RYL Forums - The shortest horror story

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."

The last man on earth did not move right away. He had been imagining the knocking for weeks. How each time he opened the door someone different was there. A beautiful woman, a young child, even his best friend had visited him in hallucinations of what lay outside the door. But he knew in his heart was really on the other side of the door. Another stretch of unremarkable sunny coastline with a sluggish patch of greying sea, flatter than the proverbial mill pond. It hadn’t done much anyway since the mood vanished, but now it was polluted on a nuclear atomic level. It made the Dead Sea look tame. He had once tried dipping a branch into it to see what happened. The branch came back a horrible shade of vomit with no leaves. He had not bothered trying to put anymore of himself into it, although he always considered that it would be a reasonably inventive way to commit suicide if he eventually went mad. Not that there was any one at all around to remark on his choice of method to end his life. Only he would have known. It wasn’t a thought to comfort him much.

He had discovered in his past few weeks that some of the things he had previously enjoyed were entirely pointless. Going for a beer wasn’t much fun, he could stay out til 4 am and then stagger home, after all there was no closing time, no need to pay, but there were no taxi’s either. Sometimes he drove himself home, blind drunk, just for the fun of it. He had nearly broken several important things that way. It was a habit he soon stopped. He had even tried taking some very over the top cocktails of drugs for a while. That wasn’t much fun easier although it wasn’t too difficult to come by either. So after the first two or three weeks he had given up. Now he mostly sat alone in his room. He amused himself with his own imagination. And his imagination kept throwing up the knocking noise.

Again there came the knock on the door. He looked up out of his reverie, staring at the door. He stared at the door for a while, the padlock on it; he could not entirely remember why he had put the padlock there in the first place. It wasn’t as if there was anything to keep out, and he knew he didn’t really need keeping in. He supposed it was just force of habit really. He stared at the door, imagining he could see through it, today his imagination provided a faceless soldier, clad in black with black shades and a black afghan scarf wrapped around his face. All that was visible was a few small amounts of pale skin, his nose and forehead. Even his crew cut hair was black. His gun too was a strange matt colour, not the usual shiny grey but once again, black. He started to consider the matter of black, was it a tone, a colour, or an absence of light? He could, if he so wished look it up in the encyclopaedia. Google, now being defunct with the end of the internet and such like. Hell, he thought to himself, electricity wasn’t around. Not so much it wasn’t around, but there was nothing left to carry it. At least he didn’t think there was, he had long since stopped caring overly.

But then he returned his attention to the matter of the door. He still hadn’t bothered to see which hallucination was visiting him this time, but he had a strong suspicion that is was the man he imagined he could see through the cracked and salt stained wood. In reality the room was barely more than a little shack, perched on the sea shore and not at all designed to live in. But that wasn’t of any concern to him; he was more absorbed with the matter of the man on the other side of the door. He knew it was a man now; it was after all his own imagination that provided him so it could be anyone he wanted. But still he just watched the door, he didn’t answer it, even though the last man on earth was well aware that it would continue until he pretended to answer the door and maybe converse with the hallucination that waited there. He had the feeling he would end up committing suicide sooner rather than later. The hallucinations were already driving him to the brink of insanity, quite probably beyond. He couldn’t really remember any more, his sense of time was warped already.

The knock came again and the last man on earth heaved a sigh, he had to answer the door eventually, so he rose from his sitting position. Crossing the room in a few strides he swung the door open and there facing him was the man dressed all in black. Black doc martens, black combat trousers, black shirt, black leather jacket, and black afghan scarf. He even had a black regulation crew cut and sunglasses, hiding his eyes from anyone who cared to look. He even had the matt black gun that the last man on earth had imagined he would carry. The Man in black smiled as he raised his gun and shot the last man on earth twice, once between his eyes and once in the centre of his chest. The last man on earth had just long enough to register the feeling of shattering bone fragments before his life abruptly ended. As the last man on earth crumpled to the ground, killed by his own hallucination the Man in Black smiled, then he abruptly turned and strode towards the sea, fading out of existence as he did so. The last man on earth died alone whilst his hallucination committed suicide in the irradiated sea.