Change from norm

Four Walls is a short story I'm working on which blends personal experience with aspects of horror to create hopefully an exciting story.

Four Walls by Andrew G. Carson

The devil hoards my soul in a decanter and when the hankering takes him fiendishly he steals a dram form it's neck. Each dram brings him closer to desperation and me that little bit closer to being left an emptying shell of faded whispers of a forgotten existence. When my essence has been vanquished by his unquenchable thirst in a drunken mist filled craze he will choose, he will choose his next victim form an incessant list of sinners and fallen saints.

These discarded thoughts were those of James Leach, a thirty five year old recluse who often finds such contemplations pass by his intellectual radar in moments of depression and such moments were now more recurrent than ever. James a sufferer of an undiagnosed illness which has had the best and brightest neurologists, neuropsychologists and general practitioners baffled for the past thirteen and a half years all of which James was finding very tiresome to say the least.

Ever since the night of the accident, the night that changed his life and his mental acumen for the worse. That night thirteen years, seven months, twenty two days, eighteen minutes and thirteen seconds ago. A night he will never forget no matter what mental debilitating illnesses old age ravages upon him and no matter how hard he tries.

The night began like any other James was heading off to study at the local library after hours, a fringe benefit of being the son of the librarian which had come in handy all the way through school and now as he attended University. It was also beneficial as being the son of the librarian James often guilt tripped his mother into reserving new releases of popular horror fiction most notably the work of local writer Bradley M. Hawks (a man that a young James on more than one occasion had found himself following around town bewildered by his knowledge of the occult and the creatures of the night) for him to collect after school and now as he had gotten older after University.

He left his then student digs with the latest Bradley M. Hawks novel tucked under his arm and headed into town walking as he so liked to do, James' father liked to remind him "If God intended us to drive everywhere he would have given us wheels instead of feet and a v6 engine instead of a bum hole". As a bairn James thought his father to be slightly screwy in this regard but as he had gotten older he came to share in his father's thinking.

There was a definite chill in the air and an unearthly stillness like you would only find standing in the the eye of a tornado but alas he reminded himself this was a Scottish residential street he found himself walking along not the dusty highways of Kansas or any of those other twister seized States , no the only thing likely to whiz by your head here was a nedish midgey or a discarded chip poke lost in the wind.