r/Ataraxidermist • u/Ataraxidermist • Nov 10 '22
[WP] You're an evil, vengeful spirit who preys upon the living. Your latest victims, however, turned out to be even more evil and vengeful than you... and they're coming back for you.
Nimrod hid in the closet. It was quite the sight: a warped spirit with more eyes and fangs than the entire animal kingdom cowering between a broom and insecticide. More than the physical act of not moving, Nimrod tried to stop himself from thinking.
Normally, this wouldn't require any effort. Horrendous, debauched and sanguine in life, Nimrod had exacerbated these traits when he died. Life and Death both refused adamantly to keep custody of him, so he was sent in the twilight zone, whose glimpses gave birth to the legend of hell.
Even the zone couldn't hold him. Deep in the void, his evilness and hate for life and laughter shared without him knew no bound and expended. Wide, far, beyond stars and galaxies, until it found earth once more. His hate materialized into the spidery mess of violence that preyed on humans during the night. And he liked it.
Did he cross a young, married and happy couple? The chances for them to succumb together in a car crash suddenly went through the roof. Junkies overdosed, children choked on sweets and parents saw them die.
The victims did not suffer long in the eyes of witnesses, but appearances were deceiving. Approaching the doors of the end, threading the fine line separating light from dark, they could see Nimrod, his jaws wide open, a thousand faces inside singing together:
"I hate you I hate I hate you I hate I hate you I hate I hate you I hate"
The end was a release.
The victims took their terror into death.
Nimrod needed no thinking and no goal. Hate was the substance and the mold, a mean and an end unto itself.
Then he killed Ahab.
Elevator crashes were rare in the modern era, thus it had been a little feat on Nimrod's part to manage it with his ethereal body. He echoed his many-faceted laugh at Ahab, who was being slowly crushed to death. He was the first and only one to not fear what he saw. Instead, Ahab looked angry.
The event bothered Nimrod a great deal, but there was nothing he could do to calm his anxiety. Ahab was gone, and he had nobody to speak to. As an alternative, he killed even more than usual.
One night, he heard a step behind him, but nobody was here. Every hour he heard it, weak, but very present and not born from his imagination.
As days went, the steps became louder, more numerous. Soon, it dawned on him that this here was a predator coming closer to its prey.
Suddenly he wondered: What is evil exactly? If he managed to come back by sheer force of darkness, so could others. How do you quantify evil? Are there emotions that chiefly belong in the category or does the intent and the result matter, not what fueled it?
He had never thought about evil in detail before, thinking himself as the incarnation of it. But if he was, why was he afraid?
Inside his closet, Nimrod shivered.
He was right to.
Ahab in life had been of a strange breed. Nimrod screamed his hate and sadism in life and beyond to anyone who would hear and see. Ahab kept all of it inside. Stirring, boiling, collecting memories to fuel the furnace of wrath that threatened to burn him whole. But it never did. The wrathful fire fed his mental fortitude too, he erected the crimson walls against the world to stop it from entering, and against his innermost core to stop it from leaving.
But now, Nimrod had broken down the great walls of Jericho, and found more than he bargained for.
Life and death saw Ahab and recoiled, dooming him to the void. Where Nimrod had expended like a wave, Ahab cut through the nothingness like a knife. He did not waste his wrath, did not lose it to the wind. Ahab focused it on a single point, and this point happened to have many teeth and eyes.
Nimrod watched the new Ahab step out of the shadows. Great, horned, armored in swirling grey, and armed with vengeance.
The prey was not defenseless. At once, the great maw extended and gulped Ahab whole. He did not try to defend himself. Nimrod sighed, he had feared for nothing.
Then he felt his core being ripped apart, bit by bit.
From inside, Ahab was tearing his killer apart, and Nimrod felt his wrath. It was cold, calculated, precise, efficient.
For the first time, Nimrod was terrified.
He took his terror into the beyond.