Nowhereville

“I think it’s a bit too late for you to turn around now, don’t you?,” the voice said. It was low, almost a hiss, but it rang clearly in my ears that were accustomed to the deathly silence around me. The voice had an ironic edge to it, and it sounded almost amused about something. I might have imagined it. My heart gave a start as I turned around, looking for the person to whom it had belonged.

On the front steps of the house nearest to me, on my right, I could make out the slender silhouette of what was unmistakably a girl. The moment I saw her, I came to my senses and some of the senseless fear disappeared. It seemed to me absurd now that I had ever thought this was a deserted town. After all, people couldn’t just all leave their homes and move somewhere else or just all drop dead of their own accord.

I moved closer to the house until I was standing in front of the rusty gate. I could see the girl clearly now; she had startling features – at least from a distance. She was extremely pale though; the eerie light of the dusk made her skin look almost bluish. Her lips were a dark shade of red, in contrast to her sickly white skin. Raven black hair reached down to the middle of her back. However, the most outstanding feature of her strange looks was her eyes. They were large, almost too large for her delicate face. They were jet black; there was no mistaking in this, even in the fading light. They weren’t just dark brown; they were of a genuinely black, making her look as though she had no pupils. They seemed hollow, in a way; when you were looking into them, you felt like you were looking into oblivion. None of the eerie light of the twilit sky was reflected into her eyes, they seemed to shine with a light of their own; a bluish tint not unlike that of her ghoulish skin. I avoided her gaze as much as I could.

She wasn’t beautiful; I couldn’t say that now that I had taken a better look at her. Instead, she looked like someone who had been very beautiful a long time ago, but was now marred, stigmatic. I had been relieved to see her and hear her voice before, but now I wish I hadn’t. I don’t know how to put my feelings into words, but she didn’t look normal.

Seeing that I didn’t reply, she smiled a strange smile, which instead of warming her features, made them appear even more hostile and unpleasant. The smile didn’t touch her eyes; it froze on her lips that were the color of black currant.

She then stood up abruptly, giving me a haut-le-corps. Her body was oddly shaped: she was skinnier than any person I had ever seen in my life. She was very tall, almost as tall as me. In fact, she was so tall and so thin that she looked two-dimensional. Her deathly pale skin was stretched over her delicate yet prominent bones – her clavicles looked like they were about to puncture her skin. She was wearing an odd assortment of clothes: a pair of knee high black leather boots, a pair of very old, decrepit-looking black jeans and a loose, washed out, baggy black T-shirt that left her fleshless shoulders bare. She wasn’t the kind of person you’d want to meet in a dark alley at night. Actually, come to think of it, she wasn’t the kind of person you’d want to meet anywhere. At a first glance, she had looked very beautiful indeed, but the more I looked at her, the more I felt my hair standing on its ends.

She watched me just as intently as I watched her. However, her glance did not avoid my eyes; she was staring right at me, boring holes in me with those horrid black eyes. Her gaze did not waver; she didn’t as much as blink. She started moving towards me, walking slowly. However, when she started walking, I noticed yet another strange thing about her. She seemed to have tremendous difficulty moving. Her right leg was limp; she was sort of dragging it after her. Her shoulders made strange movements when she stepped, moving up and down. She vaguely reminded me of a puppet whose strings were broken. She finally stopped in front of the rusty gate and grabbed the fence for support. When she did so, I couldn’t help but notice her fingernails, which were longer than I had seen on anyone and sharp looking, of a faint yellowish, sickly color.

I stood rather close to her; the only thing that separated us was the gate. I wanted to walk away from her – better yet, run away – but something kept me rooted to the spot. Just like a deer in the headlights of a truck, I thought wildly. Now that I saw her up close, she was even more dreadful to behold. Her skin was so white it looked transparent, so that I could see all the bluish veins underneath its surface. Her eyes were boring into mine still, and they were still perfectly expressionless. Looking into them was just like looking into a bottomless black pit. Her black hair was lank and lifeless, just like all of her other features. However, as I was observing her, I noticed yet another thing. Her smell. She smelled dreadful. She had about her that nasty, fetid smell of putrefaction that you sometimes notice when you pass by a road kill that hasn’t been cleaned off the highway. I shuddered.

“Kari, nice to meet you,” she said in a light voice, offering me a spidery, sickly pale hand that I was reluctant to shake. However, politeness got the better of me and I shook her hand quickly, not wanting to touch her any more than was necessary. Her skin was so cold compared to the suffocating heat that it gave me the shivers. I pulled my hand out of hers quickly. I was so disgusted by her icy touch that I even forgot to introduce myself. She smiled at my rudeness, baring her teeth in a sharp smile. I quickly looked away from her.

“I’m, er, John,” I answered in a small voice. I looked up at her again; she was still watching me with that peculiar look on her face. My God, she was dreadful. I had never in my life seen any living person to resemble a dead body so much. Everything, from those hollow eyes and that gaunt face to her cold skin and that reek, screamed death. I wanted to put as much distance between her and me as possible.

“What a perfectly common name,” she replied in a raspy voice. “Your parents must’ve been really bored.”

Ignoring her odd, pointless comment, I edged away from the gate.

“Er, I have to go, it’s getting late and I have, um, to get somewhere,” I said awkwardly as I started walking. I was, of course, referring to my grandmother’s house. Just as I turned around, happy that I had managed to get away from that creature, because I couldn’t bring myself to believe that that was indeed a human being, I heard her voice again.

“The house you’re looking for is that one,” she said, pointing at a house across the road from her own. I spun around on my heels to look at the house she had indicated. On the gate, I could see, indeed, a rusty sign that said 34, and I instantly knew she was right, because that was the number my dad had scribbled on the piece of paper when he had written the address. I felt a cold pang of uneasiness. How had she known? I hadn’t told her anything about my purpose here. Plus, if my house was so close to hers, I would have to bear seeing her every day of my stay here. Hopefully, I would be out of this dreadful town before long, and I would be back in my sunny California. Oh, how sorely mistaken I was.

“I’ll see you around,” Kari added before disappearing inside her house. As I stared stupidly from her house to the house at no. 34, I could feel cold beads of sweat gathering up on my forehead. I felt strange beyond words, as I stood there in the gloomy twilight that seemed to stretch on forever, as if time had been dilated. I must have looked like a complete moron, standing there in the middle of the street, but I somehow knew that there was no one beyonf the houses’ black windows to see me.