Authors: Suren Hakobyan
Tags: #horror, #mystery, #god, #hell, #fantasy, #supernatural, #devil, #monster, #afterlife, #survivial
Edge of End
ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in reviews.
Cover Art:
Suren Hakobyan
Editors:
Sandra Jones
Victoria
Zurakowski
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction.
All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the
author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to real
persons, places, or events is coincidental.
Copyright 2014 Suren
Hakobyan
Published by Suren Hakobyan
at Smashwords
Contents
Chapter one: The smell of ground
Chapter five: They want me in the house
Chapter eight: The call of the house
Chapter twelve: An inch from
nothingness
Chapter fourteen: Hopelessness
Chapter seventeen: The old man’s gone
Chapter nineteen: The last resident
How would you know you no longer
exist? Ask me, I know. Amidst absolute darkness you see nothing,
you hear nothing, you smell nothing, and you feel nothing. Time
doesn’t have meaning there, infinity had obsessed me swallowing my
soul until a musty smell like rotten eggs and decaying fish mixed
with the stench of a dead rat lying in the sun for days, that
worked its way through my nostrils and filtered my
lungs.
I was pushed away from darkness, from
not-my-existence.
Opening my eyes, I sniffed, my vision
blurred, no idea where I was.
The dust carried on the wind had stuck
to my face and mouth, and as my tongue ran over my lips, I screwed
up my eyes with disgust at the taste.
I blinked, my vision gradually
restored, and I gazed over the landscape.
The first image that I caught sight of
was the light-brown colored ground–solid and cracked as if it
hadn’t seen rain for months. Placing my hands down on it, I managed
to push myself up into a sitting position.
It wasn’t easy.
My body felt weak
and sore, as if I had been beaten. A sharp pain
shot down my neck towards my spine. My instinctive reaction was to
scream, which followed instantly; I couldn’t help it.
Still in pain, I took a deep breath,
inhaling the stifling air. Who was I? No, it was a difficult
question. What was my name? My head was empty, darkness lying
behind the picture of endless sand now I was staring at.
I pressed my hands against my eyes and
rubbed my face, balancing my breath and trying to concentrate. I
knew I had had a life before the darkness, in the back of my mind I
saw how the world worked, but I had nothing of my own. I knocked on
my head by my balled hand as if trying to switch it on, and it
would process and pull out my memories from darkness.
Nothing. My past was gone.
I dug my hands into my pockets in
search of a wallet or anything else, but they were empty–no credit
cards, no papers or checks. Nothing to connect me to my
past.
I stared ahead at empty spot feeling
nothing yet until panic registered in me and I gasped for air,
breathing rapidly, my heart hammering. Squeezing my eyes shut, I
let out a painful and long cry until my lungs were out of air and
my voice reduced to a weak squeak, and then died away.
“
Where am I?” I cried in
my full voice after I filled my lungs with air. “Hey! Can anybody
hear me? Anybody.” Then I started cursing by that letting out my
anger and my fear.
At least I knew I could
talk.
I sucked in a great lungful of the air
trying to take control of my emotional explosion. I opened my eyes,
slowly scanning my surroundings, an alien and barren
landscape.
Where was I?
I stared ahead, feeling
giddy and weak in the legs. There was a road, if you could call it
that–more of a dust track that led to a
town
just beyond the horizon. On
either side, just a carpet of endless desert sand and dust bowl
stretched before me.
I found myself staring hard at the
horizon.
However, the horizon was
not your typical
skyline
. Overcome with grayness,
there was not a single cloud in the sky. Somehow the earth was
illuminated, despite there being no sunshine. The source of the
light lay invisible.
The
town
shimmered through the heat,
making me feel kind of giddy. Although I couldn’t see it clearly, I
focused on some distant rooftops. That point in the distance became
my destination as if I was in the ocean, and the
town
was my island of
salvation.
Without giving it too much thought, I
tried to stand up, but it was difficult. As soon as I had a stable
footing on the ground, my ankle rolled, and I tumbled down, rolling
over the dusty, smelly ground once again. I cried out in pain as I
keeled over backwards, gazing up into the sky, and crooning under
my breath.
My eyes got lost momentarily. Never in
my life had I seen such a sky. There were no stars, no sun, and no
moon above me, just a hanging void. I felt that void
surreptitiously seeping inside me through my eyes. It flowed within
my soul sucking the remaining strength out of my weakened
body.
Surely, there had to be unbelievable,
inaccessible powers hidden amongst those gray skies.
Blinking, I tore my eyes
away from the mesmerizing sight and shook my head. With great
difficulty, I managed to pull myself up again and, raising my head,
I stared ahead at the
town
. I had no idea what I was going
to discover in that place, but the peaked rooftops were my only
hope.
The second time I took a step, I did
so more gingerly. With only one road to take, I pushed on, dragging
my heavy limbs.
I moved like a child learning to walk,
wobbling with each step and swaying with my arms. With each step I
took, I felt the strength returning in my legs. Although, I was
limping, at least I was moving.
During that arduous lonely
journey to the
town
, I tried to recall what had happened and how I had ended up
here.
Where?
I
asked myself.
Here in the middle of
nowhere,
I thought. But my memory had sunk
into oblivion, and as much as I tried to extract something from it,
it didn't give anything up. I probed deeper and deeper into my
memory, but could retrieve nothing–not who I was, nor how I had
gotten here.
I could have wondered for hours, but
my mind was blank, as if my brain was a computer’s hard drive, and
a devious child, clicking repeatedly on the folder with my memories
inside, had pressed shift+delete.
I was confused with no
idea what to do next, my legs hauled me towards the
town
themselves. A
moment later I stopped, put my head into my hands nervously, closed
my eyes and wished myself back to my past, looking for anything
familiar to me, but again there was nothing. I couldn’t even
remember my own name. I couldn’t remember anything from my life,
but I had somehow strangely retained a wealth of random
information: the date of First World War, the US presidents in
chronological order.
Is that even possible?
I could tell you Einstein’s equation
of relativity, too. But I had somehow forgotten who I was. I had
lost all the memories related to my life.
I scanned the area around me,
desperately searching for my memories. In my mind, I perhaps
thought that I could have uncovered them there–in the desert’s
dust. I have no idea whether I had read it or seen it somewhere,
but somehow I knew that people who had lost their memories
sometimes got them back. But I couldn’t stand around waiting for
that to happen. I had to move on; I didn’t have much
choice.
Running my hands through my hair, I
let out a heavy sigh and shambled onwards, occasionally looking
back on the path I had travelled, but still nothing had changed.
The sky remained calm with a sense of eeriness to it. After having
looked up twice already, I decided not to take another look. Every
time my eyes came into contact with the sky, I felt a hand pressing
down upon my head, placing pressure upon my brain.
Look
ahead
, I scolded myself,
keep going
.
There were no tracks or footprints on
the dusty path that I’d called a road. It was six inches below the
desert level. The rotten smell that had stirred my slumber wasn’t
nearly as potent as when I’d been lying on it, or perhaps I had
adjusted to the stench. I don’t recall now. At that point, there
wasn’t much to examine apart from the roadside that seemed to have
been made idyllically. You will never see anything like that in any
other desert.
I am not sure if I came
upon the
town
, or
the
town
came
upon me.
Soon I could see that the
road divided the
town
in two, with different houses lining its sides. There was no
sign of life, apart from the movement of the trees and even they
seemed dead. The leaves had darkened to a deep yellow and hung
precariously off the branches.
I reached the
town
and halted at the
entrance. Scanning the first two houses curiously, my eyes stopped
on a notice, bearing the name
Morsfinis
.
Weird name,
I thought.
I stood in front of that
notice with doubts about moving on. The
town
was beneath a shadow of
nothingness, and it was as though a big dark cloud had come and
strategically hung itself above that place.
I tried to refrain from looking
upwards. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t look up again. The
emptiness that lay before me grew my doubts; I just had no idea
what I was going to do next.