Excerpt: Remembrance & Temple

Remembrance

Something I noticed at the time, and this troubled me even then, was how quickly people stopped talking about the outside world. It was like nothing else existed. The lack of television, and the resurgence of newspapers helped this. Suddenly, our whole world existed within these walls and we just adjusted. Not consciously, but something in our brains just stopped trying to grab hold of the big picture and settled us down. After the first year, I never heard the word America again, or Australia, or Middle East. A whole world, vanished. And we just got on with our fucking lives.

Temple

You enter the room again, despite the horrors you know it contains, ignoring the warning being screamed in your head. Heart racing and feet slowing, your own body rebelling against a decision already taken. Ignore the creak of the floorboards under your feet, ignore the stench of death, ignore the feeling of a single great eye bearing witness to your actions, and definitely ignore the hot breath on the back of your neck. Focus on the doorway, that gaping void into the waiting unknown, the dark abyss pregnant with dread, closing your mind to the possibility of anything else. Hesitate at the entrance, one last hopeless chance at a respite from these events, but an unneccesary one as your legs move of their own acord, breaking the threshold and throwing you into madness. One final rule flits across your thoughts, above all, Don't Scream.

She screamed.