He got off his knees and concentrated on the whispering voices. The voices were calling his name. He couldn’t see anything. Not even the opening in the floor that he had come through. He followed their whispering calls, letting the deafening roar of the noise wash over him and dull into background white noise. The more steps he walked the clearer the voices, and the duller the thunderous maelstrom around him became.
He followed the voices through the pure darkness of the room. He kept his hands pressed against his head and ears. What little protection they provided was still necessary. You can ignore your environment but if you take it too far the environment will kill you. He was aware of the danger the noise presented and the fact that his ears were bleeding helped to reinforce his urgency to escape this place.
The voices called to him; their voices rang out against the intense white noise that howled around him. Their calls guided his steps. His foot kicked up against hard stone. He had found a wall of the room and the voices floated over his head. “William.” Their call was louder now and more urgent.
With his hands still pressed against his head he brushed his face against the wall, feeling for something, anything. He supposed that there had to be a way up into the next room. He just had to find it. His face rubbed up against a sharp impression in the stone, almost like a step. He felt around for another and found it. He would have to climb up the stone.
Taking a deep breath, he let go of the sides of his head. He threw himself at the wall and scaled it as fast as he could.
He pulled himself into the next room.
The noise stopped.
He collapsed onto the hard stone floor and breathed deep gasps of relief. He laid there on his back breathing heavily. He reached up and wiped at the trail of blood that had oozed from his ears. He would probably be deaf for the rest of his life. What good is a werewolf without his hearing? If this was some kind of joke and they were just testing him he could see why this city of theirs was so empty. Their people probably ended up dying just by coming into this building. Not like he had had any choice in the matter, those that died here probably didn’t have one either.
He felt a sharp pain in his neck. He reached up and felt at the sting and pulled out a small piece of what felt like wood. He couldn’t see what it was and he threw it away as he massaged his neck.
He couldn’t feel any pain in his neck at all. He couldn’t feel his neck. He knew his hand was touching his neck, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel any pain. He couldn’t feel anything.
He tried to lift himself up. His body moved and reacted to his commands but in the total darkness of this third room he wasn’t sure where he was spatially. He tried to stand up and he over balanced and fell to the floor. He was pretty sure his face had smacked the ground but he couldn’t feel anything.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He groped around in the dark and managed after some difficulty to get up on his hands and knees without falling over. He felt great. He found himself laughing and as he did, his weight shifted and he fell over once more. He rolled onto his back laughing. It registered in the back of his mind that he couldn’t really hear himself laugh though. That just made him laugh harder. He felt drunk and lost but it didn’t matter because he just felt so good right now.
He was sixteen years old puking into the toilet of a friend’s house. The party was in celebration of homecoming. He had brought his girlfriend over to his friend Shawn’s house. It was actually Shawn’s parent’s house but they were away on vacation in the Bahamas somewhere. They were celebrating being alive, being with each other, and the fact that their school’s football team had just kicked the crap out of their district opponents previously that night. The only down side to that whole scenario was that the school’s starting quarterback just so happened to be that asshole Robert Jenkins, go figure. His popularity would soar after this win over Del Campo high school and William just couldn’t find it in himself to congratulate the guy. His popularity in school had only increased his asshole tendencies and he had become more brazen as the years wore on.
Robert was probably going to show up at the party at some point, but he wasn’t going to let that ruin his evening. Shawn called him over for shots. He strolled over to the table and raised the shot glass to their school and downed the fiery liquid. It burned going down his throat but he knew that after a while the alcohol would take effect. He had come to learn that the more a drink burned, the drunker you were going to get. He took several more shots and drank a few beers. In another hour he wasn’t walking anymore; he was floating.
He felt no pain. Even the fact that his girlfriend had stormed out of the house yelling at him about the dumbass he was making out of himself didn’t matter. He couldn’t feel anything, and he was happy. He was with his friends, and everything was right with the world.
That’s when it happened. He felt a violent muscle spasm in his stomach, and he knew that he had to get to a bathroom. He rushed through the crowd trying to stall the inevitable. He reached an empty bathroom and as he threw the lid off the toilet his stomach commenced to empty its contents into the bowl. The stream of alcohol and other half-digested food came up through his mouth and splashed down into the toilet.
After several minutes of painful vomiting, he stood up and cleaned himself off. He looked at himself in the mirror. It took him several moments of staring at the reflection to even start to recognize himself. His hair was a disheveled mess of free-standing hairs and tangles, his eyes were red and blood shot, and his lips were parted as he breathed through his mouth trying to calm down his insides.
This wasn’t him. If the price for feeling this good was looking like this and being exactly what his girlfriend had called him, a dumbass, and the inevitable hangover and twisting of his insides that was sure to follow him through tomorrow, then he would deal with not feeling that good in the first place. He cleaned himself off and walked out of the house. Nothing was worth that horrible feeling of guilt, humiliation, and shame. He never drank like that again.