Happy Halloween! I’ve written a short story for the Writing Contest currently being held by Top In Fiction where an inanimate object takes center stage in horror. I was also inspired by the beautiful displays of porcelain figurines that were often used as ornaments on the dessert table.
Read while listening:
Oh Verity, how your name rings so pleasantly in my ears, how sweet the syllables taste upon my lips, my tongue. You were far more than just a figurine or a simple antique. You were special, and you were mine. I do not know if you had a past life or if you had perhaps been fashioned after a young woman in the height of her youth, but you were real to me all the same.
And your name, oh, your name I shall never forget!
And how it lives on in my memory, even now!
The shopkeeper told me your name when I bought you. She told me all about your extended history, how much you were worth, how very coveted you had been. I was proud to own you, to have the privilege of placing you upon my shelf, my little Verity.
I admired your porcelain like it was the finest of rarities in all the world. Those smooth, rosy cheeks on your lovely face, so full of innocence and wonder. I delighted in putting you out at the dessert table, surrounding you with rich creams and decadent cakes, so that my guests could admire your sculpted beauty. Now and again, I would even allow them to grab hold of you, to feel the smoothness of your skin, watching as they ran their fingers along the outlines of your bare shoulder, which was always revealed just so in that coquettish manner of yours…
Verity, oh Verity! You bewitched me entirely, and though I knew you were inanimate, I was much preoccupied by the subtle changes I swore to have witnessed in you. A growing fear that you had been tainted—corrupted beyond repair—made me exceedingly miserable. Though I knew that I must be mad to entertain such contemplations over a porcelain figurine upon my shelf, I knew that you had been altered. If the others had seen you as often as I do at the altar I erected in your name, they would have undoubtedly noticed the miniscule changes.
For one, your beautiful little smile began to fade, and in spite of it being nearly imperceptible, I saw it all the same. It began to unnerve me, the more change I perceived. You were still put out as an ornament on the dessert table, and I continued to be quite pleased when you were complimented by my guests. A few of them even tried to purchase you off of me, but I outright refused their offers…
Every.
Single.
Time.
You may have been corrupted, but you were still my little Verity…
What I saw changed in you next at last prompted me to no longer put you on display, but to hide you in my bedchambers.
Your eyes began to darken.
Little.
By.
Little.
I thought that perhaps your paint had been fading, worn off after decades, but—no. It was something more, something deeper. Looking into your little doe eyes no longer filled me with that joyful satisfaction. Instead, I found myself staring into black eyes made of the void itself, causing ghosts of vermin to crawl upon my skin and sending relentless shivers all throughout my body.
Oh Verity, how I missed those sweet doe eyes of yours! How they sparkled, how they seemed to glow just for me in the basking sunlight…It was such a sight, and it was all mine.
But your wicked transformation proved to be ever the more disturbing as time wore on. Your expression was no longer open, ready for the world to fill you with all of its love. Oh, how it would have filled you, Verity! But now…now how I shudder to see your face turned so vile! So full of disgust!
What happened to you, my little Verity?
At length, I could not possibly withstand seeing you so altered. I wished more than anything for you to return to your perfect self, but it only developed as I scrutinized each subtlety with an obsession corroding away at my very soul!
Oh, how I lamented your degradation! What sinister evil could have done this to you? To take a budding flower in its prime, a fruit most ripened of its nectar, and rip it apart so cruelly?
Shaken to my core as I was, bitter tears welled up within my exhausted eyes each and every night. And it would not end, only growing worse at intervals.
Slowly…slowly…Oh, how dreadfully slowly it changed you! I ran my finger down your curved edges, in the hopes of somehow preserving that purity which had brought pleasure to so many. How could you possibly be admired now, in such a state? With eyes full of pitch black hatred, piercing my very heart? Verity, oh Verity, my dear, little Verity!
It was on the darkest and quietest of all nights that I witnessed the worst change of all.
Your shining porcelain began to crack. When the first one formed, there was a shrill cry that at once both deafened me and could hardly be heard, it was so faint. It spread throughout your budding chest like fine hairs as the shrieks grew exponentially, until they could no longer be ignored.
Utterly panicked, I tried to keep you from falling apart, to save whatever I could, but the more I touched your figure, the more hateful those pitch black eyes became. Full of venomous poison, they pierced my heart yet again like a harsh judgement.
The cracks spread even further along as the screams resounded through me and throughout all of my bedchambers. Collapsing to the floor at once, I knocked you down with me, and you, and you—
You shattered.
Your girlish face returned to how it had once been. Rosy, youthful, open.
Except now, you were entirely broken.
I hastened to put you back together again, but it was simply no use. Your dress, your bare shoulder, your curled hair, your inviting smile, it all lay utterly shattered upon the floor.
Fumbling about, I nearly did not take notice of the way my hands were blackened decaying like an old corpse. In horror, I perceived cracks forming upon my skin, spreading like the Black Death up along my arms and coursing through my whole body. What was happening to me? My madness had overcome me, the creeping sensation of crawling vermin reemerged and escaped from the very crevices between the cracks of my rotting flesh. Is this what had so corrupted you, my Verity?
I opened my mouth to scream, but it had been sealed shut as though behind glass. With a darkening vision, a film was placed over my eyes. My limbs stiffened, rendering me unable to move. I attempted to move in spite of my quickening breath, but it was in vain. It was hopeless.
Laying upon the floor, I felt myself slowly being consumed by the grotesque vermin which were born from me. It was then, that I realized, the corruption I had so greatly feared ruining you, Verity, was myself. It was I who had been the very agent of sin destroying your purity.
And yet, as I became nothing, acutely feeling every squirming, writhing vermin crawling upon my flesh, I still thought of nothing but you, forever fresh in mind, in soul, and in body….
Oh, how I miss you…
My lovely, lovely, little Verity.
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If you enjoyed this horror story, check out some of my other ones:
An incredible story. You perfectly captured how some men see a girl's coming of age as corruption. Some of it even reminded me of religious doctrines making women who refuse to live as men's pleasure tools out to be wocked and sinful. Love it!
Creepy and disturbing and reminiscent of the orgies the aristocrats have in the child abuse network. With the ageing and decay of the statue like the growing older of the child until they are not a child anymore and that's why he gets angry. Then there's the multiple personality alters and the fracturing/dissociation.
You got inside the man's head brilliantly. And showed it's really not a nice place to be.