The Quiet One (standard:horror, 2771 words)
Author: Chrysalis	Added: Sep 17 2000	Views/Reads: 4446/2454	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Are you ever intrigued by someone who seems as if they exist only on the edge of reality..Dont you ever wonder..about the quiet ones?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

bald comments and taunting haughty-assed attitude. 

So anyway, we'd all sit around and the prof would read and a few of us
would try to take it kinda seriously and try to offer good advice to 
the other writers in our group, but eventually we'd all just wait for 
Karl to begin his tirade, rip the story or poem up, and then grinning 
his trumped up, irritating grin, he'd tell the author exactly what he 
did wrong and how to fix it. The friggin part of it was he was most 
often right and the poor prof would spend equal time wincing and 
agreeing. I could most often tell behind my hidden smile that the guy 
was trying his damndest not to let his Karl become too exaulted or 
anything. He always would look down at the ground, purse his lips under 
his shaggy mustache and say slowly and rather reluctantly.."Well, yes 
Karl..that is one possible way of looking at the problem..." And of 
course Karl would grab the end of the kite string and run with it. His 
poor mother must have had quite a time with the brilliant little 
bastard. 

And of course, his favorite victims to pick on were the weakest, most
vulnerable members of our little group. Me?..Nah. I'm self confident 
enough and not so in love with my own talent that I'm pretty much able 
to escape Karl's scrutiny with little more than a scraped back and a 
few smart ass comments tossed back and forth like a football. He gets a 
good barb in now and again, but his overblown sarcasm tends to just 
kinda rolls off me. 

But the quiet girl. He just sits like a hunter waiting for the duck on
the lake to take off so he can just start firing at will. I sometimes 
sit there and pull a bit nervously at my upper lip as her stories are 
read. I find myself flipping between watching her still form and her 
blushing eartips and him..concentrating, cateloguing, humming in his 
intensity as he absorbs every word, every flaw, every potential for a 
descent slam or scathing comment. 

You can almost hear the collective groan of the group of us as the
prof's voice fades off with the last word. And see the poor teacher 
eyes as he sends darting, measured warnings to Karl to be nice! But 
Karl..shit..i know he sees the warnings. He just chooses to ignore 
them, sits up slowly triumphant in his chair and rubs his large palms 
together in gleeful anticipation. Asshole, I have thought more than 
once. 

You know..I know it's the way her face rearranges itself during these
tirades of masked "helpful critiques" that was the fuel that fired my 
dreams the next night. It was the drone of his voice in syruppy 
falsetto tones as he mimicked her ill chosen and meek, sweet words. It 
was the way I could see the pale flame ignite..white hot inside her and 
her pale cheeks grew even more chalky and her white knuckles glowed 
like exposed bones in her lap. It was how she tightened up like a 
someone drawing her very soul back like a bow..pulling her skin taut 
around her tiny little body til she began to..expand somehow. 

In my vision, she grew larger and larger. Like Karl was inflating her
with with his own grandiosity and his hot air. She was taking it all 
inside herself, swallowing him with her silent hot rage..seething like 
a kettle that was about to blow with the tension. 

Well..I don't quite remember how the class ended that night, but we were
all left writhing with her embaressament and his foppishness. And her 
palapable anger. It was a real thing now. We couldn't see it but it 
stood in that room as surely as if it were a stone monument to her pain 
and rage and his superiority and mean-spiritedness. 

I did have the strangest dream of the two of them that night. I woke up
sitting in a hard straightbacked chair in Karl's bedroom. No idea why I 
was there, but as it so often happened in dreams, it made perfect sense 
at the time. The room was pretty dark, bathed in dancing shadows as if 
we were near a body of water. I watched Karl impassively as the pale 
girl he had sliced to ribbons began to tape my arms to the thin wooden 
armrails of the chair. He lay turned on his side under black silk 
sheets, his legs sprawled much as they were when we sat in class 
together. One arm was tucked under his head and I thought I saw a thin 
line of drool spindle down from his half open lips. The girl wound tape 
around and around both my arms and then my legs. My body felt leaden 
and useless. As if it really didn't need to be present, but I guess I 
wouldn't be much of an observer if it wasn't there at all. I obediently 
opened my lips as she stuffed wads of cotton bandaging in my mouth (I 
can still taste the medicinal tang of it) and then proceeded to wind 
more of the invisible tape around my head. Til just my eyes were free 
to move about..but my vision was transfixed on the sleeping man before 
me. 

From my periphery..I watched her move closer to the bed. It was an
island of navy blue in the shadowed room and somehow the walls seemed 
to fall away. I was bobbing in a sea of dancing shadows. the only 
things stationary in the room was me..the quiet girl..and Karl on his 
island bed. But she drew closer. Floating like a pale cloud. And her 
face. She wore that same expression as if it were stamped into the 
muscles and skin and tisssues and sinew of her face. The repressed 
anger. The hurt disbelief. The bleached white anger..pure in it's 
fierceness. Exaggerated as Karls's own sense of self importance. I 
could see that her gaze was wide and her pupils dialated in her total 
visual absorption of her prey. 

I understood vaguely then. The hunted had turned the tables. The hunter
had become tonight's special. The silk sheets was the garnish he was 
being served up on. Gradually I could make out that one of the dancing 
shadows was taking form in her tiny hand. Silver. Wickedly curved. 
Growing longer and thinner and sharper like a deadly phallic cobra. A 
knife! 

My cheeks puffed out my alarm. But I could only breathe through my nose
and my shouts of warning and DON'T!!!!! were muffled into the cotton 
batting in my mouth and I could only emit a sad sort of whail that left 
me dizzy for the effort. I felt my nostrils flaring deperately as she 
drew closer to the bed and I drew in sharp cold air into my lungs like 
a rabid balloon. Spots were beginning to hinder my eyesight and I shook 
my head trying to clear them..Noooo...I had to watch!!!..What the hell 
was she doing....God NO!!!!!! 

I slumped then in the chair, some minor synapse in my brain whispering I
might as well relax. There was no way to escape and she so obviously 
wanted me to witness this dish of revenge... She stood for a brief 
eternity at the foot of the bed. Holding the bright silver dagger out 
from her body away from her chest. Karl just seemed to sleep on..like 
an inoccent wayward child.. oblivious to the danger posed at his large, 
relaxed feet. 

Her hate eminated from her in waves..undulating half formed vapors like
those of heat roiling above summer roads...Her spine was so straight. I 
had the premonition I could snap her in half with my thumb if I could 
try. And every pore in her body was concentrating on the object of her 
loathing. Karl. I pulled ineffeciently at the bonds around my wrists. 
She was going to kill him. I knew it. She was making me watch. I knew 
that too. For all those fucking times I sat there, Sympathetic to her 
plight but unwilling to step in and save her. To salvage her talent, 
brief though it was..from the iron and useless ravages of an 
uncivilized brute of a beast like Karl. This was my punishment for my 
sin of omission. For my inablity to challenge injustice. For chivalry 
to just stand back behind the velvet ropes and not cross swords with 
the slaughterers..In a white hot blinding flash of lightening I 
understood. 

And from behind my gag I began to scream..even before the blade slashed
though the exposed back of the sleeping man. And a spouting crimson 
fountain of black blood began slapping every surface in the room as he 
turned with a mighty roar that shook the very vestiges of my mind. And 
the blade came down again with deadly intent. This time from the 
anterior. Straight for Karl's black and foolish heart..fresh ribbons of 
black and scarlet erupting from the wound in mighty gushes and 
spurts..interpersed with the flashing brilliant neon silver blade 
chopping and rending muscle and skin ..the quiet girl, her unchanging 
face except for a horrifingly appropriate grin of triumph baring her 
white teeth between her colorless lips..Take that! And That! And that! 
the blade and her hands and bloodcoated arms seemed to say. I could 
tell from my wildly bulging eyes that she was taking demonic delight in 
her task as finally...the gyrating moaning flailing form that was once 
a man..began to still beneath the crunch and mash of the weapon in her 
hands. He was dead. 

She stood there..again...for what seemed the longest damn time. I
slumped heavily against the tape holding me back. I'd ravaged some of 
it during my fight to free myself. And I was breathing mightily hard 
sruggling it seemed just to inflate my weary 
lungs..it'soverit'soverit'sover...the words rolled round and round in 
my head..red and black marbles on a spinning roulette 
wheel..it'soverit'soverit'sover.... 

Til with a triumphant flourish, she pulled back the blood sodden sheets
off the mutilated corpse..to reveal a post-mortem erection..stalwart as 
a flag in the teetering, bizarre, dream-shadowed world we shared for 
this brief pocket of time...and the quiet girl looked at me..for the 
first time..I saw the glittering gold of her eyes..her eyes were 
gold!..before she bent over swiftly from the waist...and the moonlight 
flashed on her porcelain teeth...and as she bit the.. Oh god no!..as 
she bit into the swollen, purple distention presented before her with a 
deep furious hunger...Nono...Omigod..My lungs opened wide for a mighty 
terrifed SCREEEEEEEEEAM!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

I woke very suddenly sitting straight upright in bed..the sound issueing
from my chest like a parachute opening with a lifesaving whoosh in a 
wide blue morning sky. Dyeing off as I gracefuly floated back down to 
the land of the awake and the rational. But my mind still reeking of 
the sight of the blood spilling gracefully from the corners of her 
delicate mouth...Oh god... 

I felt very strange seeing her in class the next night. She sat in the
same spot in the circle, her hands folded demurely in her thin lap, her 
eyes examining designs in the carpetting. She never even noticed how 
unnerved and conspicuous I seemed. I fidgeted about the whole hour and 
a half, watching the clock almost as much as I kept glancing at her. 
And remembering that aweful dream. 

Funny thing was, Karl was missing from class that night, definitely not
like him. The class was not quite the same without his vigorous 
presence. I found myself wondering with just the faintest sense of 
alarm where the blowhard was..and I couldn't help but wonder.. about 
the quiet one. 


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