The scary thread
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Got a true story. Not scary, but creepy nontheless. Anyways, a couple years back my family and I were home. I walked by the our door and I saw a guy in a pickup truck parked in our driveway. He got out and was dragging a garbage bag behind him as he walked along the length of the rosebed in the front. He kept looking down as if he was looking for something. When he reached the end, he turned around and started walking back. I left before he got back to his truck to go tell one of my parents. When I went to the window, he was gone. The thing is, we live down a gravel road so no vehicle could come down it without making alot of noise. I asked my family and they said they didn't see or hear anything. It was really wierd and creepy. It was almost like no one was there. But I saw what I saw what I saw!!*
(cookie for reference)
(cookie for reference)
The one that affected me the most happened a few years back. It was around 5 pm, and my mom was working late, so I was home alone. It was the middle of winter, so it got dark pretty fast, and I was locked up in my room, eating chips and watching Ed Edd n Eddy.
All of a sudden I got a weird feeling, like somebody was watching me and planning to attack at anytime. That usually doesn't happen, so I was worried and decided to let the dog in. I gathered up the courage to leave my room and close the door behind me, and as I walked down the hallway, which was also incredibly dark, I heard a rustling, and my door opened. Out came a shadow shaped like a little boy, crawling on all fours, who called my name and walked slowly to my mom's room across the hall. I bolted to the back door to let the dog in, who was barking furiously. When that happened, I took him and ran to the front yard to wait for my mom to get home.
What freaked me out the most was her saying that she couldn't sleep well in her room for a week or so after I told her, saying that she could've sworn she saw something peeking in at her from the closet.
All of a sudden I got a weird feeling, like somebody was watching me and planning to attack at anytime. That usually doesn't happen, so I was worried and decided to let the dog in. I gathered up the courage to leave my room and close the door behind me, and as I walked down the hallway, which was also incredibly dark, I heard a rustling, and my door opened. Out came a shadow shaped like a little boy, crawling on all fours, who called my name and walked slowly to my mom's room across the hall. I bolted to the back door to let the dog in, who was barking furiously. When that happened, I took him and ran to the front yard to wait for my mom to get home.
What freaked me out the most was her saying that she couldn't sleep well in her room for a week or so after I told her, saying that she could've sworn she saw something peeking in at her from the closet.
Unteroffizier Erich Lang awakes long after the dawn to the distant sound of artillery. The gunmetal sky ripples with threatening black clouds, and the dusty smell of rain hangs in the chill air. He is slumped back against the earthen wall, his left arm crooked and folded behind him. It comes awake in a flare of pinpricks and fire, and he winces as he works it free and shakes. His slender frame is wrapped in his thick woolen coat, sodden and heavy with mud, and he feels cold water seeping in through his threadbare trousers. Besides the upturned helmet lying in the mud a few yards away, he is alone in narrow trench.
He pulls his long legs toward his body and stands, feeling the cold air glide through the shifting folds of his clothes. The coat tugs at him as he stands, weighted down with filth. There is water in his boots, running down his legs as he stands to soak through the layered socks that protected the last bit warmth and dryness. He scowls at the mud and the sky, and they are unmoved.
He winces against the sudden pain in his head and chest as he tries to sort out the jumble of memories and awakening thoughts. He wonders idly what day it is, but he cannot recall the chaplain?s last sermon, the only landmark he has to mark the progress of the days. He tries to remember the night before, or at least some small hint of how he?d ended here, soaking up rainwater in the trench. The preceding days are a monotone fog, a jumble of images and impressions of mud soaked boredom and terror.
?Thought you might be dead, ? comes a voice from his left. He turns to see a figure, leaning on the wooden post at the crook in the trench. His face is obscured by a gloved hand gripping a smoldering cigarette. Erich blinks and strains to focus on the man, but his blood is now surging in anticipation of tobacco.
He takes a few awkward steps, and he can see now, the crooked chin and bulbous nose of Karl Strauss. Aromatic smoke seeps from between his yellowed teeth, and Erich wordlessly extends his hands. Karl drops the small leather pouch into them. When Erich has rolled, lit and inhaled his first cigarette, he clears his throat and spits on the hard packed earth.
?Why did you let me sleep out here? I could have froze,? he rasps. His throat is raw and catches when he speaks. Karl chuckles, a deep rumble from his barrel chest, and flicks his cigarette against the wall. It collides noiselessly with a support beam and blossoms into a hundred momentary sparks.
?I let you do what you like, Lang.? He grins at Erich and claps him sharply on the back. Erich momentarily considers anger, but cannot find the heart for it.
The low tremor of a distant explosion ripples through the dirt, and Erich stiffens.
?Big guns. Far away,? Karl says, and Erich begins to relax.
?Us or them??
Karl shrugs and his eyes bulge slightly. For the thousandth time, Erich can see how perfectly Karl was suited to his life before the war. He pictures Karl on the stage, greasepaint glinting in the lights, playing the clown, the fool, for the cream of Bavaria. A natural.
Out here, in the blindspot of God, Karl is a natural of another sort. Erich has been with him in the beginning, since Belgium. Erich can recall the clown?s visage, somehow pleasant and comical still, in the firelight of Andenne, as they burnt the village and, fearing guerilla fighters, shot all the men.
Karl and Erich walk the trench, taking the traverse back through the lines. A few men huddle for warmth in small groups, smoking, or warming their hands on tin mugs of coffee. There is a lethargic stillness to the men, and they keep their eyes fixed on the ground or skyward, but avoid eye contact. Erich is grateful for the quiet passage.
The first guard post is empty, and the mounted machine gun and mortar are untended. Erich looks to Karl, but he seems unconcerned. Karl has kept a small rank superiority to Erich for the past three years, and Erich has come to depend on relinquishing all judgement and worry to the older man. It has allowed to live this long, unquestioning.
Only the Chaplain sits at the mess hall benches, solemnly dipping a crumbling dry biscuit into his coffee. Karl and Erich join him, following his lead to soften the rocky bread. The Chaplain, Sebastian Raus looks up at them with watery brown eyes through his scratched and chipped spectacles, and nods, almost imperceptibly, before returning to the patient vivisection of his meal.
Erich thinks to ask him what day it is, but can?t imagine knowing would be worth the effort, and moves to lay his jacket on a small stove. Anemic smoke drifts from it, and it seems no warmer than the surroundings. They sit in silence, draining the last of the coffee and rolling cigarettes from Karl?s seemingly endless pouch.
?I just realized,? starts Sebastian, his voice tenuous from disuse. ?I haven?t seen an officer in at least a day.?
?This is a good thing, most likely,? Karl huffs with his crooked grin.
?What if? What if the line is breached, and we?re cut off, with no one to tell us?? The Chaplain does not appear worried, merely curious. For a moment, Erich considers the logic in this conclusion, and cold panic begins to coalesce in him.

?Stick to the sermons, father,? Karl snorts his derision.
But the idea gnaws at Erich through the day. He passes scattered and listless men, all strangers to him, but no officers. It occurs that he cannot recall the last briefing they had. At an empty guide post, he raises his head tentatively above the outside wall, and gazes across the front, toward the French line.
As it has a thousand times before, the stark unearthliness of no man?s land catches his breath and turns his heart to ice. Jagged cinders in the shape of trees jut defiantly from the craters and hillocks of carrion soaked mud. Erich can see blue hands clutching at the sky, the ragged shreds of boys from across the Empire.
The land is dead, Erich knows this in some deep and primal way; he?s seen burned farms, and razed towns, but out here, it?s different somehow. There?s a palpable emptiness, a hollow that absorbs all sound, and cuts away at those that persist in living here. Erich can feel it, reaching out to him from the monochrome charnel fields. A shiver twists around his spine.
?I know it doesn?t look like it, but, He is here.? Sebastian?s voice is quiet and hollow. Erich turns to regard the Chaplain briefly, before returning his gaze back to the void.
?I admire your faith, Sebastian,? Erich leaves the next part unsaid. Sebastian has been insistent and dedicated, but they?ve had this conversation many times. Erich knows they are going through the motions to satisfy Sebastian?s guilt, but today, he?s too tired to humor him. Erich hasn?t believed since Andenne. Sebastian?s smile is weary, and he looks grateful for Erich?s non-participation.
?You?ll see,? he says, at last.
They stand in silence, as a thin and fetid miasma of fog drifts over the dead land and spills like molasses into the trench. Erich is looking at the fog thicken and blot out the unburied dead, when he turns to see Sebastian is gone, the fog and the dead land stealing even the sound of his footsteps.
The sky darkens and Erich gives up any hope of being dry or warm today. A concertina picks out a lively tune in the distance, but the fog muffles the sounds and robs the life from the notes. Erich tries to follow the wilting music, taking traverses and glancing down each line, but it always stays in the distance, circling around him in the encroaching gloom. At last, it dies away, mid stanza with a mournful trill, and Erich is alone in the deepening gloom
He fights down panic as he backtracks towards the front line. The dark and the mist have muffled the world, the only sound is the scratching shuffle of his wet wool coat and the tread of his boots. The trench is empty, and he is alone. Above him the sky is a bruise, purple and darkening. He struggles to recall which direction the makeshift barracks are in, but this only makes him realize that he?s not quite sure where he is at this moment.
The fear has him now, a cold blue corpse?s hand clutching at his lungs. He struggles to catch his breath and the filthy damp in his clothes presses inward, smothering his skin and extinguishing the heat like a flame.
The world pitches a little, shudders, and he?s suddenly aware of sitting, Karl above him and sliding a lit cigarette between his fingers. Erich catches a hold of his drumbeat heart and focuses on the warmth of the smoke. Karl is playing the father, his best paternal mask on his face.
?I worry about you, Erich,? Karl says at last.
?What?s going on?? Erich demands. Karl smiles, sadly, and helps Erich to his feet.
?Does it matter?? Karl offers at last, turning away. ?Get some sleep, boy.?
He hums tunelessly, and soon the fog swallows his music and the burning ember of his cigarette, and Erich is alone, again. For the first time he can remember, Karl?s assurance has not thawed the frost in him. His heart begins to surge again, terror winding around his ventricles and constricting. He loses his breath and begins to pant, dropping his helmet and running his fingers through his filthy hair. The sky seems to contract around him, and the trench stretches away infinitely. Erich is gripped by fear, and he slumps against the earthen barricade.
There is a low thud, followed by an angry hissing, and a bright column of red fire arcs into the sky, igniting the black fog. The world is suddenly bright and painted crimson. He stumbles to the edge of the trench, and looks over the edge, hoping pitifully not to see what he knows is there.
The nightmare landscape of filth and gore is cast into sharp and dancing relief by the burning flare, and the graveyard is picked out in sharp contrast. The dead trees loom menacingly like prison bars around the dead. The fog hovers like a noxious living thing, it?s tendrils caressing the defiled earth.
In the hellish stillness, he sees them, surging from the fog. Hundreds, thousands of the enemy, breaking across the pitted ground like a wave. Bayonets on rifle barrels shudder across the surface like quills, and they are pressed together so close that Erich can not pick one from the next.
He grasps at his back for his rifle, and realizes with a sickening lurch that his doesn?t have it, hasn?t had it all day. His sidearm holster is empty, the leather damp and torn.
They are closer now, and the world is silent. Erich can see their hollow, empty eye sockets. He can see their hanging, shattered jaws and torn leathery skin. He can see the French soldiers in ragged uniforms, and the torn and burnt shapes of civilians. He can see his friends, his comrades. They all bear down on him beneath the waning flare light in utter and unbroken quiet.
They crash over the edge of the trench, and Erich feels a bayonet slide into his lungs, hears the rifles fire, and smells the burning wool and meat from his ragged wounds. He is crushed backwards, his arm folding beneath him as he tumbles to the floor.
The rotting thing above him stands, panting. Erich looks up to it, but instead of worm choked cavities, he sees? watery blue eyes in a filthy, young face. He sees fear that matches his own. He sees a child. He sees. He begins to understand.
The fog, at last, obscures his sight.
Erich awakes long after the dawn to the distant sound of artillery. The gunmetal sky ripples with threatening black clouds. He is slumped back against the earthen wall, his arm crooked and folded behind him. It comes awake in a flare of pinpricks and fire. Besides the upturned helmet lying in the mud a few yards away, he is alone.
***
I awake, as always, to the click and whir of a thousand hidden cameras, and the rising glow of the ambient lights. Over the next 30 minutes, the curtains on my bedroom will slowly part, gliding on mechanized tracks, and the yellow sunlight of dawn will stream into the wide circular room. Like all mornings, I entertain for the briefest moments the thought of hurling myself at the windows and plunging the half mile to the ground. I hold on to the little fantasy of wind and sky and falling for as long as it will remain, dreaming of those magnificent moments of freedom and choice.
Even if I were not a coward, there are a thousand unseen barriers and safe guards. I can not see them, but several parents are doubtlessly just outside the door, and would be between me and the window before I could leave the bed. I allow the dream of freedom to evaporate for another morning.
The woman next to me, I can not recall her name, shifts and rolls to embrace me. I wrap my arms around her and return the affection, but there is no love in it. She is young and soft, skin still stretched taut over her athletic and perfect frame. I know that in my youth I would have been buzzing with anticipation and lust simply seeing her, but now I can only take solace in the momentary ghost of affection and emotion. Her skin is warm, and her fine and downy body hair is smoother than the silk of the sheets. I draw an abstract of pleasure from this closeness, feeling something akin to happiness when our bellies synchronize in breathing, pressed close as they rise and fall in an alternating rhythm. Her breath is hot and damp on my chin and neck. It only takes me a few moments to tire of her, and I swung my legs to the edge of the bed.
The black marble of the walls and floor of my bedroom are heated to my exact preference, so I walk, naked, into the large bathroom. Like every morning, I try not to focus on the near-silent buzzing of small servos and motors as each of the cameras pivots to keep me in view at all time. They must be completely autonomous, but it amuses me to think of a thousand uniformed parents tediously tracking my every move, 16 hours a day. They would be madder than I by now.
The routine begins; not identical every morning, but a tiny repertoire of ordered tasks combined in a slightly different order than the day before. Shave. Shower. Preen. Pose. Smile. Evacuate. Masturbate.
By altering my routines with feckless reorganization, it gives the impression of variance where there is none. The parents tell me that this is just one of the reasons my channel is still so popular, despite being functionally identical to my father?s and his father?s before us. I have a flair for fakery, for lying. It makes them proud. It makes me hollow.
I can choose what want to do for the rest of the day, from an approved list; another beautiful facade of freedom. I can hold court over a hundred gladiators and command them to break each other apart. I can paint on a canvas a hundred feet tall. I can inhale hallucinogens and stumble through the thousand-acre wildlife preserve on the outer decks of the Tower. I can copulate with my choice of limitless young women, or men. I can beat a child until his skull caves in. It is of course, a limited form of choice. I cannot go back to bed and weep. I can never say ?Stop?. I cannot leave the Tower.
I am at my most honest, I believe, in the 8 hours of broadcast solitude each night, locked in the blacked out bedroom of silk and marble with whatever woman has caught my fancy. These are the times that I can admit, in my solitude and self reflection, that I would never be able to exist outside the Tower. I know nothing about the outside, and the parents and my concubines can only tell me of the millions of people that love me. I don?t know how a real person lives. I only know my world.
I spend the day in the museum, aimlessly wandering through ancient paintings and statues before practicing horseback riding on one of the open air decks. I do this partially because I told the parents I would be in the harem all day, and it amuses me to think of them struggling to adapt the programming, and the wasted resources.
When I am done for the day, I retire to a balcony with a drink. The jagged spires of the horizon look like teeth as they swallow the sun, and I can feel the cold, familiar knot in my guts, that unease and dread at the crawling passage of time.
I?ve been as careful as I could not to conceive, but that can never last. I have no illusions about this. Sooner or later, I will have a son. Doubtless the parents are already weaning me off the contraceptives in my meals. I grow ill at the thought, and stand to complete my nightly ritual.
I descend the elevator through the vast interior space of the Tower, towards the lower levels. The parents love this portion of my night, such a wonder flair for the dramatic, they say. I do it because it keeps me sane.
The guards below are like the parents, only their uniforms are different. They smile at me with genuine love and affection and allow me to pass the viewing chamber.
My father, a man I never met, is laying on a soiled mattress bed, in a sterile metal chamber.
They only love you for so long.
He stirs slightly, but I know he cannot see me; his eyes are now lidless, each orb a milky ball of scar tissue. His mouth is lipless and his dry and bleeding gums encase only a few shattered teeth. His ears are gone, the skin pulled tight around them and sewn shut with black cord.
His limbs each terminated in a raw stump when I first was allowed to see him, now they are completely gone. I?ve watched them break, bend and vanish in slow bites over the years, but they are simply scars around his gaunt torso now. There are deep, fresh gouges in his gut. Every time I think he simply cannot endure more, he astounds me by continuing to live.
When my time on the channel ends each night, his begins. The Tower goes deep underground, and that is my father?s world, a nightmare mirror of my own. For the last few months they have taken to opening him up to take away ragged chips of his organs. Since they took his tongue and lips, he has no shame about gibbering and wailing wordlessly.
I have no love for this man, no pity for this thing. I can barely feel pity for myself.
But he is my mirror, my portrait of the future. The people that love me now will grow weary, and will fall in love with my inevitable son. Later, these same people will delight in watching my slow and surgical dismantlement, for eight hours every night.
The mechanical arm on the ceiling descends, lopping a hook through the harness around my father?s broken body, and carries him into the next room to prep him for the show. He begins to shriek, a ululating cry of helpless terror, and thrashes in the machine?s embrace, but it cradles him almost gently as it takes him from my view, and into someone else?s.
I look away. Return to my room. Lie motionless and empty in the dark.
The channel changes.
***
Sometime during the third consecutive night spent huddled over the toilet, insides heaving and shuddering as I vomit forth seemingly everything I?d ever eaten, I realize what?s happening: He?s trying to poison me. It?s all so elegant, so perfect, and so clear, that I almost laugh, but another barrage of retching forces me into silence
The next morning I throw everything in the kitchen away, wrapping it three times in black plastic and burying it deep in the apartments communal trash cans, to prevent an unfortunate transient from crossfire of His wrath. I am out the door of the complex and halfway to the corner store when I realize: He knows, must know, where I would shop.
I pick a direction and walk, enjoying the chill winter air that soothes the ragged shreds of my inside. I turn at random intervals, following an improbable path out of my familiar neighborhood, until I find a small shop with an unfamiliar name. Once inside, I hurriedly fill a small plastic basket; brands that I never have eaten, strange tins of ethnic ingredients I can?t recognize, foods that I?d never thought of buying. Soy milk. Tofu. I can feel my stomach reborn in anticipation of an untainted meal.
I prepare the meal in a fog of nervous anticipation, trying to focus on savoring the aromas and the grease spitting sounds of the frying pan. It tastes clean, but then, so has every other meal before this. I try to tell myself that the mounting pain inside me is simple fear and anxiety, but before the stroke of midnight, I am again crouched in the dingy bathroom, surrendering the days work into the porcelain mouth of the sewer.
The next day, I pack up the remaining food and dispose of it with the same care. I eat out that day, layering debt onto the last of my credit cards at restaurants on the opposite side of town.
He is more clever than I could ever imagined, and I am awash in despair as I spend another sleepless night gagging and sobbing on the tile floor. I imagine the Algorithm, the perfect predictive models at His disposal, brilliantly charting my every move across the city; every time I thought I?d outwitted Him, I was willingly walking into his web.
I buy a candy bar from a vending machine in a theater, and hold it close like a talisman. When I get home, I fill the bath a few inches deep with rust colored water, and hold the little plastic wrapped bundle beneath the water and squeeze. I know that I will see it, but it still breaks my heart when I do. A thin almost invisible stream of bubbles picks out the point where a foreign object has pierced the protective layer. Through the haze of piercing hunger, I convince myself to try, just one bite, and to take the chances. It?s a gamble that I do not win.
In the small hours of the morning as I press my fists into my empty protesting belly, I imagine the legion of His followers sliding silently through the restaurants and produce aisles of my life, slipping hypodermic needles into carefully selected packages of food. They are ruining and corrupting at His whim, surgical and efficient, before vanishing into the throng of the city at my approach. They will always be one step ahead of me, until I learn to think in new ways, to chart new cognitive pathways, and turn the game back upon Him. So, I tell myself, this is what I must do.
The first day of my new life, I spend in the small living area of my apartment, organizing my thoughts with clean and sterile efficiency, and conserving what energy I can from my wasting body. Night brings the retching sickness, but all that arises is water? and pills, half digested in the bilious water.
The pills. Of course. Not for the first time, I feel a sharp twinge of respect for crystalline perfection of His plans. I dump the last of my dozen prescriptions into the toilet.
On my third day, I feel a clarity and a sense of purpose that shocks me in it?s intensity, and my will penetrates the starvation malaise. I must win, or I will die. The rashes and sores in my cheeks are deeper, and I can feel the gentle sway of loose teeth in my desiccated mouth when I grind them in thought. He is winning, but not for long. There is still time.
Water, I collect from the roof in a small army of cheap hardware buckets. I know that somewhere in the byzantine plumbing of the aged building, there must one of His infernally clever devices; a tiny pump, squatting like a predator and pulsing it?s vile contents into the water main. I?ll have to give up bathing. A small sacrifice. The rain water will keep me alive for a while longer, but I must find a way to eat.
The answer comes to me in small unconnected puzzle pieces over the next few days. While gently working another loose molar from my bleeding gums, they suddenly snap together, and a warm smothering blanket of epiphany coats my aching frame. The clattering of the tooth into the sink basin is like the ringing of bells.
Late in the evening, I begin another unconscious dérive, drifting through the city on shaking and atrophied legs, knowing full well that He is watching. But this, my beautiful solution, is beyond even His reach.
I choose the house at random, and then, in one final attempt to baffle the Algorithim, turn around and choose another house across the little tree lined street. I sift through the mail; it?s a small sample size, but enough to confirm the most necessary of facts. A single occupant.
The poor man is surprised to have a visitor at all, and his face contorts with fear as force my way inside. I am flooded with guilt and regret as I push him to the floor and strike quickly with the crowbar I pull from the folds of my jacket.
No.
I must steel myself. This is His fault. He has brought us to this, and this poor man is just another of His victims.
I make quick work of the meat, the muscle memories of summers spent hunting in the mountains flaring up with each quick cut. I allow myself a quick bite, a feast to my shrunken and withered stomach. The iron and mineral salt taste floods my head like a vapor and I bawl in relief, like a child. When I have the meat packed tight into my rucksack, I light a single candle on the top floor of the little house, and turn the gas range on high.
I?m not yet home when I hear the low rumble in the distance; the pulsing lights of fire engines highlight the black cloud hanging in the sky.
For the first time in more than a month, I sleep well, my body rapidly healing as pure, untainted nutrients penetrate my cells. I am not yet well, but after a few more meals, I will be ready, once more, to fight Him. I know I can beat him now. I know the Algorithm can only predict the actions of my past self, bound by the laws and morals of the old world.
That world is dead.
I am a free man.
***
Istanbul, Turkey
August
09:12:09 AM
I am at a small outdoor cafe just a few hundred yards from the teeming throng of a morning market, just in sight of the Bosporus. I love this city, and all its thick and violent contradictions. The rising heat of the day is already causing the linen of my suit to cling to my legs.
I awoke last night with a change of heart; you are owed an explanation, and even a warning. If I do as I have planned, I and my actions will be vilified, and misunderstood. Please believe me, I am doing this for all the right reasons. You may not see it now, but in ten or twenty years, you will see a new world born. That is worth any sacrifice.
I have done my work here in Turkey, the first of many great cities to see, and I board a plane tomorrow. Don?t bother looking for me here.
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
September
05:04:20 AM
I am in one of the oldest settlements of mankind, and her majesty overwhelms me, just as her descent saddens me. Once the jewel of Alexander?s conquest, and the capital of Tamarlane?s empire, she has fallen into disrepair and goes fallow with neglect. I must confess knowing this already, but forgive my sense of romanticism; I did want to see this place, once.
I have no work to do here; once the junction of trade lanes between East and West, Samarkand has become isolated and useless to me. But the ghosts of her history and past bring me strength and resolve. The case that I carry with me is heavy in my hand, it is my burden, but with each stop, that burden lessens.
I have allowed myself this one folly, leaving the web for a moment, but I will not linger long.
Munich, Germany
September
08:05:18 AM
The city still sleeps late into the morning on Saturday, and in many places the streets are still empty. There is a grand majesty of Munich?s remaining prewar buildings, and I remarked on its beauty to my local driver. ?It was a lot nicer before the British bombed us,? he said without a hint of irony. He was at least two generations removed from the war, and did not seem, or want, to understand when I told him that London had the same problem.
Most of humanity is horrified by the specter of the war, of what happened here. They wonder how man could be so inhumane. These people know nothing of the world, or of nature, red in tooth and claw. These are the people that artificially elevate humanity above the animal kingdom, people that maintain an ephemeral barrier between our particular primate sub-grouping, and the rest of life on Earth. I never understood these people.
I deposited one more device downtown, in a massive state-of-the-art theater complex. I hid it carefully, and set the little slaved atomic clock to my own. My flight departs in a few hours, and if you are following me, you will have no luck in Germany.
London, England
October
05:09:19 AM
London shows her war wounds with flat gray office towers, and plain, blocky apartments, yet her age and history bleed through the scars as I stroll down the Thames, scarcely aware of the brackish odor of the oily waters. The trash and detritus in the river don?t sadden me, the way I imagine it would for you.
You draw some artificial line between a hamburger wrapper and the fallen leaves of a tree that I will never understand. You distinguish between nature and humanity in a way that puzzles me. We are nature, our cities, our roads, and our orbital satellites are no different than a termite colony, or a birds nest, except perhaps in scale. There is nothing unique about humanity. I know that I am all but alone in this conceit, but history and nature herself will prove me right.
The devices I planted here are in the Underground; silently waiting for the day to come when I will activate them, and they will open their ceramic filters and gently release their payload into the air. I burned the last decade of my life like a candle to forge the perfect weapon, hardened against the air, hearty and undeniably alive, burning with the will to survive.
I have chosen the stations because the first letters of each station spell my name. Consider it an artist?s signature. I wouldn?t tell you this if I wasn?t sure this would be useless information, and I doubt you have even uncovered who I am.
As always, I will be gone before you arrive.
Chicago, Illinois
November
02:15:03 PM
Chicago is the hub of a great wheel of airline traffic; along its thousand intersecting lines, millions of passengers will pass through, robbing the stale airport air of oxygen and expunging carbon dioxide. Even these sterile, atmosphere-regulated glass and steel tunnels, I still see nature, green and red with life.
I need to make a distinction. I know that what I am doing seems to be wrong, evil. However, I also understand that morality is an artificial device we used to guide tribal behavior, a useful conceit in creating harmony and growth in small populations. But there is no real weight to good and evil. Nature is beyond that. There is nothing evil about the wasp that implants her young into a living caterpillar. Our concepts of ethics are as fragile as our bodies, and just as impermanent.
A few devices in the ventilation systems will infect millions. You can search for them if you want, but there is a great deal of redundancy in my plan. You can grind yourself to the bone attempting to undo my work, but in the end, you will fail. If you are wise, you will cease pursuit and begin to prepare for the inevitable struggle ahead.
Tokyo, Japan
November
09:18:05 PM
Tokyo must be a hell to those who see nature as only forests or mountains or clean ocean waters. To me, it is a wonder of that natural world. The lights and madness of Roppongi are just as wondrous and alive as the synchronized flashing of fireflies. This is nature, and if you will allow me a moment of species-self congratulation, this is nature at its finest and most wonderful. But nature has no apex. It will only grow and learn and become more beautiful. It brings tears to my eyes.
I was asleep for so many decades, laboring in a lab for a pharmaceutical giant. (Which one is not important. It will not help you find me, especially not this late.) I wish I could tell you that there was some epiphany, some concrete lesson I could share with you to make you understand why I have chose this path for us all. The truth is sadly mundane: the influx of money from a chain of discoveries gave me the time to think, and become aware of the world and its systems, slowly and gradually. The money also gave me the resources to act once I was determined.
The world regulates itself. People ascribe some sort of special malevolence to the acts of man, unaware that we are not the first species to war, to commit genocide. Foolish. This is not unique to man. Many other species before us outstripped their habitats, and sowed the seeds of their own destruction. They simply are no longer among us to act as a warning. Evolutionary strategies either work, forever sustainable, or they do not, and the species die. This is the only rule in nature. Live for the future, or be buried in the past.
It should be clear now, to all of us, that despite our species? meteoric growth, we have not opted for the former strategy, and it is only a matter of time before we collapse.
I will not stand for that. I am as much a part of nature as anything else, and so are my weapons. I will be the regulator. We will adapt, or die. But be brave: no matter the outcome, the world will be bettered. And I sincerely hope you will be there to see it, so that you can know that I was right.
The devices here are spread randomly, one is buried in a planter box that struck my eye as I walked the streets, another beneath the table of bustling cafe. You must know now that finding them will be impossible. Please, for your own sake, the time for pursuit and prevention is long passed. It?s time to prepare.
San Francisco, California
December
00:00:00 AM
I never imagined that I would remain uninfected, despite my precautions after so much exposure; I had elongated the viruses dormancy for just this reason, to buy myself a little more time. I have not finished my web yet, as I had originally envisioned it, but my infection models show I have done more than enough. I will rest a little now, and I will try not to regret my part in this. Not my actions of course, but my inability to see the fruits of my labor.
Humanity would have died without me. We?ve grown soft, slow, no longer a viable organism. We would have slowly, subtly altered the environment until the world itself was toxic to us, and then we would have vanished with a whimper. Those who think that Man has the ability to destroy the world labor under the same strange anthropocentrism as those who think we are somehow divorced from the rest of the kingdom of life. We could no more end the world than we could create it. We only can kill ourselves, and take a few million unstable species down with us. Is this how you want to end? Slowly poisoned or drowned by our inability to see the long term?
This is not the way, and I will not allow it.
Humanity, I am giving you a great gift, though I know you will never see it as such. I am giving you competition. You will work together, you will merge your resources and be reforged and tempered in the fires of struggle and crisis, together. Or you will die. You will blossom into something new, or you will fertilize the fields of the next competitor for space and resources. But you will change. It?s inevitable now, and it brings me pride and joy even as the lining of my lungs slough free and I drown in infected blood.
I have left you something. One last breadcrumb, woven into these letters. It may be the key to your salvation. If you find it, it will set you onto the path to the cure. You understand that I can not just hand it to you, that would defeat my whole purpose. Believe me when I say that I want you to live, but I must be strong not to undermine the grand struggle that will shape you for centuries to come.
It?s over now. If you still wish to seek me, you are only wasting your precious little time, anything that could help you, I have already sent. The rest, I have burned and erased. The triggers on the devices will release soon. Very soon.
But, if for some foolish reason, you want to see the meat and bones and fluids I will leave behind, you will know where to find me. I will be Patient Zero.
There is a small puzzle built into this story?
***
The sun is high above me by the time I see the farm on the horizon, with it?s tattered yellow flag whipping in the hot breeze. The barn?s central roof beam is bowed, sagging gently in a way that feels warm and inviting, like the childhood ideal of a barn. There have been a half dozen farms along the last stretch of road, but none prominently displayed the signal flag, or showing any signs of habitation. It seems providence that I should come to this place, and I step of the highway onto a nearly overgrown gravel path.
I?ve been following Highway 37 all morning, a blacktop scar dividing the glass-still wetlands to the South and the fields and hills of wild golden grass to the North. I savor the quiet emptiness of Creation. Alone except for the elegant cranes above the water and the herds of deer grazing in the dry brush, I find long silent hours to reflect and meditate on the days passed, and the glorious days ahead. Beneath my feet the pavement is already growing warm, and the air begins to shimmer in the distance. There is a wet, earthy riot of smells, wet and earthy like fresh tilled soil and stagnant water. The whine and drone of insects is a warbling monotone symphony, unbroken save for the short cries of waterfowl.
The Vallejo Crater is far behind me now, hidden by a ridge of meek hills and the opalescent summer haze. Ahead, a little farmhouse comes into view from behind the barn, a leaning two room structure with pale yellow paint peeling in the sun. Again, I feel a comforting warmth and my grin widens at the charming innocence of the little home, and I try to imagine it without the thick wooden boards over the windows and doors.
On the porch, an elderly man in a stained white shirt stands up, slowly and stiffly as he wipes his hands on his jeans. He hoists and shoulders his rifle, bringing the sights into alignment with our eyes. I smile and wave.
?Ho there,? he barks in a voice like tumbling rocks. ?Would you mind speaking, please? What?s your name??
?Caleb,? I reply. No point in lying. I hold the grin firm and come to a stop as I swing the pack off my shoulders. ?I just? I just saw your flag.?
?That?s why we have it up.? The rifle comes down to his side as he steps slowly of the porch. ?What can I do for you, Caleb??
I exhale and raise my eyebrows with what I hope is a convincing look of honest confusion. ?To tell you the truth, sir, I?m not sure if I do need anything. I just got excited to see the flag. It?s been a little while.?
?I imagine it has,? he says softly, ?it?s been a while since anyone?s seen it. Where you coming from, son??
?The Crater, and before that, I come out of Winters, up near Sacramento.?
He regards me silently for moment with his head tilted, smiling slightly. ?That?s a long way on foot,? he says finally. ?Where you headed??
?The ocean, I think, sir.?
He smiles wide at this, and when his skin creases into a weathered map of a joy, I see, so clearly, what a good and righteous man he is. It?s clear at once that God has led me directly here, and I thank Him for his guidance. The man steps down from the porch, leaving the rifle behind.
?You in any hurry to get to the ocean, Caleb?? he asks with a few dry chuckles that could be mistaken for coughs.
?No, sir.? His smile is infectious and I no longer have to strain to affect the expression. ?I?d just like to do it sometime before the end of September. The heat makes them sluggish, and it?s been easy traveling so far.? He barks once with laughter at this.
?No need for ?sir?,? he says quickly, as if it embarrasses him. ?I?m Daniel. Pleasure meeting you Caleb.?
?Likewise, Daniel.? I nod slightly, lowering my eyes, another small calculated gesture.
?Listen, Caleb, I wonder if you?d be interested in a day?s work. I?ve got a beam on the barn that?s rotted through, and I could sure use a hand setting up a brace. We could give you as much food as you can carry, fresh off the farm. You interested?? I open my mouth to speak, and he cuts me off. ?You don?t need to know the first thing about carpentry. I just need you to be able to hold some planks still and follow directions.?
?Daniel, I think that would make me very happy,? I say with sincerity now. The thought of good honest work with my hands to better Daniel?s last days fills me with the same warmth as before. I offer my hand and we shake once; his hand is calloused and cool.
?Good, good?? he nods thoughtfully, his eyes narrowing a little; I get a little nervous twinge of paranoia that makes me have to work slightly harder at smiling and I drop his hand. ?Well, shall we get started??
I lean my backpack against the side of the house and turn to follow him towards the barn. He turns to stare out towards the highway and shouts over his shoulder at me. ?You didn?t see any of the sickos on the road or nearby, did you??
?No sir.? I respond, suppressing a little laugh at his vernacular. ?Haven?t seen them all morning. It?s been nice and quiet.? He gives one last scan of the horizon and turns away with a little nod of satisfaction, we enter the barn, and I have my first lesson in carpentry.
I devour every word he says as we brace and buttress several of the barns rotting timbers. I can hardly absorb all the information he can offer, surrounded by a cacophony of shuffling, clucking and baying farm animals. He shares his personal advice on hammering and woodworking with an almost guilty pride, lowering his voice conspiratorially. He is aghast at the fact that I don?t carry a gun, and he even tells me a little about what he remembers from Before. I am a blank page, now rapidly filling.
Before long I fall into the easy rhythm of the simple repetitive actions, and we are finished far earlier than I expect. The air is starting to grow cool and the whine of mosquitos rising off the wetlands is audible. It feels almost perfunctory when he invites me in for dinner with him and his wife, and I, powerless against the inevitable, accept heartily.
Caroline is slow and doughy woman with thinning hair and rotting teeth, and I take a liking to her instantly. She unlocks the thick barricaded door to let us in, and I am met by a bouquet of smells from the small kitchen: the peppery grease of fried meats, the bright sharp tang of something bitter and green. I am already salivating as I bow politely before her when Daniel introduces me.
Caroline remarks over dinner that she?s never met anyone as polite and well-mannered as me; that even Before, I would have been called ?old fashioned?. I am silent for a moment as I flare with panic and am suddenly conscious of all my little affectations; but it?s obvious by her wide grin that she finds it charming.
?I was raised well,? I offer with a smile, feeling my heart rate slow. ?My parents were good God-loving people, and we had a very secure community in Winters.? She nods heartily at the mention of God and closes her eyes; Daniel looks momentarily embarrassed and shuffles in his chair. The tiny flashes of body language fill my heart with sadness.
I offer up the tin of coffee I recently scavenged and we talk late into the evening trading news and stories we?ve heard, much of it baffling and contradictory. It was Caroline who brought up the End Times, and I tried to defer to Daniel?s visible discomfort by suppressing my own excitement.
?I just can?t see how Dan can deny it anymore after all these years,? she tells me as he shifts in his chair. ?It?s just like it says in the Bible. These days are proof the He is coming.?
Daniel smiles, one that on a lesser man would look patronizing. ?I could argue the opposite?? he locks eyes with her, and I can see the weathered and worn smooth love between them. I gently steer the conversation away.
When they retire, I unroll my bedroll out under the stars and soak in the chaotic summer night. The stars are a shimmering riot, and I trace the shapes I know again and again as the stirring breeze from off the water cools the air. I close my eyes and concentrate on the near silent passage of a coyote, as he walks a slow half circle around me before bounding off into the dark. The night is woven with life, and it cradles me like a nest. I sleep long and well.
I awake before dawn, and prepare myself.
Daniel is up before me. He has packed a box full of fresh cabbage and squash, a dozen grapefruit as well as a half dozen jars of homemade jams. He looks sheepish when I discover him filling the box, and I know, more that ever, that God has not led me astray. There is a contentedness that fills me as I approach.
?Thank you Daniel. And? She?s right you know.? I say, smiling sadly at him. He opens his mouth to speak, but looks confused momentarily. ?About the End,? I offer, and I see now that he understands.
?Look, Caleb?? I can see how much this pains him. I wonder if he lost his faith, or if he ever had it. ?I don?t really want to have this argument with you. The dead aren?t rising. This is a disease.?
?Who says viruses can?t be divine or diabolical? The Revenants are just one of the signs?? I am already starting to strain with exhilaration as I somehow manage keep my words even and slow.
?Kid. I?m really not interested.? His brow is furrowing in frustration; he looks 10 years older now, and tired. I take another step towards him.
?Daniel, I?m sorry for what you?ve had to go through, you didn?t deserve it.? I lock eyes and continue moving. ?I want to make it right for you.? I put one arm around him and pull him toward me. I can feel him start to panic in my arms.
He starts to say my name, the first hard syllable exits his lip and then stops as I slide the thin blade gently between his ribs and into his heart. I hold him tight and whisper gently to him as he slides away, his eyes growing dim. Later, I lay him on the floor and admire the peaceful expression on his pale face.
Carolina is still in bed but awake. I could smell the sickness on her the night before, the demonic taint of the disease hanging in the air like a chemical flag, but it was even stronger now, surging forward as she grows weaker. I sit next to her on the bed, smiling warmly. She is fixated on the blood on my shirt.
?Caroline. I know you must have felt sometimes like God has abandoned you, like you?ve been left behind. But you?re not. No one will be left behind. God is loving.?
She is shaking in fear, and I want so bad to be able to comfort her. But I know she will understand as soon as I have set her free. I am crying slightly, so happy for the opportunity to do these good works, and to save good people like this.
?I know you?re sick. And I know you?re scared. But I won?t let that stop you from going home. Daniel will be waiting for you.? I tell her with a smile, as I press the pillow tight against her face. She only struggles for a few moments, and I stroke her hand gently as she goes still.
Afterward, I use the thin bladed knife to cut and shred between the vertebrae just above her shoulders. I?ve seen the disease take hosts that were already two days dead, but without the spinal column, the Beast can never take Caroline?s body in thrall. I do the same for Daniel, even though he seems free of infection, because I take what I do very seriously. I am an instrument of God, and there are so many good souls that need to be called home.
I bury Daniel and Caroline side by side beneath the noon sun, and say a few happy words over their earthly remains. There is so much joy in me now, and a little pride as well. But mostly, I know how lucky I am to have been chosen. I fill my pack with the fresh food from the kitchen before I leave, thanking them both silently for their gifts.
I am on the road, the sun again on my back and the ocean ahead. This is the end of history, and the winter of all God?s Creation; but still, there is work to be done.
He pulls his long legs toward his body and stands, feeling the cold air glide through the shifting folds of his clothes. The coat tugs at him as he stands, weighted down with filth. There is water in his boots, running down his legs as he stands to soak through the layered socks that protected the last bit warmth and dryness. He scowls at the mud and the sky, and they are unmoved.
He winces against the sudden pain in his head and chest as he tries to sort out the jumble of memories and awakening thoughts. He wonders idly what day it is, but he cannot recall the chaplain?s last sermon, the only landmark he has to mark the progress of the days. He tries to remember the night before, or at least some small hint of how he?d ended here, soaking up rainwater in the trench. The preceding days are a monotone fog, a jumble of images and impressions of mud soaked boredom and terror.
?Thought you might be dead, ? comes a voice from his left. He turns to see a figure, leaning on the wooden post at the crook in the trench. His face is obscured by a gloved hand gripping a smoldering cigarette. Erich blinks and strains to focus on the man, but his blood is now surging in anticipation of tobacco.
He takes a few awkward steps, and he can see now, the crooked chin and bulbous nose of Karl Strauss. Aromatic smoke seeps from between his yellowed teeth, and Erich wordlessly extends his hands. Karl drops the small leather pouch into them. When Erich has rolled, lit and inhaled his first cigarette, he clears his throat and spits on the hard packed earth.
?Why did you let me sleep out here? I could have froze,? he rasps. His throat is raw and catches when he speaks. Karl chuckles, a deep rumble from his barrel chest, and flicks his cigarette against the wall. It collides noiselessly with a support beam and blossoms into a hundred momentary sparks.
?I let you do what you like, Lang.? He grins at Erich and claps him sharply on the back. Erich momentarily considers anger, but cannot find the heart for it.
The low tremor of a distant explosion ripples through the dirt, and Erich stiffens.
?Big guns. Far away,? Karl says, and Erich begins to relax.
?Us or them??
Karl shrugs and his eyes bulge slightly. For the thousandth time, Erich can see how perfectly Karl was suited to his life before the war. He pictures Karl on the stage, greasepaint glinting in the lights, playing the clown, the fool, for the cream of Bavaria. A natural.
Out here, in the blindspot of God, Karl is a natural of another sort. Erich has been with him in the beginning, since Belgium. Erich can recall the clown?s visage, somehow pleasant and comical still, in the firelight of Andenne, as they burnt the village and, fearing guerilla fighters, shot all the men.
Karl and Erich walk the trench, taking the traverse back through the lines. A few men huddle for warmth in small groups, smoking, or warming their hands on tin mugs of coffee. There is a lethargic stillness to the men, and they keep their eyes fixed on the ground or skyward, but avoid eye contact. Erich is grateful for the quiet passage.
The first guard post is empty, and the mounted machine gun and mortar are untended. Erich looks to Karl, but he seems unconcerned. Karl has kept a small rank superiority to Erich for the past three years, and Erich has come to depend on relinquishing all judgement and worry to the older man. It has allowed to live this long, unquestioning.
Only the Chaplain sits at the mess hall benches, solemnly dipping a crumbling dry biscuit into his coffee. Karl and Erich join him, following his lead to soften the rocky bread. The Chaplain, Sebastian Raus looks up at them with watery brown eyes through his scratched and chipped spectacles, and nods, almost imperceptibly, before returning to the patient vivisection of his meal.
Erich thinks to ask him what day it is, but can?t imagine knowing would be worth the effort, and moves to lay his jacket on a small stove. Anemic smoke drifts from it, and it seems no warmer than the surroundings. They sit in silence, draining the last of the coffee and rolling cigarettes from Karl?s seemingly endless pouch.
?I just realized,? starts Sebastian, his voice tenuous from disuse. ?I haven?t seen an officer in at least a day.?
?This is a good thing, most likely,? Karl huffs with his crooked grin.
?What if? What if the line is breached, and we?re cut off, with no one to tell us?? The Chaplain does not appear worried, merely curious. For a moment, Erich considers the logic in this conclusion, and cold panic begins to coalesce in him.

?Stick to the sermons, father,? Karl snorts his derision.
But the idea gnaws at Erich through the day. He passes scattered and listless men, all strangers to him, but no officers. It occurs that he cannot recall the last briefing they had. At an empty guide post, he raises his head tentatively above the outside wall, and gazes across the front, toward the French line.
As it has a thousand times before, the stark unearthliness of no man?s land catches his breath and turns his heart to ice. Jagged cinders in the shape of trees jut defiantly from the craters and hillocks of carrion soaked mud. Erich can see blue hands clutching at the sky, the ragged shreds of boys from across the Empire.
The land is dead, Erich knows this in some deep and primal way; he?s seen burned farms, and razed towns, but out here, it?s different somehow. There?s a palpable emptiness, a hollow that absorbs all sound, and cuts away at those that persist in living here. Erich can feel it, reaching out to him from the monochrome charnel fields. A shiver twists around his spine.
?I know it doesn?t look like it, but, He is here.? Sebastian?s voice is quiet and hollow. Erich turns to regard the Chaplain briefly, before returning his gaze back to the void.
?I admire your faith, Sebastian,? Erich leaves the next part unsaid. Sebastian has been insistent and dedicated, but they?ve had this conversation many times. Erich knows they are going through the motions to satisfy Sebastian?s guilt, but today, he?s too tired to humor him. Erich hasn?t believed since Andenne. Sebastian?s smile is weary, and he looks grateful for Erich?s non-participation.
?You?ll see,? he says, at last.
They stand in silence, as a thin and fetid miasma of fog drifts over the dead land and spills like molasses into the trench. Erich is looking at the fog thicken and blot out the unburied dead, when he turns to see Sebastian is gone, the fog and the dead land stealing even the sound of his footsteps.
The sky darkens and Erich gives up any hope of being dry or warm today. A concertina picks out a lively tune in the distance, but the fog muffles the sounds and robs the life from the notes. Erich tries to follow the wilting music, taking traverses and glancing down each line, but it always stays in the distance, circling around him in the encroaching gloom. At last, it dies away, mid stanza with a mournful trill, and Erich is alone in the deepening gloom
He fights down panic as he backtracks towards the front line. The dark and the mist have muffled the world, the only sound is the scratching shuffle of his wet wool coat and the tread of his boots. The trench is empty, and he is alone. Above him the sky is a bruise, purple and darkening. He struggles to recall which direction the makeshift barracks are in, but this only makes him realize that he?s not quite sure where he is at this moment.
The fear has him now, a cold blue corpse?s hand clutching at his lungs. He struggles to catch his breath and the filthy damp in his clothes presses inward, smothering his skin and extinguishing the heat like a flame.
The world pitches a little, shudders, and he?s suddenly aware of sitting, Karl above him and sliding a lit cigarette between his fingers. Erich catches a hold of his drumbeat heart and focuses on the warmth of the smoke. Karl is playing the father, his best paternal mask on his face.
?I worry about you, Erich,? Karl says at last.
?What?s going on?? Erich demands. Karl smiles, sadly, and helps Erich to his feet.
?Does it matter?? Karl offers at last, turning away. ?Get some sleep, boy.?
He hums tunelessly, and soon the fog swallows his music and the burning ember of his cigarette, and Erich is alone, again. For the first time he can remember, Karl?s assurance has not thawed the frost in him. His heart begins to surge again, terror winding around his ventricles and constricting. He loses his breath and begins to pant, dropping his helmet and running his fingers through his filthy hair. The sky seems to contract around him, and the trench stretches away infinitely. Erich is gripped by fear, and he slumps against the earthen barricade.
There is a low thud, followed by an angry hissing, and a bright column of red fire arcs into the sky, igniting the black fog. The world is suddenly bright and painted crimson. He stumbles to the edge of the trench, and looks over the edge, hoping pitifully not to see what he knows is there.
The nightmare landscape of filth and gore is cast into sharp and dancing relief by the burning flare, and the graveyard is picked out in sharp contrast. The dead trees loom menacingly like prison bars around the dead. The fog hovers like a noxious living thing, it?s tendrils caressing the defiled earth.
In the hellish stillness, he sees them, surging from the fog. Hundreds, thousands of the enemy, breaking across the pitted ground like a wave. Bayonets on rifle barrels shudder across the surface like quills, and they are pressed together so close that Erich can not pick one from the next.
He grasps at his back for his rifle, and realizes with a sickening lurch that his doesn?t have it, hasn?t had it all day. His sidearm holster is empty, the leather damp and torn.
They are closer now, and the world is silent. Erich can see their hollow, empty eye sockets. He can see their hanging, shattered jaws and torn leathery skin. He can see the French soldiers in ragged uniforms, and the torn and burnt shapes of civilians. He can see his friends, his comrades. They all bear down on him beneath the waning flare light in utter and unbroken quiet.
They crash over the edge of the trench, and Erich feels a bayonet slide into his lungs, hears the rifles fire, and smells the burning wool and meat from his ragged wounds. He is crushed backwards, his arm folding beneath him as he tumbles to the floor.
The rotting thing above him stands, panting. Erich looks up to it, but instead of worm choked cavities, he sees? watery blue eyes in a filthy, young face. He sees fear that matches his own. He sees a child. He sees. He begins to understand.
The fog, at last, obscures his sight.
Erich awakes long after the dawn to the distant sound of artillery. The gunmetal sky ripples with threatening black clouds. He is slumped back against the earthen wall, his arm crooked and folded behind him. It comes awake in a flare of pinpricks and fire. Besides the upturned helmet lying in the mud a few yards away, he is alone.
***
I awake, as always, to the click and whir of a thousand hidden cameras, and the rising glow of the ambient lights. Over the next 30 minutes, the curtains on my bedroom will slowly part, gliding on mechanized tracks, and the yellow sunlight of dawn will stream into the wide circular room. Like all mornings, I entertain for the briefest moments the thought of hurling myself at the windows and plunging the half mile to the ground. I hold on to the little fantasy of wind and sky and falling for as long as it will remain, dreaming of those magnificent moments of freedom and choice.
Even if I were not a coward, there are a thousand unseen barriers and safe guards. I can not see them, but several parents are doubtlessly just outside the door, and would be between me and the window before I could leave the bed. I allow the dream of freedom to evaporate for another morning.
The woman next to me, I can not recall her name, shifts and rolls to embrace me. I wrap my arms around her and return the affection, but there is no love in it. She is young and soft, skin still stretched taut over her athletic and perfect frame. I know that in my youth I would have been buzzing with anticipation and lust simply seeing her, but now I can only take solace in the momentary ghost of affection and emotion. Her skin is warm, and her fine and downy body hair is smoother than the silk of the sheets. I draw an abstract of pleasure from this closeness, feeling something akin to happiness when our bellies synchronize in breathing, pressed close as they rise and fall in an alternating rhythm. Her breath is hot and damp on my chin and neck. It only takes me a few moments to tire of her, and I swung my legs to the edge of the bed.
The black marble of the walls and floor of my bedroom are heated to my exact preference, so I walk, naked, into the large bathroom. Like every morning, I try not to focus on the near-silent buzzing of small servos and motors as each of the cameras pivots to keep me in view at all time. They must be completely autonomous, but it amuses me to think of a thousand uniformed parents tediously tracking my every move, 16 hours a day. They would be madder than I by now.
The routine begins; not identical every morning, but a tiny repertoire of ordered tasks combined in a slightly different order than the day before. Shave. Shower. Preen. Pose. Smile. Evacuate. Masturbate.
By altering my routines with feckless reorganization, it gives the impression of variance where there is none. The parents tell me that this is just one of the reasons my channel is still so popular, despite being functionally identical to my father?s and his father?s before us. I have a flair for fakery, for lying. It makes them proud. It makes me hollow.
I can choose what want to do for the rest of the day, from an approved list; another beautiful facade of freedom. I can hold court over a hundred gladiators and command them to break each other apart. I can paint on a canvas a hundred feet tall. I can inhale hallucinogens and stumble through the thousand-acre wildlife preserve on the outer decks of the Tower. I can copulate with my choice of limitless young women, or men. I can beat a child until his skull caves in. It is of course, a limited form of choice. I cannot go back to bed and weep. I can never say ?Stop?. I cannot leave the Tower.
I am at my most honest, I believe, in the 8 hours of broadcast solitude each night, locked in the blacked out bedroom of silk and marble with whatever woman has caught my fancy. These are the times that I can admit, in my solitude and self reflection, that I would never be able to exist outside the Tower. I know nothing about the outside, and the parents and my concubines can only tell me of the millions of people that love me. I don?t know how a real person lives. I only know my world.
I spend the day in the museum, aimlessly wandering through ancient paintings and statues before practicing horseback riding on one of the open air decks. I do this partially because I told the parents I would be in the harem all day, and it amuses me to think of them struggling to adapt the programming, and the wasted resources.
When I am done for the day, I retire to a balcony with a drink. The jagged spires of the horizon look like teeth as they swallow the sun, and I can feel the cold, familiar knot in my guts, that unease and dread at the crawling passage of time.
I?ve been as careful as I could not to conceive, but that can never last. I have no illusions about this. Sooner or later, I will have a son. Doubtless the parents are already weaning me off the contraceptives in my meals. I grow ill at the thought, and stand to complete my nightly ritual.
I descend the elevator through the vast interior space of the Tower, towards the lower levels. The parents love this portion of my night, such a wonder flair for the dramatic, they say. I do it because it keeps me sane.
The guards below are like the parents, only their uniforms are different. They smile at me with genuine love and affection and allow me to pass the viewing chamber.
My father, a man I never met, is laying on a soiled mattress bed, in a sterile metal chamber.
They only love you for so long.
He stirs slightly, but I know he cannot see me; his eyes are now lidless, each orb a milky ball of scar tissue. His mouth is lipless and his dry and bleeding gums encase only a few shattered teeth. His ears are gone, the skin pulled tight around them and sewn shut with black cord.
His limbs each terminated in a raw stump when I first was allowed to see him, now they are completely gone. I?ve watched them break, bend and vanish in slow bites over the years, but they are simply scars around his gaunt torso now. There are deep, fresh gouges in his gut. Every time I think he simply cannot endure more, he astounds me by continuing to live.
When my time on the channel ends each night, his begins. The Tower goes deep underground, and that is my father?s world, a nightmare mirror of my own. For the last few months they have taken to opening him up to take away ragged chips of his organs. Since they took his tongue and lips, he has no shame about gibbering and wailing wordlessly.
I have no love for this man, no pity for this thing. I can barely feel pity for myself.
But he is my mirror, my portrait of the future. The people that love me now will grow weary, and will fall in love with my inevitable son. Later, these same people will delight in watching my slow and surgical dismantlement, for eight hours every night.
The mechanical arm on the ceiling descends, lopping a hook through the harness around my father?s broken body, and carries him into the next room to prep him for the show. He begins to shriek, a ululating cry of helpless terror, and thrashes in the machine?s embrace, but it cradles him almost gently as it takes him from my view, and into someone else?s.
I look away. Return to my room. Lie motionless and empty in the dark.
The channel changes.
***
Sometime during the third consecutive night spent huddled over the toilet, insides heaving and shuddering as I vomit forth seemingly everything I?d ever eaten, I realize what?s happening: He?s trying to poison me. It?s all so elegant, so perfect, and so clear, that I almost laugh, but another barrage of retching forces me into silence
The next morning I throw everything in the kitchen away, wrapping it three times in black plastic and burying it deep in the apartments communal trash cans, to prevent an unfortunate transient from crossfire of His wrath. I am out the door of the complex and halfway to the corner store when I realize: He knows, must know, where I would shop.
I pick a direction and walk, enjoying the chill winter air that soothes the ragged shreds of my inside. I turn at random intervals, following an improbable path out of my familiar neighborhood, until I find a small shop with an unfamiliar name. Once inside, I hurriedly fill a small plastic basket; brands that I never have eaten, strange tins of ethnic ingredients I can?t recognize, foods that I?d never thought of buying. Soy milk. Tofu. I can feel my stomach reborn in anticipation of an untainted meal.
I prepare the meal in a fog of nervous anticipation, trying to focus on savoring the aromas and the grease spitting sounds of the frying pan. It tastes clean, but then, so has every other meal before this. I try to tell myself that the mounting pain inside me is simple fear and anxiety, but before the stroke of midnight, I am again crouched in the dingy bathroom, surrendering the days work into the porcelain mouth of the sewer.
The next day, I pack up the remaining food and dispose of it with the same care. I eat out that day, layering debt onto the last of my credit cards at restaurants on the opposite side of town.
He is more clever than I could ever imagined, and I am awash in despair as I spend another sleepless night gagging and sobbing on the tile floor. I imagine the Algorithm, the perfect predictive models at His disposal, brilliantly charting my every move across the city; every time I thought I?d outwitted Him, I was willingly walking into his web.
I buy a candy bar from a vending machine in a theater, and hold it close like a talisman. When I get home, I fill the bath a few inches deep with rust colored water, and hold the little plastic wrapped bundle beneath the water and squeeze. I know that I will see it, but it still breaks my heart when I do. A thin almost invisible stream of bubbles picks out the point where a foreign object has pierced the protective layer. Through the haze of piercing hunger, I convince myself to try, just one bite, and to take the chances. It?s a gamble that I do not win.
In the small hours of the morning as I press my fists into my empty protesting belly, I imagine the legion of His followers sliding silently through the restaurants and produce aisles of my life, slipping hypodermic needles into carefully selected packages of food. They are ruining and corrupting at His whim, surgical and efficient, before vanishing into the throng of the city at my approach. They will always be one step ahead of me, until I learn to think in new ways, to chart new cognitive pathways, and turn the game back upon Him. So, I tell myself, this is what I must do.
The first day of my new life, I spend in the small living area of my apartment, organizing my thoughts with clean and sterile efficiency, and conserving what energy I can from my wasting body. Night brings the retching sickness, but all that arises is water? and pills, half digested in the bilious water.
The pills. Of course. Not for the first time, I feel a sharp twinge of respect for crystalline perfection of His plans. I dump the last of my dozen prescriptions into the toilet.
On my third day, I feel a clarity and a sense of purpose that shocks me in it?s intensity, and my will penetrates the starvation malaise. I must win, or I will die. The rashes and sores in my cheeks are deeper, and I can feel the gentle sway of loose teeth in my desiccated mouth when I grind them in thought. He is winning, but not for long. There is still time.
Water, I collect from the roof in a small army of cheap hardware buckets. I know that somewhere in the byzantine plumbing of the aged building, there must one of His infernally clever devices; a tiny pump, squatting like a predator and pulsing it?s vile contents into the water main. I?ll have to give up bathing. A small sacrifice. The rain water will keep me alive for a while longer, but I must find a way to eat.
The answer comes to me in small unconnected puzzle pieces over the next few days. While gently working another loose molar from my bleeding gums, they suddenly snap together, and a warm smothering blanket of epiphany coats my aching frame. The clattering of the tooth into the sink basin is like the ringing of bells.
Late in the evening, I begin another unconscious dérive, drifting through the city on shaking and atrophied legs, knowing full well that He is watching. But this, my beautiful solution, is beyond even His reach.
I choose the house at random, and then, in one final attempt to baffle the Algorithim, turn around and choose another house across the little tree lined street. I sift through the mail; it?s a small sample size, but enough to confirm the most necessary of facts. A single occupant.
The poor man is surprised to have a visitor at all, and his face contorts with fear as force my way inside. I am flooded with guilt and regret as I push him to the floor and strike quickly with the crowbar I pull from the folds of my jacket.
No.
I must steel myself. This is His fault. He has brought us to this, and this poor man is just another of His victims.
I make quick work of the meat, the muscle memories of summers spent hunting in the mountains flaring up with each quick cut. I allow myself a quick bite, a feast to my shrunken and withered stomach. The iron and mineral salt taste floods my head like a vapor and I bawl in relief, like a child. When I have the meat packed tight into my rucksack, I light a single candle on the top floor of the little house, and turn the gas range on high.
I?m not yet home when I hear the low rumble in the distance; the pulsing lights of fire engines highlight the black cloud hanging in the sky.
For the first time in more than a month, I sleep well, my body rapidly healing as pure, untainted nutrients penetrate my cells. I am not yet well, but after a few more meals, I will be ready, once more, to fight Him. I know I can beat him now. I know the Algorithm can only predict the actions of my past self, bound by the laws and morals of the old world.
That world is dead.
I am a free man.
***
Istanbul, Turkey
August
09:12:09 AM
I am at a small outdoor cafe just a few hundred yards from the teeming throng of a morning market, just in sight of the Bosporus. I love this city, and all its thick and violent contradictions. The rising heat of the day is already causing the linen of my suit to cling to my legs.
I awoke last night with a change of heart; you are owed an explanation, and even a warning. If I do as I have planned, I and my actions will be vilified, and misunderstood. Please believe me, I am doing this for all the right reasons. You may not see it now, but in ten or twenty years, you will see a new world born. That is worth any sacrifice.
I have done my work here in Turkey, the first of many great cities to see, and I board a plane tomorrow. Don?t bother looking for me here.
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
September
05:04:20 AM
I am in one of the oldest settlements of mankind, and her majesty overwhelms me, just as her descent saddens me. Once the jewel of Alexander?s conquest, and the capital of Tamarlane?s empire, she has fallen into disrepair and goes fallow with neglect. I must confess knowing this already, but forgive my sense of romanticism; I did want to see this place, once.
I have no work to do here; once the junction of trade lanes between East and West, Samarkand has become isolated and useless to me. But the ghosts of her history and past bring me strength and resolve. The case that I carry with me is heavy in my hand, it is my burden, but with each stop, that burden lessens.
I have allowed myself this one folly, leaving the web for a moment, but I will not linger long.
Munich, Germany
September
08:05:18 AM
The city still sleeps late into the morning on Saturday, and in many places the streets are still empty. There is a grand majesty of Munich?s remaining prewar buildings, and I remarked on its beauty to my local driver. ?It was a lot nicer before the British bombed us,? he said without a hint of irony. He was at least two generations removed from the war, and did not seem, or want, to understand when I told him that London had the same problem.
Most of humanity is horrified by the specter of the war, of what happened here. They wonder how man could be so inhumane. These people know nothing of the world, or of nature, red in tooth and claw. These are the people that artificially elevate humanity above the animal kingdom, people that maintain an ephemeral barrier between our particular primate sub-grouping, and the rest of life on Earth. I never understood these people.
I deposited one more device downtown, in a massive state-of-the-art theater complex. I hid it carefully, and set the little slaved atomic clock to my own. My flight departs in a few hours, and if you are following me, you will have no luck in Germany.
London, England
October
05:09:19 AM
London shows her war wounds with flat gray office towers, and plain, blocky apartments, yet her age and history bleed through the scars as I stroll down the Thames, scarcely aware of the brackish odor of the oily waters. The trash and detritus in the river don?t sadden me, the way I imagine it would for you.
You draw some artificial line between a hamburger wrapper and the fallen leaves of a tree that I will never understand. You distinguish between nature and humanity in a way that puzzles me. We are nature, our cities, our roads, and our orbital satellites are no different than a termite colony, or a birds nest, except perhaps in scale. There is nothing unique about humanity. I know that I am all but alone in this conceit, but history and nature herself will prove me right.
The devices I planted here are in the Underground; silently waiting for the day to come when I will activate them, and they will open their ceramic filters and gently release their payload into the air. I burned the last decade of my life like a candle to forge the perfect weapon, hardened against the air, hearty and undeniably alive, burning with the will to survive.
I have chosen the stations because the first letters of each station spell my name. Consider it an artist?s signature. I wouldn?t tell you this if I wasn?t sure this would be useless information, and I doubt you have even uncovered who I am.
As always, I will be gone before you arrive.
Chicago, Illinois
November
02:15:03 PM
Chicago is the hub of a great wheel of airline traffic; along its thousand intersecting lines, millions of passengers will pass through, robbing the stale airport air of oxygen and expunging carbon dioxide. Even these sterile, atmosphere-regulated glass and steel tunnels, I still see nature, green and red with life.
I need to make a distinction. I know that what I am doing seems to be wrong, evil. However, I also understand that morality is an artificial device we used to guide tribal behavior, a useful conceit in creating harmony and growth in small populations. But there is no real weight to good and evil. Nature is beyond that. There is nothing evil about the wasp that implants her young into a living caterpillar. Our concepts of ethics are as fragile as our bodies, and just as impermanent.
A few devices in the ventilation systems will infect millions. You can search for them if you want, but there is a great deal of redundancy in my plan. You can grind yourself to the bone attempting to undo my work, but in the end, you will fail. If you are wise, you will cease pursuit and begin to prepare for the inevitable struggle ahead.
Tokyo, Japan
November
09:18:05 PM
Tokyo must be a hell to those who see nature as only forests or mountains or clean ocean waters. To me, it is a wonder of that natural world. The lights and madness of Roppongi are just as wondrous and alive as the synchronized flashing of fireflies. This is nature, and if you will allow me a moment of species-self congratulation, this is nature at its finest and most wonderful. But nature has no apex. It will only grow and learn and become more beautiful. It brings tears to my eyes.
I was asleep for so many decades, laboring in a lab for a pharmaceutical giant. (Which one is not important. It will not help you find me, especially not this late.) I wish I could tell you that there was some epiphany, some concrete lesson I could share with you to make you understand why I have chose this path for us all. The truth is sadly mundane: the influx of money from a chain of discoveries gave me the time to think, and become aware of the world and its systems, slowly and gradually. The money also gave me the resources to act once I was determined.
The world regulates itself. People ascribe some sort of special malevolence to the acts of man, unaware that we are not the first species to war, to commit genocide. Foolish. This is not unique to man. Many other species before us outstripped their habitats, and sowed the seeds of their own destruction. They simply are no longer among us to act as a warning. Evolutionary strategies either work, forever sustainable, or they do not, and the species die. This is the only rule in nature. Live for the future, or be buried in the past.
It should be clear now, to all of us, that despite our species? meteoric growth, we have not opted for the former strategy, and it is only a matter of time before we collapse.
I will not stand for that. I am as much a part of nature as anything else, and so are my weapons. I will be the regulator. We will adapt, or die. But be brave: no matter the outcome, the world will be bettered. And I sincerely hope you will be there to see it, so that you can know that I was right.
The devices here are spread randomly, one is buried in a planter box that struck my eye as I walked the streets, another beneath the table of bustling cafe. You must know now that finding them will be impossible. Please, for your own sake, the time for pursuit and prevention is long passed. It?s time to prepare.
San Francisco, California
December
00:00:00 AM
I never imagined that I would remain uninfected, despite my precautions after so much exposure; I had elongated the viruses dormancy for just this reason, to buy myself a little more time. I have not finished my web yet, as I had originally envisioned it, but my infection models show I have done more than enough. I will rest a little now, and I will try not to regret my part in this. Not my actions of course, but my inability to see the fruits of my labor.
Humanity would have died without me. We?ve grown soft, slow, no longer a viable organism. We would have slowly, subtly altered the environment until the world itself was toxic to us, and then we would have vanished with a whimper. Those who think that Man has the ability to destroy the world labor under the same strange anthropocentrism as those who think we are somehow divorced from the rest of the kingdom of life. We could no more end the world than we could create it. We only can kill ourselves, and take a few million unstable species down with us. Is this how you want to end? Slowly poisoned or drowned by our inability to see the long term?
This is not the way, and I will not allow it.
Humanity, I am giving you a great gift, though I know you will never see it as such. I am giving you competition. You will work together, you will merge your resources and be reforged and tempered in the fires of struggle and crisis, together. Or you will die. You will blossom into something new, or you will fertilize the fields of the next competitor for space and resources. But you will change. It?s inevitable now, and it brings me pride and joy even as the lining of my lungs slough free and I drown in infected blood.
I have left you something. One last breadcrumb, woven into these letters. It may be the key to your salvation. If you find it, it will set you onto the path to the cure. You understand that I can not just hand it to you, that would defeat my whole purpose. Believe me when I say that I want you to live, but I must be strong not to undermine the grand struggle that will shape you for centuries to come.
It?s over now. If you still wish to seek me, you are only wasting your precious little time, anything that could help you, I have already sent. The rest, I have burned and erased. The triggers on the devices will release soon. Very soon.
But, if for some foolish reason, you want to see the meat and bones and fluids I will leave behind, you will know where to find me. I will be Patient Zero.
There is a small puzzle built into this story?
***
The sun is high above me by the time I see the farm on the horizon, with it?s tattered yellow flag whipping in the hot breeze. The barn?s central roof beam is bowed, sagging gently in a way that feels warm and inviting, like the childhood ideal of a barn. There have been a half dozen farms along the last stretch of road, but none prominently displayed the signal flag, or showing any signs of habitation. It seems providence that I should come to this place, and I step of the highway onto a nearly overgrown gravel path.
I?ve been following Highway 37 all morning, a blacktop scar dividing the glass-still wetlands to the South and the fields and hills of wild golden grass to the North. I savor the quiet emptiness of Creation. Alone except for the elegant cranes above the water and the herds of deer grazing in the dry brush, I find long silent hours to reflect and meditate on the days passed, and the glorious days ahead. Beneath my feet the pavement is already growing warm, and the air begins to shimmer in the distance. There is a wet, earthy riot of smells, wet and earthy like fresh tilled soil and stagnant water. The whine and drone of insects is a warbling monotone symphony, unbroken save for the short cries of waterfowl.
The Vallejo Crater is far behind me now, hidden by a ridge of meek hills and the opalescent summer haze. Ahead, a little farmhouse comes into view from behind the barn, a leaning two room structure with pale yellow paint peeling in the sun. Again, I feel a comforting warmth and my grin widens at the charming innocence of the little home, and I try to imagine it without the thick wooden boards over the windows and doors.
On the porch, an elderly man in a stained white shirt stands up, slowly and stiffly as he wipes his hands on his jeans. He hoists and shoulders his rifle, bringing the sights into alignment with our eyes. I smile and wave.
?Ho there,? he barks in a voice like tumbling rocks. ?Would you mind speaking, please? What?s your name??
?Caleb,? I reply. No point in lying. I hold the grin firm and come to a stop as I swing the pack off my shoulders. ?I just? I just saw your flag.?
?That?s why we have it up.? The rifle comes down to his side as he steps slowly of the porch. ?What can I do for you, Caleb??
I exhale and raise my eyebrows with what I hope is a convincing look of honest confusion. ?To tell you the truth, sir, I?m not sure if I do need anything. I just got excited to see the flag. It?s been a little while.?
?I imagine it has,? he says softly, ?it?s been a while since anyone?s seen it. Where you coming from, son??
?The Crater, and before that, I come out of Winters, up near Sacramento.?
He regards me silently for moment with his head tilted, smiling slightly. ?That?s a long way on foot,? he says finally. ?Where you headed??
?The ocean, I think, sir.?
He smiles wide at this, and when his skin creases into a weathered map of a joy, I see, so clearly, what a good and righteous man he is. It?s clear at once that God has led me directly here, and I thank Him for his guidance. The man steps down from the porch, leaving the rifle behind.
?You in any hurry to get to the ocean, Caleb?? he asks with a few dry chuckles that could be mistaken for coughs.
?No, sir.? His smile is infectious and I no longer have to strain to affect the expression. ?I?d just like to do it sometime before the end of September. The heat makes them sluggish, and it?s been easy traveling so far.? He barks once with laughter at this.
?No need for ?sir?,? he says quickly, as if it embarrasses him. ?I?m Daniel. Pleasure meeting you Caleb.?
?Likewise, Daniel.? I nod slightly, lowering my eyes, another small calculated gesture.
?Listen, Caleb, I wonder if you?d be interested in a day?s work. I?ve got a beam on the barn that?s rotted through, and I could sure use a hand setting up a brace. We could give you as much food as you can carry, fresh off the farm. You interested?? I open my mouth to speak, and he cuts me off. ?You don?t need to know the first thing about carpentry. I just need you to be able to hold some planks still and follow directions.?
?Daniel, I think that would make me very happy,? I say with sincerity now. The thought of good honest work with my hands to better Daniel?s last days fills me with the same warmth as before. I offer my hand and we shake once; his hand is calloused and cool.
?Good, good?? he nods thoughtfully, his eyes narrowing a little; I get a little nervous twinge of paranoia that makes me have to work slightly harder at smiling and I drop his hand. ?Well, shall we get started??
I lean my backpack against the side of the house and turn to follow him towards the barn. He turns to stare out towards the highway and shouts over his shoulder at me. ?You didn?t see any of the sickos on the road or nearby, did you??
?No sir.? I respond, suppressing a little laugh at his vernacular. ?Haven?t seen them all morning. It?s been nice and quiet.? He gives one last scan of the horizon and turns away with a little nod of satisfaction, we enter the barn, and I have my first lesson in carpentry.
I devour every word he says as we brace and buttress several of the barns rotting timbers. I can hardly absorb all the information he can offer, surrounded by a cacophony of shuffling, clucking and baying farm animals. He shares his personal advice on hammering and woodworking with an almost guilty pride, lowering his voice conspiratorially. He is aghast at the fact that I don?t carry a gun, and he even tells me a little about what he remembers from Before. I am a blank page, now rapidly filling.
Before long I fall into the easy rhythm of the simple repetitive actions, and we are finished far earlier than I expect. The air is starting to grow cool and the whine of mosquitos rising off the wetlands is audible. It feels almost perfunctory when he invites me in for dinner with him and his wife, and I, powerless against the inevitable, accept heartily.
Caroline is slow and doughy woman with thinning hair and rotting teeth, and I take a liking to her instantly. She unlocks the thick barricaded door to let us in, and I am met by a bouquet of smells from the small kitchen: the peppery grease of fried meats, the bright sharp tang of something bitter and green. I am already salivating as I bow politely before her when Daniel introduces me.
Caroline remarks over dinner that she?s never met anyone as polite and well-mannered as me; that even Before, I would have been called ?old fashioned?. I am silent for a moment as I flare with panic and am suddenly conscious of all my little affectations; but it?s obvious by her wide grin that she finds it charming.
?I was raised well,? I offer with a smile, feeling my heart rate slow. ?My parents were good God-loving people, and we had a very secure community in Winters.? She nods heartily at the mention of God and closes her eyes; Daniel looks momentarily embarrassed and shuffles in his chair. The tiny flashes of body language fill my heart with sadness.
I offer up the tin of coffee I recently scavenged and we talk late into the evening trading news and stories we?ve heard, much of it baffling and contradictory. It was Caroline who brought up the End Times, and I tried to defer to Daniel?s visible discomfort by suppressing my own excitement.
?I just can?t see how Dan can deny it anymore after all these years,? she tells me as he shifts in his chair. ?It?s just like it says in the Bible. These days are proof the He is coming.?
Daniel smiles, one that on a lesser man would look patronizing. ?I could argue the opposite?? he locks eyes with her, and I can see the weathered and worn smooth love between them. I gently steer the conversation away.
When they retire, I unroll my bedroll out under the stars and soak in the chaotic summer night. The stars are a shimmering riot, and I trace the shapes I know again and again as the stirring breeze from off the water cools the air. I close my eyes and concentrate on the near silent passage of a coyote, as he walks a slow half circle around me before bounding off into the dark. The night is woven with life, and it cradles me like a nest. I sleep long and well.
I awake before dawn, and prepare myself.
Daniel is up before me. He has packed a box full of fresh cabbage and squash, a dozen grapefruit as well as a half dozen jars of homemade jams. He looks sheepish when I discover him filling the box, and I know, more that ever, that God has not led me astray. There is a contentedness that fills me as I approach.
?Thank you Daniel. And? She?s right you know.? I say, smiling sadly at him. He opens his mouth to speak, but looks confused momentarily. ?About the End,? I offer, and I see now that he understands.
?Look, Caleb?? I can see how much this pains him. I wonder if he lost his faith, or if he ever had it. ?I don?t really want to have this argument with you. The dead aren?t rising. This is a disease.?
?Who says viruses can?t be divine or diabolical? The Revenants are just one of the signs?? I am already starting to strain with exhilaration as I somehow manage keep my words even and slow.
?Kid. I?m really not interested.? His brow is furrowing in frustration; he looks 10 years older now, and tired. I take another step towards him.
?Daniel, I?m sorry for what you?ve had to go through, you didn?t deserve it.? I lock eyes and continue moving. ?I want to make it right for you.? I put one arm around him and pull him toward me. I can feel him start to panic in my arms.
He starts to say my name, the first hard syllable exits his lip and then stops as I slide the thin blade gently between his ribs and into his heart. I hold him tight and whisper gently to him as he slides away, his eyes growing dim. Later, I lay him on the floor and admire the peaceful expression on his pale face.
Carolina is still in bed but awake. I could smell the sickness on her the night before, the demonic taint of the disease hanging in the air like a chemical flag, but it was even stronger now, surging forward as she grows weaker. I sit next to her on the bed, smiling warmly. She is fixated on the blood on my shirt.
?Caroline. I know you must have felt sometimes like God has abandoned you, like you?ve been left behind. But you?re not. No one will be left behind. God is loving.?
She is shaking in fear, and I want so bad to be able to comfort her. But I know she will understand as soon as I have set her free. I am crying slightly, so happy for the opportunity to do these good works, and to save good people like this.
?I know you?re sick. And I know you?re scared. But I won?t let that stop you from going home. Daniel will be waiting for you.? I tell her with a smile, as I press the pillow tight against her face. She only struggles for a few moments, and I stroke her hand gently as she goes still.
Afterward, I use the thin bladed knife to cut and shred between the vertebrae just above her shoulders. I?ve seen the disease take hosts that were already two days dead, but without the spinal column, the Beast can never take Caroline?s body in thrall. I do the same for Daniel, even though he seems free of infection, because I take what I do very seriously. I am an instrument of God, and there are so many good souls that need to be called home.
I bury Daniel and Caroline side by side beneath the noon sun, and say a few happy words over their earthly remains. There is so much joy in me now, and a little pride as well. But mostly, I know how lucky I am to have been chosen. I fill my pack with the fresh food from the kitchen before I leave, thanking them both silently for their gifts.
I am on the road, the sun again on my back and the ocean ahead. This is the end of history, and the winter of all God?s Creation; but still, there is work to be done.
Something is wrong.
Consciousness drifts back to me lazily, like an incoming tide as my mind and body awake in stages. At first, it is dark, and I have no form, just a terrified animal spark suspended in a featureless abyss. My primal fore brain sends useless impulses to my unanswering body, demanding that I run and hide, but I am still. How long I drift here, I do not know, and the darkness devours time.
Gradually I become aware of muted sensory impressions, the faint hiss of venting gas, the dry taste of recycled air. It is utterly black however, darker than I would have believed possible, and I slowly realize that my eyelids refuse to open. I am aware of them now, thin sheets of flesh that tug across my face, but remain closed despite my efforts. Even without them, I can still sense the glass and metal frame around me.
With a dawning wave, I realize how cold I am. So cold, that for a hideous and protracted moment, I believe I may be on fire. I begin to panic, still trapped inside my nearly lifeless body, wanting to slither and crawl away from the pain. My lips part with a tear of flesh and I can feel blood trickling into my mouth, growing instantly cool as it runs between my clenched teeth. My jaw remains locked in place, the muscles straining weakly beneath my cheeks.
I want to cry, to sob like a child, bathed in quiet despair and helplessness. In my cocoon of self pity, higher functions of my mind begin to slowly emerge, grinding like rusty gears into use, and I try to calm myself.
I am alive, I tell myself. This is all perfectly normal, and at any moment one of the ship's medics will carefully open the capsule, place the tip of a plastic bulb between my torn lips and squeeze warm, sweet electrolytes down my parched throat. This maternal image of comfort stills my quivering body, and I began to breathe regularly, and my reason begins to return.
If I am awake, then we have arrived. The long silent passage through the endless night of interstellar space has ended. If I am alive, then we are in orbit around Eta Cassiopiae.
I breathe evenly and smooth, and catch a tinge of something in the air, a faint whiff of chemical corruption from the dry sterility of the ventilation. The blackness beyond my closed eyes pulses briefly with light, registering a soft red glow as it diffuses through the vessels and capillaries of my closed lips. My cracked lips emit little white sparks of pain as I contort my face, tugging my eyelids open with a quick and agonizing jerk of the head. Fluid weeps from the corners as I blink convulsively.
At first I am terrified that I am blind, and then, slowly, the edges of my tiny capsule resolve in the faint red light of a blinking LED. The glass is just a few inches from my face and I can see my breath against it, a wet fog that briefly flowers into ice, and quickly evaporates into the dry air. Beyond the glass, is nothing, a silent and yawning darkness.
My heart is thudding in my chest now, and my limbs seem to twitch and tug on the safety restraints around my ankles and wrists. The tight glass coffin and the empty abyss beyond seem to crush me between them, twining threads of claustrophobia and agoraphobia around my chest and I struggle to breath evenly. The lights should be on. Someone should be here by now. Something is very wrong.
Faint movement at the periphery of eyes causes me to turn my head and eyes in a sharp instinctual move. The weary atrophied muscles of my neck scream in agony, and my eyes grind through sandpaper filled sockets. I gasp and my eyes fill with warm welcome tears, that without gravity simply cloud my eyes like a lens. Through the watery haze, I see a passing wave of dull red light, illuminating briefly the dimensions of the space in the dark, and then drifting out of sight.
I shake my head, gritting my teeth against the dry tearing pain of movement, and fling the tears from my eyes. They drift away in little silver spheres and freeze, moments later. I blink my eyes and try to focus again on the darkness. I barely realize that I have stopped breathing when the light returns.
It is a red emergency light, spinning silently, but it is far too dim, and far too slow. It crosses the room like a broom, briefly revealing the faintest glimpse of the space beyond. I see rows of dark containers, dozens of them, each containing the vague shadow of a figure. My eyes dart around the scene, unable to absorb any details, only the vague sense of scale and shape inside the room. I strain my eyes to focus each time the light passes, but I can?t make out anything in the dimming light. There is nothing in the darkness that can tell me what has gone wrong.
I didn?t see the window at first, but I gradually became aware of it as faint pinpricks of starlight catch my eye. I lock my eyes and focus on the drifting stars as my heart threatens to burst from my chest, and my lungs suck in frigid air in ragged gasps.
Calm, I repeat, over and over like a mantra to myself. Calm. If I can just get control of my breathing and be patient, someone will come to help.
Like an answer, there is an explosion of light from beyond the window. I squint, feeling my irises spasm and struggle to contract. Outside the porthole, there is a blue and cloudy world, looming and massive. My eyes adjust and I can do nothing but drink in the sight of the oceans and land. The planet light seeps into the cabin and illuminates the rows of glass and steel tubes, and I can finally make out the occupants.
Most of them are frozen and dead, pale blue and white wraiths with lips and eyelids pulled wide and open by contracting muscles. A few of the containers are smeared red and opaque. Each has the same flower of frozen blood and cracks, where it?s occupant must have beat his skull against the glass.
I tug again on my restraints as panic overwhelms me, my limbs thrashing against the restraints. I realize I am silently asking for god, begging escape from this frozen mausoleum.
My eyes lock onto the planet, now wide and filling the window, and my heart stops. In the blue ocean I see the distinct silhouette of the European coast. My mind reels and I clench my eyes against the disorientation.
We never left.
The fever of panic breaks, and I begin to feel a glimmer of hope. We never left. I am not going to die in orbit around an alien world. I am home. I can still be saved. These thoughts start to warm me and I stop tugging against the straps. Measured breath returns, and I close my puffy, swollen eyes and allow my heart to settle.
I open my eyes again, gazing down onto the Earth, and a sudden wave of nausea rises in me before I really understand what I?ve just seen.
Striking a sharp line across the face of the globe, the terminus between night and day divides Europe and Africa.
On the day side, I see the polar ice, a stretching white sheet that has all but absorbed the Scandinavian Peninsula and coils around the rest of the continent.
On the night side, there is primal and elemental darkness. There are no cities, no lights. There is emptiness.
As quick as it came, the Earth slides out of view, showing only her frigid and lightless night, and dropping the cabin into a final, cold darkness. The red klaxon light has stopped spinning. The lights inside my coffin have stopped blinking.
I am left alone, in the frozen dark, with the dead.
Terror claws at me, my body is shuddering and useless, with blood like ice.
I suck in a deep lungful of the dying air, and scream.
***
There was a time when I believed running might help; if I could pack up my few belongings and burn the rest under cover of darkness and flee, I could start over somewhere new. But in this bleak frostbitten place, I admit to myself, truly, that I cannot outrun him, that I can never escape him. And should I slip into the warm embrace of doubt after an unnaturally long stretch of peaceful, empty days, he will be only too happy to remind me of this.
There?s almost nothing left he can take from me. The days before him are fading like an aged photograph now, a hazy yellow dream of stability and happiness with a long future of happy possibilities stretched ahead. Today, I am huddled in the eaves of a collapsing barn in the Yukon Territory, desperately trying to start a fire with sodden and rotting hay. The more I burn now, the less I have to use as a blanket. It is a delicate balance that I have not quite mastered.
I hitchhiked across the border two months ago, and have been making my way north steadily. Going any other direction than north is no longer an option. I do not know what I will do when I reach the Artic Ocean. Perhaps continue across the sea ice, if it has not thinned to the point of breaking. What I cannot do, ever, is return to my life, to Seattle. I can never see my son again.
It seems absurd to think that just less than a year ago, my life was unfractured, whole. The pieces of my life were trite and predictable. I was an insomniac, and used to lie awake staring at the ceiling, chewing over my doubts and secret fears: that I may not be able to keep up house payments, that I may not love my wife any longer, that I would repeat my father?s failures with my son. These phantoms of doubt and fear filled my bleeding stomach with ragged holes that I recall now with almost fond nostalgia. How easy it all was, then.
The manila envelope was stuffed in the mail slot when I rose to prepare breakfast for my son. Unlabeled, unaddressed, only my name was written on it in jagged capitals. It contained one black VHS cassette, its label long ago faded and blurred. Over the top of the label was a black ink smiley face, blindly grinning up at me.
It took me a day to find our VCR in the small attic crawlspace, bundled with a few dozen home movies of our son?s soccer games and birthday parties. Late at night, long after my family had drifted off to sleep, I connected it to our television. It whirred to life with a sharp smell of burning dust, and I inserted the tape.
For a few moments, the static leapt and fizzled on the screen, then blackness. The silent image began to brighten to a washed out shot of an elementary school parking lot at the start of day, and the picture zoomed into a small group of children among the chaos, and I recognized my son and a few of his friends. I began to wonder if I had accidentally retrieved one of our old tapes, when, almost as an answer, the camera tilted forward into the inside of a car. The zoom lens racked forward on a crisp copy of the Times and lingered momentarily on the date. Two days prior. My guts curdled with unease as the screen again went dark. A few seconds later, letters appeared, the bright and jagged electronic font of cheap in-camera titles.
YOU CAN?T SAVE HIM.
My insides gut turned to ice water and I slumped in the couch, my limbs feeling distant and useless. The letters vanished in a gust of static.
I did not tell my wife, and certainly never told my son, but I drove to the police station in the morning. The heavy oppressive dread of the night before had somewhat dissipated as I handed over the tape to the jowly and half asleep officer, and answered a few mumbled questions. He registered my concern with condescending impatience, and I eventually had to clasp my jaw and walk out quietly when I realized he would never view it as anything but a harmless prank.
Two days later, with the unease in my stomach waning little, I received another tape, adorned with the same grinning cartoon. The image that this time resolved out of the static was a hallway, painted in night vision and gloom. The unseen cameraman walked slowly forward towards the last door. A little sigh of relief bubbled up in me when I could not recognize the doors and windowless walls. This was someone else?s house.
The camera tilted down to see a gloved hand twist the doorknob; the only sound in the air was the clacking spin of the VCR heads and the tape?s reels. The door opened to reveal a small and cramped bedroom and a dark, huddled form on the bed. The camera approached the form and a sleeping face soon filled the screen. It teased me with familiarity, tantalizingly close, but I could not yet recognize the face.
Two objects dropped down onto the man?s chest, thudding slightly and rousing him from his sleep. The first, a policeman?s badge, all I need in a flash of recognition to connect this slowly stirring form with the Desk Sergeant. The second sealed his identity: it was the first tape, the crude smiley face pointed perfectly upright. The policeman blinked twice and then squinted into the camera.
In the few frames before blackness, I could see the brief impression of a flash, and a symmetrical flower of blood and bone erupt from his skull, just a brief flicker of streaking colors and light. I moaned pathetically in the darkness, an animal whimper of helplessness. Like a bolt of lightning, the jagged text lit up the screen.
YOUR FAULT.
I did not move until the pale light of morning, first letting the tape play out through a further hour of static, and then later sobbing silently under the cold blue light of the idling VCR. After a few hours of that quiet delirium, doubting what I had just seen, I rewound the tape, and started it again.
It was blank. Finding a set of small screwdrivers, I dismantled the tape and gingerly separated its carapace. Inside, was a small magnet, ingeniously placed on a loose spindle inside the right spool of tape; the tape was erased the moment I watched it.
Taped firmly to the side of the black plastic housing, was a small, folded photograph. It was my wife and son, walking hand and hand out the front door of the house. On the back of the photograph, in the same blocky script as the envelope, were three letters and three sharp periods.
SHH?
There were times in the following year, when I believed that only suicide would save my family. He never told me what, if anything he wanted. He never revealed himself, or his reasons. He seemed only content to watch the engine of my life to shudder to a halt. I descended into a fog of self-pity and utter horror as all my relationships dissolved around me.
At irregular intervals, always just enough time passed to make me believe that it had ended, that I had dreamt it all, I would receive a package. They each contained a half a dozen photographs on glossy paper. My son in school, doodling in his notebooks, shot through an open window. A soccer game, his leg frozen in mid swing. A front yard game with two neighbors, my son suspended in a leap, his tongue out stuck out in a mask of joy.
I received the last package a month after my wife had left me. Unable to cope with my stony, hollow eyed silence and slow motion disintegration, she had returned across the state line, to Idaho, and her mother?s house, where she made unsubtle attempts over nightly phone calls to convince our son to join her. Whatever amicability there was between us was flaking away like old paint, and I knew a court intervention was imminent.
For myself, I did not know if I could keep my son safest close to me, or whether I was dooming him by my presence. He was increasingly distant, angry at my sudden shift in personality, and inability to make his mother happy. His presence, no matter how he pouted and hid, was the one bright and shining point of that time, a silver thread to hold onto in the maelstrom. The week of the last package, he had taken a Greyhound bus to see his mother, already hinting at a desire to stay and live with her; I was in a black and foul mood when I found to the familiar manila envelope in the entryway.
It contained a single photograph, and the first video I had gotten since the policeman?s murder. The photograph was of my son, sleeping, in his bed at home. I held it my hand, clutching tight and staring, not wanting to comprehend what I was seeing and its sickening implications.
On the video, the smiley-face was gone, and its place, was a clock. I slid it into the VCR in a state of cold shock and sat at the edge of the couch, my eyes watering and my jaw hanging slack.
IT IS TIME.
YOU CAN KEEP HIM SAFE.
The jagged letters crashed through the static and captured my gaze. Frozen in place, my lungs would not expand and my vision swam dizzyingly. The letters vanished and there was blackness again, but only momentarily, as a burst of cold light brought a new sentence to the screen:
GO-
The ashtray impacted with the center of the screen, and the television tube made an audible popping sound, as glass and circuitry spilled from the wound. I hadn?t even been aware that I was throwing the heavy pewter dish, but now I felt a hot wash of anger, the helplessness and fear of the last year flared in me.
I would leave, I told myself. I would leave tonight, and tell no one. If one good thing came from my miserable shipwreck of a life, I would keep my son safe, and I couldn?t do that in the sorry state I was in.
It seemed so obvious then, with suddenly clarity: of course he was not interested in my son. It was me he had been torturing all these months. If he hated me this much, enough to slowly break me, utterly and deliberately, then he would follow me, like hunter to prey, wherever I went. So I would go.
I almost made it out that night, but doubt ate away at my resolve as I packed a few bags, and I soon succumbed to a rare desire for sleep. In the warm cocoon of blankets, the idea of recklessly fleeing seemed so rash and foolish, and I knew that a new day would bring clarity and level headedness.
I awoke to the golden light of dawn streaming into my bedroom onto a scene of unfathomable violence.
Blood and drying viscera coated the walls in uneven splatters. The sharp copper tang in the air shook me like smelling salts to damnable clarity. The carpet was soaked and spotted with crimson, thick puddles of blood glistening in the morning sunlight.
In the far corner, where the walls were painted nearly black and the carpet invisible beneath a tiny lake of blood, was the body. The diminutive limbs were dark and smeared, stacked like cordwood; two slender arms and two legs, capped with a pair of small curled hands and two feet, so smeared in gore that I mistook them for shoes. Beside the little pile of spindly limbs was a child?s torso; momentarily I could not comprehend that this was part of the body, so surreal in its isolation and stillness.
In the farthest corner at the apex of the slaughter was the broken television on a small table, the screen fully shattered to reveal a small interior space. Inside this hollow of plastic and metal, was a child?s head, balancing gracefully on its ragged neck, and faced away from me.
It was a long time before I moved, longer still before I ceased sobbing and walked on sodden carpet and wobbling knees towards the television. I prayed that I would not see my son?s birthmark and scars on the limbs and I held my gaze straight ahead as I approached the grotesque altar. Was that my son?s hair? Was it ever so black, or is that just the light?
I reached out, slowly with both hands to gently cup the small head. I was empty now, the morning breeze blowing straight through my shell. All I had to do was turn to see my son?s face, to know that I had failed him utterly, and then I would dry out like a husk and drift away on the wind.
It was light in my hands and still ever so slightly warm. I slowly spun it to face me, angry at myself for not knowing by heart the sight of my sons ears or and jaw line well enough stop now, to prevent the inevitable rotation.
The eyes were mercifully closed, but the cheeks were slit wide and high, in grim mockery of a smile. In his mouth, jammed far back and between the ragged slices of his face, was a video tape.
A wave of pure undiluted relief was followed by a sharp pang of guilt. This was not my son. I recognized the boy behind the curtain of blood, a friend of my son, yes, but this, this was not my son.
Obediently, like in a trance I took the video to the VCR, now connected to my son?s tiny black and white set. With a wad of white paper towels, I had dried and cleaned the soiled cassette, and I now slid it into the machine and watched solemnly while the letters appeared.
THIS WAS YOUR ONE WARNING
YOU CAN STILL SAVE HIM
FIRST, CLEAN UP
It dawned on me what he means, and simultaneously, why. I thought of the drying footprints of blood I?ve left around the house, my fingertips pressed against the corpse. I tried to imagine who might believe that I had slept through that act of unbridled cruelty, but seen and heard nothing.
NOW
I jerked with a start at this screen, as if the teacher has called my name and caught me day-dreaming. I rose to my feet and stopped the tape.
When I thought my son was dead, I believed that no pain could rend me worse. I now could see the foolishness of that. If he were truly gone, then I could not be hurt any worse, and in a way, the man in the dark would have lost. But he lives. He lives for me to agonize over yet again, and this time, I don?t have to wonder about the stakes. I have to do everything I can to keep him safe, I decided. This cannot happen to him.
When I returned from the woods, carrying a shovel wrapped in a thick canvas blanket from the truck, and leaving tracks of dirt and clay, I began to pour the first gallon of gasoline on the bottom floor of my house. When the house was fully saturated, I returned to the VCR and its tiny monitor to watch the rest of the tape. I am a marionette now, dancing to a silent tune, free will no longer even a factor.
The next sentence on the screen was familiar to me; though that was truly the first time I read it. I recognized it by the shape and outline of the letters; it was beneath the ashtray a split second before the impact.
GO NORTH
I was puzzled for a moment, a little resurgence of the self at this oddly vague and cryptic instruction. Just a direction and a command. I wondered where he meant for me to go, and how.
GO NOW. YOU WILL KNOW.
And the tape ended. And I went.
An hour later, a plume of smoke was visible to the south, fast receding behind truck. I drove as far as the truck would take me, until it lost traction on the ice somewhere in British Columbia, and ended broken axle?d in roadside culvert. From there, I walked. My wife shut access to my bank accounts weeks ago, and the small amount of cash that I still carried has long since vanished.
It?s been a month so far, homeless and trudging like a sentinel, through the darkest of winter. The snow and ice bring me comfort, the silent purity of the ground against the noonday sky, white on white. My life is only a direction now, and that anodyne of simplicity has bled into the land.
When I cannot find a house to beg shelter in, or a barn to break into, I build small covered trenches in the snow, and wrap myself in my tarp and blankets. This is more and more frequent as I travel northward and as my clothes begin to stink and mark me as a transient.
During the day, I walk; in the dark, I sleep. I sleep. Long and blissfully hours of oblivion come to with an ease I haven?t had since childhood, and I wake fully rested each day.
I am never alone of course. He is with me, as he always has been. When the last of the money was gone, the pangs of hunger only lasted a day. On the next morning, outside my small snow shelter, a pair of white rabbits lay stretched across the snow, only the red of their blood picking out their outlines on the snow.
During that past year in the fog of his nightmares, I never even considered who he might be. I never catalogued which clients might have secretly loathed me, or which elementary school victim of my bullying now wished me dead. I wonder now, how willful was this ignorance?
The sunlight is warm and unexpected on my face when I exit the barn the next morning, coat speckled with straw. It?s a few miles to the next town, and I can make it time to beg for some breakfast, and supplies for the next vacant stretch.
I call my son from each payphone I pass, direct to his mobile and listen to him get increasingly frustrated when I say nothing. Hearing him angry and alive is everything I need to keep going.
My son is safe, now that I?ve left him. As I believed he would, but for all the wrong reasons, the hunter, the man in the dark, has followed me here. He is no longer a danger to my family, and he can take nothing more from me now.
He is happy now, because we are going north, and so am I, because I know at last and truly, that I have saved my son. The cost is the pittance of my own life, and I am now I understand: I am grateful to give it to him. I am thankful to be pack horse to this monster, carrying us both onward.
I do not know what he wants for us here, at the top of the world, but I know when the time comes, he will make it known. So until then, I go north.
***
(Again, I feel like I?m missing something here.)
It wasn?t until I broke down in front of my sister that it occurred to me to use the word ?haunted?. When I tried to explain what was happening to me, finally articulating the weeks of dread and utter dislocation, I found that no other word would come. Haunted. There?s still a part of me that scoffs and glowers at this, to use the language of folklore; it seems to compress what I?d experienced into a simple banality, a prisoner of language.
I paid cash upfront for the house in West Toluca Lake. Something about the 1930?s Spanish architecture tucked behind the grove of weeping willows triggered a strong association with my childhood ideal of what it meant to be famous and successful in Los Angeles. It was far more than I needed, and I struggled to fill the extra rooms with bedroom sets and elaborate smoking lounges; more out of an obligation to keep up appearances when guests were over than to satisfy myself. I was happy there, for a short while.
My friends stop visiting a few months after I moved in. Increasingly elaborate excuses were spun, and I soon stopped asking. It only occurs to me now that I was doing the same, finding every reason to stay in the house.
There was such a gentle descent into the insanity of it all, that I hardly felt it happening. The unusually stormy winter hit me hard, and long hours in front of the sun lamp seemed to do little to halt my growing feeling of melancholy and nameless unease. I started sleeping later and I abandoned even the pretense of writing, spending long hours in silence on the back porch, listening to the dry rasping of the dead leaves in the cold breeze.
It was the middle of the night when I first saw him. After a long time of lying motionless in the dark, I slowly pulled myself out of bed from an Ambien fog at the sharp urging of my bladder, and shuffled towards the bathroom.
He was in the hall, standing perfectly still, his back to me. His head was cocked slightly to one side as if he was listening, but he showed no signs of seeing me. My heart leapt and my body locked as I tried to comprehend this intrusion. He was walking away from me now, the soft tread of his feet on the carpet the only sound that punctuated the stillness. Less than three seconds had passed from the moment I saw him, to when he turned a corner and was gone.
When I wrenched control from my frozen limbs, I found the house empty, and the doors still locked. Sleep came slowly that night as I tried to convince myself that what I had seen was a product of my medicated and half asleep mind.
He returned the next night, as I lay in bed. I awoke to the sound of the door opening and my eyes snapped open to complete darkness. There was the soft shuffling of feet, and then with a sickening feeling deep in my core, the sound of bedsprings softly creaking, as if he had sat at the foot of the bed. Fear held me in place like a vice. There was a sound from far away, a dusty crackling breath of wind.
My mouth went dry and I croaked a small involuntary rasp as I struggled to extricate myself from the sheets that suddenly clung to me. In that naked moment of helpless animal terror, he vanished, leaving a palpable hole in the darkness.
After that night, I was never alone in that house. At the corner of my eyes I saw slow plodding movement, the lumbering gait of a shadow that evaporated as soon as I turned. Rarely at first, but increasingly, I would see him in full view; walking slowly from room to room, sitting motionless on the patio, standing solemnly and silently in odd corners of the house. He would be gone only moments after I registered his presence, simply ceasing to exist, taking with him the tiny muffled sounds of his movements.
I could not describe him now if I tried. He was not vague or indistinct, but utterly unremarkable in every appearance. I can no longer even recall the image of him, only the idea of it all. Beyond the sight, there was an indescribable quality around him, a lingering fog of unease and dread that slowly suffused the house and clouded my mind.
My friends and my family all swear that during the darkest weeks they called me often, increasingly sick with worry. I remember none of it, just the constant crashing waves of dread and shock that weathered away at my reason.
The moment of clarity came on a clear February night. In a near daze, I stumbled towards the sleep, not wanting to stay awake, not wanting to wake up again in this house. I turned out the light, sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed when the miasma of his presence enveloped me.
He was behind me in the dark.
I pressed my eyes tightly together, and exhaled a slow wheeze, trying to calm my racing heart.
The bed behind me bucked with sudden movement and a raspy cough of air, and I leapt away, flinging the light switch upward. The bed, once immaculately made was in shambles, the sheets strewn on the floor.
Something deep inside me seemed to slowly bend and snap, and I grasped at a fragment of epiphany that slipped through my fingers away into the gloom.
I felt suddenly and sharply awake and lucid, like I hadn?t in months. I held onto my momentary courage close as I approached the front door; stepping over the threshold for the first time in weeks brought a faint wave of dizziness, and then I was in the car trying not to look back. As I pulled the car into the street, I turned to the house, the last time I saw it, its lights ablaze in mimicry of life. He was at the window, his hands clasped at his side, a momentary silhouette that vanished with only the soft sway of the curtains.
I was at a motel within an hour and at my sister?s Studio City apartment the next morning. My throat was raw from not speaking for so many days and I croaked out the story to her, embarrassed at the absurdity of the way it all, but swaddled in a profound relief.
Despite the usefulness of it to describe the events, the word ?haunted? soon turns sour in my mouth. It never occurred to me to call the intruder a ?ghost?. This was? something else. Something I can?t explain with the clubs and spears of language. The phantom impression of a right word, the perfect word, seems always at the tip of my tongue, but it never comes. It wasn?t the intruder. It was the house. There?s something wrong with the house itself.
The house is? broken.
***
Do you know what a Cordyceps is? I didn?t either until 20 minutes ago. It?s a family of thousands of different types of fungus, grows all around the word in various rainforests and jungles. The awful thing about them is they?re parasitic, they grow on other animals. An ant happens to run into some spores, and then it starts to colonize his insides, starting with his brain. At some point, the ant starts to act visibly ill; standing in place and shivering, or walking in circles. If a fellow colony member sees him in this condition, he will be dragged to the border of the colony and exiled.
Then, when it?s almost over, the ant weakly climbs as high as he can up the vines, and locks his body on tight. Finally, he dies, and the fungus emerges from the back of his head, bursting forth like a long and foul fruit. After a short time, the little stalk spews forth its own spores, leaving the mummified and broken ant clinging to the stalk, his eye cavities filled with drying fungus.
I mention this because last night, when I was up on the roof of my apartment complex, I found my brother?s body. He?s been back from 18 months on duty in the Philippines for less than three days. This was the first I?d seen him. My parents called me up the day before yesterday to tell me that he was on his way up. They told me he?d stayed in his room since he got home, and then suddenly got up and announced he was on his way to see me. They thought he was drunk, I?d I thought he?d never made it.
He must have come straight up to the roof and died, by the smell of it. I was just finishing a cigarette, all torn up with anxiety and head throbbing, and when the acrid smoke vanished I caught a whiff of rot on the hot wind. It took me just a few minutes before I?d found him; face down behind the vents and fans. A slimy gray column rose up obscenely from the base of his skull, and a frozen waterfall of roots and tendrils was dangling from his eye sockets and mouth. At the top of stalk was small arrangement of feathery wisps, a white powder drifting idly from it tips.
The spores must have drifting over the north side of the building all day. My side of the building. I came down to my apartment to try to call up the police, and my headache was rising to a feverish throb. I got through the door, and the moment I reached for the phone, pain flared in my head, so bad I almost passed out. I?ve since tried three times and I can never get my hand up on it.
The same thing happens when I try to get up and leave the room; I feel spines of ice tunneling up into my skull and my limbs lock up and shudder.
The ants, in their last moments crawl as high up the vines as he can climb. This is so the spore will spread over more of the colony below. In the end, the parasite controls the ant with an almost intelligent drive. God help me.
The pain is almost blinding now, and a new thought has been rising up rhythmically in my head, like a record skipping. Up. Up. Up. It?s joined by an image of my office tower. It?s taller than my apartment, the tallest place I can think off and although the bulge on the back of my neck is the size of a peach, the skin stretched shiny, and I?m dizzy and my eyes are cloudy, I think I can make it there. Up.
No. I?m sick. I need help.
The building pulses again in my mind. The cold wind. The roof and the sky. These images and concepts dull the pain momentarily as they pass through my mind. I think I can get there. Up. Up.
If you live in downtown Chicago, I would get the fuck out.
***
It?s been 12 days since I saw the apartment last, but there are echoes of it in everywhere, here in my temporary home. Light streaming through window will remind me of the bright, spacious living room. The squeak of the floorboards recalls the creaking first step in the hallway. The smell of cracked drywall sets my teeth on edge.
I?ve severed all ties with the apartment; all my possessions are in storage or stacked in sagging boxes here in Leif?s squalid garage. I went through the vague motions of filing the police report, and leaving an explanatory message on my landlady?s machine. I?ve done all the right and proper things, so there seems little left to do but share the why, before I move out of the City, and every city, for good.
Last September, my fiancé and I moved into the apartment; the top floor of a stately little four unit building in the Benton Park neighborhood of St. Louis. We were still living out mostly out of boxes six weeks later when the county hospital called us in the middle of the night. Her grandfather, a seemingly invincible ox of a man, who had raised her since her parents passed during her sixth grade year, had collapsed in grocery store line, a blood clot lodged in his tree trunk neck.
She had no choice, yet resentment welled in me when she took our car back to Twin Oaks to care for him, to watch and bathe him as his frozen left side slowly thawed and his mighty body withered. We talked of hiring a full time nurse? but it was the sort of idle way a barren couple might discuss children. She went to watch him die. I?d be lying if I said I didn?t lie awake at night, still on the right side of our half empty bed, praying wordlessly for death to hasten.
Despite her absence (a sensation not of pain but of emptiness, a tangible hole) I grew to enjoy in some small way, the luxury of a solitary existence. The apartment stirred feelings of contentment in me from the moment I saw it. It was adulthood, and reward for responsibility made solid and earthly. Newly remodeled, energy efficient, double paned windows on every wall casting beams of sunlight onto the cool and well worn wooden floors. It was the embodiment of our transition from sunburned country children into modern city and cubicle dwellers, rapidly paling beneath the fluorescents.
It was never perfect, but at first, the idiosyncrasies and nodes of strangeness in the apartment felt like pleasant affectations, Persian rug flaws of architecture and design that only increased our affection for the place. The bottom floor was all garages, laundry machines, and strangely irregular spaces with unfinished walls, filled with construction supplies gathering dust. The two upper floors each contain two mirrored units, one facing the street, and the other facing a sad little stone and weed garden that I preferred to ignore.
To my mild disappointment, the worst of the flaws were the walls, thin in a manner I would not have believed possible. The first night of unpacking I heard with sharp clarity the conversation of my downstairs neighbors, a heated discussion about a pair of off-season artichokes spoiling in the fridge. Over the next few weeks, we became intimately accustomed to their schedules; their alarm clocks, their love of forensic cop dramas, their histrionic arguing. I knew when they showered, I knew when they fucked. To be sure, they knew the same about us. I learned their names when we moved in and promptly forgot; the more we knew about each other from voyeuristic proximity, the less we actually wanted to deal with each other.
Two months ago, they moved out without giving a word or reason. One morning I awoke to the sound of dragging furniture, and watched with bemusement from my father?s worn recliner as they loaded a rented moving van. The next morning, the apartment door was open, revealing a swept clean doppelganger of my own living space.
Within a week the other tenant on the lower floor vacated, the door now permanently open on another blank canvas of a home. I can?t even recall his face, an anonymous gray visage that simply stopped appearing in the hallways. The other top unit, opposite my own, had been vacant since I moved in; this left me alone in the building, king of a tiny rented castle.
The youngest of five children, I knew how to appreciate solitude. I relished in the carefree freedom of heavy footfalls late at night, the loud retort of video game gunfire and explosions, the echoing moans of pornography, and the long weekend mornings spent entirely naked and stoned. I occasionally would wander into the empty other units, drifting through the uninhabited, sterile cleanliness with a mild shapeless guilt intertwined with curiosity.
It was a few weeks later that it started. The first of the strange signifiers of something wrong; signposts in a language that I am only now fluent in.
In the small hours of one Thursday morning I began to hear sounds again from downstairs. Delicate and tiny at first, but sustained and insistent. I strained in the dark to hear it, but it was slippery and would not stay in my grasp. When I could isolate it from the wind, I heard something between a hushed conversation with only one voice, or a small motor spinning in the dark, it was a babbling and inconsistent drone. It set my heart pumping as I lay perfectly still, mesmerized by the sounds. I desperately wanted to identify it, but it remained inscrutable.
I collected shifting rationalizations for it as I vainly attempted to sleep that night. A refrigerator motor going south, a failing heating or cooling duct, air in the water pipes. Hours later, I was able to drift to sleep, and despite the return of the noise each following night, I began to accept it. Even when the drone was augmented with a steady, delicate tapping noise, I had learned to live with it, to allow it to become part of the background white noise of urban life.
The sound of creaking boards began to permeate my space, not beneath my own feet but floating up from all around me. It was a warm spring, and I simply associated the sound with the dry expansion of the warming timbers. Although the sounds of a building stretching and contracting have always unsettled me, I never once doubted that these sounds could be anything but benign.
The vague stirrings of unease became solid the night I discovered the great peculiarity of the closet.
I am crouching over the sink, brushing my teeth with a fraying brush when from behind me comes a sudden, dry thud. I freeze in position, the brush protruding from my pursed lips, desperately waiting for some further sign of an intruder, or an explanation to the sound, but it is dead silent. Even the regular drone from downstairs has stopped. I walk the house with silent steps, turning every light on in turn and searching each room, but I am alone.
I check the hall closet last.
The closet lies directly behind the bathroom, exactly where I heard the sound. I open it up, flicking the light on and feverishly hoping to see a rational excuse, one of the last unpacked boxes toppled on the floor. But the closet is immaculate and the sound still hangs unexplained in the air.
Unwilling to accept the sound without explanation, I reach out and tap on the wall between closet and bathroom. The sound is oddly hollow. It slowly dawns on me that the closet is? more narrow than it should be in relation to the bathroom. The certainty grows as I pace out the distance using my bare feet, and then with the tape measure from the tool kit my fiancé?s grandfather gave us. Sure enough, there are 40 extra inches between the bathroom wall and the closet.
My capacity for rationalization is slightly strained. Surely there?s extra insulation to keep the bathroom warmer, or maybe all walls are thicker than I imagine. I?ve never built a house; I have no frame of reference for judging. I imagine a hammer left inside the wall by a careless contractor finally slipping after months of teetering. Once the adrenalin flood dissipates, I am able to forget the incident and drift quickly to sleep, relishing the absence of the babbling sounds from beneath.
The drone returns the next night.
The next few weeks pass in a haze of my rising discomfort in the apartment, until that warm Friday night. It?s two in the morning, and I am returning home late from a perfunctory office trip to the bar, not nearly as drunk as I would like. I am thinking with a grimace of self loathing about the clean laundry I?ve left to wrinkle in the dryer the night before, and I almost miss noticing that the door to the flat beneath mine is shut. I?ve become used to seeing the empty mirror image every day. Maybe the landlady finally started showing the units, I think,
Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize.
Down the stairs on the small shared back balcony, I carry an oversized duffle bag to the laundry room, sleep weighing down my ankles and eyelids. I stuff cold, wrinkled shirts into the bag, missing the usual warmth of the process; my mind drifts away to the thought of clean sheets and a morning without an alarm clock.
There are two things you should know about me at this point: I turn every light off when I leave a room. No matter what. My dad used to beat the shit out of me when the power bill spiked higher than he felt it should. Due to the same Pavlovian conditioning, I lock every door as I pass through it. I?ve even locked the back door on the way down the steps.
As I start back up the steps, the nylon cord of the duffel cutting into my shoulder; I happen to glance up at my bedroom window.
The light is on.
And there's a silhouette against the closed blinds.
I feel a warm trickle on my thigh, as the hair on the back of my neck snaps to fucking attention.
And then the light goes out.
It happens in less than a second. Thirty seconds later I?m still frozen in place, trying to parse impossible data and decide whether I?ve actually seen what I know I?ve seen. Rationalization finally fails me and I softly retrace my steps down the stairs and out through the garage, fighting the animal urge in my thighs and heart and feet to run at full speed away from the apartment.
Across the street, I stand beneath in the streetlight shadow of a dying elm, and call first the police and then a cab. After five minutes of silence, moments after I begin to chastise myself for overreacting, the venetian blinds on the living room window part slightly, and I feel the electric tingle of connecting with invisible eyes. And then it is gone.
The cab comes 20 minutes later, and the police never show up. I stay at a hotel the next night and on Sunday morning; my co-worker Leif accompanies me back to the apartment, to see how much has been stolen.
It?s all there. My laptop is still charging next to the bed, the brand new flatscreen TV stands monolith like and untouched in the living room. My stomach is twisted into knots. With Leif, a few other friends, and a pickup truck I move everything out the next day.
When we are almost finished I invite them to help themselves to the last beers in the fridge, and they squat in the empty living room, allowing sweat to evaporate off dripping brows. Emboldened by daylight and company I slip downstairs to examine the downstairs apartment, hoping to make a little sense of the unconnected puzzle pieces I have.
I go straight to the hall closet.
It has the same abnormally thick wall.
Only in this wall, someone has hammered a large, jagged hole, exposing the tiny crawl space between.
And in the dusty cavity, flat against the wall, is a cheap hardware store ladder; running up through the darkness, to the space behind the walls, in my apartment. As I stand, staring in dawning horror at the brushed aluminum and orange paint of the ladder, it moves. It bounces once against the wall and goes still. Dust drifts down in the motionless air.
Then, it creaks, slightly, shifting under invisible weight.
I can?t breathe. My lungs are clawing for oxygen and the edge of my vision goes dark, but I can?t breathe. My limbs feel cold and dead.
The next thing I know, I am outside beneath the elm tree again. I am calling Leif on his mobile phone and asking him to meet me downstairs with the last load of boxes. I don?t mention the hole, or the ladder. I just want to be away from there.
I don?t know how he got into my apartment from that space. I don?t want to know. All I care about is never seeing that building again. I mailed the keys to my landlord, and told her to keep the deposit; filled out an obligatory report with a terminally disinterested cop.
I?m burning through my last vacation days, and ignoring the insistent texts and emails from my boss. I can?t bring myself to go back to work. My chest constricts slightly, thinking about the dense hive of the downtown office building, people surrounding me at all times.
Leif has been letting me sleep on his sagging couch in his filthy one bedroom house, but I can tell I am wearing my welcome thin, and I am leaving in the morning. It?s just as well, I haven?t slept well since I abandoned the apartment; I lie awake, acutely aware of his presence in the next room, hearing him snoring, hearing the sheets shifting every time he moves. It?s time to leave.
Two days ago, my fiancé?s grandfather got a hold of his shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. Brave old bastard. I?ll be moving with her into his weathered farmhouse, with acres of barren and rocky fields surrounding it. It?s quiet out there.
It sounds like heaven.
I haven't told her yet, and I don?t think I will. I told her simply that I quit my job and moved out. She's devastated, wounded, and it would be cruel to add to it now. I may have to tell her someday if it ever comes up, because I don't want to live in the city anymore. I don?t ever want to hear people moving beneath my feet, or on the other side of a wall.
Never again.
Consciousness drifts back to me lazily, like an incoming tide as my mind and body awake in stages. At first, it is dark, and I have no form, just a terrified animal spark suspended in a featureless abyss. My primal fore brain sends useless impulses to my unanswering body, demanding that I run and hide, but I am still. How long I drift here, I do not know, and the darkness devours time.
Gradually I become aware of muted sensory impressions, the faint hiss of venting gas, the dry taste of recycled air. It is utterly black however, darker than I would have believed possible, and I slowly realize that my eyelids refuse to open. I am aware of them now, thin sheets of flesh that tug across my face, but remain closed despite my efforts. Even without them, I can still sense the glass and metal frame around me.
With a dawning wave, I realize how cold I am. So cold, that for a hideous and protracted moment, I believe I may be on fire. I begin to panic, still trapped inside my nearly lifeless body, wanting to slither and crawl away from the pain. My lips part with a tear of flesh and I can feel blood trickling into my mouth, growing instantly cool as it runs between my clenched teeth. My jaw remains locked in place, the muscles straining weakly beneath my cheeks.
I want to cry, to sob like a child, bathed in quiet despair and helplessness. In my cocoon of self pity, higher functions of my mind begin to slowly emerge, grinding like rusty gears into use, and I try to calm myself.
I am alive, I tell myself. This is all perfectly normal, and at any moment one of the ship's medics will carefully open the capsule, place the tip of a plastic bulb between my torn lips and squeeze warm, sweet electrolytes down my parched throat. This maternal image of comfort stills my quivering body, and I began to breathe regularly, and my reason begins to return.
If I am awake, then we have arrived. The long silent passage through the endless night of interstellar space has ended. If I am alive, then we are in orbit around Eta Cassiopiae.
I breathe evenly and smooth, and catch a tinge of something in the air, a faint whiff of chemical corruption from the dry sterility of the ventilation. The blackness beyond my closed eyes pulses briefly with light, registering a soft red glow as it diffuses through the vessels and capillaries of my closed lips. My cracked lips emit little white sparks of pain as I contort my face, tugging my eyelids open with a quick and agonizing jerk of the head. Fluid weeps from the corners as I blink convulsively.
At first I am terrified that I am blind, and then, slowly, the edges of my tiny capsule resolve in the faint red light of a blinking LED. The glass is just a few inches from my face and I can see my breath against it, a wet fog that briefly flowers into ice, and quickly evaporates into the dry air. Beyond the glass, is nothing, a silent and yawning darkness.
My heart is thudding in my chest now, and my limbs seem to twitch and tug on the safety restraints around my ankles and wrists. The tight glass coffin and the empty abyss beyond seem to crush me between them, twining threads of claustrophobia and agoraphobia around my chest and I struggle to breath evenly. The lights should be on. Someone should be here by now. Something is very wrong.
Faint movement at the periphery of eyes causes me to turn my head and eyes in a sharp instinctual move. The weary atrophied muscles of my neck scream in agony, and my eyes grind through sandpaper filled sockets. I gasp and my eyes fill with warm welcome tears, that without gravity simply cloud my eyes like a lens. Through the watery haze, I see a passing wave of dull red light, illuminating briefly the dimensions of the space in the dark, and then drifting out of sight.
I shake my head, gritting my teeth against the dry tearing pain of movement, and fling the tears from my eyes. They drift away in little silver spheres and freeze, moments later. I blink my eyes and try to focus again on the darkness. I barely realize that I have stopped breathing when the light returns.
It is a red emergency light, spinning silently, but it is far too dim, and far too slow. It crosses the room like a broom, briefly revealing the faintest glimpse of the space beyond. I see rows of dark containers, dozens of them, each containing the vague shadow of a figure. My eyes dart around the scene, unable to absorb any details, only the vague sense of scale and shape inside the room. I strain my eyes to focus each time the light passes, but I can?t make out anything in the dimming light. There is nothing in the darkness that can tell me what has gone wrong.
I didn?t see the window at first, but I gradually became aware of it as faint pinpricks of starlight catch my eye. I lock my eyes and focus on the drifting stars as my heart threatens to burst from my chest, and my lungs suck in frigid air in ragged gasps.
Calm, I repeat, over and over like a mantra to myself. Calm. If I can just get control of my breathing and be patient, someone will come to help.
Like an answer, there is an explosion of light from beyond the window. I squint, feeling my irises spasm and struggle to contract. Outside the porthole, there is a blue and cloudy world, looming and massive. My eyes adjust and I can do nothing but drink in the sight of the oceans and land. The planet light seeps into the cabin and illuminates the rows of glass and steel tubes, and I can finally make out the occupants.
Most of them are frozen and dead, pale blue and white wraiths with lips and eyelids pulled wide and open by contracting muscles. A few of the containers are smeared red and opaque. Each has the same flower of frozen blood and cracks, where it?s occupant must have beat his skull against the glass.
I tug again on my restraints as panic overwhelms me, my limbs thrashing against the restraints. I realize I am silently asking for god, begging escape from this frozen mausoleum.
My eyes lock onto the planet, now wide and filling the window, and my heart stops. In the blue ocean I see the distinct silhouette of the European coast. My mind reels and I clench my eyes against the disorientation.
We never left.
The fever of panic breaks, and I begin to feel a glimmer of hope. We never left. I am not going to die in orbit around an alien world. I am home. I can still be saved. These thoughts start to warm me and I stop tugging against the straps. Measured breath returns, and I close my puffy, swollen eyes and allow my heart to settle.
I open my eyes again, gazing down onto the Earth, and a sudden wave of nausea rises in me before I really understand what I?ve just seen.
Striking a sharp line across the face of the globe, the terminus between night and day divides Europe and Africa.
On the day side, I see the polar ice, a stretching white sheet that has all but absorbed the Scandinavian Peninsula and coils around the rest of the continent.
On the night side, there is primal and elemental darkness. There are no cities, no lights. There is emptiness.
As quick as it came, the Earth slides out of view, showing only her frigid and lightless night, and dropping the cabin into a final, cold darkness. The red klaxon light has stopped spinning. The lights inside my coffin have stopped blinking.
I am left alone, in the frozen dark, with the dead.
Terror claws at me, my body is shuddering and useless, with blood like ice.
I suck in a deep lungful of the dying air, and scream.
***
There was a time when I believed running might help; if I could pack up my few belongings and burn the rest under cover of darkness and flee, I could start over somewhere new. But in this bleak frostbitten place, I admit to myself, truly, that I cannot outrun him, that I can never escape him. And should I slip into the warm embrace of doubt after an unnaturally long stretch of peaceful, empty days, he will be only too happy to remind me of this.
There?s almost nothing left he can take from me. The days before him are fading like an aged photograph now, a hazy yellow dream of stability and happiness with a long future of happy possibilities stretched ahead. Today, I am huddled in the eaves of a collapsing barn in the Yukon Territory, desperately trying to start a fire with sodden and rotting hay. The more I burn now, the less I have to use as a blanket. It is a delicate balance that I have not quite mastered.
I hitchhiked across the border two months ago, and have been making my way north steadily. Going any other direction than north is no longer an option. I do not know what I will do when I reach the Artic Ocean. Perhaps continue across the sea ice, if it has not thinned to the point of breaking. What I cannot do, ever, is return to my life, to Seattle. I can never see my son again.
It seems absurd to think that just less than a year ago, my life was unfractured, whole. The pieces of my life were trite and predictable. I was an insomniac, and used to lie awake staring at the ceiling, chewing over my doubts and secret fears: that I may not be able to keep up house payments, that I may not love my wife any longer, that I would repeat my father?s failures with my son. These phantoms of doubt and fear filled my bleeding stomach with ragged holes that I recall now with almost fond nostalgia. How easy it all was, then.
The manila envelope was stuffed in the mail slot when I rose to prepare breakfast for my son. Unlabeled, unaddressed, only my name was written on it in jagged capitals. It contained one black VHS cassette, its label long ago faded and blurred. Over the top of the label was a black ink smiley face, blindly grinning up at me.
It took me a day to find our VCR in the small attic crawlspace, bundled with a few dozen home movies of our son?s soccer games and birthday parties. Late at night, long after my family had drifted off to sleep, I connected it to our television. It whirred to life with a sharp smell of burning dust, and I inserted the tape.
For a few moments, the static leapt and fizzled on the screen, then blackness. The silent image began to brighten to a washed out shot of an elementary school parking lot at the start of day, and the picture zoomed into a small group of children among the chaos, and I recognized my son and a few of his friends. I began to wonder if I had accidentally retrieved one of our old tapes, when, almost as an answer, the camera tilted forward into the inside of a car. The zoom lens racked forward on a crisp copy of the Times and lingered momentarily on the date. Two days prior. My guts curdled with unease as the screen again went dark. A few seconds later, letters appeared, the bright and jagged electronic font of cheap in-camera titles.
YOU CAN?T SAVE HIM.
My insides gut turned to ice water and I slumped in the couch, my limbs feeling distant and useless. The letters vanished in a gust of static.
I did not tell my wife, and certainly never told my son, but I drove to the police station in the morning. The heavy oppressive dread of the night before had somewhat dissipated as I handed over the tape to the jowly and half asleep officer, and answered a few mumbled questions. He registered my concern with condescending impatience, and I eventually had to clasp my jaw and walk out quietly when I realized he would never view it as anything but a harmless prank.
Two days later, with the unease in my stomach waning little, I received another tape, adorned with the same grinning cartoon. The image that this time resolved out of the static was a hallway, painted in night vision and gloom. The unseen cameraman walked slowly forward towards the last door. A little sigh of relief bubbled up in me when I could not recognize the doors and windowless walls. This was someone else?s house.
The camera tilted down to see a gloved hand twist the doorknob; the only sound in the air was the clacking spin of the VCR heads and the tape?s reels. The door opened to reveal a small and cramped bedroom and a dark, huddled form on the bed. The camera approached the form and a sleeping face soon filled the screen. It teased me with familiarity, tantalizingly close, but I could not yet recognize the face.
Two objects dropped down onto the man?s chest, thudding slightly and rousing him from his sleep. The first, a policeman?s badge, all I need in a flash of recognition to connect this slowly stirring form with the Desk Sergeant. The second sealed his identity: it was the first tape, the crude smiley face pointed perfectly upright. The policeman blinked twice and then squinted into the camera.
In the few frames before blackness, I could see the brief impression of a flash, and a symmetrical flower of blood and bone erupt from his skull, just a brief flicker of streaking colors and light. I moaned pathetically in the darkness, an animal whimper of helplessness. Like a bolt of lightning, the jagged text lit up the screen.
YOUR FAULT.
I did not move until the pale light of morning, first letting the tape play out through a further hour of static, and then later sobbing silently under the cold blue light of the idling VCR. After a few hours of that quiet delirium, doubting what I had just seen, I rewound the tape, and started it again.
It was blank. Finding a set of small screwdrivers, I dismantled the tape and gingerly separated its carapace. Inside, was a small magnet, ingeniously placed on a loose spindle inside the right spool of tape; the tape was erased the moment I watched it.
Taped firmly to the side of the black plastic housing, was a small, folded photograph. It was my wife and son, walking hand and hand out the front door of the house. On the back of the photograph, in the same blocky script as the envelope, were three letters and three sharp periods.
SHH?
There were times in the following year, when I believed that only suicide would save my family. He never told me what, if anything he wanted. He never revealed himself, or his reasons. He seemed only content to watch the engine of my life to shudder to a halt. I descended into a fog of self-pity and utter horror as all my relationships dissolved around me.
At irregular intervals, always just enough time passed to make me believe that it had ended, that I had dreamt it all, I would receive a package. They each contained a half a dozen photographs on glossy paper. My son in school, doodling in his notebooks, shot through an open window. A soccer game, his leg frozen in mid swing. A front yard game with two neighbors, my son suspended in a leap, his tongue out stuck out in a mask of joy.
I received the last package a month after my wife had left me. Unable to cope with my stony, hollow eyed silence and slow motion disintegration, she had returned across the state line, to Idaho, and her mother?s house, where she made unsubtle attempts over nightly phone calls to convince our son to join her. Whatever amicability there was between us was flaking away like old paint, and I knew a court intervention was imminent.
For myself, I did not know if I could keep my son safest close to me, or whether I was dooming him by my presence. He was increasingly distant, angry at my sudden shift in personality, and inability to make his mother happy. His presence, no matter how he pouted and hid, was the one bright and shining point of that time, a silver thread to hold onto in the maelstrom. The week of the last package, he had taken a Greyhound bus to see his mother, already hinting at a desire to stay and live with her; I was in a black and foul mood when I found to the familiar manila envelope in the entryway.
It contained a single photograph, and the first video I had gotten since the policeman?s murder. The photograph was of my son, sleeping, in his bed at home. I held it my hand, clutching tight and staring, not wanting to comprehend what I was seeing and its sickening implications.
On the video, the smiley-face was gone, and its place, was a clock. I slid it into the VCR in a state of cold shock and sat at the edge of the couch, my eyes watering and my jaw hanging slack.
IT IS TIME.
YOU CAN KEEP HIM SAFE.
The jagged letters crashed through the static and captured my gaze. Frozen in place, my lungs would not expand and my vision swam dizzyingly. The letters vanished and there was blackness again, but only momentarily, as a burst of cold light brought a new sentence to the screen:
GO-
The ashtray impacted with the center of the screen, and the television tube made an audible popping sound, as glass and circuitry spilled from the wound. I hadn?t even been aware that I was throwing the heavy pewter dish, but now I felt a hot wash of anger, the helplessness and fear of the last year flared in me.
I would leave, I told myself. I would leave tonight, and tell no one. If one good thing came from my miserable shipwreck of a life, I would keep my son safe, and I couldn?t do that in the sorry state I was in.
It seemed so obvious then, with suddenly clarity: of course he was not interested in my son. It was me he had been torturing all these months. If he hated me this much, enough to slowly break me, utterly and deliberately, then he would follow me, like hunter to prey, wherever I went. So I would go.
I almost made it out that night, but doubt ate away at my resolve as I packed a few bags, and I soon succumbed to a rare desire for sleep. In the warm cocoon of blankets, the idea of recklessly fleeing seemed so rash and foolish, and I knew that a new day would bring clarity and level headedness.
I awoke to the golden light of dawn streaming into my bedroom onto a scene of unfathomable violence.
Blood and drying viscera coated the walls in uneven splatters. The sharp copper tang in the air shook me like smelling salts to damnable clarity. The carpet was soaked and spotted with crimson, thick puddles of blood glistening in the morning sunlight.
In the far corner, where the walls were painted nearly black and the carpet invisible beneath a tiny lake of blood, was the body. The diminutive limbs were dark and smeared, stacked like cordwood; two slender arms and two legs, capped with a pair of small curled hands and two feet, so smeared in gore that I mistook them for shoes. Beside the little pile of spindly limbs was a child?s torso; momentarily I could not comprehend that this was part of the body, so surreal in its isolation and stillness.
In the farthest corner at the apex of the slaughter was the broken television on a small table, the screen fully shattered to reveal a small interior space. Inside this hollow of plastic and metal, was a child?s head, balancing gracefully on its ragged neck, and faced away from me.
It was a long time before I moved, longer still before I ceased sobbing and walked on sodden carpet and wobbling knees towards the television. I prayed that I would not see my son?s birthmark and scars on the limbs and I held my gaze straight ahead as I approached the grotesque altar. Was that my son?s hair? Was it ever so black, or is that just the light?
I reached out, slowly with both hands to gently cup the small head. I was empty now, the morning breeze blowing straight through my shell. All I had to do was turn to see my son?s face, to know that I had failed him utterly, and then I would dry out like a husk and drift away on the wind.
It was light in my hands and still ever so slightly warm. I slowly spun it to face me, angry at myself for not knowing by heart the sight of my sons ears or and jaw line well enough stop now, to prevent the inevitable rotation.
The eyes were mercifully closed, but the cheeks were slit wide and high, in grim mockery of a smile. In his mouth, jammed far back and between the ragged slices of his face, was a video tape.
A wave of pure undiluted relief was followed by a sharp pang of guilt. This was not my son. I recognized the boy behind the curtain of blood, a friend of my son, yes, but this, this was not my son.
Obediently, like in a trance I took the video to the VCR, now connected to my son?s tiny black and white set. With a wad of white paper towels, I had dried and cleaned the soiled cassette, and I now slid it into the machine and watched solemnly while the letters appeared.
THIS WAS YOUR ONE WARNING
YOU CAN STILL SAVE HIM
FIRST, CLEAN UP
It dawned on me what he means, and simultaneously, why. I thought of the drying footprints of blood I?ve left around the house, my fingertips pressed against the corpse. I tried to imagine who might believe that I had slept through that act of unbridled cruelty, but seen and heard nothing.
NOW
I jerked with a start at this screen, as if the teacher has called my name and caught me day-dreaming. I rose to my feet and stopped the tape.
When I thought my son was dead, I believed that no pain could rend me worse. I now could see the foolishness of that. If he were truly gone, then I could not be hurt any worse, and in a way, the man in the dark would have lost. But he lives. He lives for me to agonize over yet again, and this time, I don?t have to wonder about the stakes. I have to do everything I can to keep him safe, I decided. This cannot happen to him.
When I returned from the woods, carrying a shovel wrapped in a thick canvas blanket from the truck, and leaving tracks of dirt and clay, I began to pour the first gallon of gasoline on the bottom floor of my house. When the house was fully saturated, I returned to the VCR and its tiny monitor to watch the rest of the tape. I am a marionette now, dancing to a silent tune, free will no longer even a factor.
The next sentence on the screen was familiar to me; though that was truly the first time I read it. I recognized it by the shape and outline of the letters; it was beneath the ashtray a split second before the impact.
GO NORTH
I was puzzled for a moment, a little resurgence of the self at this oddly vague and cryptic instruction. Just a direction and a command. I wondered where he meant for me to go, and how.
GO NOW. YOU WILL KNOW.
And the tape ended. And I went.
An hour later, a plume of smoke was visible to the south, fast receding behind truck. I drove as far as the truck would take me, until it lost traction on the ice somewhere in British Columbia, and ended broken axle?d in roadside culvert. From there, I walked. My wife shut access to my bank accounts weeks ago, and the small amount of cash that I still carried has long since vanished.
It?s been a month so far, homeless and trudging like a sentinel, through the darkest of winter. The snow and ice bring me comfort, the silent purity of the ground against the noonday sky, white on white. My life is only a direction now, and that anodyne of simplicity has bled into the land.
When I cannot find a house to beg shelter in, or a barn to break into, I build small covered trenches in the snow, and wrap myself in my tarp and blankets. This is more and more frequent as I travel northward and as my clothes begin to stink and mark me as a transient.
During the day, I walk; in the dark, I sleep. I sleep. Long and blissfully hours of oblivion come to with an ease I haven?t had since childhood, and I wake fully rested each day.
I am never alone of course. He is with me, as he always has been. When the last of the money was gone, the pangs of hunger only lasted a day. On the next morning, outside my small snow shelter, a pair of white rabbits lay stretched across the snow, only the red of their blood picking out their outlines on the snow.
During that past year in the fog of his nightmares, I never even considered who he might be. I never catalogued which clients might have secretly loathed me, or which elementary school victim of my bullying now wished me dead. I wonder now, how willful was this ignorance?
The sunlight is warm and unexpected on my face when I exit the barn the next morning, coat speckled with straw. It?s a few miles to the next town, and I can make it time to beg for some breakfast, and supplies for the next vacant stretch.
I call my son from each payphone I pass, direct to his mobile and listen to him get increasingly frustrated when I say nothing. Hearing him angry and alive is everything I need to keep going.
My son is safe, now that I?ve left him. As I believed he would, but for all the wrong reasons, the hunter, the man in the dark, has followed me here. He is no longer a danger to my family, and he can take nothing more from me now.
He is happy now, because we are going north, and so am I, because I know at last and truly, that I have saved my son. The cost is the pittance of my own life, and I am now I understand: I am grateful to give it to him. I am thankful to be pack horse to this monster, carrying us both onward.
I do not know what he wants for us here, at the top of the world, but I know when the time comes, he will make it known. So until then, I go north.
***
(Again, I feel like I?m missing something here.)
It wasn?t until I broke down in front of my sister that it occurred to me to use the word ?haunted?. When I tried to explain what was happening to me, finally articulating the weeks of dread and utter dislocation, I found that no other word would come. Haunted. There?s still a part of me that scoffs and glowers at this, to use the language of folklore; it seems to compress what I?d experienced into a simple banality, a prisoner of language.
I paid cash upfront for the house in West Toluca Lake. Something about the 1930?s Spanish architecture tucked behind the grove of weeping willows triggered a strong association with my childhood ideal of what it meant to be famous and successful in Los Angeles. It was far more than I needed, and I struggled to fill the extra rooms with bedroom sets and elaborate smoking lounges; more out of an obligation to keep up appearances when guests were over than to satisfy myself. I was happy there, for a short while.
My friends stop visiting a few months after I moved in. Increasingly elaborate excuses were spun, and I soon stopped asking. It only occurs to me now that I was doing the same, finding every reason to stay in the house.
There was such a gentle descent into the insanity of it all, that I hardly felt it happening. The unusually stormy winter hit me hard, and long hours in front of the sun lamp seemed to do little to halt my growing feeling of melancholy and nameless unease. I started sleeping later and I abandoned even the pretense of writing, spending long hours in silence on the back porch, listening to the dry rasping of the dead leaves in the cold breeze.
It was the middle of the night when I first saw him. After a long time of lying motionless in the dark, I slowly pulled myself out of bed from an Ambien fog at the sharp urging of my bladder, and shuffled towards the bathroom.
He was in the hall, standing perfectly still, his back to me. His head was cocked slightly to one side as if he was listening, but he showed no signs of seeing me. My heart leapt and my body locked as I tried to comprehend this intrusion. He was walking away from me now, the soft tread of his feet on the carpet the only sound that punctuated the stillness. Less than three seconds had passed from the moment I saw him, to when he turned a corner and was gone.
When I wrenched control from my frozen limbs, I found the house empty, and the doors still locked. Sleep came slowly that night as I tried to convince myself that what I had seen was a product of my medicated and half asleep mind.
He returned the next night, as I lay in bed. I awoke to the sound of the door opening and my eyes snapped open to complete darkness. There was the soft shuffling of feet, and then with a sickening feeling deep in my core, the sound of bedsprings softly creaking, as if he had sat at the foot of the bed. Fear held me in place like a vice. There was a sound from far away, a dusty crackling breath of wind.
My mouth went dry and I croaked a small involuntary rasp as I struggled to extricate myself from the sheets that suddenly clung to me. In that naked moment of helpless animal terror, he vanished, leaving a palpable hole in the darkness.
After that night, I was never alone in that house. At the corner of my eyes I saw slow plodding movement, the lumbering gait of a shadow that evaporated as soon as I turned. Rarely at first, but increasingly, I would see him in full view; walking slowly from room to room, sitting motionless on the patio, standing solemnly and silently in odd corners of the house. He would be gone only moments after I registered his presence, simply ceasing to exist, taking with him the tiny muffled sounds of his movements.
I could not describe him now if I tried. He was not vague or indistinct, but utterly unremarkable in every appearance. I can no longer even recall the image of him, only the idea of it all. Beyond the sight, there was an indescribable quality around him, a lingering fog of unease and dread that slowly suffused the house and clouded my mind.
My friends and my family all swear that during the darkest weeks they called me often, increasingly sick with worry. I remember none of it, just the constant crashing waves of dread and shock that weathered away at my reason.
The moment of clarity came on a clear February night. In a near daze, I stumbled towards the sleep, not wanting to stay awake, not wanting to wake up again in this house. I turned out the light, sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed when the miasma of his presence enveloped me.
He was behind me in the dark.
I pressed my eyes tightly together, and exhaled a slow wheeze, trying to calm my racing heart.
The bed behind me bucked with sudden movement and a raspy cough of air, and I leapt away, flinging the light switch upward. The bed, once immaculately made was in shambles, the sheets strewn on the floor.
Something deep inside me seemed to slowly bend and snap, and I grasped at a fragment of epiphany that slipped through my fingers away into the gloom.
I felt suddenly and sharply awake and lucid, like I hadn?t in months. I held onto my momentary courage close as I approached the front door; stepping over the threshold for the first time in weeks brought a faint wave of dizziness, and then I was in the car trying not to look back. As I pulled the car into the street, I turned to the house, the last time I saw it, its lights ablaze in mimicry of life. He was at the window, his hands clasped at his side, a momentary silhouette that vanished with only the soft sway of the curtains.
I was at a motel within an hour and at my sister?s Studio City apartment the next morning. My throat was raw from not speaking for so many days and I croaked out the story to her, embarrassed at the absurdity of the way it all, but swaddled in a profound relief.
Despite the usefulness of it to describe the events, the word ?haunted? soon turns sour in my mouth. It never occurred to me to call the intruder a ?ghost?. This was? something else. Something I can?t explain with the clubs and spears of language. The phantom impression of a right word, the perfect word, seems always at the tip of my tongue, but it never comes. It wasn?t the intruder. It was the house. There?s something wrong with the house itself.
The house is? broken.
***
Do you know what a Cordyceps is? I didn?t either until 20 minutes ago. It?s a family of thousands of different types of fungus, grows all around the word in various rainforests and jungles. The awful thing about them is they?re parasitic, they grow on other animals. An ant happens to run into some spores, and then it starts to colonize his insides, starting with his brain. At some point, the ant starts to act visibly ill; standing in place and shivering, or walking in circles. If a fellow colony member sees him in this condition, he will be dragged to the border of the colony and exiled.
Then, when it?s almost over, the ant weakly climbs as high as he can up the vines, and locks his body on tight. Finally, he dies, and the fungus emerges from the back of his head, bursting forth like a long and foul fruit. After a short time, the little stalk spews forth its own spores, leaving the mummified and broken ant clinging to the stalk, his eye cavities filled with drying fungus.
I mention this because last night, when I was up on the roof of my apartment complex, I found my brother?s body. He?s been back from 18 months on duty in the Philippines for less than three days. This was the first I?d seen him. My parents called me up the day before yesterday to tell me that he was on his way up. They told me he?d stayed in his room since he got home, and then suddenly got up and announced he was on his way to see me. They thought he was drunk, I?d I thought he?d never made it.
He must have come straight up to the roof and died, by the smell of it. I was just finishing a cigarette, all torn up with anxiety and head throbbing, and when the acrid smoke vanished I caught a whiff of rot on the hot wind. It took me just a few minutes before I?d found him; face down behind the vents and fans. A slimy gray column rose up obscenely from the base of his skull, and a frozen waterfall of roots and tendrils was dangling from his eye sockets and mouth. At the top of stalk was small arrangement of feathery wisps, a white powder drifting idly from it tips.
The spores must have drifting over the north side of the building all day. My side of the building. I came down to my apartment to try to call up the police, and my headache was rising to a feverish throb. I got through the door, and the moment I reached for the phone, pain flared in my head, so bad I almost passed out. I?ve since tried three times and I can never get my hand up on it.
The same thing happens when I try to get up and leave the room; I feel spines of ice tunneling up into my skull and my limbs lock up and shudder.
The ants, in their last moments crawl as high up the vines as he can climb. This is so the spore will spread over more of the colony below. In the end, the parasite controls the ant with an almost intelligent drive. God help me.
The pain is almost blinding now, and a new thought has been rising up rhythmically in my head, like a record skipping. Up. Up. Up. It?s joined by an image of my office tower. It?s taller than my apartment, the tallest place I can think off and although the bulge on the back of my neck is the size of a peach, the skin stretched shiny, and I?m dizzy and my eyes are cloudy, I think I can make it there. Up.
No. I?m sick. I need help.
The building pulses again in my mind. The cold wind. The roof and the sky. These images and concepts dull the pain momentarily as they pass through my mind. I think I can get there. Up. Up.
If you live in downtown Chicago, I would get the fuck out.
***
It?s been 12 days since I saw the apartment last, but there are echoes of it in everywhere, here in my temporary home. Light streaming through window will remind me of the bright, spacious living room. The squeak of the floorboards recalls the creaking first step in the hallway. The smell of cracked drywall sets my teeth on edge.
I?ve severed all ties with the apartment; all my possessions are in storage or stacked in sagging boxes here in Leif?s squalid garage. I went through the vague motions of filing the police report, and leaving an explanatory message on my landlady?s machine. I?ve done all the right and proper things, so there seems little left to do but share the why, before I move out of the City, and every city, for good.
Last September, my fiancé and I moved into the apartment; the top floor of a stately little four unit building in the Benton Park neighborhood of St. Louis. We were still living out mostly out of boxes six weeks later when the county hospital called us in the middle of the night. Her grandfather, a seemingly invincible ox of a man, who had raised her since her parents passed during her sixth grade year, had collapsed in grocery store line, a blood clot lodged in his tree trunk neck.
She had no choice, yet resentment welled in me when she took our car back to Twin Oaks to care for him, to watch and bathe him as his frozen left side slowly thawed and his mighty body withered. We talked of hiring a full time nurse? but it was the sort of idle way a barren couple might discuss children. She went to watch him die. I?d be lying if I said I didn?t lie awake at night, still on the right side of our half empty bed, praying wordlessly for death to hasten.
Despite her absence (a sensation not of pain but of emptiness, a tangible hole) I grew to enjoy in some small way, the luxury of a solitary existence. The apartment stirred feelings of contentment in me from the moment I saw it. It was adulthood, and reward for responsibility made solid and earthly. Newly remodeled, energy efficient, double paned windows on every wall casting beams of sunlight onto the cool and well worn wooden floors. It was the embodiment of our transition from sunburned country children into modern city and cubicle dwellers, rapidly paling beneath the fluorescents.
It was never perfect, but at first, the idiosyncrasies and nodes of strangeness in the apartment felt like pleasant affectations, Persian rug flaws of architecture and design that only increased our affection for the place. The bottom floor was all garages, laundry machines, and strangely irregular spaces with unfinished walls, filled with construction supplies gathering dust. The two upper floors each contain two mirrored units, one facing the street, and the other facing a sad little stone and weed garden that I preferred to ignore.
To my mild disappointment, the worst of the flaws were the walls, thin in a manner I would not have believed possible. The first night of unpacking I heard with sharp clarity the conversation of my downstairs neighbors, a heated discussion about a pair of off-season artichokes spoiling in the fridge. Over the next few weeks, we became intimately accustomed to their schedules; their alarm clocks, their love of forensic cop dramas, their histrionic arguing. I knew when they showered, I knew when they fucked. To be sure, they knew the same about us. I learned their names when we moved in and promptly forgot; the more we knew about each other from voyeuristic proximity, the less we actually wanted to deal with each other.
Two months ago, they moved out without giving a word or reason. One morning I awoke to the sound of dragging furniture, and watched with bemusement from my father?s worn recliner as they loaded a rented moving van. The next morning, the apartment door was open, revealing a swept clean doppelganger of my own living space.
Within a week the other tenant on the lower floor vacated, the door now permanently open on another blank canvas of a home. I can?t even recall his face, an anonymous gray visage that simply stopped appearing in the hallways. The other top unit, opposite my own, had been vacant since I moved in; this left me alone in the building, king of a tiny rented castle.
The youngest of five children, I knew how to appreciate solitude. I relished in the carefree freedom of heavy footfalls late at night, the loud retort of video game gunfire and explosions, the echoing moans of pornography, and the long weekend mornings spent entirely naked and stoned. I occasionally would wander into the empty other units, drifting through the uninhabited, sterile cleanliness with a mild shapeless guilt intertwined with curiosity.
It was a few weeks later that it started. The first of the strange signifiers of something wrong; signposts in a language that I am only now fluent in.
In the small hours of one Thursday morning I began to hear sounds again from downstairs. Delicate and tiny at first, but sustained and insistent. I strained in the dark to hear it, but it was slippery and would not stay in my grasp. When I could isolate it from the wind, I heard something between a hushed conversation with only one voice, or a small motor spinning in the dark, it was a babbling and inconsistent drone. It set my heart pumping as I lay perfectly still, mesmerized by the sounds. I desperately wanted to identify it, but it remained inscrutable.
I collected shifting rationalizations for it as I vainly attempted to sleep that night. A refrigerator motor going south, a failing heating or cooling duct, air in the water pipes. Hours later, I was able to drift to sleep, and despite the return of the noise each following night, I began to accept it. Even when the drone was augmented with a steady, delicate tapping noise, I had learned to live with it, to allow it to become part of the background white noise of urban life.
The sound of creaking boards began to permeate my space, not beneath my own feet but floating up from all around me. It was a warm spring, and I simply associated the sound with the dry expansion of the warming timbers. Although the sounds of a building stretching and contracting have always unsettled me, I never once doubted that these sounds could be anything but benign.
The vague stirrings of unease became solid the night I discovered the great peculiarity of the closet.
I am crouching over the sink, brushing my teeth with a fraying brush when from behind me comes a sudden, dry thud. I freeze in position, the brush protruding from my pursed lips, desperately waiting for some further sign of an intruder, or an explanation to the sound, but it is dead silent. Even the regular drone from downstairs has stopped. I walk the house with silent steps, turning every light on in turn and searching each room, but I am alone.
I check the hall closet last.
The closet lies directly behind the bathroom, exactly where I heard the sound. I open it up, flicking the light on and feverishly hoping to see a rational excuse, one of the last unpacked boxes toppled on the floor. But the closet is immaculate and the sound still hangs unexplained in the air.
Unwilling to accept the sound without explanation, I reach out and tap on the wall between closet and bathroom. The sound is oddly hollow. It slowly dawns on me that the closet is? more narrow than it should be in relation to the bathroom. The certainty grows as I pace out the distance using my bare feet, and then with the tape measure from the tool kit my fiancé?s grandfather gave us. Sure enough, there are 40 extra inches between the bathroom wall and the closet.
My capacity for rationalization is slightly strained. Surely there?s extra insulation to keep the bathroom warmer, or maybe all walls are thicker than I imagine. I?ve never built a house; I have no frame of reference for judging. I imagine a hammer left inside the wall by a careless contractor finally slipping after months of teetering. Once the adrenalin flood dissipates, I am able to forget the incident and drift quickly to sleep, relishing the absence of the babbling sounds from beneath.
The drone returns the next night.
The next few weeks pass in a haze of my rising discomfort in the apartment, until that warm Friday night. It?s two in the morning, and I am returning home late from a perfunctory office trip to the bar, not nearly as drunk as I would like. I am thinking with a grimace of self loathing about the clean laundry I?ve left to wrinkle in the dryer the night before, and I almost miss noticing that the door to the flat beneath mine is shut. I?ve become used to seeing the empty mirror image every day. Maybe the landlady finally started showing the units, I think,
Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize.
Down the stairs on the small shared back balcony, I carry an oversized duffle bag to the laundry room, sleep weighing down my ankles and eyelids. I stuff cold, wrinkled shirts into the bag, missing the usual warmth of the process; my mind drifts away to the thought of clean sheets and a morning without an alarm clock.
There are two things you should know about me at this point: I turn every light off when I leave a room. No matter what. My dad used to beat the shit out of me when the power bill spiked higher than he felt it should. Due to the same Pavlovian conditioning, I lock every door as I pass through it. I?ve even locked the back door on the way down the steps.
As I start back up the steps, the nylon cord of the duffel cutting into my shoulder; I happen to glance up at my bedroom window.
The light is on.
And there's a silhouette against the closed blinds.
I feel a warm trickle on my thigh, as the hair on the back of my neck snaps to fucking attention.
And then the light goes out.
It happens in less than a second. Thirty seconds later I?m still frozen in place, trying to parse impossible data and decide whether I?ve actually seen what I know I?ve seen. Rationalization finally fails me and I softly retrace my steps down the stairs and out through the garage, fighting the animal urge in my thighs and heart and feet to run at full speed away from the apartment.
Across the street, I stand beneath in the streetlight shadow of a dying elm, and call first the police and then a cab. After five minutes of silence, moments after I begin to chastise myself for overreacting, the venetian blinds on the living room window part slightly, and I feel the electric tingle of connecting with invisible eyes. And then it is gone.
The cab comes 20 minutes later, and the police never show up. I stay at a hotel the next night and on Sunday morning; my co-worker Leif accompanies me back to the apartment, to see how much has been stolen.
It?s all there. My laptop is still charging next to the bed, the brand new flatscreen TV stands monolith like and untouched in the living room. My stomach is twisted into knots. With Leif, a few other friends, and a pickup truck I move everything out the next day.
When we are almost finished I invite them to help themselves to the last beers in the fridge, and they squat in the empty living room, allowing sweat to evaporate off dripping brows. Emboldened by daylight and company I slip downstairs to examine the downstairs apartment, hoping to make a little sense of the unconnected puzzle pieces I have.
I go straight to the hall closet.
It has the same abnormally thick wall.
Only in this wall, someone has hammered a large, jagged hole, exposing the tiny crawl space between.
And in the dusty cavity, flat against the wall, is a cheap hardware store ladder; running up through the darkness, to the space behind the walls, in my apartment. As I stand, staring in dawning horror at the brushed aluminum and orange paint of the ladder, it moves. It bounces once against the wall and goes still. Dust drifts down in the motionless air.
Then, it creaks, slightly, shifting under invisible weight.
I can?t breathe. My lungs are clawing for oxygen and the edge of my vision goes dark, but I can?t breathe. My limbs feel cold and dead.
The next thing I know, I am outside beneath the elm tree again. I am calling Leif on his mobile phone and asking him to meet me downstairs with the last load of boxes. I don?t mention the hole, or the ladder. I just want to be away from there.
I don?t know how he got into my apartment from that space. I don?t want to know. All I care about is never seeing that building again. I mailed the keys to my landlord, and told her to keep the deposit; filled out an obligatory report with a terminally disinterested cop.
I?m burning through my last vacation days, and ignoring the insistent texts and emails from my boss. I can?t bring myself to go back to work. My chest constricts slightly, thinking about the dense hive of the downtown office building, people surrounding me at all times.
Leif has been letting me sleep on his sagging couch in his filthy one bedroom house, but I can tell I am wearing my welcome thin, and I am leaving in the morning. It?s just as well, I haven?t slept well since I abandoned the apartment; I lie awake, acutely aware of his presence in the next room, hearing him snoring, hearing the sheets shifting every time he moves. It?s time to leave.
Two days ago, my fiancé?s grandfather got a hold of his shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. Brave old bastard. I?ll be moving with her into his weathered farmhouse, with acres of barren and rocky fields surrounding it. It?s quiet out there.
It sounds like heaven.
I haven't told her yet, and I don?t think I will. I told her simply that I quit my job and moved out. She's devastated, wounded, and it would be cruel to add to it now. I may have to tell her someday if it ever comes up, because I don't want to live in the city anymore. I don?t ever want to hear people moving beneath my feet, or on the other side of a wall.
Never again.
its fero lequid you can make it yourrself by mixing toner and sunflower oil if you pass a magnet under it it wiggles like thatShoqiyqa said:
I just want to make sure people didn't miss this story:
Istanbul, Turkey
August
09:12:09 AM
I am at a small outdoor cafe just a few hundred yards from the teeming throng of a morning market, just in sight of the Bosporus. I love this city, and all its thick and violent contradictions. The rising heat of the day is already causing the linen of my suit to cling to my legs.
I awoke last night with a change of heart; you are owed an explanation, and even a warning. If I do as I have planned, I and my actions will be vilified, and misunderstood. Please believe me, I am doing this for all the right reasons. You may not see it now, but in ten or twenty years, you will see a new world born. That is worth any sacrifice.
I have done my work here in Turkey, the first of many great cities to see, and I board a plane tomorrow. Don't bother looking for me here.
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
September
05:04:20 AM
I am in one of the oldest settlements of mankind, and her majesty overwhelms me, just as her descent saddens me. Once the jewel of Alexander's conquest, and the capital of Tamarlane's empire, she has fallen into disrepair and goes fallow with neglect. I must confess knowing this already, but forgive my sense of romanticism; I did want to see this place, once.
I have no work to do here; once the junction of trade lanes between East and West, Samarkand has become isolated and useless to me. But the ghosts of her history and past bring me strength and resolve. The case that I carry with me is heavy in my hand, it is my burden, but with each stop, that burden lessens.
I have allowed myself this one folly, leaving the web for a moment, but I will not linger long.
Munich, Germany
September
08:05:18 AM
The city still sleeps late into the morning on Saturday, and in many places the streets are still empty. There is a grand majesty of Munich's remaining prewar buildings, and I remarked on its beauty to my local driver. "It was a lot nicer before the British bombed us," he said without a hint of irony. He was at least two generations removed from the war, and did not seem, or want, to understand when I told him that London had the same problem.
Most of humanity is horrified by the specter of the war, of what happened here. They wonder how man could be so inhumane. These people know nothing of the world, or of nature, red in tooth and claw. These are the people that artificially elevate humanity above the animal kingdom, people that maintain an ephemeral barrier between our particular primate sub-grouping, and the rest of life on Earth. I never understood these people.
I deposited one more device downtown, in a massive state-of-the-art theater complex. I hid it carefully, and set the little slaved atomic clock to my own. My flight departs in a few hours, and if you are following me, you will have no luck in Germany.
London, England
October
05:09:19 AM
London shows her war wounds with flat gray office towers, and plain, blocky apartments, yet her age and history bleed through the scars as I stroll down the Thames, scarcely aware of the brackish odor of the oily waters. The trash and detritus in the river don't sadden me, the way I imagine it would for you.
You draw some artificial line between a hamburger wrapper and the fallen leaves of a tree that I will never understand. You distinguish between nature and humanity in a way that puzzles me. We are nature, our cities, our roads, and our orbital satellites are no different than a termite colony, or a birds nest, except perhaps in scale. There is nothing unique about humanity. I know that I am all but alone in this conceit, but history and nature herself will prove me right.
The devices I planted here are in the Underground; silently waiting for the day to come when I will activate them, and they will open their ceramic filters and gently release their payload into the air. I burned the last decade of my life like a candle to forge the perfect weapon, hardened against the air, hearty and undeniably alive, burning with the will to survive.
I have chosen the stations because the first letters of each station spell my name. Consider it an artist's signature. I wouldn't tell you this if I wasn't sure this would be useless information, and I doubt you have even uncovered who I am.
As always, I will be gone before you arrive.
Chicago, Illinois
November
02:15:03 PM
Chicago is the hub of a great wheel of airline traffic; along its thousand intersecting lines, millions of passengers will pass through, robbing the stale airport air of oxygen and expunging carbon dioxide. Even these sterile, atmosphere-regulated glass and steel tunnels, I still see nature, green and red with life.
I need to make a distinction. I know that what I am doing seems to be wrong, evil. However, I also understand that morality is an artificial device we used to guide tribal behavior, a useful conceit in creating harmony and growth in small populations. But there is no real weight to good and evil. Nature is beyond that. There is nothing evil about the wasp that implants her young into a living caterpillar. Our concepts of ethics are as fragile as our bodies, and just as impermanent.
A few devices in the ventilation systems will infect millions. You can search for them if you want, but there is a great deal of redundancy in my plan. You can grind yourself to the bone attempting to undo my work, but in the end, you will fail. If you are wise, you will cease pursuit and begin to prepare for the inevitable struggle ahead.
Tokyo, Japan
November
09:18:05 PM
Tokyo must be a hell to those who see nature as only forests or mountains or clean ocean waters. To me, it is a wonder of that natural world. The lights and madness of Roppongi are just as wondrous and alive as the synchronized flashing of fireflies. This is nature, and if you will allow me a moment of species-self congratulation, this is nature at its finest and most wonderful. But nature has no apex. It will only grow and learn and become more beautiful. It brings tears to my eyes.
I was asleep for so many decades, laboring in a lab for a pharmaceutical giant. (Which one is not important. It will not help you find me, especially not this late.) I wish I could tell you that there was some epiphany, some concrete lesson I could share with you to make you understand why I have chose this path for us all. The truth is sadly mundane: the influx of money from a chain of discoveries gave me the time to think, and become aware of the world and its systems, slowly and gradually. The money also gave me the resources to act once I was determined.
The world regulates itself. People ascribe some sort of special malevolence to the acts of man, unaware that we are not the first species to war, to commit genocide. Foolish. This is not unique to man. Many other species before us outstripped their habitats, and sowed the seeds of their own destruction. They simply are no longer among us to act as a warning. Evolutionary strategies either work, forever sustainable, or they do not, and the species die. This is the only rule in nature. Live for the future, or be buried in the past.
It should be clear now, to all of us, that despite our species' meteoric growth, we have not opted for the former strategy, and it is only a matter of time before we collapse.
I will not stand for that. I am as much a part of nature as anything else, and so are my weapons. I will be the regulator. We will adapt, or die. But be brave: no matter the outcome, the world will be bettered. And I sincerely hope you will be there to see it, so that you can know that I was right.
The devices here are spread randomly, one is buried in a planter box that struck my eye as I walked the streets, another beneath the table of bustling cafe. You must know now that finding them will be impossible. Please, for your own sake, the time for pursuit and prevention is long passed. It's time to prepare.
San Francisco, California
December
00:00:00 AM
I never imagined that I would remain uninfected, despite my precautions after so much exposure; I had elongated the viruses dormancy for just this reason, to buy myself a little more time. I have not finished my web yet, as I had originally envisioned it, but my infection models show I have done more than enough. I will rest a little now, and I will try not to regret my part in this. Not my actions of course, but my inability to see the fruits of my labor.
Humanity would have died without me. We've grown soft, slow, no longer a viable organism. We would have slowly, subtly altered the environment until the world itself was toxic to us, and then we would have vanished with a whimper. Those who think that Man has the ability to destroy the world labor under the same strange anthropocentrism as those who think we are somehow divorced from the rest of the kingdom of life. We could no more end the world than we could create it. We only can kill ourselves, and take a few million unstable species down with us. Is this how you want to end? Slowly poisoned or drowned by our inability to see the long term?
This is not the way, and I will not allow it.
Humanity, I am giving you a great gift, though I know you will never see it as such. I am giving you competition. You will work together, you will merge your resources and be reforged and tempered in the fires of struggle and crisis, together. Or you will die. You will blossom into something new, or you will fertilize the fields of the next competitor for space and resources. But you will change. It's inevitable now, and it brings me pride and joy even as the lining of my lungs slough free and I drown in infected blood.
I have left you something. One last breadcrumb, woven into these letters. It may be the key to your salvation. If you find it, it will set you onto the path to the cure. You understand that I can not just hand it to you, that would defeat my whole purpose. Believe me when I say that I want you to live, but I must be strong not to undermine the grand struggle that will shape you for centuries to come.
It's over now. If you still wish to seek me, you are only wasting your precious little time, anything that could help you, I have already sent. The rest, I have burned and erased. The triggers on the devices will release soon. Very soon.
But, if for some foolish reason, you want to see the meat and bones and fluids I will leave behind, you will know where to find me. I will be Patient Zero.
There is a small puzzle built into this story...
And there is indeed a puzzle in this story, I'll also give you a hint:
It's something to do with the numbers.
Istanbul, Turkey
August
09:12:09 AM
I am at a small outdoor cafe just a few hundred yards from the teeming throng of a morning market, just in sight of the Bosporus. I love this city, and all its thick and violent contradictions. The rising heat of the day is already causing the linen of my suit to cling to my legs.
I awoke last night with a change of heart; you are owed an explanation, and even a warning. If I do as I have planned, I and my actions will be vilified, and misunderstood. Please believe me, I am doing this for all the right reasons. You may not see it now, but in ten or twenty years, you will see a new world born. That is worth any sacrifice.
I have done my work here in Turkey, the first of many great cities to see, and I board a plane tomorrow. Don't bother looking for me here.
Samarkand, Uzbekistan
September
05:04:20 AM
I am in one of the oldest settlements of mankind, and her majesty overwhelms me, just as her descent saddens me. Once the jewel of Alexander's conquest, and the capital of Tamarlane's empire, she has fallen into disrepair and goes fallow with neglect. I must confess knowing this already, but forgive my sense of romanticism; I did want to see this place, once.
I have no work to do here; once the junction of trade lanes between East and West, Samarkand has become isolated and useless to me. But the ghosts of her history and past bring me strength and resolve. The case that I carry with me is heavy in my hand, it is my burden, but with each stop, that burden lessens.
I have allowed myself this one folly, leaving the web for a moment, but I will not linger long.
Munich, Germany
September
08:05:18 AM
The city still sleeps late into the morning on Saturday, and in many places the streets are still empty. There is a grand majesty of Munich's remaining prewar buildings, and I remarked on its beauty to my local driver. "It was a lot nicer before the British bombed us," he said without a hint of irony. He was at least two generations removed from the war, and did not seem, or want, to understand when I told him that London had the same problem.
Most of humanity is horrified by the specter of the war, of what happened here. They wonder how man could be so inhumane. These people know nothing of the world, or of nature, red in tooth and claw. These are the people that artificially elevate humanity above the animal kingdom, people that maintain an ephemeral barrier between our particular primate sub-grouping, and the rest of life on Earth. I never understood these people.
I deposited one more device downtown, in a massive state-of-the-art theater complex. I hid it carefully, and set the little slaved atomic clock to my own. My flight departs in a few hours, and if you are following me, you will have no luck in Germany.
London, England
October
05:09:19 AM
London shows her war wounds with flat gray office towers, and plain, blocky apartments, yet her age and history bleed through the scars as I stroll down the Thames, scarcely aware of the brackish odor of the oily waters. The trash and detritus in the river don't sadden me, the way I imagine it would for you.
You draw some artificial line between a hamburger wrapper and the fallen leaves of a tree that I will never understand. You distinguish between nature and humanity in a way that puzzles me. We are nature, our cities, our roads, and our orbital satellites are no different than a termite colony, or a birds nest, except perhaps in scale. There is nothing unique about humanity. I know that I am all but alone in this conceit, but history and nature herself will prove me right.
The devices I planted here are in the Underground; silently waiting for the day to come when I will activate them, and they will open their ceramic filters and gently release their payload into the air. I burned the last decade of my life like a candle to forge the perfect weapon, hardened against the air, hearty and undeniably alive, burning with the will to survive.
I have chosen the stations because the first letters of each station spell my name. Consider it an artist's signature. I wouldn't tell you this if I wasn't sure this would be useless information, and I doubt you have even uncovered who I am.
As always, I will be gone before you arrive.
Chicago, Illinois
November
02:15:03 PM
Chicago is the hub of a great wheel of airline traffic; along its thousand intersecting lines, millions of passengers will pass through, robbing the stale airport air of oxygen and expunging carbon dioxide. Even these sterile, atmosphere-regulated glass and steel tunnels, I still see nature, green and red with life.
I need to make a distinction. I know that what I am doing seems to be wrong, evil. However, I also understand that morality is an artificial device we used to guide tribal behavior, a useful conceit in creating harmony and growth in small populations. But there is no real weight to good and evil. Nature is beyond that. There is nothing evil about the wasp that implants her young into a living caterpillar. Our concepts of ethics are as fragile as our bodies, and just as impermanent.
A few devices in the ventilation systems will infect millions. You can search for them if you want, but there is a great deal of redundancy in my plan. You can grind yourself to the bone attempting to undo my work, but in the end, you will fail. If you are wise, you will cease pursuit and begin to prepare for the inevitable struggle ahead.
Tokyo, Japan
November
09:18:05 PM
Tokyo must be a hell to those who see nature as only forests or mountains or clean ocean waters. To me, it is a wonder of that natural world. The lights and madness of Roppongi are just as wondrous and alive as the synchronized flashing of fireflies. This is nature, and if you will allow me a moment of species-self congratulation, this is nature at its finest and most wonderful. But nature has no apex. It will only grow and learn and become more beautiful. It brings tears to my eyes.
I was asleep for so many decades, laboring in a lab for a pharmaceutical giant. (Which one is not important. It will not help you find me, especially not this late.) I wish I could tell you that there was some epiphany, some concrete lesson I could share with you to make you understand why I have chose this path for us all. The truth is sadly mundane: the influx of money from a chain of discoveries gave me the time to think, and become aware of the world and its systems, slowly and gradually. The money also gave me the resources to act once I was determined.
The world regulates itself. People ascribe some sort of special malevolence to the acts of man, unaware that we are not the first species to war, to commit genocide. Foolish. This is not unique to man. Many other species before us outstripped their habitats, and sowed the seeds of their own destruction. They simply are no longer among us to act as a warning. Evolutionary strategies either work, forever sustainable, or they do not, and the species die. This is the only rule in nature. Live for the future, or be buried in the past.
It should be clear now, to all of us, that despite our species' meteoric growth, we have not opted for the former strategy, and it is only a matter of time before we collapse.
I will not stand for that. I am as much a part of nature as anything else, and so are my weapons. I will be the regulator. We will adapt, or die. But be brave: no matter the outcome, the world will be bettered. And I sincerely hope you will be there to see it, so that you can know that I was right.
The devices here are spread randomly, one is buried in a planter box that struck my eye as I walked the streets, another beneath the table of bustling cafe. You must know now that finding them will be impossible. Please, for your own sake, the time for pursuit and prevention is long passed. It's time to prepare.
San Francisco, California
December
00:00:00 AM
I never imagined that I would remain uninfected, despite my precautions after so much exposure; I had elongated the viruses dormancy for just this reason, to buy myself a little more time. I have not finished my web yet, as I had originally envisioned it, but my infection models show I have done more than enough. I will rest a little now, and I will try not to regret my part in this. Not my actions of course, but my inability to see the fruits of my labor.
Humanity would have died without me. We've grown soft, slow, no longer a viable organism. We would have slowly, subtly altered the environment until the world itself was toxic to us, and then we would have vanished with a whimper. Those who think that Man has the ability to destroy the world labor under the same strange anthropocentrism as those who think we are somehow divorced from the rest of the kingdom of life. We could no more end the world than we could create it. We only can kill ourselves, and take a few million unstable species down with us. Is this how you want to end? Slowly poisoned or drowned by our inability to see the long term?
This is not the way, and I will not allow it.
Humanity, I am giving you a great gift, though I know you will never see it as such. I am giving you competition. You will work together, you will merge your resources and be reforged and tempered in the fires of struggle and crisis, together. Or you will die. You will blossom into something new, or you will fertilize the fields of the next competitor for space and resources. But you will change. It's inevitable now, and it brings me pride and joy even as the lining of my lungs slough free and I drown in infected blood.
I have left you something. One last breadcrumb, woven into these letters. It may be the key to your salvation. If you find it, it will set you onto the path to the cure. You understand that I can not just hand it to you, that would defeat my whole purpose. Believe me when I say that I want you to live, but I must be strong not to undermine the grand struggle that will shape you for centuries to come.
It's over now. If you still wish to seek me, you are only wasting your precious little time, anything that could help you, I have already sent. The rest, I have burned and erased. The triggers on the devices will release soon. Very soon.
But, if for some foolish reason, you want to see the meat and bones and fluids I will leave behind, you will know where to find me. I will be Patient Zero.
There is a small puzzle built into this story...
And there is indeed a puzzle in this story, I'll also give you a hint:
It's something to do with the numbers.
My neighbor, Mr. White, is usually a quiet old man, spending his days in a rocking chair on his porch, watching the city and his life pass by. However, to say that he?s odd would be an understatement. He dresses from head to toe in solid black clothes, the few times I?ve talked to him he?s seemed like a nice guy ( a little standoffish perhaps), nothing to indicate why he dresses in all the flamboyant colors of a chimney sweep.
It was the first day in August when the screaming began. 1:00 am sharp in the morning a horrible scream pierces the thin wall between our flats. As suddenly as it started, it stops, leaving my heart hammering and my mind awake. This continues for the rest of the week, but each time I make up my mind to confront him about it, the screaming stops and I lose the nerve to knock on his door. The next day he?s out on the front porch again, dressed in his usual black attire, from black shoes, up to black socks, pants, jacket, shirt, glasses, and finally hat. ?Good morning.? he mumbles as I pass. I almost stop and ask him about the past few nights, but the way he rocks back and forth on his chair, his head pointed straight ahead of him, I?m still too weirded out to talk to him about it.
I get back that evening to see him take off in an airport shuttle. Now, I haven?t seen Mr. White leave his house in the two years I?ve lived next to him, but I figure his sudden departure simply means it?ll be that much easier for me to get some sleep. Unfortunately, as soon as I get settled down into bed, I hear a new noise, a noise I hadn?t noticed earlier. My bed lies against our adjoining wall, so I can hear water running in the pipes whenever he has the faucet on. As I lie there, I can hear water rushing. Two hours and no sleep later, I realize that the noise from the pipes is even more disruptive than the screaming. I figure I?ll do us both a service and shut the running faucet off. So I dress, grab a few supplies, and head over to his door. I?ve lost my keys enough times to figure out how to jimmy a lock, so I shove a couple paper clips into the doorknob and wiggle ?em around a bit. Soon enough I hear that soft ?click? and enter his flat.
The place is in shambles. Like somebody had been running around knocking everything over. Books and magazines litter the floor and half the furniture has been knocked over and shoved against a wall. I head toward the sound of running water and enter Mr. White?s bathroom. Blood Everywhere. The walls are covered in blood, the bathtub has blood running down into it, and the edges of the sink have bits of bloody hair and flesh around the edges.
I turn off the faucet and then turn myself to get the fuck out of there. And that?s when the fucking lights go out. ?Pop? goes the bulbs in the bathroom. I flip out and bolt out of there. That?s when I make the mistake of looking behind me. From the gloom of the bathroom I see that there?s something watching me, its eyes reflecting some unknown light.
I don?t really remember the next minute, but the next thing I know I?m standing in my own bathroom, in my own apartment, with my pants heavy with my own piss. Shit. Some fucking shiny thing in the bathroom looks like eyeballs and I piss myself. I take a shower and go back to my bedroom to grab some new pants. But as I?m putting them on I look out the window. It?s fucking watching me, its eyes a glow in the darkness outside. I scream and almost ruin my second pair. But a moment later they?re gone. I call myself a dumbass for falling victim to my own imagination and go to the living room. Sleep?s out of the question, but maybe I can kill my fear with some horrible late-night television.
Everything?s cool for the first hour and half, then a commercial comes on where the background is black. You know how you can see your reflection in the TV when the screen is dark? Well I see me. I also see the fucking eyes glowing at me from the darkness behind my couch.
Frozen to my chair I watch them watch me. Never moving, never blinking, the beast in the shadows has me steady in its gaze. I snap out of it suddenly, doing a half-flip half-barrel roll away from the couch and onto the floor. Of course, when I look again, they?re gone. This shit?s too crazy for me, my last bastion of defense lies in my copious alcohol collection. Practically sprinting to the kitchen, I grab a bottle of something strong and fill the glass. Glug glug glug, raising the glass over my lips and above my head until it?s empty. But there?s something else in the bottom of the glass, I see those fucking eyes again. I slam the glass down and catch a glimmer of light as the beast takes off down my dark hallway. Shit. Shitshitshitshit.
Five minutes later, all the lights in the house are on and I?m decked out in a flashlight and a kitchen knife. Well, I should say all the lights are on but one. The hallway light died as I flipped it on, giving a soft ?pufft? of bulby death. At the end of the dark hallway lie two doors, a closet and the door out of my apartment. It?s time to get there or die trying. I creep down into the increasingly dark corridor, my flashlight and knife a foot in front of me. The goddamn closet door is open.
I think I see the beast?s eyes again as I near the closet, but it?s just the latch on the door. I reach the closet door. Breathless, I pull the knife back and get ready to strike.
?Haaahhhh!!!? is my battle-cry as I turn the corner. Nothing. No beast and no beasty eyes. I close the closet and continue to the front door, resolute in my escape. That?s when I notice another thing wrong; the outside light usually seeps in through the crack under my door. Fuck! So close and more shit happens. Playing it safe I edge up to the door and peer out the eyepiece. Two glowing eyes look back at me. I scream for the third time that night and go running back up the hallway to the light of the living room, leaving the knife and my only flashlight lying by the front door.
There?s no escape. I get ready to barricade myself in a corner. I grab the TV cabinet and began to push it toward the center of the room. It?s watching me. The space between the wall and the cabinet. Three fucking inches wide. The beast?s eyes glare at me. Its gaze is neither malevolent or friendly. Just two, perfectly round, shining orbs.
That?s it, I?m done. I collapse backwards onto the floor and back away to the wall, watching the eyes. Watching the eyes watching me. Watching the eyes watching me watching it. I sit there, staring. They don?t move. Nor do I. the night creeps by second after second, me caught in this horribly twisted staring contest. I just wish I knew what they wanted. If the beast attacked me, if it revealed itself, I could know what I?m up against. I might even figure out how I?ll die before it kills me. No. It stays in the crack between my wall and my TV and watches with infinite patience.
The darkness outside dissolves into a gray morning, and the eyes begin to lose their glimmer. As the sun lights my living room, the beast retreats, gone into the shadow it came from. To where I have no fucking idea.
I pack my things. I?m going away, fuck knows where, but I?m getting at least a thousand miles between me and here before night falls again. Two shots of bourbon wish me on my way as I grab my suitcase and set off for the front door.
?Knock, knock? someone get there first. I jump, dropping my stuff and getting ready to bolt back to the nearest corner, ?knock, knock?. But reason grabs me by the heels, whispering in my ear that the fucking night monster wouldn?t be courteous enough to knock before killing me. Slowly I open it. Mr. White is standing there, resplendent in his black hat, sunglasses, shirt, jacket, pants, socks, and shoes. ?Good morning, Steven.? says he.
?Hi.? says I.
?Say Steven, did anyone go into my apartment while I was gone? There are footprints leading from my bathroom to my door. Notice he neglects to mention what the footprints are formed of. ?Uh, no Mr. White, I?ve been in my apartment all night and I didn?t hear anything.? (If you think I?m about to admit to a man that has blood all over his bathroom and a monster living in his house that I broke into his house, then you are very mistaken). ?That?s good Steven, I have many fragile belongings that could easily be destroyed or stolen by a malicious soul. You have a good day.?
?You too, man.?
He turns to leave and then turns back to me smiling, ?Oh and Steven,? he says, ?I couldn?t help but notice bloody footprints leading from my door to yours.? His smile gets even wider. He leans in, bringing our face right next to each other. He removes his sunglasses. . Revealing two empty pits in his face? . . ?I?ll be keeping my eyes on you.?
---
"The only way out"
Gregory A. Julian moved into the mansion on 481 Cayuga Dr. Soon, angry letters from the bank began to pour into his mail slot, threatening foreclosure unless he began to pay off his sizable loan. Three months later, the requisite amount of time had passed and an eviction notice was printed by my boss. And that?s the asshole that sent me, late Friday evening, just before I left for the weekend, to deliver the letter in person to the absent Mr. Julian. I ground my teeth as I wound my way through the suburbs looking for Cayuga Drive. Somehow, this man I had never knew or met had unwittingly conspired with my boss to ruin my evening plans.
481 stood at the end of the block, its windows dark, its flanks shaded by oaks twisting into the reddening sky. I parked the car next to a dusty BMW and walked up the short stone path to his (now the bank?s) front door. It seemed odd that the expensive car would be sitting unprotected outside of his spacious garage, an even layer of pollen coating the outside and a stack of moving boxes piled within. Also, it was bizarre that the heavy front door stood halfway open, a mountain of letters and bills spilling out the doorway and onto the walk. I rapped the brass knocker against the door, ?Mr. Gregory Julian?? I called inside, ?I?m from the bank; I have some important papers to give to you.? No reply.
I ventured a little further into the hallway and repeated myself louder. Still no reply. But squinting, I saw the soft glow of a light spilling down a staircase at the end of the hallway. A glance at the hour hand on my watch was all it took to send me inside the house in search of my quarry.
The antique mansion was completely paneled in oak and a thick red carpet covered the floor. Mr. Julian was apparently trying to remodel, as several feet of the wall had been pulled off and large patches of carpet had been torn up. His method of removal was in poor taste considering the age of the place; many of the holes appeared to have been simply smashed through, as though with a sledgehammer. Or maybe he was just trying to wreck the house before the bank could get its hands on it.
Continuing down the hall and reaching the top of the stairs I realized that the light was coming from a room on the other side of the second story landing. I picked my way around cardboard boxes piled along the floor, wondering what kind of man buys a mansion, neglects to pay his debt, and never bothers to unpack. The door stood slightly ajar, light shooting out around the edges.
Through the gap I glimpsed bookshelves and sofas; it appeared to be a small study. I knocked on the door, ?Mr. Julian, I apologize for the intrusion, but I have papers that I need to hand you in person.? No reply.
I grabbed the doorknob and strode in.
The desiccated corpse of Mr. Julian lay flat on the carpet.
In one hand he clasped a pen; on the wrist of the other ran a jagged gash. I gagged ? it didn?t take a doctor to determine that he had been dead for weeks. Well, that explained why his bills went unpaid.
A harsh lamp gleamed from the corner, coloring the room in sharp contrasts. A thin object, sitting on a desk in front of the late Mr. Julian, glimmered in the light. Curiosity got the best of me and I carefully skirted around the body, a dried pool of blood crunching into the carpet underneath.
A dagger lay on the table surrounded by a spatter of thick droplets. Its edge was encrusted in a thin red film; having been plunged into the flesh of its owner. Next to it sat a torn piece of paper with a scribble of black ink scrawled across. I grabbed it and held it up to the lamp, squinting to make out the barely legible writing;
?Dear Kate and Daniel and everybody else, There is no escape. This is the only way out. I?m so sorry. Destroy the house.
Greg J.?
A chill shot down my spine. With a shock it hit me that I was standing in a pool of blood next to a corpse in a dark house at night. I raced out of the room and down the stairs with a cold sweat breaking out on my face. I ran towards the front door, a wind blowing into the house and down the hall, whipping letters through the air, slamming the door shut. I grab the doorknob and pull. A bolt crunches against its lock. Confused, I run my hands across the handle searching for the latch.
There?s no latch ? there?s not even a keyhole.
As my heart pounds, an image flashes across my scattered mind: the back door.
I sprint down the hallway, opening doors and racing through dark rooms, working my way across the house. Finally, I stumble across a moonlit alcove, where the light streams from a tiny window set into a metal door. I grab the immense handle, but again the door is bolted shut; no way to unlock it. I pound my fists against its heavy steel, but the frame doesn?t even budge. Stepping back, I realize that it resembles a bank vault; thick metal panels secured by hinges thicker than my hand, the safety glass inches thick, repelling all of my efforts to crack it.
A small piece of paper is taped onto it. I tear it off and hold it up to the window. Scratched in pencil it reads;
?There is no escape?
Something falls against the window, blotting out the light.
My feet fly back down through the house, back to the front door. The doors I had opened have all closed; I bash my way through them, their bolts bursting from the rotten walls as I charge towards the exit, lowering my shoulder, gritting my teeth.
As I round the last turn at top speed, the front door comes into view. Thick boards, pounded haphazardly into the wall, stretch across the doorway. Nails and broken glass embedded into the wood, the jagged tips jutting into the air. Barbed wire, strung like a net across the entrance, bits of flesh hanging off the rusty points.
Words burnt deep into the wood,
?There is no escape?
?shit?
I can?t stop myself fast enough; the barbed wire pierces into my guts and slashes across my face, but it also saves me, knocking me backwards onto the floor before I impale myself on the door. In pain, bleeding, I stumble away from the entrance, knocking my way through another door and stumbling into the dark. Suddenly, a step; the floor disappears and I fly head first onto hard ground, fireworks bursting before my eyes.
As the pain begins to fade I grope in the darkness for the walls. A chain falls into my hand. Instinctively, I pull it, and the garage lights up. I turn around just as the door behind me slams shut again. Whatever has me trapped in this house is closing in.
But next to the shut door a wire trails down the wall, ending in a familiar button. I slap the garage door switch.
It opens slowly, the wooden planks clanking upwards to reveal not the driveway but a dark onyx barrier - a wall of solid obsidian, glinting with malevolence. Etched into its surface that same awful epitaph;
?There is no escape?
My hope drains out of me like the red stain across my chest. I stagger backwards, collapsing across the tool shelves. Trapped?
Trapped. There is no escape. I realize I?m doomed; forever trapped inside the house until I grab the knife upstairs and plunge it into my veins. I slide down the wall, pulling the shelves down with me until I lie in a heap, surrounded by rusted tools.
As visions of suicide drift past my eyes, something cuts across the back of my hand. My imprisoned mind is captivated by the sight of what lies next to me.
It sits on the ground shiny and oiled, short blades glinting maliciously. A chainsaw. A goddamn chainsaw. Despite myself, I can?t stop laughing at the thought of revving it up and plunging it into my stomach, a red spray painting the walls of this fucking house, bone and guts grinding into a paste that splatters into the carpet. Crying with mirth I imagine the poor soul who?ll wander across my body weeks from now, recoiling in horror before making a futile dash for the closing door.
The door.
A new thought bubbles into consciousness, slowly pushing away my morbid thoughts.
The door.
My ears begin to pulse, my face feels hot. A new sensation wells up deep within me - the primal fury of a cornered animal. A fountain of energy flows through my veins and I stand up, rage slowly throbbing above the hopelessness. I grab the chainsaw with both hands. Flipping the choke, I rip the starting cord. put. put. VROOOOOWWMMMMM. The engine kicks into life and I swing it off the ground, revving the chains into a deafening harmony.
A grimace, a grin, almost, spreads across my face.
Back at the door. . The barbed wire hums with malice, but my fear is long gone. I swing the chainsaw high over my head, bringing it growling down onto the metal wires. With a shriek they split under the churning blades, snapping and twisting through the air like serpents. Ignoring the slashing wires I press forward, dicing the steel web into bits, the ends retreating before my crushing blows. I reach the door and with seething bloodlust plunge the chainsaw deep into the gap in the frame. I wrench downwards, the saw howling as it tears the wood apart, spitting shrapnel across the hallway. I hit the first hinge and gun the engine. A river of sparks flows from the disintegrating metal, landing on the broken planks of wood and catching them on fire. The chainsaw claws the frame to pieces as I press it downwards, another flurry of cinders spraying from the second hinge.
As fire crawls across the door and eats at the walls I wrench the saw out. With a roar I stab the deadbolt, smoke and flames spitting from the tip of the chainsaw. A shrieking cry shakes the mansion as the bolt shears. I plant my foot into the middle of the door and kick it out into the night, a shower of embers trailing behind it.
Wreathed in smoke I stumble out of the house. I drive home first. I need to see it, someplace familiar and safe, before being hauled off to the emergency room or the police station. Back in my living room, I pick up the phone and call the cops and the fire department, telling them to rush over to 481 Cayuga Drive. Then, looking in the bathroom mirror at my shredded face, I call an ambulance.
I stand over the sink, running water over the gouges and burns along my arms; the sweat and blood mixing with shredded fibers of wood that run down the drain. Grabbing some bandages, I patch myself up good enough to stop my bleeding to death. Closing my eyes I sit on the bathroom counter and rest my head in my hands. A gentle trickle of blood flows down my scalp. Blinking, I grab a towel off the rack and wipe the blood out. I open my eyes. And freeze. Beneath where the towel had hung, written in dripping, scarlet letters:
?There is no escape?
The door slams shut.
---
Early morning. A knock on my door. I open it. On the other side stands a Jehovah?s Witness. Again? As I get ready to slam the door, a small alarm sounds off in my dazed brain; something?s not right. Blinking the sleep out of my eyes I realize the man has no head, just a bleeding stump jutting from his shoulders. I Blink.
The man?s still there ? his head still isn?t. With widening eyes I look down and see the missing face cradled in his arms, its eyes rolling in their sockets and its tongue licking blue lips. It leaps across the threshold at me and I stumble backward down the hall. My mind reels as it chases me through the house and up the stairs. I run into my bedroom and leap through the window, landing with a crash on the lawn below. Above me, the Jehovah?s Witness raises his disembodied head above himself. He throws it at me. I duck and the head rolls across the lawn, its mad eyes spinning wildly. It comes to a stop and evaporates into a cloud of blue smoke. I lay there on the grass in the morning light, three words coursing through my numbed brain. What. The. FUCK?
Wait.
Oh yeah, I remember.
I stood hidden in the corner with the dealer, the lights of the rave splashing across our faces.
?Sorry man,? he said, ?I?m all outta E.?
?Well fuck, what else you got??
?The usual. Weed, some crystal, a couple rocks?? he casts an appraising eye over me, ?But son, I think I?ve got something special for you.? He pulls a small Ziploc from one of his pockets; inside are dozens of little white pills, ?This shit?s new, it?s called Heavenly Star.?
?Haven?t heard of it, what?s it do??
??Course you haven?t heard of it fool, I just said it?s new. It?s this drug from the Himalayas or some shit. Monks up there harvest this weird flower, process it, then chant all sorta charms over it. ?Stuff?s so fresh on the streets the cops don?t even know it exists yet. Trust me man, this here?s the ultimate trip. One of these and you?ll be tripping balls you didn?t even know you HAD.? ?So it?s like LSD??
?Man, LSD ain?t got SHIT on this stuff. Heavenly Star makes LSD feel like pixie sticks.?
?Well shit, I?ll take one then, how much??
?One pill for $200?
?That?s pretty fucking expensive?
?Pretty fucking expens-? Man, have you been LISTENING to me? Fucking Himalayas! Fucking MONKS! CHANTING! Of course it?s expensive, this shit?s rare, bro!?
I ended up buying one for the ?discount price? of $140. Then I popped it and waited. And waited. Six hours later I was cursing my stupidity and heading home, swearing to kick the shit out of that dealer the next time I saw him. That was two days ago. Looks like he wasn?t lying after all?
Heavenly star. I sat back on the grass as the sky above emptied into a gaping void. The grass under my skin was pulsing to my heartbeat, singing some unknown hymn as the blades marched along the ground. Heavenly Star.
This shit was good.
I sat up and gazed at the broken window of my melting house. It seemed like it would be a shame to waste this amazing trip inside. I?ve gone on acid walks before; I know how to keep my cool. Besides, the house had dissolved into a wall of water that endlessly tumbled over on itself. I doubt I could?ve found the door if I wanted to.
I wandered aimlessly through town, my mouth agape as I looked around. The sidewalk had dissolved into a river of grey lizards that braced their spiky backs against my feet, propelling me forwards. I passed a man with two faces who incessantly argued with himself as his head spun in a circle. A fire hydrant sprouted ribbons of pure color that gently spun themselves across my face. Overwhelming optical illusions and tactile physical hallucinations. Heavenly Star. Even with my experience I was having trouble convincing myself that it was only a drug trip. A billion ants swarmed across the blue sky, each one gripping a pearl of water in its jaws, carrying glittering droplets back to their nest in the clouds. A lone Valkyrie hovered above me, her swinging blade rending the sky into a million hovering specks of silver as she flew through time and space towards some ancient battlefield. I fell to my knees with tears in my eyes, blinded by her beauty?.
And then it all disappeared. I was crouched on the grimy sidewalk of the city as people walking by shot me nervous glances. Above me, a plane slowly crossed the sky. I stood up and mumbled something about tripping over a crack, but they didn?t seem very convinced. I ducked down an alleyway to avoid any further complications. My God, what a drug. Never before in my life had I experienced such realistic hallucinations. The fading image of the Valkyrie still shone across my memory and I knew; I knew that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Clearly I would have to purchase more Heavenly Star. But I wasn?t a fucking amateur, before that I would have to research it, make sure it wasn?t deadly or fuck me over for the rest of my life or something. Although I have to admit, it almost seemed worth it.
Since I was already in town I walked to the library and spent hours poring over the internet and grabbing as many books as I could. But I couldn?t find any information on Heavenly Star. As the day wore on into evening I was getting discouraged; on top of that I seemed to be having a relapse. Eyes peered at me from behind the peeling books. As I walked down the rows, manuscripts began to chant their contents, reciting endless tomes of knowledge and history, louder and louder, until finally I had to run out of the library with my hands over my ears, away from that endless drone of half-truths and the dead hands that once dragged an oozing pen across their unmarked surface?
Outside, a war was raging under the scarlet sun. Creatures borne of ichor and muck spun sticky tendrils around faceless wooden red men who feebly stabbed into the gelatinous mess with jagged bone daggers. Giant crabs scuttled across the battlefield, swallowing combatants into their gaping human mouths whole. Over the din of bubbling mud and screaming marionettes and chitinous clicking rose a baleful moan that crumbled buildings into dust and split open the very earth itself. Behind the falling rubble of the city rose giant charcoal fingers, the infinite digits of gibbering demi-gods who laughed and danced in the swirling chaos; their unseen eyes lighting the streets in a sickening orange haze. Then, with the blast of a thousand trumpets, the wrinkled clouds floating above the madness split apart and rained down bloody globs of flesh onto the creatures below. The chunks of falling cancerous tissue throbbed and pulsed and spread, swallowing up the fighters and the streets, crawling up the ruined buildings on tangles of thrashing veins. As it swelled around me I turned and ran along streets slick with the corpses of the dead. I ran screaming into the reddening haze while behind me the tumor crept along the ground, absorbing the world behind it, spilling out tendrils that shot into the sky and stole away the light of the sun. Ahead of me I saw a cragged maw of blackness yawning from between two ruined buildings and squeezed into the dark gap as it snapped shut. Behind me the consuming flesh was trapped by brick walls that towered endlessly, rising upwards into space and the frigid unknown beyond where dust can only stir feebly in the dying breaths of a dim, terminal universe?
I too, was trapped. I was stuck in a thin tunnel, contained on either side by the eternal brick walls. The floor under my feet was solid, but ran like a liquid. As I walked down the narrow path it squelched and bubbled under my feet. Beneath the surface the familiar faces of my family and friends gazed up at me smiling, but their eyes speaking of a deep hunger. Every few seconds a shuddering boom would rain cinder down from above and spread long ripples along the floor. I walked along the linear maze for what felt like hours.
It slowly dawned on me that the sound was getting closer. I spun around. A hulk of a man strode along the surface of the ground, his shoulders scraping either wall as he gazed down upon me from under a black hood that covered his face. As I backed away, he slowly pulled out a long glimmering axe from the darkness behind him. I tried to run but tripped and fell. Instantly, the faces floating beneath me grabbed me with their cold, rubbery tongues; the shrouded man raised his axe high above his head and brought it down upon my chest, slashing across my shirt and gouging out my flesh. A black liquid concocted from my dreams and my nightmares burst out of the wound and showered the walls in a thick ink that crept down the stone. The creatures below me began to gurgle with expectation as the executioner brought his axe up for the final blow. But as he swung it upon me, the tunnel faded away. The ground blackened and hardened back into asphalt and the giant killer burst apart with a final thunderclap. I was lying flat on my back, alone, in the alleyway?
Heavenly Star. Talk about bad shit.
I managed to climb onto my shaking legs and crawl to the end of the alley. Peering out onto the street I saw a normal evening; people strolled casually along the sidewalks, cars buzzed along the road under the navy blue sky. A soft pattering caused me to look down at my feet, where a red puddle was spreading. I gasped as I felt the long slash across my chest. Blood poured down my shirt, falling softly onto the cold cement below. What the fuck happened? I ripped off my shirt and tied it across the cut, stumbling my way home. Silently cursing the dealer and the horrible Heavenly Star.
I sat in the bathroom with gauze and antiseptic, patching myself up as best as I could. My best guess was that I had somehow injured myself in the throes of the bad trip. As I wrapped a bandage across my chest I made a solemn vow to never touch hallucinogens again; especially that fucking Heavenly Star. My head still pounded from the sights I had witnessed. Whatever beauty I saw at the beginning was overcome a hundredfold by the nightmarish visions that came afterward. The migraine throbbed, surging across my temples and sending darts of pain across my scalp. I blindly groped my way to the medicine cabinet and opened it, reaching inside for the pain relievers. My hand closed on something small and spiky. It moved?
I opened my eyes. There was no inside to my medicine cabinet, just a solid gray wall that twitched and shivered. As the gray wave enveloped my hand, I realized that it was a mass of millions of spiders. They spilled out into my bathroom, legs jerking. I reached for the door, but they crawled up my ankles, skittering into my pants and pulling me down to the ground. Enveloping me completely, I felt them begin to spin their silk around my body; they crawled into my ears to lay eggs, they fucked each other in my hair. As I screamed the spiders poured down my throat. I choked and spluttered, feeling their hairy claws skitter around inside my lungs. The mass closed over my face, blocking out the light. Eight million legs ran along my body, wrapping me tight in ethereal threads, tying me up, jabbing their two million fangs into my flesh, burning my insides to ooze. I passed out to the soft sounds of their clicking.
The morning sun streamed onto my face. I rose above the nightmares in the darkness of my mind and found myself lying on the bathroom floor, an empty Excedrin bottle in my hand. No spiders. No eggs. No silk. But my arm was covered in hundreds of small punctures. The wound on my chest was bleeding again, blood dripping down and spreading across the white linoleum. I ignored the pain and crawled out of the bathroom and down the stairs. Heavenly Star. Whatever it was made of, it had fucked me up good. Only one thing to do now. I had to find out more about it, and there was only one person in the world that could help me?
I sat uncomfortably at the bus stop. The day had passed slowly; small shivers of light routinely burst across reality, but so far the hallucinations had kept to a minimum. A white face kept appearing around doorways, in the closet, even on the television, but so far it hadn?t done anything but stare at me. In the house I could deal with its pupil-less eyes and missing mouth, but at night, as it sat across from me on the bench, I could feel the fear welling up inside. Finally, the bus came and I climbed into its welcoming bright interior. As I sat down, the pale creature pressed its face against the other side of the glass but thankfully didn?t follow me in. The bus wound its way into town?
The journey back to the club seemed to take forever. Lifetimes. One by one, the passengers grew old and withered away, dying in their seats without a sound. As the years passed, the paint began to peel off the seats and dust covered the dry bones of those that sat in them. Still, the bus driver journeyed on. For decades we passed rotting buildings and decaying cities; outside the window all civilization collapsed into dust and was swallowed by the wilderness. Huge gnarled trees sprouted where skyscrapers once stood, the bones of humanity jutting from their bark like the trophies of a victor. But after millennia even the trees died and the earth sat barren and dry and dead under a dim red sun. Centuries more passed, and then, with no warning, the sun exploded, expanding over the earth in a ball of flame that swallowed the last living things and blasted the planet into an infinite number of tiny shards. But the bus continued to drift on through the blackness for almost an eternity, passing collapsing galaxies and ravenous black holes until it reached its destination - the end of time - where in the blankness of true oblivion a single dot existed. It didn?t float, or drift, or orbit, the dot merely existed; for the speck WAS the very last of existence. And for a long time it raged against the void, shining the last feeble light into the pit of nothingness until finally it was snuffed out by the hands of fate. And there, at the end of time and matter and space and everything the driver stopped the bus and opened the doors?
I stepped out of the bus and onto the bustling city streets. A glance at my watch told me that I?d been riding for a total of twenty minutes. Fucking Heavenly Star again. I worked my way to the club against the waves of people that flowed against me like sparkling water. Their bodies rose up from the sidewalk as they came toward me, then sunk back into the ocean as they passed. It took me forever but I finally made it to the club, managing to get inside by handing over a wad of green paper to the massive bouncer?
I almost turned back when I walked in. The walls, floor, and ceiling were formed from massive sheets of flesh and blood. Skeletal people walked along the walls with knives, stabbing into the skin and shoving massive raw steaks down their throats as inky blood squirted out of the cut, showering them in red fountains they captured in crystalline goblets and poured into their mouths. NO. No, I was just in a club, the walls were cement, and the people were just drinking alcohol. I wound my way through the shimmering crowd looking for the dealer. The crowd?s faces blinked between reality and hallucination, normal faces sprouting wings and fangs that spun across the darkness before sinking back into the owner?s skull. I could feel the madness of Heavenly Star gripping me again as arteries branched across the stone walls and toothed phantasms descended onto the dance floor. A cold sweat was flowing from my scalp; my preciously short time with reality was coming to an end. Finally, under the mad flashing lights I saw the dealer?s face. I stumbled up to him and grabbed his collar, dragging him down to the floor with me as his face melted off and grew back on, over and over?
?YOOOOUUUUU?. The lights were going off one by one. The skin was spreading across the walls again. Over the sea of waving arms I saw the beast wearing a black hood parting the crowd ahead of him, coming towards us. The Heavenly Star was upon me.
?Man, you better get your hands off me real quick.?
?You. You gave me this stuff. What is it??
?The FUCK are you talking about??
?Heavenly Star. You sold it to me you asshole. Tell me what?s in it.?
The dealer gave me a strange look, raising his eyebrow. He stood up then pulled me to my feet, ?Oh, you?re that retard who fell for the sales pitch the other night. Hate to tell you man, but I scammed you good.?
?W-What??
He pulled the Ziploc baggie full of white pills out. ?I sold you a fucking aspirin tablet ?cause you were being so stupid. Buying all that shit about magic flowers and holy monks and shit. Ain?t no such thing as ?Heavenly Star??
?No. NO, that?s not possible. I?ve been seeing things. Horrible things? For days?.?
?Well, that?s your fucking problem. Here, take your money back, you look like shit. I?ve never said this to anyone before man, but you need to clean the fuck up.? He tugged himself free and disappeared into the swirling, bleeding crowd.
I crouched on the ground sobbing. Out of the darkness a massive hand reached down and grabbed me around the neck, pulling me down into its endless pit of nightmares ? the realm of the Heavenly Star.
It was the first day in August when the screaming began. 1:00 am sharp in the morning a horrible scream pierces the thin wall between our flats. As suddenly as it started, it stops, leaving my heart hammering and my mind awake. This continues for the rest of the week, but each time I make up my mind to confront him about it, the screaming stops and I lose the nerve to knock on his door. The next day he?s out on the front porch again, dressed in his usual black attire, from black shoes, up to black socks, pants, jacket, shirt, glasses, and finally hat. ?Good morning.? he mumbles as I pass. I almost stop and ask him about the past few nights, but the way he rocks back and forth on his chair, his head pointed straight ahead of him, I?m still too weirded out to talk to him about it.
I get back that evening to see him take off in an airport shuttle. Now, I haven?t seen Mr. White leave his house in the two years I?ve lived next to him, but I figure his sudden departure simply means it?ll be that much easier for me to get some sleep. Unfortunately, as soon as I get settled down into bed, I hear a new noise, a noise I hadn?t noticed earlier. My bed lies against our adjoining wall, so I can hear water running in the pipes whenever he has the faucet on. As I lie there, I can hear water rushing. Two hours and no sleep later, I realize that the noise from the pipes is even more disruptive than the screaming. I figure I?ll do us both a service and shut the running faucet off. So I dress, grab a few supplies, and head over to his door. I?ve lost my keys enough times to figure out how to jimmy a lock, so I shove a couple paper clips into the doorknob and wiggle ?em around a bit. Soon enough I hear that soft ?click? and enter his flat.
The place is in shambles. Like somebody had been running around knocking everything over. Books and magazines litter the floor and half the furniture has been knocked over and shoved against a wall. I head toward the sound of running water and enter Mr. White?s bathroom. Blood Everywhere. The walls are covered in blood, the bathtub has blood running down into it, and the edges of the sink have bits of bloody hair and flesh around the edges.
I turn off the faucet and then turn myself to get the fuck out of there. And that?s when the fucking lights go out. ?Pop? goes the bulbs in the bathroom. I flip out and bolt out of there. That?s when I make the mistake of looking behind me. From the gloom of the bathroom I see that there?s something watching me, its eyes reflecting some unknown light.
I don?t really remember the next minute, but the next thing I know I?m standing in my own bathroom, in my own apartment, with my pants heavy with my own piss. Shit. Some fucking shiny thing in the bathroom looks like eyeballs and I piss myself. I take a shower and go back to my bedroom to grab some new pants. But as I?m putting them on I look out the window. It?s fucking watching me, its eyes a glow in the darkness outside. I scream and almost ruin my second pair. But a moment later they?re gone. I call myself a dumbass for falling victim to my own imagination and go to the living room. Sleep?s out of the question, but maybe I can kill my fear with some horrible late-night television.
Everything?s cool for the first hour and half, then a commercial comes on where the background is black. You know how you can see your reflection in the TV when the screen is dark? Well I see me. I also see the fucking eyes glowing at me from the darkness behind my couch.
Frozen to my chair I watch them watch me. Never moving, never blinking, the beast in the shadows has me steady in its gaze. I snap out of it suddenly, doing a half-flip half-barrel roll away from the couch and onto the floor. Of course, when I look again, they?re gone. This shit?s too crazy for me, my last bastion of defense lies in my copious alcohol collection. Practically sprinting to the kitchen, I grab a bottle of something strong and fill the glass. Glug glug glug, raising the glass over my lips and above my head until it?s empty. But there?s something else in the bottom of the glass, I see those fucking eyes again. I slam the glass down and catch a glimmer of light as the beast takes off down my dark hallway. Shit. Shitshitshitshit.
Five minutes later, all the lights in the house are on and I?m decked out in a flashlight and a kitchen knife. Well, I should say all the lights are on but one. The hallway light died as I flipped it on, giving a soft ?pufft? of bulby death. At the end of the dark hallway lie two doors, a closet and the door out of my apartment. It?s time to get there or die trying. I creep down into the increasingly dark corridor, my flashlight and knife a foot in front of me. The goddamn closet door is open.
I think I see the beast?s eyes again as I near the closet, but it?s just the latch on the door. I reach the closet door. Breathless, I pull the knife back and get ready to strike.
?Haaahhhh!!!? is my battle-cry as I turn the corner. Nothing. No beast and no beasty eyes. I close the closet and continue to the front door, resolute in my escape. That?s when I notice another thing wrong; the outside light usually seeps in through the crack under my door. Fuck! So close and more shit happens. Playing it safe I edge up to the door and peer out the eyepiece. Two glowing eyes look back at me. I scream for the third time that night and go running back up the hallway to the light of the living room, leaving the knife and my only flashlight lying by the front door.
There?s no escape. I get ready to barricade myself in a corner. I grab the TV cabinet and began to push it toward the center of the room. It?s watching me. The space between the wall and the cabinet. Three fucking inches wide. The beast?s eyes glare at me. Its gaze is neither malevolent or friendly. Just two, perfectly round, shining orbs.
That?s it, I?m done. I collapse backwards onto the floor and back away to the wall, watching the eyes. Watching the eyes watching me. Watching the eyes watching me watching it. I sit there, staring. They don?t move. Nor do I. the night creeps by second after second, me caught in this horribly twisted staring contest. I just wish I knew what they wanted. If the beast attacked me, if it revealed itself, I could know what I?m up against. I might even figure out how I?ll die before it kills me. No. It stays in the crack between my wall and my TV and watches with infinite patience.
The darkness outside dissolves into a gray morning, and the eyes begin to lose their glimmer. As the sun lights my living room, the beast retreats, gone into the shadow it came from. To where I have no fucking idea.
I pack my things. I?m going away, fuck knows where, but I?m getting at least a thousand miles between me and here before night falls again. Two shots of bourbon wish me on my way as I grab my suitcase and set off for the front door.
?Knock, knock? someone get there first. I jump, dropping my stuff and getting ready to bolt back to the nearest corner, ?knock, knock?. But reason grabs me by the heels, whispering in my ear that the fucking night monster wouldn?t be courteous enough to knock before killing me. Slowly I open it. Mr. White is standing there, resplendent in his black hat, sunglasses, shirt, jacket, pants, socks, and shoes. ?Good morning, Steven.? says he.
?Hi.? says I.
?Say Steven, did anyone go into my apartment while I was gone? There are footprints leading from my bathroom to my door. Notice he neglects to mention what the footprints are formed of. ?Uh, no Mr. White, I?ve been in my apartment all night and I didn?t hear anything.? (If you think I?m about to admit to a man that has blood all over his bathroom and a monster living in his house that I broke into his house, then you are very mistaken). ?That?s good Steven, I have many fragile belongings that could easily be destroyed or stolen by a malicious soul. You have a good day.?
?You too, man.?
He turns to leave and then turns back to me smiling, ?Oh and Steven,? he says, ?I couldn?t help but notice bloody footprints leading from my door to yours.? His smile gets even wider. He leans in, bringing our face right next to each other. He removes his sunglasses. . Revealing two empty pits in his face? . . ?I?ll be keeping my eyes on you.?
---
"The only way out"
Gregory A. Julian moved into the mansion on 481 Cayuga Dr. Soon, angry letters from the bank began to pour into his mail slot, threatening foreclosure unless he began to pay off his sizable loan. Three months later, the requisite amount of time had passed and an eviction notice was printed by my boss. And that?s the asshole that sent me, late Friday evening, just before I left for the weekend, to deliver the letter in person to the absent Mr. Julian. I ground my teeth as I wound my way through the suburbs looking for Cayuga Drive. Somehow, this man I had never knew or met had unwittingly conspired with my boss to ruin my evening plans.
481 stood at the end of the block, its windows dark, its flanks shaded by oaks twisting into the reddening sky. I parked the car next to a dusty BMW and walked up the short stone path to his (now the bank?s) front door. It seemed odd that the expensive car would be sitting unprotected outside of his spacious garage, an even layer of pollen coating the outside and a stack of moving boxes piled within. Also, it was bizarre that the heavy front door stood halfway open, a mountain of letters and bills spilling out the doorway and onto the walk. I rapped the brass knocker against the door, ?Mr. Gregory Julian?? I called inside, ?I?m from the bank; I have some important papers to give to you.? No reply.
I ventured a little further into the hallway and repeated myself louder. Still no reply. But squinting, I saw the soft glow of a light spilling down a staircase at the end of the hallway. A glance at the hour hand on my watch was all it took to send me inside the house in search of my quarry.
The antique mansion was completely paneled in oak and a thick red carpet covered the floor. Mr. Julian was apparently trying to remodel, as several feet of the wall had been pulled off and large patches of carpet had been torn up. His method of removal was in poor taste considering the age of the place; many of the holes appeared to have been simply smashed through, as though with a sledgehammer. Or maybe he was just trying to wreck the house before the bank could get its hands on it.
Continuing down the hall and reaching the top of the stairs I realized that the light was coming from a room on the other side of the second story landing. I picked my way around cardboard boxes piled along the floor, wondering what kind of man buys a mansion, neglects to pay his debt, and never bothers to unpack. The door stood slightly ajar, light shooting out around the edges.
Through the gap I glimpsed bookshelves and sofas; it appeared to be a small study. I knocked on the door, ?Mr. Julian, I apologize for the intrusion, but I have papers that I need to hand you in person.? No reply.
I grabbed the doorknob and strode in.
The desiccated corpse of Mr. Julian lay flat on the carpet.
In one hand he clasped a pen; on the wrist of the other ran a jagged gash. I gagged ? it didn?t take a doctor to determine that he had been dead for weeks. Well, that explained why his bills went unpaid.
A harsh lamp gleamed from the corner, coloring the room in sharp contrasts. A thin object, sitting on a desk in front of the late Mr. Julian, glimmered in the light. Curiosity got the best of me and I carefully skirted around the body, a dried pool of blood crunching into the carpet underneath.
A dagger lay on the table surrounded by a spatter of thick droplets. Its edge was encrusted in a thin red film; having been plunged into the flesh of its owner. Next to it sat a torn piece of paper with a scribble of black ink scrawled across. I grabbed it and held it up to the lamp, squinting to make out the barely legible writing;
?Dear Kate and Daniel and everybody else, There is no escape. This is the only way out. I?m so sorry. Destroy the house.
Greg J.?
A chill shot down my spine. With a shock it hit me that I was standing in a pool of blood next to a corpse in a dark house at night. I raced out of the room and down the stairs with a cold sweat breaking out on my face. I ran towards the front door, a wind blowing into the house and down the hall, whipping letters through the air, slamming the door shut. I grab the doorknob and pull. A bolt crunches against its lock. Confused, I run my hands across the handle searching for the latch.
There?s no latch ? there?s not even a keyhole.
As my heart pounds, an image flashes across my scattered mind: the back door.
I sprint down the hallway, opening doors and racing through dark rooms, working my way across the house. Finally, I stumble across a moonlit alcove, where the light streams from a tiny window set into a metal door. I grab the immense handle, but again the door is bolted shut; no way to unlock it. I pound my fists against its heavy steel, but the frame doesn?t even budge. Stepping back, I realize that it resembles a bank vault; thick metal panels secured by hinges thicker than my hand, the safety glass inches thick, repelling all of my efforts to crack it.
A small piece of paper is taped onto it. I tear it off and hold it up to the window. Scratched in pencil it reads;
?There is no escape?
Something falls against the window, blotting out the light.
My feet fly back down through the house, back to the front door. The doors I had opened have all closed; I bash my way through them, their bolts bursting from the rotten walls as I charge towards the exit, lowering my shoulder, gritting my teeth.
As I round the last turn at top speed, the front door comes into view. Thick boards, pounded haphazardly into the wall, stretch across the doorway. Nails and broken glass embedded into the wood, the jagged tips jutting into the air. Barbed wire, strung like a net across the entrance, bits of flesh hanging off the rusty points.
Words burnt deep into the wood,
?There is no escape?
?shit?
I can?t stop myself fast enough; the barbed wire pierces into my guts and slashes across my face, but it also saves me, knocking me backwards onto the floor before I impale myself on the door. In pain, bleeding, I stumble away from the entrance, knocking my way through another door and stumbling into the dark. Suddenly, a step; the floor disappears and I fly head first onto hard ground, fireworks bursting before my eyes.
As the pain begins to fade I grope in the darkness for the walls. A chain falls into my hand. Instinctively, I pull it, and the garage lights up. I turn around just as the door behind me slams shut again. Whatever has me trapped in this house is closing in.
But next to the shut door a wire trails down the wall, ending in a familiar button. I slap the garage door switch.
It opens slowly, the wooden planks clanking upwards to reveal not the driveway but a dark onyx barrier - a wall of solid obsidian, glinting with malevolence. Etched into its surface that same awful epitaph;
?There is no escape?
My hope drains out of me like the red stain across my chest. I stagger backwards, collapsing across the tool shelves. Trapped?
Trapped. There is no escape. I realize I?m doomed; forever trapped inside the house until I grab the knife upstairs and plunge it into my veins. I slide down the wall, pulling the shelves down with me until I lie in a heap, surrounded by rusted tools.
As visions of suicide drift past my eyes, something cuts across the back of my hand. My imprisoned mind is captivated by the sight of what lies next to me.
It sits on the ground shiny and oiled, short blades glinting maliciously. A chainsaw. A goddamn chainsaw. Despite myself, I can?t stop laughing at the thought of revving it up and plunging it into my stomach, a red spray painting the walls of this fucking house, bone and guts grinding into a paste that splatters into the carpet. Crying with mirth I imagine the poor soul who?ll wander across my body weeks from now, recoiling in horror before making a futile dash for the closing door.
The door.
A new thought bubbles into consciousness, slowly pushing away my morbid thoughts.
The door.
My ears begin to pulse, my face feels hot. A new sensation wells up deep within me - the primal fury of a cornered animal. A fountain of energy flows through my veins and I stand up, rage slowly throbbing above the hopelessness. I grab the chainsaw with both hands. Flipping the choke, I rip the starting cord. put. put. VROOOOOWWMMMMM. The engine kicks into life and I swing it off the ground, revving the chains into a deafening harmony.
A grimace, a grin, almost, spreads across my face.
Back at the door. . The barbed wire hums with malice, but my fear is long gone. I swing the chainsaw high over my head, bringing it growling down onto the metal wires. With a shriek they split under the churning blades, snapping and twisting through the air like serpents. Ignoring the slashing wires I press forward, dicing the steel web into bits, the ends retreating before my crushing blows. I reach the door and with seething bloodlust plunge the chainsaw deep into the gap in the frame. I wrench downwards, the saw howling as it tears the wood apart, spitting shrapnel across the hallway. I hit the first hinge and gun the engine. A river of sparks flows from the disintegrating metal, landing on the broken planks of wood and catching them on fire. The chainsaw claws the frame to pieces as I press it downwards, another flurry of cinders spraying from the second hinge.
As fire crawls across the door and eats at the walls I wrench the saw out. With a roar I stab the deadbolt, smoke and flames spitting from the tip of the chainsaw. A shrieking cry shakes the mansion as the bolt shears. I plant my foot into the middle of the door and kick it out into the night, a shower of embers trailing behind it.
Wreathed in smoke I stumble out of the house. I drive home first. I need to see it, someplace familiar and safe, before being hauled off to the emergency room or the police station. Back in my living room, I pick up the phone and call the cops and the fire department, telling them to rush over to 481 Cayuga Drive. Then, looking in the bathroom mirror at my shredded face, I call an ambulance.
I stand over the sink, running water over the gouges and burns along my arms; the sweat and blood mixing with shredded fibers of wood that run down the drain. Grabbing some bandages, I patch myself up good enough to stop my bleeding to death. Closing my eyes I sit on the bathroom counter and rest my head in my hands. A gentle trickle of blood flows down my scalp. Blinking, I grab a towel off the rack and wipe the blood out. I open my eyes. And freeze. Beneath where the towel had hung, written in dripping, scarlet letters:
?There is no escape?
The door slams shut.
---
Early morning. A knock on my door. I open it. On the other side stands a Jehovah?s Witness. Again? As I get ready to slam the door, a small alarm sounds off in my dazed brain; something?s not right. Blinking the sleep out of my eyes I realize the man has no head, just a bleeding stump jutting from his shoulders. I Blink.
The man?s still there ? his head still isn?t. With widening eyes I look down and see the missing face cradled in his arms, its eyes rolling in their sockets and its tongue licking blue lips. It leaps across the threshold at me and I stumble backward down the hall. My mind reels as it chases me through the house and up the stairs. I run into my bedroom and leap through the window, landing with a crash on the lawn below. Above me, the Jehovah?s Witness raises his disembodied head above himself. He throws it at me. I duck and the head rolls across the lawn, its mad eyes spinning wildly. It comes to a stop and evaporates into a cloud of blue smoke. I lay there on the grass in the morning light, three words coursing through my numbed brain. What. The. FUCK?
Wait.
Oh yeah, I remember.
I stood hidden in the corner with the dealer, the lights of the rave splashing across our faces.
?Sorry man,? he said, ?I?m all outta E.?
?Well fuck, what else you got??
?The usual. Weed, some crystal, a couple rocks?? he casts an appraising eye over me, ?But son, I think I?ve got something special for you.? He pulls a small Ziploc from one of his pockets; inside are dozens of little white pills, ?This shit?s new, it?s called Heavenly Star.?
?Haven?t heard of it, what?s it do??
??Course you haven?t heard of it fool, I just said it?s new. It?s this drug from the Himalayas or some shit. Monks up there harvest this weird flower, process it, then chant all sorta charms over it. ?Stuff?s so fresh on the streets the cops don?t even know it exists yet. Trust me man, this here?s the ultimate trip. One of these and you?ll be tripping balls you didn?t even know you HAD.? ?So it?s like LSD??
?Man, LSD ain?t got SHIT on this stuff. Heavenly Star makes LSD feel like pixie sticks.?
?Well shit, I?ll take one then, how much??
?One pill for $200?
?That?s pretty fucking expensive?
?Pretty fucking expens-? Man, have you been LISTENING to me? Fucking Himalayas! Fucking MONKS! CHANTING! Of course it?s expensive, this shit?s rare, bro!?
I ended up buying one for the ?discount price? of $140. Then I popped it and waited. And waited. Six hours later I was cursing my stupidity and heading home, swearing to kick the shit out of that dealer the next time I saw him. That was two days ago. Looks like he wasn?t lying after all?
Heavenly star. I sat back on the grass as the sky above emptied into a gaping void. The grass under my skin was pulsing to my heartbeat, singing some unknown hymn as the blades marched along the ground. Heavenly Star.
This shit was good.
I sat up and gazed at the broken window of my melting house. It seemed like it would be a shame to waste this amazing trip inside. I?ve gone on acid walks before; I know how to keep my cool. Besides, the house had dissolved into a wall of water that endlessly tumbled over on itself. I doubt I could?ve found the door if I wanted to.
I wandered aimlessly through town, my mouth agape as I looked around. The sidewalk had dissolved into a river of grey lizards that braced their spiky backs against my feet, propelling me forwards. I passed a man with two faces who incessantly argued with himself as his head spun in a circle. A fire hydrant sprouted ribbons of pure color that gently spun themselves across my face. Overwhelming optical illusions and tactile physical hallucinations. Heavenly Star. Even with my experience I was having trouble convincing myself that it was only a drug trip. A billion ants swarmed across the blue sky, each one gripping a pearl of water in its jaws, carrying glittering droplets back to their nest in the clouds. A lone Valkyrie hovered above me, her swinging blade rending the sky into a million hovering specks of silver as she flew through time and space towards some ancient battlefield. I fell to my knees with tears in my eyes, blinded by her beauty?.
And then it all disappeared. I was crouched on the grimy sidewalk of the city as people walking by shot me nervous glances. Above me, a plane slowly crossed the sky. I stood up and mumbled something about tripping over a crack, but they didn?t seem very convinced. I ducked down an alleyway to avoid any further complications. My God, what a drug. Never before in my life had I experienced such realistic hallucinations. The fading image of the Valkyrie still shone across my memory and I knew; I knew that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Clearly I would have to purchase more Heavenly Star. But I wasn?t a fucking amateur, before that I would have to research it, make sure it wasn?t deadly or fuck me over for the rest of my life or something. Although I have to admit, it almost seemed worth it.
Since I was already in town I walked to the library and spent hours poring over the internet and grabbing as many books as I could. But I couldn?t find any information on Heavenly Star. As the day wore on into evening I was getting discouraged; on top of that I seemed to be having a relapse. Eyes peered at me from behind the peeling books. As I walked down the rows, manuscripts began to chant their contents, reciting endless tomes of knowledge and history, louder and louder, until finally I had to run out of the library with my hands over my ears, away from that endless drone of half-truths and the dead hands that once dragged an oozing pen across their unmarked surface?
Outside, a war was raging under the scarlet sun. Creatures borne of ichor and muck spun sticky tendrils around faceless wooden red men who feebly stabbed into the gelatinous mess with jagged bone daggers. Giant crabs scuttled across the battlefield, swallowing combatants into their gaping human mouths whole. Over the din of bubbling mud and screaming marionettes and chitinous clicking rose a baleful moan that crumbled buildings into dust and split open the very earth itself. Behind the falling rubble of the city rose giant charcoal fingers, the infinite digits of gibbering demi-gods who laughed and danced in the swirling chaos; their unseen eyes lighting the streets in a sickening orange haze. Then, with the blast of a thousand trumpets, the wrinkled clouds floating above the madness split apart and rained down bloody globs of flesh onto the creatures below. The chunks of falling cancerous tissue throbbed and pulsed and spread, swallowing up the fighters and the streets, crawling up the ruined buildings on tangles of thrashing veins. As it swelled around me I turned and ran along streets slick with the corpses of the dead. I ran screaming into the reddening haze while behind me the tumor crept along the ground, absorbing the world behind it, spilling out tendrils that shot into the sky and stole away the light of the sun. Ahead of me I saw a cragged maw of blackness yawning from between two ruined buildings and squeezed into the dark gap as it snapped shut. Behind me the consuming flesh was trapped by brick walls that towered endlessly, rising upwards into space and the frigid unknown beyond where dust can only stir feebly in the dying breaths of a dim, terminal universe?
I too, was trapped. I was stuck in a thin tunnel, contained on either side by the eternal brick walls. The floor under my feet was solid, but ran like a liquid. As I walked down the narrow path it squelched and bubbled under my feet. Beneath the surface the familiar faces of my family and friends gazed up at me smiling, but their eyes speaking of a deep hunger. Every few seconds a shuddering boom would rain cinder down from above and spread long ripples along the floor. I walked along the linear maze for what felt like hours.
It slowly dawned on me that the sound was getting closer. I spun around. A hulk of a man strode along the surface of the ground, his shoulders scraping either wall as he gazed down upon me from under a black hood that covered his face. As I backed away, he slowly pulled out a long glimmering axe from the darkness behind him. I tried to run but tripped and fell. Instantly, the faces floating beneath me grabbed me with their cold, rubbery tongues; the shrouded man raised his axe high above his head and brought it down upon my chest, slashing across my shirt and gouging out my flesh. A black liquid concocted from my dreams and my nightmares burst out of the wound and showered the walls in a thick ink that crept down the stone. The creatures below me began to gurgle with expectation as the executioner brought his axe up for the final blow. But as he swung it upon me, the tunnel faded away. The ground blackened and hardened back into asphalt and the giant killer burst apart with a final thunderclap. I was lying flat on my back, alone, in the alleyway?
Heavenly Star. Talk about bad shit.
I managed to climb onto my shaking legs and crawl to the end of the alley. Peering out onto the street I saw a normal evening; people strolled casually along the sidewalks, cars buzzed along the road under the navy blue sky. A soft pattering caused me to look down at my feet, where a red puddle was spreading. I gasped as I felt the long slash across my chest. Blood poured down my shirt, falling softly onto the cold cement below. What the fuck happened? I ripped off my shirt and tied it across the cut, stumbling my way home. Silently cursing the dealer and the horrible Heavenly Star.
I sat in the bathroom with gauze and antiseptic, patching myself up as best as I could. My best guess was that I had somehow injured myself in the throes of the bad trip. As I wrapped a bandage across my chest I made a solemn vow to never touch hallucinogens again; especially that fucking Heavenly Star. My head still pounded from the sights I had witnessed. Whatever beauty I saw at the beginning was overcome a hundredfold by the nightmarish visions that came afterward. The migraine throbbed, surging across my temples and sending darts of pain across my scalp. I blindly groped my way to the medicine cabinet and opened it, reaching inside for the pain relievers. My hand closed on something small and spiky. It moved?
I opened my eyes. There was no inside to my medicine cabinet, just a solid gray wall that twitched and shivered. As the gray wave enveloped my hand, I realized that it was a mass of millions of spiders. They spilled out into my bathroom, legs jerking. I reached for the door, but they crawled up my ankles, skittering into my pants and pulling me down to the ground. Enveloping me completely, I felt them begin to spin their silk around my body; they crawled into my ears to lay eggs, they fucked each other in my hair. As I screamed the spiders poured down my throat. I choked and spluttered, feeling their hairy claws skitter around inside my lungs. The mass closed over my face, blocking out the light. Eight million legs ran along my body, wrapping me tight in ethereal threads, tying me up, jabbing their two million fangs into my flesh, burning my insides to ooze. I passed out to the soft sounds of their clicking.
The morning sun streamed onto my face. I rose above the nightmares in the darkness of my mind and found myself lying on the bathroom floor, an empty Excedrin bottle in my hand. No spiders. No eggs. No silk. But my arm was covered in hundreds of small punctures. The wound on my chest was bleeding again, blood dripping down and spreading across the white linoleum. I ignored the pain and crawled out of the bathroom and down the stairs. Heavenly Star. Whatever it was made of, it had fucked me up good. Only one thing to do now. I had to find out more about it, and there was only one person in the world that could help me?
I sat uncomfortably at the bus stop. The day had passed slowly; small shivers of light routinely burst across reality, but so far the hallucinations had kept to a minimum. A white face kept appearing around doorways, in the closet, even on the television, but so far it hadn?t done anything but stare at me. In the house I could deal with its pupil-less eyes and missing mouth, but at night, as it sat across from me on the bench, I could feel the fear welling up inside. Finally, the bus came and I climbed into its welcoming bright interior. As I sat down, the pale creature pressed its face against the other side of the glass but thankfully didn?t follow me in. The bus wound its way into town?
The journey back to the club seemed to take forever. Lifetimes. One by one, the passengers grew old and withered away, dying in their seats without a sound. As the years passed, the paint began to peel off the seats and dust covered the dry bones of those that sat in them. Still, the bus driver journeyed on. For decades we passed rotting buildings and decaying cities; outside the window all civilization collapsed into dust and was swallowed by the wilderness. Huge gnarled trees sprouted where skyscrapers once stood, the bones of humanity jutting from their bark like the trophies of a victor. But after millennia even the trees died and the earth sat barren and dry and dead under a dim red sun. Centuries more passed, and then, with no warning, the sun exploded, expanding over the earth in a ball of flame that swallowed the last living things and blasted the planet into an infinite number of tiny shards. But the bus continued to drift on through the blackness for almost an eternity, passing collapsing galaxies and ravenous black holes until it reached its destination - the end of time - where in the blankness of true oblivion a single dot existed. It didn?t float, or drift, or orbit, the dot merely existed; for the speck WAS the very last of existence. And for a long time it raged against the void, shining the last feeble light into the pit of nothingness until finally it was snuffed out by the hands of fate. And there, at the end of time and matter and space and everything the driver stopped the bus and opened the doors?
I stepped out of the bus and onto the bustling city streets. A glance at my watch told me that I?d been riding for a total of twenty minutes. Fucking Heavenly Star again. I worked my way to the club against the waves of people that flowed against me like sparkling water. Their bodies rose up from the sidewalk as they came toward me, then sunk back into the ocean as they passed. It took me forever but I finally made it to the club, managing to get inside by handing over a wad of green paper to the massive bouncer?
I almost turned back when I walked in. The walls, floor, and ceiling were formed from massive sheets of flesh and blood. Skeletal people walked along the walls with knives, stabbing into the skin and shoving massive raw steaks down their throats as inky blood squirted out of the cut, showering them in red fountains they captured in crystalline goblets and poured into their mouths. NO. No, I was just in a club, the walls were cement, and the people were just drinking alcohol. I wound my way through the shimmering crowd looking for the dealer. The crowd?s faces blinked between reality and hallucination, normal faces sprouting wings and fangs that spun across the darkness before sinking back into the owner?s skull. I could feel the madness of Heavenly Star gripping me again as arteries branched across the stone walls and toothed phantasms descended onto the dance floor. A cold sweat was flowing from my scalp; my preciously short time with reality was coming to an end. Finally, under the mad flashing lights I saw the dealer?s face. I stumbled up to him and grabbed his collar, dragging him down to the floor with me as his face melted off and grew back on, over and over?
?YOOOOUUUUU?. The lights were going off one by one. The skin was spreading across the walls again. Over the sea of waving arms I saw the beast wearing a black hood parting the crowd ahead of him, coming towards us. The Heavenly Star was upon me.
?Man, you better get your hands off me real quick.?
?You. You gave me this stuff. What is it??
?The FUCK are you talking about??
?Heavenly Star. You sold it to me you asshole. Tell me what?s in it.?
The dealer gave me a strange look, raising his eyebrow. He stood up then pulled me to my feet, ?Oh, you?re that retard who fell for the sales pitch the other night. Hate to tell you man, but I scammed you good.?
?W-What??
He pulled the Ziploc baggie full of white pills out. ?I sold you a fucking aspirin tablet ?cause you were being so stupid. Buying all that shit about magic flowers and holy monks and shit. Ain?t no such thing as ?Heavenly Star??
?No. NO, that?s not possible. I?ve been seeing things. Horrible things? For days?.?
?Well, that?s your fucking problem. Here, take your money back, you look like shit. I?ve never said this to anyone before man, but you need to clean the fuck up.? He tugged himself free and disappeared into the swirling, bleeding crowd.
I crouched on the ground sobbing. Out of the darkness a massive hand reached down and grabbed me around the neck, pulling me down into its endless pit of nightmares ? the realm of the Heavenly Star.
One I wrote:
There is no worse thing than spiders in your head.
He had found this out the hard way. It itched horribly, and it wasn't even an itch you could get to. Even if you tore out every lock of your hair, carefully, strand by strand. Even if you got right down to the skin and dug your ragged nails into it and scratched, putting all of your strength and fury into trying to scratch that itch, you still couldn't get to it. It just kept itching.
And it was noisy, too. The crawling of the spiders was awful loud. He wished they were quiet, like normal spiders on nature shows, like the Discovery channel used to have. He used to watch the Discovery channel; he liked the shows about sharks. Sharks were pretty cool, and he always liked watching those crazy motherfuckers who'd go down and try to pet the sharks. He'd laughed at them with Danny and Rob. They'd bring some booze-cheap shit, but the good shit-and the cards for poker, and they would play a few games and watch Shark Week. They'd drink every time some idiot did something that would get the shark snapping at them, and be delightfully buzzed in no time at all. And he'd thought spiders were pretty cool, too, until they'd moved into his head. On the nature shows, they were quiet and just went about living their lives, not really bothering anyone. But these things! They built their hundreds of tiny webs in a cacophony of sharp steel strands, the unbearably loud scraping against the inside of his skull, and the endless crunching and clicking of thousands of tiny fangs.
Danny and Rob hadn't been over in an awful long time. He sort of wanted to see them and play poker again, or maybe smoke 'em at Monopoly; he was the only one in his wide circle of friends with the patience for Monopoly. And he always got Park Place and Boardwalk; he was good at the game, good at hustling deals like that. But it had been a long time since he'd felt like dragging himself out of bed. Not that he would have been able to anyway. Still, he just didn't feel like moving very much. It might've aggravated his tenants, and that would have made it itch even worse, because it would have wrecked their silvery webs. Would have made the noises louder. So he'd laid on his belly in his bed for weeks, staring at the headboard with wide, sleepless, staring eyes. He didn't dare to close his eyes, either. It might have bothered his tenants if he slept. He knew that he snored and that he tossed and turned. His last girlfriend had told him as much. Sort of missed her. She'd been a rose, she had, but she'd left him, and he couldn't quite remember why anymore, no more than he remembered why there were spiders nesting in his skull right now, or when it had started.
He scratched his head again, and howled, loud and piteously, as his ragged nails tore open several red gashes. Had itched so much, so furiously, that he'd dug fine little furrows down to the bone, and they never quite closed. Every time he dragged the fingernails across, trying to get to the maddening itch in his brain, he would tear open an old one and it would bleed afresh. Then the noise would become even louder, as if they were scolding him for ruining their work.
Hot tears slid down his dry face; he dug his nails into the rough sheets of his bed instead and let his head bleed. At least the itching had receded a little bit, for even just a second, before starting back up again amidst a racket of angry fang-clicking and whining steel strings. He groaned quietly and buried his head into the pillow. One ice-blue eye twitched as he felt dozens of tiny, spindly legs gingerly creeping over the back of it.
He felt a tiny, tight thread wind around the optic nerve directly behind his eyeball, and his eyelid twitched wildly again. Next would come the nightmares. They seemed to do this in cycles. First they'd crawl around weaving their webs. He'd scratch and tear open old wounds, shaking the spiders around. Then they'd continue weaving their webs, and they'd be careful to weave them around his eyes, too. That was how he knew. How he saw. He would see the spiders crawling through his skull, weaving intricate webs in the empty space.
Sometimes he could hold out for a day or two without scratching, if he really tried. But the longer the spiders spun, the worse the clicking and tugging and scraping and tapping would get. It would echo violently around his infested head, each tiny noise booming like thunder. The strings would squeeze too tightly around his eyes, or tiny hairy legs would sting at the inside of his skull--swift, tiny little pinpricks, multiplied by a thousand, each spindly leg scurrying gracefully, purposefully, around the cavernous hollow, as they strung up their shining, beautiful webs, cutting well-trodden tracks into the bone. Sometimes he just couldn't take it anymore, and he'd have to itch. Then they'd disappear from his mind for a short time, then it would just start up the whole vicious cycle again. And again. And again.
There's no escaping spiders in your head.
He had found this out the hard way. It itched horribly, and it wasn't even an itch you could get to. Even if you tore out every lock of your hair, carefully, strand by strand. Even if you got right down to the skin and dug your ragged nails into it and scratched, putting all of your strength and fury into trying to scratch that itch, you still couldn't get to it. It just kept itching.
And it was noisy, too. The crawling of the spiders was awful loud. He wished they were quiet, like normal spiders on nature shows, like the Discovery channel used to have. He used to watch the Discovery channel; he liked the shows about sharks. Sharks were pretty cool, and he always liked watching those crazy motherfuckers who'd go down and try to pet the sharks. He'd laughed at them with Danny and Rob. They'd bring some booze-cheap shit, but the good shit-and the cards for poker, and they would play a few games and watch Shark Week. They'd drink every time some idiot did something that would get the shark snapping at them, and be delightfully buzzed in no time at all. And he'd thought spiders were pretty cool, too, until they'd moved into his head. On the nature shows, they were quiet and just went about living their lives, not really bothering anyone. But these things! They built their hundreds of tiny webs in a cacophony of sharp steel strands, the unbearably loud scraping against the inside of his skull, and the endless crunching and clicking of thousands of tiny fangs.
Danny and Rob hadn't been over in an awful long time. He sort of wanted to see them and play poker again, or maybe smoke 'em at Monopoly; he was the only one in his wide circle of friends with the patience for Monopoly. And he always got Park Place and Boardwalk; he was good at the game, good at hustling deals like that. But it had been a long time since he'd felt like dragging himself out of bed. Not that he would have been able to anyway. Still, he just didn't feel like moving very much. It might've aggravated his tenants, and that would have made it itch even worse, because it would have wrecked their silvery webs. Would have made the noises louder. So he'd laid on his belly in his bed for weeks, staring at the headboard with wide, sleepless, staring eyes. He didn't dare to close his eyes, either. It might have bothered his tenants if he slept. He knew that he snored and that he tossed and turned. His last girlfriend had told him as much. Sort of missed her. She'd been a rose, she had, but she'd left him, and he couldn't quite remember why anymore, no more than he remembered why there were spiders nesting in his skull right now, or when it had started.
He scratched his head again, and howled, loud and piteously, as his ragged nails tore open several red gashes. Had itched so much, so furiously, that he'd dug fine little furrows down to the bone, and they never quite closed. Every time he dragged the fingernails across, trying to get to the maddening itch in his brain, he would tear open an old one and it would bleed afresh. Then the noise would become even louder, as if they were scolding him for ruining their work.
Hot tears slid down his dry face; he dug his nails into the rough sheets of his bed instead and let his head bleed. At least the itching had receded a little bit, for even just a second, before starting back up again amidst a racket of angry fang-clicking and whining steel strings. He groaned quietly and buried his head into the pillow. One ice-blue eye twitched as he felt dozens of tiny, spindly legs gingerly creeping over the back of it.
He felt a tiny, tight thread wind around the optic nerve directly behind his eyeball, and his eyelid twitched wildly again. Next would come the nightmares. They seemed to do this in cycles. First they'd crawl around weaving their webs. He'd scratch and tear open old wounds, shaking the spiders around. Then they'd continue weaving their webs, and they'd be careful to weave them around his eyes, too. That was how he knew. How he saw. He would see the spiders crawling through his skull, weaving intricate webs in the empty space.
Sometimes he could hold out for a day or two without scratching, if he really tried. But the longer the spiders spun, the worse the clicking and tugging and scraping and tapping would get. It would echo violently around his infested head, each tiny noise booming like thunder. The strings would squeeze too tightly around his eyes, or tiny hairy legs would sting at the inside of his skull--swift, tiny little pinpricks, multiplied by a thousand, each spindly leg scurrying gracefully, purposefully, around the cavernous hollow, as they strung up their shining, beautiful webs, cutting well-trodden tracks into the bone. Sometimes he just couldn't take it anymore, and he'd have to itch. Then they'd disappear from his mind for a short time, then it would just start up the whole vicious cycle again. And again. And again.
There's no escaping spiders in your head.
The chill of moonless night and the stale smell of cigarettes, keep me awake. It's the scarlet red that paints my walls and the still echoing screams through the dark halls the lets me sleep.
Welcome back, and please sit down and have a warm drink while holding your blanket close till the sun peaks over the snow peaked mountains. For tonight your nightmares will be haunting every conner of house till that warm sun light breaks the night sky.
Seeking refuge here was a dire mistake, but I welcome you none the less.
Welcome back, and please sit down and have a warm drink while holding your blanket close till the sun peaks over the snow peaked mountains. For tonight your nightmares will be haunting every conner of house till that warm sun light breaks the night sky.
Seeking refuge here was a dire mistake, but I welcome you none the less.
Yeah, sorry about that, I don't spoiler them because it seems like too much work, if that makes sense.Mcupobob said:
Hello.
I am Mr. Welldone.
I watched the copulation which conceived you and I screamed in horror. I saw you birthed like a hatched parasite, hairless and gagging, and I grit my teeth in hatred, sliding them over each other again and again and again and again and again until they were flat and smooth. I will watch you wither and grow old, as your body congeals and the weight of your years pulls your flesh from your body and I will grin and snicker, laugh and laugh. I will see your desiccated corpse pumped full of superficial chemicals, interred into the dirt to feed the eyeless, subterranean creatures of the earth and I will howl because I know where you are going.
I know where you are going.
I know the secrets of this earth, as I knew the secrets of the one before it. I will bring about the End, and you cannot stop me.
You read these tales and you do not know that with each you read, with each you create and recreate, with each you retell, with each you claim ownership of, you beckon the End.
For there will be some among you who will try to verify these tales. You will seek them out. Those that do so with passion will find that many of them are falsehoods? but some will be harrowing at the very least. Others will leave you scarred for the rest of your fleeting days. Others still will leave you stripped of your flesh.
And that flesh will be used to build more, and more, and more tales. Twisted and stretched to cry out to more curious individuals.
And I will smile, my teeth clenching together tightly, tightly, tightly until one cracks with a satisfying pop. My eyes unblinking; watching everything fall into place; wide and empty; weeping and shriveling with delicious, protracted agony.
I am so excited. So very excited.
Even as you read this, some among you are emboldened. The sick part of you which lusts for the End whispers into your mind, making you want to see the horror, the pain, the blood, the death. You want to see it. You want to see what lies hidden in the dark, beyond sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch.
Come.
Come and see.
I will show you such wonderful things.
***
Hello.
It is not what you cannot see in the Dark that you fear.
It seems the masses have comforted themselves with the trite statement ?people fear the unknown.? Humanity finds a strange comfort in this statement. If people did indeed fear the unknown, this statement would be akin to locking eyes and spirit with that soul-rending horror which lurks unseen in the back of every human?s mind.
No, it is not what you cannot see in the Dark that you fear.
It is what you will see if you gaze long and hard into it. You will see that thing you ?know? you will see. You will attempt to assuage that sting of fear in your mind by numbly assuring yourself that it is simply a figment of the rampant faculties of the subconscious.
It is not.
Yes, we fear the Dark for a reason.
The reason is not what you think it is.
***
Hello.
Many fellows, in their markedly-less-than infinite wisdom, choose to prove their gender and sexual orientation by seeking out a locale rumored to be frequented with events of the ?supernatural.? What a loathsome and paradoxical term, ?supernatural.? How can a thing be ?above nature? when it is naturally occurring?
I digress.
Many such ?brave? souls who set out in search of the nocturnal thrills of the unknown find that there is little to fear, despite the cold sweat they feel, and choose to take this evidence as the answer to whether or not the ?supernatural? exists in our shared perception of the world.
What fools.
Indeed, if one steels themselves overmuch, such an individual may find that he or she never will see anything beyond the mundane. It is those that embrace their fear that find much more startling evidence supporting the possibility of earthly entities and energies beyond our current understanding.
Fear is more than a biological warning to impending danger; it is a sense, little different than the five most people are familiar with. To ignore one?s fear is to close one?s eyes to such secrets possessed of beauty beyond most mortals? imaginations.
And so I impart this advice upon those who wish to confirm the existence of the ?supernatural.?
Exalt yourself in your fear.
Stoke its fires and seek out the Darkness.
You will see such wonderful things.
***
Hello.
Of all of the most wonderful things to be seen in this world, the best of them lay in the periphery of the worldly, the superficial, the mundane, the worthless, the duplicitous, wretched, horrid, loathsome, hated, despicable, sickening, vapid reality which humanity clings to.
Pardon me.
But, in the corners of the eye lay unknown gems amidst the refuse. Those flitting shapes humanity unconsciously assigns to the readily explainable, acceptable normalities of the social world which haunt us, leaving us with a vague fear that begs our eyes to close so very tightly when the lights are put down for an evening?s rest and not to open again until the reassuring light of the morning dispels the possibilities of the Darkness.
What waste. What ridiculousness.
Open your eyes and use the wondrous capabilities of this fantastic organ. As you goes about your evening hygienic rituals, I suggest you pay indirect attention to the cold black of the hallways waiting outside the door. Wait for the inevitable thing, out of place with the characteristic stillness of the night, swiftly passing by to unknown destinations.
But do not acknowledge it.
Do not. Do not. Do not.
Some things are best only seen and not interacted with in other ways.
For in seeing that which believes itself unseen, awareness comes with the most severe of consequences.
Oh, yes. So severe.
Do behave.
Look, but do not touch. Or speak. Or taste.
Only then, perhaps, will you hear. Faintly on the first occasion, but on every occasion thereafter impossible to ignore. Even as they stand, now so clearly, leering at you from the Darkest corners of your safest, most sacred havens, do not acknowledge their presence.
Be content to observe.
Yes. Content.
Such contentedness is the only barrier against their predations.
If you can do this, if one can stand the temptations of the Darkness and control one?s primordial self, perhaps then you will be prepared.
Prepared.
For more.
Much more.
***
Hello.
Tales of strange creatures, occurrences, and sightings persist from the first days of man until today. To discard them out of hand is foolishness, as is to believe blindly.
But for those that seek out the Dark, you will see horrors which will shatter your human mind.
There was once a time when Man understood His place in the universe. But things change. Always changing. Though, even in recent history there have been those that have understood. However, such individuals? wise insight is turned to examine the mundanity of nature rather than its unexplainable qualities.
What waste.
The bulk does not understand, will never understand. There is only fear and blind denial. Even when faced with old ?truths? the human mind shuts itself off and the person attempts desperately to find any mundane explanation possible to retain ?sanity.?
Sanity. A creature wholly wrought of comparison and worthless society.
Only those bold enough to search in the dark, blind and senseless, will see the old ?truths.?
You will see, and you will understand your place. You will experience feelings so powerful and varied that you will be unable to assign words to describe the experience.
And then it will all End.
***
Hello.
Can one be simultaneously amused and disgusted?
Apparently so.
Humanity disgusts me for its constant squabbling for little pieces of paper, hierarchical conflicts for power that exists only in the imaginations of those involved, and the pointless use of lives in order to sustain nothing but a paltry level of comfort.
I am sickened.
And, yet, I am also entertained. It is like watching some cruel joke unfold. I sit, waiting for one among you to ascend to greater powers than known to the bulk of humanity, but so few are willing to aspire. So full of yourselves, so assured that you already know the workings of the universe.
You rob yourselves of the greatest of mysteries.
I cannot wait.
I cannot wait.
I cannot wait to see it all End.
I cannot wait to watch you scream and suffer.
A magnificent din of flesh being stripped from bone, which is then made to dance to the whims of the most horrifying destruction the sentient portion of the universe has borne witness to.
It will be a wonderful taste of vengeance for having been subjected to your monotony.
Yet, I still yearn for even one among you to attain the eyes with which to see the all of the cosmos.
But I also yearn to pluck your organs from their positions of safe functioning simply to relish the expression of pain and terror on your faces.
I wonder if I shall ever be so divided.
I wonder what I shall do when such divisions cease.
I cannot wait
I am Mr. Welldone.
I watched the copulation which conceived you and I screamed in horror. I saw you birthed like a hatched parasite, hairless and gagging, and I grit my teeth in hatred, sliding them over each other again and again and again and again and again until they were flat and smooth. I will watch you wither and grow old, as your body congeals and the weight of your years pulls your flesh from your body and I will grin and snicker, laugh and laugh. I will see your desiccated corpse pumped full of superficial chemicals, interred into the dirt to feed the eyeless, subterranean creatures of the earth and I will howl because I know where you are going.
I know where you are going.
I know the secrets of this earth, as I knew the secrets of the one before it. I will bring about the End, and you cannot stop me.
You read these tales and you do not know that with each you read, with each you create and recreate, with each you retell, with each you claim ownership of, you beckon the End.
For there will be some among you who will try to verify these tales. You will seek them out. Those that do so with passion will find that many of them are falsehoods? but some will be harrowing at the very least. Others will leave you scarred for the rest of your fleeting days. Others still will leave you stripped of your flesh.
And that flesh will be used to build more, and more, and more tales. Twisted and stretched to cry out to more curious individuals.
And I will smile, my teeth clenching together tightly, tightly, tightly until one cracks with a satisfying pop. My eyes unblinking; watching everything fall into place; wide and empty; weeping and shriveling with delicious, protracted agony.
I am so excited. So very excited.
Even as you read this, some among you are emboldened. The sick part of you which lusts for the End whispers into your mind, making you want to see the horror, the pain, the blood, the death. You want to see it. You want to see what lies hidden in the dark, beyond sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch.
Come.
Come and see.
I will show you such wonderful things.
***
Hello.
It is not what you cannot see in the Dark that you fear.
It seems the masses have comforted themselves with the trite statement ?people fear the unknown.? Humanity finds a strange comfort in this statement. If people did indeed fear the unknown, this statement would be akin to locking eyes and spirit with that soul-rending horror which lurks unseen in the back of every human?s mind.
No, it is not what you cannot see in the Dark that you fear.
It is what you will see if you gaze long and hard into it. You will see that thing you ?know? you will see. You will attempt to assuage that sting of fear in your mind by numbly assuring yourself that it is simply a figment of the rampant faculties of the subconscious.
It is not.
Yes, we fear the Dark for a reason.
The reason is not what you think it is.
***
Hello.
Many fellows, in their markedly-less-than infinite wisdom, choose to prove their gender and sexual orientation by seeking out a locale rumored to be frequented with events of the ?supernatural.? What a loathsome and paradoxical term, ?supernatural.? How can a thing be ?above nature? when it is naturally occurring?
I digress.
Many such ?brave? souls who set out in search of the nocturnal thrills of the unknown find that there is little to fear, despite the cold sweat they feel, and choose to take this evidence as the answer to whether or not the ?supernatural? exists in our shared perception of the world.
What fools.
Indeed, if one steels themselves overmuch, such an individual may find that he or she never will see anything beyond the mundane. It is those that embrace their fear that find much more startling evidence supporting the possibility of earthly entities and energies beyond our current understanding.
Fear is more than a biological warning to impending danger; it is a sense, little different than the five most people are familiar with. To ignore one?s fear is to close one?s eyes to such secrets possessed of beauty beyond most mortals? imaginations.
And so I impart this advice upon those who wish to confirm the existence of the ?supernatural.?
Exalt yourself in your fear.
Stoke its fires and seek out the Darkness.
You will see such wonderful things.
***
Hello.
Of all of the most wonderful things to be seen in this world, the best of them lay in the periphery of the worldly, the superficial, the mundane, the worthless, the duplicitous, wretched, horrid, loathsome, hated, despicable, sickening, vapid reality which humanity clings to.
Pardon me.
But, in the corners of the eye lay unknown gems amidst the refuse. Those flitting shapes humanity unconsciously assigns to the readily explainable, acceptable normalities of the social world which haunt us, leaving us with a vague fear that begs our eyes to close so very tightly when the lights are put down for an evening?s rest and not to open again until the reassuring light of the morning dispels the possibilities of the Darkness.
What waste. What ridiculousness.
Open your eyes and use the wondrous capabilities of this fantastic organ. As you goes about your evening hygienic rituals, I suggest you pay indirect attention to the cold black of the hallways waiting outside the door. Wait for the inevitable thing, out of place with the characteristic stillness of the night, swiftly passing by to unknown destinations.
But do not acknowledge it.
Do not. Do not. Do not.
Some things are best only seen and not interacted with in other ways.
For in seeing that which believes itself unseen, awareness comes with the most severe of consequences.
Oh, yes. So severe.
Do behave.
Look, but do not touch. Or speak. Or taste.
Only then, perhaps, will you hear. Faintly on the first occasion, but on every occasion thereafter impossible to ignore. Even as they stand, now so clearly, leering at you from the Darkest corners of your safest, most sacred havens, do not acknowledge their presence.
Be content to observe.
Yes. Content.
Such contentedness is the only barrier against their predations.
If you can do this, if one can stand the temptations of the Darkness and control one?s primordial self, perhaps then you will be prepared.
Prepared.
For more.
Much more.
***
Hello.
Tales of strange creatures, occurrences, and sightings persist from the first days of man until today. To discard them out of hand is foolishness, as is to believe blindly.
But for those that seek out the Dark, you will see horrors which will shatter your human mind.
There was once a time when Man understood His place in the universe. But things change. Always changing. Though, even in recent history there have been those that have understood. However, such individuals? wise insight is turned to examine the mundanity of nature rather than its unexplainable qualities.
What waste.
The bulk does not understand, will never understand. There is only fear and blind denial. Even when faced with old ?truths? the human mind shuts itself off and the person attempts desperately to find any mundane explanation possible to retain ?sanity.?
Sanity. A creature wholly wrought of comparison and worthless society.
Only those bold enough to search in the dark, blind and senseless, will see the old ?truths.?
You will see, and you will understand your place. You will experience feelings so powerful and varied that you will be unable to assign words to describe the experience.
And then it will all End.
***
Hello.
Can one be simultaneously amused and disgusted?
Apparently so.
Humanity disgusts me for its constant squabbling for little pieces of paper, hierarchical conflicts for power that exists only in the imaginations of those involved, and the pointless use of lives in order to sustain nothing but a paltry level of comfort.
I am sickened.
And, yet, I am also entertained. It is like watching some cruel joke unfold. I sit, waiting for one among you to ascend to greater powers than known to the bulk of humanity, but so few are willing to aspire. So full of yourselves, so assured that you already know the workings of the universe.
You rob yourselves of the greatest of mysteries.
I cannot wait.
I cannot wait.
I cannot wait to see it all End.
I cannot wait to watch you scream and suffer.
A magnificent din of flesh being stripped from bone, which is then made to dance to the whims of the most horrifying destruction the sentient portion of the universe has borne witness to.
It will be a wonderful taste of vengeance for having been subjected to your monotony.
Yet, I still yearn for even one among you to attain the eyes with which to see the all of the cosmos.
But I also yearn to pluck your organs from their positions of safe functioning simply to relish the expression of pain and terror on your faces.
I wonder if I shall ever be so divided.
I wonder what I shall do when such divisions cease.
I cannot wait
Everything was screaming. The dials, the readouts, everything was screaming, but he noticed none of it. What he noticed was the heat. He was burning. Not on fire, but inside, burning with a searing heat that was cooking him inside out. What's more, the tiny capsule was so sealed, so perfectly fitted, he couldn't even twist or writhe to burn in a new position. The radio squawked and squealed twice before going silent, the tiny plate starting to warp as the shoddy, overwhelmed heat shield continued to buckle under the reentry force, the flames licking white and golden past his tiny porthole.
Still, the heat was not what filled the man with fear, what made him afraid of not only his immediate and untimely demise, but what may possibly be waiting beyond it. The baking flames did not form a total wall over the tiny porthole fixed over his sweating, softening face. They divided in the middle, blocked by the hard, sharp point of a chin.
The face watched him, staring, vague suggestions of limbs holding to the sides of the window. The face watched, even with no eyes, no mouth, the blank, vapid nothing still so hellishly suggestive. It watched, smiling a nothing smile as the tiny bit of grit burned up in the thin, searing atmosphere?
And its breath fogged to frost on the burning, bubbling window.
Still, the heat was not what filled the man with fear, what made him afraid of not only his immediate and untimely demise, but what may possibly be waiting beyond it. The baking flames did not form a total wall over the tiny porthole fixed over his sweating, softening face. They divided in the middle, blocked by the hard, sharp point of a chin.
The face watched him, staring, vague suggestions of limbs holding to the sides of the window. The face watched, even with no eyes, no mouth, the blank, vapid nothing still so hellishly suggestive. It watched, smiling a nothing smile as the tiny bit of grit burned up in the thin, searing atmosphere?
And its breath fogged to frost on the burning, bubbling window.
The water was cool, if a bit murky. The lake was the color of tea, owing to its past as a logging route. Great banks of long tree trunks would bob and sink, staining the lake. At least, that's what the boy's grandpa said. He dove off the dock, slipping into the cool water as easy as an otter, his sunburned skin drinking in the cooling water.
The lake was very deep, and quickly he was over the vast, deep edges, paddling softly with the easy grace attainable only by the happy few who know the width and depth of summer break. He turned over to his back, the murky, tea-colored haze buoying him up on billows of cool water. He flicked his hands with a careless annoyance as he skirted a patch of loosed seaweed, sending it bobbing away. He watched the clouds, listening to the empty hum of the lake in his ears.
He slowly noticed more patches floating about him, and bobbed to vertical, wincing as his feet kicked and brushed the slippery, brown strands of weed. The strands twitched and clutched with their soggy strength, and he sighed as he started to plot a course out of the muck.
Deep below, the twitching strands stirred the muck they were rooted so deeply in. The mud puffed? then bulged, rising softly in a great mound. Then it opened eyes, great sludgy orbs the size of cars. It slowly rose, freeing its gnashing maw, and drifted up to see what its feelers had found.
The lake was very deep, and quickly he was over the vast, deep edges, paddling softly with the easy grace attainable only by the happy few who know the width and depth of summer break. He turned over to his back, the murky, tea-colored haze buoying him up on billows of cool water. He flicked his hands with a careless annoyance as he skirted a patch of loosed seaweed, sending it bobbing away. He watched the clouds, listening to the empty hum of the lake in his ears.
He slowly noticed more patches floating about him, and bobbed to vertical, wincing as his feet kicked and brushed the slippery, brown strands of weed. The strands twitched and clutched with their soggy strength, and he sighed as he started to plot a course out of the muck.
Deep below, the twitching strands stirred the muck they were rooted so deeply in. The mud puffed? then bulged, rising softly in a great mound. Then it opened eyes, great sludgy orbs the size of cars. It slowly rose, freeing its gnashing maw, and drifted up to see what its feelers had found.
The door was heavy, and old, but still strong. It sealed the passage tight, blocking even light from around its edges. The hall was claustrophobic, and in near total darkness but for the dim, drooling light from the far-off stair. He beat on the door again, feeling the thick reverberation bounce through its solid core. He could try and pick the lock, or bash it in, but that was not the way. Not their way, never. Respect was always foremost, even at the utmost end of need.
He folded back on his haunches, his sigh turning the dust on the long-abandoned floor. He looked back, at the dim stair, and considered again just going back, letting it go. He thought this way for a long time, then stood with a new, more burning resolve. He went and knocked again? and again? and again. He hammered on the door. He beat on the door. He slammed his fists over and over, thundering against its mocking, ageless weight. He beat his fists until they split, spilling blood that looked like deeper, slicker smears of darkness onto the unrelenting wood. He threw himself against it, biting, clawing, gouging at the wood like something rabid and in pain.
Finally, he slowed, then stopped, pulling away from the blank wood with an almost sheepish slink. He folded back up again, letting the split, reeking flesh stop pulsing and start to knit over. He turned the black, pulsing mass that gave him sight to the door again, split tongues lolling as he chastised himself for his reckless, misplaced hatred. They had gone, those many, and hidden deep in their vaults. This may be the last, the very last flake of rotten flesh left of their abandoned body. Their endless impatience had called to them for correction, so?they had come. Man had hidden deep in their vaults, their short-sightedness leaving them no retreat, no escape.
Now they waited, delaying their final lessons with every futile breath? But to worry and to lose one's temper was not the way of the People. He resolved that, once ages had turned the door to dust, he would show them the folly of hope.
One eon at a time.
He folded back on his haunches, his sigh turning the dust on the long-abandoned floor. He looked back, at the dim stair, and considered again just going back, letting it go. He thought this way for a long time, then stood with a new, more burning resolve. He went and knocked again? and again? and again. He hammered on the door. He beat on the door. He slammed his fists over and over, thundering against its mocking, ageless weight. He beat his fists until they split, spilling blood that looked like deeper, slicker smears of darkness onto the unrelenting wood. He threw himself against it, biting, clawing, gouging at the wood like something rabid and in pain.
Finally, he slowed, then stopped, pulling away from the blank wood with an almost sheepish slink. He folded back up again, letting the split, reeking flesh stop pulsing and start to knit over. He turned the black, pulsing mass that gave him sight to the door again, split tongues lolling as he chastised himself for his reckless, misplaced hatred. They had gone, those many, and hidden deep in their vaults. This may be the last, the very last flake of rotten flesh left of their abandoned body. Their endless impatience had called to them for correction, so?they had come. Man had hidden deep in their vaults, their short-sightedness leaving them no retreat, no escape.
Now they waited, delaying their final lessons with every futile breath? But to worry and to lose one's temper was not the way of the People. He resolved that, once ages had turned the door to dust, he would show them the folly of hope.
One eon at a time.
I've been sick for days now. That bubbling nausea that fills your throat, makes you feel as if you're about to throw up every time you burp or so much as breathe out your mouth. Holding the toilet, resting my head on the cool, cool porcelain, I really question why in the hell I don't make myself throw up and just get it over with. It's just not something I can do?thinking of forcefully gagging myself?ugh, it's almost worse then I feel now. Almost.
Suddenly it hits me, and this is it, this is IT. I feel that slick, sour spit coat my throat, my belly tightening up as I push my head over the bowl and spit. For a split second before I explode, I realize this thing has not been cleaned in a while. Then I vomit. Hard. Mucus-rich and acidic, it pours out in a hard, jetting stream from my mouth and nose, burning my nasal passages like fire. It hits so hard, it feels like it should be coming out my eyes, too.
I vomit again, and again, the third time bringing up just some thin, reeking slime, and I gasp a bit, getting my breath back before the next wave. I pitch forward again, eyes tearing as they squeeze shut, and I feel another hot jet of filth pour out. Opening my eyes, it seems?different. A tarry black, and there are?things bobbing in it. I don't have time to look too hard, before two more hard retches double me over the bowl. These are more pinkish, and I can definitely see some kind of meat in these. Hamburger, maybe?
More vomit, more oddness. I don't remember eating any kind of jelly, especially cherry. It's starting to hurt, a deep spike each time. God, how much can a person throw up? When did I eat noodles that long?or that big? The goo in it is getting thicker too, and pink?starting to feel at least a little better. Ugh?when did I eat a balloon? My belly is feeling better now, really light. Jesus?whatever that was is floating still?almost looks like it's pulsing, or beating?going to have to move to the sink, toilet's almost full. Feeling better now?hungry, actually. Very hungry. Starving. Ravenous.
I feel so empty.
Suddenly it hits me, and this is it, this is IT. I feel that slick, sour spit coat my throat, my belly tightening up as I push my head over the bowl and spit. For a split second before I explode, I realize this thing has not been cleaned in a while. Then I vomit. Hard. Mucus-rich and acidic, it pours out in a hard, jetting stream from my mouth and nose, burning my nasal passages like fire. It hits so hard, it feels like it should be coming out my eyes, too.
I vomit again, and again, the third time bringing up just some thin, reeking slime, and I gasp a bit, getting my breath back before the next wave. I pitch forward again, eyes tearing as they squeeze shut, and I feel another hot jet of filth pour out. Opening my eyes, it seems?different. A tarry black, and there are?things bobbing in it. I don't have time to look too hard, before two more hard retches double me over the bowl. These are more pinkish, and I can definitely see some kind of meat in these. Hamburger, maybe?
More vomit, more oddness. I don't remember eating any kind of jelly, especially cherry. It's starting to hurt, a deep spike each time. God, how much can a person throw up? When did I eat noodles that long?or that big? The goo in it is getting thicker too, and pink?starting to feel at least a little better. Ugh?when did I eat a balloon? My belly is feeling better now, really light. Jesus?whatever that was is floating still?almost looks like it's pulsing, or beating?going to have to move to the sink, toilet's almost full. Feeling better now?hungry, actually. Very hungry. Starving. Ravenous.
I feel so empty.
The TV was blaring sex and violence, but all she could think about was her damn bubbling arm. She picked at it idly, once again cursing herself for forgetting the sun screen over the weekend. It'd been such a good chance to get Adam to notice her, but she'd just ended up burned and humiliated. She'd been offered some sunblock, but Tammy had been there, snickering some comment involving the term ?Casper the virgin ghost?, so she'd rejected it, saying she wanted to work on her tan. Now, if she were any more red, she'd be mistaken for a radish. She picked at the onion kin flakes on her arms, trying to ignore the odd texture of the bubbled skin.
She kept flipping between channels, trying to ignore the burning itch on her arms, face and body, all of which served to keep the memory of her humiliation crystal clear. She picked at her arm idly, trying to find a rerun of something she hadn't seen, all the while brushing off the liquid and peeled flesh from her arms
wait?liquid?
She looked at her arms, and felt her throat grow paralyzed around a scream. She was bathing in blood. It ran from great, flapping rents in her skin, the flesh peeled and pulled free in thin strips and shallow patches. As she tried to recoil, she saw a flash of bone. She skidded and fell from the couch, the jostling causing the peeled wounds to stretch more. Oddly numb, the rifts continued to ooze blood freely as she scrambled to her feet, starting to hyperventilate. She tried to press the peeled, red flesh back in to the wounds, but they just lolled free with a fresh splash of blood.
She walked gingerly, trying to ease her way across the floor, but every motion seemed to cause the peeling to extend more. She brushed her arm, trying to see the bleeding rents more clearly, and strangled around a scream as a palm-sized patch of flesh pulled and flopped free, blood glistening on the newly freed muscle. She moaned, hands rising to her face?only to feel it shift like a cheap, ill-fitting mask, the burning, itching pain rising more and more as she started to peel?
Hours later, she hooked a finger under her eyelid, mad pain compelling her to rid herself of the last, traitorous patch of skin
She kept flipping between channels, trying to ignore the burning itch on her arms, face and body, all of which served to keep the memory of her humiliation crystal clear. She picked at her arm idly, trying to find a rerun of something she hadn't seen, all the while brushing off the liquid and peeled flesh from her arms
wait?liquid?
She looked at her arms, and felt her throat grow paralyzed around a scream. She was bathing in blood. It ran from great, flapping rents in her skin, the flesh peeled and pulled free in thin strips and shallow patches. As she tried to recoil, she saw a flash of bone. She skidded and fell from the couch, the jostling causing the peeled wounds to stretch more. Oddly numb, the rifts continued to ooze blood freely as she scrambled to her feet, starting to hyperventilate. She tried to press the peeled, red flesh back in to the wounds, but they just lolled free with a fresh splash of blood.
She walked gingerly, trying to ease her way across the floor, but every motion seemed to cause the peeling to extend more. She brushed her arm, trying to see the bleeding rents more clearly, and strangled around a scream as a palm-sized patch of flesh pulled and flopped free, blood glistening on the newly freed muscle. She moaned, hands rising to her face?only to feel it shift like a cheap, ill-fitting mask, the burning, itching pain rising more and more as she started to peel?
Hours later, she hooked a finger under her eyelid, mad pain compelling her to rid herself of the last, traitorous patch of skin
Johnathan had a bump. It was just a little swelling, like a fat pimple, starting right behind his shoulder in one of those spots you could never quite get at, right by the armpit. And this bump was annoying, but he couldn't quite put his finger on why. It wasn't like it was a huge swelling, or a blister? it was just there, and uncomfortable.
So Johnathan lived with the bump that showed up out of nowhere. When he mentioned it to his mother over the phone, she commented that it was probably a swollen lymph node and he was getting a cold or the flu. His boss suggested it might just be a liquid pocket in the muscle (which sounded plenty gross) and everybody else had advice for him about the firm little bump. He ignored all of it.
After all, it was just a bump. Who didn't get those little lumps curiously under the skin from time to time?
He remembered living in a dorm with a guy who once got one right under his jaw, and it was like an egg there, awkwardly on the side of his face and neck, but it had gone away a few days later with some ice and hot compresses placed on it every so often. So Johnathan didn't think about the bump on his back.
Not until he realized it wasn't going away. And it was growing a little bit bigger every day. He finally chanced a look at it in the mirror and found it to be strangely not as gross as he though, just a swelling under the skin, with a few small wrinkles in it, like loose skin. He resolved to let it sit alone for a while longer.
A week later, he quietly noted that he was getting hungry a lot more often, and tended to feel winded and dizzy now and then, curious for somebody like him. And whenever he checked the bump, he found that it had grown some more.
Another week, and he was afraid to check on it. It had started to spread in a strange way, two more prominent little lumps sticking out from it that made it awkward to sleep on his back or side any more, and left a little hump in the shoulder of his shirts.
Maybe it was fear that kept him from going to the doctor, or some sort of innate stubbornness and refusal to accept help. But he called in sick to work the next day and spent the day sleeping, keeping a hot compress on his shoulder, and watching reruns of SCRUBS on cable.
The next morning, he realized that the lump didn't ache or feel awkward and swollen anymore. Actually, he mused, dully half-awake, he didn't feel it at all. Sitting up out of bed and stretching, he reached, back, trying to feel it? and something clutched his finger. He thought about his little sister being born, her tiny, frail baby-hands with sharp nails, and that was what he felt.
In a panic, he tore off his shirt and bolted to the bathroom, throwing on the lights and turning, twisting his head awkwardly to glance over his shoulder at the bump.
Which wasn't so much a bump anymore as something else. Potato-shaped, it had doubled in size overnight, becoming the size of a football almost. Those little wrinkles in it were now open, exposing two dark, glinting eyes, and a little toothless, lipless mouth. Two arms, tiny and thin and malformed, complete with small hands, twitched in the air. It opened it's little mouth, and out came? a squeak. Tiny and peircing.
eeeee it went.
"AAAAAH!" he replied, and for the first time in the grown man's life, he felt a wave of vertigo hit him like a ton of bricks, and he did something he has once been convinced nobody really did, ever. He clear-out fainted, temple smacking against the bathroom tile on the way down and sealing his unconsciousness for quite some time.
He woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. The answering machine picked itup, and he opened his eyes. Everything was curiously blurry, and he struggled for a second to get his arms under himself, and lift himself up. His back felt wet, no, sticky, like he had spilled milk on himself and it had curdled and dried down his shoulder and spine.
For one horrible moment, Johnathan remembered, and he clutched the edge of the sink and pulled himself up, turning around hastily to look at the bump. But he found only a large patch on his pack. The skin was smooth, so smooth, and so pale, like it'd never seen sunlight. And something had dried and caked on his back, leaving dark lined stains.
The answering machine finished taking its message with a beep, and he stared at the mirror, dumbfounded, until he heard something rustling outside the bathroom, the faintest sound of padding footsteps, tiny.
He stared at the bathroom door into the empty hall, those tiny footsteps disappearing off towards the kitchen. Part of his screamed to shut the door, lock it, climb out the bathroom window and call somebody to help him. Maybe he was hallucinating, or had hit his head too hard when he went down, another part of him argued. But a third part, that spoke in just a whisper in his mind, somehow convinced him otherwise.
He strode out of the bathroom, slipping silently into his room to grab something from his closet, and tip-toed to the kitchen, hearing rustling on the far side of the counter island. He took a deep breath to steady himself, and crept around the corner of the island, having to bite his lip and steel himself to avoid another unpleasant meeting with the floor.
It was malformed. Half fetus, half tumor, all horrific, still dripping some sort of foul pus as it stumbled on narrow little bowled legs, its thin little arms trying to open a cabinet door, little beady black eyes glancing around nervously as it licked its lipless mouth with a red tongue.
Suddenly, its black eyes found him and it turned. He took a step back automatically, swallowing hard. It was bigger than he had expected. Like a toddler. And it opened its little mouth, with pink gums and a red tongue, with no teeth, disturbingly childlike? and spoke.
"D?daddeeeeee."
It wheezed, it squealed out. Johnathan hoisted up what he had gotten from his bedroom without pause and stepped forwards. His baseball bat, aluminum, from days spent playing. All in a second, he bought it down on the tiny creature. And again. And again. And again and again.
"Hey, John! Open up!" Peter knocked on the door to his friend's apartment. "Come ON man, where the hell were you?! You didn't call in to work and we called, like, eight times yesterday! What the hell!?" He shouted through the door, before Johnathan opened in, a small smile on his face, eyes a little glazed, bags under them, like he hadn't slept much.
"Peter! Sorry?come on in." Johnathan motioned. He was freshly dressed, in jeans and a new shirt. Peter noted that the shirt clung to his shoulders without any odd formations, and raised a brow. "Hey, did you get rid of your freaky-ass bump?" he asked, and Johnathan paused for a second in the kitchen, where he had been doing dishes.
"Er?yeah. Yeah, it went away." He muttered, glancing at the drain in the sink. There was a soft squeaking noise, and Peter wondered if Johnathan's apartment had mice, glancing away. Johnathan stared at the drain again? and then flipped the switch for the trash disposal for what felt like the hundredth time that day.
eeeee
So Johnathan lived with the bump that showed up out of nowhere. When he mentioned it to his mother over the phone, she commented that it was probably a swollen lymph node and he was getting a cold or the flu. His boss suggested it might just be a liquid pocket in the muscle (which sounded plenty gross) and everybody else had advice for him about the firm little bump. He ignored all of it.
After all, it was just a bump. Who didn't get those little lumps curiously under the skin from time to time?
He remembered living in a dorm with a guy who once got one right under his jaw, and it was like an egg there, awkwardly on the side of his face and neck, but it had gone away a few days later with some ice and hot compresses placed on it every so often. So Johnathan didn't think about the bump on his back.
Not until he realized it wasn't going away. And it was growing a little bit bigger every day. He finally chanced a look at it in the mirror and found it to be strangely not as gross as he though, just a swelling under the skin, with a few small wrinkles in it, like loose skin. He resolved to let it sit alone for a while longer.
A week later, he quietly noted that he was getting hungry a lot more often, and tended to feel winded and dizzy now and then, curious for somebody like him. And whenever he checked the bump, he found that it had grown some more.
Another week, and he was afraid to check on it. It had started to spread in a strange way, two more prominent little lumps sticking out from it that made it awkward to sleep on his back or side any more, and left a little hump in the shoulder of his shirts.
Maybe it was fear that kept him from going to the doctor, or some sort of innate stubbornness and refusal to accept help. But he called in sick to work the next day and spent the day sleeping, keeping a hot compress on his shoulder, and watching reruns of SCRUBS on cable.
The next morning, he realized that the lump didn't ache or feel awkward and swollen anymore. Actually, he mused, dully half-awake, he didn't feel it at all. Sitting up out of bed and stretching, he reached, back, trying to feel it? and something clutched his finger. He thought about his little sister being born, her tiny, frail baby-hands with sharp nails, and that was what he felt.
In a panic, he tore off his shirt and bolted to the bathroom, throwing on the lights and turning, twisting his head awkwardly to glance over his shoulder at the bump.
Which wasn't so much a bump anymore as something else. Potato-shaped, it had doubled in size overnight, becoming the size of a football almost. Those little wrinkles in it were now open, exposing two dark, glinting eyes, and a little toothless, lipless mouth. Two arms, tiny and thin and malformed, complete with small hands, twitched in the air. It opened it's little mouth, and out came? a squeak. Tiny and peircing.
eeeee it went.
"AAAAAH!" he replied, and for the first time in the grown man's life, he felt a wave of vertigo hit him like a ton of bricks, and he did something he has once been convinced nobody really did, ever. He clear-out fainted, temple smacking against the bathroom tile on the way down and sealing his unconsciousness for quite some time.
He woke up to the sound of the phone ringing. The answering machine picked itup, and he opened his eyes. Everything was curiously blurry, and he struggled for a second to get his arms under himself, and lift himself up. His back felt wet, no, sticky, like he had spilled milk on himself and it had curdled and dried down his shoulder and spine.
For one horrible moment, Johnathan remembered, and he clutched the edge of the sink and pulled himself up, turning around hastily to look at the bump. But he found only a large patch on his pack. The skin was smooth, so smooth, and so pale, like it'd never seen sunlight. And something had dried and caked on his back, leaving dark lined stains.
The answering machine finished taking its message with a beep, and he stared at the mirror, dumbfounded, until he heard something rustling outside the bathroom, the faintest sound of padding footsteps, tiny.
He stared at the bathroom door into the empty hall, those tiny footsteps disappearing off towards the kitchen. Part of his screamed to shut the door, lock it, climb out the bathroom window and call somebody to help him. Maybe he was hallucinating, or had hit his head too hard when he went down, another part of him argued. But a third part, that spoke in just a whisper in his mind, somehow convinced him otherwise.
He strode out of the bathroom, slipping silently into his room to grab something from his closet, and tip-toed to the kitchen, hearing rustling on the far side of the counter island. He took a deep breath to steady himself, and crept around the corner of the island, having to bite his lip and steel himself to avoid another unpleasant meeting with the floor.
It was malformed. Half fetus, half tumor, all horrific, still dripping some sort of foul pus as it stumbled on narrow little bowled legs, its thin little arms trying to open a cabinet door, little beady black eyes glancing around nervously as it licked its lipless mouth with a red tongue.
Suddenly, its black eyes found him and it turned. He took a step back automatically, swallowing hard. It was bigger than he had expected. Like a toddler. And it opened its little mouth, with pink gums and a red tongue, with no teeth, disturbingly childlike? and spoke.
"D?daddeeeeee."
It wheezed, it squealed out. Johnathan hoisted up what he had gotten from his bedroom without pause and stepped forwards. His baseball bat, aluminum, from days spent playing. All in a second, he bought it down on the tiny creature. And again. And again. And again and again.
"Hey, John! Open up!" Peter knocked on the door to his friend's apartment. "Come ON man, where the hell were you?! You didn't call in to work and we called, like, eight times yesterday! What the hell!?" He shouted through the door, before Johnathan opened in, a small smile on his face, eyes a little glazed, bags under them, like he hadn't slept much.
"Peter! Sorry?come on in." Johnathan motioned. He was freshly dressed, in jeans and a new shirt. Peter noted that the shirt clung to his shoulders without any odd formations, and raised a brow. "Hey, did you get rid of your freaky-ass bump?" he asked, and Johnathan paused for a second in the kitchen, where he had been doing dishes.
"Er?yeah. Yeah, it went away." He muttered, glancing at the drain in the sink. There was a soft squeaking noise, and Peter wondered if Johnathan's apartment had mice, glancing away. Johnathan stared at the drain again? and then flipped the switch for the trash disposal for what felt like the hundredth time that day.
eeeee
The average human being slips at least four or five times in their lifetime. Some slip hundreds, or thousands of times; it's hard to tell since nobody generally notices. Some suspect that the human's unique ability to slip is what gives us our stand-out trait - sentience. The ability to think and reason beyond what's immediately concerning us.
A slip is usually a little thing. A little discrepancy. You could have sworn that such-and-such historical event happened on such-and-such a date, or you could swear that you won a fight your brother says you lost, or you realized that there's a student missing in one of your classes - or there's an extra one you must have just never noticed before.
Children slip more often; sometimes they slip away for good if they're especially prone to it. But it happens to adults quite a bit too. You never really think about it, or notice it, although sometimes you might get a little wave of residual energy from the slip - déjà vu, maybe, or a shiver that crawls down your spine in the middle of a warm day.
But fortunately for you, you've probably never slipped too far. Just into the next reality over. Where there's one minuscule thing different, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Somebody's eye color is different, there's an extra student in your class, maybe you forgot to do something you swore you did.
For the unlucky ones who slip far enough that they realize it, they usually have the good graces to forget about it, never think about it, assume that they're crazy or just have memory problems. The ones who fight it generally don't wind up doing so well. Go talk to a seemingly calm, normal "general schizophrenic" who will tell you that JFK wasn't assassinated and who the current president really should be.
And then there are the extremely unlucky ones. Ones who slip so far there are no replacements. Ones who slip into places where the K-T extinction never happened; or where the Earth never formed (who last all of ten seconds in hard vacuum); or where they don't have any family, and they never existed, and they don't even really exist, waiting on street corners, trying to make sense of what happened.
A lucky few, very few, can slip at will, sliding from world to world without a second thought, exploring a vast multiverse. You might see these ones, they're the ones who show up at parties unexplained and never say their names, and are gone like they never were there in the morning.
And then there is the third minority. Those who slip who aren't human. All kinds of things that you see out of the corner of your eyes. Creatures not meant for this world, this time, this universe. They often don't last long, having fallen through the cracks in reality, but for what they're worth they certainly make an impression on us, lasting ages and ages.
So pay attention to your slips. Those moments where your memory and your life don't match up, where you could have sworn your father's eyes were green and not blue, the times when you pass a street you never noticed before, or see trees in a park where there were none. Because it's not just you.
It's just a slip.
A slip is usually a little thing. A little discrepancy. You could have sworn that such-and-such historical event happened on such-and-such a date, or you could swear that you won a fight your brother says you lost, or you realized that there's a student missing in one of your classes - or there's an extra one you must have just never noticed before.
Children slip more often; sometimes they slip away for good if they're especially prone to it. But it happens to adults quite a bit too. You never really think about it, or notice it, although sometimes you might get a little wave of residual energy from the slip - déjà vu, maybe, or a shiver that crawls down your spine in the middle of a warm day.
But fortunately for you, you've probably never slipped too far. Just into the next reality over. Where there's one minuscule thing different, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Somebody's eye color is different, there's an extra student in your class, maybe you forgot to do something you swore you did.
For the unlucky ones who slip far enough that they realize it, they usually have the good graces to forget about it, never think about it, assume that they're crazy or just have memory problems. The ones who fight it generally don't wind up doing so well. Go talk to a seemingly calm, normal "general schizophrenic" who will tell you that JFK wasn't assassinated and who the current president really should be.
And then there are the extremely unlucky ones. Ones who slip so far there are no replacements. Ones who slip into places where the K-T extinction never happened; or where the Earth never formed (who last all of ten seconds in hard vacuum); or where they don't have any family, and they never existed, and they don't even really exist, waiting on street corners, trying to make sense of what happened.
A lucky few, very few, can slip at will, sliding from world to world without a second thought, exploring a vast multiverse. You might see these ones, they're the ones who show up at parties unexplained and never say their names, and are gone like they never were there in the morning.
And then there is the third minority. Those who slip who aren't human. All kinds of things that you see out of the corner of your eyes. Creatures not meant for this world, this time, this universe. They often don't last long, having fallen through the cracks in reality, but for what they're worth they certainly make an impression on us, lasting ages and ages.
So pay attention to your slips. Those moments where your memory and your life don't match up, where you could have sworn your father's eyes were green and not blue, the times when you pass a street you never noticed before, or see trees in a park where there were none. Because it's not just you.
It's just a slip.
This is true, and it's not really scary. Just strange, take it how you will.
It was a late night, so the traffic was lite and no one was around. I had intended to go see a friend of mine, but half way there, I just couldn't take the pain in my leg. Cold, and in alot of pain I headed back somewhat crying from the pain, mumbling to myself. I was to distracted with getting home to rest my sore legs and painful feet, that I didn't look or pay attention when crossing the highway. When all of a sudden, I looked and a truck was barring down on me... I don't know how, but I was pulled back immediately as the truck slightly missed me. There was no one around and I was to tired and in to much pain to believe I could be capable of moving back so fast and instaneously.
Make of it what you will, self-preservation over powering pain or perhaps a ghost of a loved one. I'd like to think it was a Guardian Angel who grabbed me and pulled me back.
I'm not kidding when it felt like I was jerked back away from my impending doom. It wasn't like running back or jumping back.
It was a late night, so the traffic was lite and no one was around. I had intended to go see a friend of mine, but half way there, I just couldn't take the pain in my leg. Cold, and in alot of pain I headed back somewhat crying from the pain, mumbling to myself. I was to distracted with getting home to rest my sore legs and painful feet, that I didn't look or pay attention when crossing the highway. When all of a sudden, I looked and a truck was barring down on me... I don't know how, but I was pulled back immediately as the truck slightly missed me. There was no one around and I was to tired and in to much pain to believe I could be capable of moving back so fast and instaneously.
Make of it what you will, self-preservation over powering pain or perhaps a ghost of a loved one. I'd like to think it was a Guardian Angel who grabbed me and pulled me back.
I'm not kidding when it felt like I was jerked back away from my impending doom. It wasn't like running back or jumping back.