Chapter 555

Carlos, a man weathered by 38 years of sun and hardship, felt a coldness that had nothing to do with the poorly sealed window of his small apartment. It was a chill that seeped into his bones, a feeling of being watched, even when he was alone.

He lived a solitary life in a modest home, tucked away in a forgotten corner of San Salvador. His days were filled mostly work as a cleaner, his evenings by quiet dinners, a small amount of television. But lately, the nights had become… different.

The change wasn't abrupt. It began with small things, sounds out of place – the creak of a floorboard when he wasn't walking, the rustle of fabric when he was alone.

"Must be the old building," he'd tell himself, pushing the unease aside, finding comfort in an explanation that quickly changed into dread. But in the deepest recesses of his mind, a small voice, which only spoke in screams in the dark, knew.

Carlos started to notice shadows flickering in his periphery, gone when he turned to look. He caught glimpses of movement in reflective surfaces, too fleeting to be sure, but enough to make his heart jump against its bony confines.

He found himself holding his breath without realizing it, listening for any sound that would explain away the growing sense of dread. He strained his hearing and waited to hear it again.

Sleep offered no escape. Nightmares plagued him, vivid and disturbing. Shapes moved in the darkness, whispering voices that seemed to claw at his sanity, but they left no trace behind.

One evening, while washing dishes, Carlos saw it clearly, a tall, dark silhouette, blocking the hall light at his kitchen's doorway. A cold fist closed around his lungs. His insides turned into sloshing acid and ice, simultaneously boiling, freezing, and he knew the silhouette wasn't "something" but someone.

He whirled around, dropping the plate he held. It shattered, a piercing, sharp counterpoint to the growing buzz of unease that the silhouette ignited and made flare up within his fear center. But there was nothing there. Just the shadows playing tricks on his tired mind, he told himself.

Except it kept happening. More and more frequently. The sightings of this tall, gaunt silhouette became the core event of all of Carlos' days. His once calm apartment now felt alien, haunted.

"You are losing your mind," He said to his reflection that night. His eyes were bloodshot, the bags underneath them like purple bruises. It had begun. It would only get worse. The man in the mirror offered only despair in its eyes.

The sounds became bolder, the creaks closer, and the rustles accompanied by cold, dragging breaths that smelled of dirt and… something else, something rotten. A smell like decomposition, but... ancient. Older than death.

One night, Carlos woke to find the shadow standing at the foot of his bed. He could not see any defining facial attributes of it, yet felt as though it was looking directly into him, past his flesh and blood, past bone and down into his soul, the ugliest thing there was.

He tried to scream, but his voice caught in his throat, choked out by an unseen hand. He flailed, scrambling back against the wall, trapped in his own horror show. He felt hot all over. He was soaked in fear.

The figure didn't move. It didn't have to. It just stood there, a column of pure dread. He couldn't breathe past its foul, rotting miasma and he choked, a hacking cough breaking past his constricted, dry, aching throat.

Carlos finally found his voice, a trembling, "What do you want?" He rasped into the consuming darkness in a whisper, barely getting the last word past his tongue. It tasted as acrid as he felt, like swallowing metal dipped in venom.

No answer. Only the heavy, suffocating feeling of its "presence" that bore down on him like an insurmountable mountain of invisible bricks. The "presence" didn't seem all that concerned with his question. It only waited.

Eventually, with the first rays of a sad, grey dawn, the figure melted back into the shadows, leaving Carlos in a heap on his bed, a trembling mess. That morning felt heavy on his head, like wearing an actual leaden hat.

He tried to rationalize what he was experiencing. Hallucinations? Stress? A nervous breakdown? All of those, combined? What if... what if it wasn't just in his mind?

The question ate at him, the unbidden query a living worm burrowing into his brain. Carlos started researching. He searched for old lore, local legends, anything that could explain what was happening to him.

He found stories, whispered tales of beings known as the Soul Reavers. Spirits that hunted those who had done terrible, unredeemable things. Spirits that feed off your suffering, and feed you suffering.

The tales said these Reavers would haunt their prey, driving them mad with fear before finally claiming their souls. And their methods of claiming souls sounded like an experience in the worst levels of agony.

Carlos, in his younger years, had fallen in with bad company. He'd done things, bad things, that still haunted his conscience, things for which he had never made amends, not really.

He had never forgiven himself. The guilt of the sins he committed in his early twenties gnawed at him with needle teeth, relentlessly. Always lurking in the shadowy depths of his mind. He tried to be better, to make something out of the waste of a man that he saw himself as.

Could this be why the Reaver was here? For the past sins he had tried so desperately to bury? Was it because, truly, at his core, he hated himself? He decided this had to be why, why else? He saw no other logic in it.

That night, he tried to fight it. He stayed awake, armed with a crucifix and a worn-out Bible, muttering prayers under his breath, repeating what little of it that he had ever memorized in his far too short years.

The figure appeared, its form even more pronounced, its shadows seemed deeper, pulsating. This darkness was nothing like darkness as other people experienced, the "dark" of night, this was something older. Older than the world.

Carlos held up the crucifix, a small beacon in the dark room, hands shaking. The skin across his face, the muscles of his face, the interior of his mouth, all ached from tension, an unholy kind of pain.

"In the name of God, I command you to leave!" His voice shook, but he forced a boldness he didn't feel, not on a fundamental level. In the dark, there was only fear and screaming.

The figure tilted its head, or at least that's how Carlos perceived it. It was almost comical. And that laughter bubbled up into the man's dry throat and burned, and then just evaporated away before it got close enough to escape as any kind of noise.

Then, a voice, raspy and cold, echoed not in the room, but inside Carlos's head. It spoke with a voice that was very nearly solid, physical enough that he felt its fetid whisper against his face. "God has no power here."

Carlos felt his will crack. The crucifix slipped from his numb fingers, falling uselessly on the floor, like he might when his legs gave up and out. Which seemed imminent. His legs weren't even just shaking, they were convulsing.

The Reaver started moving. With the fluidity of ink bleeding into a glass of water, it moved towards him, a relentless tide of darkness and malevolence. Its face appeared more prominently in the ambient glow of his cheap flashlight, shining on its unholy frame.

It had no eyes, only empty sockets that seemed to draw him in, promising oblivion, welcoming him. Its mouth was a gaping maw of razor-sharp teeth, dripping with an ichor that smoked and hissed.

Carlos felt his mind unravel. The terror was absolute, beyond anything he'd ever imagined. Screams echoed in his skull, not his own, but a chorus of tortured souls, ancient and unyielding.

He squeezed his eyes shut, tears running down his face, mixing with the sweat and blood. He braced for pain, for the tearing apart of his being. He begged for it to be quick, even though the stories said it would last an eternity, this pain, even after he was taken.

But then… nothing. The cold receded, the pressure eased. Carlos opened his eyes, trembling uncontrollably. There were dark spatters across his cheap white bedspread, some of which appeared almost iridescent, almost as dark as the shadows from which he emerged.

He was alone. The room was silent except for the frantic pounding of his heart and the small whimper that escaped the confines of his sore throat. And as he got up from bed, his weak knees wobbling, his muscles in his legs feeling too weak to stand, he heard his own bones crack and splinter.

Slowly, shaking his head, he shuffled towards his mirror, where a horrible image began to congeal and take its wicked, foul form as he got closer, drawing the same kind of light that a black hole might suck into its center.

The Reaver was gone… because it was now within him. The figure in the mirror was Carlos, but changed. His eyes were gone, empty sockets staring out with a black light of unspeakable dread.

His mouth was twisted into a grotesque smile, a gruesome, unholy aperture rimmed with teeth too sharp, too numerous, that seeped with the black, smoking bile he now recognized as the tears and blood of ancient souls.

His skin appeared pulled taut across bone, in some places splitting open, weeping with the same awful iridescent ichor that oozed and seeped from its vile jaws and ocular cavities. And as Carlos moved, the mirror showed him moving. His face was still his, but with the "features" of the Reaver.

Carlos stared at his own monstrous reflection, the truth hitting him with the force of a physical blow. The Reaver hadn't come to kill him. It had come to become him, to make him like them.

The whispers returned, louder this time, an undercurrent beneath his own frantic thoughts. They spoke of suffering, of unending torment. It seemed impossible to be able to think, now that the awful whispers were nearly screams within his head.

He was now the hunter, the thing that would drive others to madness and despair. He would haunt those lost souls, his face of terror would drive them insane. It wasn't punishment, the realization sunk into his own soul with dreadful clarity. It was propagation.

This was not the end, and the realization that he was forever trapped inside this terrible fate brought about a soul deep sob. He sobbed the same kind of sobbing he felt he would expect a soul that had been eaten by this creature and damned would, its own weeping echoed back.

Carlos collapsed to the floor, a broken man, his soul devoured. Not taken to some underworld, not annihilated, but twisted, perverted. The "whispers" continued.

And in the dark corners of San Salvador, in the lonely, forgotten rooms, others began to notice the shadows moving, the whispers growing, the feeling of being watched by something not human. Not anymore. The new Reaver was at work. He felt them all.