The man in a windbreaker stepped out into the cold night air. He turned around for just long enough to close the heavy door behind him and lock it. He stood still for a moment, straining his ears as the characteristic clatter of that heavy door thudding close was echoing in his mind even long after the echo of the door disappeared into the distant noises of the distant civilization. Mike Lawson turned around. Before him was a parking lot, surrounded on all sides by walls of unphased concrete, broken at intervals only by black windows. The only escape from this maddening jailroom of concrete was either the starless sky above his head or the driveway of the parking lot, which led shortly onto a road that disappeared around a corner in the concrete maze. Mike inhaled a shaky breath, shoving his cold hands into his windbreaker pockets as he spotted the lonely parking lot’s only vehicle. In this awful prison of concrete, he seemed to be the only human left on the planet. Were it not for the night’s stars mixing into a mellow teal from surrounding light pollution or the sound of his footsteps fading into a distant hum from faraway street cars, he would have assumed he was the last human alive on Earth. No, in fact, were it not for the emotionless concrete walls around him, whose many streaks of sooty black were evidence of the relentlessness with which rain soaks, or the weather-worn asphalt below him, whose scarce blades of grass were evidence of the fervor with which nature reclaims, he would have been certain he was the only human ever to have been alive in history.
He stopped at the door of his Nissan, his reflection staring back at him in the dirty yellow light of the lot’s one street lamp. It was only then did he notice how wide were the eyes of that neatly-shaven Caucasian man in a windbreaker-draped polo who gazed awkwardly back at him. He sighed, looking once back at the door from whence he came. It made absolutely no sense. He sighed once again. He needed to stop trying to make sense of life. That was his failing. With a sigh, he despaired. He opened the car door.
Climbing into the car was as awkward as climbing into cars usually is. Having despaired of taking another long silence, he simply turned the key to bring his beloved blue Nissan to life. When, at last, the car purred to life, a warmth seemed to fill him. With the light and purr of his car having awakened, he almost felt like a child who had spent a night up scared of the dark, only for the child’s father to finally wake up. Hoping to avoid the terrifying lifelessness of a silence at all costs, he turned the radio on and tuned it to sports. It was then he was at least able to occupy his mind as well as his senses on the illusion of something between him and the night.
The drive home was just as monotonous as drives home always are. The roads leading out of the city were nearly desolate. His arms navigated these roads in such unphased automation that he could have performed the whole drive blindfolded and would have never missed a turn. The horror of automation is that it is sightless.
His mind automatically phased between odd and end worldly thoughts with the sports channel eventually becoming merely a backdrop to his sleepy meanderings. He needed a girlfriend, he thought. Something to keep him occupied. Where would get a girlfriend? Working such odd hours made it hard to meet anyone. What girls even did he know? A few from work. And the only one of the three young enough who was remotely cute or attractive already had a boyfriend. Maybe he could start joining the guys at work for a beer. Maybe he could find a girlfriend there. But, even if he did – even if he built up all the nerve to break his automated life of being either at work or at home – what then? What was there about him that could make a girl like him? The other guys at work all had hobbies or were good-looking or visited the gymn. Mike, of course, never considered himself ugly or weak. But he was never so much of a man to consider himself good-looking and he only lifted the scarce weight at home. Maybe he was smart – he did have a bachelor’s education in abstract math, after all – but what would his ability to find the Taylor series of a function be to any odd chick who was interested in hanging out with a group of mostly blue-collar workers at the bar? Being a smart man surrounded by blue-collar workers, he found he had gotten all of the faults of intelligence with none of its benefits. Maybe he could get a hobby? Don’t girls like books? It seemed the beneficial genes to mating had passed him. His conclusion, ultimately, was that he needed to visit the gym.
The rest of the drive was spent in this same monotonous meandering; most of it was entirely uninteresting, with any odd house or mailbox that he passed just being the same old unattractive one-story house or old mailbox as the one he passed every other night after work. This drive home, however, was oddly peculiar in that he felt somewhat alone on the road. Even the scarce few miles he spent on the highway, he was able to merge and exit with no remote possibility of even seeing another car. It was as if a disease had utterly whipped out all the rest of humanity and he was alone, his one little Nissan being the only car on a night-veiled world of roads made for a bustling community of others. It is understandable, then, why the warmness of having his Nissan as a companion was little-by-little revealing itself as a thin veil against the cold of night.
The one time he did see another vehicle was too alarming for his heightened nerves. Out of the blackness of his rearview mirror, a blur of red sparked alive and, as the blur brightened, so too did a steady whine of terror louden. When the road straightened, Mike, who was quaking with panic, pulled over for an ambulance to whirr by him. The blinding emergency vehicle was too caught up in its desperate occupation to even notice him and simply turned off the route up ahead and disappeared into the blackness. Mike’s hands were far too shaky as he signaled his returning to the road. His heart was beating far too fast over the growing purr of his accelerating Nissan. What a cruel twist of fate it was that the only reminder that he was not alone on this road was a reminder that he might soon be one person more alone in this world! The company of his pathetic Nissan was a poor consolation to such a dreadful thought.
But even that poor consolation was soon to be torn away. When, at last, he turned off the twisting maze of roads into the same old driveway into which he pulled every work evening, he breathed a sigh of some of the worst form of exhaustion: an exhaustion which was barred from ever being given rest by heightened nerves. Mike reluctantly cut the engine of his car, killing the sports channel before the long-awaited field goal was kicked. The one story façade in front of him vanished into blackness. The automatic stream that was his absent thought process was all too suddenly cut off and replaced with a swarm of irrational feelings none of which manifested themselves in thought. He pulled himself out of the silent comfort of his little blue Nissan, giving himself only a minute to stand in the cold night wind, which whistled through the tops of the trees around him as he was out in the middle of positively nowhere. Assuredly, now, he was the last human on Earth. He gazed up towards the sky with dread; the stars were being choked out by a veil of clouds. The passing breeze was not so therapeutic the next time it whistled over his bare skin. And, as that dreaded observation dawned on him, he hastily locked his car and scampered up to what could have been called a front porch, before slipping into the comfort of his home.
He was greeted by an empty living space to his right, whose two small couches and black television screen were vaguely illuminated in the ominously warm glow of the kitchen’s one light. He shivered as the distant hum of the air conditioning cut-off leaving him in the complete silence that is civilization.
For some odd reason, he could not move. He felt as if he was having a guest over, but he knew not whom. The living room seemed so maddeningly neat, but, in the awkward light of the room beyond, it felt almost as if it was not laid out for him. Any detail that would have made it homely – the colors of the carpet and couch, the screen of the television, the warmth of the empty fireplace – seemed to be all rendered purposeless and unintentional in the glow of the light which seemed to hit them by accident. It seemed as if he was on a date with nobody. Not even himself. He sighed, throwing his windbreaker over the couch as he crept into the kitchen.
He must’ve left the light on before leaving. Ignoring the accident, he yanked the kettle up by the neck and filled it slowly up. The sound of the water lessening in pitch was the only noise which penetrated the night. It was not until the water ran over the top of the kettle did he cut the sink off, returning the night to a silence that was filled only by the jostling water in a nervous kettle and the tap of footsteps on his kitchen floor. He crossed the room to his stove and slammed the kettle down, waiting in an awkward silence as the clicking of the gas lighter gave triumphant way to a steady blue flame beneath the greasy metal stovetop. He turned to the freezer long enough to pull out a microwave dinner and turned to the microwave only long enough to microwave said dinner.
Within the five or so minutes that the silence was filled by the whisper of the stovetop flame and the hum of the microwave oven, Mike escaped into the living room, flicking on the one overhead light with an awkwardly loud click. In the new-found light, the room seemed jarred out of its past state of solitary darkness, as if it were a sleeper trying to pull the covers over his head. Shedding light over that lifeless fireplace and those personless sofas turned out to be hardly the cure to this room’s purposelessness that Mike thought it would be. Mike crossed the room, yanked up the remote and turned on the television.
Funny. Wi-Fi’s down. When turned on, all that stared at him through that once lifeless screen was a notice that he was unable to connect. Several attempts at trying his password proved utterly futile. Unable to connect. He wrestled with this predicament only long enough to start to feel silly on that couch before the kettle and the microwave simultaneously whined and beeped.
Seeing as that he was in the kitchen, he took the liberty to survey his Wi-Fi server to be immediately presented with the root of his problem in the form of a single flickering pinprick of light, where he hoped to have found five full glows. He sighed. He made a noble attempt at not thinking about what he would do to spend his night without television. But that attempt was rendered fruitless after his plate was soon clean and his cup of tea quickly empty.
A futile try at turning on the radio confirmed that the internet situation was inherent to all his household. As almost a force of nervous habit, he started another cup of green tea, and sat back, wondering what he ought to do with the few hours that lay out before him. Going immediately to bed seemed somehow dreadful. He could not say just how; it simply did. He was paranoid about wasting this night under the covers. But what else could he do? He could try call his mom. But he rarely ever called her. And besides, any hope of getting cellular signal was likely vain, considering his luck. But he might as well try. The only answer he received was the eerie whistle of a dial tone. He was a helpless man trying to call his parent, surrounded on all sides by the night. So, it seemed, all hope of contact with any world beyond this little island of manufactured light was utterly vain. He glanced once out the small window, his only means of seeing the black world beyond in this small yellow prison of a kitchen. Through that window, he saw but the faintest impression of a shifting sea of trees, which stilled and waved with ominous unpredictability. With a shiver, he stood up and hobbled around this awkward barrier of the table to yank the curtains closed. At last, his water finished boiling. Perhaps a single cup of tea was what he needed to solace the night.
As the tea steeped, he purposed to find a book within his bedroom shelves to glut his lack of entertainment. Very little of it seemed interesting: most were math textbooks that he knew cover-to-cover. A Holy Bible lay in a neglected corner, having been a gift from one of the few people outside of work to whom he had spoken in the last few months. He rarely since then remembered touching the book and it simply sat there as a reminder of a short span in his life when he was playing with the idea of going to church. He scrupled picking it out tonight, but the mere thought was awkward. Where, even, would he start? The Bible is no light reading. And, with how little he knows of religion, he would probably not get much of anything out of it anyway. What, did he expect to finish the Bible this night and then move onto all of Dante’s Divine Comedy next? And with how little of a source of entertainment scripture seemed, he suspected it would simply make the night feel all the lonelier. All of this considered, he merely reached a shaky arm up to one of the few cheap fiction novels which his scanty collection boasted.
A chapter or so of this was spent in the silence of the night, with the only sound being his sipping of tea. But, as soon as the last dregs of his warm green tea were washed away, the dread of the night returned. He frowned into his teacup and then down at the third-to-last page before the start of the next chapter. Hobbling off to bed sounded like a nightmare; the only thing that sounded worse was staying awake. He therefore judged sleep the most fitting option.
He spent an awful few minutes in the restroom reliving himself of two cups of tea and brushing his teeth. His hands were shaky as he washed out the toothbrush under the sink and set it to the side with a click. He stood still, looking down at the empty bowl of the sink, seeing a grotesque disfigurement of his face staring back at him from the shiny sink spout. He was alone with this silent disfigured character. His stomach was turning. His intestines twisted and lurched. The longer he thought, the sicker he felt until he had to balance himself on the edge of the sink, queasiness making the ground rock like the deck of a vessel. He gazed up at his face in the mirror to see the wide whites of that man’s eyes surrounded by skin wet and shiny with perspiration. Splashing water over his face a number of times, however, succeeded in smoldering the fiery heat underneath his skin and easing the nauseating discomfort within his head. What was his problem? It made absolutely no sense.
The terror of reliving himself to bed was growing all the more intense. As he exited the loo, he eased the bathroom door closed, letting the rattling of its hinges reverberate eternally in his memory. He had to steady himself on the wall beside him to convince himself that he was still inhabited the body which he had possessed all his life. He staggered through the kitchen and into the foyer with only the doorway at the other end from the entrance in his sight. As soon as he reached that doorway, he would be safe for tonight and never again need to fear this dark which was besieging his home and seeping its way in with every light switch he flicked off.
He was just feet away from the bedroom door. He could reach out his hand and touch the doorknob with his fingertips. But all at once moment, a sound from behind made him leap. All his world focused on that one sound.
The fortress that was his bland single-story home was under siege. He wheeled around to see the front doorway that cut off this foyer from the night air. The sound was a faint murmur of voices from within that night air.
It seemed an eternity of freezing in that foyer before he heard the sound return. Should he answer it? Not a widow punctured the wall around the door to give him a revelation of whatever creature owned that muffled voice.
It seemed like hours, but it must have only been ten minutes. He pulled out his phone, entered his pin, clicked the phone app, and dialed 911.
An eerie dial tone was all that filled the night. An eerie dial tone and nothing more.
The murmur died away.
Mike put his phone away, seeing he must resolve on one option. He waited, like a deer in the sights of a rifle, straining for even a whisper of that well-known unknown sound which had once threatened his impenetrable fortress of lifeless civilization. Another apparent hour passed before he inched slowly to the door, straining to jump away from that awful portal to the night at the slightest notice of a noise. He reached the door and, for an ominous moment, pressed his ear to its cold surface; the maddened hammering of his heart, however, destroyed any hope of hearing aught past that lifeless barrier from the land of unknown chaos. He brought his finger up to the door’s lock. He grimaced as it clambered open, its clamber being one of the most bombastically deafening noises of his life, second only to the creak of the door.
He poked his naked head out into the coldness of the night, a white-knuckled grip around the door that he hoped to slam closed at a moment’s notice.
“Hello? I – Is somebody there…?”
Darkness and nothing more answered him. A cold night’s wind cruelly rushed over his face, enraged at this pathetic mortal for disturbing the beast of blackness from its slumber. In a maddened furry, he slammed the door closed, cutting off all hope of the night to murmur any longer.
He threw the lock down and sighed. He turned around and fell backwards, the door being the only object keeping from sinking to the floor. But it would not remain. With the lock still barred, his exhausted nerves were jarred awake by the clicking of the doorknob. And, before even he had time enough to process this movement, the door fell away and he dropped into blackness, never able to remember anything more than that moment.
The world – with the term “world” used with cruel looseness – finally returned to his senses. The first object he observed was that he was in the thick of a blackness, with his face pressed heavily against a splintered wooden floor. The throbbing pain of a headache seemed to numb all the rest of his senses so that further observation only graced him in the tense intervals between throbs. He coughed out his first few breaths, the pain in his head becoming nearly explosive as the coughing fit subsided. He tried to groan once, but his throat forbade the action with another cough. He tried to bring his hand up to rub his head but a fit of confusion swarmed his mind when he realized his hands were both impossible to move. His first assumption was that this was merely the fog of having slept on them; but, as his sore arms slowly awoke, as his bleak eyesight slowly adjusted, and as his foggy thoughts slowly formulated, he realized that his wrists were tied together behind his back with a cord that cut off blood from his numb hands. With the fit of horror that is confusion, his newly adjusted eyesight revealed to him a glimmer off in the darkness. He strained to focus on it. A glimmer off in the darkness. His eyes adjusted to the light. The glimmer cast a dancing glow on wooden floorboards below it and the wall behind it. He dragged the side of his head against this painful floorboard to see that these candles on the ground around him formed a circle of sorts. Straining his head to the right allowed him the first view of the roof since he awoke. And with this view, he took a sharp intake of fearful breath.
Above his head was a blood-red read snake standing beside a pyramid; it took him several moments in the fearful darkness to realize that they were painted on the wooden ceiling, although he knew not how high above his head and he knew not how they were painted. Perhaps it was the foul scent of iron that filled the air, but something about this room suggested that the icon above was not written in mere red paint. He squirmed to achieve a finer focus of the symbol above his head. That awful snake was maniacally cryptic, like an unknown hieroglyph of some ancient society. He realized, at once, that the snake was forming the letter ‘S’ and that the pyramid looked to his math-trained mind like the Greek letter Delta. Written below that ominous icon was a foreboding line of symbols, he recognized as Greek, some of which he recognized. Written above it was an unexplained “JK” with an exponent of negative one, all written in the very same ornately ominous font as the letters which adorned the space below those two iconic symbols. His mathematical education could attain him enough to perhaps recognize what these symbols were supposed to be but – as he realized with growing desperation – never enough to know for certain what they were, whence they came, nor for what reason they came. He stared at that snake in the faint candlelight, with the image forever seared on his memory. That awful ‘∆S’ painted over that splintered wood roof and lit dimly in the candlelight seemed grow and grow until it was larger than all the universe and became the eternal waterfall of black annihilation over which every last sight on this endless stream would tumble. It grew – nay, perhaps the rest of the world shrank – until he could see nothing else. The longer he spent in that lifeless cabin, the more it seemed that the world had already shrank into nothing more than this tiny candlelit séance room.
No, he must not sit there and sulk! He at least had to find out where he was! Perhaps, if only just perhaps, he was still alive and still able to escape. He glanced to the wall above his head to find, with growing desperation, that if he was still alive, he had little chance of expecting that to be the remaining state for long. It was crowded with wall hangings of knives of all sizes and lengths, whose glistening blades were painted with those same ominous two symbols as the roof above his head. Some of these knives were quite recently used, as the blood splatters about their blades were fresh and glistening red like rubies. The ropes about his wrists grew tighter. In a furry of desperation, he glanced to the wall below his feet, feeling all the more disorientated to see a window out which he expected to plummet. The glass of this window glinted with the reflections of candles. He tried to jerk his head about in an attempt to see the wall behind him, but his aching neck screamed in retaliation to the maneuver, and he had to delay for a few moments of throbbing pain only to renew the attempt by rolling over slowly and with many groans until he was just able to witness the desired sight. The room’s one door, just barely noticeable in the darkness, broke the madness of this small butcher’s den of wood. If only he could just untie himself and try the latch! Then, maybe he could make it out of the sight of this horrific snake. He dared not look away from that long-desired portal to the outside world; but, even with his eyes adverted, he knew the snake was staring down at him. And, with rising panic, he knew he might never escape that snake’s sight. But he had to at least try!
But all at once, his heart sank: the faintest sliver of light. It appeared under the door, a glimmer. A glimmer, which flickered like someone was pacing with a lamp in the other room. When, at last, he noticed the light, his ears could decipher also the faint murmurs of voices beyond that door. They could have been speaking Russian for all he knew; hardly a world of their meaning was able to penetrate the surface of that door. But, from the energy of the two or so footsteps he heard shaking these floorboards, he knew they were excited. Whether with joy or rage, he could not hope to discern. Mike squirmed, biting his lip to keep from groaning. He had to think of some way to escape before that door flew open!
The moment that doorknob turned he knew would be his end. Perhaps the window would suffice for an escape? Could he shatter the glass? But how would he relinquish the bondage of these burning chords that had him like a boar on a butcher’s table? The thought of those knives returned to mind. Something about a knife made it unimaginably more terrifying than any larger weapon. Knives were instruments of meticulous attention to detail. Had he seen a row of dirty hatchets lining that wall, he could know these fiends simply hoped to dismember quickly and brutishly. But the fact that they wielded knives revealed to him that they were intent not merely o killing him, but on dissecting him. He grimaced to think of how slowly these monsters would conduct the first incision to his throat or the inevitable removal of his heart. Realizing their awful attention to detail made escaping the wrath of those murmuring voices and their bloody knives seem all the more hopeless. But could he not think of at least something? His heart hammered in his chest as his mind raged with a thousand thoughts and worries as to his plan of escape; his brain felt like a poorly maintained plain having to take hastily to the skies before an oncoming air raid. Any moment a clicking doorknob would announce the inevitable brandishing of a scalpel. Surely, he could find a means to cut the bonds of ropes in a room full of candlelit knives. Yes! That was it! The candles!
The idea flitted into the mix of exhaustion and panic that was his mind as if it were whispered by some universal voice of reason. With a painful groan, he squirmed and squirmed all the more, struggling to pass his feet between his wrists so that he may reach his arms out to the glimmer of light before him. The voices still murmured in the other room as his heart still hammered in his ear. Like a helpless foul in a cage. Like a helpless foul who was jamming its head into the bars to escape. He groaned, his knees against his chest with the soles of his boots catching against the ropes about his hands. The murmuring voices began to shout as if these evil accomplices were devolving into argument. His hands freed themselves from the grip of his boot’s tip. He reached out for the light in front of him, its warmth just outside of reach of his fingertips. The shouts grew in ferocity. If they were to speak so heartlessly to eachother, imagine what terror they would enact on their sacrifice’s next victim. The victim squirmed, the splintered wooden floor inching painfully along below his bare arms and face. A rusted nail jabbed a bruise on his arm which he only noticed when it was so aggravated. He bit his lip to retain a scream as, at last, the tiny glimmer was close enough that he could bring the chords about his wrists to its flaming surface. It seemed an eternity in that tiny cabin as he felt the grip on his wrists loosen, caring little for how much the heat around his wrists burned. The sharp smell of smoke filled the small space, forcing him to cut off his breath. With a whelming rush of joy, his hands separated, the grip of the rope being cut away. His heart hammered. The shouts grew. He brought his feet near a candle not far below the one just before his face. The smell of smoke filled his nostrils making him grimace, resisting a cough. It felt like an eternity of holding his feet to the little flame, in despairing hopes to free his sorry limbs from this ever-weakening grip before the click of that nob rang out. But, just as the grip seemed to grow weak enough for escape, the shouting in the other room was suddenly cut off. A question from one voice killed the tirade; it seemed as if both men had abandoned their argument and were straining to hear, or perhaps to smell. The victim held his breath. At last, at long last, the grip about his feet broke away. He kicked off the rope and pulled himself to a kneel, the rush of adrenaline causing him to ignore any bit of the pain which filled his every limb and hammered in his aching brain at his weak attempt to stand. But, as he pulled his feet underneath him, seconds passing like hours, all of eternity flashed by in a moment when the door beside him gave a slight click and a sequel.
The sliver of light blinded his view to his right. He took no moment to notice the figure in that doorway; to him, the figure was but a lifeless ghost, an apparition of inevitable death. He simply set his eyes on the room’s one escape and bolted, his every last irrational hope focused on the delicate glassy veil between him and freedom into the slavery of the outside world.
March 8th, 1998
St. Ana’s Mental Hospital
Patient No. 465
Name: NA
Age: Approx. 25
Sex: M
Weight: 86.4 Kg
Relations: NA
Possible Diagnosis: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Epilepsy, Schizophrenia, Thought Disorder or Psychosis
Symptoms: Heightened anxiety, Paranoid delusions, Delusions of reference, Persecutory delusions, Incoherent and disorganized speech, and Possible vivid hallucinations
Notes: At 6:45 AM of March 7th, 2024, 911 received a report of a body, male, found on the side of Briton Rd. in Bridgewater County. When medical personnel arrived, the patient was conscious. The patient was reportedly bleeding profusely from scratches on the arms and was struggling to stand erect, possibly due to exhaustion or fatigue. Reportedly, the patient continuously insisted that he was the target of a murder attempt, giving vivid and visceral descriptions of his supposed place of kidnapping and capture. The patient reportedly proceeded to insist on this despite being told the contrary. After being found, the patient soon lost consciousness and was sent to St. Ana’s General Hospital.
At 7:50 AM, blood tests run at St. Ana’s General Hospital confirmed a dangerous presence of Phenobarbital in excess of 40 mcg/mL in the patient’s system. The patient was quickly administered Intravenous fluids (IVs), intubation, and laxatives (see St. Ana’s General Hospital report on Patient No. 465 for medicinal specifications and concentrations). The patient was put on ventilation for the remainder of the night until 9:00 AM when phenobarbital levels were deemed low enough to administer the patient into St. Ana’s Mental Hospital, where the patient currently resides, being still administered IVs and appropriate medication (see end of report for specifications on medications).
Mike’s body was laying below him. Laying below him was his body. He could not kneel down. He could not look down at his hands or his feet; his hands and his feet were sitting right there on the splintered wooden floor, bound like a butchered boar. He was floating just above the body he had always called his; he tried to squirm away from the scene, but he could not squirm. His arms and legs – if he had them – were utterly paralyzed. And the body was utterly lifeless.
Dried blood was oozing from a thin slit in the throat. Besides that, not an incision more marred the delicate surface of this inevitable victim of dissection. Nothing was half so horrific as the eyes that he so often remembered seeing in the mirror open, a look of horror at their life’s final sight forever evident on their white surface. That was his very own face! His stomach grew sick at the thought, threatening to vomit away the contents from within his spectral body. He tried to advert his eyes from the sight, but they would not advert; he could not even blink in retaliation to this view. This view of his very own face. His very own body, the very one which he drove home and so abused by pumping full of microwave dinners and ungodly servings of green tea. The very body which once was his only companion since first it took on the grab of a tiny naked infant: it lay on the floor full-grown and dead. Those very hands which once clutched the wheels of his car, and the edge of his sink were now clasped together in silent prayer to a god he knew didn’t exist. Those very feet which once found their place crossed on his ottoman and staggering on the restroom floor were now bound together, not even able to kick in retaliation for the cold touch of the scalpel to his throat. That face, that very same face which he saw in the window of his car door and in the mirror of his restroom, its bare Caucasian surface wet with a drench of perspiration and its wide white eyes aghast with the horror of finality. He still had no idea what it was that he feared that night that he looked on his own face in the mirror; but whatever it was, he knew from this corpse’s expression that his last moments were spent fearing the exact same thing.
The spectral eyes of Mike gazed slowly up – or did the physical world of his body lower slowly down? – and the body disappeared below his view into blackness for but a moment as his extramarital gaze followed its ominously slow course on a meridian running from the floor to the ceiling. Where once there were walls, there was utter blackness. But such was not so for the ceiling. As his gaze rose higher, he gasped with horror to unveil a sight of infinitely more terror than a mere hieroglyph on a wooden ceiling.
Slowly, slowly, the whole of the terrifying image was shifting into view. The blackness was not right in front of his face like a veil: it was beyond him, far beyond him, engulfing not simply all of a small room, but all of the beloved outside world, in its eternal black bosom of impermanence and filling him with a terror that his dead form was the last thing to be engulfed. And high, high above his head was the engulfer.
A snake swam, no flew, and danced about spiraling and twirling high above in the abyss, dancing in horrific triumph over its victim of eternity. As this distant dancing daemon crossed his sight, far away, from beyond infinity, a low throbbing chant could be heard when utter silence prevailed before. He could not hear the words of the chant – nobody could, for nobody was left to hear. But the Snake heard it, and it filled this beast with a horrific, child-like glee for it danced all the more, twirling, spiraling, and spinning into shapes that were fantastic and absurd, obscene and grotesque for mere human eyes to unveil. And all at last, with no warning whatsoever, Mike gasped as the beast lunged out from where it was and swallowed all his sight between the fangs of that unlocked jaw, engulfing all his blackened world in utter blackness.
“Dr. Davis. Dr. Clyde. Afternoon, ladies. Mind if I sit here?”
The two attractive young ladies could not resist a smile as they answered in almost rehearsed unison.
“Not at all, Dr. Lewis.”
Dr. Lewis smiled sardonically, internally commending himself for his cunning. He set his meal tray down and slipped into the chair across from these two faces that had become such warmly familiar sights since first they started training six months ago. He pretended to ignore the two ladies as he proceeded to pull out the patient files and skim them through. The lively clatter of the cafeteria was their only backdrop as the two ladies proceeded to unknowingly torment the man with a return of his ignorance, setting themselves simply to a silent enjoyment of their meals. Fearing that he had taken the age-old strategy of ignorance too far, Dr. Lewis took his chance to strike up conversation.
“Either of you ladies seen the patient just brought in? The one found on the side of Brighton Road?”
Dr. Davis, defeated with her lack of privilege to responding, simply shook her head and directed her gaze to the triumphant Dr. Clyde, who answered with as much formality as a subordinate should answer the hospital’s most seasoned Doctor, given the hypothetical circ*mstance that said seasoned Doctor is not extremely good-looking.
“I did. I was part of those who helped receive him.”
Pretending to only just notice her, Dr. Lewis responded, “Oh? And what do you think of him?”
Dr. Clyde, perhaps wishing to torture her rival, responded with trace amounts of girlish glee, “What do you mean?”
Lewis allowed his unphased gaze to advert to her face long enough to reward her forwardness. “I mean what do you think got him where he is? Not every day you get a man loaded with barbiturates and covered in scrapes like he was thrown through a window. What do you think happened to that guy?”
“I believe it is really a little obvious; he’s psychotic. Probably schizophrenic. He’s delusional and probably thinks he’s got some special privilege of some kind. Pretty soon we’ll get some calls at a farm somewhere about a man who had fallen through a window and stolen loads of drugs, talking on about some evil cult that’s coming for him, and the whole thing’ll be explained.”
A brief silence passed. Dr. Davis, seeking any chance she could to intervene in the exchange, brought her own opinion, if only for the sake of contradicting Dr. Clyde.
“But can your theory explain why he was found with so much phenobarbital and only phenobarbital? People have that around to put down dogs not normally to get high. And why was he talking about cults in the first place?”
Clyde nobly defended her statement: “He’s insane, Marry. Insane people do crazy things. What do you think he did? What, was he actually captured by some cult as a sacrifice to Cthulhu or something?”
Marry stuttered for just a moment, scrupling whether it would have been wise to bicker such an obviously loosing debate. At last, noticing that Dr. Lewis had silently taken the bantering as a means to put a cheeseburger between himself and the two-sided conversation, she decided to divert her opponent by maturely seeking the opinion of an elder.
“What do you think he did, Dr. Lewis?”
Lewis set the paper down, his food poised in mid-air, stone frozen. For a moment – and that was just a moment, even if it was an awful moment – his signature air of nonchalance dropped, being penetrated by a couple of nervous stutters. But such a cunning fox as he did not soon yield to embarrassment, and he regained his façade of carelessness by proceeding to peruse the patient catalogue while offering the first response he could think of which was ridden with carelessness.
“I guess I think Clyde’s right. He’s schizophrenic.”
The unspoken triumph of Clyde and the unspoken defeat of Davis was numbed slightly by the carelessness which Lewis seemed to offer to both ladies. But triumph and defeat were still undeniably present, even if it was only just a tad and even if it was only for a moment. For the fleeting course of their conversation’s remainder, however, the two ladies were fortunately able to lay aside their friendly rivalry for the sake of employee bantering.
At last, after he had finished his meal and most of the catalogue, Dr. Lewis sat back and stretched.
“So, are you ladies doing anything this evening?”
The two ladies glanced between eachother, the former dichotomy of defeat and triumph now rearing its head with greater fervor. Davis was the first to answer.
“Got dinner with the family. Parents are coming over.”
The disappointment in her voice betrayed how sincerely she abhorred her parents as opposed to other options. Clyde, however, was quite eager to shyly respond, “I’m free this evening.”
Lewis sighed, finally deciding it untactful to make such a dramatic maneuver on such a quick whim in the presence of such a rival. Besides, he thought as he glanced at the golden glimmer on Clyde’s middle finger. Since last year’s run-in with Mr. Willis, he’d made a resolution that married women weren’t worth it.
“Kay, great. I heard some of the others at the office were thinking of having a party tonight. I won’t be going, but you can talk to Marice if you’re interested.”
The disappointment and relief that each respective lady felt went quite without saying. Dr. Lewis stood and stretched, pretending not to notice, and succeeding not to care for the heart that he had so aggravated and the social rules he had so ignored.
“I gotta get back to work, though. See you ladies round.”
A quick farewell traveled in his wake. With that brief interlude having now passed, the two ladies proceeded to dine as if nothing had disrupted their two respective lives in the first place.
Mike was surrounded by a crowd of all sorts of heights ranging from the dwarf to the giant and colors ranging from the blurriest of white to the smudgest of brown. This crowd filed down the middle hall and, from thence, filled up each and every pew with the fluidity of a river in the foreknowledge of a routine. Somehow, the threat that was this routine river was daunting enough a crowd to make filing into a church pew in a small hall into an act of complete social dread. With each church member that filed into his seat just where he always knew routine determined he ought, alienation from the status quo seemed to grip Mike all the more. He was forced to allow the flow of human bodies pull him into its meandering flow and have him swept into the middle of the second-to last pew near the front.
Around him was a murmuring group of faces, none of which were now turned his direction. In having now each found their habitual seats, the crowd of conversational churchgoers proceeded to prove that routine and discipline are both certainly separable. Parents chattered, children laughed, babies cried, all filling the low candlelit wooden rafters with the fuzzied resonance of their voices. Seeing as that he was surrounded by chatter on all sides but barred from being able to engage it, he set himself to passively taking in the sight of the sunlight filling in through the arched stained-glass windows to his left. The windows surrounding the small church room are white blotches in his sight, just as the faces filling the pews are brown smears. This alienation was a perpetual state, making the burning wish for the service to start fill him with a deeper intensity. That was all until a warm baritone voice sounded from his right.
“Hello. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”
Mike feared he leapt as he glanced to the source of the sound, beholding the warm smile of a face, a face which represented the darker sign of the diverse spectrum of skin tones in this Baptist crowd. Speech was caught on Mike’s tongue. The stranger, however, seemed not to notice as he extended a warm handshake.
“My name’s Noah. What’s yours?”
He shook the hand, a firm hand, and responded that his name was Mike.
“It’s great to meet you, Mike. Have you ever been to First Ridge Baptist Church before?”
Mike replied that he hadn’t. Hiding greater complexities regarding his thoughts towards religion, Mike simply informed the stranger that he was looking around for churches. His expectations of the stranger pouring out an exhaustive testimony regarding his experience with church were adverted by the gentleman’s welcoming reply consisting simply of, “Well, I hope you find something worthwhile here.”
Mike and the stranger exchanged a few more kind words before their conversation ended in the warm welcome that Mike knew was offered him but felt he could not accept past its simple civilities. Not long afterwards, the churchroom – as if entirely on cue – fell completely silent, save a few crying children being shuffled out of the room by reverent parents. Mike held his head down as a muffled clatter filled the rafters with any sitting members now standing to their feet. He, however, was jarred out of his absent state when the whole room exploded into a scripture reading, forcing him to look up and try to mimic the scriptures being recited as best he could. A broad man in a tan suit and black tie appeared at the front of the church, behind the lectern. After the reading passed, he gave a simple and reverent command.
“Family, let’s worship the LORD.”
The introduction sounded on a piano, filling the rafters with the harmonious thud of hymn-like chords under a warmly familiar melody. All in a gentle chorus, the whole of the church room filled with the lines of What a Friend we Have in Jesus. The affectionate and beautiful lines of verse floated through the blurry air around Mike, with him feeling like an island of isolation among faces which greeted a friend he could not see. He simply swayed to the music’s gentle rhythm, hands in his pockets, as he let the words pass over his ears, putting in his mind a hoard of unaffected Westernized illustrations of a Middle Eastern moral teacher.
He would have never, until then, claimed not to like hymns. In fact, he still remembers with fondness those old days he spent at college where he would study in the empty chapel on Saturdays specifically because it was full of no sound other than the gentle resonances of the church organist practicing Sunday’s repertoire. But he was now steadily realizing that he quite disliked being expected to sing hymns. Until he made that realization, it seemed almost mysterious why all those voices around him seem to pass over his ears turning the silence of his own voice steadily into a silence of social anxiety and not of reverence. But it was this very uncomfortable situation which seemed to teach him quite a bit more about the difference between himself and those people around him. That difference being quite simply this: he took no pleasure in adorning a God whom he had never seen in his life.
Within that tiny church pew, frustration was beginning to grind his teeth. Not a word passed those lips as his swaying halted, the words of the hymn passing around him like a stream flowing about a stone. He almost feared sharp tears would fill his eyes, and his show of emotion would be all too quickly evident, and all too quickly misinterpreted by the kind churchgoers from outside the blurry sphere of his perception. But, like a man – and a respectful man, at that – he held his feelings back, giving place only to the blunt and emotionless thoughts and questions which motivated these feelings. Despite his admiration for religion and the church, he was finding the promises of “Having faith” to be hopelessly empty. He had come to church hoping to find God. Instead, he simply found empty rafters into which hymns floated with merely the hopes that they could reach the ear of a God whose face has never touched anyone’s eyes, whose hands have never blessed anyone’s touch, and whose voice had never reached anyone’s ears. In short, he was quite convinced that church was simply not for him.
As he pondered this thought, all the voices of the church around him slowly faded into a foggy mess. Filled with a sudden desperate panic, he tried to open his eyes. These curtains which he had voluntarily clenched closed against hot tears, remained heedless to his wish to now have them pulled open. Control of his own body was slipping from his grasp. His limbs were frozen as the pressure that Earth once exerted against his feet now lay over his body and chest like a blanket. The dull thud of the piano over the soft shine of the melody soon faded until it was nothing but an absent hum. Over the hum, he thought he heard voices. A baritone and a couple others; perhaps he even heard the laughter of a feminine voice. Soon, however, all perception, like an island in the sight of a helpless vessel drifting in the fog, disappeared from view, dissolving entirely into blackness.
“How are his phenobarbital levels?”
“Below 40 now.”
“Mm. I see.”
“Do you think he’ll make it?”
“Still can’t be sure. Whatever he did to himself, pumping himself full of barbiturates was only one of them.”
“He looks more stable since this morning.”
“We can’t be certain of anything. He’s had his reprises. All we can do is keep a steady IV on him and keep a close eye in case if he wakes up. Even then, I’m not holding high hopes for him.”
“… D – Doctor, did you hear that a gentleman who knew him came in today?”
“Mhm?”
“Yes, he said he was a priest… Father something-or-other used to see him come to Mass.”
“Mm, does this Father ‘Something-or-other’ happen to know our friend’s name?”
“He just said he’d seen him in Mass. He never said he knew his name.”
“Well, you should have asked.”
“Sorry. I will try to find the priest’s exact name.”
“No need. It’s – It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
“W-with all due respect, are you sure it is? I mean, we can’t be sure – “
“I said no need, darling. Priests are very busying people, and we’ll learn this guy’s name soon enough if it ever becomes that important.”
“I know, but…”
“But what? Do you think I’m wrong?”
“No…”
Mike knelt on his knees, listening to the distant resonances of Father Brooke’s voice, floating from afar like the whistles of winds from high beyond the mountains. He opened his clenched eyes once to see the grandiose gothic hall, vibrantly and horrifically alight in the blood red of the stained glass; the crimson flood painted all the sharp knife-like angles of the arches just over the windows and the vaults high above his head in the stark dramatic clarity of the ominous gothic blackness. Sitting utterly alone at a far end of the church, the whole of the service was distant in its grandiosity; it was in just the same way that the mighty heavens or a long-awaited dream may feel just as entirely distant as they feel utterly grandiose. The eucharist was but a tiny glimmer of gold in front of the faraway tabernacle. The voice of the priest was but a distance murmur in the cavernous vaults. The windows above his head, which dwarfed his tiny, robed figure in timeless religious imagery, seemed only about as small as a thin slit. And high above the head of the priest, hanging from the roof on display for all to see, was a distant cross, on which was displayed a model of that very Middle Eastern religious teacher himself. From this distance, Mike could only just make out the face of that dead figure.
But the more he thought, the more welcoming the image of that man nailed to a cross seemed. If God existed, that would be Him for sure; nailed to a splintered wooden piece, helpless to save himself. Despite how those in the faraway pews may disagree, God is quite helpless. From that moment and forever onward, the only image that would come to mind upon thinking of “God” would be that of a naked, bloody, tortured man who was literally nailed to his device of inevitable death. And he may never be able to understand how churches can display such obvious proof of God’s weakness with such apparent pride and confidence.
Mass is ended and the reverent tones of the organ joined the choir, raising praises above in an ancient and long-passed tongue that Mike was hopeless to understand. He simply lay his forehead against his clenched fist, letting the music wash over not simply his ears, but the whole of his body. The throb of the mighty organ’s pedals rolled out like thunder from the great bombards, which crossed the entire length of the cathedral from some unseen depths within the belly of this cross-shaped beast and which shook the very seat below his elbows with their great throb. The moans of the foreign syllables floated into the air like fog from the choir’s innumerable voices, who became with eachother one vast instrument whose song the very beast’s stones took up and who disappeared behind the very essence of eternity within that ancient tongue. For once, Mike did not need to understand the words. The very resonance itself – perhaps even the very fact that the resonance was so foreign – made him feel as if he were exiting his body and floating into the vaults above. But, just then, truth became comfort’s executioner as a moment of panic was starting to wash him over; something unspeakably foreign and vast was surrounding him and filling the very bones of his body. A panic filled him that he might never be the same after this; he might never again be able to kick off his shoes and sit down to the television without another care in the world. He clenched his fists and closed his eyes, not daring to let him be terrorized by that image of emptiness and infinitude that was the great belly of this black beast. The helpless face of God appeared in his mind time and time again, making his stomach turn. The empty, sorrowful tones of the choir were but the mighty harmonies of a funeral that has lasted for 2,000 years – no, for all of human history. And, now that he had most certainly seen the face of God in the coffin, he could not return to his seat without a hope of later going home to distract himself from that awful sight.
No! No! He remembers this! He was sitting in Mass and nearly had a panic attack, but it turned out alright, of course it did! He wavered between depression and anxiety for a few weeks afterwards, unable to shake away that awful loneliness that had stuck itself to him in that terrible, vast cathedral, but soon enough, he got over it! It was not long before he was able to come home again and turn on the television without a care in the world. Soon enough, he would be himself again. This anxiety was nothing more than a short spike in an otherwise completely flat line. He would open his eyes when the choir would stop singing and he would shuffle his way home.
But the choir never stopped. The quaking roar of that organ and the melancholy chants of those voices only imbued themselves more and more into the air until the very breaths he took resonated with those foreign tones of eternity. He clutched his eyes shut, leaning all the more on this cold pew in front of him, with his head pressed against his clenched hands until it began to ache. He could hear his heart hammering in his chest and his brow moist with sweat as that vulnerable little stomach of his turned and tossed. But all at once, the church pew vanished, and he fell face forward onto the cold stone floor.
The world around him began to spin. He could secure it all by opening his eyes, if only he would look up and face the front of that church with an unwavering gaze, if only he would dare to stare down that massive empty hall overlooked by that infamously dead God, if only he would wake up, the world would cease to spin, turn, and twist. But he desperately held his face against the cold stone floor, sprawled out like a dead body in a world that tossed and turned as if the Earth were thrown off from the sun. He would not dare save himself from the immediate inevitable destruction if it would come at the price of its mere delayal!
But, as the world spun onward into a greater dizzying spiral with the resonating chants of the choir growing more deranged by the syllable, his grip on reality was slipping all too quickly. And, in a spirt of pure panic, he let the veil before his eyes drop away. And, oh the horror of that one ill-strengthed decision! He may never regret anything more than looking up from that awful stone floor. For, the moment he looked up, the whole world ceased to spin, like a ship run aground. And, when it did so, the view of the cathedral had entirely vanished while the chants of the choir had only grown clearer.
Lacrimosa Dies Illa
Before him were the black depths of that eternal world in which that infinitude of throatless voices resonated with their terrible chant. Before him was the true end of all eternity and all existence. Before him was utter blackness, shrouding all but an ancient step pyramid atop of which sat a massive red snake, who sat above like the sun atop a cloud. The snake glared down at him, and he cowered, knowing that, at once, a thousand eyes were watching him from behind that veil of darkness and that not a single living or nonliving being existed beyond this small strip of stone. The snake began its awful dance as he held his breath, shaking all over. His heart was hammering in his chest enough to fill him with panic lest it burst, forcing tremors through his every limb to where he could not even bring two legs beneath his body, let alone bring two hands beneath his elbows. He coughed, watching a splatter of vomit stain the dirty stone all around him. But all at once, the horror of his sickness was entirely averted by a distraction which made him feel as if his insides were melting away.
The tones of the choir were no longer that of the elegant melancholy of the Catholic mass. Rather every last tone of elegance and beauty had vanished, being replaced with the complete descent into savage villainy that are prehistoric chants. What was worse, he could understand what they spake.
“Full of tears will be that day,
When to the dust man shall return!
“Praise the King, the almighty King
The Serpentine, the snake whom Society unknowingly fears,
Come to us, thy terrible serpentine fangs,
And sink thy fangs into the fragile flesh of time,
“Make us thy fangs, make us thy fangs,
Fear the fangs, oh fear the fangs!
Let us deliver the flesh of this fragile world unto thy steps,
And bring death, oh bring death!
Hail horrors! Hail horrors!
Not in the sun of eternal delight,
Not in the hope of everlasting joy,
But in the fangs of that alone which shall outlive the world,
Shall be our lives our strength, our all,
Hail the god of decay! Hail the god of death!”
Nothing kicked Mike, but he seemed launched forward, tumbling onto the steps of the pyramid, with the jeering chants growing all the louder.
“Offer unto Decay Its due! Be ushers unto the day when It shall rein!”
Mike could not stand even were this unseen force not pushing him further and further into the arms of his inevitable death; his arms and legs weighed a thousand pounds. Resistance would be futile and, even were it not, it would be pointless. And, just then, a chant resounded whose memory would sear him forever.
“And if this soul is not killed before this Month’s third day’s sun,
Then let us all give ourselves to decay,
If we fail to give him to decay,
Then let our lives be given instead,
That all may see the power of decay,”
He could not process the words. He could not even question them. He could only open his mouth in a vain attempt to scream as he was thrown once again against the steps, his head slammed against a stone, his body sprawled out over them and his world turned upside down with only a view of that high above beast in the infinite blackness. All the chants crescendoed in one gargantuan shout as, for the last time, that beast’s head plummeted from the skies and his world was engulfed between those fangs.
The First Sun’s Rise,
The Prison
He leapt up, instinctively throwing his hands beneath him as those tormented by nightmares do when they awake. A gasp escaped his lungs, followed by exasperated breathes. He had shot up, bracing himself for feeling the capture in that bed of fangs and that embrace in the veil of darkness. It took him some minutes, therefore, to process the reality that he was not lying between sheets of fangs but of cotton and that he saw not by a veil of darkness but a glow of daylight.
Daylight! It glowed like a fuzzy blur through a window at his bed’s end. He gasped, trying to control his exacerbated breaths, trembling limbs, and restless stomach as he convinced himself that he was awake. By some cruel twist of fate, it was an unprecedently difficult process to shake off the foreign feeling that this world of new sensations was anything but a dream. He was already quite convinced it could only be a fault of perception that his ringing ears were all so suddenly stripped of that awful sensation of those deafening chants. The ringing silence did little to cure his suspicion. In this silence, he tried to take in visual details of the room around him to dull his disenchantment. But, with the violently bright blur to his vision before him, no more sensory details of any kind seemed certain besides the awful discomfort of his sickened, shaking body under these warm sheets, which no amount of light could blind from him.
But, as he blinked against the light, its violence slowly began to dull until the blur subsided. Just a muted glow of light filtered its way through a grey, cloud-covered window. Within this light, he surveyed the room. The white walls of the room seemed for a sickening moment to waver between claustrophobically close to eternally far before the awful waving suddenly calmed. Seeing them at what he perceived to be their true distance away, he ascertained that his bed was positioned in the corner of a rather small one-bed room, with only the size to boast a window, a chair, and a white countertop, doubling as a bedstand. If someone was so awful as to have designed this room, then sterile bear necessity was the fiend’s only priority. Mike could not tell what he would have given for simply a colorful pattern to grace the tile floor or a painting to break up the repetitive wall or even a crack to mar its sterile white plaster, so that he may have at least something of interest to occupy his mind for the hours that seemed to tick on. Even out the window, what he hoped to be a natural scenery was simply a monotonous and endless sea of mutely lighted cloud cover. Such a view offered nothing more than an indication that the sun was somewhere between having risen and having set. It was otherwise impossible to ascertain his surroundings. Even after he at last noticed that his aching body was draped in a medical gown and that the plastic chord on his arm was attached to a bag of water, he was still somehow unable to understand what structure he inhabited was and what circ*mstances had landed him in said structure. He remained in such a groggy confusion up until the moment the doorknob squeaked and allowed for an agent of enlightenment.
A woman came in. She seemed busy at something, he couldn’t tell what, and only to notice him as an afterthought. When she did so, however, she addressed him directly by observing that he had at last awoken. He did not respond, his mind still raging with questions each of which he expected this woman to answer without his having to take the trouble to ask them. Instead of enlightening him, the white lab coat and knee-length black skirt simply stood by the bedside, not giving a word. He even looked directly into her eyes, hoping to communicate enough helplessness that she may be able to ease his distress. Rather, she simply inhaled and proceeded to inquire his name.
He mentally stuttered for a moment before answering.
“N-No… Mike.”
She asked if he had a last name. She asked again. Then, she asked if he had any family or friends they could contact.
He thought for a moment before formulating the first response he could into words.
“I went to Mass. I saw Noah.”
She said that was very nice. She stood still for a moment as if he was expected to contribute more to the conversation than the product of some helpless eyes and a confused mind. At length, however, the white lab coat and knee-length black shirt slowly turned around to exit the room. Before that waterfall of blonde hair disappeared behind a door, however, Mike was able to regain his voice enough to ask a question which he had pulled out of the furry of his groggy mind like a stone pulled from a muddled river.
“What day of the month is it?”
The blonde hair, white lab coat and knee-length black skirt froze in the half-closed doorway for just a moment. She turned around giving him what he perceived through the fog to be a warm, red-lipped smile on what he just possibly make out to be a pretty lady’s face. That face responded that it was the first of the month. Then, blonde hair covered where the face was once again, and a closed door covered the blonde hair.
He waited all the longer, as the pit in his stomach reluctantly eased. But the pit in his stomach only eased to give way for a knot; and as his sickness slowly wore away like water drying off, he was only reminded all the more of the impending danger. Who or what had brought him to this hospital bed was a reality entirely beyond him. He had simply been shoved into a condition which he could not comprehend, by a force he could not comprehend, for a reason he could not comprehend, with an end he could not comprehend. Were he at home, he could try and shrug off this anxiety as a mere trifle and proceed to concern himself over something so small as the stain he needed to get off his shirt or the channel he needed to get on his television. But all such concerns had been entirely stripped of him and all possible distractions had been starved of life. And now that all those blessed distractions were dead, he was hemmed in by the greatest distraction of all mankind. From walls that would not talk, windows that would not blink, and doors that would not open, this sterile little prison was steadily starving him of life and preaching to him of death.
It is understandable, then, the overwhelming mix of relief and urgency that flooded him when the door began to creak open, making him shoot upward under his covers, hoping beyond hope to entreat the favor of this potential savior. The open door admitted a tall, broad man in a lab coat. Mike only needed to study the man for a minute to realize that, if any hope for answers existed, it would be found by this man. His temples were grey with wisdom, his chin was chiseled with precision and his posture was imbued with authority. Mike hadn’t even seen the man’s eyes; he did not need to. The man could have been a cyclops for all he cared, the blue tie testified as loudly as the careful walk that he would be the only man in perhaps all this God-forsaken world who has any remote power or knowledge over Mike’s situation.
Thus, when the man was hardly halfway from the door to the bed, Mike leapt out from the awful prison of those warm, sweaty covers, just barely saving himself from flying face-first into the glossy tile floor when the sheets had tangled themselves quite thoroughly over his legs. He was surprised to be reminded that he had legs and horrified to know that he had to be reminded. His helpless body flopped against the floor like a fish being thrown onto a deck, with his useless back appendages still chained to the bed by this mess of white sheets and blankets. At this position, he was simply left lying on his elbows, eyes wide against the floor where his potential savior’s loafers would have stepped had the man not halted his course at the sudden outburst.
The room was silent for an awkward moment as Mike squirmed to wriggle his back half out from this trap. But no matter how much perspiration he added to his brow in the effort, the cruel warm sheets refused to slide off his sweaty body. All at once, his weak arms collapsed, letting his chest fall to the floor with a grunt. Now, he despaired. Surely, this savior would be kind to aid so desperate a creature! With his face still forced at the ground, Mike caught his breath enough to force out a plea.
“Help me! I’m confused!”
Surely any remotely benevolent person would have had compassion for such a human! Surely, even a complete stranger would be willing to listen to the cry of a fellow human in such a confused state as this! Surely, that simple four-word plea should be enough to pull the heart from the chest of any good man enough to warrant compassion!
Mike forced his elbows beneath him and looked up with a grunt. He could not see the man’s face against the glare of the nearby window. But he watched the figure looming above him step back for a moment. Mike could only repeat his plea.
“Please! Could you even tell me where I am.”
Silence.
Mike could hear his own breathing and heartbeat as he felt eyes studying him from behind the veil of a blinding light. A glare of disapproval was shifting behind that glare of sunlight. Mike simply heard his heartbeat; his hope was burning to hear a reassuring voice. But he was met with disapproving silence.
Then, the looming figure above turned his head only briefly to mumble a word to someone or something behind him. When the gaze turned back towards Mike, it spent only a minute or so in the stillness before the figure knelt down at last.
He seemed to avoid touching Mike as if he were speaking to a leper. But he did at last speak.
What he spoke Mike could only just hear beneath the muffling baritone vibrations of his voice. The voice sounded more like a memory than a reality. It asked him what his name was.
Impatience and desperation hammered over the sheet-tangled form on the floor. He’d already given one of them his name! He could not let this last source of hope simply disappear through the door like the other one! Mike squirmed and grunted, trying with all his might to pull the sheets off him so that he might stand and address this figure.
“No! No! Listen to me! I need help! You don’t understand!”
The voice spoke again, its words just discernable over the rabble of desperately squirming sheet-tried appendages. It told him he was here to help. It told him he just needed to calm down and they could help him. It told him everything would be alright.
No! Mike had been captured by a villainous cult whose poison could be in the very water he drinks for all he knew, and he was supposed to believe that everything would “Be alright”? He had spent hours tormented by the terror of that snake and the thin veil of reality had hidden the sight only to tell him that he needed to calm down? What sort of madman was this that had just entered the room to hide comfortably behind the veil of blurry sunlight?
But, at last, Mike did calm down, like a rabbit in a snare accepting its fate. Through heavy breaths, he gave one last desperate plea, hoping beyond hope the silence he was breaking was one of compassionate concern and not a distaining judgement.
“My name’s Mike… Please, my life’s in danger… I think someone’s out to kill me,” sobs hammered between the words of his one last plea, “Can you just please tell me where I am!”
With all his body pressed against this cold tile floor, he let his head drop with a thud, hearing only his staggered breaths and manic heartbeats. A couple sobs escaped. He flinched when a large hand had been pressed gently to his shoulder. He held his breath as a stillness ensued, straining his every sense for even a glimmer of hope in this utter confusion. At last, the awful baritone murmurs of that voice rang out trying to adopt the garb of reassurance.
The voice told him he was in St. Anna’s Mental Hospital.
Bodies, like a single mindless seething beast, floated by on the left, all murmuring like undead corpses forever cursed to wander these sterile white halls. With the female doctor wheeling his IV behind him, Mike lumbered behind the commanding strides of the man with the baritone murmur. When he brought his eyes up from the floor, he focused simply on the slickly cut back of that handsome haircut. He had, a few times during this journey of shame, locked eyes with the occasional inmate floating past him, simply because he let his gaze wander just a tad too far. What he saw when he did so made him regret ever looking away from anything other than the floor or the haircut ever again. The few miserable creatures whose eyes passed his gaze would have looked ordinary enough, barring the hospital gowns, were he to run into them on a normal day on the streets. That was all except for two awful details that made them a horrifically unhuman sight, fit only for the most grotesque of horror stories. The look on their blank white faces and the teeter in their forward hunch transformed figures who would have otherwise been ordinary human beings into a mob of animated corpses. If ever he would need a representation of the true worst state of humanity, he only need look here; those creatures were so horrifically human that they were no longer human. Their mere posture emulated that of their prehistoric ancestors, which was only just barely blessed with the ability to walk. And the look on their faces – it was beyond words. They stared past all gazes, their eyes utterly unphased the entire time they were examined, as if they were staring into another reality, a world which is nothing more than a construction of their own delusional brains. The look on their open drool-soaked mouths and yellow bag-rimmed eyes seemed utterly incapable of ever betraying any recognition of the outside world from within that accident of firing electricity in their brains. When first he encountered one of their stupid faces, Mike was overwhelmed with terror. How long would it be in this cursed place before his face became just a fellow among this mob of one face? But, by the time he had met the eyes of the second or third face, the object of his fear had shifted, turning it less from fear and more into desperation. Who was to say that all of humanity was not already a fellow among these hollow men? By the point this awful thought cursed his mind, Mike decided simply to focus his gaze on the floor or, on occasion, the back of his guide’s head.
It seemed like an eternity would pass of these sullen groaning bodies floating by him in that maddeningly sterile building. One flight of stairs was crossed, but even in that crammed concrete-walled stairway, he could not shake the impression that he had been shoved into some liminal reality which was outside of all reality. Since leaving his prison room, he never even saw another window. Just hallway after hallway of the same maze of white-walled corridors, whose featureless brown doors and spotless art deco carpet were lit clearly in eerily unblinking light by the blank LED strip lights overhead. The featureless rooms continued for eternity in all directions; were he to take the foolish risk of glancing down any one hallway, he would simply see it end in a turn off or a fork. With this terrible repetition of hallway after hallway, of white wall after white wall, of turn after turn, the desperate thought started to fill him that this maze of halls had actually extended for all eternity; that this was not a blip in the programming of the world but that the world was a cover-up in the programming of reality. And that reality is a reality of monotony. That the true reality – the true world over which all the world was created – was nothing more than this maze of monotony, which extended eternally in all directions. His tiny little self being led by two doctors was the only semblance of variation in the eternity of monotony. And he could never be freed to the illusion of reality for all so long as air filled his lungs.
Oh, how he longed simply to see a tree or feel grass on his feet! He had never realized how much nature meant to him until he realized how unnatural anything else felt. If he could just fill his nostrils with the scent of the outdoors and his ears with the sounds of the birds, he could solace himself into thinking that reality was not a confiding and restricting thing, but something free and open into which he could fly like a bird. Oh, if he could but catch a glance out a window! If he could but see something, anything, to prove to him that this awful building full of monotony was but a building confided by four walls, a foundation, and a roof, and not the eternity of drudgery that it threatened to be.
The threat for his drudgeries wanderings to roll on for eternity proved itself to be merely a threat when, at long last, the form of the doctor with the baritone murmur halted at one of the doors. Mike nearly ran into him but froze and watched what he presumed to be one or two gloved hands fiddle with the lock, before having the door opened. The female doctor followed behind Mike as the doorway passed around him. He was led into a room.
A blurry form of a human – a pink smudge against the glass topped with a bit of grey fuzz – stood at the other end of the room. All white walls of this room were utterly featureless, save the one door on one side, through which he had been led, and the long glass on the other, behind which stood the blurry figure. He blinked up at the figure, expecting it to become clearer as he blinked, but only met with the same vague smudge with which he had been left alone. A voice sounded from somewhere, perhaps a hidden speaker. It was old and grouchy, more like a croak than a voice, and confirmed the identity of this vague smudge – given that it was the voice attached to the vague smudge – to be that of an old human female. The voice asked him his name.
At long last, he could make out the syllables.
“Mike… Mike Lawson…”
The voice told him to look down at the table in front of him and tell it the colors of the cards he saw on the table. When he did so, the three flash cards seemed to morph and merge almost so that they all became a soup of the same color. What would they do if he answered incorrectly? What sane human is unable to tell one color from another? How on Earth could he confirm he was answering correctly? To answer would be to take the immense risk of being wrong. Could he stand the repercussions if they saw him stumble into the wrong answer to that unfathomable question? It was no small effort, then, for him to formulate what he perceived to be the real colors.
“Red… Green… Orange…?”
With no confirmation of having heard him, the voice asked him if he knew what president was in office. He closed his eyes in thought. After a minute of thinking, trying to work from his childhood up until now through each past presidential election, he could merely make out a stupefied noise.
“Uhhhmmm…”
At last, he remembered. The voice, however, seemed entirely uninterested in waiting any longer and interrupted his any attempt to give the correct answer by asking him how old he was. He quickly told it his age, trying his hardest to cover up his lack of confidence in the exact value. With each answer he gave, the voice tormented him by offering no confirmation whatsoever that his answer was either correct or incorrect, either sane or mad, either appreciated or hated. Like the silence of the universe, this voice simply proceeded to ask more questions.
At long last, however, the awful barrage of questions ceased. The voice told him to take a seat. He did so, letting his body collapse into the chair at the table, throwing his head into his arms, too weary to look up. The blur in the glass disappeared and he heard a door close somewhere from beyond that glass. Now, he was all alone; just himself and that empty glass from which had come only questions and never answers. And now that he was alone with himself – with utterly nothing, no books, no television, no beer, no friends, no girls, no windows, no tress, no sports, nothing to distract him – he had come face to face with the greatest problem of all humanity.
He had not realized how impending was his panic attack until the panic received a temporary relief when a knock rattled at the door. He held his breath. Who or what ever could be behind that featureless hinged barricade? He had no time to give an answer before the door squeaked open, admitting a pair of clicking heels, a knee-length black skirt, a white lab coat, and a shoulder-length shower of blonde hair. The pretty face which this blonde hair framed was smiling. In the hands that protruded from the sleeves of this lab coat was a plate with food on it.
To his astonishment, an unprecedented wave of relief washed Mike over. Oddly, she did not seem to smile so much for him as she was smiling at him, as if she had just heard a funny joke from a coworker and would have otherwise greeted him with as much a straight face as any other patient. Even so, her smile was reassuring and even pleasing to look at; even if he would be trapped to this world for all eternity, at least he had that pretty smile between those two glossed-over eyes to remember as his ashes decay away over this stainless carpet. The female doctor asked him how he was doing as she appeared by his side and set the plate on the table before him. She asked him how he was doing! How sweet of her! In that moment, she had become like a mother to him. He’d never felt so cared for as he did right then, even if she was caring for him out of duty and was probably only doing it cheerfully by coincidence.
“I… I’m doing alright, thank you…”
He wanted to ask her how she was but did not find the time before her cheerful voice said, that was very nice, and she proceeded to turn around and exit the room, leaving him in silence.
Under any other circ*mstance, he would have undeniably been quite outraged at the briefness of her visit, as he had time and time before. But, right now, he felt quite like a burden of outrage had for once been relived from his chest and not added. It had been quite some time since he had enjoyed a meal, not to mention a meal of such quality. The grey sirloin steak lay on the plate in front of him, flanked by green lettuce wet with freshness, and soaked by a thin layer of moisture. His mouth watered uncontrollably as he only now remembered how utterly starved he was. And, as of now, the pleasure of her relieving his onslaught of starvation was easily enough to distract from what would otherwise have been annoyance of her limiting her expression of care.
He was alone with this pleasure for some time. Oddly enough, they had given him proper silverware and a true steak knife, its edge oddly sharp. It seemed, for a moment, peculiar that they would give a steak knife to someone they thought to be insane. His hunger, however, allowed him to shrug off any peculiarity by making the happy presumption that he had answered the questions correctly, they no longer considered him insane, and this was his reward. He placed the cloth napkin in his lap, allowing himself to indulge on the happy feeling of enjoying a fine dinner in a fine restaurant. Nothing had until then compared to the pure bliss of that first bite of steak. And, with every last grind of his teeth over the wholesome, flavorful strings of meat, his anxiety was melting away, defeated by pleasure.
At some point, while he was nearing the end of his steak and salad, a knock sounded once more on the door behind him. Assuming it to be the female doctor come to ask if he would like some tea with it, he called out that the door may be opened. The wooden barricade swung reluctantly ajar, admitting the black loafers, grey khakis, blue necktie, and white lab coat and temples of the doctor with the baritone murmur.
An awkward moment passed between the two men in which neither said anything, fidgeting as if he expected the other to speak. At last, however, the doctor in the lab coat stepped forward, glancing continuously between Mike and the ground before his feet. He tossed the door closed. The ringing of its slam came to Mike’s ears, greeted with some surprise. The doctor in the white lab coat did not seem to notice the utter peculiarity of his entering with seemingly no purpose. He simply stood rooted to the ground, his hands together in front of his chest, staring with intimidating serenity at Mike. The furrowed brow above and the untwitching mouth below that stare were steadily moving from awkward to unnerving. Mike dared not even look the man in the eye, forcing his memory of that man’s stare to be converted to a blur as he slowly slid his gaze to the ground. Even so, despite his desperate wishes otherwise, he could not escape the knowledge that this repressed stare was still in the room with him.
He was just about to return to his steak, having just picked up his knife, when the faceless stranger stepped forward, letting a baritone murmur fall onto Mike’s ears. The murmur started by commenting that Mike had been given real silverware.
“Uhmmm… Yes... I have…”
Somewhere within him, a buttress of confidence had crumbled, allowing for the possibility that the citadel may crumble with it. The male doctor did not give another word about the knife. Instead, he passed by Mike and began to pace the small space of room between the other side of the table and this side of the glass. A pace that seemed at first like a nervous habit was steadily becoming a determined march, until Mike began to cower, instinctively clutching his knife and fork as if he would soon need to use them as weapons.
Still pacing, the unphased voice of the doctor asked, “So… You said you were captured by a cult? And they attempted to kill you, you say?”
Mike could not answer immediately. Where did this odd figure intend to lead this conversation? The eventual answer was reluctant, treading with care lest it breed adverse effects.
“Yes… a cult that attempted to kill me captured me last night… Or, at least, I think it was last night.”
The doctor neither ceased in pacing nor once glanced up from the floor.
“And you said the cult had a symbol of a snake, no? A snake with a pyramid?”
“Y-… Yes… Yes, it was a snake with a pyramid.”
“And did you see your captors?”
“No, I did not…”
“And can you point us to where they took you?”
“Uhhmmm... no, I can’t.”
“But you know they took you?”
“Uhhmm… yes, yes, I do.”
“And it was a snake with a pyramid – the cult’s symbol that is?”
“Yes, I just said that.”
At this, the doctor’s pacing ceased. A dreadful silence fell across the room. Mike was a helpless prisoner in this tiny chair. He tried to push it away from the table, watching the side of that terrifying, demonic visage still glaring at the ground. How could it be possible that a look so evil had so suddenly crossed a face so manly and approachable? Mike’s hands were shaking, as he began to decide the last few bites of steak were not worth risking his life and determined to swiftly push the table away.
But before he could, the demonic baritone broke the silence.
“Well, Mr. Michal Lawson. I am sorry to inform you that you know too much.”
Even though he had braced himself for the worst, Mike could have never predicted what ferocity had so suddenly leapt at him in the form of that commandingly dressed doctor. He would have never expected to be nervously trying to push away from a table one moment and to be out of breath on the floor the next moment, grappling with foreign hands over the weapon of his impending doom.
He could have never imagined such a sudden spirt of agility could originate from a posture so proper. But appearances, he was beginning to learn, were much too misleading. The formally put-together doctor had been standing still and trim one moment, his gaze entirely adverted to the floor. The next moment, he had all so suddenly leapt over the table – directly over the table, like a sheepdog over a fence – and had brought the full force of his impact into the chest of his victim. Mike could not believe his eyes when the image of the crazed face of that doctor slammed itself into all his view. He could not trust his ears when the sound of the table, chair, and IVs all crashing into a heap hammered his tympanic membrane. He would not even dare trust his instincts when he was, all in one moment, thrown into the overwhelming bombard that is the primal human survival drive, demanding that he grasp his knife for the sake of all his chance at preservation. But when he felt the plastic chair fly out from underneath his seat and the unmoving hard floor slam into his back, he found he could not but believe that his frantic eyes, ears, and instincts reported the truth as much as his throbbing back. His chest was burning from the impact and burned all the more when he struggled, being nailed to the ground by an unmoving knee. He tried to kick his legs at least to hit some part of his captor’s body, but the two awkward appendages were caught between a chair and a table and were of use only to make his struggle more agonizing. But his legs could have been chained with iron for all he cared; the true horror of the situation was found in his hands. For two very powerful lab coat-ending hands had wrapped their iron grip around their victim’s right wrist, struggling and grasping to relieve this wrist of a sharpened steak knife.
The face of the doctor stared from high above him, disconnected from all the world as if it were the face of God starring over a helpless humanity. No emotion beside determination marred that unfeeling brow of the man. Entirely contrary to the unnerving serenity of this face, those hands were twisting, prying, and pulling like a child for a remote over supremacy of that weapon of potential death. Mike gasped for breath, struggling to avoid swallowing the end of a necktie that had flopped in his face. Gravity and strength were in his disfavor; he was pushing one desperate hand against the whole bodyweight of this powerful creature of death. His arm burned as his elbow threatened to twist backwards. Not daring to risk the horrific pain of listening to and feeling his arm bones crack at the moment of being twisted out of any natural state, Mike pushed back against the attempt to break his locked arm. But, in so struggling, his desperate resistance of the natural bend of his arm proved hopelessly futile and his arm collapsed inward, bringing the tip of the knife on a direct course for his throat.
The only thing that saved that blade from digging itself deep into his trachea was his left hand catching his right just in time to save it from being shoved onto such a fatal course. Now, both of his hands were being shoved against his throat, suffocating him by forcing the ribs of his windpipe with the weight of a whole man. The knife caught in the grasp of four different hands was being twisted and pried at; for one moment, Mike thought he felt a sharp tickle or sting ring its way up his wrist. Blood spilled over his hand and stained his chin, soaking the very tip of the necktie that slapped against his jaw. He twisted and pulled desperately with his right hand, many groans and perhaps even screams of agony accompanying his hopeless attempt to free any number of his imprisoned appendages. When, at last, he freed his right leg from the awful hold of the chair, he brought it up against his chest to where his foot was right against the abdomen of his attacker. He tried to kick the beast of a man, but with how their bodies were directly atop one another, it turned out to be but a desperate shove, with his foot hopeless to exert any offensive power. Such a shove, however, entirely defied the force of gravity that had worked so efficiently to his utter disadvantage; his patella barged against the diaphragm which was being shoved just about as powerfully into the sharp knee by the force of gravity. He heard the doctor momentarily gasp as his grip weakened if only slightly. But slightly was all Mike needed to rightfully regain his weapon.
He tore the knife from the iron clasps that had forced themselves against his throat; in doing so, he flung it through the air on a maddened course in the direction of his attacker’s face.
A scream of manly agony filled the room for a moment as his attacker leapt to his knees, forsaking all handhold against his prey’s poor trachea. Mike took only a moment to see that a long scar had gashed its way across the left check of his doctor, thin and oozing with blood that was staining his once spotless collar. Mike tried to swing the knife at this face once more in hopes of his steel blade puncturing flesh much deeper; but his swing was horrifically miscalculated and, before he knew it, his right arm was pinned against the floor with the knife once more being wrenched from his grasp. He tried to roll over slightly to bring his left arm to aid, but the effort was fruitless. The knife was torn from his grasp. He tried to sit up, but all hopes of so doing were shattered when a giant of a hand, stained with blood, slammed itself against his shoulder, pinning him to the carpet beyond all hope. High above that maliciously unemotional scared face rose a knife on the end of a long-extended arm, its shimmering tip thirsting for the sensation of sliding through the delicate fiber of a human heart.
What kind of maddened medical procedure was this? What sort of doctor would treat his patient so viciously? Was this a streak of the very insanity with which Mike was being accused? What kind of a hypocrite was this excuse of a doctor that he calls a man insane and then proceeds to murder him with a steak knife!?
Mike closed his eyes, helpless blood-stained hands weakly grasping at the blood-streaked arm which had him pinned, pleading for mercy. He could hear his hammering heart, crying out from within him in retaliation to its fate, and their ferocious breathes animalistic and gasping. He entirely expected the sounds all to cut off in one terrible instant. But the instant never arrived.
Instead, the heavy gasps and breaths continued. His eyes were still sealed shut, but he knew he could hear the sound of footsteps hammering from just behind a wall. And, just after their course ceased, the sound of a door flying open broke the silence, proceeded immediately by the shrill, murderous screech of a woman screaming.
Mike opened his eyes and strained his head to look up and see, standing in that open doorway, a black skirt from over which stared a woman’s face; where once he saw a pretty face of glee, now he was staring into wide eyes of terror, which beheld nothing less than the scene of a potential murder.
Mike tried to plead up at her. He could not speak; words would not form in his gasping throat. But he was certain, absolutely certain, that she would see his situation and immediately realize all of what had occurred. A stunned silence passed the room, filled only by gasps for air. At any moment, she would point an accusatory finger at his attacker and rage at him for the horrific madman he was.
But the moment never came. Mike glanced back to where he once saw that unfeeling face of his attacker directed at him and the thirsty blade of that knife high above the face. But now, the face was not directed at him, and the knife was nowhere above his head. The knife was clutched at the doctor’s side and the face was gazing up at the woman, its expression entirely adverted from its captive. At long last, Mike could make out the first words that broke the silence.
“Dr. Lewis! What the… What just happened!?”
Dr. Lewis did not cower a moment. He betrayed not an ounce of shame or regret for his actions. What? What kind of unfeeling maniac could be so stoic in the face of his being thus exposed?!
“A Suicide attempt, Marry. I stopped him just in time.”
What? A suicide attempt!? Was this not attempted murder?
“A suicide attempt! Why are you covered in blood?!”
The baritone voice returned, not marked by an ounce of remorse. Rather, it was full of professionalism and even nonchalance that was beyond insulting.
“I came in just when he was about to slit his throat. I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop going on about the cult and the snake. I was forced to take the knife from him, but not without resistance.”
It was at this that the female doctor knelt down so that she was eyelevel with her male counterpart. As if the nearly murdered victim sprawled on the ground did not even exist, she simply looked into the face of this awful man, bringing one of her delicate hands up to his wounded check in nurturing sympathy.
“Are you okay?”
The male doctor said he would be fine, but they needed to get this patient back to his room. He held out the knife and asked the female doctor why she had given him a real steak knife. She said it was simply on the tray he had handed her. He informed her never to let him make such a mistake again. She looked down at the ground in shame as the male doctor set his two blood-stained hands to bringing his would-be victim to his feet.
After a moment of having Mike’s privilege of silverware entirely confiscated and having his fountain of blood thoroughly bandaged, the thunder of a stretcher rolling into the small doorway filled his ears. His vision was growing too weak to even see the concerned face of the woman and the grim expression of the man overhead; a bright slit of light occasionally dotted by faint blurs was all that filled the blackness. Only by hearing the distant murmur of voices could he make out that the room had admitted two other doctors. He could feel himself being cradled at the head, chest, legs, and feet to where the ground fell away from him only to return in the form of the stretcher’s hard surface into which straps had him firmly incarcerated. Here, he was helpless to feel the whole world lowering around him, as that stretcher’s hard surface and those unyielding straps remained constant reminders of his hopeless imprisonment. The cold touch of foreign hands wrapped about his wrist as his current IV tube was painfully jerked out, only for another such tube to be shoved into its place in his wrist. He tried to groan as he was rocked left and right by the force of the stretcher being wheeled through turn after unceasing turn in this endless maze of corridors.
His helpless body groaned with pain at every yank of the straps against his chest. His sore muscles throbbed with agony with every hammer of his panicking heart. His every joint screamed in retaliation with every mere thought of attempting a struggle. The words of various voices murmuring about him and the number of various footsteps scuttling below him swayed in and out of recognition. It was not for some time could he make out individual sounds among this tempest of voices and noises around him. The male doctor was deep into giving his erroneous account of the incident to all the doctors around him, steeping all of them in the baffling lie about his victim’s suicidal tendencies. Mike wanted to sit up right there and object to every syllable that poured out of that wellspring of sick fables, but such an act was rendered just as impossible by his incapacitated state as it was rendered futile by the doctors’ unconfronted prejudices. Nothing was ever so disgusting as being surrounded by a hoard of professionals who claimed to be his protectors, only for each and every one of them to be unknowingly letting the very hands that just tried to kill him wheel his stretcher. All his every perception and belief was forever locked away, all his world forever secured alongside himself in an unbreakable safe, which the world could neither see nor hear and about which the world can only offer erroneous theories and construed fables. Is this what madness is? To be as cut off from the world as the world is from reality? He was suffocating in his metal-walled vacuum chamber and no living soul would dare save him because no living soul would dare sacrifice that cursed thing which we call sanity. Has anything ever been so insane as pretending to be sane? Has anything ever been such an act of willful ignorance and unknown suicide as calling other people’s perceptions a mere figment of unreasonableness and lunacy? Behind the word “Sanity” is the noose into which the world is placing her unsuspecting neck. It is now clear; sanity is how the world will end. Not because the world was orderly, and her population rightly thought they were insane in thinking she was chaotic. But because the world was chaotic – viciously chaotic – the world was unknown, the world was merciless, the world was infinitely beyond anything any mere mortal mind could conceive; but her ignorant population could not let go of the lie that they were sane in thinking she was orderly.
Mike groaned, as the capability of his vocal cords to belch out inarticulate drones was finally returning. He tried to pull his eyelids entirely away, only for them to be greeted by painful strobing flashes between flashes that made his brain throb. He groaned all the more, having no other way to retaliate to the throbbing pain, and slammed his eyes shut, cutting out all blinding flashes. He tried once more to open his eyes, only in cautious and slow intervals so as to deny the strobing flashes the pleasure of inflicting on him such pain. When, at last, his view was wide enough and his eyes were adjusted enough, he was able to make out the awful white roof of a corridor, striped with LED strip lights that flashed by his vision in periodic bombards of blinding light. To his right and left, the form of a lab coat topped with a head was trotting, their hands holding lightly onto the edges of his stretcher and their gaze focused entirely on the path before them. He would not suffer the searing pain in the neck and eyes of trying to look up; but he knew by the direction from which those awful baritone syllables rumbled that his murderer was wheeling his stretcher at the head. Not one of the doctors around him seemed attentive to even the mere fact that his eyes were opened. They merely shouted between eachother about some lunatic whom they thought was laying wounded before them having attempted to kill himself. Mike Groaned. That flashing white roof above him seemed to be closing in. Its featureless white surface marred only by the strips of blinding light was slowly lowering above his head, threatening to surround him and squeeze the life from his lungs. He almost wondered if it would have been wiser to simply have let the male doctor’s story be true and to have let that knife run through his heart right there and then back in the small room. His cursed animalistic survival instincts had taken all control before he could even think up a sensible action. Now that he had won the ability to say he was still alive, if even only barely, it was starting to seem that being alive was as much an act of desperation as being dead.
He jostled as they hauled him slowly and painfully up the stairwell. His muscles screamed in retaliation to having their weak grip over his bones so mercilessly teased at by these awful straps. It seemed like hours of execution. But when the torture finally ceased, it was replaced only by the further torture of those strobing lights and that baritone voice. With a jostle, however, his whole world halted, the strobings ceased, and all voices fell silent. A door squeaked open, and he was wheeled into a featureless white room where those painful straps were finally released and he was lain in the warm embrace of his bed sheets, which proceeded to tempt his aching body and brain into an eternal sleep.
The bustle of voices beside his bed returned for a moment. One of the foreign doctors suggested that they leave himself alone with Mike, a point which was suddenly debated by a disgustingly familiar baritone voice, which wanted nothing more than solitude with the helpless patient. After some minutes of argumentation between the four voices, where all voices were evenly split in advocation for their partner, it was agreed that one of the other doctors would stand outside Mike’s room, since the yet unpredictable madman appeared to be asleep, and the baritone-voiced doctor would arrive within the hour to speak alone with Mike. After the nearly heated debate tensely absolved, all footsteps scuttled out of the room, leaving Mike with only an hour at most to regain his strength before his executioner arrived.
He stood in the blackness, a mirror which reflected the true colors of his heart, mind, and soul. All around him, it covered him like a river and filled him like air. It was inescapable. But, within the blackness, a small spark of red, like an ember, like a flame. He tried to turn and run; his mind was cursed already with the knowledge of what that spark was. This one little spark had grown to a raging flame, consuming all the world, merely by virtue of the world’s confidence against it. Every last man, woman, and child that once existed had willingly adopted ignorance to it simply because that was what every other man woman and child was doing. And, together, they all paid the price.
Maybe it would be better for him to pay the same price. Maybe he could at least relieve himself the burden of his knowledge. True, the poison would hurt all the more when the beast finally bit; but the moment of its hurt would be so much briefer, only an instant, before all his pains and joys alike would be swallowed whole. Perhaps the only way to hold onto them would be to put himself under the lie that they could be his in the first place. After all, what was truth? Was it ever something so important that it must be grasped at the expense of comfort? Who ever decided that truth had so much importance that it must be allowed to tear away the veil of deception and illusion that is our sense of inherent human worth and purpose?
The flame was growing in the blackness. He could not even turn from it; wherever he jerked his head, that awful spark occupied the same space in his view. He could not even run from it; whenever he stumbled backwards, the terrible flame grew all the larger at still the same rate. It was still but a dot in the blackness; but this thought was all the more terrible. Imagine how long of excruciating wait it would be before that dot would grow to a size large enough.
Nothing would be more of a relief right now than to shrug himself off as a mere lunatic. Nothing would be more of a relief than if it was an attempt at suicide. But, unfortunately, the line between lunacy and sanity is as blurred as the line between suicide and murder.
Maybe he should just give into it; maybe the doctors, if not more truthful, are more sensible. Maybe he should grab the knife anyway. If he struggled, like a rabbit in a snare, what would be the end? Simply to return to that same little wasted shack in the middle of the woods, to live his life as the same little wasted man, with a mind full of the same little wasted memories! And what good was any of that? He was wasted, wasted to the core. It was an end he could never avoid. Perhaps if he had become a famous engineer or architect, he could have saved himself from the inevitable end of futility. No! He could not have, not with all the fame society has to offer, not with all the money economy can give, not with all the love, attention, or wealth that any number of mortals could feed him. This blackness which he now saw was all the stronger a reminder that the memory of his mortal life was just as mortal as the lives which remembered him. Compared to the eternity before and after the emergence of humanity from apes, compared to the infinitude of cold, destitute, lifeless worlds in this starry sea of blackness, compared to millennia of years after the Earth is engulfed by a dying sun – and compared to all the hours, which are logically impossible to count, in that lonely, timeless blackness into which all of life – every last king, every last microbe – all of the universe – every last star, every last planet – and all of time – every last century, every last second – will inevitably, entirely, and hopelessly fade, life is quite seriously nothing.
Maybe he should just let go and give in. Self-preservation and survival might be all human. But what good is humanity in the face of eternity? Why should that be anything worth honoring and preserving?
The glimmer grew all the larger. Its ferocious features became all the clearer. Mike gasped, having at once never expected the sight, yet expecting it all along just the same. The fiery red face of the snake in the utter blackness flew for his face with ferocity, hunger for flesh in those crimson eyes and thirst for blood in those crimson fangs. Mike was frozen still by terror, helpless to save himself from even the mere thought of the beast which flew towards him with unspeakable ferocity. And, for the last time, he heard that chant piercing the darkness by an unseen voice.
“And if this soul is not killed before this Month’s third day’s sun,
Then let us all give ourselves to decay,
If we fail to give him to decay,
Then let our lives be given instead,
That all may see the power of decay,”
“No! No, I won’t, I won’t give in!”
Mike shot up in his bed, his screams filling the room. He glances around for only a moment, the exasperated pulsation of his inhaling and exhaling filling the tiny white chamber. Oh, to be transferred from the futility of that blackness to the sterility of this whiteness! Nothing had done quite so well to stamp out the small flame that was his will to live.
But the flame was still alight and he would keep it alight with every last fiber in his body if he must. If he was nothing more than an animal fighting for its pathetic little life, he would make himself just that! Do not let the mere thought of that snake enter your mind! Survival. Think only of that. To think of anything else, to even acknowledge the existence of that unseen all-seeing eye would be to play right into its game.
The hour! The hour would pass! The doctor with the baritone voice would barge through that featureless door any moment now and stand in the middle of the room with a flawlessly engineered plan to commit any atrocity he must to wipe away this little life like a smudge on a glass and walk away without blame. Mike could not let that happen! The rabbit must pull out of the snare if it costed him everything he had to life for.
With a spurt of energy that he never could have before encountered, Mike leapt out of the bed, throwing his bedsheets off his sweaty hospital gown like they were an old coat. He glanced frantically around the room. The window was still foggy with cloud-covered sunlight. The wall was still pasty with monotony. His arm was still imprisoned to the IVs. He threw the sleeve of the gown back to see clearly, just down his arm from the thorough bandaging at his wrist, a plastic line full of clear fluid that protruded from the surface of his skin. He wrapped his hands as far up the line as he could and – thinking of the searing pain of the action only afterwards – yanked ruthlessly at the line, ripping the catheter from its place in his bloodstream. He threw the bloody line away to where it swung limp, connected to a useless bag of clear fluids. His arm burned with pain as a thin line of blood painted it down the side. He tore a pillowcase off the bed, not daring take any longer than he must in tying the bloodstained white cloth around his bare flesh. He was, at last, free from that awful fetter. But he was hardly free from the prison.
He glanced once more around the room. Utter silence hung over the air, a silence which he could not bear in the stillness, a silence which could only determine that he was alone for now. Nothing was ever so urgent as that silence. He glanced again around the room, this time more helplessly than the other two times, for anything that could be of service. The sterile little wooden chair was still at the same lifeless desk. Not a clock broke the wall to confirm to him the hour. He simply set himself to the first task he could. In a frantic furry, he threw all of the drawers in the desk from their place, scattering them violently in a heap of broken wooded knobs and panels. He stripped the desk and ransacked the cabinets, without finding even a single piece of paper to be of service. No reality was every half so helpless as the reality that existed outside of reality, lacking all semblance of feature, variation, or color. In a spirt of desperation, Mike threw his frantic body into the chair, the sound of his frustrated sighs mixing nearly with sobs to be the only companion to his ears besides the hammer of his heart.
He had not a clue how long he had been sleeping. For all he knew that baritone voice could step through the door any moment now. That no doctor has entered yet was at least confirmation that the guard at the door had, for some reason, left his post. Mike’s heart skipped a beat when the thought entered his mind that this vacancy may be because of the expectation that the baritone-voiced doctor may arrive any moment now. He flung himself to his feet violently enough to nearly fall overtop the desk. Rest could wait. He glanced once more about the room’s every feature to determine at least something to be his doorway out.
Then, he saw it. The window. He dashed up to the window to gaze out it for only a moment, but what a wonderful, hopeful moment that was! The small parking lot a few stories below was crowded with vehicles and surrounded on all sides with a forest of wonderful greenery that disappeared into the grey horizon in all directions. He could almost dance, if not sing! He was seeing greenery! He was seeing, if only seeing, something, if only something, beyond this endless, endless monotony of hallway after hallway after hallway! Thank God in Heaven, this awful prison was not eternal!
But Mike could think no longer on his hope. He had to bring it to fruition if it cost him his life. And, considering the drop, it may just cost that.
But it was his only way. He snatched the tiny wooden chair by the back. And ran up to the window.
“Dr. Lewis, are you quite sure you want to visit him again? I mean, look at what he did to you. You’re lucky he didn’t hit your eye, not to mention your throat!”
“I will be quite fine, thank you Josh. I’ve dealt with much worse than this.”
As the elevator hummed, Dr. Joshua Higgins glanced nervously between Dr. Lewis and his female counterpart, betraying in his glance his complete and utter lack of assurance and his very minimal presence of respect for the experienced Dr. Lewis.
“Dr. Lewis… Don’t you want me or even Marry to stand outside the door and come in if you have an issue?”
“For the last time, I’ll be alright. You two have your own responsibilities around here. I can handle him by myself. He’ll be no trouble.”
The elevator doors slid slowly open, just in time for Dr. Lewis to be proven quite thoroughly wrong. Far down the halls, closer to the stairwell entrance, was resounding a great, repetitive crash of wood against a reinforced hospital window. All three doctors leapt in terror. Lewis swore under his breath, bolting down the hall without even time to object to the other two doctors following swiftly in his wake.
Swinging the chair like a baseball bat, he threw its legs against the glass with a great thud that filled the room and rattled his limbs. He’d never seen glass so strong in all his life! With a heave of his aching arms and lungs, he readied the chair for another swing as his quaking legs braced themselves for the momentous motion. Desperately, like an animal, he swung the chair once again, his feeble arms wearing and tearing to provide as much force as possible against the impenetrable glass surface. Dull thud after dull thud, the window gave not a budge. Between desperate swings and staggering breaths, he could hear footsteps from far away hammering up the hall. Renewed power filled his every next swing until, with a deafening crack, the first leg of the feeble chair snapped off with only a couple inches of a smearing window crack to show for his relentless onslaughts against that cursed device of imprisonment. The hammering footsteps grew all the louder. The desperate swings grew all the stronger. The few inches of crack grew ever so larger. Some maniacs had previously fought this glass to die; Mike was fighting it to live. Life and death never felt quite so much the same.
The last turn in the corridor flew by Dr. Lewis’s face. He rushed down the halls for the door from which the deafening crashes were resounding. Josh tried to shove him aside to enter the room, but the man’s feeble attempt was quickly hammered off by what was practically a punch by Lewis. Lewis threw his fingers around the doorknob, only to try vainly to turn it. The crashings continued, each crash hammering in the heart with unspeakable dread. He swore aloud jerking his hand from the nob to shove it into his pocket; but he was not quick enough. But an instant after he released the doorknob, Josh had thrown his keys into the lock. A quick jerk by the master key, a turn of the doorknob, and the door swung lazily ajar. One last deafening crash, louder than any of the others and followed by the explosive crack of shattering plastic and wood, rang out just before Lewis threw the door and Josh carelessly aside and dashed into the room.
He nearly fell face-forward over a ruined pile of broken drawers and shattered chair legs. He stopped himself from taking the fatal step, however, just soon enough to glance to the window. This glance gave him only enough time to see a pair of Caucasian hands disappearing off the shattered window’s sill.
The fall had passed so quickly that Mike hardly had time to register his legs burning from a two-story drop. He stumbled and staggered across the parking lot, scanning the lot desperately for opportunities. He would run out of this lot on his own two aching legs if he must! A baritone screech was trying to call him from somewhere above his head, but he could not hear the words. He was too busy having noticed a man in a teal scrub clambering out of a silver Subaru not yards across the lot. Armed with but the shattered back of a chair, Mike charged for the man, swinging the device in the air like a complete maniac. He only remembered the pure look of terror on the poor man’s eyes as, dropping his keys helplessly to the floor with a clatter, the helpless teal smudge bolted into the woods like a startled deer.
Mike threw the broken piece of wood aside and leapt into the car, convinced all the time that hands could try to apprehend him from behind at any moment. He leapt into the driver’s seat of the Subaru, not even wasting time in securing his seatbelt until he slammed the door close and shot the key forward, awakening the engine with a purr. He threw the car into reverse, flew out of the confides of that small parking space and, with no care whatsoever for the possibility of obstructing pedestrians, shoved the vehicle into drive and slammed the gas pedal, watching all that prison land of a parking lot slingshot out of sight.
He flew out of the driveway onto the road, just narrowly avoiding his car’s side being branded by the grill of a Dodge Ram in the other lane. The enraged horn cries of the offended vehicle faded away into road behind him, disappearing down a tunnel of greenery in the rearview mirror alongside the entryway to that awful asylum of insanity. The needle on the speedometer rocketed up to the 45 MPH mark, where it nervously settled. His hands still shaking and his heart still hammering, he set himself to the mere task of making sure he was the only inhabitant on this endless wooded road. And, in escaping the mental hospital, he had run with open arms into the true asylum that is the world.
The Wasteland
Save this lonely, wooded road, not another sign of life touched his eyes, ears, or nostrils for ages of being accompanied only by the steady purr of the Subaru flat-four and the growing exhaustion of his every limb. Yet, with all the pain that filled them, his every arm and leg acted in perfect, almost unnerving, coordination to keep his car unfailingly locked on the path indicated by the unbreaking road lines. With the few forks this swerving mountain road presented, he was beginning to discover his complete inability and unfamiliarity with these roads. He would have pulled over to scour the glove compartment for a map, but he knew such would be throwing precious time onto the alter of convenience.
His lack of any sense of direction was proving to conceive his uncertainty and frustration more than he had once expected. The road signs could have been written in Chinese for all he cared; they all carried just as little meaning to him. The moment he passed a fork, he instantaneously forgot the current name of his road. To say his luck with landmarks was poor would be an insulative understatement. Since the prison had disappeared in the mirror, not even a driveway had passed by. Not even the most rundown and neglected of homes was here to keep him company. With how hopelessly lost he was, he utterly lacked any way of knowing that this road did not simply end in an anticlimactic dead end, inescapable like the other end of a trap. How he could respond were he to run into such a desperate place was utterly beyond him. With all his hopeless state considered, he eventually decided it prudent to at least skim the glove compartment for a map. The road’s utter lack of shoulder or stop sign made pulling over impossible; yet he could not continue without at least trying his luck.
His luck, however, remained in complete refusal of altering its downward trajectory. The glove compartment contained only a vehicle registration, a packet of gum, and a couple miscellaneous receipts to the grocery store. Giving an angered sigh and jerking the wheel to the right to avoid flying off his momentarily neglected path, he threw the glove compartment closed, setting all his attention to the mere act of driving for as long as his aching limbs could in this glowing darkness. The minutes of forests flying by on snake-like curves were passing like hours. His stomach began to groan and complain with hunger, joining all of his limbs in their retaliation to the life-threatening exertion. With all the misfortune that was hammering his efforts away like a relentless torrent, he turned to the most desperate act that humanity had ever suffered – that is, the act of prayer – for at least some sign of friendly civilization.
But his prayers were poorly worded and, if any god had heard them, it clearly did not care about them. All that answered his prayers were miles and miles more of forest-flanked road and a steadily dimming blur of sunshine through what cloud cover he could see above the silhouetted foliage. Frustration was mixing with starvation in his stomach. What hope, what assurance, could ever be found in a world of purpleness and perplexity? What could a land of nameless roads, homeless souls, and endless pursuits boast besides the mere possibility of being able to live another day? And what a sorry excuse for a possibility that was! The frustration in his chest was growing to desperation as he thought about it. He was dangled high above an endless abyss, clinging to an unseen shelf by merely his fingertips, unable to even confirm his ability to hold onto the shelf for any longer than now, not to mention the shelf’s certainty to exist any more than he.
The darkness grew deep enough to finally demand his headlights. Now, in the dark of night, he adverted to frantically and repeatedly glancing to his review mirror for the slightest glimmer of a trailing vehicle. Perhaps his attackers would not be following in a car. As far as he knew, they were just as likely to be prepared to swoop down from the sky as they were to appear in his taillights. All he could know with any remote certainty was that, whoever these attackers were, they would certainly not rest easy with his getaway.
His limbs ached and burned. He began to grow panicked when the signs on the road and the trees about its borders were beginning to merge into a bright blur against the darkness. At some moments, he could not even tell if his eyes were still open. In his state, to drive on much longer would be the force of the rabbit’s neck against the wire. At last, giving into the whims of his weary limbs, he continued to drive only long enough to be blessed by a slight clearing in the foliage to the right. He slowed as he neared the clearing, not caring even for his turn signal. Only thinking about the condition of his vehicle after he pulled off the road and grimaced at the sound of the right side scraping against a thornbush, he brought the car to an easy halt on the tree-surrounded clearing. Considering himself far enough off the road that the risk of hazard lights was not warranted, he merely cut the engine. Driving would wait until the day. Shivering, he pulled the seat back, hoping beyond hope, yet dreading beyond dread, nothing more than the certainty of sleep.
Yet even sleep was a distant lover for a moment too long. A whine, no a cry, from far away was filling the night air, sending shivers up his spine. Lights flashing through the black foliage. He pulled his seat up and his head down, expecting with all certainty that the oncoming encounter was bound to be bloody. The color of ruby and sapphire penetrated the blackness of the dark, below them two bright eyes that lit up the surface of every leaf in the forest around. The siren now screamed in his ear, tirelessly testifying to the seriousness with which it approached its duty. He had little time to register how curious it was that the cruiser was driving towards the mental hospital from which he ran and not away from it until the blur of screaming sirens and blaring lights had flashed by him, not dimming a headlight, tapping a break, or dampening a siren for the world as it whizzed by in a second. His little Subaru continued to quake long after the shrill siren’s tone had reached its highest. The siren faded into a deeper and deeper rumble until its horrific howl could be heard no longer.
He breathed a sigh of relief, releasing the white-knuckled grip he once clasped about the wheel. He sat lower in his seat. Whatever that blur of blue and red was hoping to encounter, it at least was not the stolen silver Subaru. He pulled his seat back once again as the night reverted into darkness all around him. While the cruiser was whizzing by, he was convinced that the light which was screaming his name was never so terrifying as when it had pierced the darkness. But now that the cruiser had long since vanished, he found that the darkness into which he was now plunged had never seemed so terrible as when it had swallowed the light. Any sign that he was not the last intelligent, sentient being in the world would be as much a sign of death as any sign in the contrary. Any sigh of relief he had previously breathed was preciously brief.
But, despite all the dread of the night, the agony of his exhaustion was overwhelming. And his stomach could tie itself into no number of loops that would not be enough to bar sleep. It was not long before that elusive lover returned to her true love, letting him bid farewell to reality once again as he greeted the only reality which seemed just as real.
The Second Day’s Sunrise,
He had awoken, his eyes able to open, but to no notice of his own. He wavered on the gap between the reality of dreams and the dream of reality, unsure even where he had put his arms and legs. When he closed his eyes, it seemed just as probable for him to open them being secured in the wakeful world of brightness as for him to open them being tossed in the furious flood of the night.
He let his eyes fall open for the last time, the ice between he and the foggy world slowly thawing away. Like a piece of washed-up seagrass being steadily beckoned out to sea by the throbbing waves, he felt the building perceptions of reality pushing him further and further into the comfortable assurance of wakedness. Or was it a comfortable assurance? Where or who was he that this assurance could be remotely considered a comfort? He was a washed-up man with hardly even a name, no understanding of direction, no responsibility to anyone, no assurance of anything, and no permanent home anywhere. He was running from an enemy through the dark, unable to tell how close or how far this unseen pursuer was to wrapping a cold grip of death about his throat. This tiny Subaru was his marooned island, and this infinite forest was his lonely ocean. How could such a state be anything close to a comfort for him?
He was fully expecting to simply forgo all expectation of hope and roll over, accepting that this equivalent of death is as far as he will ever travel. Were it not for the very sudden pang in his stomach, he would have most certainly done just that; but, unfortunately for him, the reminder of his impending starvation was enough to jar him into enough of a concern for his state to force him to sit up and at least search the stolen car for anything that could be of service to make his running from inevitable death at least a little less unbearable.
The hour on the dashboard clock read 11:48. Good God! He could have never thought he was asleep for so long! He tried to repress the thought of what these long hours of sleep may mean for the progress of his pursuers. He began to search the crammed interior of the car, hoping with some desperation that the original owner of this vehicle was unusually messy. Searching the glovebox more thoroughly revealed a couple twenty-dollar bills and a few odd nickels which his first inspection had failed to locate. With some grunts of frustration on his aching body, he shuffled himself to the backseat, snagging his bloody hospital gown on the transmission more than once. Here in the tiny backseat, he found a few odd papers on the ground. He remembers only that this stack did not boast a single map. But, to his pleasure, he also found a pile of workout clothes and a pair of newly purchased New Balance tennis shoes in the footwell. It was at least a pleasure to drape his scabbed and aching skin in something besides an old sweaty hospital gown, even if the running shorts and shirt would prove to be quite miserable in the outdoors.
He stuffed the spent hospital gown under the driver’s seat, alongside the smelly brown pillowcase that had wrapped his scabbed upper arm. He did not dare remove the bandages about his wrist, lest the possible bleeding prove to be profuse. Turning on the car and revealing his vehicle to be as spent on gas as was his stomach on food, he decided simply to set himself to scouring these roads for a gas station.
The Subaru was at least alive enough to bring him on the roads for another few hours of travel. It was certainly no small stroke of luck that he had stumbled across those few twenties. A wallet was a luxury he did not right now have; the leather pouch containing all access to his life earnings and his all confirmation of his identity had been torn from him by his captors. Life savings, not to mention human identity, was a luxury he did not have in this endless ocean of green.
All that he was had been stolen by someone else. Everything from the four wheels beneath him to the heart within him was a gift from someone whom he could not thank. What had he done to deserve the luxury of this vehicle? What had he done to be worthy of the luxury of this skin about his beating heart? When his parents had sacrificed their own cells to form a fetus, who was he that this body they formed would be his? Could he even rightly say that it was his body? By whose decree? By that of the parents who formed the body? By that of the government that protects the body? By that of the mind that possesses the body? Did a mind even possess the body?
And what did he hope to protect in trying to preserve this body? Was the excuse of a home which he hoped to return to enough of a home to be worth hoping for? Was the life out of which this unknown enemy had jarred him a life worth trying to secure once more?
His intellectual wanderings followed much the same stream for perhaps an hour. How awful of a thing it is to be left alone to think about oneself! No force has ever been such a powerful force of evil as that of humanity’s hatred of sitting still in a room.
But, fortunately for him, while only as temporary as life, these wanderings were at least briefer. And, with the spotting of some building or structure through the thick foliage up ahead, they were all forsaken in favor of the bombard of questions as to this building’s identity.
He need not question long; his stomach lightened, if only just a little, to see gas pumps out front of a weather-worn yellow brick building, just off the road and surrounded on all other sides by thick covers of foliage. The neon sign over the front window identified the gas station as “Uncle Lou’s”.
Mike slammed on the break just in time to careen his way into the empty parking lot. He swooped into a space by one of the two old gas pumps and stepped out into the cold wind to find, with some pleasure, that the gas pump was still operational. With how entirely remote this small island of cracked asphalt and weathered brick was, he was struggling to grasp the possibility that any station owner would benefit from his inserting the money at the pump. Were it not for the yellow glow of the lights through that wide window, he would be convinced this gas station was but the skeletal remains of some long-neglected vehicular respite. And with the confirmation of life that was those yellow lights, the station birthed no small suspicion. Perhaps he had found this remote gas station because a remote gas station was exactly what someone wanted him to find.
Thinking it therefore prudent not to overextend his stay, he quickly shuffled through the cold outdoors past the noisome barricade of that glass door in hopes of finding some semblance of direction or nourishment.
As far as comfort was concerned, the gas station was abysmal. It smelled quite pleasant, like roses, and the sound of classic rock being played quietly on the store radio would have made the place feel like home on any ordinary day. But, with all the terrible torrent of thoughts that was hoarding his poor mind right now, Mike found the store’s homely personality as reassuring to his upset stomach’s many knots as the store’s frigid air condition was relieving to his bare leg’s many goosebumps. As far as the store was concerned, any personality whatsoever was enough to further the awful sensation that this store was bait on a stick for a much more sinister plan.
The store boasted three isles, each one full of various refreshments ranging from potato chips to chocolates. The left wall was entirely taken by a massive display of ice cold drinks in a cooler and the right wall was reserved by an entrance into the restrooms. The back of the store was entirely obstructed by the isles so that no natural light from the window would reach it; but stepping past the threshold to the store’s interior revealed this back wall to boast a counter and a cash register.
Mike stepped cautiously in, checking down every isle before ever daring to peruse the protein bar section on the first isle. As he stepped down that hallway flanked by gas station refreshments, a faraway sound touched his ears; a sound which made him freeze, straining his ears to hear only his hammering heart. A sound which he could not have mistaken for anything less sinister. A sound which heralded the entry of an entity entirely unknown and entirely unprecedented to all his world. A sound of a door opening from behind the counter.
All rationality had, for a moment, been lost as his mind raged with all possible horrific visions of what that awful beast could have been that had now entered the room. At no point did he have time to consider that this stranger could simply be a store clerk; he was much too busy throwing himself into the raging torrent of unbounded imagination, dreaming up all sorts of grotesque forms that this recently entered beast might have taken. But he would soon no longer need to merely dream of the beast; for his imagination was suddenly interrupted and his terror was fully prodded when the sound of cautiously approaching footsteps sounded from down the entrance side of the isle.
He was cornered! Running for the door would place him in direct sight of his pursuer. Dashing down the aisle would simply delay the inevitable. He frantically searched the aisle for anything to be of service, anything he could hide behind, anything he could grab and use as a weapon, anything that could stand between himself and that unknown pursuer. He had only just torn a windshield brush from a display stand at that fateful moment when the unknown footsteps had reached the end of his isle.
It was only at this very moment that it all at once dawned on him how silly he must have looked. He stood absolutely dumb, a windshield brush brandished in his two hands like a spear at the other end of the isle in which stood a short man with thin white whisps of hair over his blemished head and a very confused look on his expressive face.
Mike slowly lowered the windshield brush as if he faced an opponent he had no hope to defeat. His gaze lowered. The hammering of his heart slowed as the heat in his face boiled.
The old store clerk was the first to speak, his voice good-natured accent pinning him as the image of central New York breeding. It was voice that could only be described as casual with a spark of bombastic.
“I don’t know what you’re expecting to find robbin’ an old gas station owner with a windshield brush. I’ve never been robbed before, but I get the feeling that’s ain’t usually how it’s done.”
Head still low, Mike quickly returned the windshield brush to its place and pushed off the allegations of his being an attempted thief by ignoring them. He replied to the good-natured tone with more of a sulking mumble than he had intended.
“I just want to purchase a few things. I’m on my way through town.”
The joviality on the face of the store clerk faded slightly in being dismissed by the reply of his latest customer.
“Well, ya’ us’lly bring things to the counter when ya’ purchase them.”
The man ended the awkward introduction there by disappearing to whence he had come. Mike followed him to the counter only after he snatched a box of protein bars.
At the cash register, Mike could see clearly from the blue polo’s name tag that this New Yorker voice belonged to “Uncle Lou”. The stupidity of his expecting the store clerk to be anything else was becoming more evident by the moment.
Before he scanned the item, Mike noticed the clerk’s face had been giving him an uncomfortably inquisitive gaze for some time. Pretending as if the gaze was something which his customer had never noticed, the gentleman proceeded to scan the one item and take Mike’s twenty, but not without letting his casually bombastic New York-accented voice offer a casual remark that made the hair on the back of Mike’s neck stand up.
“So, ya’ heard about St. Anna’s lately?”
Mike stammered, caught utterly off guard by the man’s having so casually and precisely thrown out a name that brough back no small number of terrible memories and images to him. The amount of time Mike spent in a dumb silence was surely enough to arouse the good man’s suspicion.
“No… What about it?”
Entirely oblivious to the unseen repercussions of his flippant statement, the man casually continued as he printed the receipt.
“Well, you said you were passin’ through the area, and I thought you’d have passed by St. Anna’s on the way here. It’s probably the only landmark in a hundred-mile radius.” After an awkward pause filled only by the whine of the receipt printer, the New York accept continued, “A patient broke out a’ the mental warden last night. They think ’s psychotic. They say he’s attempted suicide once before with a steak knife. Crazy they’d give a man a steak knife like that. Oh, boy… Then, he broke out of the place by smashin’ his window open with a chair. A wooden chair of all things! Oh boy, oh boy… I can only imagine how many safety codes were broken by the chair alone, not to mention a window that can be broken by it. What a load a’ crap that place is!”
A diminuendoing stream of “Oh, boy”s followed this remark. Mike, meanwhile, was hoping to take the receipt and dash swiftly away without another word. Those shaky elderly hands, however, had other plans than being so quick to hand away the slip of paper and were much more preoccupied in accompanying that New York accent in speaking by waving sporadically in the air with every syllable.
“I used to be a prison counselor, so I’ve seen a few trauma victims and suicide attempts in my day. But this really takes the cake! And then, the patient stole some guy’s car – it was a Subaru Forester – and drove off to who-knows-where. So, he could either be miles away right now or dying in a ditch. We won’t know until somebody finds him.”
Mike was growing frantic now, on the edge of simply snatching the cursed piece of paper right from between the man’s fingers and dashing off before the man could look around the aisles and out the window.
“This is where the story gets scary, though. Nobody knows the patient’s name. He’s like a ghost. Different doctors reported a’ hearing different names, so he could be anyone right now. Say, you don’t look so good. Is everything okay?”
Mike told him everything was fine. Mike asked if he could have the receipt.
“Oh, yeah, sure, sorry. I like the sound of my voice too much. Here’s your receipt, but before ya’ go, I think there’s something I should let you know.”
Petrified, Mike locked eyes with the man, feeling the whole room swaying as he anticipated how that good-natured voice was about to continue. What it said made Mike’s heart skip a beat.
“The break out’s not the only crazy thing that happened yesterday… Since last night, one of the doctors who worked with the man went missing.”
Mike was mute, his eyes darting everywhere besides the face of the store clerk.
“Wh-what? Why?
“Nobody knows. But news just came out that one of his coworkers found him this morning… well, she found parts of him…”
“P-p-… parts…?”
“There’s been not just a breakout, but a killing. Last night, the doctor was taken and murdered. It couldn’t have been suicide, since nobody dismembers himself with suicide. The cops can’t think of anyone else who would kill him, maybe except for the patient who escaped. But that’s a risky theory, since they’re not sure where a patient would find a knife so sharp and would have such a good understanding of human anatomy.”
The world was beginning to close in on him. This bombastic store clerk had absolutely no idea how his casually worded gossip was tormenting his poor customer. Mike felt his balance failing him. He put two firm hands to the counter, his gaze down at the ground.
“Do you know the doctor’s name?”
“Uhhh… His name was something like Stephen Lewis… Say, are ya’ sure you’re alright? I’m not scaring ya’ am I?”
Mike said he was fine.
“I’m sorry if that was too much. I wouldn’t have said it if I knew you were a little squeamish… I just wanted you to be in the know as you’re passing through, so that you don’t just open the door to a stranger or something… But I’m sure you already know that. Don’t worry, I’m sure somebody like you will be perfectly fine. I can’t imagine you’re someone that anybody wants to kill.”
Mike took the receipt and his purchase and, with no further words of farewell, turned and half bolted out of the confiding space, flinching the entire time for the press of that razor sharp scalpel against his neck. Every second, now, was a second closer to death.
The tiny Subaru roared, bucking left and right underneath him with every jolt and turn. Beads of sweat were trickling down his back as he glued his eyes on the path laid out by these winding yellow lines, climbing on a gentle slope ever higher. He had made the ridiculous mistake of having not purchased a map at the gas station about an hour ago and was paying for it. Now, a winding road through nowhere was laid out before him, leading him ever onward into desperation.
He would have expected at least to have passed a car. But the morning wore on and on with not a single pair of wheels grazing the asphalt all around. His stomach twisted at the thought; the gas station itself was enough of a glimpse of civilization to remind him that he was not the only human on this cursed world. But the empty road was enough of a certainty of desolation to assure him that all other humans saw him worth leaving alone.
This endless stream of winding, tree-flanked, serpentine asphalt could never once assure him of an end of any kind; and thus, more than anything else, he drove ever onward dreading the end. But no matter how dreadful the knowledge of the unknown was to him, he never even thought of bringing his foot to the break long enough to stop; and, if he did think of it, he repressed the thought enough to have never thought of it.
An endless row of midnight black arrows on fiery yellow signs lined the road ahead, sending him on a precarious trajectory that shoved his body into the door as he climbed ever upward. The endless turn, like all endless tortures in life and like the endless torture of life itself, finally ended, opening before him a straightaway lined on both sides by the veil of green which shades all roadsides like the veil of black shades oblivion or the veil of white shades the corridors. Above him towered the spiring peaks of the pines, gathered like two armies of ashy green hoplites frozen an instant during the clash when they are only far enough to allow four lanes of forgotten roadway between them. And above those was the ashy grey veil of late afternoon clouds.
Down a quarter mile away, the road vanished around a curve. But, as this curve sped steadily closer, Mike was beginning to notice a rectangle of bright green in the trees against the ashen green of the pines. He held his breath, daring to advert his eyesight from the road long enough to strain it at that rectangle of bright green. Besides the road, just before the sharpest turn, a sign heralded an exit to a nearby town not a quarter mile down the road. As his vehicle flew through the turn, he breathed easily at long last.
Only when certainty meant the difference between life and death did he realize how little humans can be certain of anything. Even the assumption that this sign reported in truth was as much a leap of faith as the assumption that our senses perceive in honesty. Perhaps we, as humans, hold no belief dearer than the belief that sanity must always be more important than logic and comfort must always be held closer than truth.
But no matter how much some might say he offended reason in doing so, he could not but take that leap of faith in trusting that, when half of that sign’s promise finally fulfilled itself in the form of an exit, it would be worth diverting off onto. His face was burning with shame as the cautionary speed limit sign flashed by the right side just before a lineup of black arrows over yellow faces, all peaking over from behind the barricade of the guard rails. He hammered the brake and jerked the wheel to avoid flying madly into that guardrail all until the speedometer’s red needle plummeted from 50 to 35 and the road’s tree-flanked course straightened from so sharp a curve to a gentle straightaway.
He inched slowly and cautiously up the straightaway, scanning all the trees besides the bleak little road for any sign of life or civilization. Any moment now, he would spot the friendly façade of a suburban home. Just around the turn in the straightaway, assuredly, and a row of houses would become immediately visible around the trees like the sun around a mountain.
The turn passed his face by and, for a glorious, indescribable moment, the whole of the forest gave way to two signs of civilizations – which were, in this case, quite literal signs. The first was a stop sign, warning of an intersecting road. The second was a large welcome sign, which welcomed him, in warm Times New Roman Font, to the suburbs of Ridgeway.
He would have never been able to guess, from what he saw on the sign alone, that this suburb would turn out to be the land that it was. The sign was perfectly kept; the rosebushes about its base were pleasantly trimmed and the grass about their mulch was freshly mown. It was in perfect reasonableness, then, that he pulled slowly up to the sign, signaled a right turn, and proceeded to drive down the road to the right.
A road of opportunity extended onwards, tame and orderly. The road was a welcome relief from the serpentine curves of the forested highway. Instead of maddened snake-like curves and turbulent sea-like waves, this road was characterized by sane linear straightness and unadventurous untouched flatness. The veil of trees appeared to cease rather abruptly up ahead, so it was possible to presume that the ground all around the road was similarly as flat and undisturbed. It was not until enough of the trees around had strolled by the little Subaru did he realize that, though as perfectly flat as the road itself, the land around the road was not utterly featureless; for, with a leap of excitement, he noticed that the road was flanked on both sides by the tiny front yards of row after row of suburban settlements.
He eased the brake slowly down, the purr of the Subaru’s engine dying away to where it was impossible to hear over the sliding of its wheels over the asphalt. Here, the trees all passed gently by at walking pace, falling away all around him and welcoming the inmate of this little Subaru onto a corridor lined on all sides with civilization.
With how long he had spent running like an injured animal in the woods, the world of civilization was a cold rain on his parched tongue. Up until this moment, all civilization which crossed his path was suspicious in proportion to how it was scarce. To have happened across another gas station or another stretch of highway instead of this plentiful crop of homes would have been to travel further into the baited trap. But now that he was clearly surrounded by well-meaning and kind suburban homes, which undoubtedly housed well-meaning and kind suburban citizens, he needed no convincing to believe that he was finally out of the trap. Whoever his pursuers were, they were crafty, working in the darkest nooks and crannies of society which every supposedly sensible person would have overlooked. He had not yet come to any reason to believe that his pursuers would trouble themselves with something so lengthy and intricate as constructing an entire suburban settlement that turned out to be a trap. Surely, a suburb must imply suburbans.
The late afternoon was growing dim, but not so much so to demand his headlights. He therefore continued to stroll smoothly down this sterile little unmarked road, being oddly struck by the complete lack of cars for which he had to watch out as he drove.
He scanned the houses as he passed them by, searching for one which showed the signature signs of housing a happy family. Each and every house showed the clear and deliberate marks of design; they all followed the traditional shape and pallet that comes to mind on mention of an American suburb, with pointed triangular A-frames, black square storm windows, and spotless rectangular front porches. But the longer he examined them, the more he found these deliberate marks of design, but not really the marks of true design. It was an impression he could not really put to words at first. None of them seemed to have any kind of decoration with which homeowners always claim their homes. That alone was enough to make the houses feel almost naked in a way. They lacked something to them that made it impossible for him to consider them as obviously bearing the marks of design. Maybe it was the way each and every roof and gable sloped just like its neighbor, as if all of them were evolved from one another. Maybe it was the way their plastic facades betrayed themselves to be mere imitations of wood in how they lacked any signs of wear and age. Maybe it was the way the broad lightless windows stared out into the space in front of them like a couple of stupid eyes, glazed over by a complete inability to comprehend anything. But something about these lines of house after house after featureless house revealed a complete lack of something in their design; maybe that “something” is what artists like to call “heart”. With absolutely nothing to mark any one house as loved by a family among the others, their complete lack of creativity and originality was as apparent as what marks of design they boasted. Yes, they boasted design only insofar as a featureless brick wall or an untouched white canvas.
The only life he could notice was that of the plant life; and the only plant life was that of the square lawns of neatly trimmed grass, punctuated only by stubby concrete driveways and traversed by a sidewalk, and the branchless saplings, occasionally dotting the roadside and only ever between the road and said sidewalk. No bushes, flowers, or trees claimed the spaces of mulch that occasionally flanked walkways and driveways. The bare saplings themselves could have hardly been considered alive in any other context, seeing as that they appeared as nothing more than a twig stuck in a square of mulch. To him, the forest had always seemed chaotic and lacking in the clear marks of a designer; squares of mulch never designated where trees should grow in nature. And yet, as he passed these featureless facades slower and slower, he began to wonder if there was a difference between design and creativity which he had never noticed.
Each branchless sapling was passing slower and slower until, at last, the Subaru halted. He sat in the idle car for a moment longer, gazing stupidly at the red needle relaxed over the farthest left end of the speedometer. He glanced out the right passenger window once more to see a house, so much like all the other houses, staring stupidly off into space not a few yards away. A horrible moment of recognition dawned on him as he considered that stare, a moment whose memory he proceeded to try and repress.
Considering no better course of action, he slowly put his hand to the transmission before reluctantly sliding it into park. Determined now, he heaved the parking brake back and cut the engine. The pleasant purr of his four-wheeled friend cut off, leaving him in silence.
Like a sleeper bracing himself for waking, he braced himself to open the door. When at last he did, he was filled once more with a familiar contempt at that poor teal smudge for not having left a coat in the Subaru.
He pulled himself out of the vehicle with a grunt, stretching his aching back and legs upon placing his feet on a surface besides the car’s pedals. He tossed the door closed, the sound of its empty slamming disappearing into all directions with not even a whisper of the wind to answer it.
The only sound in the whole world was that of his breathing through shivers and his stepping on asphalt. He gazed timidly up and down the road to see nearly a mirror image disappearing into the blue on both sides of him. He tried to hold back the fear that this road now went on for eternity in both directions.
The markless asphalt road seemed so much wider in person. The road seemed so much longer on foot. Standing beside the driver’s door of his Subaru, he was an adrift sailor swimming alongside his life raft. At long last, he inhaled deeply the air of determination, letting the short beep of his car locking disappear into the unphased cold as he stepped away from his life raft.
He set himself to climbing the sidewalk to house nearest to his car’s place of parking. He stepped onto the grass beside the road slowly as if he had forgotten what grass was. Slowly, he inched up to the walkway, keeping his eyes down at the featureless concrete below his every next step. When he had come to stand just beside the mailbox, he froze to let his gaze slide slowly up.
The house that covered all view past the few yards of grass in front of him was a painful sight to behold under the dying glow of the sun. Its facade consisted of two stupid faces sitting directly beside eachother like two decapitated heads placed on a plate. The face on the left, which was utterly featureless, boasted an empty A-frame roof that looked either like an unfortunately tall forehead or a dunce cap, under which glared two expressionless rectangular eyes whose mouth had evidently been sewn shut. The house’s driveway, not wishing to tease that mouthless head by leading directly into a garage in its face, diverted to the left side to where it ended, perhaps at a garage door in the house’s unseen side. A walkway diverting off this driveway led across the front of the mute face, where any walker would be in the emotionless gaze of those rectangular eyes, before leading to the bottom of a staircase on the side of the face on the right.
This staircase led to a covered square porch, only large enough for a small landing in front of the door, but high enough off the ground to demand support beams. Seen from where he stood, the front porch made the face on the right look stupidest of all; as opposed to the A-frame of the left face, the right face’s roof sloped forward. This roof was punctuated by two dormers with forward-sloping shed roofs. Between them and the square front porch, this face gave the undeniable impression of two blank eyes with bushy shed-roof eyebrows which gaped out at the world from overtop a perpetually yawning mouth, which drooled out a set of stairsteps leading to the ground. Besides this mouth, two of the same such windows formed two giant moles on either cheek of the unattractive beast, completely assuring that this otherwise featureless off-white face would be as repulsive as possible.
With a shudder, he jogged across the lawn, any reverence for the path laid out by the driveway entirely overshadowed by his growing dislike for the house. Even on the short distance between the stairsteps and the sidewalk, he felt like a deer in the sights of a hunter. It was with no want of eagerness did he finally scurry up those steps and find himself under the protection of the porch. He breathed a sigh of relief for a moment. But he kept it simply to a moment; and, before long, he pressed the doorbell.
No sound returned. He heard a ringing inside the house when he pushed the device. But not a scooting of a chair, not a barking of a dog, not the turning of a doorknob would care to follow. Just complete silence.
He rang the doorbell yet again. Silence. He rang the doorbell once more. Finally, his hand hovered up to the wooden surface of the door and hammered three firm knocks. Not a whisper returned. At last, after too long of waiting for a response, his fingers wrapped around the doorknob and cautiously turned.
The unlocked door slid open. Beyond it was near utter darkness, through which he could only just make out an unadorned foyer.
“Hello…? Is anyone home?”
That voice rang out with no answer. He tried to strain his eyes through the darkness inside as the light outside was slowly dimming. Not a single sign of life stood out to him from that unphased foyer. He pulled the door closed.
He decided to walk his way around the house. The backyard was fenced off, thus entirely invisible. The driveway on the left side was empty where he would have expected a car. On the right side, his quest for life was only continually frustrated. All that met him there was the tight space between two houses, split by an empty bed of mulch and terminating in a featureless fence. He gazed up and down the right side of this unattractive abode, feeling repulsed by the minute at that mouthless wall of a face, that boasted, overtop its two stupid eyes, one third eye that glared out from its freakishly tall forehead below an ugly leprous spot, which was a gable vent, that marred the very pinnacle of its a-frame forehead. He spent only a moment longer examining that awful right side, remaining where he was long enough to dwell on the sympathy he must feel for anyone who would be forced to live next to such a hideous excuse for architecture.
Had he seen these faces on any ordinary day besides any ordinary street, it would have been nothing peculiar. But, on the street that they were and on the night that this was, the inner hideousness of the suburbs was revealing itself. Not wishing to draw out his torture, he decided to try his luck with the house to the right; besides a similarly stupid mouthless A-frame face, which was alike to the rest of the house in its awful mold-green hue, the right face’s forward-sloping silver roof was marked by three insipid eyes under which was a grin, almost like that of a skeleton, whose top teeth were missing and whose bottom teeth only remained in the form of the covered front porch’s railing.
Bracing the vulnerability of dashing up to the other front porch and trying its doorbell proved to be in vain. The houses were as desolate as they were unemotional.
As he stood on the front porch, he once again thought he felt that awful, sharpened scalpel against the back of his neck, sending shivers down his spine and twists in his stomach. He spun around to see, behind him, nothing but the same road boasting the same row of expressionless houses on the other side, and on which was parked the same Subaru. He stepped further off the porch and scanned down both directions. No silver scalpel, no red snake, no white lab coat caught his eye. There was not a bush, lamppost, or tree for any of these things to hide behind for as far as he could see. The only eyes that he could see were much too preoccupied with staring off into space to give a change in expression at any movement of his. But, even so, he could not help but scan each and every window that his eye fell upon to be certain that an ominous figure was not hiding behind that black glass. And even when he had scanned as many windows as he could, certainty was well beyond anything he could use to describe his situation. Had his executioners led him to these outskirts of reality, this space of liminality and nothingness, simply so that they could be certain his blood and organs would only spill where no eye would care to see?
The only thing worse than certain death is delayed execution. The only thing worse than delayed execution is uncertain death.
The first thing to bring him back to reality – if his situation could be called that – was a cold wind that swept its way down the endless corridor of houses and brushed itself over his bear arms and legs. He shivered violently for a moment, before deciding it best to return to the only remote sense of safety he knew. He scurried down the steps and trotted straightway for the little Subaru, awkwardly pulling his keys from the running shorts as he walked around the vehicle. Keys jingling in his hand, he halted his circumnavigation once he arrived at the driver’s side door. Not a minute later of hasty fumbling and he had returned to the wonderful luxury of a warm and functional citadel of automotive safety.
The little Subaru purred warmly. At last, as the darkness had grown too thick, he clicked the headlights on, piercing the veil of blackness with a wide field of light through which he could just see the further part of the road off ahead and the closer houses of the settlement all around. He eased down on the gas pedal, letting the dimly lit nighttime scenery glide by him. Now his eyes were glued before him on the road ahead which was flanked by nothing more than row upon row of the same faceless face.
His mind finally had time to race with all the possibilities of this dreaded place. What had happened to make this settlement so repugnant to settlers? Why would the houses be so perfectly trimmed and kept if all its purpose was for the adoption of no owner more than the emptiness of night? The only explanations for this horde of questions flew dramatically between the absurdly illogical, and the horrifically logical. To believe that these perfectly kept settlements had simply never been settled yet, despite all of its reasonableness, seemed far beyond him. What had reasonableness ever done him? What had reasonableness ever done anyone?
No, he must not panic. Perhaps it was true; he was simply driving by façade after façade of empty house because nobody cared to inhabit them. Assuredly, then, he could find a break in the pattern. He could certainly find somewhere that these houses boasted an owner; it was the only thing he had left to hope for. If it was true, as it seemed to be, that he was alone in this hopeless world of monotony, would he ever be able to see another world again?
He passed several intersections marked by stop signs; hoping beyond hope that another car would pass by, he stopped at each and every one only to be reminded of the futility of the act of stopping on an empty road. He resolved that, if he found an end to this endless corridor of houses with nothing more than a cul-de-sac and more empty houses, he would retrace his steps and search the intersections. There was the scalpel against his neck again; there were the chills and twists. How long could he search? Would searching but never finding be what leads to death? Or – Heaven forbid – would searching and actually finding be rather what beckons the scalpel himward? The worst death is the one for which we always search but never intend to find. Was he preparing himself for the worst death?
All these questions and more would soon be answered.
He first noticed it off on the obscure borders of the blackness. The grey evening sky up ahead was punctuated no longer by more oncoming A-frame rooves. Rather, it was pierced by an unbreaking fence of silhouetted treetops.
He glued his eyes to the end of the road ahead, the windows on the houses out of his periphery glinting by all the quicker. Their maddened rush slowed only when the silhouettes of the treetops had grown to the height of the houses around him and the houses around him had come to the border of the trees.
All in seemingly an instant, the view of his headlights unveiled the end of this road and the limits of this suburb. He expected the road lined by empty houses to terminate in a mere cul-de-sac and more empty houses. But his expectations were hardly a thing to be heeded. Rather, the line of house after house terminated at the exact moment of the road at an unexplained uncrossed border, as if this were some sort of rendering error in the code of reality. What once was a civilization gave sudden way to a massive clearing, which his headlights were steadily revealing in greater detail as his car inched cautiously forward.
The first thing that was obvious was that the clearing was a perfect dead end. The second thing to become clear was that the clearing was no mere accident of nature. The defined border between the clearing and the trees was square in shape and large enough to have held a few more rows of houses and several more yards of road at least. The floor of the clearing was not an uneven meadow of overgrown grass, flowers, and weeds as might be expected in any natural phenomenon. Rather, its ground was smooth and even, save simply the edges whose borders were lined with mounds of freshly dug dirt. All of the ground, he realized, was nothing more than dirt, suggesting any grass that once grew on it had been ripped from its roots during the leveling process. He scanned about the borders of the clearing first as his car inched to a halt; but once his car at last halted, the wanderings of his eyes halted on one heart-stopping sight now in the center of his bright headlight beams. Crouching at the far end of that dirty clearing was a pair of two beastly glowing eyes.
He leapt when first he saw those eyes. But, not moments later, his rocketing heart rate and breathing were being steadily calmed by his vision, which assured him that the two eyes turned out to be nothing more than the reflections of his lights in the lifeless headlights of a motionless bulldozer, parked where the road would have been at the other end of the clearing.
The sleeping construction vehicle gazed blankly at him from behind the giant dirty scoop it rested on the ground. From behind the dull surface of that scoop, he could only just see a pair of eyes overtop a snarling grille that was just visible behind that dirty shield. His lonely breathing filled the silent cabin of the Subaru, being absorbed into the soundless leather seats and rumbling plastic dashboard. He dared not move, lest he awaken that beast. The imposing bulldozer looked like a dragon guarding the entrance of his cave. But unlike a dragon, who uses the earth-shaking murmur of its growls and snores to intimidate its prey, the sleeping beast up ahead was achieving much the same effect by the mere unmoving silence of the night.
He stepped cautiously out of the vehicle, daring to let himself be as exposed to a hidden attacker as he was to the cold night wind. The nearby purr of his Subaru was the only sound that pierced the night, sounding loudest right where he was and growing quieter as it vanished into the distance with not a murmur to answer. The beast across from him simply slept, noticing the cold, helpless, vulnerable human as little as it noticed the purring engine of the vehicle to which this human clung.
Slowly and cautiously, he released his hold on the car door. He took one step across the border from that solid asphalt ground to the lumpy dirty sea. He took another step, now with no foot on the solid comfort of the asphalt, watching his long shadow shift over the ground in the bright flood of light in front of him. The ominous murmur of his companion behind him would not cease in warning him to exercise caution while also incautiously broadcasting its timid growl throughout all the air around. The longer he forced himself to disregard the commands of his companion, the more his breath trembled.
What even was he expecting to find, stepping out of the car? Did he hope to find some construction worker still at work behind one of these dirt mounds to whom he could call for help? Would even such a man be willing to help? Would even such a man be worth accepting help? If he found any life here, would Mike simply find madmen?
He remembered the words of that distant rhyme.
“And if this soul is not killed before this Month’s third day’s sun,
Then let us all give ourselves to decay,
If we fail to give him to decay,
Then let our lives be given instead,
What did that even mean? How many suns would it have been come the next sunrise? Was there a set time before which his pursuers – whoever or whatever they were – had vowed to kill him? If these pursuers were able to get away with dismembering a leading doctor without being noticed, why had they not made certain that the same happens to their current victim? His inability to answer this question forbade his pondering it any longer out in that cold clearing.
Not even the distant call of a bird broke the ominous silence. The noiseless nature herself was holding her hands out in tense expectation; what this expectation was of, Mike could not even guess. He was ready to resign to his car with a shaky sigh. That was just before he caught sight of something behind the trees.
He froze. He did not dare turn his back. There it was again. Off beyond the veil of trees ahead, just to the left of the bulldozer, he saw a faint glint – like some distant windows or eyes. They were well into the woods; if they had a source, they were easily beyond anything his car’s headlights could unveil while they were still comfortably hidden in the forest. That he could not determine a thing about their source was as much as he could determine.
They were only a couple flickers or flashes. And he had only just caught them. He stood still in the cold scrupling whether he must wager himself on a pair of distant flashes. If marching through those woods turned out to be his only road to assured salvation, he would have given up the world in turning his back on them now. This could be the last night he ever has to make a choice, given he even has the whole of the night. Uncertainty demands to seize every possibility.
He ran back to his car, returning to it only long enough to cut the engine and convince himself the parking brake was on. Ignoring his vehicle’s retaliation to having the headlights left on, he stole the keys and threw the door closed in his wake.
He stormed his way across the dirty sea. As he trekked through the dirt-covered plain, the only movement in this motionless world was that of his shadow shrinking with his every step. Soon, however, he had crossed the dirty land, and was so dangerously near the border between the light and the darkness that his shadow all but vanished at the edge of the forest.
Passing the bulldozer was a momentous task. Darring to possibly awaken the beast turned out to be the greatest danger of crossing that dirty plane. In fact, the only time he adverted his eyes from the forest ahead was when he made that dangerous pass, glancing ceaselessly back at the dirty driver’s seat window and the massive caterpillar treads to be assure himself of a complete lack of movement from the beast to his right.
At last, he passed the beast to stand just at the border between the fern-blanketed forest floor and the naked dirty ground. The border was curiously sharp as if not even a leaf from one of those ferns nor a rock from a piece of dirt should dare to cross it. The faraway glow of the headlights was just enough to scan the border to the left and right. Only then did he spot a compromise in the border hidden in the shadow of the sleeping bulldozer.
A thin footpath path cut its way between the pines and through the ferns. It would have been impossible to see from the other side of the beast. But now that he had spotted it, he could clearly make out where it was that the night-veiled crowd of pine trunks gave way for a footpath.
He stood just at the edge of the bulldozer’s shadow, glanced nervously between the deep woods where he had seen those lights and the start of the path. Were those lights worth the desperate leap of faith? What had such leaps yielded him thus far? Is there ever a point where one must make too many leaps of faith or leap too far for the act to be worthwhile?
He could only just see the bark of the nearest trees that his headlights could reach. How did he know that the forest was not trees and nothing more? He shivered in the cold once again, deciding in the silence that the appearance of the footpath was enough a confirmation of plausibility for him to follow through with a dedication to the wager.
The vast array of black trees reached for the sky high above his head, like a group of villains standing over their next prey. He slowly and sheepishly hiked through the path, deciding to simply keep his eyes down to where he would avoid the sight of the trees and keep the sight of the path. In the growing darkness of the night, he could only just notice a grassless path snaking its way through ferns and trunks. He was alone with the empty path and woods in that dark night. At least, he chose to believe he was; the thought of what might be hiding behind any one of those shadowy trunks was a thought too horrible to entertain.
Who had taken the time to construct such a path as this? What antiquated civilization had construed the idea of a footpath leading to seemingly nowhere? Had this civilization known their beloved path was soon going to be trampled over by the scoop of the bulldozer and the façade of the suburb? What treasure did they hide at its end that would be worth a path but not a road?
It was not long of solemnly inching between the trees that he at last came across the answer to his question. He brought his gaze up as the path gave way to a small clearing. Unlike the distinct and defined square clearing from whence he had come, this clearing had no definite shape, and its uneven ground was home to patches of grass, ferns, as opposed to the piles of dirt that were the only boast of the clearing behind. But these few characteristics that set this small clearing apart from the other were hardly enough to strike the clearing’s observer so silent; among this small clearing’s boast of ferns and grass stood two curious structures that seemed to sit as naturally in the woods as the trees themselves.
The first structure was very small and most of it was underground. In fact, the only clue he had that it even existed were three little crosses poking out from the grass in front of him, serving as the nameless headstones to mark three forgotten lives that had been lived, had died, and now were buried. The second structure dwarfed the other three. Against the still shadows of the trees around it, the triangular façade of white church stood tall over him, its imposing steeple reaching for the tips of the pines around it.
Anywhere else, he would have thought of it as merely a tiny church, especially compared to other churches he had seen before. But, when surrounded by such vast woods that disappeared out into infinity, the tiny church seemed to become one entity with the forest. Where suburban houses were built on a foundation of manufactured plastic and extended on for a dizzying eternity, this church stood with walls of natural wood and stood firm as a rock, content to survey the world from this little hidden garden in the woods. Where the windows of the houses were empty and soulless, the arched windows beside this steeple were melancholy yet content, gazing on from both sides of the arched doorway with the solemn wisdom of age.
He stepped forward, careful not to let the sole of his shoes trample the ground before the headstones. His footsteps were entirely muffled by the grass, leaving him alone with the sound of his fearful breathing in the sight of that solemn steeple. Yes, those windows must have been the source of that glinting light. But he still was not certain he wanted to run into a fool who would be crazy enough to be wandering a spooky abandoned church late at night.
The vast white church did not seem to notice him stepping closer to it. The ivy-coated façade was unmoved as he put his first foot to the stone steps. The arched door stood above his head, its old wooden surface marred with untold ages of wear and tear. Not a sign nor a letter stood near the cracked stone doorway arch to give any tell of this church’s identity, congregation, or history. Not a single twitch from that barred doorway answered his standing before it. He brought his hand up to the cold splintered surface. In the dark, he could see his hand in front of him painted grey. He hesitated only a moment before leaning on the door only just enough for the old wooden object to slide ajar with a creak.
The door slid all the way open, revealing a dim interior. He stepped slowly inside, watching the ground before his feet cautiously. Once past the door, he brought his gaze up. Not a soul broke the sight. An empty baptismal basin stood at the end of a long hallway flanked on both sides by empty pews, all but black silhouettes in the dim light that flitted through the blood-shaded, fire-tinted, stained-glass windows. The dim glow of the fire and ice, blood, and water in every little arched window that lined the sides and the large arched window that filled the back was a dazzling sight. It made him think of diamonds in a cave, glowing all sorts of dazzling colors from the backdrop of complete blackness. When first he caught a glimpse of it, he froze, fearful lest he awaken the window’s many figures. Dazzling though it was, the light was also scarce; and in being scarce, it managed to be ominous. It was only enough to see the wooden floor below his feet, the glinting pipes of the church organ across the room, and the shadowy rafters of the roof above.
He looked directly up his head to see, poised a story or so above, the gaping mouth of a vast churchbell, whose surface was coated with untold decades of dust and was softly aglow in the open windows of the belfry. The dusty rope of that bell hung limply down, swaying not an inch in the windless air above his head. Imagine how grave and dreadful would be the sound were that rope to be pulled. Would the rotting struts and walls of that little steeple even survive such a tremendous crash?
Terrified lest the bell ring once again or the rafters hold no longer, he brought his gaze down from the bell and returned it to the shadowy church hall before him, softly aglow in the breathtaking light, light which dimly flitted through the dazzling images of the saints and apostles. He shivered out a shaky breath before moving. A pair of footsteps filled the empty building for the first time in perhaps a hundred years.
“Hello… Anybody here?”
This time, instead of being returned with complete muffled silence, his voice returned to him in the form of a mute echo. It was an echo only enough to make the wooden rafters hum, but the startling effect was something to which he had grown so unused that he leapt when first he heard it. Nonetheless, he kept walking forward, feeling like a criminal approaching the scaffold, though knowing neither why nor how.
He stood at last before that empty baptismal. He looked over it not knowing whether he had expected it to be full of nothing but dust or not. It was empty. Perfectly empty. Somehow, that thought disappointed him. Up until now, the sight of the baptismal had blocked the church’s stage. But now, at last, he could peer over the obstruction before him. He looked from the baptismal to the stage beyond and gasped for what saw.
Lit in the dimly dazzling glow of that vast red window behind was a rotting wooden stage, between whose boards a few new leaves were sprouting, and on which lay a dead body, naked with one arm spread out and the other torn off.
He never would have predicted the dread with which he would realize what that dead body actually was. It was a crucifix, fallen over from its sacred pedestal. Christ’s dead face was slumped in peaceful acceptance of his fate of death; but he never could have known his true fate of dismemberment and fracture.
Mike trembled, his breaths staggering. The whole church was silent. Too silent. Too silent to be the end to which all these highways and corridors had ultimately led. Too ferociously silent. Too silent to be the church on whose very own stage was lying the broken form of their professed savior of the world, blasphemed by the very law of gravity that he had supposedly created. Too dreadfully, ferociously silent. Too silent to have been formed from the conception of conscious and imagination in whose bourn originates all design and creativity. Too dreadfully, furiously, maddeningly silent. It was the silence of the universe. It was the silence of God.
Where were the mourners in those empty pews to remember the life and legacy of their god? Where were the tolls of that unmoved church bell to mourn the loss and forsaking of that long dead being? Where were the mournful chords of the organ to console the widows and orphans of this hopeless race? What kind of an animal is humanity that it does not think the death of god something to pity? What kind of monster is god that it does not think the hopelessness of humanity something to console? Could any god that wishes to be worshipped and enamored ever be the same god that sets itself infinitely beyond all reach of its creation and leave them to be proven as a batch of imbecilic wretches and morons?
He staggered back, trying to console himself on the steady throbbings of his shaky breathes. Just a few weeks ago, the same dread had overflown him when he had seen an image of the crucifix whole without a single crack or tear in the surface of that dead god’s limbs. Why was it that now that he saw that same image of a dead god laid out shattered at his feet, he would encounter the same overwhelming dread as he did when it was whole?
Would he ever be the same again? Could he ever return home as he used to, dressing his wounds with the balm of comfort to distract him from such terrible realities? Would he ever be able to wager his life on a belief in purpose when this belief had been proven so clearly the result of a blind man’s stammer?
No. He needed to get a hold of himself. These questions could wait for when he gets out of this mess… if he gets out of this mess… but, if he got out of it, would he not be convinced that the questions can wait for when he gets into another mess?
No, no, don’t think about it. No doom seemed so impending as the doom to which a godless universe is destined. But perhaps he could grasp, if only grasp out for a chance to clutch a little longer at the life which he was destined to lose, to believe a little longer in the purpose which he knew was vain.
His shaky arms and legs steadied themselves as he put his hands to the rim of the baptismal. It was a few more moments where he feared he may vomit into that long forgotten sacred basin before finally he was steady enough to stand. He felt the sweat still trickling down off his brow, down his neck, and into his shirt. He shivered.
A cold, heartless emptiness still held the church in its grasp, completely ambivalent at the actions of this small, lonely mortal within the rotting belly of the beast. This emptiness made the church feel like a dream. He had to bite his tongue in desperate hopes to convince himself otherwise. The surreal eyes of that crucifix did not twitch. Mike brought his gaze cautiously upward to the stained-glass figure through whom a dim glow of light was resonating. He could not tell nor remember who it was imaged in that window; in this cold dark prison, the light blurred the figure to where the eyes of its observer could not even discern its form. Mike shivered once again.
Could the saints imaged in the windows be any consolation to this church’s loneliness? No, it was not right. He had seen lights through the trees just moments ago. Could those mute images have carried the candle to bear that light? Did he journey all this dark path and find the possible source of the light which he sought only for that light to have been an illusion from the start? There was that scalpel to the back of his neck again.
He wheeled around frantically. Nobody occupied the empty space of rotting hardwood behind him. It was merely an empty hallway between dimly lit, dust-coated pews that led to a half-open double door from whence glowed a sliver of unfiltered natural light. He slowly scanned the church pews closest to him, not at all consoled to see darkness and nothing more overtop undisturbed coats of dust. What kind of a fool was he, chasing lights in the dark like a child after fireflies, when he should have known full well that it may come to this? Come to questions and nothing more?
His gaze arrived once again at that empty bloody-red stage, on which laid the slain, fractured body of the savior. Those lifeless eyes could not hear a single plea of his. Those limp arms could not twitch an inch to bear a candle. Like all the rest of humankind, he was alone in the darkness with the shattered remnants of the age-old worship of god. And, like all the rest of humankind, it was impossible for him to prove that he was not alone in the darkness with the impending evil of Satan. What god could save him now?
No, he needed to be rational. It was a trick of the eye, yes. He didn’t see a candle behind those windows. It was simply the illusion of a few stray beams of light from his Subaru passing through the foliage and glinting off a distant pane of glass. It was just the same with that sleeping bulldozer’s headlights; he had thought it was the eyes of a prowling beast when it was really the reflectors of a lifeless vehicle. Oh, what a consoling reality it is that memory can be contorted. He was just contorting his memories when he thought that it was, without a doubt, a glint of light behind a glass. He was alone in this church; the place was creepy enough to chill his spine and steal his breath, but it was most definitely empty. Simple observation will prove that much.
He shivered. He sighed. He glanced once more to that dead savior’s face.
And then it erupted. An explosive roar that filled the room and shook the rotting wood, making the walls tremble on their unmoving struts. A piercing roar which reverberated eternally until its every vibration was imprinted within the furthest depths of his memory. A dreadful roar that rang out periodically like the ringing of a chime counting off the seconds before doom.
It was the metallic clanging toll of a vast churchbell, ringing out from the steeple and filling the air like mist over a cemetery.
Mike felt as if he had been smacked from a sullen sleep into reality. All the rest of the church became a megaphone to that horrific toll of oncoming doom, its once ominously silent structures brough to life in vengeance.
The apostils and saints glared down at him like a pack of wolves emerging from their den. The sneers evident on those vengeful faces through the dim glow surrounded him, sealing his doom. The eyes of the savior remained peacefully closed like a parent asleep with his child being taken in the night. The tolls of that bell peeled on, counting off seconds until an Untold Hour.
His breaths, once staggered, now came like the hammering of his horrified heartbeat. Their rhythm was frantic over the forebodingly confident pulse of the metallic clashes. He stumbled backwards, trying to turn around and break for the door at the same instant. He took one miscalculated step and the floorboard below broke in. He dropped to his knees, frantically trying to dislodge his captured foot. He glanced every which way to try and spot the axe that was destined to fall. And as he glanced, he made the mistake of glancing up.
High above him, candles hidden in the rafters lit up the boards of the very roof. And over the splintered surface of that age-worn roof was painted the ferocious image of a pyramid and a snake, marking in blood the spot where they wished their prey to fall.
Mike screamed, yes, he screamed a horrified scream of bloody murder. It was the scream which rings out from the lungs of a body moments before the heart is split. It was the scream of a human who has been turned into an animal hunted for sport. And, beneath the outrageous sound of that blood-thinning scream was the ominous, steady tolling of inevitable doom.
He freed his foot! He leapt to his feet not wasting a moment. He bounded for that open door, nearly smashing through it as he careened out of that hellhole of a church like a bullet from a gun. He leapt down the stairs, his eyes fixed only on the trail. The muddy ground flew for his face when, in one horrible moment, he tripped over one of the unseen graves. He turned over, dirt painting his violently quaking limbs as he beheld the image of the church overtop him. The monster loomed over its prey, a disapproving vengeance in the wide old eyes of that awakened beast. Those tolls of doom rang out over the world, awakening the whole mob of the forest to join in that periodic countdown to the Unknown Hour. As they rang, a roar awakened from the belly of that ivy-coated monster, the roar not of brass, but of lead, the lead pipes of an organ, which rang out in maniacal harmony with the bell to the sound of mortality.
Mike leapt up, his limbs flying with unprecedented agility, and broke for the footpath. The trees seemed to be closing in around him and he knew if he were to stop running even for a second those vast trunks, which joined that tolling bell and roaring organ in singing of impending doom, would engulf him whole.
He broke free from the forest, bounding into the clearing. He dashed over the ground where once a bulldozer stood, startled beyond words to see the hunched form of that beast halfway across the clearing on a direct course for a helpless Subaru.
Running to save the only friend he ever knew, he charged across the clearing, ripping his keys from his bulging pocket, flying as fast as his glass-torn legs could carry him to reach his vehicle before that lumbering beast.
He ran right past the guzzling engine of that evil monster and dodged the dirty scoop to be greeted by the blazing glow of his Subaru’s headlights. He blinked but did not slow until he nearly crashed into the driver’s side door. The growing groan of that lumbering beast joined the chorus of the organ and the bell, filling him with desperate urgency as he unlocked the car and threw the door open.
He tumbled into the car, slamming the door in his wake. Out the driver’s window, two blinding lights of an awakened beast glared down its prey, the beast’s metallic surface set violently alight by the nearing headlights. The prey shoved his car keys in the ignition. The elephantine metal scoop lifted slowly in the air, like an axe lifting over the neck of its victim, revealing the sight of two vast treads, vast treads which ploughed over the Earth with unspoken power, vast treads which were seconds away from the front bumper of the helpless Subaru.
The car screeched to life. The scoop of the bulldozer nearly covered all the window. He threw the transmission into reverse and the emergency brake down. That gargantuan scoop hung just over his head. He slammed the gas pedal.
The vast metal scoop of the heartless, growling, lumbering beast dropped with a deafening clash of hundreds of tons, shattering the asphalt pavement right where a helpless Subaru sat not a second ago.
Mike flew forward as his car leapt away from its attacker. He tossed the wheel to the left, feeling the whole world spin around him until the view of the street from whence he came filled his front windshield. The eyes of that heartless beast blinded him from the rearview mirror. But that predator would be stripped of prey; for the man threw his transmission into drive and, buckling his seatbelt as an afterthought, slammed the gas down to where the raspy little engine of that Subaru filled his ears, sending all needles on his dashboard flying as those two evil eyes in his rearview mirror faded.
The white-knuckled grip with which he clutched the wheel did not lessen during the whole mad dash out of the suburbs. The ferocious vivacity with which the sights around the road flew by his windows did not ease during the dizzying careen down an exit. The wide eyes with which he endlessly glanced at the rearview mirror did not tire during the tempestuous voyage through the mountains. Rain began to blur the view out his window as he flew down the chaotically serpentine, endlessly bucking two-lane roller coaster of a road. The scarce speed limit sign flew by him at a rate well beyond what any one sign would approve. He had lost all control, of the road, of his circ*mstance, of himself, he was flying, no crashing, and no soul could tell him where.
It could have been seconds, it could have been hours of this maddened rush through a forest he could not see, following a slick road he could not control but still loomed the terror he could not suppress. He knew he would not make it the whole night. That red serpent in the roof high above his head seared itself onto his mind, tormenting him to the terrible toll to that Untolled Hour, glaring down at him from the candlelight, promising to devour him whole, laughing at his doomed attempts to resist the inevitable, feasting lustfully on the blood-curdling overtones of his scream. A windshield stood between him and a rainy forest that flew by in a blur, careened through like a falcon shot by a hunter or a plane shot by a rocket. Heaven only knows what horrific instruments of unhuman torture, of gory dismemberment, of unseen dissection were poised in the hands of those who chased him. Whether right on his tale or miles away, whether ahead or behind, he could neither know, discern, nor guess. As is the case with all humanity, desperation is the only way to describe his circ*mstance.
He was helpless to avoid the end of this horror story of a night. But ends come all too soon with all too little warning. And this night’s end was to come in the form of a bright light before his squinting eyes.
The yellow signs beside the mountain curve flew by as one yellow and black snake, giving way suddenly to a road with no turns, neither left nor right, but marred with waves like the sea. He plummeted through the downward slopes and flew through the upward slopes, weighing a thousand pounds at their troughs and absolutely weightless at their crests. He may have even caught air at the crests of one or two, he could not tell. What he could tell became all too obvious when he cleared the last crest.
As the hill flew past and he lost feeling of the seat under him, he was suddenly blinded by a bright pair of lights in the deep darkness, brilliant white lights which turned all view of the road and the forest into utter and complete blackness. The first vehicle he ever met on the road, he had not even time to turn down his own high beams before he realized, through squinting eyes, that the viciously bright orbs of light were flying at him from the dead center of the road, snaking their manic way into his lane.
His heart leapt into his throat as he slammed the brake, filling his ears with a hysterical screech, and threw the wheel to the right in desperate avoidance of ever driving straightway into that distant deathtrap of brightness.
Those bright lights took no moment’s hesitation to swerve; they were growing brighter and brighter in his view, not giving a twitch in their maddened path of death.
The victim only had time to gasp.
In the course of an instant, the wink of an eye, his whole windshield flashed white and the speeding mass of his Subaru hammering against the momentum of a vast white truck slammed every last piece of plastic in the cabin. His windshield exploded as miniscule beads of auto glass and airbag fabric flew in his face. His ears were filled with the crash of all parts of his car absorbing the impact, his shoulders were torn with the force of all fibers in the seatbelt constraining his body. His car, once speeding head on, was now sent spiraling out from beneath him, thrown utterly off the road by the merciless impact to its driver’s side. Left and right, up and down, vanished as he flew into his door. But all the maddened spiraling, all the merciless impact, all the dizzying tossing was all cut off when, at last, the right side of his helpless car was sent smashing into a thick wall of trees with one great final crash that filled his ears for only an instant.
Helplessly tied to his seat, he opened his eyes, his ears full of some mechanical hissing and his nostrils pierced with a scent resembling burning plastic. He blinked relentlessly until the world stopped spinning.
He was in the Subaru… What was left of the Subaru… It was not moving.
The windows were gone. The cabin was full of glass. He was facing the side of the road. Only his front wheels were on the road. Gravity was pulling him back into his seat. Rain was soaking his hair. The side door was crushed in like a soda can with a long branch spearing where a passenger’s head would have been, stopping just short of his temples. He sat back for only a moment. His stomach did not ease.
Wait! He was being chased! He needed to run before they found the body! Before they dismembered the body!
After many failed attempts, he finally unclicked his buckle. With his feeble arms, he tried to push the door open. It was impossible to budge. He needed to climb out the window. He groaned, forcing his trapped legs free from under the steering wheel. With all his might, he heaved his shoulders out the side window and shoved his whole body to drop overtop torn grass and thorns.
He knelt, his head spinning. His brain was throbbing, throbbing like a heart in pain. His stomach was twisting and turning. He tried to stand. He grabbed onto the dirty, wet, and twisted car mirror and pulled. His stomach lurched. He staggered onto the road on two legs for only a moment longer. He dropped to his knees, coughing out vomit into his shadow.
Shadow. All the world was shadow. His vomiting spree came in full force, his whole mouth and nostrils filled with the sharp acidic taste.
Was it over now? A few more coughs came with that sharp taste. He could finally breathe again, but his breaths were weak. Using his hands, he pulled his shaking feet beneath him. He staggered a moment in the brightness of those headlights. He looked back at his car. The poor Subaru sat there pleading for help, her coughing engine still trying to purr, her eyes faced high into the sky. He tried to stumble away the direction he was driving.
A veil of darkness filled the sky above the tops of that army of trees. He staggered across the road until he was struck in the chest. He looked down at what he had hit. It was a metal guardrail. He looked past the guardrail to see what he could of a gently downward-sloping hill in the darkness. Desperately, he scrambled to climb the guardrail.
With a heave, he landed on soft, wet grass. But his legs would not carry him any further. He collapsed onto the gentle slope of grass, guarded from rolling down by a tiny rock cleft. It was as if the rock was placed just for him to sit on. He looked back up at the sky, clearly visible to his burning eyes, presented in full blackness by the clearing of trees before him. They framed his view of utter foggy blackness.
It was over, he knew it. The skies would never open, and he would be seized from behind, his neck to be severed. He had to accept what he could not ever accept. He breathed into his burning mouth and nostrils one long-savored breath: the scent of midnight rain over forests of pine. All this resistance of the inevitable had to end somewhere, by the very nature of inevitable. His body would be found a distorted mess tomorrow and his crash would be framed as an unfortunate roadside accident. He had played right into their trap. None would be the wiser tomorrow morning regarding the untimely demise of a breakout hospital patient. Just like the rest of humanity, his story will end and will be merely a pity. And the world will keep spinning.
He puts his head in his hands. Oh, just let the blow come! After all so long of resisting, he just wants the knife to touch his neck! It would be a comfort after all that this trip through Hell has taught him about the sorry state of humankind. He pulls his soaking hands away from his bloody face. The rain is calming. Calming. Calming. It’s a mist now, floating through the trees, but not obstructing the sky.
The veil of the sky is clear, clearer than any veil has ever been, clearer for it does not obstruct; it reveals.
He was pleading in his head. Just let the clouds clear. At least, if only. The sky remained veiled.
His heart sank. He was ready to drop his head back in his hands and spend the rest of his existence hoping for that knife to fall once more. But he did not get the chance before at last, at long last, the clouds trembled, a thin couple of stars began to glimmer through them, a blur of moonlight glowed to life and, at long, long last, the veil was torn.
The Third Sunrise
The wall of early morning trees flashed by the window as the light police cruiser glided almost noiselessly down the serpentine mountain roads. Father Brookes found that he had to hold rather tightly to the handles to keep from having himself thrown left and right at each turn. The police chief had quickly revealed himself to be the type of driver who takes the comfort of his passengers on an extremely low priority: something quite understandable when you consider what was probably the common mood of the relationship between the officer and his backseat passengers. The silence between the two gentlemen had been occasionally disturbed, like the dirt at the bottom of a river, once or twice for the sake of sharing odd bits and pieces of information left out from the conversations an hour ago between Brookes and another officer. But, between the priest’s exhaustion with having testified lengthily at the station and the chief’s preoccupation with now driving erratically through the mountains, only scarce spirts of conversation were able to squirm their way between the two gentlemen.
At length, however, the chief saw yet more questions of his necessary to have cleared.
“Father, how many times did you meet Mr. Lawson?”
“I believe it was roughly twice that I spoke with him on different occasions, but I have seen him in the pews occasionally.”
“And you’re absolutely sure there wasn’t anything off about him?”
“As much as the testimony of a priest who has only met a man twice can serve, yes, he seemed perfectly sane. His weekly church attendance was almost regular for about a month, but he did tell me himself that he was not really religious. My impression was that he was an intelligent and controlled man… but impressions rarely mean much compared to the deeper self.”
“Mmm, police officers and priests can both agree with that at least. You don’t know of any other witnesses? Anybody else you ever saw him chatting with at church?”
“Not that I know of… My impression is that the man is to himself somewhat… Especially considering how he may have felt out-of-place at Mass, it could be likely that he never spoke to anyone besides his run-in with myself.”
“I see.”
A solemn silence passed for but a moment.
“Officer Bradly…?”
“Yes?”
“Is there any chance that he could be acquitted? Perhaps if real witnesses come forth?”
The officer sighed, his sigh piercing Brookes with a slight dread.
“There’s a chance. I won’t tell ya’ there isn’t… We’d probably have to be able to explain why he claimed to see what he did… And then, after all that, it’s still true that we still need to find the guy first.”
Father Brookes brought his disappointed gaze down to his hands in his lap. Despite all his anxieties, he could at least console himself on the fact that they brought him along; that was enough to make him sure that they expected at least a possibility of having found the poor fugitive.
After long enough, their drive was interrupted by a voice on the police radio. It told of having stumbled upon two crashed vehicles – a silver Subaru Forester and a white Ford Transit – both absolutely totaled, with the Ford entirely rolled over. As well, two dead bodies were found at the scene. With that news, Father Brookes’ heart sank. As it was not far from their location, the police chief replied that they would be there with an ETA of 5 minutes.
“Well, Father,” the chief nonchalantly remarked to his passenger, “We’re about to see how much of a chance we’ve got.”
The sirens blared and the forest flew by.
It was sooner even than 5 minutes before they arrived at the awful scene. A long curve in the road opened up to that same hill-marred strip of straightaway – that is, with the term “Straightaway” applied exclusively in the lateral plane.
Father Brookes’s seatbelt dug into his shoulder as their assent up the second-to last hill slowed on sight of the leaves up ahead being lit up in flashing red and blue. With a jolt, their car halted on the hill’s crest.
“Dear God…” Brookes gasped under his breath the second his eyes fell upon those dead limbs. The formality of a mere radio report would have never done justice to the horror of that sight.
He stepped out into the chilly early-morning air, pulling the lapels of his black topcoat tighter around his clerical collar. The police chief followed suit. Together, on both sides of the cruiser, they beheld the vicious sight that was already being surveyed by an officer in a car just down the hill.
Faraway, past the hill before them, a beam of headlights was still visible in the sunlight of dawn. Those must have been the lights of the Subaru, crashed outside of sight, because the wreck of the ill-fated Ford Transit was clearly within sight, most of its chassis trying to hide within the yet unlit shadow of the last hill, hewn all about with pieces door frames and bumpers that had exploded all across the road. The Ford itself was overturned, its wheels poised helplessly in the air, its roof crushed under its own weight. The angle at which the overturned vehicle lay to the road joined the crumpled engine block and torn-away side door in testifying to the violence of its crash.
He brought his gaze back to them. Two men lying on their faces right besides eachother, sprawled out on the asphalt just in front of the wreckage. Father Brookes hesitantly followed the chief down the short hill to meet his colleague at the hill’s bottom.
The other officer, a short woman with a confident poise, tipped her hat to the two visitors.
“Chief Bradly. Father Brookes. I’m glad you could be here, Father.”
The two gentlemen offered their civilities in greeting to the lady.
“What did you find, Ellie?”
“The Subaru’s up the hill, a complete wreck. Didn’t find any bodies in that one. These two were the only I’ve found, but I haven’t been looking too closely. I suspect the two vehicles collided head-on up there – both of their engine blocks have the wrinkles to prove the collision was head-on, for sure – the Subaru spun out of control and landing sideways in a thicket and the Ford…”
She trailed off for only a moment. “….The Ford, it lost traction – I almost think it got air time going off that hill – and rolled over, landing upside-down on the other hill. I can only think the two drivers were not buckled, because…”
She ended the observations and conclusions merely by joining the gentlemen in gazing solemnly down on the two dead forms, ejected through a windshield and left with only the friction against the asphalt to halt their trajectory. Father Brookes crossed himself solemnly.
The two men could have merely been sleeping on their faces, were they not so morbidly motionless, thrown over a ground painted with their own blood. The fabric of their wool sports jackets was torn by being catapulted through a window and dragged over wet asphalt. It was as curious as it was horrific to see the bodies of two men attired like mild-mannered college professors spilled out at the scene of an accident so dreadful.
Father Brookes pulled out his square spectacles and bent down over the backs of their heads, looking closely to be utterly certain that both men were completely foreign to him. Mr. Lawson was Caucasian with dark hair; that rules out the man with a red tint to his hazelnut locks. The other man’s shaggy black hair hid most of his neck and face that would have been visible in his position; but the tint of the exposed hands which lay relaxed over the dirty road quite clearly testified in disfavor of his being Mr. Lawson. The priest gave a solemn sigh; if any weight of anxiety had been lifted from his chest, it would have been impossible for him to notice under the weight of the horror.
“So, Father Brookes, do any of them look familiar?”
“Neither, no. Those poor men. God bless their souls however He can.”
A couple murmurs of affirmation followed the priests’ words. But the respectful stillness was pierced with terror once more when a glimmer caught the clerical eye.
“Have either of you seen this?”
The priest pointed down to an object that had evidently dropped from the pocket of the nearest body. The officer named Ellie was the first to respond.
“I noticed it, yes. A small knife. Very small – might better be called a scalpel. I’m still not sure what he had it for.”
Father Brookes dawned his spectacles as he and Officer Brandly knelt down to view the device in greater detail. His breath was caught in his lungs when he saw what he first thought tot be blood on its tip. But closer examination revealed it to be something much worse.
Both men fell silent. They both knew the finer details of the narrative which had so infamously sent the fugitive Mr. Lawson to the mental hospital. And engraved in red on that knife’s awful blade was a symbol of a pyramid and a serpent.
Father Brookes was the first to stand, crossing himself once more. Though sometimes concerning, a snake was admittedly not an unusual thing to see on a knife. But, given the finer circ*mstances, to see such a snake on such a knife was a possible confirmation of untold expectations of terror.
Chief Bradly stood slowly.
“Well… That’s… that’s something.”
The other two said nothing. Bradly glanced awkwardly to his companions.
“C’mon. Let’s take a look around. I’m sure there’s something more we can find before CSIs arrive.”
Father Brookes remained with Bradly at the van as Ellie took off for a journey down the street to where the Subaru lay. With all the horror story that they had just witnessed in that one scene, Brookes had simply to set his hopes on their finding poor Mr. Lawson. To him, what they had just witnessed was enough to quell his doubt of Lawson’s narrative. But it was unfortunately not enough to quell his new fears for the safety of an innocent man.
He was warmed to be surrounded by men and women so devoted to a just man’s cause. Yet he knew full well that an unspoken fear hung over all three that this tale of causes was not bound to end happily or justly for anyone.
But any expression of this fear was quelled before it could ever come forth. For not minutes later, their female counterpart came bounding back from the direction of the sunrise. When her report came, it was at once lifted beyond the clouds, yet restrained below the sea with the same urgency.
“Father, Chief: I found something. You both need to come.”
The gentlemen wasted no time in following her. They practically ran to the location she had indicated. Not far down the road, in the light of a rising sun, a sudden turn to the right was flanked by a guardrail. And sitting just beyond that guardrail, leaning against it, was the hunched silhouette of a man.
Before the turn was a massive range of mountains, rolling on like wrinkles in a blanket, vast, green-painted mountain peaks that were dizzying to look upon, reminding all observers of how pathetically small they were in those majestic green shadows. And high above these peaks, colors of gold and crimson were painting the sky, colors which had pierced away the blackness and silence of the night before and had shrouded all the world in the violent embrace of comfort, bringing light to the darkness and chasing the shadows away in the shimmering splendor of the rising sun, which split the veil of the clouds in majestic grandeur to fall warmly over the tear-streaked face of the poor little man who sat at the other side of the guardrail sobbing.
He wept. The group of three approached the curious sight. And, as they did, they found the weeping man was praying, thanking God in Heaven for the sunrise and promising that he would never waste a life again.
