The Morphine Addict



In a dark, decrepit city that was almost nameless and hardly ever located on any map of the nation, a ghostly mist slithered about the streets like a spectrally-white python, shrouding the few speechless   denizens and any crepuscular vermin that scurried along those rotting, cracked sidewalks and those dismally-bleak roads. The monolithic skyscrapers towered over the city resembling grotesque gods against the infinitely pitch blackness of the night sky. Any foreigner who travelled to this forsaken nightmare city would surely think that this was a breeding ground for demonic witchery and devils to shriek and crawl upon the wretched alley walls and through the tunnels of the mephitic sewers.

A moderately-sized building stood within the middle of the witch-haunted city, with a decaying gambrel roof and crumbling Georgian balustrades making up what was once the fire escape and the stairs. If a wanderer sojourned to this eldritch place were to glance at it and opine to its current status, they would surely deem it to be an ancient apartment complex left to rot. Despite such speculation, it indeed withheld a most pitifully-hideous dweller within a foul-scented, box-like room. The room had a bilious-hued wallpaper around it, which its original color had withered away. Missing patches revealing the putrid wood behind it, and years of unkemptness left it damaged and torn by the chewing and clawing of hideous rats.

In a forsaken corner within this cell-like room, a morphine-addict lied supine, glancing up at the wooden, loathsome roof, panting due to his deplorable withdrawal and weakened with ravenous hunger. Perspiring profusely, his vision beheld an optical illusion, there being three trembling roofs before him, constantly shifting from the left, to the center, to the right in a dreadful loop, with his own heartbeat thundering in his ears.

Eyes wide and bloodshot, uncurled fingers twitching and shaking uncontrollably, and his teeth corroded beyond dental repair, one would not even give a second thought to such an unappealing sight. The morphine-addict did not recall his home, his birthplace, friends or relatives, or even his own name. As far as he knew, this rotted, fish-eyed edifice was his home, with its dark passages and its roof only exhibiting cobwebs and shadows.

With a strength that was fueled only by the craving of that mad delectable substance, his filthy digits wormed their way into his pockets and withdrew a needle filled with that sweet nectar from the Pit, and he forcibly inserted the apex of the needle into his vein, his cry of lamentable anguish converting from the pain of the sudden jabbing into a relished moaning and broken gasps of sensational pleasure. An unsettling smile spread across his dirty face as the substance worked its way through his bloodstream.

With this action, he placed his instrument of nourishment into his pocket, still retaining that delicious substance and saving it for future injections, and curled into a fetal-like position upon the creaky floor, exhilarated breathes escaping his nostrils and mouth. Lifeless and forlorn, the man stayed gazing forward at the wretchedly-gross wall. Gazing at nothingness.

While lying dormant on the floor, he heard the environment alive with a nauseating noise, a noise so loathsomely abominable that it made his sagged skin crawl. Momentarily he had closed his eyes without noticing a thing, and then opened them to a most repugnant image; on every side of this jail-like room, there was a disgusting shaking all over the walls making that awful wallpaper appearing alive and to be executing a singular, evil dance of death. In conjunction with this terrifying motion came the verminous slithering and screeching of reprehensibly gigantic rats.

But the horror went beyond this, as the rats, although horrible to behold, were unlike any other rats he or any other human had ever seen. The things had coarse black grimy fur at the head with a rodentian face, with fleshy, deformed humanoid fingers that functioned as paws. Below the waste is wear the true horror was, abandoning any resemblance to any species of rat or any other critter on this Earth. From its abdomen sprouted greenish-grey tentacles with opening and closing mouth-like holes.

Their arrangement was curious, following a pattern not known on any critter of land, air, or sea. On their backs there formed a grotesque eye, constantly shifting in a bestial fashion. These fiendish rodents from beyond any known dimension squirmed and cried out menacingly as they scurried and clawed their up and down the walls, with the man’s eyes filling with unutterable horror he saw these monsters and their alien bodies writhe grotesquely with the tentacles rhythmically changed colors as they slithered all around.

Suddenly, his eyes shot open, widened with dread and fear, and he glanced about his peeling walls, the screeching and visceral horror of those unearthly rats spawned from the Pit itself disappearing. It was a wretched momentary nightmare. As he reached this thought, trembling in fear and his acidic breath coming out in choked gasps, he remained lying there, glancing blankly into that miserable wallpaper.

From the corner of his eye, he noticed a most peculiar sight; in the darkness, something resembling a movement within the grim patterns of that horrid wallpaper. Without flinching or uttering a sound, he gazed at the curious movement as it began to move in unusual ways, slowly converting into a distinct shape, a horrible silhouette made of nightmares.

The morphine addict ceased his breathing, and his staring remained fixated on the area where he had witnessed the shadow on the wall. It may be contemplated that perhaps that horrid silhouette was merely a result of the powerful narcotic pumping through his system, when an eerie, devilish whisper began to haunt the air. It made breathing sounds resembling an elderly warlock’s final breath, and the wretched sounds that followed resembled a wicked incantation of sorts in some unknown language.

As he sat up, the man gazed around, still in a morphine-induced state, the hideous whispering grew more fearfully volatile and numerous, and he began to see more of these terrible wall creatures crawling all over that loathsome wallpaper on all corners of the room. They were somewhat humanoid, imp-like with shadowy black skin. The deplorable things writhed and seemed to climb out of the wallpaper and furtively scurry in all directions within the gloomy room. The addict’s grotesquely bloodshot eyes swung to and fro, as these menacing beasts performed their maniacal lumbering. During this maddening fiasco, the evil whispers grew louder still, and they clawed at his ears, making him shield them from those groans and mutterings of darkened depths.

On all fours, he crawled upon that cold, tattered wooden floor, as the creatures on the walls and the whispers plagued him infinitely, driving him to near madness. Towards the window he crawled, with warm sweat trickling down his chin and cheeks, his itinerary discursive and drunken. Finally reaching the sill of that misty, cold window, the eldritch whispers and the devils surrounding him seemed to sweetly dissipate. Struggling with faint and shortness of breath, he forcefully managed to get to his feet and held himself balanced on the sill and walls, and he glanced out into the abysmal, rotted city streets below.

But as the morphine-addict studied the abhorred skyscrapers and the chillingly-archaic dwellings, a bleak apartment complex parallel to his own with two similar, eerie rotting fish-eyed windows stood before him. What a hideous den this was, and the man could see that the roll-down curtains of both windows were down, concealing whatever inhabitants lived within these crypts.

<p class="MsoNormal">But there was a blaringly bright light illuminating the windows, and within these mad lights, he could see a most twisted, dreadful sight; swarms of silhouetted   mad human corpses gaited morbidly without arms or heads, like headless and armless mannequins treading about.

<p class="MsoNormal">The addict dispensed a shriek of terror at this most disturbingly uncanny event, and then his bloody optic orbs shifted heavenwards to behold an even greater horror; swirling mists that dwarfed the phantasmal fog slithering through the dilapidated streets below were descending down upon the city from the putrid sky, and within the swirling spectral mist, there were fog phantoms, writing in anguish and he could hear growls and guttural roars from a hauntingly cosmic domain that almost seemed to seep forth from the very borders of our known universe.

<p class="MsoNormal">As his eyes remained anchored on this fantastically-horrific scene, he saw an array of mystical, cosmically-horrible colors within the mist, as if lighted by internal fires.

<p class="MsoNormal">But “colors” they are referred to as such only by analogy. It was impossible to say if they were on the visible spectrum or not. The phosphorescent glow expanded and like lightning bolts within a thunderhead, they sparked and exploded in a hideously vibrant manner, and as the chaotically-menacing mist descended lower still. Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocals which will would never leave the memory of anyone who listened to them. Not from any Earthly organism where they born, for no animal’s organs can create emit such unspeakably horrible noises.

<p class="MsoNormal">The mist began to engulf the surrounding city block, swallowing up entire buildings and the streets below. The morphine addict fell backwards and began crawling away from the thunder-croaking Hellish fog from the stars, with its menacing colors devouring the building with the grotesque, headless silhouettes gaiting back and forth.

<p class="MsoNormal">The misty, eldritch fog began to seep in from the cracks of the shut window as well as the threshold of his collapsing door, and the cosmic, multi-colored mist began to darken and consume the room itself. The mist seemed to let out a terribly vile odor, with its scent dreadful enough to numb and burn any mere human’s olfactory organs. The addict put his hand to his mouth, attempting to shield the stream of pink and yellow vomit from pouring out due to the stench of that monstrous mist.

<p class="MsoNormal">The colors than, hideously enough, began to meld into one another and form a vaguely anthropomorphic shape. A head was visible albeit with no facial features and was seemingly glabrous, and its hands appeared roughly human as well, but the feet appeared to be digitless. The form began to wade towards the addict, and then came more of them, piercing through the mist and approaching him, with their alien arms outstretched hungrily.

<p class="MsoNormal">With the fiendish phosphorescence burning his irises, the addict backing away, his face now twisted with horrid expressions both due to the overwhelming, unutterable fear and the constant injections of morphine into his system. His eyes were now completely crimson and nearly gruesomely popping out their sockets. Sweat slithered down his face and almost appeared ichthyic to demonstrate the macabre, seemingly impossible contractions and distortions of his facial muscles because of this sensation of horror.

<p class="MsoNormal">As the Hellish color-beings drew ever closer, the man backed away, shrieking hideously but being drowned out by those ghastly infra-bass timbre roars and thunderous growls. Stretching out a hand as a meager defense against these colored things, he didn’t realize that behind was his window.

<p class="MsoNormal">His back pressed against the fragile glass, and it shattered instantaneously due to the extra weight it would carry, and opposed to falling downward as the ordinary natural laws of our universe would hold, the man felt himself being pulled backwards in a parabolic trajectory at breakneck speed, like a morbid talon yanking him away from his shattered window.

<p class="MsoNormal">As he was dragged backwards, he glanced backwards in the direction of his pulling, and madness ensued. What he witnessed before him was a sight of such magnitude, of cosmic horror and atrocities that have never been before spoken of or seen. A swirling vortex of spectral darkish purple and grotesque blue hues fused with the blackness of space.

<p class="MsoNormal">Deeper and deeper he was pulled in at a remarkable incalculable velocity, when the true madness began. Glancing downwards, his nerves shrieked at a hellish black city of mammoth stone terraces with grotesque pyramids, cyclopean towers with hideously-cosmic angles that never seemed to stay in one position. Devil-lights burned demonically from haunting windows, and cowled, horribly robed people in black and red of this dreadful city dancing madly to deranged fluting instruments that bayed from the infinite depths.

<p class="MsoNormal">Within the air, then came these monstrous centipede-like things writhing through along with on his monstrous, lost voyage through a horrendously morbid cosmic portal, and heinous worm-like things with putrid mask-like faces vaguely resembling human ones with gaping mouths and slit eyes, shrieking in indescribable tones.

<p class="MsoNormal">Along with these cosmic abominations came those other things; huge purplish and azure crustaceous like beasts with several legs and two massive bat-like wings with illuminating heads, and a duo of pincer-like appendages flew alongside him, with their monstrous wings flapping vigorously and emitting a weird buzzing noise.

<p class="MsoNormal">Further and further within this swirling torrent of madness and astronomical horror descended the morphine addict, accompanied by these heinous beasts of unknown cosmic origins. Fungoid evil planets began to appear, hued with colors reminiscent of Hellish fire and miasmic slime.

<p class="MsoNormal">Until at last, he heard a most hideous guttural groaning that would be impossible for mere language to convey, a groaning that would surely drive any human to the brink of their sanity. A constant humming and deplorable roaring echoed throughout the space vortex, thundering throughout the vast infinity of cold space.

<p class="MsoNormal">Looking towards the source of this monstrous cry, the addict let out an extended, horrified scream, a scream that he nor any human has nor ever would scream as powerful as his was in the history of mankind’s existence; a giant conglomerate of writhing, grotesque tentacles all bunched together, squirming like enraged snakes stood in the center of orbiting terrible planets. Gelatinous and membranous, with great eyes pulsating and shifting in all directions, with numerous mouths forming all around its sides opening and shutting constantly, the whole monstrous thing shaded a diabolical gray.

<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:center">No more was left within that needle...

<p class="MsoNormal">His precious elixir had been drained dry. With a most unsightly awful face, he lied there, lifeless and in death’s grip, with his eyes like crimson fish-eyes, his mouth slightly agape twisted into a form of sheer fright that no human could ever feel in their life. The morphine addict had injected those last, sweet drops into his system, and now it was all gone, and so was he. His cold corpse lied there, within his rotting room that now served a new purpose as his grave. It is curious to ponder whether or not those fiendish trips he endured were a result of his addiction, or whether his damned soul was sent into a realm of horrors and fantastic beasts that no nightmare could ever conjure up.