The Void Must Be Fed
| | |

The Void Must Be Fed

ByMilo Sterlin
14 minute read
Not rated yet. Be the first to rate this story.
How scary was it?

The Void has been here for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I thought every house had one. It seemed like the most normal thing in the world, sitting at the back of my parents’ basement when I was a child. I have long since grown older, but the Void remains where it has always been, waiting in the darkness with its insatiable hunger. Ever since I could walk, it demanded to be fed.

As I would quickly learn, it had a peculiar appetite. Anything raw, canned, or otherwise untouched by human hands, it refused. Anything I’d put effort into making, however, it devoured greedily. It started with the sort of food you expect a six year old to make or sneak away with; a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, a chunk of minced meat stolen from dinner when my parents hadn’t been looking. But no matter how much food I snuck into the basement, it was never enough. Soon, I turned to unconventional means. A crayon drawing. A red and blue finger painting. The paper on which I first practiced writing letters.

My parents never noticed the missing food, and neither, it seemed, did they notice the other things. I cannot say whether this was a mercy or a misfortune. The Void, at least, was a most mannerly eater– despite its seeming voracity. It never left a crumb, nor did it ever refuse a meal. I found some comfort in this. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that, whatever else might be said of my sloppily-made sandwiches or infantile drawings, the Void would always have them, no matter how unpalatable.

As I grew older, however, my repasts grew ever more ambitious. I discovered that I could make things which had no practical purpose whatsoever, and that these, too, pleased its appetite. A sketch of an eye. A little figure in the vague shape of a head, fashioned with my father’s Swiss Army knife and a great deal of patience. A poem about heartbreak, penned in the margins of a school notebook one rainy afternoon, and carried downstairs with no small degree of pride. The Void consumed them all. It made no distinction between the wooden carving and the poem, between the careful arrangement of words and the clumsy chiseling of wood. It swallowed each with the same terrible eagerness, and I, in my juvenile ignorance, took this for a compliment.

It was not until I was older that I began to wonder what became of the things it ate. I asked it once when I was ten, though I knew it could not answer. Some years later I asked again, in a manner that was less a question than a plea. But the Void did not speak. It never gave any sign of life, save when I brought it something new. Then it would open its great, lightless mouth, then engulf my entire hand, and whatever I had made would be ripped from my hands into its keeping.
I began, in time, to take greater care with my offerings. I once spent four weeks sculpting a clay figure– far less crude than the old wooden head– and I laboured over each detail until I could find no fault in it. It looked just like my sister: a pubescent girl with blonde locks that almost seemed to flow in the windless air. I carried it to the Void, my heart thundering against my ribs, presented it before that awful darkness, and waited. As usual, it swallowed my hand and sucked the sculpture into its maw. And, as usual, it was gone. And, as usual, I had nothing to show for my weeks of work.

I told myself that I had not yet made anything worthy of its attention. That these had all been test runs. The thought was a comfort, for it left me with something to chase after. There was always another page to fill, another thing to sculpt, to fashion. And if the Void had nothing to say of what I had given it, why, then, I must simply give it something better.

My next undertaking was a sculpt of my mother’s face. I had not intended it to be so, at first; I had merely wished to improve upon my previous efforts, and thought that a human face, with all its subtle peculiarities, would afford me ample opportunity to do so. As the days passed, I found myself recalling the precise arrangement of her features: the little furrow between her brows when she was troubled, the faint lines around her mouth and above her upper lip, the protruding bags under her eyes, the tip of her nose which pointed ever so slightly to the left. I worked for nearly two months, and when at last I stood before the finished bust, I was overcome by an inexplicable melancholy. It was a faithful likeness, I thought, perhaps the finest thing I had ever made. I could almost imagine it was really her standing before me, had she perhaps lost a few pounds, and had she been made of clay. But it wasn’t… it. What that it was, I don’t know. Perfection, perhaps. An unachievable dream, dreamt by a man with imperfect hands and a limited mind.
Nonetheless, I carried it downstairs that evening. The Void received it as it had received all the rest, engulfing my hand to the wrist and sucking the bust into its depths. I watched until the last pale curl of clay disappeared. Then I withdrew my hand, brushed the few remnants of clay from my fingers, and returned upstairs.

It was around this time that I began to experience a most disagreeable sensation whenever I completed a piece of work. In the beginning, there had been pleasure in the making, a quiet contentment which persisted even after the thing itself had been surrendered to the Void. Now, however, the pleasure seemed to drain from me in anticipation of that final journey downstairs. I would sit for hours before an unfinished piece, dreading the moment of its completion, yet unable to abandon it; for what was the purpose of making a thing, if not to feed the Void? And what was the purpose of feeding it, if not to make something worthy of its attention? I found myself examining my work with an increasingly merciless eye, discovering faults where none had troubled me before, and labouring to correct them with a desperation that would have been comical, had it not been so exhausting. Still, I could not bring myself to withhold an offering. The thought of keeping something for myself, of allowing a finished work to remain in my possession, tucked away neatly behind a display case, seemed a kind of betrayal.

My next attempt was different. I had by then grown rather proficient in the art of sculpting, and resolved to attempt something other than a person. Perhaps the Void hungered for something it had never seen. Not an hour after that thought, my eye fell upon my father’s pocket watch. It was an old-fashioned thing, as most of his possessions were. Its brass casing had dulled with age, and the glass was scratched in a dozen different places, though its hands kept their steady march, just as the day it had been purchased. I had seen it a thousand times, dangling from his waistcoat pocket or resting next to him upon the dinner table, though I had never given it much thought. Now, however, I found myself studying every little imperfection, every shallow groove in the metal, every faint numeral upon its face.

I began my work that very evening, and for the better part of a month did little else. I fashioned the casing first, then the face, then the slender hands, taking particular care to set them at the precise hour displayed upon the original. I even took the time to paint it, having purchased the paints with all the money I had left from my summer job. When I finished, I placed the two watches side by side. They were nearly indistinguishable. For the first time in months, I felt pride. A wide beam of light warming up my insides like a radiator. With renewed confidence, I carried my creation downstairs with great confidence. This was it, I thought. The Void would grace me with a reply, an acknowledgement. Perhaps it would pause, if only for a moment, before consuming something so carefully wrought.
I extended my hand. And before I could blink, the darkness had swallowed the sculpture. The clay, the paint, the effort. It swallowed everything I had made of it, and gave me nothing in return.

I confess that I wept that night. Not for the figure itself, nor even for the weeks of labour it had cost me, but for the injustice of it all. I had given the Void my all. I had given it experiences, moulded with such care that I had sometimes felt I was holding the very people themselves between my fingers. And yet it had never so much as paused. It had never tasted or beheld, never seemed to savour a line or a curve, never once given me reason to believe that the things I offered were anything more than the next morsel in an endless succession of morsels.
I began to resent it. I resented its ceaseless hunger, its silence, its terrible and unchanging indifference. Most of all, I resented the ease with which it took from me. For I had come to understand that the Void required no excellence. It required only that I make something, and then surrender it. The thought filled me with disgust. I resolved, then, that I would make no more figures, write no more poems, fashion no more trifles for its amusement. Let it hunger. Let it gnaw at its own emptiness. I would make something for myself, and keep it.

For a time, I kept my word. I made no offerings, and the Void made no complaint. It remained where it had always been, a patch of darkness at the back of my basement, neither growing nor shrinking, neither stirring nor sleeping. I avoided looking at it when I was down there, and busied myself with other pursuits when I wasn’t. Yet I found, to my dismay, that the absence of its demands did not bring the relief I had anticipated. I had imagined that, freed from the necessity of feeding it, I might at last create for the simple pleasure of creation. Instead, I found myself unable to even start anything. I would shape a figure, then smush it between my palms over some small imperfection. Everything seemed diminished by the knowledge that it might have been better; everything seemed worthless for the very reason that I had made it. And sometimes, in the quiet hours of the night, when the house had settled into stillness and my family slept, I would sneak downstairs and press my ear against the door of the basement, hoping to hear it asking for my return. But, of course, no such sound came.

I did not sleep on the night I relapsed. Nor did I eat, save for a stale crust of bread which I found beneath the kitchen table sometime after midnight. I sat in my workshop until the early hours, staring at the empty space upon my desk where the watch had lain months before. I cannot adequately describe the sensation which took hold of me. It wasn’t quite anger, nor was it sorrow, but something more wretched than either: a feverish, all-consuming need to prove that I was capable of making something worthy of its attention. But what more could it possibly want? What more could I give?

Despite those questions, I worked for twenty-one consecutive days. I scarcely left the room, and when I did, it was only to fetch more water or clay, or to collapse upon my bed for an hour or two before returning to my work. I had conceived an idea which, in my estimation, surpassed all my previous undertakings. I would fashion a figure of myself, not as I appeared in the mirror, nor as I might have appeared to another, but as I had come to understand myself: a man curled into the shape of a circle, his body bent backwards until his mouth met his own flesh, teeth sunk into the small of his back. I worked with an almost religious fervour. Every muscle, every fold of skin was rendered with painstaking attention. I gave the figure my own face, though I took some liberties with its expression; the eyes were wide and feverish, the brow furrowed, and the mouth forced open, the edges twisted into a tight downturn. It was grotesque, certainly, but there was a strange beauty to it, too. I had made something of myself, I thought, which was more myself than I had ever been. I had made the hunger visible. A hunger the Void was sure to recognise– and thus, to acknowledge.

When at last I finished, I sat before it for a long while. I remember feeling strangely calm. The fever had passed, leaving behind a terrible exhaustion and a certainty I had not felt in years. I had put all of it into that figure. There was nothing left to improve, nothing left to correct. I carried it downstairs, taking care not to disturb its delicate features. The Void waited. I held the sculpture before it, and spoke tenderly.
“Look.”
I held it closer, and it swallowed the figure.

I remained there, my arms outstretched, long after the last of the clay had vanished. I waited for a reply. I waited for the slightest indication that something, somewhere inside, had understood what I had given. But the Void remained silent. And something in me broke.

I do not remember falling to my knees, though I must have done so, for I found myself upon the cold concrete, my hands pressed against the floor and my face wet with tears. I cursed it. I cursed the very nature of its existence– the burden it had placed upon me. I pleaded with it. I asked it what more it could possibly want of me, and when no answer came, I begged it to tell me whether it had ever liked a single thing I had made. Whether it had ever seen the things I had so carefully held before it. Whether, in all these years, I had meant anything to it at all. My voice grew hoarse, and soon gave out entirely. Still, it offered nothing. There was not even the satisfaction of knowing that my cries had reached it.
I cannot say what possessed me then. Perhaps it was madness, perhaps desperation. Either way, I rose, staggered towards the darkness, and extended my arms. I had given it my first words, my sculptures, my time, my likeness, and the likenesses of those I loved. I had given it everything I knew. Everything I held dear. There remained only the maker.
And so I crammed myself inside its maw.

I had expected teeth, perhaps, or some vast and terrible stomach in which all my offerings lay rotting. Instead, I found myself suspended in a place I could scarcely describe, had you given me a thousand years to do so. Still, I shall do my utmost to paint you a picture.
In every direction stretched an immeasurable expanse, blacker than the darkness of the basement, yet not entirely devoid of light. Far away, or perhaps impossibly close– I could not tell, there hung enormous shapes, pale and indistinct, like the silhouettes of worlds glimpsed through the murky depths of a filthy river. I could not tell whether they were stars, or sculptures, or things for which my mind possessed no name. There was a sensation of immeasurable depth, of something extending beyond the furthest reaches of thought, and through it all ran a silence so complete that I became acutely aware of my own existence as an intrusion.

And then I finally saw it. I cannot tell you what it was. To call it a creature would be an affronting disservice, but to call it God would be to afford it an intention which I am certain it did not possess. It was everywhere. A presence so immense that the distinction between its being and the place in which I found myself seemed entirely meaningless. I tried to approach it, though I cannot say whether I actually moved. I looked upon it with all the terror and reverence of which I was capable, and waited.
But it did not look upon me.
I do not mean that it refused to look. It didn’t turn away or anything of the sort. It just failed to notice me– to even register my being there. I was no more significant to that vastness than a singular plankton is to the ocean. I had imagined the Void to be hungry. I had imagined that, somewhere within its endless appetite, there might exist a desire, however crude, for the things I had made. But there was no desire there. It did not consume out of yearning as I had so long understood it. It had never wanted me to create– or even to feed it. Moreover, it’d never even noticed that I had. And that, to me, was far worse.

After sitting with that realization for what felt like hours, I found myself lying on the basement floor. I was several feet from where I had entered, my clothes damp with sweat and my limbs trembling so violently that I could scarcely stand. The Void had spat me out. I crawled away from it, dragging myself towards the stairs, and did not look back until I had reached the top. There it remained, as it had always remained: a patch of darkness at the back of my basement, neither growing nor shrinking, neither stirring nor sleeping.
I have not approached it since. But, strangely, I have been sculpting more regularly than before. At first, I found myself returning to the faces of my family as inspiration. But I no longer felt compelled to perfect them. If a nose was crooked, I let it remain crooked. If a line was uneven, I saw no reason to correct it. I have even taken to sculpting things for which I have no particular affection, simply because I find their shapes pleasing or their forms interesting. Some of these works I keep, others I dismantle when I grow tired of looking at them. There is a peculiar satisfaction in knowing that, for once, their purpose need not extend beyond the pleasure I took in making them. I cannot say that I have entirely rid myself of the old habits. Even now, when I finish a piece, I sometimes find my eyes wandering towards the basement door, and I must remind myself that there is no reason to take it downstairs. Still, I have come to enjoy the work in a way I never did before. And perhaps there is merit to that.

Credit: Milo Sterlin

Linktree

More from Milo Sterlin

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *