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If You’re Armed and at the Glenmont Metro, Please Shoot Me

drug trials, drugs, experimentation, experiments, madness, Peter Frost David, psychological, psychological horror, sci-fi, science, science fiction, time

If you’re armed and at the Glenmont metro, please shoot me. Make it a headshot. Shoot me in the temple, aiming slightly downwards. I need the bullet to travel the shortest possible distance through my brain before it hits my hippocampus. If I’m lucky, the sensation of the gunshot ripping through my skull will only last a few decades. As awful as this sounds, you’ll be doing me an enormous favor. Death by a headshot, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, is vastly better than the alternative. My ordeal started over ten thousand years ago, at 10:15 this morning. I earn extra money by participating in drug trials. I’m a so-called “healthy subject” who takes experimental drugs to help assess side effects. Once it was a kidney drug. A few times it’s been something for blood pressure or cholesterol. This morning they told me the drug I took was a psychoactive substance intended to accelerate brain function. None of the drugs I had tested so far have ever done anything for me, in the recreational sense. In other words, none of the drugs I’ve tested have given me a killer buzz, or mellowed me out, or anything. Maybe I’ve always ended up the placebo group, but nothing I’ve tested had affected me at all. Today’s drug was different. This shit worked. They gave me a pill at 10:15 and told me to hang out in the waiting room until they called me back for some tests. “Only about thirty minutes,” the research assistant told me. I flopped onto the waiting room couch and read a few articles from a copy of Psychology Today that was sitting on the coffee table. They hadn’t called me back when I finished the Psychology Today so I picked up a US News and read it cover-to-cover. Then I read an old Scientific American. What was taking them so damn long? I sluggishly turned my head to look at the wall clock. It was only 10:23 am. I had read all three magazines in eight minutes. I remember thinking this was going to be a long day. I was right. The waiting room had little bookshelf with some used hardcovers on it. When I stood up to walk to the bookshelf it felt like my legs barely worked. It’s not that they were weak. They were just slow. It took a full minute just to stand up off the couch, and another minute to take two steps to the bookcase. I scanned the old books on the shelf and picked out a copy of Moby Dick. My arms had the same problems as my legs. Just reaching one foot in front of me to grab the book took a long time. I actually got bored just waiting for my hand to reach the spine of the book. I slogged back to the couch and collapsed onto it in a slow-motion fall that reminded me of the low-gravity hops of astronauts on the moon. I opened Moby Dick (slowly) and began reading. I started with Call me Ishmael and got as far as Ahab throwing his pipe into the sea (which was all the way to friggin chapter thirty) before they called me back. “How are you feeling?” the research assistant asked me. “I feel slow,” I said. “Actually, it’s the other way around. Everything seems slow because you’re so fast.” “But my legs. My arms. They’re moving in slow motion.” “Your body seems like it’s moving slowly because your brain is fast. Your brain is running ten or twenty times faster than normal. You are thinking and perceiving reality at an accelerated pace. But your body is still constrained by the laws of biomechanics. Frankly, you’re moving much faster than a normal person,” she pantomimed a jogging motion. “But your brain is running so much faster right now, that even your fast walk seems very slow to you.” I thought about my slow-motion flop onto the waiting room couch. Even if my muscles had slowed down, my body would still react to gravity the same way. But in the waiting room, I even fell in slow motion. Slow muscles couldn’t explain why gravity seemed weaker. My brain was going at warp ten. That’s how I managed to read three magazines and the first thirty chapters of Moby Dick in fifteen minutes. They ran a series of tests on me. The physical tests were fun. They made me juggle three balls. Then four. Then six. I had no problem keeping six balls in the air because they seemed to be moving so slowly. It was boring, frankly, waiting for each ball to move through its arc so I could catch it (with my slow-motion hands) and toss it back into the air. They threw cheerios in the air and I caught them with chopsticks. They dropped a handful of coins and I counted the total value before they hit the ground. The cognitive tests were less fun, but very illuminating. Finish a fifty-word word search (three seconds). Solve an intricate maze drawn onto a poster-sized paper (two seconds). View a slide show projected at ten images per second and answer detailed questions about what I saw (95% correct). They told me I measured over 250 on the Knopf scale. Apparently, that’s deep into the superhuman range of thinking speeds. Then they sent me home. “It’ll wear off in a few hours,” they said. “Which will seem like days to you. Try to use the residual effects to get some work done. Catch up on work emails while you’re still in high-speed mode!” The ride home was horrible. It was only three metro stops, and in real-world time, it only took about thirty-five minutes. But in my drug-accelerated hyper-time, it felt like days. Days. Just walking out of the medical research suite to the elevator seemed like it took an hour. I sprinted out of the office, willing my legs to push me faster. But, the laws of biomechanics held me prisoner. As accelerated as my brain was, I couldn’t do anything to make my legs work faster. The huge disconnect between my body and mind made it extremely difficult to judge how and when to slow down, turn, or rotate my body. I had basically turned into giant, slow-motion spaz. I misjudged my speed and rammed into the wall by the elevator button at a pretty good speed. Even though I could see the wall coming at me, I couldn’t make my finger, outstretched to hit the elevator button, move away fast enough and I jammed it against the wall. Hard. The pain was intense. If my brain had been running at regular speed, it probably only would have hurt for thirty seconds or so. But in my accelerated state, the intense pain seemed to last for half an hour. Forty-five minutes maybe. The elevator ride was horrible. It felt like I spent four or five hours just descending seven floors, with nothing to look at but the interior of the elevator car. I sprinted to the metro station. I have to admit, this part was almost fun. Even though my body moved at, what seemed to me, super-slow speed, I could still carefully choose how and where to place my feet, swing my arms, and turn my torso. It only took a block or two to getting used to having a brain that ran two dozen times faster than my body. Then I basically sprint-danced the rest of the way, twisting and juking between people on the sidewalk and dodging moving cars with inches (a.k.a. minutes) of clearance. I spent an hour, in my time frame, descending into the subway and running to the platform. Endless tedium waiting the six minutes for the red-line train to arrive. Although there was more to look at on the metro platform than inside the elevator, it was still intensely boring. I should have stolen that copy of Moby Dick. The red-line train roared into the station in slow-motion. The normally high-pitched squeal of its brakes was frequency shifted by my high-speed mind to a long low tone, like a monotone Tuba solo. It wasn’t just the squealing subway train that was three octaves lower than normal. All sound was slowed to the point of near inaudibility. Voices were gone, shifted below the threshold frequency of my hearing. I did manage to hear a screaming baby on my subway car – her shrieks slowed to sound like whale songs. Sharp sounds like a car horns and trucks bouncing over potholes were low, muddied roars like distant thunder. Back at the research offices, I could still hear and communicate with the research staff. But now verbal communication with anyone would be impossible. The effects of the drug were still intensifying. I spent what seemed like days on that fucking red-line train. Days. Listening to the whale-song of the screaming baby and the Tuba solo of the brakes. Where ordinary voices were frequency-shifted out of my audio range, smells didn’t seem to be affected. I never became nose-blind to the body odor, the stench of the train’s brakes, and mélange of farts and other smells wafting through the metro car. I finally got back to my apartment. Sprinting through my open door and into the front hall at full speed was like a slow, relaxing drift down a lazy river. I was relieved to be home. At least I had stuff I could do there. I picked up the book I was reading – One Hundred Years of Solitude – and finished it. Despite turning the pages so quickly that I tore many of them, it seemed like most of the time I spent finishing the book was spent on page turning and not actually reading. Three minutes had passed since I got home. I tried surfing the Internet (my GOD it takes a long time for computers to boot these days) but it was too frustratingly slow. Hours (seemingly) to load each new page, and a fraction of a second to read it. A hundred articles in my news feed read and just three more minutes done. I dipped into my pile of yet-to-be-read books and finished two more. Four more minutes had passed. I decided to try to sleep off the remaining effects of the drug. Unfortunately, whatever part of my mind is responsible for perception, the part that’s been accelerated to hyper speeds by the drug, isn’t the same as the part that governs sleep. Despite being awake for what I perceived as days, my physical brain still thought it was 1:25 pm. It was not ready for sleep. Nevertheless, I tried to sleep. I walked to my bedroom (a slow 45-minute drift through my apartment) and flung myself into bed (lazily falling like a feather onto the mattress). I closed my eyes and lay there for hours and hours (10 minutes of reality time) before giving up. Sleep would not come. I was facing what was going to feel like days, or maybe even weeks of being trapped in a slow-motion prison. So I took an Ambien. The sensation of the pill and the splash of water I used to swallow it sliding my throat was sickening. A lump that blocked my breathing, moving like a slug down my esophagus. I read a book. Ten minutes had passed. I read another. Eighteen minutes since I took the Ambien. I threw the book across the room in disgust at my situation. The book slowly pirouetted and spun through the air, like a leaf blowing in a breeze. It hit the wall with a long, faint rumble – the only sound I had head for what seemed like hours – then drifted to the floor like a flip-flop sinking in a swimming pool. The force of gravity hadn’t changed since I took the pill. The laws of physics were the same. It was just my perception of time that had gone wackadoo. This meant I could use the speed things seemed to fall as a way of judging the effects of the drug. Based on how long it took the book to drift to the floor, I estimated the effects of the drug were still intensifying. I read a magazine. I turned on the television – I clearly saw each frame of video like I was watching a slideshow. Frustrated, I turned the television off. I read some more. The first two books of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Not exactly a light read. Frankly, I hated it. But given the hours of tedium it would take to go get another book off my bookshelf, just sitting on the couch and reading Churchill was better. Or at least less worse. It had now been thirty-five minutes since I took the Ambien. I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. Time passed. I inhaled – a hours long process. Time passed. I exhaled for more hours. Sleep. Would. Not. Come. I needed a new plan. I decided to go back to the offices where they gave me the drug. Maybe they would have something that could counteract its effects. Or at least something to knock me out until it wore off. I exited my apartment as fast as possible – taking hours in my time-frame to do so. I didn’t even bother locking the door. It would have taken too long. Down the stairs (it’s faster than the elevator if you run), through the lobby, out the front door and onto the street. These few things felt like a long day at the office. Sprinting down the street, dancing and weaving between pedestrians with, what must have looked to them, superhuman dexterity. Down the first flight of stairs at the metro. Across the landing. Another hour. Then on to the second flight of stairs. That’s when the Ambien hit me. The Ambien didn’t make me sleepy. Not at all. Instead, it must have had a severe cross-reaction with the experimental drug I took this morning. I was bounding down the second flight of stairs, moving in slow motion, but still making perceptible progress. Then, wham – everything stopped. The dull roar of the street and metro noise ceased, replaced by the most perfect silence I’ve ever experienced. My downwards motion seemed to completely freeze. Before the Ambien kicked in, my perception of time was maybe a few hundred times slower than real-time. After the Ambien took effect, time moved thousands of times slower. Every second seemed like days to me. Even just moving my eyes to focus on a new point was like an impossibly slow scroll across my visual field. Over the course of the afternoon, I learned how to walk, run, and jump when my mind ran hundreds of times faster than my body. But with another four or five orders of magnitude of slow-down caused by the Ambien, body control was almost impossible. I fell on the stairs. Even though I was all-but-frozen in mid-step, controlling my muscles was impossible. I commanded my foot forwards for hours, then backwards for hours more when it seemed like I would miss the next step. Hours attempting to adjust the angle of my ankle, then re-adjusting when it felt wrong. Despite these efforts, I rolled my ankle on the next step. The pain wasn’t at all mitigated by the slowness. Hours of increasing strain on my bent ankle. The nerve signals that send pain into the brain must work differently than the nerves in my ear. Sonic energy was spread out over time, diluted until it was imperceptible. Pain flowed into my brain undiluted by the change in my perception of time. Hours and hours of increasing weight on my turned ankle turned into hours of increasing pain upon increasing pain. I pitched forwards, my high-speed mind completely unable to control my low-speed body. I drifted downwards for days, managing to rotate my torso enough to keep my head from impacting the ground first. I eventually landed on my right shoulder. At first the impact wasn’t even noticeable. Then I felt a slight pressure in my shoulder as it came in contact with the ground. The pressure grew, bringing increasing pain, for hour upon hour. My shoulder finally gave out, popping out of its socket with an endless sickening tug. I came to a stop days later, crumpled onto the ground, staring at the ceiling. The pain in my shoulder still screaming with the intensity of a fresh violent injury. I had plenty of time to think during that fall. If every second seemed like days to me, then each minute of real-world time would be like years. Even if the drug cleared out of my system in the next two or three hours, this nightmare would seem to last centuries. By the time I hit the ground, I had a plan. I would somehow get to the platform and throw myself in front of a train. I twisted onto my hands and knees. Days of my dislocated shoulder crying for relief. I misjudged my rotation and rolled onto my back. I tried again, collapsing onto my face as I tried to figure out how to control a body that moved slower than grass grew. Weeks of effort were finally rewarded with success – I stabilized on my hands and knees. If just getting on all fours was this difficult, I figured that walking or running was completely out of the question. So I crawled. I crawled through the metro tunnel. The dumb looks on the faces in the crowd lingered on me for weeks. I crawled under the turnstyle and onto the escalator. The escalator spilled the rush-hour crowd onto the platform at the same speed a glacier spills ice into the sea. I looked out over the crowded platform during my interminable downward ride. The train status sign said the next train wouldn’t arrive for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was like a year to me. I’d have to spend a year on the metro platform, waiting to die. I crawled off the escalator, enduring days of stupid expressions on the commuters’ faces. I crawled a few feet to a concrete bench and curled up next to it, trying to find a position to lessen the pain in my shoulder. Then my problem with time got worse. Impossibly worse. The massive slowdown on the stairs was just the beginning of the interaction between the experimental drug and the Ambien. It fully hit me while I was curled up by the bench. I blinked. Years of darkness followed. Sound was already gone, and with my blink, sight was gone as well. All that existed was the pain from my fall. My hyper-accelerated mind wasted no time compensating for the lack of sensory input. Voices spoke to me. They sung to me in languages that never existed. Patterns and faces and colors came and went in my mind’s eye. I recalled my whole life, and imagined living another. I forgot English. I settled into a profound despair. I spoke to God. I became God. I imagined a new universe and brought it to life with my thoughts. Then I did it all again. And again. My eyes opened with geologic slowness. A faint glow. Weeks. A slit of light. Weeks. A narrow view of the metro platform – ankles of the commuters near me and an advertisement on the opposite wall. I extracted my phone from my pocket. A project that spanned decades. How can I even explain the boredom? The pain in my shoulder is nothing compared to the boredom. Every thought I can think, I have thought hundreds of times already. The view of ankles and advertisements never changes. Never. The boredom is so intense it’s tangible – like a solid object of metal and stone wedged into my skull. Inescapable. What are my options? If I crawl and fall onto the tracks without an oncoming train to crush me, I won’t die. I’ll experience even more pain from the four-foot fall, but I’ll most likely be rescued by some do-gooder on the platform and unable to act when the train finally does arrive. My suffering in that scenario will be endless. So I wait for the train. So I can throw myself under it. When it finally hits me, I will experience the pain of being ripped to pieces for centuries until finally, the light of life leaves my brain, and my experience ends. I’ve lived hundreds of lifespans at the foot of this bench. I am far older, in spirit, than any human who has ever lived. Most of my life experience has been a snapshot of pain huddled on the floor of a subway platform, with an unchanging view of ankles and advertisements. This post is my plan B. My Hail Mary. My long-shot. I’ve spent lifetimes typing and posting this message in the hope that someone will read it and become convinced that my suffering must end. Someone on this platform right now. Someone who will find the man curled under the bench, the man who crawled down the escalator, and kill him as swiftly as possible. A bullet to the temple. If you’re armed and at the Glenmont metro, please shoot me.

12 minutes

February 20, 2020

Drugs and Addictions, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Psychological Horror, Science and Experimentation, Science Fiction and Aliens

A Shattered Life

disease, entities, Matt Dymerski, monsters, paranormal, supernatural, time travel

I don’t know when you’re going to read this, but I can tell you when it started: I was out for a walk alone in the woods when the entity came for me. It was beyond a blur. It was, for lack of a better term, absence of meaning. Where it hid, there were no trees; where it crept closer, there was no grass; through the arc it leapt at me, there was no breeze of motion. There was no air at all. As it struck, I felt the distinct sensation of claws puncturing me somewhere unseen; somewhere I’d never felt before. My hands and arms and legs and torso seemed fine and I wasn’t bleeding, but I knew I’d been injured somehow. As I fearfully ran back home, I could tell that I was less. I was vaguely tired, and it was hard to focus at times. The solution at that early stage was easy: a big cup of coffee helped me feel normal again. For a while, that subtle drain on my spirit became lost in the ebb and flow of caffeine in my system. You could say my life began that week, actually, because that was when I met Mar. She and I got along great, though, to be honest, I’m pretty sure I fell in love with her over the phone before we even met. It was almost as if the strong emotions of that first week made the entity fight back—it was still with me, latched on to some invisible part of my being. The first few incidents were minor, and I hardly worried about them. The color of a neighbor’s car changed from dark blue to black one morning, and I stared at it before shaking my head and shrugging off the difference. Two days later, at work, a coworker’s name changed from Fred to Dan. I carefully asked around, but everyone said his name had always been Dan. I figured I’d just been mistaken. Then, as ridiculous as this sounds, I was peeing in my bathroom at home when I suddenly found myself on a random street. I was still in my pajamas, pants down, and urinating—but now in full view of a dozen people at a bus stop. Horrified, I pulled up my clothes and ran before someone called the cops. I did manage to get home, but the experience forced me to admit that I was still in danger. The entity was doing something to me, and I didn’t understand how to fight back. Mar showed up that evening, but she had her own key. “Hey,” I asked her with confusion. “How’d you get a key?” She just laughed. “You’re cute. Are you sure you’re okay with this?” She opened a door and entered a room full of boxes. “I know living together is a big step, especially when we’ve only been dating three months.” Living together? I’d literally just met her the week before. Thing was, my mother had always called me a smart cookie for a reason. I knew when to shut my yap. Instead of causing a scene, I told her everything was fine—and then I went straight to my room and began investigating. My things were just as I had left them with no sign of a three month gap in habitation, but I did find something out of the ordinary: the date. I shivered angrily as I processed the truth. The entity had eaten three months of my life. What the hell was I facing? What kind of creature could consume pieces of one’s soul like that? I’d missed the most exciting part of a new relationship, and I would never understand any shared stories or in-jokes from that period. Something absurdly precious had been taken from me, and I was furious. That fury helped suppress the entity. I never imbibed alcohol. I drank coffee religiously. I checked the date every time I woke up. For three years, I managed to live each day while observing nothing more than minor alterations. A social fact here and there—someone’s job, how many kids they had, that sort of thing—the layout of nearby streets, the time my favorite television show aired, that kind of thing. Always, those changes reminded me the creature still had its claws sunk into my spirit. Not once in three years did I ever let myself zone out. One day, I grew careless. I let myself get really into the season finale of my favorite show. It was gripping; a fantastic story. Right at the height of the action, a young boy came up to my lounger and shook my arm. Surprised, I asked, “Who are you? How did you get in here?” He laughed and smiled brightly. “Silly Daddy!” My heart sank in my chest. I knew immediately what had happened. After a few masked questions, I discovered that he was two years old—and that he was my son. The agony and heartache filling my chest was nearly unbearable. Not only had I missed the birth of my son, I would never see or know the first years of his life. Mar and I had obviously gotten married and started a family in the time I’d lost, and I had no idea what joys or pains those years contained. It was snowing outside. Holding my sudden son in my lap, I sat and watched the flakes fall outside. What kind of life was this going to be if slips in concentration could cost me years? I had to get help. The church had no idea what to do. The priests didn’t believe me, and told me I had a health issue rather than some sort of possession. The doctors didn’t have any clue. Nothing showed up on all their scans and tests, but they happily took my money in return for nothing. By the time I ran out of options, I’d decided to tell Mar. There was no way to know what this all looked like from her side. What was I like when I wasn’t there? Did I still take our son to school? Did I still do my job? Clearly, I did, because she seemed to be none the wiser, but I still had a horrible feeling that something must have been missing in her life when I wasn’t actually home inside my own head. But the night I set up a nice dinner in preparation, she arrived not by unlocking the front door, but by knocking on it. I answered, and found that she was in a nice dress. She was happily surprised by the settings on the table. “A fancy dinner for a second date? I knew you were sweet on me!” Thank the Lord I knew when to keep my mouth shut. If I’d gone on about being married and having a son, she might have run for the hills. Instead, I took her coat and sat down for our second date. Through carefully crafted questions, I managed to deduce the truth. This really was our second date. She saw relief and happiness in me, but interpreted that as dating jitters. I was just excited to realize that the entity wasn’t necessarily eating whole portions of my life. The symptoms, as I was beginning to understand them, were more like the consequences of a shattered soul. The creature had wounded me; broken me into pieces. Perhaps I was to live my life out of order, but at least I would actually get to live it. And so it went for a few years—from my perspective. While minor changes in politics or geography would happen daily, major shifts in my mental location only happened every couple months. When I found myself in a new place and time in my life, I just shut up and listened, making sure to get the lay of the land before doing anything to avoid making mistakes. On the farthest-flung leap yet, I met my six-year-old grandson, and I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said, “Writer.” I told him that was a fine idea. Then, I was back in month two of my relationship with Mar, and I had the best night with her on the riverfront. When I say the best, I mean the best. Knowing how special she would become to me, I asked her to move in. I got to live through what I’d missed the first go-around, and I came to understand that I was never mentally absent. I would always be there—eventually. When we were moving her boxes in, she stopped for a moment and said she marveled at my great love, as if I’d known her for a lifetime and never once doubted she was the one. That was the first time I’d truly laughed freely and wholeheartedly since the entity had wounded me. She was right about my love for her, but for exactly the reason she’d considered a silly romantic analogy. I had known her my whole life, and I’d come to terms with my situation and found peace with it. It wasn’t so bad to have sneak peeks at all the best parts ahead. But of course I wouldn’t be writing this if it hadn’t gotten worse. The entity was still with me. It had not wounded me and departed like I’d wanted to believe. The closest I can describe my growing understanding was that the creature was burrowing deeper into my psyche, fracturing it into smaller pieces. Instead of months between major shifts, I began having only weeks. Once I noticed that trend, I feared my ultimate fate would be to jump between times in my life heartbeat by heartbeat, forever confused, forever lost. Only an instant in each time meant I would never be able to speak with anyone else, never be able to hold a conversation, never express or receive love. As the true depth of that fear came upon me, I sat in an older version of me and watched the snow falling outside. That was the one constant in my life: the weather didn’t care who I was or what pains I had to face. Nature was always there. The falling snow was always like a little hook that kept me in a place; the pure emotional peace it brought was like a panacea on my mental wounds, and I’d never yet shifted while watching the pattern of falling white and thinking of the times I’d gone sledding or built a snow fort as a child. A teenager touched my arm. “Grandpa?” “Eh?” He’d startled me out of my thoughts, so I was less careful than usual. “Who are you?” He half-grinned, as if not sure whether I was joking. Handing me a stack of papers, he said, “It’s my first attempt at a novel. Would you read it and tell me what you think?” Ahh, of course. “Pursuing that dream of being a writer, I see.” He burned bright red. “Trying to, anyway.” “All right. Run off, I’ll read this right now.” The words were blurry, and, annoyed, I looked for glasses I probably had for reading. Being old was terrible, and I wanted to leap back into a younger year—but not before I read his book. I found my glasses in a sweater pocket, and began leafing through. Mar puttered in and out of the living room, still beautiful, but I had to focus. I didn’t know how much time I would have there. It seemed that we had relatives over. Was it Christmas? A pair of adults and a couple kids I didn’t recognize tromped through the hallway, and I saw my son, now adult, walk by with his wife on the way out the door. As a group, the extended family began sledding outside. Finally, I finished reading the story, and I called out for my grandson. He rushed down the stairs and into the living room. “How was it?” “Well, it’s terrible,” I told him truthfully. “But it’s terrible for all the right reasons. You’re still a young man, so your characters behave like young people, but the structure of the story itself is very solid.” I paused. “I didn’t expect it to turn out to be a horror story.” He nodded. “It’s a reflection of the times. Expectations for the future are dismal, not hopeful like they used to be.” “You’re far too young to be aware like that,” I told him. An idea occurred to me. “If you’re into horror, do you know anything about strange creatures?” “Sure. I read everything I can. I love it.” Warily, I scanned the entrances to the living room. Everyone was busy outside. For the first time, I opened up to someone in my life about what I was experiencing. In hushed tones, I told him about my fragmented consciousness. For a teenager, he took it well. “You’re serious?” “Yes.” He donned the determined look of a grown man accepting a quest. “I’ll look into it, see what I can find out. You should start writing down everything you experience. Build some data. Maybe we can map your psychic wound.” Wow. “Sounds like a plan.” I was surprised. That made sense, and I hadn’t expected him to have a serious response. “But how will I get all the notes in one place?” “Let’s come up with somewhere for you to leave them,” he said, frowning with thought. “Then I’ll get them, and we can trace the path you’re taking through your own life, see if there’s a pattern.” For the first time since the situation had gotten worse, I felt hope again. “How about under the stairs? Nobody ever goes under there.” “Sure.” He turned and left the living room. I peered after him. I heard him banging around near the stairs. Finally, he returned with a box, laid it on the carpet, and opened it to reveal a bursting stack of papers. He exclaimed, “Holy crap!”—but of course, being a teenager, he didn’t really say crap. Taken aback, I blinked rapidly, forgiving his cussing because of the shock. “Did I write those?” He looked up at me with wonder. “Yeah. Or, you will. You still have to write them and put them under the stairs after this.” He gazed back down at the papers—then covered the box. “So you probably shouldn’t see what they say. That could get weird.” That much I understood. “Right.” He gulped. “There are like fifty boxes under there, all filled up like this. Deciphering these will take a very long time.” His tone dropped to deadly seriousness. “But I will save you, grandpa. Because I don’t think anyone else can.” Tears flowed down my cheeks then, and I couldn’t help but sob once or twice. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d become in my shifting prison of awareness until I finally had someone who understood. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” And then I was young again, and at work on a random Tuesday. Once the sadness and relief faded, anger and determination replaced them. After I finished my work, I grabbed some paper and began writing. While the weeks shifted around me, while those weeks became days, and then hours, I wrote every single spare moment about when and where I thought I was. I put them under the stairs out of order; my first box was actually the thirtieth, and my last box was the first. Once I had over fifty boxes written from my perspective—and once my shifting became a matter of minutes—I knew it was up to my grandson to take it from there. I put my head down and stopped looking. I couldn’t stand the river of changing awareness any longer. Names and places and dates and jobs and colors and people were all wrong and different. I’d never been older. I sat watching the snow fall. A man of at least thirty that I vaguely recognized entered the room. “Come on, I think I finally figured it out.” I was so frail that moving was painful. “Are you him? Are you my grandson?” “Yes.” He took me to a room filled with strange equipment and sat me in a rubber chair facing a large mirror twice the height of a man. “The pattern finally revealed itself.” “How long have you worked on this?” I asked him, aghast. “Tell me you didn’t miss your life like I’m missing mine!” His expression was both stone cold and furiously resolute. “It’ll be worth it.” He brought two thin metal rods close to my arm and then nodded at the mirror. “Look. This shock is carefully calibrated.” The electric zap from his device was startling, but not painful. In the mirror, I saw a rapid arcing light-silhouette appear above my head and shoulder. The electricity moved through the creature like a wave, briefly revealing the terrible nature of what was happening to me. A bulging leech-like mouth was wrapped around the back of my head, coming down to my eyebrows and touching each ear, and its slug-like body ran over my shoulder and into my very soul. It was a parasite. And it was feeding on my mind. My now-adult grandson held my hand as I took in the horror. After a moment, he asked, “Removing it is going to hurt very badly. Are you up for this?” Fearful, I asked, “Is Mar here?” His face softened. “No. Not for a few years now.” I could tell from his reaction what had happened, but I didn’t want it to be true. “How?” “We have this conversation a lot,” he responded. “Are you sure you want to know? It never makes you feel better.” Tears brimmed in my eyes. “Then I don’t care if it hurts, or if I die. I don’t want to stay in a time where she’s not alive.” He made a sympathetic noise of understanding and then returned to his machines to hook several wires, diodes, and other bits of technology to my limbs and forehead. While he did so, he talked. “I’ve worked for two decades to figure this out, and I’ve had a ton of help from other researchers of the occult. This parasite doesn’t technically exist in our plane. It’s one of the lesser spawns of µ¬ßµ, and it feeds on the plexus of mind, soul, and quantum consciousness/reality. When details like names and colors of objects changed, you weren’t going crazy. The web of your existence was merely losing strands as the creature ate its way through you.” I didn’t fully understand. I looked up in confusion as he placed a circlet of electronics like a crown on my head in exact line with where the parasite’s mouth had ringed me. “What’s µ¬ßµ?” He paused his work and grew pale. “I forgot that you wouldn’t know. You’re lucky, believe me.” After a deep breath, he began moving again, and placed his fingers near a few switches. “Ready? This is carefully tuned to make your nervous system extremely unappetizing to the parasite, but it’s basically electro-shock therapy.” I could still see Mar’s smile. Even though she was dead, I’d just been with her moments ago. “Do it.” The click of a switch echoed in my ears, and I almost laughed at how mild the electricity was. It didn’t feel like anything—at least at first. Then, I saw the mirror shaking, and my body within that image convulsing. Oh. No. It did hurt. Nothing had ever been more painful. It was just so excruciating that my mind hadn’t been able to immediately process it. As my vision shook and fire burned in every nerve in my body, I could see the reflected trembling light-silhouette of the parasite on my head as it writhed in agony equal to mine. It had claws—six clawed lizard-like limbs under its leech-like body—and it cut into me in an attempt to stay latched on. The electricity made my memories flare. Mar’s smile was foremost, lit brightly in front of a warm fire as the snow fell past the window behind her. The edges of that memory began lighting up, and I realized that my life was one continuous stretch of experience—it was only the awareness of it that had been fragmented by that feasting evil on my back. I’d never managed to be there for the birth of my son. I’d jumped around it a dozen times, but never actually lived it. For the first time, I got to hold Mar’s hand and be there for her. No. No! That moment had shifted seamlessly into holding her hand as she lay in a hospital bed for a very different reason. Not this! God, why? It was so merciless to make me remember this. I broke down in tears as nurses rushed into the room. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to experience it. I’d seen all the good parts, but I hadn’t wanted the worst part—the inevitable end that all would one day face. It wasn’t worth it. It was tainted. All that joy was given back ten thousand fold as pain. The fire in my body and in my brain surged to sheer white torture, and I screamed. My scream faded into a surprised shout as the machines and electricity and chair faded away. Snow was no longer falling around my life; I was out in the woods on a bright summer day. Oh God. I turned to see the creature approaching me. It was the same absence of meaning; the same blank on reality. It crept forward, just like before—but, this time, it hissed and turned away. I stood, astounded at being young again and freed from the parasite. My grandson had actually done it! He’d made me an unappetizing meal, so the predator of mind and soul had moved on in search of a different snack. I returned home in a daze. And while I was sitting there processing all that had happened, the phone rang. I looked at it in awe and sadness. I knew who it was. It was Marjorie, calling for the first time for some trivial reason she’d admit thirty years later was made up just to talk to me. But all I could see was her lying in that hospital bed dying. It was going to end in unspeakable pain and loneliness. I would become an old man, left to sit by myself in an empty house, his soulmate gone long before him. At the end of it all, the only thing I would have left: sitting and watching the falling snow. But now, thanks to my grandson, I would also have my memories. It would be a wild ride, no matter how it ended. On a sudden impulse, I picked up the phone. With a smile, I asked, “Hey, who’s this?” Even though I already knew. Author’s note: Together, my grandfather and I did set out to write the tale of his life. Unfortunately, his Alzheimer’s disease progressed rapidly, and we were never able to finish. He’s still alive, but I imagine that, mentally, he is in a better place than the nursing home. I like to think he’s back in his younger days, living life and being happy, because the reality is much colder. It’s snowing today; he loves the snow. When I visited him, he didn’t recognize me, but he did smile as he sat looking out the window.

14 minutes

July 22, 2020

Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids, Science Fiction and Aliens

My Father Punished Me When I Talked to Ghosts

abductions, blindness, child abuse, childhood, children, crimes, deaths, deception, investigations, kidnappings, kids, lies, murders

I’ve been blind since birth. As I grew up, everything was described to me in such vivid detail that I didn’t even realize why it was that important to see, especially having no reference point to compare it. We lived in a single-floor ranch house, that’s what Father told me. In my mind, of course, I could see, although unlike how a sighted person could. I had spatial awareness. I knew where my bedroom was, where the bathroom, living room and kitchen were. Each wall had its own texture. I don’t know if that was done on purpose, or if I could feel things others never noticed. I rarely fell over. Only if Father, or one of the visitors, put something somewhere they shouldn’t have. It was usually the visitors, and Father would shout. They visited infrequently, and only briefly when they did. Father said I shouldn’t speak to them, that it unsettled him. He’d worry when I saw something he didn’t, saw it with my ears or by touch. Ellie was the first. She seemed very sweet. She asked me my name and why my face was so messed up. She was in the living room. I could hear where she sat from her breaths. Harsh nasal sounds, as if her nose was blocked. When father had a cold, he’d always breath through his mouth, big labored breaths, as he wasn’t used to it. When people mentioned my face, I always touched it, trying to work out why it was so strange to them. When I asked if I could touch theirs, there was always a pause. I guessed sighted people never did that. Why would they need to? When I asked Ellie if I could touch her face, she reluctantly agreed, but moments later Father entered the room and asked me who I was speaking to. I told him, “Nobody.” He would always punish me when I spoke about them. I think it scared him. He’d take my arm and march me off. I’d be knocked off-balance and disoriented, to the point where when he finally set me down, my hands would frantically search my surroundings until I knew where I was. It was usually my bedroom, though every now and then he’d leave me outside, in the middle of nowhere. That was the worst. I would be lost and scared. He told me about the road that ran in front of the house, and explained that the sounds I heard were cars, that they’d kill me if they touched me. Those sounds were my only means of recognizing my surroundings. I waited until I heard one, and then knew which way to run back to the house. I heard Ellie that evening. She whispered to me, saying she was scared. I whispered back, but she didn’t hear. I asked Father about Ellie. He didn’t want to talk about her. I asked him why. He didn’t reply. When I told him that she asked about my face, he asked me how I responded. I told him I wanted to touch hers. He laughed, though I knew he wasn’t happy. I could hear the difference. When you laugh for pleasure, your mouth is wide open. When you pretend, your mouth is almost closed. To me, the difference is obvious. It wasn’t until I was older that he explained. He said we lived in a special place, connected to the “other world”. That sometimes dead people slip through, people who died in pain and wanted to reach the living. He explained that because I couldn’t see, I was able to tune in to that. That they knew I was listening when others weren’t. He said I had to ignore it. Otherwise, he told me, they’d latch on and never leave me. All the dead want is to be alive again, he said. It was dangerous, and they would trick me. He said he knew how to deal with them, but he couldn’t help if they became attached to me. Alex appeared to me a few years later. She told me she was lost and didn’t know where she was. I told her I wasn’t allowed to speak to her. Still, she pleaded for help. I kept quiet, knowing what would happen if I said anything. “Did you speak to them?” Father asked. Though I was upset, I told him no. I wished I could help her. I knew what it was like to be lost, and it scared me. Alex didn’t whisper to me at all. I’d ignored her, and she ignored me. Father saved me, and I was thankful. After Alex, I knew what I needed to do, so I did it. The spirits stopped bothering me after that, for a very long time. That was, until Sarah appeared. Sarah didn’t give me a chance to be quiet. I was on my own, sitting in the living room and listening to the television. “Help,” she said. “I need to find a way out.” I stayed silent. “You can hear me, can’t you?” she asked, surprised. “I’m not allowed to speak to you,” I told her. “Please,” she begged. “I’m scared, I’m lost. I want to see my daddy.” I gripped the arms of the chair and told her I wasn’t allowed. “He’s dead,” she said. I didn’t answer. “Your father is dead,” she said again. I wasn’t going to fall for it. I heard banging from around the room as things began to fly, and the shelves began to shake. “Stop it!” I shouted. And it did. “Please help me leave,” she said. I wasn’t going to talk to her. I did the only thing I thought would help. I unlocked the front door, hoping she’d run out and get lost, just like I would do. When I heard from her no more, I locked the door and sat back down. I listened intently for any signs she was still there. Except for the sounds of the TV, it was silent. I hated when my heart raced. I became all too aware of the tick-tock feeling of the rise and fall within my chest, like it was about to explode. When I heard my father’s voice, I screamed. “Son,” he said, “I need your help. I think I’m dying.” I did what he told me to do; I didn’t speak. If he did die, he’d never leave me. Instead, I raced out into the open air and shouted for help. I shouted until my voice was hoarse. I heard the sounds of cars racing along the road in front of my house. I shouted until I heard someone respond. It was a woman. “What’s wrong?” they asked. I told them I think my father was dying. They asked what had happened to my face. I pleaded with them to help me, and they promised they would. I sat down on the grass and waited. Sometime later, the woman returned to me and asked if she could hold my hand. “I’m so sorry,” she told me. I heard the sounds of sirens, and of people rushing. I asked what was going on. The woman said she was there for me. As the noise died down, a man asked me a question. “I’m a paramedic,” he said. “What happened to your face?” I told him I was fine. He asked if I was sure, and I told him I was. He asked if I minded him touching my face. I said it was okay. A moment later, I felt a pressure release from around my forehead and the air felt cold against my skin. It sounded as if he were peeling an orange. I imagined that in my head and worried he’d expose my insides. I screamed and asked what he was doing. He told me everything was going to be okay, and the woman squeezed my hand, telling me to be brave. I didn’t know what it was I was experiencing. I felt a tight pain within my head, like when you smash your shin against something hard, followed by something I’ve come to understand as “bright”. It hurt so much. I began to cry. “What happened to your eyes?” the paramedic asked. I said I was blind. He asked to check them. The pain returned when he examined them. “Do you know him? the man asked the woman who had helped me. She told him that I had been screaming for help and that she had come to my aid, but that she had never met me before. “How long have you had your eye injury?” he asked me. I told him I’d been blind from birth. He asked me if I could see his fingers. I told him no. He asked if I could open my eyes. I said I didn’t know what he meant. He asked if he could open them for me. I didn’t respond. Then I felt his fingers on my face, fingers covered in something rubbery. Suddenly, it became “bright” again. I screamed. He tried to calm me. The woman squeezed my hand again. I didn’t know what was happening. Things I couldn’t describe came to me. It was like it always was, but multiplied one hundred-fold, and so much more real. I carried on screaming as a fuzzy form came into view. “Just breathe, okay?” the paramedic said. “Everything will be fine. When was the last time you saw?” As my heart began to calm and my breathing slowed, I became distracted by what I was experiencing. It overwhelmed me. I wanted to cry, and I did. “How long has it been?” he asked again. “I’ve never seen anything before,” I told him. * * * * * * I was told to keep an eye mask on for most of the day, only taking it off at night at first, to allow my eyes time to adjust. At the same time, I was placed in the custody of my aunt and uncle, and didn’t even know it at first. They were shocked at what happened to me, and that I had never attended school. The past few years have been a rollercoaster ride. The doctors said I may never have perfect vision, though what little I have is a Godsend, and I’ll take what I can get. I’ve only recently been learning to read and write, so I apologize if my English isn’t the greatest. It’s the best I can do. I’ve been asking my aunt what happened to my father, but all she says is that he died of a heart attack. I asked what sort of man he was. She says he was her brother and she’ll love him no matter what. My uncle doesn’t want to talk about him at all. I’ve been using the computer a lot recently, and really enjoying the internet. I can’t believe such a thing exists. After being so lonely for so long, I can talk to whoever I want, when I want, though I’m wary of that. After all, how do I know if who I’m speaking to is alive? No one seems to share my father’s concerns about that. Today I was on a forum discussing the spirit world – I was so happy to find people who I could relate to – and someone curious about my username sent me a link to an article on a true-crime website. It was about my father, and mentioned me by name. They asked me who I was, and if I was the same person. According to the article, my mother had gone missing soon after my birth. It said I’d been bound so that I couldn’t see. That my father always wanted a daughter. They found fourteen bodies in the basement. They said one got away, a girl by the name of Sarah Frank. She was the one to call the police. They found Father’s car parked around the back of the house. They supposed he carried his victims into the basement via the storm entrance and left them there. Sarah had managed to get away after she agreed to be his daughter following four days of sustained torture. She stabbed him with a knife he’d placed on the counter to butter some toast. I didn’t want to believe it. And I am not sure I would have, if it weren’t for the names of the victims, two of which stuck out: Ellie Farmer and Alex Riddle. I’d spoken to them both in the living room. To this day, I wonder if my father had been honest with me about a single thing in his life. Throughout it all, one question remains above all others. Did I speak to Ellie and Alex before, or after, he killed them?

8 minutes

December 10, 2019

Abductions and Kidnappings, Children and Childhood, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Investigations and Crimes

Distorted Warning Signals

Ashley Rose Wellman

When I got the first one, I was literally seconds away from stepping onto the plane when a call from “UNKNOWN” blared from my cell phone. It was a ringtone I hadn’t heard before, one I was pretty sure hadn’t come with the phone. Normally, I wouldn’t have stopped to answer it, but I was expecting a call about a job I had interviewed for the previous week. I took a deep breath in and accepted the call. “Hello?” “Do not get on the plane.” A woman’s voice, garbled and strange, as if her vocal chords had been shredded, and she was trying desperately to choke out speech. Despite the unnerving, fractured quality of her voice, her tone was insistent and eerily calm. Then the call ended. I froze. I had always had a slight phobia of air travel, and something about this call just… there’s no way I was about to get on a seven hour flight now. I turned around and headed toward the food court. I’d just get another flight later in the afternoon, I figured. I watched from the airport Starbucks three hours later as every TV in the terminal lit up with the crash footage of the plane I should have been on. No survivors. Not a single one. I tried to trace the call. So did the police. But there was nothing to trace. There was no evidence my phone had ever received a call around that time. They analyzed phone records, incoming and outgoing communication to my phone… nothing. I wasn’t making it up. I couldn’t have been. That wasn’t the only call. Throughout the years, they were few and far between, but always right. And I always listened. “Do not go on that blind date tonight.” Five months later, my would-be “date” was convicted of killing four women, all with my hair color and build. Found them in a shallow grave about 250 feet from the diner he offered to take me to. “Do not drive to the concert tonight.” Eighteen-wheeler lost control and plowed into a line of cars. Every driver crushed. Every driver killed. In the stretch of freeway I would have been driving down. No matter if I got a new phone, if I moved across the country, the calls would still come. I could almost feel the presence of… whatever it was, whatever it is, watching over me. I imagined being at the bottom of the freezing ocean, still strapped into my coach-section plane seat, or being in that mass grave across from the diner, or watching an eighteen-wheeler skidding toward my car, knowing death was imminent, and I’d get this tightness in my chest. I’d think about how thin that line was. How close I’d gotten. If I hadn’t had a job interview I was waiting to hear back from, I’d have never listened to that first call. And that would be it for me. It always felt like something was coming for me. But there was always this… this fractured, warped voice, with these calls that never seemed to exist after I heard them. Self-destructing warning signals, rotting away before my eyes. And I was alive. I had a bad feeling about this cruise. I had planned it as a girl’s week out with some of my old friends from college, and was looking forward to a week in the tropics in the dead of winter—but part of me could almost sense that the call was coming. Maybe I’d watched Titanic one too many times, but there was a little nagging fear from the start. I hoped it would be fine, but I knew that if something was going to happen, I’d get the call. I’d know. Now, a week before I’m set to go on the cruise, after stepping into my apartment after returning from dinner with a friend, I notice my cell has a message from “UNKNOWN”. They’ve never had to leave a message before. Haven’t checked it all night. Damn it, and I had really wanted to go on that cruise, too. Ah, well. Not worth whatever horrific fate awaited me in that cold dark ocean. I click “play message”, and feel my stomach drop as I listen to the voice, sounding horrifically distorted, as if it emanates from a throat slashed to ribbons, crackling with more urgency than ever before. I look around my apartment as the voice on the phone repeats the same phrase over and over again. “Do not come home after dinner tonight. Do not come home after dinner tonight. DO NOT COME HOME AFTER DINNER TONIGHT.”

3 minutes

July 13, 2019

Beings and Entities, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Monsters, Creatures, and Cryptids, Occult, Magic, and Witchcraft, Psychological Horror, Survival Horror, Suspense and Thrillers

He Who Wanders

Simon Simonian

I missed the scorching wind of Andalusia. How it pours sunlight onto your face, toying with eyelashes, flattening dry sand against cheeks and milling around hair. I missed the smell of the valley and that ripening softness of Muscat fluff glistening in the afternoon breeze. From up here, I can see the house where I grew up. I see white chapels tucked into grape orchards like pawns scattered on a chess board. I can see patches of asphalt on El Jardinito Road hailing from the old town through dappled rocks, then waning behind the horizon with erratic headlights of beat-up trucks cruising along. One of the pit stops along Ed Jardinito, where truck drivers stop to relieve themselves, marks the starting point to this wavy trail. All covered in blotches of spindly grass stalks and flaxen sand, the trail is barely noticeable at first. Truth is, no one even cares to notice it. Why would truckers taking a blitz-leak care to check on a mucky trail leading to God knows where? But I do. This is how I got up here, to the top of this hill, where I am standing now. I’ve climbed all the way up here, so I can finally end it all – all these years of vagrancy and fugue, exile and fear. This is where it’s all going to come to an end. But for now, I am enjoying the view of the valley unfolding below. I am sipping the air of what could be my final memories. He will show up soon. He always does. Like a shadow, he’s been following me right on my footsteps, always there, behind me. And there he is! His limping figure appears behind the sharp bend off El Jardinito. He looks up and he sees me, then stops for a moment to catch his breath and leans on his cane, as if assessing the remaining trajectory for this final stretch, then resumes his walk. Or should I say, “resumes his agonizing trudging”. Years of endless chase took a toll on his body. No wonder. How long has he been chasing me? Ten, twenty, thirty years? He is slow. Methodically slow. But for once, I will not run. I will wait. Right here, behind this rock. I will finally come face to face with him. This sharp Swiss knife blade I am holding in my hand will soon lance right through his neck bone. Yes, that’s what I am going to do. This ends here, at the dead end of this sandy trail atop the hill overlooking the valley with its white chapels and Muscat orchards. Funny. After all these years, I still don’t know the real name of my chaser. I always called him what master Borges called him “He who wanders”. He who wanders, listen. I will kill you. * * * * * * Borges. The Borges. I idolized him when I was in college. Many did, but I was different. It was 1961. I was an average lazy learner at the Universidad Laboral de Córdoba, floating around from one semester to another with barely passable grades. I had very few friends and almost no interests. One can say that I had an early form of an identity crisis. Besides chugging Anisado, my only other passion was Literature. Latin American Literature. Borges and Neruda were at the forefront. One could only imagine my excitement when I saw a pamphlet hanging on the wall of the Literature faculty. Spaces were limited. But who cared? It was the man himself, Jorge Luis Borges, coming to give us a lecture followed by an open panel of questions. Like a maniac, I rushed to the auditorium hours before the lecture. I was the first in line and when the doors opened, I got the front row seat. The auditorium was packed with drooling chins of young self-proclaimed prodigies, awaiting the arrival of the great one. And there he was, the blind Lord of Literature, walking upright onto the stage with a cane and his loyal assistant right by his side. Standing ovation. He nodded and made a “thank you, please be seated” gesture. Then he began. The lecture was dedicated to Spanish writers, I cannot distinctly recall if it was Cervantes or De Vega. It truly made no difference. Somehow, I managed to sit through his entire lecture, which lasted over three hours, and remember nothing. He talked slowly and methodically, pouring honey into our ears like Segovia’s guitar, with his absent eyesight affixed on the ceiling. And then it happened. Something that caught me completely off guard. Before closing the day, Borges was about to take questions from the audience. Of course, I raised my hand and so did about hundreds of other students. One of Borges’ assistants whispered something into his ear, which made him smile. “It is an honor for me to be in front of an audience of young people, but our time is not infinite,” he said with blind eyes still pinned on the far corner of the hall. “For that reason, I will randomly pick questions from five of you.” I have never won any prizes or lotteries in my life. When I played poker or blackjack, I lost far more than I won. I knew my limitations and that turned me into an average apathetic person, rarely trying to outdo oneself. And so, sitting still with little ambition – I got used to that. Until that moment. When I saw Borges pointing his finger in my direction, that came as nothing short of a shock. “Me?” “Yes, young man. Senor Borges picked you. Step forward and introduce yourself,” said his assistant. I did not know what to ask. So, I quietly mumbled my full name. “Fernandez Augustin Navaro” Borges shifted his gray-shaded pupils in my direction as if reacting to a sudden buzzing of a fruit fly. “Fernandez Augustin Navaro. Navaro. Haven’t I met you once before, young man?” he asked. “No, senor Borges. I never had the honor.” “But you will. We will meet again, Senor Navaro. You and I will meet again. But for right now, what is your question?” The rest of the day was foggy. I don’t even remember what question I asked, it must have been about him winning the Prix International, not sure. And maybe not important. No, not important at all. The greatest writer in the history of mankind called me by name and then that bizarre unreal thing he said about us meeting again. When? * * * * * * Nine years later. In 1970. And there I was – a somewhat-promising journalist in one of London’s somewhat-scandalous tabloid newspapers. Every week my name was featured on the second page alongside with celebrity chronicles and vile rumors. My paycheck was decent enough for a small studio flat by Manchester Square. After years of having been pent-up by directionless studies, you could say I became something more than an average. Or at least that is what I believed. That day (it was early October, arguably the best season in London) began as usual. I ate my chic breakfast consisting of two scrambled eggs, ham, toast, and dark roast coffee at Barrymore’s Diner and was ready for a pleasant walk to the office. It was shortly after 8 am, and I was in no hurry. My route was the same as it was every day: pass the square, right turn on George Street, left turn on Thayer, another right on Marylebone. My thoughts that morning were all preoccupied with the piece I was working on, so I was slowly making my way through the square when something caught my eye. Or rather, someone. At first, I did not pay much attention to him, no more than I did to anybody else who idled at the square that morning. Hippy rascals with soiled hair playing guitar on every corner was a common theme in those days, and London town was certainly no exception. So here was another one of those misunderstood love proclaimers, sitting right behind the gated area of the square. Striped worn out jacket, heavy cap, sandals with clots of woolen socks sticking out. A common hippy bum as anyone may have thought. I thought so too except this one had something that made my intestines churn. I didn’t know what it was, but once I saw him, I felt the irresistible urge to instantly walk away and never see him again. The way he looked at me, that gloomy frown that made me think of a line from Oscar Wilde, “that fellow’s got to swing.” There certainly was something outer worldly about that “fellow.” His eyes, as if carved from a rock below his forehead were mercilessly drilling thousands of tiny holes through me. I added pace. As I turned back one last time, I noticed him slowly walking towards me. Past the gates of the square, onto the street, paying no attention to screeching tires of honking cars. Walking right towards me. He’s just a bum. No, he is not. Just another one of those unwashed hippies. No, no, run run run! George Street was empty like in post-war bombed quarters. I could hear my brisk footsteps. Or was it the drubbing of my aorta against the chest? He was catching up. Run? Don’t be silly. Yes, run. First slowly as if you’re trying to not show your chaser that you’re scared. No, not scared, more like in a hurry. Why am I running? I can take him out with one punch. But it really wasn’t about that. It was my first experience of that feeling, which I can only describe as some sort of primordial sense of fear. Panic. Dread. Unexplained sense of looming doom arching above you like a dark figure with a scythe. I ran. I ran faster than my feet could move. As I turned the corner on Thayer, I paused and looked back, fearing to see him right behind. Scrambled eggs, toast, and dark roast coffee were about to make their way back up through my esophagus. Wiping the sweat off my palms onto my pants, I bent forward in a protective position and looked around. Empty windows of George Street were checking me out like a toddler witnessing parent in a cowardly act. Whoever that man was that incensed me into this uncontrollable panic, he was now gone. Shame on you, Fernandez Augustin, I repeated to myself while making futile attempts to enthrall palpitation to subside. Shame on you. I mumbled repeating that word. Mumbling turned into whistling that song by “Magic Lanterns”. Shame, shame. I whistled, acting calm and self-composed. I sang without knowing words only to convert my mind to something else. I sang so others wouldn’t notice me shaking. I climbed the stairs of my office building. Three at a time. Third floor. The familiar smell of typography oils calmed me down. Safe heaven. Shame on you, Fernandez Augustin Navaro. * * * * * * Even now I question myself whether my journey to madness began on that day or was it underway for many years. Madness that creeps in and recedes in tidal waves. Is that how it usually happens? All I know is that an hour later I was laughing at my little moment of weaknesses. Preposterous and rubbish, my thick Andalusian twang spoke to me. The idea of being fully checked out by a specialist did cross my mind, and I immediately thought of Doctor Patel in Camden Town. He’d give me a comfortable medical diagnosis like a panic attack and prescribe some white pills, I thought. Little did I know that the day had more surprises in store. The unnerving script development continued in a more eerie fashion when my boss marched to my desk with a pack of printed paper. No, Navaro you are not going to see Doctor Patel in Camden Town who will make a judgment call on your insanity. Instead, you are going to do an article on Jorge Luis Borges’ new book. He is making his presentation today at London Public Library and blah, blah, blah. I forgot about the panic attack. The thrill of seeing Master Borges again, nine years later, was surreal. Moments later I was sitting in a cab on my way to the London Public Library, scribbling all possible questions I should be asking him. El Informe de Brodie? Other books? Forget it! I knew very well what I would ask. I paid the cab and galloped up the marble stairs leading to the hallway, where the Master was about to hold his new book presentation. I elbowed myself through the crowd of journalists to occupy the coveted front-row spot. Quick inventory check: wallet, j-sack along with the omnipresent Swiss knife. Seconds ticked leisurely on my wristwatch. Four more minutes. Forget this morning’s sickness. Forget Dr. Patel. Collect yourself, Fernandez Augustin * * * * * * “Navaro! That’s your last name, isn’t it?” “Yes. Yes, Senor Borges. But how do you..?” “Nine years ago, in Cordoba. I told you we would meet again. Do you remember?” I nodded rapidly completely forgetting he couldn’t see me. Stupid. “Perhaps,” continued Borges, “it would be more prudent for us to speak privately after the conference. I invite you to have coffee with me. You like Colombian coffee, Mr. Navaro? I shall see you precisely at 6 o’clock at the address that my assistant will provide.” His blind eyes were still affixed at the top far corner of the hallway, far above all the congested sharp-penciled critics and arduous followers of his divine writing. The attention was now all on me, as revealed by hundreds of photo flashes from behind. I thought of all the explaining that I would have to do tomorrow. How does Borges know you? Are you friends? You were raised in Cordova, are you his illegitimate son? Back then I did not know. Answers came later. * * * * * * Memory is a tricky animal. As I gaze over the valley and satiate my lungs with familiar smells, I cannot think of anything specific. Vague and elusive memories of my childhood home. And these orchards, these white chapels and the old town itself – nothing but an incomprehensible sensation somewhere down there, below the chest cage. I close my eyes and let the sun twirl around with tinted specks of mosaic light. I am trying to focus without looking. Alas, nothing comes to mind. I’ve been robbed of my memory. You! I cast my eyes at the trail again. He is closing in. It’s hard for him to walk upward, and yet I see that determination in his eyes, in his tight grip of that wobbly walking stick, in the way he periodically stops to catch his breath and eyeball the remaining distance. I am not going anywhere. Five? Ten more minutes? Come and take me, old man. If you can. I almost see his facial expression under the heavily pronounced frontal lobe. It’s a grin. It’s an expression that says, “We shall see.” * * * * * * Once I read an interview in “The Morning Times”. In it, Borges was portrayed as extremely humble and minimalistic. His house was depicted as a perfectly organized space with easy access to everything. Books on the shelves (judging from the admiration of the columnist, there were lots of them) were organized by theme and by title. Dictionaries and encyclopedias were grouped together on the same rack, so he could find them easily. In another article, dated 1966, I read that when Borges travels, and those travels were quite extensive, he carries a whole rack of books along, some of which may not even be read. When I entered his hotel room, that very bookrack was the first thing that caught my eye. I stood perplexed at the multitude of titles, most unknown to me, when I heard the door swing wide open, and there he was entering through the doorway with a leisurely swinging cane. “Ah, Senor Navaro, how kind of you to visit this old man!” I took a step towards him and produced some gibberish like “pleasure is all but mine”. He half-smiled and pointed his hand to the chair. “I know you will quite enjoy the taste of Colombian dark roast.” Borges sat down and leaned slightly backwards, without releasing his cane. “Do you know the biggest advantage of being blind?” he asked and answered immediately. “Blind don’t need light, so my utility bills are way lower.” He laughed at his own joke only to be interrupted by his assistant carrying a tray of aromatic coffee poured in two small porcelain cups. Amazing how the very idea of drinking coffee instantly changes your mood before you even take your first sip. As I was readying to go on a pre-scripted monologue of expressing my gratitude and honor, Borges jumped right into the action. “I will get right to it, Senor Navaro. About you being here and about me remembering you. I know you have many questions. I will attempt to answer some. Some, but not all. When you leave this hotel, there will still be some questions that you will have to find answers to. On your own.” He gently picked his cup of coffee and with hand somewhat shaking, took an artistic sip. Yes, I had questions. So many that my brain membranes were buzzing in bewilderment and disbelief. Here I was, sitting in the room with one of the greatest writers, who happened to mysteriously know my name and “Have you by any chance read my ‘The Book of Imaginary Beings?’” asked Borges. I have. Many times. I read it in Spanish, when it just came out. Very recently I bought the English translation in some shabby bookstore off Oxford Circus. I read that book far too many times, but never in its entirety, mostly starting on a random page. Just as Borges had intended it to be consumed by his readers. “You see, Senor Navaro, that book was, and perhaps still is, a never-ending work in progress as human imagination has no boundaries. I have included what I had researched over ten years ago, then recently expanded and republished with more figments of collective human imagination. But the book is merely a small subset. In a way, the book writes itself. In some form, it’s a labyrinth, an endless one, a living one, where every corridor and every room is never the same. What I had always wanted is the book to reflect the labyrinth in our collective subconsciousness, the force that drives our minds to craft. For that reason, all the creatures in my book are strictly fictional. Mythical. Am I not boring you?” “Not at all. I understand, Senor Borges.” He nodded and wiped a coffee grind off his nose. “That book, as its title implies, is all about imaginary beings. Tales, legends, folklore. But one thing that no one knows is that I had originally intended this book to include one more being. A being that goes by its Latin name Quietus Est. It appeared and disappeared across many cultures, sometimes centuries apart. Very little is known of it, but what I found was indeed astonishing. First, this being is physically no different than an ordinary human. You may say, it is human in many ways. As I studied this entity, I became more and more agitated. I could not stop. Like a madman, I was trying to learn more and more, but very soon the excitement turned into another feeling. Fear.” “Fear of what, Senor Borges?” Borges eyesight shifted from the corner of the room straight on me, as if he could perfectly see me. “Fear of what I had uncovered. That Quietus Est is not a myth at all.” He attempted to take another sip, but his hands started shaking, so he had to put the cup down, spilling some of it on the saucer and around the table. “Pardon me, young man, I am trying to maintain composure. But you have not tried the coffee”, he said wiping his mouth and forehead with a knitted handkerchief. I raised the small cup and took a sip, disregarding the aromatic fumes of Colombian beans drifting down my internal gorges. “Pardon me sir, but you are saying that the imaginary being called Quietus Est was not imaginary. Is that why you decided not to include him in your book of imaginary beings?” “Only in part. Fear came from the realization of what it would mean for mankind to know about its existence. You see it’s no secret that we are all well aware of our eventual demise. We all die. But imagine what would happen if we all stared right into the face of death every single day of our lives and knew the time that was left for us in this world. Death not as a vague concept portrayed by middle-aged artists, not as a folklore tale of a grim reaper. But as a real living entity that stalks you and walks around showing you a ticking clock counting down minutes and seconds. Getting closer to you with every second, trying to grab your hand. Running from death is worse than death itself.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “But I shall talk no more. Allow me to give you my scribbles from years ago. These are unedited in their raw format, so please pardon the poor language. It’s right there, in the drawer. You will find a folder with a yellow piece of paper. Read it aloud, while my ripe old body attempts to catch a breath.” I opened the drawer, as he instructed, and found a yellow piece of cursive handwritings carved in Spanish with some Latin phrases. The scribbles were short, less than a page long with marks and scratches, but most of this was very much decipherable. He must have written this himself half-blind, I thought. What caused him to do that and not dictate to his assistant? I unfolded the paper and began reading. Quietus Est It is said that one shall not know about its own ways and times of demise. The imminent passing is only felt by those that are either terminally ill, and even so, they don’t possess the knowledge of when and where, or by death row inmates awaiting the exact day and time of their execution. Lack of such knowledge coerces us to exist. Sumerians believed in a certain deity (the word “deity” was scratched and replaced with “demon of death embodied in human flesh and bones”, which again was scratched and replaced with “entity”), whose sole role was to stalk its victims and inform them of how much time they have left to live. Per the ancient “Book of Dead”, which was discovered as a set of clay tablets, typically buried in corpses, only those that are “luminous” can see the deity (again crossed out twice, replaced with “demon”, then with “entity”). The “luminous” ones are thought to be either people with high spiritual powers or vice versa, the cursed ones, condemned by priests. The reference briefly reappears in some Egyptian manuscripts, but in later writings is replaced by Anubis or – in rare occurrences – by Horus. The writings again depict this unnamed being as an eternal human who never sleeps, but always wanders. What’s strange is that neither Sumerians nor Egyptians ever gave the entity a discrete name. However, the latter rare findings during Dark Ages refer to him as Quietus Est. The only depiction of Quietus Est was that of an ordinary human standing next to a sun clock, which was used to measure the time that the chosen one had left to live. From time to time Quietus Est stalks the chosen one and, when cornered, moves hands of the clock forward to shorten the lifetime. If the chosen one cannot escape, then his time eventually runs out. The very last reference was found in “Enough, Mr. Navaro. You understand the idea. Now on to the main question. Why are you here?” He drew closer, and a dull shadow from a lamp cut right through his elongated forehead. “Quietus Est is an eternal wanderer who is always with us, the timekeeper who sits at the edge of the stage with a ticking watch on his wrist. The greatest gift given to mankind is its inability to see him. When I lost sight, I thought blindness was a blessing in disguise. But one does not require eyes to see the wanderer. What eyes cannot see, ears can hear and skin can feel. I hear him. I feel him. You are here, Mr. Navaro because you and I are the luminous ones…” Borges paused and asked me with a trembling voice: “Mr. Navaro, you saw him too, didn’t you?” Cold shivers that have been accumulating in my lower back rushed up my spinal cord in millions of explosions. Nausea formed a massive ball of air in my throat, and for a moment I struggled to breathe. Desperately trying to cease the thumping inside, I pushed words out. “I saw him today.” * * * * * * How do you get used to the notion of being a passerby on this Earth? Ordinary humans do not have to get used to that. We have that built-in protection layer, that safety cork in our brain membranes that separates the realization of being mortal from flooding down upon us. It allows us to breathe the air. It lets us exhibit this extraordinary, yet sacred carelessness. The mental block that denies the laws of life on a primitive emotional level even for the keenest scholars. The indecipherable Tetragrammaton is shown to us in every step we take, in every cup of Colombian coffee we sip, in every word of wisdom that we collect from books. Every second we bypass the sinister tick-tock and hear the name of the God being whispered into our ears. And yet we, humans, turn around and whistle “Shame Shame”, deceiving our own self-cognizance. And that, as Senor Borges called it, is the true blessing. Those who possess the name of the divine being are doomed. Knowledge is madness. Knowledge is inexistence. Knowledge of death is worse than death. We sat in his hotel room until early morning, the two luminous and doomed souls. Our casual exchange of words was amplified by the ticking of the clock. It was dawn when I noticed Borges nodding in his sleep. His left hand was still resting on the cane and his pupils were shuffling behind shut eyelids. Borges was dreaming. So must have I. As I was exiting the foyer of the hotel, I hid behind the column and looked around the street. It was empty. Bleak light of street lamps drew strange crossbeams on pavements. Early October leaves were gyring in closed circles like witches around the fire. I was looking around, hoping to not see him. He wasn’t there. But he was. I felt his presence not very far from me. * * * * * * Muscat orchards – they resonate inside like echoes of a guitar string heard from a deep alcove, but nothing particular comes to mind. I am trying to shift focus from one object to another, but my nomad memory is lost in endless labyrinths. You took my memories away from me, didn’t you? Wait, mortal. Wait five more minutes, and you will know the answer, I hear in my brain. He is talking to me now. I can see how the long uphill walk is wearing him out. But what are pain and tiredness when you’re crossing the finish line? As Borges warned me, “Do not ever come close to him. Do not look him straight in the eyes. He will always be near. His watch will be ticking. If he attempts to catch on, run. But he will forever follow. In a way, he will be like a shadow of you.” And I ran. And he wandered. I evaded. He followed. He came too close to me in my hotel room on the second day after my long night in Borges’ quarters. The fool in me still thought that escaping from him would be as easy as moving into a new flat. Or checking into a hotel. So I did just that. It was some shabby hotel minutes from my work where I decided to spend a few nights just to think things through. That evening, and I remember every minute of it, was my first face to face encounter with him. My room, B6, was on the basement level. As I stumbled through the dark hotel corridor, trying to find the key to my room, I felt his presence, but my ignorant foolishness dismissed all mental warnings and turned the keys. As the door hinge squeaked, I took my first step into the hotel room. A street-level window was casting two thick yellow streaks of light on the floor carpet. I smelled dust and spider webs. He was in my room. Sitting on the edge of the bed with a rope in his hand. A thin white blanket was covering his head like a shroud around a statue. I stood in a stupor like a paralyzed insect. An avalanche of sweat gushed from every pore of my body. With hand twisted behind my back, I was feverishly trying to twist the doorknob. He got up from the bed with a groan. He took a step towards me. Hand too sweaty to turn the knob. Open it. Open! He grabbed my wrist. Open! Run! The stretched corridor of the hotel basement flashed like random shots of a silent movie. Run! B5. B2. B1. Run! Staircase. Up! Exit! Run! “Your time is coming, Fernandez Augustin Navaro!” a whisper crawled into my ears. “Coming, coming!” hissed the wind. I ran until my legs gave in. I fell down somewhere in the outskirts of the town, passing out in an alley amidst rubbish until sunup. My madness has begun. In the days following my first face-to-face encounter with Quietus Est, I’ve moved out of my London flat. I had some savings, enough to tramp town to town, continent to continent, doing temp jobs here and there, sometimes sleeping on streets. He was right behind me. Even if I didn’t see him for a month, I knew he would soon catch on. It would be only a matter of time for him to pop up somewhere on the opposite side of the street, in the next car over on the subway, or madly prying through shutters of windows in the house across. My attempts to speak to Borges were futile. How does the blind master live with this curse, I wondered. How does he manage to evade his sinister follower? I had questions. Far more than I had anticipated. But Senor Borges was already on the other side of the globe. I wrote him letters. He never replied. I tried calling hotels where he stayed. Unavailable. The books that he wrote, I bought all of them in attempts to find hidden meanings. What if he had secret messages for me inside his writings? The Book of Sand, Dr. Brodie’s Report I even searched his earlier writings, analyzed every word. Pointless. Futile. Until 1983. “Shakespeare’s Memory.” His final book, as it turned out to be. I was somewhere in Eastern Europe when I bought the book. Immediately I began my scrupulous study. Letter by letter, page by page, analyzing every space and every punctuation sign. And that’s when I found it. The answer. The answer was the story itself. The story that did not require much study or decryption. All I had to do was read it. I knew I had to come face to face with Quietus Est like Borges did, but not before having to go through the life of an exile. That’s what Borges had intended me to do. Such was his final and only message to me embodied within his last story. A story written for the public, but intended for my eyes only. The story was that the protagonist receives memories of Shakespeare. Memories that overwhelm him, overpowering his own. He forgets modern day cars and engines, instead remembering faces and names from some distant past, memories he has never known. Memories that belonged to another man. “In a way, he will be like a shadow of you,” Borges told me that night. Slowly but surely, my shadow was becoming me. That’s why I can only vaguely remember you, my childhood home. Him or me, no more running. It ends here. * * * * * * Few more minutes, I say to myself as I look at the watch. There he is. He is out of breath. Beaten, tired and bent by the weight of his own arid body. One last push, old man, and we will meet. I am hiding behind the rock. His footsteps on gravel and sand, I can tell them from any other footsteps in the world. His breathing, wheezing and crackling. I am counting to five. He knows where I am, but he is too tired to take that last step. Let me take that step for you. I am staring at his face, wrinkled like leaves of an ancient scroll. “Time’s up, Quietus Est,” I am telling him. He is not fighting back, and my Swiss blade finds a comfy spot below his Adam’s apple. I am going to finish him now. Popping sounds are coming out from his flabby throat. What are you trying to tell me, old man? Let me hear your last words. I am easing the pressure to let him talk. But the sounds that come out not words, but laughter. “You, you are confused,” he says. “You’ve got it all wrong. Let me, let me help you understand.” I am letting him sit up. He is coughing blood. One wrong move and he’s dead. He wipes the blood off his lips and nods in understanding. “All my life I have followed you,” he begins slowly. “It’s a miracle I have come this far and lived this long. Ever since I left Cordoba, I was a ticking time bomb. I was diagnosed as suicidal. Doctor after doctor, therapies, specialists, prescription, yoga – I have tried them all. Some helped for a while, and the disease subsided, but then trolled back with a new stronger wave. It’s this disease that nests here” – and he points to his head – “forcing me to look for a way to end my own life. It all began in London, on that morning when I was sitting on the bench in the middle of that square, feeling the disease gnawing on my brain. My first attempt was in that hotel, room B6. I sat on the bed in that dark room for hours with a rope in my hand and a blanket over my head. Death opened the door and stood above me in the darkness of the room. Oh, how I wanted my pain to end! But it was not meant to be. Not then, not there. I had to live on. Ever since that day, it was a cat and a mouse game between us. I chased death, and death would always slip away. Until now.” He pauses, rubbing his flabby neck, then points his finger down the valley and continues: “I was born in that house. I remember every moment of my childhood. My parents, my toys, my school. I remember playing hide and seek with my cousins in Muscat gardens and dosing off to Sunday clergy in that white chapel. I remember Eastern rugs being washed on the street and the smell of grapes. My name is Fernandez August Navaro. And you, you have no true name, but they call you Quietus Es

22 minutes

January 24, 2017

Beings and Entities

The Living History Project

Christine O'Neill, deaths, diaries, dying, history, letters, memories, military, projects, radios, recordings, school, students, suicides, teachers, technology, war, war stories, wars

One of my least favorite parts about being a middle school history teacher is the bullshit “Living History” assignments we give at the end of every school year. Kids are supposed to sit with their grandparents and video tape, voice record, or transcribe their oldest memories for posterity (and for an easy way to bring up their GPA). I have been doing this for seventeen years, and when I collected the projects this time around, I assumed they would be as dull, if not duller than usual. This had not been a particularly bright class. So I went home, poured myself a glass of wine, and prepared for a long night of “I only owned two pairs of pants when I was your age” and “My brother got beat with a newspaper for hitting a baseball into a neighbor’s yard.” And of course, these projects were peppered with innocent, old-person comments that were so horribly sexist and racist you just had to laugh. Now, I had a girl in my class whom I will call Olivia. She was pudgy, quiet, and proved herself a consistent B student. I expected her project to be as unremarkable as her, and perhaps that’s why I was so profoundly disturbed by what I witnessed that night. Olivia had submitted two discs for some reason, so I began with the one marked “interview.” My screen hiccuped twice before a grainy image of a living room came into view. The place was a hoarder’s hell. Olivia was curled up in an armchair clutching a notebook and looking like a scared animal. Across from her sat a man with a somber countenance, smoking a cigarette and staring at her expectantly. “Go ahead,” a woman’s voice whispered from behind the camera. Olivia’s owlish eyes flashed towards the screen, then back to the man. “I am here with my Great Uncle Stephen,” she began almost inaudibly. “He is going to tell us about his oldest memories from being in the army.” Great Uncle Stephen looked like he’d rather be in a goddamn trench at the moment, but he waited patiently for the questions to begin. Not surprisingly, Olivia read verbatim from the suggested questions sheet I had handed out to the students. He answered her curtly. Once or twice I heard her mother whisper “Speak up, Olivia” from behind the camera. Typical, boring shit. So I was intrigued when Olivia set down the notebook and asked, “Did you like being in the army?” That was totally off-script. Great Uncle Stephen emitted a chain smoker’s wheeze. “Nope. Glad to get out of my town though.” “Where did you go?” “Balkans.” “Uh-huh,” she said. I doubted she knew what the Balkans were, and my suspicion was confirmed when she asked, “Was Baukiss very different from here?” “Yes.” Mom cleared her throat from behind the camera, perhaps encouraging Great Uncle Stephen to be a little more forthcoming. But Olivia seemed genuinely interested. “Uncle Stephen,” she asked, “what is your very worst memory from the army?” The old man crushed his cigarette in the ashtray and then slowly lifted himself out of his chair. “I’ll be back,” he mumbled. The camera cut off. When the screen flashed back on, everything was the same except Great Uncle Stephen had several pieces of paper in plastic sleeves laid atop all the crap sitting on his coffee table. One, he held in his hand. “I was a kid when I enlisted,” he said, looking at Olivia. “Your brother’s age,” he told her. Olivia nodded. “I never saw combat. Both of my deployments were to cities in Eastern Europe that had been destroyed by civil wars. Everything was a mess. I felt like a janitor for fuck’s sa-” “Ahem!” Mom coughed. Great Uncle Stephen sighed and looked at his paper. “My unit was assigned to a school that had been obliterated by all the violence. Broken windows, caved-in rooms – and for some reason, the part that got to me the most was that the school had been like this for years before we got there. No one had lifted a finger to fix it. I saw kids walk by it on their way to go beg for money or whatever shit they did-” The camera dipped towards the floor as I heard Mom whisper harshly at Great Uncle Stephen. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. “Do you want to hear this goddamn story or not?” I heard him bark in response. “Then you better let me tell it how I want.” “Mom,” Olivia chimed. “Please stop interrupting.” “Are you presenting this in front of the class?” “No, Mom, we’re just handing it in to the teacher.” “I’m sure he’s heard the word shit before,” Great Uncle Stephen contributed helpfully. I wasn’t a “he” as a matter of fact, but other than that the statement was accurate. The camera was lifted and after a couple of blurry focus adjustments, the shot was the same as before. “Ahh, I’m talking too much anyway,” he grumbled. He lifted the piece of paper in his hand close to his face. “In the basement, I found this letter. I didn’t know what it said but I had a buddy of mine translate it. So I’m gonna read it now. And then I’ll tell you what I saw in that basement.” A chill ran down my spine. Mom zoomed in to Great Uncle Stephen and his letter. His palsied hands trembled as he held up the paper. This is what he read: Dear Sir, I never loved my country. So many of these skirmishes are born from patriotism, a power struggle for the shards of a once-great empire, but I do not care what name my home has on a map. This fighting is senseless and I stay as far away from it as I can. It was not these attacks and disorganized violence that took the lives of my wife and child. It was illness. Mercifully, it happened quickly for the baby. Nadja suffered for longer. I watched in horror knowing I could do nothing for them. My only solace is that I was there for them every step of the way. I stopped going to work one day, and no one came after me. I doubt they noticed I was gone. Since the school was simply across a field, visible from my window, it would have been easy to go for a few hours each day and come home quickly to care for them. But what was the point? All I did was clean floors. I was as useless to the world as I was to my family. I tried to take Nadja to the hospital, but the journey was too long and taxing. I brought her home and she died that night. After Nadja and the baby were gone… well, I don’t remember much. I didn’t leave my hovel, barely ate and slept, thought many times of taking my own life. Tempting though it was, I felt paralyzed by my own helplessness. The one thing that kept me sane was my radio. I never turned it off once. Even though I didn’t listen to the words being said – in fact, the channel I got the clearest was in English (I think) which I don’t speak a lick of. But the voices, the music, and the true knowledge that life existed beyond this violent city sustained me. I have no idea how much time passed before I saw the light of day again. I was dizzy from hunger, so finding food was my priority. My radio came with me, of course. Since I first holed myself up, it has gone everywhere with me. It talks to me as I sleep and as I wake. I don’t know what it’s saying, but I know I would die without it. Once I had some water and food, it occurred to me that the only thing left to do was go back to work. So I did. The following morning, I simply returned to the school where I was a janitor and got back to work. Nobody made a big deal out of it. Like I said, Nadja had been sick for a long time, and those who worked at the school knew it. I appreciate that no one had pestered me to come back to work during the hardest days of my life. The teachers never said much to me, but we smiled at each other in the halls and that mutual respect was perhaps the reason I decided to come back at all. The place had gone to the dogs without me, so I simply grabbed my broom and rags from my closet and set to cleaning. Everyone is grateful to have me back, I know. And the best part is that nobody minds my radio. I bring it with me everywhere and keep the volume low enough not to disrupt the students. No one has ever complained. In fact, I suspect they like it. The schoolhouse is not very big, but does require a lot of maintenance. The floors are always sticky and stained, so I spend most of my time mopping. Kids make messes – I guess that’s why I’m still in business. Sometimes I have to move things around to make sure I get every spot on the floor beautiful and clean, but I take pride in that. And the repairs! The school always needs tune-ups here and there, and I am happy to help. Some days I’m reconstructing a desk that broke as I whistle along with the radio, other times I handle more serious, structural issues. Days when I have work like this, I feel truly instrumental, like a cog in a larger machine. How could this school survive without me? It took me a long time, but I once again feel that I have purpose. There is a larder behind the school that is full of preserved food. In lieu of payment, I am allowed to take as much food as I need. That arrangement is fine – what would I do with money anyway? I used to bring the food back to my home, just one field away from the school, but when I started sleeping in the basement no one seemed to notice. This school is special to me and I cannot leave it unguarded. When I am besieged with memories of my wife and baby, I turn up the volume on the radio to drown out such thoughts. It works for me every time. Except this morning. Because this morning, I woke up to dead silence. I frantically examined the radio to see what had happened. I honestly cannot tell you how many days in a row I have been using it. Did it simply live out its life and die naturally? I have spent the entire day trying to fix it. Most of this time, I have been crying. I am losing my mind without it. I have given myself until sundown. If I cannot fix it by then, I am going to take my life. I am writing this because the sunlight is starting to die and I know what my fate shall be. I have thought about taking one last walk through the halls of my school, saying goodbye to the students and teachers. I know I will be missed. But I cannot bring myself to leave this room. I cannot go anywhere knowing that my radio is dead in here. There are no more tears in me. It feels now like I can’t catch my breath. I vomited what little food I had in my stomach and I am growing dizzy again, like I did after Nadja died. I am not long for this world. But before I take my life, I have closed the door to this room and stuck a chair beneath the handle. It is the only room in the basement and has a small casement that lets in just enough light for me to see what I am doing. If anyone is kind enough to come looking for me, they should not be met with this gruesome sight. Perhaps they will see the door is blocked, smell my rotting body, and simply forget I ever existed. But I have placed both my radio and this note outside the door. Kind sir, if you are reading this, I have one humble request: please fix it. Save my radio. It did not deserve to die in its sleep and I am ashamed that I cannot revive it. Now I am ready to join Nadja and little Ludmilla in heaven. I hope this school can find another janitor who loves and cares for it the way I do. The hour is now. Do not forget my radio. Stanislav When Mom zoomed back out, Olivia had tears in her eyes. “Thank you for sharing, Uncle Stephen,” Mom said, her voice choked. “I think we have enough.” “Wait!” Olivia chirped. “He said there’s more. What did you find?” Before Great Uncle Stephen could open his mouth, the image disappeared. My jaw dropped. Was that it? What did Great Uncle Stephen see? I promptly remembered that there was a second disc. This one was unmarked, but I hoped it contained the rest of the interview. There was no video, only audio. The voice that started up was Olivia’s. “Hi, Miss Gerrity. I’m sorry about my mom, but she refused to record the rest of what my uncle was saying. But I asked him to continue and secretly recorded the story as a voice memo on my phone. I remember you said earlier this year that history is written by the people who win wars.” She sucked in a breath and commenced crying. “But everyone’s history is important, even if they are sad, pathetic people and even if they never won a single thing in their life. I haven’t slept through the night since I finished this project, but you have to hear what my uncle has to say.” There were tears in my eyes, too. The sincerity of her words was beautiful. I was also flattered that she had remembered some trite phrase I threw around because it was what my history teachers said to me. Before I got too sappy over it, the audio began again. “Fine,” came Mom’s frustrated voice. “If you want to hear the rest of the story, fine, but this is not appropriate for a school project.” “Let me finish,” Great Uncle Stephen snapped. “If it’s too much for you, help yourself to a snack in the kitchen. But Olivia wants to know what happened.” I heard her mother mumble something and walk away. Olivia and her uncle were alone. I imagined her looking at him expectantly. “So did you find the radio? Or did it get ruined when the school got blown up?” He rasped and I heard the distinct click of a lighter. “That letter,” he began slowly, “had a date on it.” “What date?” she inquired hungrily. “It was dated two weeks before we started rebuilding the school.” “Didn’t you say the school had been destroyed like two years ago?” “Yes,” replied Great Uncle Stephen. “It had been.” There was silence as I felt goosebumps on my arms. The images that came to my mind were almost too overwhelming to express, but Great Uncle Stephen put them into words effortlessly. Clearly he had spent his whole life thinking about it. “This man, this Stanislav, went to a vandalized, falling apart schoolhouse and cleaned up blood and rubble like it was spilled drinks and dust. He smiled at dead bodies in the hallway and believed they were smiling back at him because they liked his radio. He moved around corpses so he could sweep the ground under them. The roof was half collapsed, so when it rained, he must’ve gotten soaking wet but was so oblivious that he didn’t even feel a thing.” I could hear Olivia crying steadily. “I found the larder he was talking about. It was all pickled, preserved food that probably tasted like shit. Most of the stuff was moldy.” “Did – did you see the dead body?” “Yes. Hanging from the ceiling, but still amazingly… lifelike. He wasn’t rotting away. This hadn’t happened years ago.” “Did he look peaceful?” she asked, a chord of desperation in her voice. “Couldn’t tell you. The smell was rank, and his face was blue and his eyes were bulging. Like this.” I imagined him demonstrating. “And the radio?” Olivia wept. I heard Great Uncle Stephen take a long drag of his cigarette. “It was there, alright. And it was still on.”

10 minutes

April 25, 2019

Artifacts and Objects, Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Historical Fiction, Journals and Diaries, Locations and Sites, Military and Warfare, Strange and Unexplained, Technology, the Internet, and the Deep Web

I Found a Letter From My Stalker

messages, MinisterofOwls, mutilations, notes, stalkers

I found this note, nailed onto a tree on my front lawn. I really don’t know how to describe it. I’ll just let you read it yourself. [Note start] I saw you today. It was your birthday. You didn’t see me. You hardly ever do these days. Your skin looked so nice and healthy, and your eyes, they were the most beautiful I’d ever seen them. You’ve grown so much. I remember how different you used to look when you were younger. I remember the day I first met you. It was four years ago. I was sitting at my desk, head down, listening to the teacher rattling off names for attendance. The teacher called out a name I didn’t recognize, and a stranger’s voice answered behind me. Was there a new student? The teacher didn’t pause for a second, just continued calling out name after name. I turned my head to where the voice had come from. I saw you, a pale thing, so thin, your eyes so red, at a seat that should have been empty. I saw the fireflies flying around you, flickering. Dozens of them, never straying far from you. I saw them going through you, and coming out through your skin, like you were a mist to them. Can you believe I thought you were a ghost? No one else seemed to acknowledge the new stranger sitting at the back of the class. Class after class, hour after hour passed as I waited for something to happen. For someone to notice you, for you to leave, for you to let out a ghoulish scream and claw at me like in the horror story I was certain I was in. But nothing happened. Teachers came and went. My classmates laughed and slept, and you just sat there. The bell rang for recess. The other kids ran to their mundanities for the day, leaving me and you together in the empty classroom. You stood up and pulled a chair from the desk next to you, making it face your desk. You turned your head to me and spoke. “Well, you’re slow today. Come on. Ask me your questions.” I don’t know why I didn’t run away screaming at that moment. Probably would have turned out better for me in the long run, but let’s not speculate. I guess, at that point in my life , I was pretty bloody lonely. I figured there was only a 50-50 chance you’d eat me and the other 50 was that someone wanted to talk with me. Kid priorities don’t make sense to me either these days. So I went along with the flow. I walked over to your desk, sat down on the chair you pulled for me, and asked my question. What were you? You told me you didn’t know. You said that once you were a child, just like me, with parents and friends. You used to go to the same schools as me. Then, one day, one ordinary day, when you were ten, you just woke up and you were like this, covered in fireflies and no one could remember you the moment they concentrated on anything else. No one, not even your parents. You told me of how I’d notice you, every day. How I’d think of you until recess every day. How I’d come to you every day. How we would talk, every day. How we would meet for the first time, every day, for the last three years. About how I’d forget the instant I walked out of the room. How everyone would forget you. How the fireflies would make them. How for the last three years, you’d been alone. Your story was very hard to believe. So I didn’t. I asked what reality prank show I was on. You looked, well, unimpressed, and asked me to continue telling my story. I was caught off guard by the non sequitur. You said last time I was here, I was telling you a story, a horror story about a haunted house. As you detailed the story, goosebumps prickled my skin. It was a story I’d been making up in my head. A story I hadn’t told anyone yet. At that moment, a million reactions were open to me, all simultaneously adequate and inadequate. But the only thing that seemed proper was to finish the story for you. So I did. Halfway through, you interrupted me to ask if my mother had recovered from her sickness yet. I had to shake my head, a bit ashamed at the fact that I shared this private matter to a stranger. The story ended a few minutes before recess. My next class was in another room. You told me to go. Your steadiness took me back. You seemed so… accepting of your fate. Like you’d already gotten used to the idea of being forgotten forever. I was a kid back then. I wasn’t a particularly smart kid, and I was probably on the onset of a crush. So you can excuse what I did next as an example of my childhood stupidity. I grabbed my scissors, pressed it against my arm’s skin, and dug in. As it drew blood, I pushed it forwards, till the cut formed the shape I wanted. Letter by letter, I carved your name onto my arm. Just so you know, I don’t regret that. Don’t get me wrong, kid power might have made me do it, but it sure as hell didn’t make the pain go away. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. But even then as a kid, I thought what was happening to you was unfair. I remember how your eyes looked when you saw that. The confusion. How strange it was for you that anyone would want to remember. I remember that look so clearly. When I woke up the next day and saw your name on my arm, I remembered you. I didn’t forget. That day, for the first time, we had a conversation that wasn’t so one-sided. You said no one had ever done anything like that before and suggested I might have a mental illness. I won’t deny it, that drew a little blood. As we talked, a creeping thought came into my head: Did you prefer it when I didn’t remember? That night, I was sitting up on my bed, staring at your name on my arm, wondering if I should cover it up so I couldn’t see it and give you back your privacy, when I heard a crash. I looked up to see my bedroom window shattered and a dirty rock on my floor. I looked out of the cracked window, to see a dark figure on my lawn. You were outside yelling, about how we should hang out. It took me a while to get used to how bad you were at talking to people. Years without practice, made you quite a bit rusty. That was all right. We had a lot of time. For the next two years, we spent most of our free time together. Most of the time, we talked. You’d tell me an aspect of your life and how you lived. You still stayed in your old house. Your parents never noticed the food that had gone missing, never noticed the extra room, or that you’d stolen the extra keys. One night, I confided in you that I was beginning to think you were a part of my imagination, Fight Club style. After all, what could you do to me that I couldn’t do to myself? You spent the next month or so trying to leave bite marks on my ear or neck, to prove a point. I still have a few scars on my ear, so I guess you did. Looking back, I could see the warning signs even then. Your skin seemed to get worse and worse, paler and paler, and you’d rubbed your eyes raw. It was in winter we had our wakeup call. The morning began like any other. I woke up, brushed my teeth, and started searching for clothes to wear. It was a winter morning, and my room was dark, so I didn’t see your name on my arm. The cold sent shivers through my body, and pulled out a long sleeve jacket. A small bell rang in my head. Don’t you usually roll your sleeves up? Yeah, and why did I? That was annoying. I finished tidying up and headed to school. On the school bus, I felt oddly content, like something I’d been worrying about had just… disappeared. I walked up the school stairs, down the hall, through my classroom door, and sat down at my desk. The same feeling of a burden forgotten hounded my mind. What was I forgetting? When recess came, I just sat at my desk, while my classmates ran out. It felt like a ritual, but I didn’t know what for. I was contemplating just walking out to join them, when I heard it. It was something small in the wind, like a whisper, but it came over and over, incessant. It sounded like my name. I knew this was strange, that this was worth my attention, but I felt oddly calm. Everything would be alright, everything would be fine. Just ignore it. I sat there at my desk, my mind a war zone between two conflicting, contradictory voices, when I felt a force tugging on my sleeve. The moment I noticed this, my jacket sleeve tore open. I saw your name on my arm, and then your hand that had ripped my jacket open. You’d been yelling at me for over 20 minutes. I think that was the moment we realized how on edge our friendship really was. One accident away from complete erasure. We spent most of the next year in the town library together, trying to find out what the fireflies were. It wasn’t really a problem for me. Because of my mother’s treatment, my family couldn’t afford to go on any trips, and our house didn’t have heating anymore, so I was happy to spend my time with you. Trying to find information was a puzzle in and of itself. After all, how would I read about people I couldn’t remember and how would you find out who was special when no one could even remember enough about them to record them? We found our old family trees and records. Individually, we’d write down the name of everyone in the book on two lists, and then we would compare. The names I hadn’t remembered to write down, but you had, would become the focus. They were the names who were under the curse of the fireflies. We compiled a list of “suspicious” books. Books we thought could help us, because they were written by, or were about, the people we were searching for. I read the books, with the list of names side-by-side, reading it again for every page of the book. You scoured the internet on the library computers, on the lookout for articles about the people. Our search would lead us to the first glimpse we got of what was really happening to you. It was late at night when you found the picture. I was a bit drowsy at that time, and almost about to nod off when I heard a sharp intake of breath. I turned to see you standing up, pointing at the screen. I didn’t see anything. Well, anything noteworthy. On the screen was a picture of a clearing somewhere in the woods. You held up your piece of paper where you’d marked out two names. Susie Applebee-Reagan, 13. Terry Applebee-Reagan, 12. Siblings. For a moment, I saw the paper and the screen side-by-side. Side-by-side. And then I saw them. Two figures, emerging from the woods, towards the camera. They were almost humanoid, with the exception of their limbs, which stretched to nightmarish proportions. Their blank, white skin was that of a pure albino, and looked more like tree bark than anything you expected to find on a mammal. A cloud of fireflies surrounded the duo. The shorter one looked emaciated. I could see their rib cages, around which their… their eyes! God, their eyes! So small, so red. The taller one, with its white hair, didn’t look alive anymore. They were little more than skin wrapped around a skeleton. Fireflies swarmed out of the pair’s empty eye sockets. Both reached for the cameraman. I looked at the article surrounding the picture. It was a blog posted by a hiker, twenty years after the last mention of the two kids. The picture was a mystery to the cameraman as well. He’d been wanting to go to the woods pictured for a while now, but he never actually remembered going there. The picture had just appeared on his camera one day, out the blue. For a moment, I looked at your face. Your thin, pale face, with those red-veined eyes. Would that be you when my scar faded? Just a walking horror I’d glimpse, then forget? We worked through our reading list at a much faster pace starting from that moment. Maybe we should’ve gone slower. At least every book, every website we’d left untouched, promised hope. The books that we finished and tossed aside promised nothing but the clearing in the woods as one’s future. And we tossed aside a lot of books. I believe I tore through three-fourths of my reading list before I stumbled across the journal. Oh, God, that horrible, horrible journal. The journal used to belong to a mental patient, named Joey, who claimed to be a serial killer. He was locked up in an asylum when the police discovered his supposed victims never existed. He was ‘diagnosed’ with a need for attention, and shoved away. They should have electrocuted him. They should have fried him until his flesh melted and his hair burned. In the journal, he talked about how he carried out his killings. He knew things, bizarre and disturbing things no one else knew. He knew of strange creatures that lived in the woods. Of them, his favorites were the fireflies. I’m not going to tell you how he summoned these things. I trust you. I trust you more than anyone, but a thing like this belongs to the ground more than it ever will to the human mind. In the end, it’s sufficient to know that these things were not fireflies. Joey would start his ritual by taking a kid. Any kid, anyone he pleased. He could take them at any time, in the dead of night from their own homes, or in broad daylight from their front yards. It didn’t matter if he was seen. He’d take them to his house and drag them inside. Usually, an Amber Alert came up at that point. He didn’t care. Like I said, it wouldn’t matter soon. He’d drag them to a special room in his house. Here the fireflies would come and latch onto them. Now, nobody was searching for the kids. Not the police, not the parents. Nobody. From then on, he could do whatever he wanted to the kid. He’d get bored of them after a day or two, after the child had broken. At that point, he disposed of them. Hacksaw, kitchen knife, anything would work. He detailed a large pit of bodies he kept in the woods, swarming with bugs. One day, I guess he got bored of that too, so he went right to the police station and turned himself in. Not on account of guilt, no, no, no. He just wanted someone to know about the stuff he was doing. Sick bastard. Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. He never stopped killing kids. The asylum doors didn’t stop him from doing what he liked. It just made him improvise. He made a new way. He modified the flies, so they could survive without a host, just in a dormant state. When a child (he specified the age) would approach the swarm, it would latch on and begin its effect. Over the years, the child would warp horribly into the things we saw in the woods. I wish I could hate him in peace. I wish I could say the world owed him nothing. But that wouldn’t be true. He detailed a way out. On the final page, there was an exact explanation on how to get rid of the fireflies. You must have seen something in my face because, at that moment, you asked if had I found anything. I said no and closed the book. A few minutes later, you shut down the computer. You picked up the last book and went through it yourself. When you reached the end cover, you tossed it aside. I asked what we should do now. You said it was alright. I could go home. We’d talk about it in the morning. I stood up and walked past the shelves of books. I headed for the library entrance, but stopped right outside the door and waited. I waited until I heard the sniffling sounds. I sneaked back to our table, where you were quietly sobbing. You had your head in your hands. I sat back down, as you raised your eyes to me. You said you wished you’d never met me. How happy you were when you had nothing to lose. How I ruined your life. You’d never really gotten better at talking to people. That was the worst love confession I’d ever heard. I remember how we kissed that night. I remember your hands gripping my hair. I remember that kiss. I wish it could’ve been just a kiss. I’m sorry I ruined that moment. When my arms were around you, I was close enough to steal a firefly without you noticing. I remember holding the firefly in my hand. I remember how it struggled, until it didn’t. Until it was a part of me. The fireflies shifted. They came over to me, and left you. I remember the familiar look in your eyes. The confusion. I never wanted to see that confusion in your eyes again. You deserved to be loved and you deserved to know that. I wasn’t really living anyway. You reached for me. I pulled away, as the last lights of recognition faded from your eyes. And then you were just staring at a stranger, walking away into a crowd of strangers. That was a year ago. You’ve gotten so much better since then. You have so many friends now. So many people at your birthday party. You also look so much healthier. I haven’t been as fortunate. My skin’s gotten a lot paler, and my eyes hurt all the time now. I couldn’t go to school like you did all those years. I haven’t wasted my time though. I found Joey’s pit. The bodies, there were so many bodies. There’s a grave for those children now. Without me, my mom could afford her surgery. She looked so happy. Just yesterday, I saw her playing with my baby brother. I saw you crying yesterday. You were with your friends, laughing. For a brief moment, your eyes met mine, and then, they were so wet. I think I’m going away. For good, I think. You’re not going to be happy if I stick around. I’m so happy I met you, even if you don’t remember me. [Note end] Sometimes I go through depressive episodes. I feel so lonely, even with my friends. I don’t know what’s going through my head during these times, and sometimes I’d end up in a bath tub, a knife in my hands and my wrists bleeding. Until now, I thought I was cutting my wrists. I wasn’t. The cuts… they’re letters. I’ve been carving a name onto my arm.

12 minutes

January 6, 2019

Body Horror, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Strange and Unexplained

Don’t Let Them In

addictions, alcoholics, alcoholism, child abuse, childhood, children, domestic abuse, drug abuse, drugs, kids, Maddie Kate, mental illness, mothers, parents, substance abuse, suspense

Addiction took our mother slowly, rocked her through it and sung her to sleep sunk deep into the mattress on her bed. When her back teeth fell out, she left them on the side of the bathtub. I was seven, and I kept them in a matchbox, the missing pieces of her kept safe so that she wouldn’t be lost forever. So maybe one day we could put her back together. Our house fell around us, and we tried our best to raise ourselves. The ceilings had water damage, the bottom stairs had dry rot, and in the winters the radiators bled rust. But it was still our house, and Annie made it a home. My sister Annie mothered me, with lopsided Band-Aids on bruised knees and lukewarm microwave meals. She told me ghost stories and didn’t mind when I crawled into her bed later on, too scared to sleep alone. She taught me to dance, barefoot on the living room carpet, music channel on full volume on the TV shaking our preadolescent hips. She always let me shower first so that I could enjoy the hot water, and never complained when she had to make do with the cold. She brushed my hair every day before school, even when I screamed and hit her when she caught the tangles. Annie was dark-haired like her father, whoever he had been, but I was blonde. Annie was desperate to be blonde too, like Marilyn Monroe. Like Mom. I think she thought it would make them closer, remind Mom less of her dad. I’d give anything for her to have her hands in my hair one more time, even if it hurt. She moved to New York when I turned eighteen and never came back. I still dream about her sometimes. Keeping up with our mother was impossible, and we learned from a young age that we would always be left behind. It didn’t make it any easier. When she was drinking light, she was radiant and would wake us up at 3 am with pancakes dripping in cherry syrup. Sometimes when the weather was right, and she’d had enough being drunk alone, she would call our school up and tell them we had both come down with summer sickness, and we’d drive to the beach instead. I remember being nine years old in the backseat of the car coming home after one of our ocean days, sucking the salt from my fingers. Annie had just dyed her hair blonde, her best friend Jane helping her bend over our kitchen sink. From behind, I couldn’t tell who was the mother and who was the daughter, radio up and windows down, blowing the sky inside. When she was drinking heavily, she’d be out all night, hair piled up like a beauty queen, eyes glazed over and ringed with glitter and black. Sometimes she’d be gone a day or two. She would never give us advance notice; one day we’d just wake up to an empty house, with the fridge packed full and a post-it note on its door, complete with a smear of Mom’s lipstick in the outline of a kiss, telling us she’d be back soon. Sometimes she’d bring guys home, filling the table with beer cans and ashtrays, smoke up to the ceiling, Mom lost in the haze. We’d sleep with pillows over our heads, trying to drown out the music they would blast all night, and wake up to strangers at our kitchen table in the morning, asking us where we kept the coffee. When Mom drank too little, she fell apart. She wouldn’t buy food, and the refrigerator went bare. She’d chain smoke, leaving cigarette burns on the wallpaper up by the stairs like the walls were sick and decaying. She barely slept, walking around with blue half-moons under her eyes, knuckles raw. She would scream at the slightest thing. I remember once when I spilled a glass of juice on the couch. She looked over at me with dead eyes and dragged me off onto the carpet and then took every single cushion off the couch and into the back yard and set them on fire. Annie went to watch a while from the window and then sat next to me on the floor, backs pressed against the skeleton of the seats, head resting in the crater of my collar bones. It was the worst when Mom drank too much. She’d laugh too loudly and too long, at anything and everything, until her mouth started to shake and she began to cry into her cereal at the breakfast table. Annie shut down when Mom was like this, going somewhere deep inside herself where no one could hurt her. She’d stay up until the morning watching old black and white movies on TV, whispering the lines she knew by heart like prayers. When I was five years old, I’d cry when I’d find Mom passed out on her bed, sure she would never wake up. Annie would wipe my tears and tell me she was only sleeping, like the princesses in my storybook. We’d sit on Mom’s bed together and wait for her to wake up. When we were older, I was the one who would pick Mom up off the bathroom floor again and again, and Annie would put her to bed, smoothing her hair off her face, wiping the vomit from her mouth, and changing her clothes if she’d pissed herself. Watching them then, there was no doubt that Annie was the mother now. It was October, and I was thirteen, Annie sixteen. It was a Wednesday night and Mom had been gone for two days. She’d called us that morning from a payphone, voice slurring, telling us she was having the best time with all her new friends, and that she hoped we were doing fine. When she asked me if I was having a good birthday, I hung up on her. My birthday had been the day before. Annie had given me a pile of presents, strawberry lip gloss and glittery nail polishes. I didn’t ask where she’d gotten the money for them. I didn’t care. We’d taken the bus to the beach with Jane and ate the birthday cake she had made for me, sand getting into the frosting. It tasted like sweetness and the sea, and I savored every bite and scrape of sugar against my teeth. We watched the sun go down, Annie snapping grainy photos on her Nokia as I blew out my candles, wishing over and over that Mom wouldn’t come home, that she’d stay gone this time. But that Wednesday night, Annie and I weren’t speaking. Anger hung heavy between us, seeping through the floorboards. It began when she tripped at the bottom of the stairs. We’d both laughed, Annie throwing her head back, the gap between her front teeth catching the light. When I’d bent to pick her up, I felt her breath, warm against the freckles on my cheeks. I let go of her arms, and she fell again, hitting the floor and grinning, shaking her hair from her face. Her breath was heavy with whiskey. I couldn’t start picking her up too, couldn’t watch her fall again and again. Just like Mom, I knew she’d never get back up. I’d stared down at her, blonde hair hanging over her eyes, and all I could see was our mother. Then I was running, feet slamming the hallway like heartbeats turned loose. I’d run for the kitchen and tipped every bottle we had down the sink, shoving Annie back as she fought to stop me, catching liquor on her fingers as it fell. She grabbed my shoulders and made me drop the very last bottle. It smashed between us on the floor, glass shards shining like we’d dragged the stars out of the sky and broken them, like pieces we could never put back. Outside through the open windows, the sky turned pale gold, the clouds a mess of pink and cream smeared across the horizon. I cried then, watching my sister on her knees picking up the pieces. That was Annie, always trying to fix things even when it was too late. The smell of food dragged me from my room, my stomach turning traitor inside my ribcage. Annie was cooking pasta, real food not made in a microwave. She’d set the table, Tammy Wynette singing softly from the CD player, Annie gently swaying her hips as she stirred the tomato sauce, rich and warm. As we ate in silence, I forgave her more with every bite. Mom never cooked dinner, never remembered my favorite had been spaghetti since I was a kid, and never stayed sober long enough to sit up at a table. Annie wasn’t Mom. We were washing the dishes when we first heard it. A moth was crawling down the inside of the pane, and I cracked the window to let it out into the dark. From the backyard came a faint sound. I tilted my head to listen as it was coming from far off. Crying. I figured it was Mika, the two-year-old next door, having a tantrum loud enough for us to catch, or maybe even Lucky Strike, the cat that belonged to the junkies down the street, begging for food like he sometimes did. I always wanted to feed him when he came around, winding over my ankles, but Annie always stopped me, saying once you started giving they never stopped taking. Looking back, I don’t think she was talking about the cat. Annie flipped the Christmas lights strung up around the porch, and we sat on the plastic beach chairs watching the skies. When we were little, we’d sit outside, and Annie would tell me the names of all the constellations and the stories of how they came to be hung up in the night sky. I had to grow up before I realized she made them all up as she went along. It was a game we still liked to play now, making up ridiculous stories for the shapes we could pick out. “Ah, yes, that one there is the Coors Light. It got there when God dropped it out of his convertible window and never picked it up,” she said, nodding sagely and hiding her smile. “Of course,” I said, waving my hands and pointing up past the power lines. “Right next to The Ashtray, left there by angels on a smoke break.” “Yeah, they say if you wish on it, all your dreams will come true,” said Annie with a grin. Then she stopped laughing, and her voice grew quiet, face tilted up to all those dead stars. “Let’s wish, Emmy. Let’s wish.” So we did. The sound of wailing interrupted us. It was closer this time, and definitely human. We turned to one another in confusion. Annie shrugged, and I squinted into the black. It sounded like a baby, lost, tired and alone. “It must be Mika?” I said, slowly getting to my feet. “Maybe he walked around the back? Do you want to call Connie and tell her we’ll bring him over?” Annie didn’t reply. I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Okay, I guess I’ll do everything then.” I stepped off the porch, grass soft against my heels. The air smelled like it might rain, fresh and clean and growing. A promise unfulfilled. “Em.” Annie’s voice was strained. I turned to her with a smile. It died on my face when I saw the look on her own. “Em, get inside now.” She was staring out into the dark, past me, and opening the door with one hand behind her, fingers fumbling on the latch. I froze, barefoot in the dirt. I’d glimpsed what she was looking at. In the bushes by the back fence, someone was crouching with their knees tucked up neatly under his chin, and his arms wrapped around his legs. His mouth was agape, softly opening and closing as he cried. Like a child, lost in the dark. No – not like a child. More like someone pretending, mimicking the sound under cover of darkness. Suddenly they straightened their back, snapping upright, face still obscured by shadow. They were tall and slim, extraordinarily thin by human standards. Panic made me move, carried forward by animal instincts leftover from a time when people still lived in nature. I was faster than Annie, dragging her inside and slamming the door behind us, hearing it bounce on its hinges as I locked it. We watched as the person slowly approached the house with long, deliberate strides. Annie reached for my hand, holding me tight, and turned me to face her, holding my shoulders. “Don’t turn around, Emmy. Don’t turn around.” Instinctively I started to look over my shoulder into the gloom. Annie grabbed my face hard and shook her head. I knew then she was serious. “I’m…” her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat, gripping my hand tight enough to hurt, nails digging in, grounding herself. I looked down at our interlocked fingers, both of us born of the same bones. “I’m going to call the cops, and everything is going to be…” Her voice faltered, stuttering. Tears spilled over her lashes. Annie never cried. “Your phone’s on the porch,” she whispered, and bile crawled its way up my throat. Her phone was upstairs, charging. A soft, tap-tap-tapping filled the silence. Annie turned wide-eyed to the window. It was the sound of someone’s forehead slowly and repeatedly bumping against the glass. Then the blows accelerated, gaining in both speed and strength, skin meeting glass until they were slamming into the window hard enough to shake the panes. A moment later the tapping stopped, and I was about to ask Annie if I could look now, when she screamed, followed by the sound of cracking glass and a tremendous crash. Whoever was in our yard had just smashed their face hard enough into the window to shatter it. We ran up the stairs two steps at a time, skipping the rotted ones out of habit. I turned to look behind me once, and Annie yanked my face back before I could see. The sound of glass breaking echoed behind us as we made it to the bathroom and locked the door. A weak, mewling cry, like that of an infant calling for its mother, filled the hallway, trapped between the walls and entryways. Annie threw her back against the door, feet jammed up against the bathtub, clutching a knife she had grabbed from the kitchen. I joined her, shoulder to shoulder, and did the same. Slow footsteps started on the stairs, calculated and casual. The crying took on a mocking quality, resembling laughter, arriving in short, shrill bursts of sound followed by high-pitched giggling, and then silence, only to start again a moment later. The first door on the upstairs floor was my bedroom, and we heard the distinct sound of it slamming open. They were looking for us. “What the fuck is going on?” I asked Annie, not even bothering to brush away the tears that I couldn’t keep from falling. I watched my sister pick herself up off the floor and brace her hands on the door as we heard the sound of a second door slamming open. Mom’s room. The next room on the hallway was the bathroom. Annie pulled me to my feet and handed me the knife. I shook my head and pushed it back to her, terrified of what would happen if I had to use it. Annie shoved me and pressed the knife into my hands, thumb pressing hard enough along the edge to draw blood. I watched a winding road of crimson rivulets cascading down her wrist. In spite of the pain, Annie continued pushing the blade into my hands. Finally, I took it from her. Something slammed against the wall that Mom’s room shared with the bathroom. A high-pitched howl followed. I held my breath and felt my heart beating frantically in the base of my throat. “I’m gonna get the phone from my room,” my sister said. I shook my head dramatically in protest. Before I could say a word, Annie clamped a hand over my mouth. I could taste the blood on her hand, salty and sweet. Like birthday cake by the ocean. “Yes. I’m gonna get the phone, and I’m going to call the cops. We’re going to be okay.” I shook my head again. “It’s the only way,” Annie insisted. “When I go, I need you to lock the door, and I don’t want you to open it for anything or anyone. Not for me, not for… anyone. Promise me.” I shook my head, and Annie pressed her hand against my mouth, pushing my teeth against my lips so forcefully it made my eyes water. “Promise me, Em!” Something smashed in the room next door. Annie brushed the hair from my face and gently tucked it behind my ear. “Promise,” she mouthed, and unlocked the door as slowly as possible, the bolt scraping gently. I watched the curve of her shoulder disappear into the darkened hall, like the moon in eclipse. And then she was gone. I couldn’t move or breathe for a second, and then I slammed the bolt shut just as something bounced off the outside of the door. A high-pitched scream ensued, followed by the handle rattling up and down hard enough to pop a screw loose. I watched it roll toward me on the tiles. And then everything went still. I sat with my back to the door, holding the knife and wishing I was holding Annie’s hand instead. The silence continued. For a moment, the only sound was that of my breath slowly filling the room. A voice broke the illusion of solitude. “Em?” a familiar voice came through the door. Startled, I gripped the knife even more firmly than before. “Honey, what’s going on?” “Mom?” my voice cracked. “Momma, is that you?” I wrapped my arms around myself to keep from shaking. “Sweetie, it’s okay, just open the door. It’s okay, just let me in.” The handle rattled again, gentler this time. “Just let me in, it’s all okay.” She banged impatiently on the door, and I took my handle of the bolt. “Honey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I missed your birthday. I’m sorry I’m such a terrible mother. Please!” her voice broke, and she started to cry. “Just let me in, baby. I’m so sorry.” I screwed my eyes shut. She sounded so sad and so lost. I just wanted her to hold me as like she did when I was a kid, when I’d come in with a scraped knee after falling off the swings. Maybe this time she meant it. Perhaps it would all be okay. My hand found its way to the bolt again. My sister’s voice came through the door, warm and gentle. “Yeah, Emilie, let us in. It’s all okay.” My hand froze on the bolt, and I tightened my grip on my weapon. Annie never called me by my full name. A hand banged on the door, handle rattling. “Emilie, let us in!” Annie’s voice became low and guttural, followed by the same shrill giggles from before. Mom spoke now, pleading and crying, her voice growing louder and louder. “Let us in! Let us in! Let us in!” she shouted over and over again, punctuated by her fists on the door. I thought about bedtime stories, and all the demons and monsters we pray never crawl out from under our beds. “That’s not my sister, and you’re not my mother!” I screamed through the door, hands over my head. I climbed into the bathtub, curled into the fetal position, and clutched the knife to my chest. I didn’t know what it was outside that door, but I knew it wasn’t Annie. It wasn’t the voice that scolded me whenever I changed the TV channel, the one that sang me happy birthday, the one that told me I was smart even when I got bad grades, the one that read me stories about princesses that never wake up. It wasn’t human. Bangs and yells came from downstairs, followed by the footsteps of people running. A low, guttural howl ripped through the house, filling the room until I felt like I was drowning in the sound, and then the door was kicked in. I screamed, covered my eyes, and waited to die. A moment later arms found me, lifted me from the tub, and carried me from the room. I looked at the outside of the door as I was taken downstairs. Its exterior was covered in long, scraping claw marks, stretching to the floor. I found the hallway covered in the soft, downy remains of torn-up pillows, making it appear as if it had snowed indoors. I watched the tiny feathers drift slowly as men in uniforms checked each of the rooms that looked like they had been ripped apart by something feral. Outside, police cars and an ambulance waited in our driveway, and there, in the middle of it all, was Annie, bathed in blue and red light and glowing in the dark like a neon angel. I threw myself from the officer’s shoulders and ran to her. Then I held us both together, broken pieces and all, standing under all those constellations we’d concocted. Muffled screaming came from the ambulance, which rocked occasionally. Annie gently turned my head away, smiling so sadly it made my chest ache. I understood. It turns out there was no demon. No wild animal or bad men were trying to break in. It was just Mom, out of her mind on booze, drugs, and everything in between, coming to the end of a week-long binge. Something had finally broken inside her head, and this time we couldn’t put her back together no matter how hard we tried. Sometimes you fall one last time, and then never get back up. Annie had seen her rail-thin frame in the garden, blood dribbling from her mouth, track marks bulging on her forearms like unmapped roads, desperate for one more hit, one more fix. She’d searched the kitchen for all the alcohol I’d thrown away, and when she hadn’t found any, she went hunting for the stash hidden in the bathroom. She hadn’t wanted me, just the drugs on the other side of the door. She’d been so high she was able to mimic Annie’s voice nearly perfectly. The real monsters are the ones that eat you alive slowly, the kind that comes in a bottle or a needle, or at the end of a long list of reasons why you can’t get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes the monsters are the ones that raise you or love you the most. But it’s up to you to let them in.

13 minutes

May 28, 2019

Children and Childhood, Drugs and Addictions, Madness, Paranoia, and Mental Illness, Suspense and Thrillers

What Happens When the Stars Go Out

afterlife, deaths, feelspastas, Jesse Clark, life, love, marriage

The red lights are only making the pain worse. It is an immense, earth-shattering pain, in my midsection and in my head. I try to move, but I can’t; I try to speak, but I can’t do that either. It hurts too much, and my voice obeys me no more than do my joints or my muscles or my bones or my mind. And yet still there is movement. I can feel myself being lifted up and placed on something – a bed, maybe, or – no. A gurney. “Alright!” one of the EMTs says, and several others then roll me into the back of an ambulance, and climb in behind me. But I’m already fading fast, and feeling an inexplicable heat, by the time those doors are shut. One EMT, a blonde woman, shoots me a curious little look, just as I’m slipping away, and says aloud, “Wait. Wait, I think I know… ”…we’re made of that stuff, right?” I turned around. There was a woman there, red-haired and about my age, give or take, and she was alarmingly beautiful. But how long she’d been staring at the exhibit alongside me I had no idea. ”I’m sorry?” ”I said ‘you know we’re made of that stuff, right’?” She nodded at the museum wall, which depicted in detail the births and life cycle and deaths of stars. I pursed my lips. ”We’re… made of stars?” ”Yep. Isn’t it awesome?” She stepped up beside me and moved her arm across the diagram as she spoke. “I just watched a documentary about it last night. Stars are just fusion factories held together by their own gravity. They start off fusing hydrogen to helium, and then they keep going on and on, fusing heavier and heavier elements until they’re fusing the heaviest stuff. Then they exhaust their fuel and collapse under their own weight, and they blow off their outer layers and pretty much shower the galaxy with all these random elements, some of which are eventually used to create life.” ”Huh.” ”Yeah. I’m Robin, by the way.” She extended her hand, and I shook it. ”Uh, hey. Brian. Nice to meet you.” There was an awkward pause before I said, “Alright, I got one for you. If you replaced the sun with a black hole, what would happen?” ”Depends on its mass.” ”Nope! The answer is – drumroll please – nothing. I mean everything would get dark and cold, but we wouldn’t fall in. Earth’s orbit would remain entirely unaffected.” ”IF the black hole had the same mass as the sun.” ”What?” ”What you said would only be true if the black hole in question happened to have the same mass as the sun. Which it wouldn’t, because the sun isn’t massive enough to collapse into a black hole.” ”Oh. Damn.” ”Yep. Me one, you zero. Sorry, pal.” ”Alright.” I said. “You’re on. Whoever gets the most points by closing time buys drinks.” She smiled at that and punched me in the shoulder, just light enough not to sting. ”Alright, loser. Come…” “…on,” the EMT says. There is a flurry of activity around me, and there are voices, too, and blinding lights, and a cooling down of that monstrous heat. One of the paramedics is looking me over. Then he looks to another colleague – the blonde woman – and he shakes his head, slowly. “This one’s gone, Rachel.” But she continues running tests, running diagnostics, placing a soft hand on my arm in case I’m awake enough to appreciate the comfort. I am. Barely. But I’m fading fast, and that heat is coming right on back as I do. “Not yet he’s not,” she says. There’s pain in her voice that she does her fruitless best to conceal. “I already lost one earlier, Todd. I’m not losing…” ”… another one!” Robin said, and I laughed and agreed and we rushed to the back of the line. ”See? Told you you’d like Ferris Wheels. Can’t believe you’ve never been on one before today.” She shrugged. “Never thought they were as extreme as roller coasters, so I wasn’t interested.” ”Well they’re not supposed to be ‘extreme.’ Ferris Wheels are for all the parents waiting on their kids and sick people trying to relax their stomachs so they don’t puke funnel cake all over the pavement.” ”And adorable young couples, apparently.” And just then we were waved into the next seat. We sat ourselves down, and moments later the great wheel began to groan and protest and, finally, to turn; it dragged our cart around its underside and then lifted it up, up, up to the top of its crest, where we could see the whole city at twilight, and the ships in the harbor that were backlit red with the setting sun, and the clouds that were lined at their tops with just a little bit of starlight. Robin snuggled up next to me and put her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her waist. For a moment then I could’ve sworn the empty seat in front of us move on its own, and furrowed my brow. But then Robin spoke. ”Thank you for being here with me,” she said. I didn’t respond with words;I just kissed her on the head and held her tight, as the Wheel began taking us… “…down on the eighteen hundred block of Gardersdale,” one of the EMTs says. “Yeah. Yeah. Another one, I know. Hell of a fucking night, isn’t it?” The conversation is muffled again in short order. I’m drifting in and out, but the jostling of the room and the sound of an engine tell me we’re still in the ambulance. The other paramedics, for their part, continue running tests and checking my vitals, and as they work I try to remember what’s happened. But it hurts. Dammit, does it hurt, almost as much as that rushing heat, and the effort is further disrupted when the ambulance hits a bump in the road and I nearly spill out of the gurney. But Rachel puts her steadying hand on my chest and says, “Hang in there, Brian. We’re almost…” ”…there!” Robin pointed at the interstate ramp, and I took the turn and put St. Thomas Vineyard away in the rearview. ”Still can’t believe Mason got married,” I said. “He’s only known that girl for what, a year? Less?” Robin shrugged. “They were in love.” ”They hardly knew each other! They don’t know if whatever they’re feeling is genuine, life-long love or just new relationship googley-eyes that hasn’t worn off yet. I guarantee it – and I’ll put money on this – they’ll be done within a year. Just watch.” ”You don’t know that,” she said. There was a brief pause, and then she added, “We’ve been dating for two years.” ”So?” ”So… how far off do you think we are?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. Haven’t really thought about it.” ”You haven’t thought about it? At all?” ”I mean of course I’ve thought about it. I just… I don’t know if we’re ready, you know?” I looked over at her, but she just stared out there at the rain with her chin in her palm. So I continued. “Think about it like this: people prepare their whole lives for jobs, right? They start going to school as soon as they can talk, and they’re not done till they’re in their twenties, and it’s all so they can get a piece of paper that says ‘hey, hire my ass, I’m smart enough to work.’ But marriage? Nobody trains for that shit. People just hook up and say, ‘hey we’re twenty five, or twenty eight, you’re cute, I’m cute. Let’s spend fifteen thousand dollars on a giant ceremony and then live as glorified roommates for five years until we’re both fat and hate each other and get divorced because neither one of us knew or cared how much work this thing would require.” There was a longer pause then, before she said, with a degree of seriousness I wasn’t in the least bit prepared for, “Is that where you think we’re headed? ‘Glorified roommates?’” Quickly I calculated an avenue of retreat. But I calculated wrong. “No! Not you,” I said. “Not us. I mean most people, you know? Most people just dive in and either get divorced or stick it out till someone gets heart disease. The divorce rate is more than fifty percent now in the US. But the ‘I-don’t-love-you-anymore’ rate? Shit, that’s probably close to ninety by the time everyone hits middle age. I just want to make sure you’re the right person, you know?” If ever there were words I wish I could’ve taken back, it were those twelve. She said nothing, but I saw her reflection in the window, and the little tear that welled up in the corner of her eye said more than words ever could. ”Listen, I… that came out wrong. I just meant-” ”Can you drop me off at my car, please?” ”I thought you wanted to come over-?” ”I don’t feel good. Please?” And we drove in silence for a while, as the rain picked up its pace and fell in sheets and in torrents. After another twenty minutes I made the turn onto my street and parked, and once I did she got out without so much as a glance and walked across the road to her own car. I ran to follow. ”Robin, wait!” I grabbed her lightly by the arm. It was slick with rainwater. “Talk to me. Please?” ”What do you want?” I blinked. ”I want you to talk to me. I just s-” ”No. I mean with us. Where do you want this to go?” ”Where do I want this to go? I want to be with you! Listen, I didn’t mean to imply that – that I don’t want that. I just want us to be smart about it. You know?” ”Well maybe love isn’t something you can calculate on a fucking spreadsheet, Brian!” She was shouting over the cacophony of the storm. “Maybe it’s just this thing you feel, you know? And maybe it doesn’t make any damn logical sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to. But that’s part of what makes it special; it’s an adventure; it’s a ‘jump off a cliff with me’ type of thing. And yeah, sure. Not everyone survives the fall, I guess. But if you find the right person, then-” ”A ‘jump off the cliff with me’ type of adventure? Come on, Robin! We’re not writing up a damn dating website profile here; this is real life! There are kids involved, and finances, and house buying, and mortgages and all that shit! Not every day is some cute little romance comedy. This is half your life we’re talking about. Two-thirds, even. Okay? All I meant was that you have to be prepared for it. I just-” ”I thought we were prepared.” ”What do you mean?” She dug through her purse for a moment, and then held up a ring that was brilliant even when covered in the rain. I felt my heart skip at least a full beat. ”Is that, um-” ”It was my mom’s,” she said. “She gave it to me before she died. She said, ‘find your partner in crime, Robin. Find someone who’ll sweep you off your feet. And jump off a cliff with you.’” There was a pause before she added, “And at the time she said it I thought I knew exactly who that person was.” I tried for a moment, but I knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there was no combination of words in the English language that could be strung together to right this ship. ”Good-bye, Brian.” She kissed me on the cheek, and rubbed the back of her hand on down it. And then she turned and got in her Civic, and drove off until I couldn’t see her tail-lights at all through the pouring of the… “…rain’s comin’ down hard, boys,” another of the EMTs said. “Careful when you unload him.” There were grunts of acknowledgement, and then the back of the ambulance flew open and the sound of the storm utterly exploded into it; I felt the rush of wind, and the rain pelting my skin in sheets, and together they helped a bit with the oncoming heat that still I couldn’t place. And then I felt movement. The gurney dipped and hit pavement while the paramedics held me down. And then there were shouts, and lights, and running feet, and then the hospital door… ”Open?!” I shouted. The man behind the counter shot me a look. But I shouted it again, over the sound of rainfall and through the glass. “I said, are you open?!” And then he pointed at the sign saying the opposite, and went back to reading. But I wasn’t taking no for an answer; I dug out my wallet and pulled a twenty from the fold, and slapped it flat up against the glass. Within seconds the paper was soaked with rainwater. But it got his attention, and he rolled his eyes, and the door clicked and whirred and slid open. ”Make it quick, man.” ”I know, I know. I will. Thank you so much.” I ran down the aisles and then, true to my word, made it back to the counter in less than a minute. The man put down his book, and processed the sale. ”Date night?” He said, as he bagged the card after the flowers. I smiled a bit. ”Something like that.” And then I thanked him and ran back out to my car, and got inside, and took out the card and scribbled on its inner sleeve the words, ‘Jump off a cliff… “…with me, with me!” A doctor running alongside the cart motioned to some nurses in the hall, and they ran to follow. He turns to the EMTs. “Is he stable?” “He’s slipping. Heart rate’s falling, breathing slowing. Not good. Mumbled something about being too hot earlier, but if anything his temperature’s too low.” Someone shows the doctor a chart. He reads it as he runs, and his face is grim. “Shit. Alright,” he says. “Let’s…” ”…move!” I shout at the car I’m passing. “Just a little rain, assholes.” But it wasn’t. It was a lot of rain. Sheets and buckets and torrents of it, in fact; it’d long since turned the dirt to mud, and it swept up against my windshield like ocean surf, and the road was slick with little rivers of it than ran on down past the pebbles. I was going far, far too fast for such conditions. But I didn’t… “…care about that,” the doctor said. “I just want to get his fluids up. Rachel!” The woman from the ambulance runs up and discusses my condition in harsh whispers with the doctor. As I fade, and as the damn heat floods on back in, it becomes impossible to hear what they’re saying. But it’s abundantly clear from the body language that she hasn’t yet give up… ’…hope for a reunion with these guys?’ ’Well, Bolan and Snake say they’re against it, entirely. So that doesn’t bode well. But on the other hand, Sebastian’s said on multiple occasions that he’s willing to do it for the fans. And look what happened with Guns N’ Roses! Few years ago nobody wouldn’ve thought they’d get back togeth-‘ I switched the radio off, and then wrapped both hands around the wheel with such force the knuckles turned white on the grip. The car hit seventy miles per hour. Seventy five. Seventy nine. The windshield wipers were flying, but they weren’t going fast en- *”FUCK!” I slammed my foot on the brakes as the lights of activity in the road came in out of nowhere from the rain. The car jolted and shuddered and fought for traction with the pavement, and I felt the tires squeal and the metal of the car grind in… “…protest.” “I don’t care if he wants to protest!” the doctor snaps back. “You tell him to wait in the damn lobby like everyone else!” The nurse accepts her orders and heads back out into the hallway. “I’m sorry, sir,” she says. “You can’t see him until-” “Until what?! That’s my son in there! That’s my son! That’s-” and then there’s a scuffle of feet, and more shouts as a security guard drags my father from the wing. Rachel pauses as she hears the shouts, and then her eyes well up a bit with tears, and she looks at my face and appears to realize something. But she doesn’t say what. The shouts continue, but they fade. And so do I. And in comes the heat as I do. “That’s my son!” Dad says. “That’s my boy! Let me see my boy! Stop! Please…!” ”…stop!” The police officer had both hands up as my car barreled towards him. “Stop! Stop the car!” Finally there was a jolt and a shudder as the tires gained control at last, and the car slammed to a halt. Both the officer and I sighed in relief, and then he approached my window and tapped the glass with his knuckle. I lowered it. I shouted over the rain, “I’m sorry, sir! Roads are crazy out here. You okay?” He ignored the question. “I’m gonna need you to sit here for a bit, okay?” He said. “Just until the accident’s cleared up.” ”Accident?” ”Its bad.” He nodded in the direction of the wreckage, and then he said again, “Just sit tight! We’ll waive you over when there’s an open lane.” And then he ran off into the storm. I scanned the scene. There was a man on the side of the road, I saw, sitting on the pavement with a poncho for the rainfall and his head in his hands. His SUV was totaled; the front end was bent and twisted and hideously mangled. But the other car was in far, far worse shape than that. I squinted hard, and could only make out panels of white amidst charred black chunks of metal and the force of the rain. But it was enough. It was a Civic. Oh, God. Oh, God, no. No, no, no. I got out of the car and left the door hanging open in the rain, and then I ran forward, at least until the officer caught sight of me and ran back over and grabbed me by the shoulders. ”Hey!” He said. “I told you to wait in the car! What’re you-” ”ROBIN!!” I shouted over him. “ROBIN!” And then I saw it; a fleeting glimpse of movement, a white sheet flipped on a gurney. A strand of red hair fell from the right side and hung there as the EMTs carted away the body. ”ROBIN!” I screamed. “That’s my girl! That’s my girl!” The officer was confused and stunned and did the only thing he could think to do – drag me back to my car. ”No! Stop!” I was inconsolable but in no shape at all to resist. “Stop, please! That’s my girl! Let me see my girl! Please, stop!” One of the EMTs, covered in blood from the waist up, turned to look at the spectacle. But then someone shouted her name. “Rachel!” The doctor says. “You with us, or what? Let’s go!” She blinks as she stares at me, and then says, “Uh, yeah. Sorry. I just realized, this guy was-” “Just get the charcoal, please? We don’t have time.” And she does; she runs off to fetch exactly that. And then I feel a hideously invasive sensation – a tube is being placed in my nose, and then I feel it falling down, into my throat. I’m too weak to gag, but I somehow manage to clench my fist. A nurse sees the movement, and he holds me down to steady me. “Whoa, whoa…” ”…Whoa, whoa, you okay, man? My roommate stumbled back as I threw open the door. I charged past him. “You’re comin’ in hot!” He said again. “You good, bro?” But I ignored him. I went to the bathroom, and I leaned up against the sink for a long moment, and I grabbed my temples and set my jaw and sobbed without a sound; aching, wracking, heaving sobs. I heard a knock. ”Hey, man,” he said. “You good, dude? Anything I can like, get for you? Or-?” ”I’m fine,” I managed. It wasn’t convincing in the slightest, but I didn’t care. I opened up my phone. There was a text from Robin there, from this morning. It read, ‘I love you,’ and they were all at once the most beautiful and the most painful words I’d ever read. ‘I love you.’ I love you, too. I’m coming. Hang on, baby. I’m coming. Then I backed out, and found my dad in the contacts list, and typed, ‘I love you, Dad.’ Moments later I got a response: ‘I love you too, son! You okay?’ But I ignored it, and then I threw open the cupboard, and I grabbed an old… “…bottle of pills,” a nurse said. “Swallowed the whole damn thing. Lucky his roommate called it in when he did.” But the doctor is incredulous. “Well. That remains to be seen, now, doesn’t it?” Then he turns to the door. “Rach-” And she pushes it open with her elbow before he finishes. “I got it, I got it. I’m here.” “Alright!” He says. “Fingers crossed, people. Let’s see if we can’t save a psycho!” There are isolated chuckles. Rachel, though, almost snaps at her superior for the insult, but then someone says, “Here we go!” And then there is thick, wretched black stuff funneling down that tube and down into my throat. I’m almost desperate enough, but not quite strong enough, to resist it. I can feel it sliding, and hitting bottom, and pumping, and pulsing. My heart rate is erratic; my breathing is erratic; my ability to comprehend the situation is every bit as erratic. I struggle as much as I can against the restraints, but all my effort and all my strength of arms musters up not more than the faintest whimper. But Rachel hears it. She moves to my side, and she holds my head, and says, in soft enough a whisper that only I can hear the words, “Don’t follow her, Brian. Don’t follow her. Please, Jesus. I need him here. I need this win.” But I begin to fade all the same. One by one, as the spikes on the EKG slow to sporadic pulses, I see the nurses turn to each other and shake their heads. One by one by one, that is, until there is only a trembling Rachel there, and she’s holding on for me tight enough for everyone in the room. “Call it,” the doctor says, just as the darkness swirls in and I feel like I’m starting to fall away. The conversation carries on as I pass. “Two thirty two AM,” one nurse says. But I can hear Rachel screaming in protest – “No! He’s not gone! There’s still time, there’s still time to save him, there’s still…” But she’s wrong. I’m already gone. Her voice, and her face – those things are behind me as I pass. They’re fading away into the darkness that’s consuming me, and swallowing me whole, and throwing me to the winds. And just when the magnitude of the situation dawns on me – then comes the heat. There are monstrous amounts of it. It rips and tears and scorches and scalds, and had I the ability to scream out or even to breathe I would’ve done so until my throat was hoarse. But then there is a new pain. A different pain. A hand reaches out of the blackness, and it grabs my left-side forearm with such mighty force that the resulting pain eclipses that of the heat, and the nails of that hand rip right through the flesh. And then I’m being pulled, and there is a rushing wind. It is cool and refreshing and beautiful, and suddenly I’m somewhere else entirely. I blinked. The darkness was gone, and the heat with it, and that sensation of being devoured. Instead, those things had been replaced with starlit clouds as far off in every direction as the eye could see. But my arm stung like hell all the same. I looked at it. There were nail-marks, I saw. Four deep cuts beneath the inner wrist and a fifth on the side, in the shape of a hand. They bled a bit. And then I heard an all too familiar voice. “You okay?” I stood up, slowly, and I turned, holding my damned stinging arm while I did it, and said, “Robin. Robin, w-what was that? That darkness? And the heat, and th-” “Its where you would’ve spent your eternity, Brian, had I not pulled you out.” I had no words other than the weakest, “Thanks.” “You know,” she said, holding her own arm. “Suicide’s not exactly what I meant by ‘jumping off a cliff.” I blinked again, and took a long, deep breath. “Yeah. I guess I didn’t think things through.” “Not sure you fully realize how much of an understatement that is.” “Well, maybe I don’t. But you know what? I’d do it again, Robin. I’m serious.” She nearly rolled her eyes, but I doubled down on the sentiment. “What I said? Out there on my street? I’m sorry. I mean it, I’m sorry. You were right. Love isn’t about taxes or headaches or just tolerating each other until we’re seventy. It’s like your mom said. It’s about sweeping your girl off her feet. It’s about jumping over cliffs with someone, and not knowing where you’ll land, and not caring, as long as you get there together. And if this is where we land, wherever this is, I’m okay with that.” And I leaned in for a kiss. But she stopped me with her hand before it landed, and I opened my eyes. “I can tell you’ve been working on that speech for a while,” she said. “Over and over again In my head, in the car, until… until I got to the scene of the wreck.” I looked at the ground, and then back up at her. “And I realized, right then, that if you fucking left the earth itself than I would, too. So here I a-” “I was wrong, too.” She cut me off. “W-what do you mean?” “About love. I was wrong. My mother was wrong. It’s not just about crap you see in rom-coms and greeting-cards, Brian.” Again I blinked. “I know that! I know, it’s – it’s something you feel in your heart; that defies logic and reason. Not something you can put on a spreadsheet. Like you said earlier.” She sighed a bit, and then said, “Can I show you something?” “Uh, I guess so. Sure.” And then she took my hand, and Infinity rolled in and faded back out, and all of a sudden we were somewhere else entirely. “Are we -?” “On the Ferris Wheel? Yep. Turn around.” I did, and there we were, past Robin and past me, on the seat above and behind us. I remembered it like yesterday; we were staring out at the whole city at twilight, and the ships in the harbor that were backlit red with the setting sun, and the clouds that were lined at their tops with just a little bit of starlight. I rustled in my seat a bit and it moved, and past Me saw it and looked like he was about to speak. But before he did, past Robin said “Thank you for being here with me,” and got a kiss on the head. “What do you see?” Robin said. “Us. A year ago and change. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Your mom had just died, so I took you here. To get your mind off things.” “You did. That was the first day in months I’d felt truly safe and truly at peace. That was love.” “I know it was. And I still love you, just the s-.” “It’s a kind of love,” she said, cutting me off again. “And it’s absolutely beautiful when it lasts. But can I show you something else?” “Uh… okay. Yeah.” She took my hand again, and again Infinity itself rolled in and out like the tide, and then we were somewhere else. The hospital, it looked like. St. Joseph’s. “What do you see here?” I looked around. Nurses running up and down the hallway. Doctors reviewing notes and talking to their patients. “I don’t know. A hospital.” She nodded in the direction of a particular room. “Look in there.” So I did. There was a woman on the cot. She was emaciated and hairless and deathly frail, and the Doctors inside were shutting off the last of the machines. “A dying woman,” I said. “Looks like cancer.” “Yep. And what about there?” I looked down. There was a nurse crouched down in front of the same door and talking to a girl – eight or nine years old, if I had to guess – in silly voices. The girl had been crying, but the nurse managed to make her smile a bit, even as her mother died on the other side of the door. “Looks like a nurse comforting a little girl.” “That’s right,” Robin said. “And that little girl will remember that nurse for the rest of her life – even if they never meet again or so much as exchange names – as the lady who came to her in her darkest hour and made her smile.” She turned to me. “That’s love, too. Just as beautiful and just as precious as what we had.” “What’s your point?” She didn’t answer; she just stuck out her hand with a sad smile, and I took it. Infinity faded in and back out a third time. And then we were in the waiting room. “See that?” Robin pointed to the corner of the room, and I squinted. “Oh hey! What’s Dylan doing here?” “He called the ambulance when you didn’t come out of the bathroom,” she said. “He knew something was wrong, and when they drove you off he followed them here. Been standing there ever since, asking for information on you every time a nurse walks by. He’s starting to annoy them.” I watched my roommate for a bit, and sure enough he grabbed a nurse, and asked her a question that I couldn’t hear. She said something pleasantly dismissive, and he nodded, and then leaned his head back up against the wall and closed his eyes. “Wow. I uh, I had no idea he cared that much.” “That’s love, too, Brian. Would you do the same for him?” But she held out her hand again before I could answer, and I took it. For a fourth time Infinity blinked. And then I was in the emergency room, looking down on myself. I was covered in vomit from the charcoal and the pills, but I was still, too. Deathly still. Most of the nurses and the doctor were still walking out the door. But Rachel wasn’t. She was crying openly now, and making no effort to hide it. She reached for something. A needle, it looked like, or a syringe. “What’s she doing?” “You’ll see soon enough,” Robin said. “But that there? That’s also love.” She held out her hand once again and said, “One more.” And I took it. And then we were in the parking lot of the same place. The rain was coming down harder than ever. “Turn around,” Robin said. And I did. And then I stopped; There were no words. It was my father in his car. He was holding a Bible up to his chest with both hands, and he was crying in a way no child should ever have to see their father cry. “And that there?” Robin said. “That’s the kind of love that can move mountains.” I put my hand up against his window. He didn’t seem to notice. “He can’t see you, Brian. Not from there.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Okay,” I said. “I get it. I fucked up.” And then she released my hand, and all of a sudden we were back in the clouds again, under the stars. I wiped another tear before it fell. “So now what? It’s too late for me to go back down there. I’m already gone.” Robin took another step forward, and said, “Maybe not.” And she put her hand on my temple, and my eyes rolled back. And then I saw it. *Rachel and I are on a beach. Our child is playing out in the surf, and the sun hits her hair just right, and for a moment it is made of gold. And then the image fades, and another one takes its place. A birthday party. I have silver hair at my temples. Rachel does too. But it doesn’t matter. Our little girl is turning ten. And then that image fades, too, and is replaced by another, and another, and another; each one yielding another moment where someone loved someone else enough for it to break through the clouds and be seen forever, even if the moment itself lasted only for a heartbeat. Finally there is an image of Rachel and myself on a porch as old as we are, and she holds my hand and says, “I’m glad you didn’t follow her.” And I say back, “Me too,” and I kiss her on the head. And then Robin pulls back her hand, and there we were again, standing out there in the clouds together. “How did you do that?” I asked. She shrugged. “Time has nearly no meaning in this place. I’ve been here for a while, Brian, and yet the doctors haven’t even left your operating room. Don’t think too much about it. Just think about what you want.” “That,” I said. “Was… was that my future?” She shrugged again. “Could be. I don’t know what you saw, and I don’t need to know. Was it enough?” I nodded, and she stepped forward again, and said “Then go and get it.” “I’ll miss you too damn much.” “Well there’s nothing wrong with missing someone,” she said. “That just means love lasted a little longer than what ignited it. So go ahead and miss me. You owe me that much. Feel the loss; stand up to the storm like a man, and memorize the pain, and learn it inside and out, and let it roll over you in waves and run its course. And then one day you’ll wake up and realize you have scar-tissue where the skin used to be, and you’ll be stronger than the grief ever was.” “I can tell you’ve been working on that speech for a while.” “Like I said. I’ve been here for a while.” And then she kissed me, one last time, and for the briefest moment all the little scars and cuts and scrapes and nicks in my heart were filled up and made whole, and she said, “You’re made up of the stars, kid. Now go light up the world.” And then she was… “…gone, Rachel. Okay? I’m not gonna tell you aga-” But I shot upright before the doctor could finish the thought, and I gasped for air when I did and grabbed at my chest with more strength than I’d had in hours. There was a needle in it; a bolt of life to the heart, and Rachel broke down in tears when she saw me. “Well I’ll be damned,” the doctor said. “Welcome back to the land of the living, son. And Rachel?” She turned around. “Good work, kid. Made me proud.” And he left, and she turned back to me and tried to hide a smile while she did it. “Hey there. How’re you feeling?” “Better than dead.” There was a pause before I added, “Hey. I’m glad you got your win.” She took my hand and squeezed it. For a moment she paused when she saw a scar below the wrist that looked like the result of fingernails dragging through flesh. But then she dismissed it and said, “I am too. And you’ll get yours. Okay? I promise you will.” I said, “I know.” And with that she got up and left the room to go save someone else’s life, while I took out my phone, and opened up the most recent text, and hit reply. ‘Am now.’ CREDIT: Jesse Clark

21 minutes

June 25, 2020

Deaths, Murders, and Disappearances, Feelspastas and Happy Endings, Hell and the Afterlife, Strange and Unexplained

The Seer of Possibilities

Thomas O.

"Sometimes, otherworldly beings find interesting ways to try and contact you. They might use a Ouija(...TRUNCATED)

19 minutes

January 26, 2015

Beings and Entities