Hi guys!!! Sorry that the updates for "Gone" haven't been so frequent lately. My "home life" hasn't been so great and finishing high school almost snapped me in two. I have been so busy with early summer stuff and have been rather preoccupied with a few things…Anyways…here's yet another story in TSLOZAC. I'll try to update ASAP, but can't guarantee anything right now.
Preface
Cody's POV:
The temperature of the room was dropping quickly. I awoke shivering and twisted in my blankets. My eyes darted to the window next at the end of my bed to see frost creeping up the glass, hiding the moon in its depths. I squinted to try to decipher the phase of the moon as goose bumps rolled up and down the back of my neck. The light of the street lamp was dimmed by the frost but by the time I saw the luminous spherical shape of the full moon, the door was opening and it was happening all over again.
He was here once more. The door creaked open to reveal the old man dressed in the shaggy, brown poncho and shredded, patched corduroys. In his cracked and chaliced hand, he held a tattered rope tied to a non-groomed goat. The familiar stench of the beastly goat's greasy fur reached my nose, causing me to dive deeper into my checkered comforter.
I tried to bundle into a ball to get warm when I found that I was no longer capable of any movement whatsoever. My legs were stiff boards and my arms still as statues as I watched the old man approach me, a devilish look on his face. He leaned over my single bed and, after removing the covers, examined my long body. His long, boney fingers poked my stomach, my legs, then my toes, and finally, as if he hand discovered what he was looking for, smiled at me, showing all of his crooked, yellow teeth.
The goat seemed to be getting impatient and the old man could sense this. He patted the goat on the head, then, smiling wickedly at me again, reached into in pocket and pulled out a long, serrated knife. Without hesitation, he started at my feet; sawing off my toes and feeding them to the hungry goat. I could feel the knife cutting through my flesh and I could see the blood dripping down onto my white sheets, but I only felt pain when the goat was grinding my joints to pieces. The man continued to saw me to pieces, working his way up past my knees and onto my thighs. Each slab the goat received was bigger than the last, but the more the goat ate, the hungrier he seemed to get.
The dreaded moment came once again; the old man had reached my heart. Images of my childhood swam before my eyes, causing tears to form in my eyes and add to the already-saturated bed. Me, at the age of five, trying to master the talent of riding a bike with training wheels, but continually falling to the hot pavement which seemed so far away. This transferred into the moving image of me getting chased by the horrible dog that lived next door with my brother laughing from the sidelines. These images blurred, but only to be replaced with my twin brother taunting me when I was afraid to swim. That faded out too, but was replaced with the old man's face. It appeared to be floating on ocean waves surrounded by mist as his mouth moved up and down, apparently talking to me, but I could not hear a word he was saying.
I tried to close my eyes and drift back to sleep, but I was in too much pain from the pictures that had scarred my brain. I managed to squint past the mist to see, with horror, that the old man was now brandishing the knife above his head. Before I could do anything to stop him, he plunged it into my forehead. Splitting pain spread through what was left of my body as if my bone marrow was on fire. The next thing I knew, the world was fading into darkness and I was falling…falling…falling…