The man shook violently, globules of dark paint tracing foul trails down his naked flesh. Red and in places showing signs of blistering, his skin crackled and steamed against the cool apartment air, as the heat thing, that gloom beast, wore him like a suit.

His eyes glazed. He tried to focus upon the canvas, but could barely make sense of it as his hands, now not his own, slathered brushstroke after brushstroke of blacks and greys and foul dirty colors, reeking of death and decay. After a while, he stopped trying to take in the image, knowing that nothing that he conjured up in this state would be to his liking. This canvas was not for him, but merely a vehicle of that other thing, the one that had joined with him years ago before his rise and his fall.

He shut his eyes hoping to remove the image from his vision, but the shutting of those thin lids, those useless veils of flesh and vein, did nothing to shut out the viscous corruption that had seized him. Rather than the dancing lights that one expected with their eyes squinted tightly shut, he saw through those lids across the miles and the voids to another place, an other place, where the gloom thing, the heat thing, that other thing dwelled.

There rising from the dark waves of the void came the face of a young girl, her sandy hair pulled back in a ponytail revealing her freckled cheeks and her wide green eyes. Slowly from that liquid dark more and more of her emerged rising from the dream water until the scene melted into place, like a demonic watercolor dripping across the inner surface of his eyelids.

She ran across decayed heaps of earth, which twisted with unseen termites and maggots and shimmer bugs of the other place. With each footfall the piles of earth flaked away revealing the rotten bone beneath, but the girl could not see it. She bounded forward towards a radio station stabbing up through the field – the radio station, the one always there beneath the surface, bubbling up, a boil on humanity.

She shouldn't enter there. She couldn't. Somehow, he had to stop her.

"No," he said. The word coughed out weak and barely audible.

Still she ran, and more and more of the spoiled earth peeled back with each step, shedding away from the bone and the oil marrow that ran its length. She stopped at the chain-link fence, jangling the mesh, testing for give.

"No one else," he said. Stronger now. Audible but still barely a whisper.

The fence revealed no give, but the girl would not be deterred. She paced its perimeter stopping every few feet to pull at it and inspect it. The man knew that fence. No door broke its surface. He had seen to that, yet now he thought he should have built it stronger. Brick perhaps, or some barbwire at the top. There were sayings about hindsight, but dwelling on that now did the man no good.

The young girl moved another few feet down the edge of the chain-link, pulling at it once more. The mesh bent out in a gently sloping bubble but it did not give away nor reveal any opening.

"Let her go." His voice cracked as he said it, but this time it came out clear and commanding.

His gut seized, those barbwire electrodes firing again, turning his insides to jelly. His knees wobbled and he gripped at his easel clenching his naked butt cheeks and fighting to stay on his feet.

The girl knelt down now, sifting through the earth at the base of the fence. As she dug, the shimmer bugs dangled from her fingers, though they did not reveal themselves to her. They slithered along her palms and across her torn sleeve, searching and groping. As the man watched, the cramps wrenching his stomach and tearing at his innards, he saw one of the bug things inch up the girl's arm, disappearing beneath that torn fabric of her sleeve.

"No!" He shouted and pushed out against the canvas toppling it and the easel in a crash to the floor, paints splattering across his naked form.

The girl brushed aside another heap of dirt and dream things, now having dug a foot beneath the surface and yet the chain-link fence did not end. It grew down deep, one with the bone and the oil-slick marrow, a living otherness fused at the deep down core. He knew she could find no way under it, and yet her resolve worried him. That gloom beast had had its fill and needed no more this day.

"No!" he shouted as he fell to the floor in another paroxysm and felt the warmth of urine trickle down his leg and spread in a pool on the knotted wood paneling beneath him.

Puzzled, the girl kicked at the dirt pile and ran her gaze along the length of the fence. She wouldn't, would she? Why would she dare? But of course she would. Youth brought with it a fearlessness that was lost with age. Young as she was, she still suffered from that bravery of ignorance. She lifted her head up to the sky, but it was not the clouds that caught her attention, but the top of the fence a mere ten feet above. He knew it then. He could not stop her.

But perhaps he could stop it.

He felt the thick stickiness of the paint covering his hands and glanced down to their unbidden dance. His fingers swayed and rocked along the floor, slowly painting – finishing the broken canvas.

Not tonight, he thought, clawing his way to his knees. The hard wood felt coarse against his knobby legs, grating against them like sandpaper rubbing through flesh as he crawled across the floor to the closest wall.

"You can't have her," he mumbled. He didn't know her, this little girl, any more than he had the fat little boy with whom she had been playing. Yet this thing had eaten its pound and would have no more. Not now. Years of freedom had given the man resolve, and the beast thing had not yet had time to once more break down his will.

"You won't have her," he said, and began pounding his head into the wall as hard as he could. With each subsequent fall a crack began to spread up as the plaster slowly dented and shattered centimeter by centimeter.

"No," he said. His head fell into the wall with great force, blood rushing up into a knotted bruise running the length of his forehead. Somewhere behind him, lost in the discarded obscenities of his apartment, a radio began to play. Over its speakers a slow bass line droned, reverberating through an unsyncopated shadowy ambience, an air of gloom and misery that only seemed to further agitate the now broken man.

"No," he said one final time.

Even as the neighbors began to shout, their voices muffled by the broken plaster wall, the man banged his head again and again, until he fell at last to the floor. With what strength remained he lifted up his head and let it repeatedly fall. Again, and again. And Again.

Author's Note:

Hopefully you're still enjoying Radio Waves of the Macabre. You've made it this far, so that's not a terrible sign. That being the case, please comment, vote,  share a link, or spread the word.  Your feedback and engagement is very  much appreciated.

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A young girl climbs towards a danger that she doesn't understand...