Gothic Short Stories

Morning bell. Five chimes blurred together, a lost chorus that shook the madhouse and unsettled dust in its rafters. The deranged exiles wailed in response, their voices climbing, louder and louder, until the final strike broke into a crashing wave. Deep ocean. That was that. Dead went the bell, and a reverberant unease spread through the cellblock. Grayness — less a substance, more a feeling — whisked in through the windows. Elora listened to the creeping nothingness. She lay awake on her sweat-soaked cot. Her cell, a narrow and filthy nook, sunk into the madhouse like the knothole in a dead tree. Its lone luxury was the window overlooking her cot, more of a chiseled gulch, blooming with morning light. Through it, fleets of prisoner ships would soon slip over the horizon. New

Lunatics. But who could judge the pathetic bastards? Elora was one of them, after all. She was a tall woman, gaunt, with dust speckled in her raven-black hair. Her left knee was a jagged octagon, shattered decades ago in a failed suicide. She seldom walked around her tiny cell; but when she did, it was with a pronounced limp. Elora was over 400 years old. She'd lost count at 452. Slowly, the past was draining from her mind. Parents. Friends. Lovers. Faces blurred together. In that murky broth, eventually, she would one day lose herself. Even her name — Elora — felt like the outcome of a lifelong whisper-down-the-lane. Letters came and went. Sounds and stops. Syllables. No-Shadow. That's what they called it. Thousands of years ago, so the story went, the plague emerged and people began losing their shadows, marked with the kiss of immortality. At first, the condition seemed like a dream come true. Who wouldn't want to live forever? Then the No-Shadows began losing their minds. While their bodies stayed young, their brains grew wearier and wearier, until immortality scooped out their souls. It left them ruined, zombified freaks. Towns fell. Villages burned. The condition