My footsteps echoed from the floor as I pattered home. School was over and it felt like millennia had passed. I looked at the ground as I walked, watching water flow through the cracks in the sidewalk. Rain poured over me, bringing a chill that seeped into my bones. But I paid no mind to it. 

As I exited the school courtyard and stepped out of the gate, I heard their hushed whispers. They spoke as if I couldn’t hear them. As if I was deaf.

I knew what they said.

“Have you heard? An entire train’s worth of passengers was killed. He was the only survivor.”

“I bet it was him” a girl said. “He’s creepy. And I don’t think I’ve ever looked at him in the face.”

“Does he always cover his face?” a guy chimed in. “Because I don’t remember ever getting a look. Maybe we all subconsciously avert our eyes.”

Then the first person said something that I was used to hearing. 

“I don’t want to be near him. He’ll probably curse us all.”

They were right.

Anyone who became my friend died. And I never understood why.

It doesn’t matter. None of it did. The only thing I had that belonged to me was my name, Vali.

For all my life, I have been cursed with misfortune. It was inexplicable, almost supernatural. Things beyond all understanding always happened to me and everyone around me. 

I don’t think a single good thing has ever happened. That’s why I stay away from people.

The only friends I ever had were dead because of me.

I was a stain in existence.

The whispers of the other students melded into one cacophonous voice, brushing against my ear, as if reminding me of what I was and the fate I couldn’t escape. And even after I left the school, the voice never stopped.

***

A Week Ago

I was taking the train home when the tragedy happened.

I scrolled through my phone, scoffing at the ongoing events occurring around the world. 

“What a joke,” I muttered, seeing previous tragedies that happened because of my mere presence. “Fucking fate. If it truly exists, then it’s a bitch.”

The woman sitting next to me frowned when she heard my language. She was wearing a blouse and black leggings that looked professional. “You’re saying this a little too loud, young man.”

“Then ignore me,” I rolled my eyes.

Her frown hardened. “That’s awfully rude. Are you upset over something?”

“What does it look like?”

She shook her head indignantly. The woman studied me for a moment, her eyes narrowing in recognition. “You’re that kid. Vali. The one who is always found in crime scenes where dozens of people die.”

I sighed. “I’m surprised you recognized me.”

“It’s hard to look at your face,” she noted. “It’s like I naturally want to avert my eyes.”

“Everyone feels that way,” I said crossly. “I’m used to it.”

“Did you do it?” she asked softly.

“Do what?”

“Kill those people.”

The cabin was packed to the brim, an interlocked mass of people either sitting down or holding on to one of the bars to steady themselves.

“No,” I said calmly. “I didn’t. Believe what you want. I don’t care.”

“Is death that irrelevant to you?” she asked, starting to glare at me.

“What? Do you expect me to start crying over deaths I didn’t cause? We all die. That’s all there is to it.”

“But that makes life even more precious.”

I smiled grimly. “Life isn’t precious. I know that all too well.”

“Maybe the rumors are true,” the woman said, her face suddenly horrified at something I was doing. “Death follows you everywhere.”

My blood went cold. 

No… it was just like last time.

I whipped my head toward the window and looked at my reflection. For a moment, I saw myself for how I was. Blonde hair, gray eyes that were almost silver, and skin that was slightly tanned.

Then my reflection rippled, being replaced by streaks of shadow. Rows of crimson eyes opened, staring at me. Images of worlds crumbling into nothing flashed through my mind, being swallowed by the void.

I turned back around just as the lights went out.

Scream pierced through my ears.

Darkness engulfed the train cabin completely like inky water. The same bloodred eyes littered all across the air, each widening in grotesque ways. The train rumbled violently as they began to glow with eerie light.

Blood splattered the floor, bodies slumping to the floor. They were all covered in red pustules that crackled with the same sanguine fluid, spasming erratically. The people still alive yelled in agony, but their throats promptly exploded with blood, as if screaming made exacerbated the damage done to them.

One by one, their lives were snuffed out like candles, and all went silent…

“It happened again…” I whispered to myself, the gruesome scene grasping at my mind, tearing through it like a knife. It haunted me, twisted my sanity like paper, and etched itself into my memory.

I looked to my side and saw the woman…

Her body was still in a sitting position, but her head was leaned back. Red pustules had burst out blood, her throat ruptured. She was missing half an arm, revealing layers of fat, bone, and muscle. With trembling hands, I lowered her head. More blood flowed out of her mouth.

But the worst part was that she was missing both eyes. They exploded too, as if they had been crushed.

I let her go and she fell to the ground face-first. I stared at my shaking hands, horrified.

It had happened again…

Why did this always happen?

“Death follows you everywhere,” the woman had said.

***

The memory flashed through my mind like a chilling breeze.

“Stop thinking about it,” I muttered. “It wasn’t me.”

But I didn’t fully believe that. Some part of me doubted it. 

Was it truly me? Did I kill all those people?

I finally reached my house, which was small and one-story. It never truly felt like a home to me.

Steeling myself, I unlocked it with my keys and stepped inside. I didn’t bother announcing myself. 

I walked into my kitchen and saw my twin sister, Mona, eating at the table with my mother.

“You could have waited for me,” I said, setting my backpack down. “We got out of school at the same time.”

Mona regarded me coldly. “I didn’t want to see the deaths you caused, Vali.”

“Do you really think that was me?” I said darkly. “I didn’t do any of that.”

“Oh, so are you saying all those dead bodies around you were coincidental?”

“You’ve been saying this for years. How many times are we going to argue about this?”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Until you fucking leave us!” she snapped. “It was you who killed Dad! It was all your fault!”

I said nothing, sorrow filling me. I clenched my fist, memories coming back to haunt me once more.

“Quiet, you two,” my mother said so quietly we almost couldn’t hear her. “You can’t blame him.”

But I knew she didn’t truly believe that. Everytime she looked at me I saw the same fear in her eyes as when she saw my nine-year-old self standing over my dad’s disfigured body, red pustules covering him.

She did blame me, but didn’t want to say it. My mom wanted to pretend like nothing happen, trying to convince herself that I didn’t have anything to do with it. She wanted something logical—something that wouldn’t break her.

It was ironic because it was worse than accepting it. Everyday her heart went colder and colder.

I think that broke me more than any death. I strove to be better. To prove it wasn’t me. Because of that, I allowed my sister to insult me. It was her way of coping. We used to be close, but I knew she would never have affection for me ever again. 

“I’m not hungry,” I said, reading the cue. I left without another word, heading to my room.

I opened the door and entered it. It was pretty barren except for my bed, my desk, and my drawers where I kept my clothes. It didn’t have a closet. I would have decorated more if this was truly my home. But it wasn’t. I wasn’t welcomed here.

I shook with emotion, reliving the day my father died once again.

***

I was nine-years-old. I was watching my dad work on his computer with all my childlike innocence. He smiled at me.

“You look rather interested,” he said playfully.

“I’m bored,” I admitted. “What are you doing?”

My dad worked with literature, researching its history in all types of genre and how it has affected society as a whole. “Words have power,” he once said. “Like how thoughts have power. We affect the world around us with our love and our hate. It depends on the person to decide how they want to do it.”

He was fascinated with all types of genres, like nonfiction, fiction, autobiographies, scientific, historical, etc.

“Research on a special type of literature,” Dad replied. 

I looked at the screen. I saw a picture of a book cover that was red with illustrations of eerie-looking eyes all over it.

“What is that?” I said, shuddering. “It looks creepy.”

“It’s a book about something called Cthulhu Mythos,” he explained. “Stories about beings that are the embodiment of infinity, a concept that humans can’t understand.”

I tilted my head in confusion. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad.”

He smiled and rubbed my head. “Don’t worry about it, Val. It’s confusing for me, too. But it has become infamous since it was released almost a century ago. I’m studying its significance.”

I looked back at the screen and saw text below the book cover. It read: “Significance of a Madman: The Messages of H.P. Lovecraft.”

At that moment I should have stopped looking at it. Those eyes seemed to bore into me with piercing shards of ice. My head started to hurt, as if those same pieces of ice were stabbing themselves into my brain. A chill swept throughout my being, my soul going cold. 

These eyes… they were familiar.

Not the same, but similar.

I resonated with the image in a petrifying way, a tumultuous ringing sound bouncing across one side of my skull to another.

I began to shake… No, I wasn’t shaking, the entire house was.

A force exploded out of me, as if being reminded by the picture of the Eldritch Being. Eyes opened all over the walls, bloody tears flowing out of them. Tendrils of shadows wrapped around me like frigid rivers.

I looked at my dad and saw his eyes glazed over, his body involuntarily shaking. When he peered down at me, it was almost as if he wasn’t seeing me, but seeing through me. Something shattered his humanity and stripped him of all sanity.

“Dad…” I said softly, shaking him.

Tendrils looped around him voraciously, emanating with an eerie crimson glow. Suddenly, my dad’s body went rigid, as if his limbs were physically unable to move. He remained still, like a statue, as if he would be sitting in his chair for an eternity.

The eyes around the room all slowly trained their gazes on him. A vast, ubiquitous presence filled the room, nearly bringing me to my knees in its intensity. My chest began to tighten and constrict, as if something was trying to escape—to break out of me.

Streaks of shadows pulled themselves out of me, reaching toward my dad. All I remembered before everything went black was screaming, crying, and trying to grab him before it was too late.

***

I was breathing heavily in the present, my fists clenching my bedsheets. Sweat clung to my shirt, from fear or panic, I did not know.

It made me realize that every death, every grotesque event—all of it was my fault. Inadvertently or not, something that came from me was what took all those lives. The force was what tore families apart and took loved ones away from others.

“Damn it…” I shook with emotion, my gasps becoming louder and louder.

A knock came from the door, snapping me out of my panic attack.

“Dear? Are you okay? You didn’t eat…” my mom’s mousy voice rang from outside my room. 

To others, it may seem like my mom is worried—and maybe she was. But even without seeing her, I could picture her terrified look, as if she were expecting shadows to slip out from beneath the door. I knew she and Mona walked in the room the day the thing killed my dad as soon as the eyes disappeared and the shadowy tendrils retreated back into me.

They were lucky it didn’t lash out on them.

I don’t think I could live with myself if that thing killed them. My dad was already my breaking point. I didn’t want to go past that.

I could never stop loving my mother, even if she could never love me back. She suffered so much, all because of me. And I could never be mad at my sister, because she had all right to hate me. None of it is her fault. I would never blame her.

I loved my family with every fiber of my being.

But I knew I would never be loved back.

So I did not answer my mom. She shouldn’t have to, not when the source of her suffering and grief was right behind that door.

I would sacrifice my happiness if it meant they would be happy.

I would allow myself to break if it meant they were whole.

I would hate myself if it meant that they love themselves.

Because I was curse, a blemish upon the world. A Sinner who can never purge the filth in his soul.

I was born this way. I would accept that. I couldn’t change it. 

But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t live the way I want.

I made my decision when I heard my mother walk away, almost briskly. She was glad to have an excuse to not talk to me.

“Sorry, Mom. I’m sorry, Mona,” I whispered. “Everything will be better. I promise. Maybe you’ll be able to live normally when it’s over.”

I sighed and got off my bed, walking over to my window, looking at the horizon. Streams of light trickled inside my room, a disturbingly peaceful sight. Exhaling, I pulled the window open after a bit of struggling with the rust that had accumulated. 

I put one leg over the windowsill, then hopped over with the other, landing softly on the grass. 

Without looking back, I walked away from the house.

***

My hood was over my head as I walked through my neighborhood. Houses were sprawled incongruently, old and sad and beaten. The sidewalk I stalked through was cracked and bumped, as if the earth was being uprooted over time. 

Occasionally, a car would pass by the road, and a passerby would walk past me, giving me a suspicious look. But otherwise, no one paid me any mind.

The silence around me was palpable, my heartbeat reverberated through my body, growing louder as I got closer to my destination. 

The wind began to howl, gray clouds looming over the earth from above. But nonetheless, I continued walking past the blocks that made up the neighborhood, exiting it after five minutes of walking.

A road stretched out past the entrance. Pedestrians milled around and about, normal in every sense of the word. The leaves of trees rustled erratically, sometimes detaching themselves from their branches.

I began to cross the road when the screech of a car brought me out of my thoughts. I turned to my right and spotted a car coming toward me. The driver finally glanced away from his phone and his eyes widened. He slammed on the brakes, but he was too late. The car slowed down, but it kept going, being pushed by the momentum it had.

Right before it hit me, shadows erupted out of me, as if protecting me. When the car made impact, it flipped over me, being flung to my left. Pedestrians screamed, trying to scramble out of the way, but the particularly slow people were still crushed underneath the car.

I forced down the bile trying to rush up my throat and began to run, my heartbeat pounding through my chest. I pushed past curious bystanders trying to get a closer look. The force lashed out, as if I was being attacked, and I heard bodies slumping to the ground.

I panicked even more, but I did not dare look back.

Ever since this thing killed my father, I tried to ignore it. I tried to pretend like it didn’t exist. Because I found that the more I acknowledged it, the more it interfered with my life—and the more it killed.

But now I didn’t just acknowledge its existence, I also feared it. It was free to attack anything because I couldn’t calm myself.

I kept running, ignoring everything around me but my goal.

Eventually, I reached my destination, a vast bridge that overlooked a rushing river below. It was rarely used, but cars sometimes passed through it. I walked through the side of it, watching cars streak past me. 

I walked until I was in the center of the bridge. I stared at the river at the bottom, sharp rocks jutting out of it.

The only way to rid the world of this horrible curse is to die.

I wouldn’t just sacrifice my happiness, my sanity, my self-love.

I would sacrifice my life.

Because that was all I could do. The only thing I could control. 

My mom and my sister would eventually see my death on my news…

And they’ll be relieved. 

I smiled sadly, and stood on the railing, allowing gravity to do its job. I slid off the railing, falling down, closing my eyes as I rushed to the waters below.

The world around me shattered when I splattered on the rocks.

The only thing I remembered before dying was wondering why the thing inside of me let me die.

***

 I slowly opened my eyes, feeling an odd sense of peace. All around me, an inky black void expanded around me, swallowing me in its wake. I sprang up to my feet, panic sinking its icy claws into me.

“No, I’m supposed to be dead,” I said, eyes widening.

“You are dead,” a discordant voice said behind me. It sounded like a thousand voices spoke at once, filling my head with its sheer intensity. Despite this, I could understand what it said quite easily.

I quickly spun around, looking at the being who was with me in this void.

A beautiful woman smiled at me. Her hair was the color of silver, fluttering around her elegantly. The woman’s skin was pale, almost like ice, making me shudder. But the most horrifying part about her were her eyes. They were black. Black as the void that surrounded us.

Her smile widened, but I realized that it held no warmth. It was cold. Cold like her eyes, cold like the void.

“You’re finally here,” she said, her thousand voices surprisingly smooth. “It seems you found out your purpose after all, Vali. Welcome to the Void.”

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Hello readers. For those that don’t know me (which is probably all of you) I am Darkxtex. I originally only uploaded on Wattpad. But I'm here now, too.

I have a few chapters done. But I might go back and revise it because I'm not sure if I'm too satisfied about the first few chapters.

Thanks for reading, though. Let me know what you think.