Today’s Prompt: Footsteps
Silence drives me mad. Not the silence itself, but what shows up in it. I need the noise, the music, the television to drown it out. Footsteps. Steadily walking toward me. If there’s nothing to mask them, I hear then getting closer and closer and closer. Whatever is walking never reaches me. Always approaching, never reaching. And if it did, what would happen to me. Who –or what– is walking toward me? I don’t want to find out.
I know what you’re thinking but I am not imagining them. The footsteps are real, they are always there, and they are coming for me.
I used to love the quiet. Libraries were one of my favorite places to be. The silent words, millions upon millions, making not a sound. They exist in some other plane and can be reached by opening the covers of a book. Like a portal only entirely safe. If a book started to reach too deep or too far into this world, you could close the cover, put it back on the shelf. Until you were ready, prepared to deal with it. There’s a comfort in libraries of the quiet presence of other people all performing this magic each time they turn a page. The rustle of the paper the only incantation. Chairs scraping. A cough. Footsteps quietly going and coming. Smooth sounds, measured and controlled.
Somehow that other dimension that libraries and their books serve as a temple for or a portal to has broken loose of its mooring. This is where the footsteps are actually walking, I am sure. The lexicon has escaped the realm of concepts and is stalking me, us, here in the realm of the physical. The footsteps followed me out of the library one day, walking with a deliberate pace always toward me.
I don’t going to libraries anymore. Or churches. Museums. Any place where the silence is deep enough to bring me the echo of this walker. I don’t know if it’s because I’m afraid that more will leak from that universe to this one. Maybe I’m afraid that if the walker reaches me, I will disappear, be sucked into that universe and lose my connection to this one forever.
