The Elephant Island Chronicles
Pree-sents
The Lonely Candle
By Conrad Hannon
Narration by Eleven Labs
In a cramped studio apartment on the 13th floor of a nondescript high-rise, Gordon Grayson sat motionless in his frayed armchair, staring blankly at the flickering flame of a single candle. The weak orange light danced across his gaunt features, casting long shadows that seemed to retreat into the room's dark corners. Outside his grimy window, the city bustled with its usual frenetic energy, but time stood still inside Gordon's four walls.
It was Gordon's 40th birthday, though you wouldn't know it from the utter lack of festivity. No cards adorned his barren walls. No presents were stacked on his wobbly particleboard coffee table. No cheerful voicemails waited on his disconnected landline. The only acknowledgment of the day's significance was that solitary candle stuck haphazardly into a stale muffin Gordon had bought from the corner store three days prior.
As Gordon watched the wax slowly drip down the candle's pockmarked sides, he pondered how he had arrived at this moment. How had four decades of life led him to this dingy room, celebrating (if you could call it that) alone?
He thought back to birthdays past - to the raucous parties of his youth when he was surrounded by laughing friends and adoring family. To the intimate dinners of his 20s, shared with a revolving cast of girlfriends who promised forever but rarely lasted beyond dessert. Even to the subdued office celebrations of his 30s, when co-workers would reluctantly gather to mumble an off-key rendition of "Happy Birthday" before descending like vultures upon the free sheet cake.
Gordon had never particularly enjoyed those rituals. The forced smiles and small talk. The hollow well-wishes from people who barely knew him. The pressure to appear grateful and happy, even when he felt neither. But now, faced with their total absence, he found himself longing for even those tepid social interactions.
With a weary sigh, Gordon leaned forward and blew out the candle. Instantly, the room was plunged into darkness, save for the faint glow of streetlights filtering through his grimy blinds. He didn't bother making a wish. He knew from experience that wishes rarely came true, at least not for people like him.
As acrid smoke curled upwards from the extinguished wick, Gordon felt himself being pulled along with it, rising out of his body and drifting towards the ceiling. He watched with detached curiosity as his physical form slumped lower in the chair, eyes glazing over. Was this what an out-of-body experience felt like? Or had he finally cracked under the weight of his isolation?
Before he could ponder the question further, Gordon found himself whisked out his window and into the teeming city beyond. He soared past glittering skyscrapers and over congested streets, an invisible specter observing the world below. Eventually, he came to rest outside the window of a cozy-looking restaurant.
Inside, a boisterous group was gathered around a long table. Balloons and streamers festooned the walls, and a large cake covered in candles sat at the center of the table. Gordon pressed his ethereal face against the glass, drinking in the scene of celebration.
At the head of the table sat a man who looked to be about Gordon's age, beaming as his friends and family sang to him. Children giggled and clapped along. An older couple - presumably the birthday boy's parents - looked on with pride. As the song concluded, a beautiful woman leaned in to plant a kiss on the man's cheek.
Gordon felt a pang of envy so sharp it was almost physical. This man had everything Gordon lacked - love, companionship, a sense of belonging. What made him so special? Why did he deserve happiness while Gordon withered away alone?
As if in answer to his unspoken questions, the scene before him began to shift and distort. The smiling faces grew grotesque, lips peeling back to reveal razor-sharp teeth. Eyes bulged and multiplied, covering faces in twitching, veiny orbs. Fingers elongated into grasping claws.
The birthday man's chair toppled backward as the mutated creatures fell upon him in a feeding frenzy. Gordon recoiled in horror as they tore into flesh and cracked bones, fighting over scraps of the birthday boy's rapidly diminishing carcass.
In mere moments, all that remained was a pool of blood and viscera on the restaurant's polished floor. The monsters licked their chops contentedly, their distorted features morphing back into human form. They chatted and laughed as if nothing had happened, casually wiping gore from their chins with linen napkins.
Gordon's spirit was whisked away once more, coming to rest outside a tidy suburban home. Through a bay window, he could see a modest gathering - just a nuclear family of four seated around a kitchen table. Another birthday celebration, this one far more low-key than the last.
A middle-aged woman sat at the head of the table, smiling softly as her husband and two teenage children serenaded her. A small cake adorned with a "50" candle sat before her. The scene radiated warmth and contentment - the quiet joy of a life well-lived.
Gordon felt his envy give way to a wistful sadness. He'd once imagined this future for himself - a loving partner, children to carry on his legacy, a home filled with laughter and shared memories. Now, at 40, such domestic bliss seemed forever out of reach.
Once again, the idyllic tableau began to warp and twist before Gordon's eyes. The woman's face contorted in pain, her skin stretching and bulging as if something was trying to claw its way out from inside her. Her family looked on impassively, expressions blank as their matriarch's body was rent asunder.
With a wet, tearing sound, a creature burst forth from the woman's chest cavity. It resembled nothing so much as an overgrown fetus - translucent skin revealing a network of pulsing veins, bulbous head housing lidless black eyes, spindly limbs tipped with needle-like claws.
The abomination let out a keening wail as it surveyed its surroundings. To Gordon's mounting horror, the woman's husband and children began to applaud, their faces splitting into inhumanly wide grins. They cooed and fawned over the monstrous infant as it began to messily devour its host's remains.
Gordon's consciousness was yanked away once more before he could see the grisly feast's conclusion. This time, he found himself hovering outside a grimy window in a familiar run-down apartment building. With a start, he realized he was looking in on his own home.
Inside, his physical body remained slumped in the armchair, glassy-eyed and motionless. The candle on the table had long since burned out, a thin tendril of smoke still rising from its blackened wick. The scene was so stark, so devoid of life or joy, that Gordon felt a wave of pity for his corporeal self.
He watched as his body slowly stirred, head lifting as if roused from a deep slumber. But the eyes that opened were not Gordon's own. Instead of his usual muddy brown irises, depthless black orbs stared out at the world. A rictus grin spread across his face, far too wide to be natural.
The thing wearing Gordon's skin rose from the chair with jerky, marionette-like movements. It shuffled to the kitchenette, retrieving a wickedly sharp carving knife from a drawer. Gripping the handle tightly, it began to slice into the flesh of Gordon's forearm.
Gordon tried to cry out to stop this violation of his body, but he had no voice in his current incorporeal state. He could only watch in mute horror as the creature methodically flayed the skin from his arm, peeling it away in long strips.
To his revulsion, Gordon saw something moving beneath the exposed muscle and sinew. Dozens of squirming, maggot-like creatures wriggled free from the wound, dropping to the floor with wet plops. They began to grow at an alarming rate, swelling and mutating into lung-sized slug creatures that oozed a trail of caustic slime in their wake.
The not-Gordon grinned wider still as it continued to carve into various parts of its borrowed body, releasing more and more of the grotesque parasites. Soon, the apartment floor was carpeted in a writhing mass of bloated, glistening forms.
In desperation, Gordon attempted to flee this nightmarish scene. But he found himself trapped, an invisible prisoner forced to bear witness as his body was systematically destroyed and the horrific slug-beasts multiplied. Their caustic secretions began to eat through the floor, sending them spilling into the apartments below.
Gordon could hear screams of terror and agony rising from the lower floors as the parasites found new hosts to infest. The sounds of destruction spread like ripples in a pond as the monstrous slugs breached the building's outer walls and surged into the streets beyond.
From his fixed vantage point, Gordon watched helplessly as the city he'd called home for so long descended into chaos. Panicked crowds fled before the advancing wave of writhing horrors. Emergency vehicles with blaring sirens were quickly overwhelmed, their occupants becoming new incubators for the rapidly evolving parasites.
The infected began to exhibit the same black eyes and unnaturally wide grins as the thing that had taken over Gordon's body. They moved with singular purpose, herding the uninfected into tight groups where they could be easily swarmed by the ever-growing slug creatures.
As night fell, fires began to bloom across the city. The flames cast the surreal scene in a hellish light, glinting off the slime-slick bodies of the parasites as they continued their inexorable spread. Gordon's apartment had become ground zero for an apocalyptic plague, and it was all his fault. If he hadn't been so isolated, so removed from human contact, perhaps the creatures couldn't have gained a foothold.
The hours crawled by, and Gordon remained a helpless observer as his city was consumed. By dawn, an eerie quiet had fallen over the ravaged landscape. The fires had burned themselves out, leaving behind blackened husks of buildings. The streets were empty save for abandoned vehicles and mounds of shed slug carapaces.
At first, Gordon thought the invasion had run its course, that the parasites had moved on to fresh hunting grounds. But then he began to notice movement in the shadows. Twisted forms skulked through alleyways and peered from shattered windows - no longer human, but not quite the monstrous slugs either.
These new creatures were bipedal, with elongated limbs and bulbous heads reminiscent of the chest-bursting infant Gordon had witnessed earlier. They moved with unsettling grace, loping across debris-strewn streets on all fours or easily scaling sheer walls.
Gordon realized with growing dread that this was the next phase of the invasion. The parasites hadn't simply killed their hosts - they had transformed them into something new and terrifying. And now, these hybrid abominations were beginning to gather, drawn to some unheard signal.
They converged on a central plaza, thousands of mutated former humans standing in concentric circles. In the center of this grotesque assembly stood the not-Gordon, somehow still animate despite the ruinous damage it had inflicted on its stolen body.
The creature raised Gordon's mangled arms, letting out an unearthly shriek. The assembled hybrids responded in kind, their cries rising in a cacophonous chorus that shattered the few intact windows in the surrounding buildings. As one, they turned their faces skyward.
The overcast sky began to churn and roil, dark clouds spiraling into a massive vortex directly above the gathered horde. The clouds parted to reveal... something. Gordon's mind recoiled from the sight, unable to process the vast and bizarre form descending from on high.
It was as if a mountain had grown tentacles if mountains were made of pulsating flesh and lidless eyes. Cosmic horror made manifest, it blotted out the sun as it slowly lowered itself towards the ruined city. The hybrids gibbered and writhed in ecstasy, welcoming their eldritch progenitor to its new domain.
As the titanic being touched down, its immense bulk crushing entire city blocks, Gordon felt his incorporeal form begin to dissipate. His consciousness fragmented, drawn inexorably towards the cosmic monstrosity. The last thing he perceived before oblivion claimed him was a glimpse of what lay beyond the portal in the sky - an infinite void teeming with more of these world-ending behemoths, hungrily eyeing the defenseless planet below.
In his final moments, Gordon reflected on the cruel irony of his situation. He had spent his life avoiding human connection, terrified of the vulnerability it entailed. And in doing so, he had left himself exposed to something far worse. His self-imposed isolation had made him the perfect vector for an invasion that would remake the world in its horrific image.
Gordon's last coherent thought was a fervent wish as his spirit was absorbed into the undulating mass of the eldritch god, mingling with the essences of countless other consumed souls. He wished he had reached out and forged the connections he'd always shied away from. Because, in the end, it was not the pain of rejection or the messiness of relationships that had doomed him. It was the simple, crushing loneliness of a candle flame guttering in an empty room, mourning the passage of another year unshared.
The cosmic entity's countless eyes turned towards the horizon, surveying the pristine continents that lay waiting to be conquered. Somewhere in the gestalt consciousness of the beast, a faint echo of Gordon Grayson grieved for the billions of lives that would soon be snuffed out. But that spark of humanity was quickly subsumed by the alien hunger that now drove the organism.
And so, on the 40th anniversary of Gordon Grayson's birth, the world as he had known it came to an end. All because a lonely man had chosen solitude over connection one too many times. In the cosmic algebra of fate, that simple decision had tipped the scales toward annihilation.
Across the globe, other solitary souls celebrated quiet birthdays, unaware of the doom that even now raced towards them on a tide of writhing flesh and caustic slime. Their candles flickered in darkened rooms, each one a beacon guiding the invasion force onwards. One by one, the lights would go out. And in the endless dark that followed, perhaps they would finally find the connection they had always feared.
But it would be far too late.
The End.
Thank you for your time today. Until next time, stay gruntled.
