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This is my first venture into fiction in many years, and it is an expression of my first love: horror.
Be warned that it discusses suicide, mental illness, and includes descriptions that you might find disturbing. If that’s not for you, watch this cute cat video instead. Due to this story’s disturbing nature, it is behind a paywall.
The night was clear when Trevor spoke the words. It was February, and the slightest hints of spring were cutting through the ice in the air. The wind blew, but it was not as cold as it had been the night before.
Trevor didn't know this, for he was sitting in his bed in his basement bedroom. The wind tapped on his window, but he didn’t hear it. He only heard the words as he spoke them: simple words, silly words — a rhyme that had the lilt and loll of something he might have heard as a tike in the nursery; he was almost certain that he had. The words echoed as he said them, not remembered themselves, but seeming to give shape to a memory, an echolocation revealing something vast buried beneath the ground of his mind.
Dozens of rhymes had passed his lips on similar nights just as this. Some had been grotesque variations of common nursery rhymes. Some had been nonsense words. All had failed to yield the desired result.
He had persistently sought these words, this elusive rhyme, for months. Rumors of them lurked in the darkest corners of the web, whispered between faceless usernames in the flickering glare of computer screens.
The origin of the rhyme was uncertain. Legend had it that it had been unearthed by the great Aleister Crowley, who considered uttering them in his last days of drug addiction and poverty but was staid from doing so by his formidable ego. Others suggested that they were the lyrics of a lost Throbbing Gristle song. Still others suggested that the words were first known, but never uttered, by the Marquis de Sade, who had given the rhyme to those he wanted annihilated. All legends. Strangely, no one who murmured about these words on the gore sites, Telegram groups, and suicide circles ever doubted the existence of the rhyme, unlike all the other online legends that had come and gone. This legend, though barely known, would never die.
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