Insanity Spreads

By SW Carter

Edited by EnvyMachinery

Johnathon Lee spent a lot of time digging that night.  Frantically shoveling the soil beneath his feet, he never felt like the hole was quite deep enough.  He needed the ditch to be significant enough to hide his equally massive crime.  Why should he be caught?  After all, the fault surely placed itself elsewhere when he had been pushed so close to the edge.

Even now, Johnathon felt the nagging voices in his head.  He shouted curses, holding his head in anger and agony, screaming for them to stop.  They occasionally ceased if he just shouted with the proper elevated volume.  Then, he shot up after each shouting, looking to and fro to make sure his hellish crime wasn’t discovered.

Johnathon spotted no one as he looked around except for the stinking corpse next to his face.  He put up with the old man the corpse belonged to long enough.  A smirk crawled across the face of the night-time digger as he imagined his victim burning in hell, a place where such a disgusting creature surely belonged.

Poor Johnathon burying his pitiful life, at least he finally knew the ecstasy of release.  Once, there existed a time where life presented a much kinder picture.  The old man hired Johnathon at a young age, training the boy in the art of watchmaking.  The job paid fantastically, and his boss loved mentoring him.

The years dragged on for our now very dead specimen.  With each passing year, the business grew poorer, and the old man felt the cold, bitter sting of life in his very heart.  The final straw was when the elderly man’s dog lashed out, biting his hand.  He killed the dog in his anger, and sunk into an evil rage.  He verbally abused Johnathon every day near the end, blaming it on some sickness and strange visions dancing in his head.  Insanity appeared to spread, as one day, his apprentice finally broke.

Johnathon made and remade the watch several times, but it simply brought no satisfaction to his old mentor.  Finally, in a fit of rage the old man threw his apprentice’s work at the wall, shattering it into pieces.  Johnathan flew into a rage, picking up a nearby hammer, beating the man to the ground.  The task felt far more difficult than he had imagined as the fight in the old man grew with each strike.  At the moment of the kill, just before Johnathon brought down the full force of the hammer, he swore his eyes caught the old man’s pupils turn blood red and white fur spread across his face like an overgrown beard.   Johnathon cried out in pain as the old man bit into his arm in some kind of last ditch effort to survive.  Finally, the hammer broke the skull of its target with a sickening crack, and the victim lay dead.

At last, Johnathon packed the last bit of dirt upon the body of the old man, smirking with satisfaction.  He knew his name was listed in the will of the old watchmaker.  His successful living with a well-tested business was assured. 

Unfortunately, just as he finished wiping the sweat from his brow, shouts echoed again in his mind.  They appeared to be hundreds of voices, crying out in pain and fear.  They begged for their lives, and yet, all he could feel was hunger.  Shutting his eyes tight, he screamed to drown the voices out, but this time they were here to stay.  Once he opened his eyes again, he observed wolves all around him, and he seemed to be covered in white fur as a dark red clouded his vision.

Howls echoed out that night.  The town was bathed in crimson.  Legends pour across the northern lands in hushed whispers, and mothers shut the windows of their children’s rooms airtight.  You see, Johnathon learned something new from his mentor that night!  Insanity spreads, but so do other things.