Since taking the job, he'd had no place to call his home. The Deliverers slept and ate in isolated quarters within the warehouse and caught snatches of sleep in the back of the van on long nights. All small confined spaces, but at least the rooms in the warehouse housed a bed if nothing else. The communal canteen and wash-rooms were always clean but not somewhere to hang out. There was a unwritten rule somewhere that eating, showering and bathroom visits should able be observed in silence. It was a rule which wasn't always abided by. Sometimes the whispered voices of the Deliverers bothered him more than the vast silences.
Now, panicked and tiring, this house was the only place he could think of running. He had no home, or at least no memory of one to flee to. No familiar, welcoming surroundings. Abraham ran around the side of the house to the open window where he had left the black container earlier. Having expelled its dark cloud, the container had already began to decompose in the night air and rain. Abraham forced the window open, not caring about making too much noise for hopefully the delivered container had already done the job he had imagined that it would, and the house would offer shelter.
Abraham never saw them enter the van, but suddenly the Three Sisters had been there right next to him in that confined space, offering a clear definition between light and dark. He’d watched them in frozen terror, as they’d started their ghostly chanting, their eyes burning white hot as the van began to tremble, the black clouds stirring in anger against them. The Three Sisters had swept inside the van, just as the black clouds were ready to envelop the trapped Abraham. But instead of consuming him, with sudden collective swiftness the Three Sisters had brushed past him, ignoring Abraham completely as they engaged their sudden charge towards the swirling blackness. Abraham had watched the cloud dissipate from around him, almost steeling itself for its confrontation with the Three Sisters. He’d felt the gust of stale air as it swept to intersect the greater threat than him.
A sudden shockwave rocked the entire van and the light flashed as if someone were rapidly flicking a light-switch on and off. The moment had spurred Abraham and he’d once more clambered back through to the cab, this time not stopping. He’d pushed his body through the broken wind shield and landed hard on the asphalt. Looking back at the van he’d seen it shaking violently, a battle between the light and dark going on inside with a cacophony of shrill noises and distant voices.
So Abraham had ran. Ran hard. Ran here.
Never once stopping to look behind and never feeling like he was safe.
Something would be coming for him.
Whether it would be the light or the dark, he dared not consider.
Climbing into the room onto a counter top, Abraham thought for a moment as to how he had guessed correctly at this being a kitchen window. He slid to the floor and slammed the window shut, turning the latches to secure it. His eyes already more than accustomed to the cover of night, he swept through the room considering finding something to defend himself with, but his acute vision stopped him in his tracks. Through an archway he could see into a living area, dimly lit by the orange display of a digital clock. The shape of a woman slumped forwards in the armchair called his attention from across the way. Slowly Abraham approached her. There was a faint, foul smell in the air, something he had recently tasted. He thought back to the van and the black cloud.
As he reached her, he looked at her head resting on her chest her hair straggling down like a weeping willow. The body position looked too uncomfortable to be one of slumber and he noticed a mug of something half consumed on the table next to her. A pink dressing gown wrapped tightly around her. Cautiously Abraham reached out a hand and tilted the woman's head backwards. As her dead weight fell solemnly back into the chair, parts of her face peered out between the strands of blonde hair. In the muted light, Abraham couldn't make out what exactly he was seeing, and with the back of his hand swept aside the fallen hair from her face. Abraham reeled backwards, suddenly wishing the room was buried in a deeper darkness that even his eyes could not penetrate. The face staring up at him was that of a young woman, a fresh face of a twenty year old that hadn't seen too much of life and yet there were black gouges in her skin and fresh bruises around her face, cruel make-up that made her appear to have absorbed all of life's crushing blows in one single moment. Her mouth was agape, silently screaming from the inside, but Abraham was transfixed by the eyes. Dark, empty eyes which were still open.
Yet somewhere behind them, movement.
A mini aperture depicting stormy clouds swimming across the vast sky.
Abraham bolted from the room in disgust. Reeling at the sense of responsibility that this crime had been committed by his own hand. So the stories about the containers were truer than he could have imagined. Inexplicable wells of torture that took the recipients in their sleep. The little seeds of doubt and fear that would bloom rapidly into debilitating nightmares. For the first time the hidden stories behind his work had a real face. A real young face, of someone who had maybe slipped downstairs in the dead of night trying for a warm glass of milk to encourage sleep, unaware of what that sleep would bring. This is what he did ten times every night.
Delivering debilitating nightmares.
He may as well be the one breaking into these people's houses and bludgeoning, torturing them, he thought. But from the look in her eyes, Abraham considered that nothing he could do to anyone would bear the fruits of such horrendous despair as what lay in those dead eyes.
Chapter Five
Abraham skidded into the bathroom, his fingers flailing wildly at the lock on the wooden door. He dropped to his knees on the tiled floor and firmly slid the catch across on the lock, chest burning from the unfamiliar burst of exercise and a welling sensation of needing to vomit. His bloodied hand remained on the small lock in a subconscious belief that it would be fortified by his touch. In truth it held the bathroom door closed for privacy, not for security. Abraham held his breath and pushed his ear against the wooden door. He listened intently for foreign sounds elsewhere in the house.
Would he really be safe here, he wondered?
Surely if the Three Sisters could find him out on the road, they could track him here, maybe they could sense his trail of destruction. He listened for another moment and heard a rattle of central heating pipes and the creaking of the settling wooden stairs; household sounds, grating at his frayed nerves. Why now? Why now after all this time? Maybe fate simply had him next in line. Inescapable fate that strips one of free will, or maybe he had let his guard down at some point and they had spotted him.
Hearing nothing else out of the ordinary, Abraham scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees towards a vanity unit by a bathtub. Opening the cupboard, he raked out bottles of cosmetic and medicinal sundries, carelessly littering the floor with containers of face cleansers, shampoos and aspirin. At the back of the cupboard, he pulled out a small plastic green first aid kid. Clambering to his feet his opened the case haphazardly and tipped the contents straight into a ceramic wash basin. He quickly rummaged through the packets of bandages and tubes of creams and pulled out the antiseptic wipes. Tearing open the packet, he pulled out the top sheet, wet and fibrous and rubbed vigorously at his hands. The small towel quickly turned vermilion. After cleaning himself up without too much due care and attention, Abraham slumped back against the bath, his feet outstretched, pushing against the door for reinforcement.
They could hear him in there. Hear his heavy breaths like the sighing of waves breaking over rocks. Watching from the ether of light it had taken a long time to find him. So many of the Deliverers they had to track, and only the three of them. But this one behind the door had leapt into their cross-hairs as he was growing forever stronger. As they collectively pushed their spirits against the door, they could feel his fear, sense the stench of his suppressed conscience burning deep inside. As one they recalled the pitiful scream that had led them to him. Always a Deliverer’s 1,000th victim screamed the loudest into the night, the echoes of their soul always breachi
ng the realm of the Sisters. This one was no different. The cumulative strokes of all his victims reaching them as his latest victim had looked into the eyes of that Hellish nightmare. The black clouds from the containers. The nightmares. A cry for help. Too little, too late to be saved. A cry that would find its way from the deepest recesses of the victim’s soul and transcend the ether where the Sisters watched over the sleeping world. All of those victims were faceless, nameless. Beautiful faces contorted into unrecognisable façades from their inner visions suffered. 1,000 victims that the Deliverer should never see, as to avoid any resurgence of conscience within them. A conscience which, if it could have borne witness to the foul contortions of the small child unaware of its own existence, through to the elderly man who wonders where his existence has gone, it would tear the Deliverer apart from the inside out. All the Deliverer ever saw was the containers, the black containers into which the Sisters would try to drive back the black clouds if only they could reach the intended victims in time before sleep was invaded.
Together they issued forth their power, a white light pushing its way in between the cracks in the wooden panels of the bathroom door. Sensing inside they were closing in on their prey, a feral cornered animal.
Abraham forced himself to his feet, his eyes fixated on the thin slivers of white light that were now pushing through the bathroom door. He could feel the air inside the small bathroom start to vibrate with the encroaching light. They had found him again. Waves of pressure started to wrap his head in a tightening veil of dull, throbbing pain. Again he cursed himself for having been so naive as to end up here, trapped without having put up so much as a fight. The bathroom window too small through which to escape and behind the only exit, the weakening door, stood the harbingers. But from the stories he'd heard he knew he'd done all he could do by running. To look upon the faces of the Three Sisters for too long would only mean a rapid demise.
With another loud splintering crack, Abraham jolted from the floor onto his feet. Panic still drove him to look for escape or at least a secret place to hide. Instead he found himself helplessly looking at his reflection in the mirror which hung on the wall over the wash basin. He searched deep into the eyes staring back at him, but the man on the other side of the mirror, the same man whose hair hung bedraggled and damp from sweat and rain, the same man whose pallid skin hung loosely from protruding cheekbones and whose blackened skin around his eyes bore ravines of pain and sorrow, had no answers either. With a feral cry of desperation, a resounding crescendo of noise against the pulsating white light forever growing within the room, Abraham swung a heavy fist which connected with the centre of the mirror. Abraham screamed in further pain as he expected the jolt of force rippling through his knuckles to signal the first shards of the glass exploding into fractions. But there before him the mirror remained intact. His broken reflection looking back at him through a perfect pane. With wits draining, Abraham reached out and yanked the entire frame from the wall and threw it to the floor as hard as he could. Yet still the glass remained unbroken and Abraham dropped to his knees beside it, gazing forlornly at the angled reflection of the door which was almost entirely swathed now in a glimmering whiteness. Running his hands down his cheeks, he leaned forward to rest his palms and forehead on the indestructible mirror in a gesture of simple supplication to anyone that would care to save his soul.
Abraham felt himself falling.
Chapter Six
As the physical barrier collapsed before them, the Sisters swept into the small room. They paused only for the briefest of moments to consume all the of the light back into their forms to strengthen their hold in the physical world. After dancing ethereally around every inch of the bathroom, they turned to look upon each other in desperate defeat as they realised they were alone.
There was no trace of the Deliverer they had followed here.
How he could have escaped their clutches they did not understand. But the pain of knowing that they had failed, the consequences of having lost another Deliver they understood. It was a Deliverer who could now go forth to deliver a thousand more black containers. In a swarming ball of fury they joined together as not even their other worldly senses could detect him.
It was then they saw the fallen mirror and around it they huddled.
Down through the glass they peered.
Another lost soul.
Then in unison their fists pounded the surface of the mirror, yet with all their force could not break through.
Chapter Seven
Abraham dropped his eyes from the light shining above him, a transparent image of the bathroom now fading. He had seen the faces of the Three Sisters looking down at him, pounding at the glass. For a moment he pictured a glowing white hand reaching through from the other side and grabbing him. But he offered a wry smile as he looked up, intuition telling him he was safe from them.
He wasn't sure where he was, or how exactly he'd come to be sitting in this small wooden boat, but the overwhelming feeling of having just cheated death for the second time was a sole sensation which, for the moment, he was happy to cling to. Kneeling over the mirror it had felt like it was another piece of his life breaking away and this time he wouldn’t be able to dodge it as it fell upon him.
He'd almost felt himself being torn apart as soon as his palms and forehead had hit the cold glass. At that moment he had felt a terrifying vacuum sucking hard at him from behind the mirror. He had tried to pull back, to free himself, but within seconds his head and arms had gone under, a steadfast gravity rapidly pulling the rest of his thin frame through the mirror. He had experienced a brief sensation of falling, but then, coming to rest on his back he found himself looking up at the window of light above him. With his eyes still adjusting from the contrasting exposures of the intense white light and the new gloomy surroundings in which he found himself, he lay still, squinted and watched through the small frame as the Sisters hovered frenetically above in their brilliant luminance on the other side of the mirror.
Abraham sat up, the light around him slowly ascending to a comfortable level. He was sat in a small wooden canoe shaped craft which seemed to sit low in the water. Water that was unworldly black, like a viscous river of tar. On both sides of the river there were shallow banks of land leading off into a distance which he couldn't clearly define. It was impossible to tell if the edge of the world was just metres ahead in any direction, or if this world and its black river wound its way into eternity. The occasional tree, like long forgotten pillars of life scattered the surface of the river banks, their barren branches, spindly and sickly, silhouetted black against a bloodied sky. A sky which nurtured no moon, no sun, no stars.
Abraham looked around this silent world and noticed that all normal perspective seemed abandoned. A tree which appeared to be towering above him was still far off in the distance whilst a tiny sapling which hung limply, appeared to be standing on some far horizon yet it brushed Abraham's shoulder as he slowly drifted by. He took another look above him, suddenly hoping to see the glimmer of light from the mirror which may have offered a way back out, but like a small wound, the sky was slowly bleeding its red clouds across the opening. Abraham drew his knees in tightly to his chest, for the first time noticing the metallic properties to the air as his breaths deepened.
It was then he saw the figures. One at first, but then slowly emerging from the undistinguishable horizon more and more came. Black and thin, barely discernible at first from the tiny saplings that he'd passed. But their bulbous crowns sitting atop fragile shoulders, black almost featureless faces with only piercing white eyes staring in his direction to define them as something human. Something like human. Abraham cowered back into the small boat as the current took him towards them. They lined the bank, one after another, now almost creating a forest as they stood side by side to peer at Abraham.
"What do you want!" screamed Abraham, panicked and looking behind him only to see more creatures emerging upstream. Panicked he put his hands over the side o
f the craft to try and paddle his way quickly past the burning eyes, but the black river ate into his fingertips like flameless fire. Abraham screamed and withdrew his hands quickly blowing on his fingers to try and numb the pain. Grimacing he tucked his hands under his armpits and closed his eyes. For a brief moment he wondered if he would have just been better off in the hands of the Sisters and a strange sensation crossed his chest as he imagined them already dancing on his grave.
It was at that moment he heard the first noise.
A whisper emanating from a throat which sounded as if it has just swallowed shards of broken glass, and opening his eyes, he again looked skywards for salvation. Then more scratched voices reached his ears, almost in a monotonous chant, but each voice saying its own unique line. He was trying not to listen, but as he drifted on down towards an endless horizon, longing for the end of this world, he began to hear nature of the words. Names, individual names being repeated over and over, layered upon and intertwining with each other individual voice, forming a horrendous cacophony that tore at Abraham's ears from all around him. Abraham let out a loud scream that strained his lungs and throat. What was this nightmare he was in?
Nightmares, the very substance of his world.
The personal nightmares that each of the unassuming black containers held. Nightmares so terrible that they would steal life during sleep. The very same nightmares that had touched upon his soul in the back of the van and was now overwhelming him. The cumulative sights and horrors that seeped into a mind that wasn't supposed to be witness to them, now stood in physical form on the banks of this river.