in front of me as I looked over and realized they were my mother’s. My hands trembled as the creature’s eyes burrowed through mine. I took the bottle out of my pocket and ate a handful of the magic candy. It slowly opened its mouth in a wide and violent sneer, then crawled on the wall and into the kitchen.
I went into the other world for a while, the one that appeared when I ate the magic. The plate in front of me held two of the finest fruits and the goblet next to me was full of vintage wine. I picked up the fruit and ate it; it was the greatest thing I had ever tasted in my life. I ate it slowly to savor the flavor right before grabbing the second one and doing the same. It was rather crunchy on the inside, yet soft on the outside, but the flavor overpowered the odd texture. I had never seen this exotic fruit before, but I knew I must have more of it. There was more on my sister’s plate so I walked over and grabbed them off hers. She was fast asleep at this point, so it didn’t matter that I took them from her. As I wiped the fruit juice from my chin, I looked at my mother. She was alert and awake as she waved for me to see her.
“Mom, it’s so good to see you. I can’t believe you’re alive.” I said.
She raised an eyebrow at me and turned away.
“Mom?”
“You believe I’m alive in here?” she asked, “That this isn’t my own prison?”
“Wh..what?”
Her face melted away- the skin falling off the bone like a rack of ribs. Her eye sockets turned into empty pits as they popped like grapes and dripped down her cheekbones. I screamed as she grabbed me and shook me awake.
The unnameable was still in the kitchen at this point as I stood over the corpse of my mother. I ripped the needle out of her arm and put it in my pocket- there was no blood left to spurt out of her arm. I closed her eyes and walked over to my unconscious sister. Her face was planted onto the table; I shook her but she wouldn’t wake up. I put my fingers to her neck and the horror was confirmed for me. With teary eyes, I turned from her body and walked to the waterlogged and cracked chair.
The creature slithered back to the dining room from the kitchen. It crept over black mold on the walls and stood behind my sister. It unhinged its gargantuan jaws and placed its gaping maw over my sister’s head as it started to slowly devour her. It grabbed her shoulders with its clawed hands as it slowly stretched its jaws further and further, until she was entirely gone. It swallowed my sister whole in a matter of minutes that felt like an eternity of agony. It turned its disgusting head to me as I looked down. I didn’t move for several moments, hoping it would go away. When it didn’t, I grabbed the “magic candy” off the table. It sneered at me with still unhinged jaws as I opened the bottle. Its venomous smirk bored through me as I put the “magic” into my mouth. Afterwards, it walked up the decrepit stairs and out of sight.
I spit the capsules onto the table.
I stood up from my chair as quietly as possible and walked to the door. With a single glance back at my mother’s corpse, I walked out of the house. The freezing rain hit my head as I walked through the overarching trees in the dark forest. The howling of wolves could be heard in the distance as I slowly walked on the path to town. I walked for five minutes until I heard the sound of hundreds of legs racing across the wet leaves.
I sprinted with atrophied legs through the forest as the unnameable charged at me with nightmarish speed. The demon’s eldritch style of movement raced through the trees with an uncanny fluidity- its movements did not belong to this world. It appeared to nearly phase in and out, as if its bones were creaking and breaking then immediately reconstructing themselves as it maliciously ran. When it caught up to me, it threw me to the cold, dead, grass. Its rancid and sickly-sweet breath invaded my nose as it sat on top of me. I tried to punch and kick it to no avail as it started to unhinge its jaw. I screamed and fought to get away from it, but its unholy strength was too much. It got its mouth around my head and covered my eyes as it tried to swallow me alive. When I felt all hope was lost, I reached into my pocket and grabbed the needle that I tore from my mother’s dead arm and jammed it into its neck. The vile poison ran through the beast’s neck and down the length of its body. It convulsed on the ground and wriggled around until finally, it shriveled and died. I stood and breathed my first sigh of relief in years.
It’s almost funny. We all tried to ignore it by escaping our world with magic, by pretending it wasn’t there and that our lives were fine. It took the deaths of two people that I loved to realize that we were giving in to what the unnameable wanted- to ignore it. I don’t think it will ever completely fade away; its malicious eyes still peer through every shadow, but at least now, I know that I have the tools to fight it.
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