A Lesson Never Learnt
A short horror by Matthew Tonks
He has come back with memory and hunger tangled together. Tonight he watches, bargaining with a reflection that knows the price of mercy and the ease of feeding.
He stands in the darkness of the shadows watching her as she sleeps. His lips part and a breath, old and stale, creeps gently from his throat as a quiver trembles across his lips, while his dead heart beats once before falling silent again. His eyes glimmer for a moment as the black rotting liquid briefly pumps through his dried-up veins. He gasps as he looks across the room, and for the first time in what seems like eons he catches his reflection in the mirror—its face curling into the same snarl that has followed him through death and back—and he takes another gasped breath.
“Look at you,” his reflection hisses at him. “Hiding in the shadows like the monster they write you out to be, but how the lies have painted you, how pathetic you truly are.”
“Stop, I—I’m the monster and more. I’ve applauded their stories, celebrated them.”
“LIAR!” he barks, his lips quivering against his ear. “You are no monster, you are a love-struck child, punished to live in the darkness forever, undeserving of your happy ending.”
“I—I,” he stammers through trembling lips.
“You’re nothing,” he spits. “Less than one whole thing. Too long have you stood lost on the sidelines, refusing to commit, reciting the same coward’s prayer you’ve whispered for centuries. No longer can you be one and then the other, for that’s not how damnation works. You are either the monster or the man.”
He draws another breath as their gazes fall upon the sleeping woman, her beauty calling to each in a different way.
“C-Can’t I just have this moment, can’t I tell her, show her our past, who she truly is, who I am, and how long I have lived waiting for her?”
“Then what? You live together happily ever after in perfect harmony? It does not happen, it does not exist, not for us, not for you.”
His chest heaves, his lungs fill, and his blackened heart beats once more.
“But what if it is? What if she has been brought to us, w-we have been brought here, these moments, these circumstances are his way of forgiving us, rewarding us f—”
“For what? For being a monster? For feeding on his children exactly as he damned us to do? You poor fool—he wanted us to resist, to crawl through the hunger, to choke on our thirst, to starve ourselves clean. And when the end finally came, he might have granted us rest, granted us forgiveness to die. But we fed. We fed because we were weak. We fed because it was easier. We fed because it felt like winning. We spat in his punishment and called it freedom. And now you dare to think this is forgiveness? No. This is another test—and you are already failing.”
“N-No, h-he’s giving her to us, h-he’s rewarding us for our love, h-he’s giving us a partner to spend the rest of eternity with.”
“Eternity is no more a lie than this conversation,” he snarls, a smirk curling across his lips as he draws back into the darkness. He tastes the saltiness on his tongue, and his eyes widen as he stares into her hollow empty shell while a river of crimson washes over her. He gasps, takes a stuttered breath, and a tear tumbles down his cheek as his hand hesitates above her face for a heartbeat before he cups her cold flesh, the thick red warmth that once brought life now slipping through his starving fingertips.
“How long I have waited for thee, mon amie,” he whispers through trembling lips as he buries himself once more into the neck of her throat and continues to feed while the grinning thing watches from the shadows.
💬 Did this one echo?
Tell me—before it forgets your name.
—
Written by Matthew Tonks
→ Read more nightmares at mtonks.com
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