Untraceable
There is one thing that frightens even Death herself.
I couldn’t put my finger on why The Suff, the urban legend that sprouted up on Substack recently, seemed eerily familiar. Then it hit me.
This is a short story that I wrote for a prompt-based competition back in January of 2023, and Substack’s new favorite Lovecraftian Being may have made an appearance…
The gate swings shut behind me. The windows of the house are black.
I turn the knob, and the door creaks open, revealing darkness. The security system is disabled, like always.
My fingers begin to itch – my muscles, my every nerve raw and aching.
I remember my first hit, when she pulled the tiny orb from her battered briefcase and held it out to me.
I have something for you, she said. It glowed a faint blue, smaller than a coin. Such a little thing – and so potent. I need much more of it now, and yet I am always left wanting, craving.
On that first day, she swept the hair off her shoulder, her fingers brushing the rounded birthmark on her neck – a cloud drifting by a crescent moon, or, from another angle, a long-bladed scythe. With her foot she slid the briefcase toward me across the floor. There’s more where that came from. Lots more. I’m getting more clients every day. And you’ll be untraceable.
I slip through the door. No alarms sound, no dogs run yapping up to me. Shadows overtake the moonlight, catching on sharp corners and jutting into the room like grasping fingers. Between the shadows, the room is meticulously bare, all angles and empty space, with the calculated starkness of a person who can afford not to keep anything.
A person who has everything, including a second chance at life.
On the day she found me, my life was a blank, dead space. I took the tiny orb, not out of curiosity but oppressive boredom. Life dragged me along like a corpse floating in a river, bloated and decayed. Everything in me and around me was numb; even the orb’s unearthly glow was muted, dull.
Then I consumed it, the orb bursting against my tongue and flooding my mouth – and color and light consumed me.
When at last my vision came swirling back, I would have done anything, gone anywhere, killed anyone, accepted any offer she made, just to have more. None of the choices I had made in my life felt truly free. My back was always up against a corner – obligations, expectations, fears. But any charade of free choice I had ended when I took what she offered. Since that first day, my every thought, every action, has had one purpose.
More.
It’s getting more and more common, people who cheat death. She ran her finger down my arm. Modern medicine, it can keep people alive who should have been mine long ago. When a person died, they used to stay that way. But not anymore. It’s little more than necromancy, restarting hearts, forcing the lungs to inhale and exhale, bringing the dead back to life. Now I need extra help from someone who’s up to the task. Could that be you?
I would have ripped out my own tongue before telling her no.
Of all the dizzying questions rattling in my mind, only one made it out of my mouth. Why do you need me?
I’m a believer in delegation, she said. And risk management.
I never know much about the clients. I receive an address and a picture, and when I arrive, the house is open and silent. All I have to do is match the person to the picture and finish my job. Then I partake.
I slip softly up the marble steps, my ears pricked for movement. In one hand I clutch a battered briefcase.
At the top of the stairs, I open the first door. A study, organized and spartan, imbued with the earthy tang of expensive wood polish and leather. All the things he won’t be able to take with him.
Risk management? Even as I asked the question, I knew her answer would change nothing. It had been so long since I had needed something. I didn’t know what I had consumed, but I knew that I needed it again and again and again.
Nothing you need to worry about. She bared her white teeth in a smile. Near death experiences can attract certain parasites. Much more dangerous for me than for you.
I could have asked more questions, but there was no point. My decision was made the moment I took the orb. Until she sat down beside me, my life had been one of deafening, deadening ease. Physical comfort, emotional aridity. Parents well-to-do yet bitter, friendships shiny but shallow. My sufferings were a thousand tiny cuts, like leeches – small and inconvenient, slowly draining the color from my life. Then she gave me her first gift – a drive, a need, relentless and insatiable.
I know now what they are, the orbs. Harvested memories, fruit to be plucked from the dead. A life’s most vibrant moments, condensed to a cacophony of light and sound – the nectar of gods and demons. The food of Reapers.
My footsteps are soft on the hardwood floors as I creep down the hall. Another door. There is the tiniest creak as it opens, and I freeze.
At a sound from within the room, my heart pounds, reverberating against my ribs.
The sound comes again.
But it’s only a snore, the heavy breathing of deep sleep.
I stand still, clutching the doorknob until my pulse slows. Then I creep inside, leaving the door ajar behind me. Pale gray moonlight streaks through a wide window overlooking the ocean, its gush of waves rushing and receding like a slow, steady heartbeat.
The client is sprawled in his bed, silky sheets tangled around his legs. He wears only briefs. Despite his massive house, his hardwood floors, his ocean view – the flesh around his stomach is loose and flabby. In his sleep, he is vulnerable, exposed, human.
The blue orb and its glow worm their way into my thoughts, for a moment blocking out all else. I shake my thoughts clear and pull a pocket knife – her second gift to me – from my jacket and press the lever. The knife swings open, growing and morphing until I hold in my hand a scythe, long and unwieldy and sharp. Sharp enough to cut a human soul from its body.
Leaning over the bed, I rest the tip against his chest. Then, with one vicious swipe, I slice the blade through his fragile flesh.
There is no blood, no crack of bones or gush of fluid. But his snoring stops, and his chest rises and falls no more.
A shadow seems to shift in the room, a curtain moving in the wind from the ocean. Outside, waves crash against the surf, their pounding rhythmic and quiet.
I must work quickly now.
I lay the briefcase on the bed and open it. Then, gently as a surgeon, I slide the blade along his forehead, and a blue orb, the size of my fist, pushes its way through the invisible incision and rises before me. An iridescent blue, its cloudy surface swirling, changeable as plasma.
Panting, I cup my hands around it and lay it in the briefcase.
Then, raising the scythe once more, I take my commission.
A slice – no more than one tenth of the glowing mass. I must not take more. I hold my portion in my hand. It is cool, its surface dancing like air across my skin.
Again I press the lever, and the scythe swishes back into a harmless pocket knife that I tuck away.
Why is it more dangerous for you than for me? I asked.
For me the risk is infinite lifetimes, she said. For you, it’s only one.
Only one. A worthless one, until she gave me meaning.
As if I’m chasing a dragon that gets farther and farther away, every taste since my first has left me wanting, but my hands still shake as anticipation racks my body.
I stuff the little slice of blue into my mouth.
Light and sound rush at me, the sensations of a life condensed to their most potent moments, gushing through me and around me.
A sled, snow spraying, wind whipping.
Birthday candles snuffing with one lung-emptying blow.
A foul ball, dust ballooning with each bounce. “You call that a pitch? You think I came here to watch that?”
Downstairs – raised voices filled with acid that no apology can erase. A suitcase and a slamming door.
The memories are jumbled, grouped together with an unknowable logic. A curly-haired woman, smiling and then gone.
Headlights glaring through the night, illuminating roads, trees, mountains – and another truck.
– Broken glass, a dark stain growing, blooming.
– Bright lights and the burning stink of antiseptic, flashes of white coats. Frantic voices. The rumble of a gurney.
Then a change, as though I’m watching the memory not from the client’s eyes but from above, looking down. I’ve seen this in many of the clients – the moment their souls left their bodies, before doctors charged them back to life – Frankenstein’s monsters in the flesh.
People crowd around the body as electricity jolts through the empty shell.
Something nags at me in the memory, tugging my consciousness.
A shadow in the corner.
I push the thought away and let the sensations overpower me, heightened and addictive and insatiable.
For the briefest flash of a moment, a darkness – a thick cloud, a fog – settles over the still body, enveloping it, sinking into the skin.
Once again lying flat and looking upward, eyes flash open to an army of surgical masks and white coats.
A sudden heaviness, like falling sand. The doctors fade away to a pinprick.
The memory ends abruptly, its potency gone, the glitter fallen away.
For a moment, I see nothing. Impenetrable darkness, though my eyes are open.
The sensation passes, and the bedroom swirls back before my vision.
Odd. I’ve never seen a memory end in that way, with darkness.
The razor edge gone from my hunger, I let out a huff of air, at once sated and disappointed.
I’ll need another job, and soon.
At the fringe of my vision, a shadow moves.
I pause, my eyes pinned to the spot. Untouched by moonlight, a corner of the room sits inky black in the night.
There shouldn’t be anyone else here tonight.
I’ve had close calls before. Spouses stirring when I enter, a dog growling at my scent, a child peeking out their bedroom door. But I am stealthy and quick. I leave no physical evidence; the death she has me deal is, for all intents and purposes, natural.
Still, there is a risk. It’s why she recruited me.
A parasite.
The corner is dark, as though the shadows leak into it.
There’s probably just furniture in the corner, or tomorrow’s suit hanging, rustling in the breeze.
I lower the lid of the briefcase, fighting against my fingers that itch to take more.
Gripping the briefcase, I turn toward the door. Then I stop, a jolt running down into my feet like ice.
The long-limbed shadow sinks low to the ground, low as a stalking lion.
Risk management, she said.
What parasite could frighten an immortal?
What is it that she fears?
My breath is shallow as my eyes strain against the darkness, groping for the commonplace thing the shadow must be –
The suit must have fallen from its hanger and crumpled to the floor – There’s a chair in the corner that I didn’t see before, with laundry draped across it –
The shadow crawls toward me, rippling across the floor like the hem of a cloak.
Its head – a hood, swallowing the light.
My scream dries up and dies in my throat. The briefcase thumps to the floor, and I run.
I do have a choice, and I won’t choose this.
I burst from the room and hurtle toward the marble stairs.
Out of this house – if I can get out of this house –
I hear nothing but my own heaving breath, my own footsteps pounding down the stairs.
I run through tentacles of shadow and throw myself through the door into the night outside.
The air is cool, with a hint of salt I didn’t notice before, and the waves rumble a lullaby in the distance. I suck in the air and dart down the flagstone path toward the gate.
The countless little moments of a life, they meant nothing to me until I could lose them.
An oak tree stands beside the gate, casting a shadow, deep and dark as a bottomless well.
I skid to a stop and stumble backward, falling hard against the stone path.
The creature drifts from the shadow of the tree. It drops low and skitters toward me.
My fingers scrabble at the dirt as I try to crawl away, but it’s too late. The shadow envelopes me, heavy as sand, pouring into my eyes, my ears, my mouth - tiny crystals scraping against the tender flesh inside me.
My vision shrinks. I’m falling into myself, the night and the moonlight dwindling to a pinprick.
Then nothingness. The oppressing weight disappears from my fingers, my hands, everything – my limbs wrested away from me, under another’s control.
What parasite have I awoken?
I see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.
Yet I’m aware.
I’m trapped.
I feel every moment as it passes – nothing else.
Only darkness.
The battered briefcase is incongruous against the woman’s crisp blazer and her rod-straight hair. Her eyes flicking through passersby, ticking them off in her head, she settles on one.
One of them has the eyes she needs, eyes snuffed of light. Someone who needs to need something.
A girl at a bus stop, scrolling on her phone. Her face is still, her eyes limp and cold as a dead thing.
Holding the briefcase tight in her hand, the woman strides toward the bus stop and drops to the bench. At the whiff of her aconite perfume, earthy and sweet, the girl looks up.
The others nearby – the homeless man with the scraggly face, the wizened old woman who soon will be one of the woman’s clients – they take no notice of her. They do not see her, do not smell her.
She tosses the hair from her shoulder, and the girl’s eyes rest on her sickle-shaped birthmark.
“I have something for you,” she says.
A hint of intrigue stirs in the girl’s eyes, overcoming wariness. “What is it?”
Smiling, she opens the latch of the briefcase, and a faint blue glow lights the girl’s face.
Awesome story! You created a really cool world.
Is The Suff reconning itself into past stories? ;)
That was great.