The White Scotch

The pressure in the room escalated to a critical, agonizing threshold.

The heavy panes of the leaded windows began to spider-web. Tiny cracks raced across the glass, branching out like frost, yet completely devoid of the sharp *crack* of fracturing glass. The air grew so dense Blackwood felt as though he were breathing in cotton.

He wiped a hand across his face, his fingers coming away wet. He looked down. It wasn't sweat. It was blood. A slow, dark crimson line had begun to trickle from his left nostril, drawn out by the crushing atmospheric weight of the paranormal silence.

Blackwood whimpered, the sound pitiful and dead in the quiet. He scrambled back to his desk, his hands shaking so violently he knocked over his inkwell. The black ink spilled across his pristine blotting paper, a silent, spreading stain.

He reached out for the crystal decanter, desperate for another drink. He needed the burn. He needed to numb his mind before the silence snapped his sanity completely in half. He poured a trembling measure of scotch into his glass.

Julian, standing on the opposite side of the mahogany desk, moved.

He drifted forward, his sodden tweed jacket brushing the wood. He reached out with a translucent, freezing hand and hovered it directly over the crystal glass Blackwood had just filled.

Blackwood froze, his hand trembling inches from the glass.

The temperature in the immediate vicinity of the drink plummeted. Frost bloomed over the cut crystal. As Julian slowly pulled his hand away, Blackwood watched in absolute, paralyzed horror as the liquid inside transformed.

The rich, warm amber of the aged scotch swirled, dissolving into a sickly, cloudy white.

It was the exact color of the cyanide solution he had used.

Julian lifted his dark, unblinking eyes from the corrupted glass to Blackwood’s terrified face. Slowly, deliberately, the ghost raised a single, pale finger and pointed at the rim of the glass.

The ultimatum settled into the air, hanging between them as heavily as the silence itself.

Julian was not going to kill him. Julian was going to wait. He would hold the professor in this airless, soundless vacuum forever. He would let the silence crush Blackwood's mind, letting him live in this locked study with the phantom mime of his victim's death playing on an endless, agonizing loop. The only escape, the only way to break the silence and face the ultimate judgment, was sitting in the glass.