short story: grim

"give it back!"


Another shout was thrown in the air.  The helpless boy then coils around in the ground. Lying helpless amidst the cold floor of the room, he shook and trembled. He barely has enough clothes to shield him from the cold damp floor of his barren and broken home. He was still trembling yet he remained from the position where he was left. Another cry was uttered.


“give it back please..”


This time he heard enough. He immediately covered his ears with his cold and trembling hands. Shutting all sounds the moment his hands touched his ears. Then there was silence. Little did he knew, he had just passed out.


In his dream it was different. Everything around him seems exactly the opposite of what his life has been. He was wearing comfortable clothes now. The room he was in was sparkling bright with cleanliness. The bed he was lying in was as soft as cotton. He felt like he was in drifting in the clouds. Everything seems perfect, till the time he looked at his reflection in the mirror.


His reflection was entirely different. It surprised him so hard that he fell back down upon gazing at his reflection. “that is not me” he mused. The reflection stared back at him while he sat on floor. Confused and scared, he summoned up all his courage and gave the mirror a quick glance. The reflection was looking straight at him. He was uttering something. Words seem so vague for him to understand the meaning of what the reflection was telling him. Deep down inside he knew what those words were.


“give it back”


“please stay away!” he shouts back at the mirror then ran outside. The reflection stayed on the mirror, crying and felt lost.


The boy kept on running. He passed by strangers who kept on calling at him. He ran as fast as he can, covering his ears as he ventured towards the woods. When he felt like he ran far enough, he broke down and cried.


He was faced down and whimpering still. As tears ran across his face, he goes again to his favorite position. The position he feels safe and secure. While sucking on his thumb, he coils down again crying in a fetal position then he fell asleep.


This was not what he wanted at all. He kept telling himself that. But then who knew that this would happen after that fateful incident.


It was a very unfortunate time to be lost in the woods. He regretted the time when he stubbornly took a detour into an unusual path. The path leaded him to the deeper part of the woods. The path where even the trees began to wither and grass ceased to grew. It was the first time he got lost in the woods and there is no one out there to save him. He was all by himself now. He sucked it up even though tears are lining up his eyes. He retraced his steps only to found out that he was walking in circles. He tried to lay down markers along the way but when he turned back the marker vanishes without a trace. It was becoming late, and darkness is eating its way across the sky. The light was slowly fading and the fog was now becoming thicker by the minute.


Then a shriek from a bird echoed so loud he jumped out of fear and ran. He ran and got cut up by low branches from dead trees. He ignored the pain ran and ran. He thought he heard laughter coming from behind him. he grabbed a thick piece of wood and ran while his eyes were closed and swinging his arm blindly as he moves forward. He ran as far as he could until he tripped on something and fell face first into a swamp.

He stood up and came to see what he tripped him and saw another body. The body was mutilated horridly. He backed away from it quickly. He felt more afraid and hit something again. This time he hit a person’s leg.


He looked up then all he could see was darkness.


He woke up to the pain from his head. His head felt like it was splitting in two. He tried to touch it only to found out he was bounded across a tree. Someone was rustling near the fire he cannot see clearly for this person’s back was facing him. He tried to ask him who the person was but all he could utter was a moan. The person looked back at him and showed his crooked teeth at him. He was balding with hair tossed around like he was pulling it out by force. He was wearing rags and dirty clothes with feet as black as coal.


The man asked the boy to remain still and wait for his turn as he was just about to finish with his meal. The boy focused till he saw what the man doing a ritual. It was the body of a boy that he tripped on a while ago. But what was weird was that the more he nears to finish the ritual the more the body became healthy. He focused as hard as he can to see what was really going on. But the pain kicks in again till he shouted and the man came to him to hit him again and then he fainted.


“it is now finished” these are the words he heard as he woke up. He was not tied up on a tree now. “where am i? and who are you?” he crawled back to see the man standing up  in front of him who just smirks and laughs sheepishly without answering him.


The boy then looks around and saw that there was something different. It was still the middle of the night he thought. But something does not feel right. He asked again “who are you?” This time the man moves in closer to stare at him from head to foot and answered “I am the man who just granted what your heart desired” he was puzzled at the man’s answer. “where am i?” he asked. “you are where you want to be” the man said. He smelled of something very awful, like a mixture of garbage and decaying animal and other filthy stuffs.


He noticed something was quite different now. He was not in the woods. The man now appears to be wearing a white suit. His face was now cleanly shaven and his hair was fixed and brushed up neatly. He looked down on him and told him a few words before he left. “never look at the mirror”. He may be appearing to be clean and neat but the stink from his inner being has been seeping out of his body; at least that was how he saw him. the boy tried to recall what had happen that night, but this was stopped by another headache. A much more painful one that made him faint from the pain.


That was all he remembered. He kept on wondering what happened that night, about why did he wake up as somebody else, and about the reflection who is crying out for him to give something back.

He thought that this nightmare should stop now. He gathered all his courage to stand up and walked back to the place where he had been to.


He knew he  had been always poor. an orphaned boy. His family died right in front of him. His father killed his mother and stabbed himself after. He lived by himself. He denied the fact that he was alone. He kept something from his parents, a little something to remember them by. He kept it closed to him. He made a scarf out of his mother’s favorite dress cut out from his father’s blade. It was the cloth that he used to clean his parent’s body before he put them in their graves.


He was looking for some rocks to make a gravestone for the graves but he got lost. That’s when his living nightmare began. He was now making his way near to the house where he ran out from. There are no more people here. It was dark and there were no lights in the room. He did not care anymore.


He opened the door with trembling hands. Then he slowly crept back to the room armed with a lamp that he picked and light from the kitchen. He then came back face to face with the reflection.

It was all coming back to him now. the reflection he saw now was the boy he saw on the woods. the one with the ugly man. The boy on the reflection was still crying. He called out to the reflection. The reflection stood up. With teary eyes he came running as close as he can be to talked to the boy. The boy on the reflection seemed to lighten up and said “are you going to give it back?” “give what back” the other boy answered. “my body of course” “you stole it to me, you and that man” said the reflection. “I do not know what happened” the boy then explained what had he remembered before he got hit again by the man. “LIES!!! that is not what happened!” shouted  the reflection. The boy was confused about what he heard and asked back “then tell me what happened”


The boy explained that the man didn’t finished what he was doing to him. he was extracting his soul from his body when he came across them. He got knocked out by the man cause he hit him with while he was running around and blindly swinging his arms while holding a piece of wood . This had distracted the man from finishing his ritual so he hit the boy and tied it up on the tree. What the boy saw when he woke up was the ritual to eat the soul of the boy but he was surprised that the man had schemed other plans for them. He switched up their souls and locked the other soul on any reflection that the boy could look into. He told the boy that this was his punishment for ruining his ritual.


The boy was taken aback and was still shocked at what the reflection had told him. He knew now that the reason behind this nightmare was because of the failed ritual. He was about to asked the reflection on how to reverse it but failed to cause the mirror shattered by a stone. It was thrown by the man who now appears to be shifting from the ugly and dirty one to the clean and neat one. He got so terrified that he started throwing things that his hand can touch. The man just laughs as he dodge away the things that was thrown from him and moving inch by inch at the process. the boy was now cornered and again trembling in fear. He was now holding a piece of broken glass in his hand as he saw the man moving closer to him.

“you must not surrender yourself to him” said the reflection. He saw a speck of the reflection through the broken glass. The man eyed him from where he was and gave up his evilest smile at the boy who is now trapped at the corner. He was now crying in fear for his soul might be taken by this man. He was holding the broken glass hard that his hands were now cut and bleeding. “your soul will be mine child” said the man coldly.


“not in this lifetime” said the boy and without thinking about it he plunges the glass into his heart while the man screamed in horror. “NOOO!!” but it was too late the boy did what he had to. But what he saw before all life from himself faded was something else. What remained in his memory was the sight of the man.


Smiling.