The Shadows in the Storm

By Kaï Wolfgang Fischer

In the depths of a dank cavern rests a creature that has been dormant for thousands of years. It has no name and cannot be described through mere human contemplation. However, it is truly evil and feeds on the negativity and vulgarity of its prey. It hovers between space and time waiting for the right moment to rise. It thrives on the torment and degradation of its victims tainted flesh. The worse they are the greater the flavour; so it prolongs its own twisted slumber, savouring each exquisite second until the rancour has perfectly ripened.
Malcolm is the main character. Although he is an accomplished surgeon, he is the ideal anti-hero, because he has his own demons and they run the risk of consuming him before the creature does. The subsequent cast of characters is a collection of frazzled fragments of humanity, along with the metamorphosis of two protagonists, Job and Shana. They are First Nation locals who remain connected to the land and, by overcoming their respective dark pasts, forge a flicker of hope for a glimpse of a fragile future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kaï Wolfgang Fischer
• Release date: Jan 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781988186016

Book preview

CoverFront.jpg

THe

shadows

in the

storm

Kaï Wolfgang Fischer

Table of Contents

Quote

The Shadows in the Storm

Dark Blessing

Cold

Wind

Perversion

The Beneath

Linchpin

Fragmented

Whiff

The Tormented

Blood

Foray

Miscellaneous

Centrepiece

Repulsion

Abundance

Disgrace

Return

Skin

Broken Mirror

Hunt

Storm

Redemption

Motion

Constructive Conversation

Wake

Eternal Slumber

About the Author

Copyright

Quote

Instead of being doomed by the darkness of our own damnation, we should strive for the soaring of our own salvation. Then to do so without the assistance of an empty God or without the blame for an invisible Devil. We are accountable for our own decisions and it is about time that we take full responsibility for them regardless of their consequences. Are we a collection of adults or a gathering of overgrown children? I am an imperfect human being, and proud of it, without hiding behind it. Instead of trying to change the world, which is childish, naive and idiotic. We should attempt a far greater feat. We should try to immunize it against its own corruption. How? By leading by example, with one small step at a time. Therein lies the true power and the glory, and the liberation of all mankind against his arch nemesis: itself.

– KWF 2013

Dark Blessing

In the epitome of darkness and death, it settled...preying. The mere notion of the distant heat pulsing and rising from its potential victims throats, then their throbbing fear, coursing through their arteries, teased the saliva dribbling from its thick, black gums. It had no choice but to twist its long, jagged jaws into a delicious sneer. The eventual triumph of its epic hunt amplified the ecstasy. It was the appetizer of a longingly-awaited meal: a feast of the fallen, and a rebirth for the reviled.

Time was the greatest mistress. There was no need for anything else, because without it, the performance – the enduring and procuring – would be oblivious, or – even worse – obsolete. The true patience of a killer was what differentiated it from the rest. The fearful, mindful and careful were the ones that fretted and lost everything in the process. It was the hunter that survived. Not due to the obvious notion that it hunted in the first place, where its prey would eventually fall, but it gained its strength through the chase, whereas its target experienced the exact opposite.

One of the greatest aspects of any slaying was watching and waiting for the mark to break. This could happen physically, of course. But how boring was that? To follow the game to the brink, and then to observe its complete and utter collapse, was delectable. To mould a broken will enslaved inside a freshly preserved body made it even sweeter. It was the ultimate prize. What was better than killing a killer?

The sneer turned into a distorted smile. It gleamed in the dank dark as if it were either a black diamond or pearl hidden in the bowels of eternity. Its ancient secrets reinforced its resolve to the point of near invulnerability. If it had a black heart of its own, then it would pump with anticipation. However, it was not weakened by such triviality, it was not shackled by such frivolity, it was beyond mere mortality and celebrated its multidimensional supremacy. It could pass in and out of realms as easily as a fragile moth would flutter near a flickering flame. There was no need for action, and there was no need for thought. It peeled through layers of space and time as if were a baby hushing itself to sleep. Then, as delicately and as smoothly as that same baby’s chest would rise and fall, it would travel to the ends of the universe and back again...never disturbing the infant, never touching it, but always waiting for it to become an empty adult, so that it could still savour its original innocence with every tear of its tainted seasoned flesh, with every drop of its vile matured blood, and with every mouthful of its lost soul. It was always about the shattered spirit. Although the meat was heavenly, the seared soul was sacred. Then, once its consumption began, its recent fears, guilt and self-loathing, drove the devastating urges furthermore.

Their intensity was nearly overwhelming. It rendered their minds blind. Their fragmented hearts would beat brutally. Their smells would sour seductively. The waiting was worth every slippery second. Their collective quest was eternal life. It was everything.

The best part was that they created their own demises. More accurately, they engineered the doom of their individual mortality. They built the cages, sculpted the bars, forged the chains, and sharpened the hooks. They trapped themselves, punctured their own skin, twisted in the air, and waited for it to start feasting. At long last, it did not have to do anything. It never really did. It only had to wait, and prey. Which was why it could not stop smiling. They usually led themselves to its deep layer, in one form or another, every single time. Then, as it would start to nibble, bite by bite, and taste by tasty taste, it would inevitably spare them from themselves. It was a horrible ordeal but an epic falsehood of freedom in the end. The pure irony was that they lied so many times over the years, where their natural unravelling was due to their debauchery of untruths; so to be ensnared by them, to be tortured by them, and to be split by them justified a hideous end to an even worse beginning. It could revive them whenever it chose, and repeat the total trial over and over again. Each subsequent session would be different and far worse than the previous interval. It had constructs, concepts and contradictions that a mere human mind could never be able to comprehend. Then it had timelessness to persist infinitely. Once the predicament truly began, it could never fully end. The most harrowing aspect was that it could torture one meal in one realm while stalking another in another. There was no escape. To watch them crumble before their first sampling was only outweighed by repeating the procedure endlessly. It fuelled the passion. It magnified the hunger. The pinnacle was purposely starving for over a millennium merely to relish in the first suckle after such a long sabbatical. It barricaded the inner pangs in the knowing of their eventual degradation, inner torment, absolute anguish and insidious self-doubt. It did so until it delighted in their complete surrender. There was no greater beauty than their cursed fate, and the instance when they realized that they were undone by it.

This was it: the moment of their shared death...the moment when everything clarified and crystallized. It was finally ready for their dishonourable destruction. It smiled cruelly. It licked its acidic saliva from its black gums with its long forked tongue. It opened its cold dark eyes for the first time in aeons. It rose to its full height. It began to creep from the deep. The wind, its sister and guide, started shrilling in the background. The cold, its jealous brother, circled everywhere. The blizzard had already reached its zenith. It was protected by it. It was invisible. It inched one long step closer to the twisted mouth of its cave. It moved extremely slowly. Every single step was an exquisite existence. It would stop. An angel would weep.

It smiled again. The wind was getting closer. The cold was getting stronger. Everything was better. The howling and swirling strengthened it. It was a sinister melody and an archaic orchestra. Eventually, they would be close...so close. It would breath in their heat, steal their dreams and shatter their souls. Their dripping flesh would decorate its halls. It would dance on their bones. It would remember the flavour of their blood all over its prolonged, distorted grimace. The night was beguiling. The pace was set. It was the beginning of their end. The first slice would be sadistically savoury, and superbly serene. Finally, and after all these centuries, it was time to truly live again.

Cold

He wondered what he was doing here. Actually that was a lie. He avoided wondering about anything really, because that would entail a beginning, middle and end. The beginning was the worst of all and a pit he never fully crawled out from. Arguably, he did run away from it briefly, but that was his first and biggest addiction. However, no matter how quickly anybody ran or how far he or she managed to get, the pit was always waiting, smiling sinisterly and wanting wantonly. It did not swallow whole. It nipped at the sides, slicing chunks here and there when it felt like it. It did so for sheer selfish pleasure and satanic satiation. It did so repeatedly to prolong the process, so that it took as long as it naturally could, so that it persevered in the sheer rapture that its latest victim could not. Which was why Malcolm was standing in the cold, freezing his ass off.

Originally, he thought that Death was stalking him. That was an allusion. Death was the one who always got blamed for everything. Death was probably the most reasonable of the bunch. The Devil was the one waiting for him in the pit. It was the perfect place. Regardless of whatever would or would not transpire, the pit never ran out of room, and the Devil never ran out of time. God was usually a no-show, where even the most faithfully pious puppet could not explain its absence. Regardless of how many knees were bloodied praying or how many dried lips cracked muttering his hallowed name, God never came. The greatest secret of all was not the Devil. It was God.

The cold crept up his legs, infecting his sickly pale skin and invading his now creaking bones. He was not an old man – not in any sense. However, the cold – or more precisely this cold – made him feel old. If he were truly honest, which he could never be about why he was in this predicament in the first place, then he would have the courage or the strength to admit that he was getting tired of himself. The irony was that courage and strength were the qualities he lacked the most. Therefore, he could never admit anything to anyone. The tragedy was that he desperately craved to do so. Although he was riddled with spiritual black holes and his selfishness fed on the anti-matter of his broken soul, he craved to be both courageous and strong. It haunted him with every guilty breath. He ached for a sliver of righteousness. The reality was that he knew it was impossible. Ultimately, it was the most unattainable. The horrible truth, or his horrible truth, was that he was the Devil. Well, he was perhaps an extremely weak version. The supreme dark being would not even acknowledge his presence. Yet, whatever he truly was, he was his own worst enemy. And that was why he gave himself the nickname, Mal. The fact that he could even remember his birth name now was a miracle.

Nobody called him Malcolm. It was for the simple reason that he ran away from his true self decades ago, so much that it would surprise anyone who were alive to remember him to know that he actually survived. He left at fifteen and always looked back. It was a glaring contradiction for someone like him; he was a person who went out of his way to never dwell on the depths of anything, especially the endless bottom leading to his emotional tomb. He could not help it. Looking back was a survival mechanism. And Mal knew all about survival. It was his excuse. It was his one true God. He did not pray to anyone or anything. He used survival as a drug. It was a magical sword, finely cracked from its very shaft all along its rusted edge. It was chipped, dulled and worn, but it was all he knew. He could not use it against a true demon. It was an escape from his peers. Although the demons devoured ravenously, humans were cattle and he treated them as such. He was a medical doctor, after all. He sliced into them all the time. They paid him to. And they loved him for it. They treated him as a God. He hated them for their total foolishness and immediate respect. It was far worse than respect. It was adulation. It burned him. It salted his seeping wounds. He was one of the emptiest people they could ever meet, yet, immediately they adored him because of a mere superficiality: his inflated and overrated profession.

The odd fellow human being would see right through him. It was extremely rare and both liberating and terrifying. Secretly he wanted to be exposed. It seemed sublime. However, that survival mechanism kicked in again. Which was the problem with addiction. As much as people abused it, in order to use it, it came at a price. Everything did. Mal’s only honesty was that he knew he was an addict, he was addicted to many, many vices, but had no intention of doing anything about any of them. They warmed him when nothing else could. Today was the only instance when his vices had failed him. It was the first time he thought he ran out of room to run. He felt trapped. For a shabby male specimen and a minor master of feather-brained manipulation, and despite all his insecurities and nightmares, the only thing he excelled at was escaping. He was quite proud of it. Now, with the wind screeching all around him, he came to the chilling conclusion that he had made the greatest blunder of his slimy existence. And the worst part of all was that he could not do anything about it. But maybe he did not want to…?

The wind was dire. It began in the plane. What a terribly shaky flight! He had never been on such an expensive trip where he felt no security at all. The tiny excuse of a plane looked as if its bolts had never been tightened since it left the factory. Through the open cockpit, he saw the old, fat pilot, who reeked of booze. It was only overtaken by the stench of engine oil. It either seemed to be constantly burning or leaking somewhere. It would not have been a flash burn, but more of a slight burn, as if droplets of it were dripping on top of a cast-iron stove. It produced enough nausea that fear nursed the back of his mind, making him wonder if the whole plane would burst into flames even in this frightful cold. Hopefully the idiotic cold could come in handy for something, he had thought for an instant. That did not really help, because his next thought jumped in where he saw himself burning while freezing at the same time. He envisioned a ripped open ceiling, the vessel jerking up and down, with his torso freezing as the wind suffocated his lungs, while flames danced around him, charring his flesh and hissing at him, while fighting the cold for his complete consumption. He had seen that several times. His only solace was closing his eyes and, whenever turbulence jolted him like a naughty fiend rattling his self-induced cage, visions of his own torturous demise ravaged him. It was the same complicated image every time. That was when the cold starting infecting his system. The flooring was icy, and then it breathed up his skin, and scraped his spine. He felt it everywhere. Although he wore several layers over every possible part of his thin body, he remained a human icicle.

That was when Death slithered into his mind. It was the wind’s fault. It rattled the plane as if it were its plaything. He pictured a behemoth holding a toy plane with one fat hand, full of filthy yellow fingernails. Then it would shake the plane whenever it felt