Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2016 2:26:11 GMT
A long planned story that's had off and on attention from me. I got the first 30 or 40 pages done over the summer. This post is the first three chapters of the first draft.
Essentially, it's about a mountain with a sketchy past that involves curses and cults. Settlers slaughtered the indians, then the settlers started disappearing and going insane, then a cult secures the town's safety, then something messes up and one night in 1998 all the inhabitants commit suicide leaving a ghost town. It focuses on a handful of people connected to the mountain that have to return to understand what happened to the town, confront their PTSD, and find loved ones who were kidnapped and taken there. Anyway, I'll release bios soon, explaining things more straightforward. Who knows how far I'll go on this one?
Bethany Salts – 0:26:42 – September 20, 2008
The taste of blood, pungent and thick in her mouth – the first sense to grace Bethany’s awakening mind – induced a disgusted recoil away from its unmistakable flavor. It was an appropriate and blind response. However, when she gave such a jerk, Beth realized, with a bewildered start, that something was very wrong. Gravity was eerily stunted. She could hear nothing through blocked up ears. In fact, for an entirely surreal and groggy moment, she couldn’t bring herself to move beyond that jolt, and instead opted for a peaceful drift in whatever medium she had found herself in.
Water… I’m underwater!
Of course, the dreamy feeling didn’t last very long after that revelation. It was but an instant later that her eyes snapped open and legs jutted out from their balled up position beneath her. Yet another instinct, this one driven less by confusion and more by a sudden flip of the switch – a natural compulsion, plain in its purpose – that is, survival.
Survival – blind, but very potent.
Within a second of the realization, instinct drove Beth to practically flail all limbs in a mad rush for air. She was underwater. She was without air. She needed to change that, now!
It didn’t take long. Her left hand broke the surface of the mysterious pool she was confined within, and suddenly, her entire upper body forced up and through the surface she had been searching for, breeching the water’s razor edge like a whale. Beth spewed the loathsome water out and swigged the much preferred, pitch black air on her arc up then back down into the equally dark water. Beth’s legs stretched out indefinitely below her, swiping the dense liquid for anything within her personal space, just trying to stay afloat, stay calm. But no, to her growing despair, there wasn’t a bottom to the pool.
No, wait, not exactly a pool. Pool water doesn’t move. This body of shadowed over water was shifting away in a very subtle current. Slow and almost undetectable, but there was definitely a flow.
No light. There was no light in this place, and the way Beth saw it (though she knew it was stupid to think ominously in a time like this), there wasn’t an absence of light, rather, a presence of darkness. The way her frantic gasps immediately echoed back to her ears gave her the impression of a fishbowl. Her confusion and noise folding in on itself. The confining way sound existed in here – it didn’t travel, it sat. Just sat and waited and made her voice sound flat and hollow to her own ears.
It was all… malicious. Quiet, observing malice.
Blind! Am I blind?! Why is it so dark in here?
As she reached out with a shaking right arm to find anything solid in the darkness, she felt the blessed texture of a naturally formed rock wall. Running her hand over its surface as her other limbs worked double time to keep her afloat, Beth detected it to be completely smooth and slick from ages of watery weathering. Thus it was nothing short of impossible to lay against its surface and rest from all this ceaseless floating. Moving her blind palm higher up the wall, she found it curved overhead, seamlessly becoming the stone roof above her as well. She was in what seemed to be a watery cave. A cave, filled almost to the roof with water. Her head was about a foot underneath the ceiling, just as she had predicted before – she was breathing very tightly meshed air.
Beth’s tongue, textured like a sodden rug on the floor of her mouth, rolled past then back behind her lips for no reason.
What am I doing? Tasting the air like a snake, she thought with a rare hint of humor. In this darkness, however, she seriously would’ve welcomed the addition of a new sense, as her sight had promptly thrown the towel and abandoned her completely. However, her humor faded fast, as that swipe of the tongue had given her a fresh taste of the mysterious bloody flavor from her awakening. Its savor was still in her mouth. A thought that made her almost freeze up and sink beneath the pattering waves of the dark water. She didn’t want to think of what gave reason to that distinct taste. But it was too late, and she retched in the water, an act just short of vomiting. Her gagging bounced off the restrictive walls and made it sound like she was revving up a go kart with a corroded battery.
Beth had to keep exploring this place. Had to find how she had even gotten here. Couldn’t afford to think of anything else and sure as hell couldn’t stop to think what could be in the water with her.
Beth, her breath coming in increasingly short, hurried bursts, pushed away from the wall and did her best to aim for the inevitable opposite side of the chamber, mindless of nothing but completing a self-administered objective. It didn’t take long thankfully. Beth almost ran into it headfirst, as her robotic and clumsy strokes barely reached a foot in front of her. She didn’t know what to expect besides an identically smooth wall to the one ten feet behind her. She only had to know that it was there. And it was.
This was an underground stream. Another prediction – this one even surer of itself. And if that was true…
Beth paddled as best she could in another direction, into the current. Eventually, she hoped she would either reach the third wall to her watery cell, or maybe even an exit to this wet corridor. She had to explore everything. Her limbs slapped and swiped around the water, not unlike like a spider trapped in a toilet bowl, but slowly, she made her way ahead. With a guiding hand on the wall to her left, she was moving against the feeble current (not that big of a feat to most, but definitely a milestone to Beth). She didn’t want to start thinking needlessly right now, but as far as she could remember, she’d only taken one swimming lesson from her mother when she was little, hated it, and never returned to the water again. Until now, of course.
Mother…
Mom? Where are you? I just want to get out of here. I want to see you again. I want to get OUT of this damn fishbowl! Think. Why am I here?! Think!
Seconds crawled into minutes. Her legs felt so tired. Her head was getting woozy, like she was short of breath. And still, there was no sign of an end in this direction. If anything, the ceiling was descending closer and closer to her head. As a result, her breaths echoed flatter and flatter, like the falling pitch of a tire running out of volume.
She knew she wanted to scream. Call out for whoever could hear her and bring someone – anyone – running to help her out of here. But she couldn’t bring herself to holler. And suddenly, she couldn’t even open her own mouth to do anything. Just a second ago, she was spitting and gasping in the damp air around (now more above than around) her. Just a second ago!
And now… no matter how much she willed it, her jaw would not comply with her mind! Only confused moans escaped her throat and filled the low hanging chamber, making her useless eyes widen at the thought that those sounds were coming from her.
“Mmm, MMM! MMMM!”
What the hell?! My mouth! What happened to my mouth?! Why can’t I…
Despite herself, she was slowly panicking in the confines of her aqueous cage. Ever so slowly… barely noticeable at first… she was sinking. And she had been from the beginning, though she refused to acknowledge it for the longest time. Her tightly shut mouth and flaring nostrils was coming dangerously close to the surface, as her frail attempts to stay afloat repeatedly met a brick wall. Just her head and neck above the water. Her stamina wouldn’t hold out forever, not at this rate. No. No. No…
“Why did you have to go?”
The words cut through the air and rested softly in the lobe of her ear. Beth froze. Her arms and legs stopped where they lay in the water. That voice… whose is it? Some boy here with me… I can’t turn around. I can’t face him…
She couldn’t see him. But she could feel his breath on her shoulder. On her ear lobe. And… peculiarly enough, an annoying buzz began in her ear. Like a cross between a tiny, invisible bee and a slow, deep ringing.
Beth was still now. Her chin was now caressing the water’s surface, gently asking permission to enter its depths, neither cold nor warm nor any sense at all.
“Why were you chosen? I wanted to see again, Beth. I wanted to see…”
Her lips, ever clamped shut, descended down, down and through the steady threshold of the water. Its surface calmed down, soothed by Beth’s surrender, slowly returning to a still equilibrium. Her nostrils now quietly exhaled, causing the smallest of ripples to form beneath them. Then her head sunk down and away, and all that was left on the surface was a few strands of brown hair (colorless in the dark) and ripples nodding in approval.
Only two bubbles appeared on the surface. Beth’s lungs were already flat tires.
“Come back… come back and let me see again…”
Beth inhaled. The bleak water rushed within her, quelling her life. Her larynx spasmed, closing off her lungs to the rushing waters in an instinctive attempt to hold off against death. But still, she wouldn’t resurface. Her mind closed off what little thought was left. Unconscious, but still loosely alive, she soon accepted another breath, this time senselessly allowing the water, the traces of blood, and the omnipresent darkness to spill into her lungs.
Finally, consciousness prevailed over unconsciousness. Will over instinct. Death over the insistence of the body to live on. It had to be done.
Come back… come back-
“GAAAH!”
A sudden breath, a burst of feeling. Numbness, deepening into red hot sensations spinning on high alert!
Bethany was up, her torso perpendicular to the starkly soft bed and its tornado of sheets. Darkness – she was in darkness!
Wait, no. No, not complete darkness. The grainy image of her nocturnal room slid into focus. Her room, my room…
She could see, thanks to the slits of sneaky moonlight sifting beyond the blinds and playing over the bed and room around her. Moonlight, her room, and…
She opened and closed her mouth rapidly, working her tongue over the gums and testing the now unlocked lips with a fear driven fascination. Her mouth working. Her eyes working. Normal, just normal…
Did I scream? Did I wake up the Hudsons? Not again…
As she remained upright, still, listening, and breathing, she waited for the red to work its way from her eyes before reflecting on whatever the hell she had just experienced. Her pumping heart seemed like it was working against cholesterol drenched blood, as each deep thump caused a fresh dose of red in her vision and sizable pain in her chest. For a good thirty seconds, she was afraid something much more tangible than a night terror would seize her – a heart attack.
When nothing happened and she had fully accepted this waking reality, she sighed, refusing to lower her head back to the pillow.
“Just a…” Beth began to say, then stopped and swung her legs around and out of the mess of covers. Breath blasting at hyper speed once more, she gusted out of bed, bee lined for the door to the adjacent bathroom and barely had enough time to locate the toilet before the vomit was out of her mouth. Her aim was questionable at the very least; she knew that once the lights came on, her marksmanship would be challenged. But for now, she just sat in this uncomfortable but familiar embrace of the toilet, contemplating what could have possibly caused this sudden onset of sickness. Not that she didn’t already know what had provoked it. This late night toilet trip wasn’t something new.
My breathing in this bathroom… sure sounds like it did in the cave. Confined echoes… weird-
“Hweh!”
A fresh wave of the spew. This one much harsher to her already sore throat. Hmmm.
Beth took the hint and clammed up. It was as if the very mention of that dream made her want to purge her guts. She shivered bitterly against the cool air.
Damn… It’s getting worse. Much, much worse. Every night now. And every time I go back to that place, my mouth just disappears. And then his voice, it reminds me…
Her eyes slid back to the bedroom beyond the slammed open door. The numbers on her digital nightstand clock read 12:27. It was late. Quiet. Dark, but not too dark. Not that dark.
No, I can’t think about it anymore… I gotta take my mind off it.
Beth, now with a purpose, slowly pulled herself up from the brisk tile floor and retreated back to the bedroom. She strode across the mostly barren abode (not a single article of stray clothing or other displaced knickknacks in sight) and stood by her lonely shelf of books in the darkened corner. It was indeed a lonely shelf. The collection of books here, numbering around 20, sat bunched together in a sad little jamboree of novels, albums, and various papery items that all held some form of personal sentimentality.
In the curious moonlight, Beth decided to reach out and select one book at random, as the obscurity of the shadows kept her from seeing each paperback and tome in detail. As her fingers grasped one such large book, she tugged it out and recognized its bloated weight immediately.
It was none other than her collection of closely kept pictures and mementos of her family. Hanging her heavy choice at her side, she strode over to the bedside and turned on the night stand lamp, strategically placed behind her pillow so as not to wake up the Hudsons during her late night reading.
Beth’s increasing night terrors and spontaneous nighttime activities were largely ignored by the Hudsons, and that was fine by her, since she largely ignored the Hudsons altogether. The tightly knit keep-away-from-my-life relationship definitely applied to all of them very well.
Positioning the tome under the well concealed light of the lamp, she opened it to the random pages she wedged her thumb between, the spine crinkling under this exhaustive opening pattern. Two glossy pages of preserved pictures of the old family life smiled up at her. Each photo and scrap of nostalgia on the page seemed just as faded and worn as her own memories of the events they showed.
The first one at the top of the left page consisted of all four of the old Salts family fellowship at a sunny Florida coastline. Six year old Bethany smiled radiantly beside her twin brother, Daniel, who was busy smirking mischievously at the camera. Their parents, towering over the dynamic sibling duo, looked content, if a bit weary from a day at the beach with the ‘twin hedgehogs of energy’ (as Beth’s father had once called the two kids). In fact, glancing at the caption she’d written below the photo, she remembered how she had remembered her dad’s hedgehog line. A few years ago, she had scribbled the caption, ‘Mom, dad, and the twin hedgehogs of energy at Daytona’ so as to set that seemingly insignificant phrase in stone. Through it, who knew, maybe she could even hear her dad’s voice again. At the very least, she would remember the words, right?
Next, Beth focused on that stupidly unaware girl in the picture. She wanted to mirror her past self’s kiddish euphoria, of which only lucky boys and girls can carry throughout their entire childhoods. At the very least, she wanted to be able to smile for real again. But something kept her from doing so. So, the solemn expression remained firmly set on her face, her mouth a straight, sealed line.
Hmm…
Reflecting absent mindedly on these things, she almost failed to catch the steadily rising stench of something in the room. But once she caught whiff of it, it was impossible to miss. Beth looked up from the scrapbook’s interior and realized with a start that she had completely forgotten to get rid of her puke in the bathroom.
“Ah, shit…” she exhaled.
Rising wearily from her seat on the bed, she pattered over to the adjoining bathroom. Her hand fumbled around beside the doorframe for a second, eventually finding the switch much higher than originally thought. She flipped it up weakly and looked, blinking at the toilet.
What looked like discolored sewer water coated over the white tiles nearest the toilet and lathered a good deal of the lid for good measure. The very idea of that liquid – like gunk from an old bathtub drain – having been inside her made her dizzy. However, that wasn’t the only thing that kept Bethany blinking dim-wittedly at the doorway.
Lying in splotches among the muck that had come from her stomach was none other than bright red blood. Its deep crimson colors contrasted the dark hue of the rest of the vomit. No doubt, that was a sizable sum of blood.
And along with the puddles of said internal matter, strings of something long and black and thick stretched out playfully on the tile and toilet lid. Strings, like long black hair, thick and unspeakable.
Blood, pungent and unmistakable.
“Ohh,” Bethany faltered and slumped to her knees, hand still reaching up for the switch as if turning off the lights would return everything back to normal. As if she could ignore such signs.
Come back. Come back…
“Please,” she begged the snickering strings caked in blood and ‘bile’, as if she could convince them to leave her alone. “I didn’t deserve this. My brother didn’t deserve this. Please, tell me why.”
Sean Carter – 20:44:23 – September 27, 2008
‘Resting his eyes for a bit’ turned out to be a trap for Sean Carter. As soon as his eyelids closed and head slumped forward onto the desktop, he was out like a busted fuse.
No wonder. These days, it was as if he couldn’t get words out of his head and onto the computer even if his life was on the line. Whether he was wide awake or dead asleep, he seemed to get the same amount of the novel completed. This, of course, didn’t sooth Sean’s incessant need to do something, to be actively getting something done. As a result, several recent late nights had been wasted away in the den, staring away at the maddeningly blank screen. He couldn’t satisfy this ever growing need to unclog the mess in his brain and get the pages flowing again.
This worried dear Douglas very much. If it wasn’t that dammed up writer’s block, it was his assistant friend Douglas nagging on about his authorship habits. Irritating. Frustrating. A mental and social traffic jam seemingly without an end.
Awakening slowly with a dry, rubber taste in his mouth, Sean reluctantly opened his eyes and found his computer asleep along with him. Jiggling the mouse with his right hand while brushing off the loose leaf paper stuck to his cheek with his left, Sean thoughtlessly smacked his lips. It had gotten dim outside. Not that Sean could really see much daylight in this plugged up study/den (another thing Douglas couldn’t stop prodding him about – his hermitlike habits and heavily fortified windows).
What time?
Glancing at the bottom right corner of the freshly woken up screen, it said 8:45. Great, a fine hour gone by. And what had he gained? Nothing at all. The first draft of The Shadow Within is still a solid 19 pages short. Nothing but-
-an email. I’ve got mail.
A slightly too excited notification was busy flagging his attention to a newly received email. Strange. He and whatever friends he had rarely ever used email. As it was, he didn’t have all that much contact with the outside world except good old stick in the mud amateur assistant Douglas and the guys at the bar. So who could it really be? Besides the nearly impossible chance that some magazine was willing to pick up his latest shitshow of a short horror story – Her Children.
Nah, that couldn’t be it… Then what?
Sean realized he was stalling the confrontation of this email. He looked down at his hand, still sitting on the mouse doing nothing, and told it to move. It obeyed, and the cursor crept up the monitor like a scared little insect on an excursion outside the hole in the wall.
Now coming into view of the email’s highlighted title, Sean did freeze. At first, he couldn’t bridge the name of said email with reality. It was as if a crucial server had malfunctioned in his noggin, sparking uselessly instead of conveying information. Then it clicked and his next breath came in an erratic gasp.
In plain text,
Eastbog Mountain Dear Mr. Carter, witnesses of the end shall… Sept. 27
Eastbog… Eastbog Mountain.
Sleep induced grogginess long gone, Sean snapped out of the temporary paralysis and clutched the mouse as if it were a baseball ready to be pitched at a mean throwing speed. He clicked on its beckoning title, not nearly as prepared as he wanted to be.
Enclosed was a short letter addressed to none other than himself. One which made his vision spin with the force of a memory beating and rattling its chains within the prison of his head.
Dear Mr. Carter,
Witnesses of the end shall be joined together once more in the viewing of the beginning. Join us, for the time of the Nameless One’s rebirth is upon us. The first spectators have already arrived. Hurry now.
Sean, his thoughts like a deer trapped in headlights, couldn’t quite grasp everything just yet.
But there was more. Scrolling down the page numbly, he discovered a single file attached. Photo, it was an innocent, unopened photo. Beneath it, more text appeared – a caption: A token of your old hobby.
Oh… please, god no…
Sean rocketed up from his seat, sending the wheeled chair sprawling behind him. Clutching his head, he squeezed his eyes shut, if only to quell the rising sea of churning waves in his sight. Waves, pain, crashing over one another, blurring his vision like an uncontrollable, dismal kaleidoscope.
He had to do it. He had to get it over with. He was either going to look at the pictures or rip his monitor off the table, one or the other.
So, tearing his eyes open, he attacked the mouse and brought up the enclosed photo. It took only a second to load up.
Then pixels formed into a coherent picture on the screen. Except, it wasn’t at all coherent.
Whatever it was Sean was looking at seemed like some joke, like a weird ‘when you see it, you’ll freak’ type illusion. The harder he stared at it, the stranger and… more cryptic the image seemed to become.
He could make out… the grainy image of someone standing in the foreground, dressed all in white, and something shrouding the edges of the frame, surrounding him or her. Like a… crowd of dark clothed onlookers. So much shadow, so hard to see clearly. Could it have been taken late at night? Dark trees, their trunks mere mysterious shades of foliage in the background.
The whole picture had a surreal, Francis Bacon-esk style – the grotesque shapes and obscurity of the figures depicted.
But that person – that unidentified girl in the forefront, clearly the object of those onlookers’ eyes… who was she?
Sean took a knee and cautiously brought his face inches from the screen, as if afraid that the hazy collections of pixels would try to pull a fast one on him. Trying to decipher her obscured facial features was proving to be an impossible task. But he definitely was getting an idea of who it might be. A heavy, sinking feeling bubbled up in Sean as he looked on.
Witnesses of the end shall be joined together once more… The first spectators have already arrived…
At long last, Sean pulled his eyes away from the image, shakily reaching for his fallen chair. Propping the poor furniture back to an upright position, Sean used it to rise from his knees and step away from the computer.
Resting on the opposite side of the room was a three compartment filing cabinet filled to the brim with mostly useless but occasionally useful junk.
Needless to say, this was one of those moments. Approaching the cabinet edgily, he thought of all the good reasons why he should’ve better organized this chest of messy information ranging from ‘temporarily unused’ writing research to passwords for various online forums and sites.
Opening the topmost drawer was like opening the floodgates. Papers stacked on papers of near pointlessly stored information on one subject or another.
How am I ever going to find those papers in this? I need to get them-
The Nameless One’s birth is almost upon us. Hurry now.
-quickly.
Then he remembered. Without a doubt, it was the first thing he’d filed away in this chest of messy organization. It was the very first thing buried, so that it couldn’t be stumbled upon and remind him of Eastbog and his time spent there.
So Sean closed up the top drawer and opened the bottom, sunk his hand into the flurry of papers, and searched for the very bottom. When his fingers grazed the floor of the cabinet, he grabbed for the poor file that lay flat at the very bottom, practically crushed beneath the weight of all the other papers.
Clutching the file tight, he pulled it out through the literary thicket and into view. In doing so, he accidentally spilled several other documents across the floor, though he did not care. The giant words on the front of the fat file sneered, Eastbog Mountain.
He could hear the unholy letters, written out by his own black pen years ago, calling out to him, taunting him.
Heyya Sean! Been a long time. Got a lots to catch up on all of a sudden, don’t we? I know you’ve been ignoring me. You’ve been ignoring part of yourself. Hurry up, Sean. Pictures can’t lie! Hurry now!
As if guided by some meticulous ritual, Sean slowly brought the envelope to the desk and set it down gently, afraid that the slightest upset to the file might cause it to turn on him. He stepped back as soon as he set it down. He took a breath. He stepped forward again and slipped a thumb beneath the wrinkled front cover.
In five minutes time, he had found it. Grabbing up his cell phone from the table, he hastily dialed the number listed beneath Bethany’s name.
Could this still be her number? The last time we talked was… gosh, at least three years ago.
He remembered so little, even though they had kept in touch immediately following The Cataclysm. But over the years, interest in talking to one another faded away. Although they were the only ones who could fully understand what each other had gone through that hellish autumn night of 1998, it was exactly the act of reminding one another of that time that was the bane of their bond. Eastbog had become helplessly associated with each of them. Every time one would try to meet up with or call the other, it would bring a flood of memories, each one worse than the last.
Whether they admitted it or not, they knew they would forever be tethered to that mountain in memory and (if you believed in that sort of stuff) spirit. Sometimes entire days (and in later years, weeks or months) would go by without either having to remember that night in detail, just as long as neither called or saw the other.
So both Bethany and Sean formed an unspoken agreement to just stop several years after they left that mountain, one that would close off communication for a few more blessed years – until now. Until that damned email decided to ring the bell once again. This time, though, it seemed worse – much, much worse.
Could it really be… there’s still someone, something, messing around with that lost village?
The phone rang obediently, over and over, each little beep vindicating Sean’s suspicions further. After what felt like 20 beeps, the call failed and Sean was left to his own beating heart again. He had been inadvertently looking at the computer monitor again. He couldn’t help but stare. That picture. That figure in white… it had to be her. Beth. Who else could it possibly be?
There was still one other he could try. One more who could understand. Hopefully.
Glimpsing the name and number he needed on the same page as Bethany’s, Sean dialed up someone else. The same tense process ensued, nothing but frustrating beeps filling his ear. Just as Sean was getting ready to give up, there was a click and then a pause from the mysterious other end of the line.
Then a man’s gruff, unmistakable voice answered Sean’s phone and prayers and said, “Hello? Who is this?”
Sean swallowed and replied, “Uh, hi. This is Sean. Sean Carter.”
There was complete silence. Sean paused to allow the man on the other end think over his name a bit, fairly certain that if he was indeed the name written on the paper, he would remember. The pause widened and became pregnant before the man finally broke it.
“Sean… Carter, eh? So it’s you. I almost forgot about that name. Not quite, though,” the gruff voice responded.
“Yeah, I thought you’d say something like that,” Sean said without much enthusiasm. He cut to the chase, “Detective Nix, I-“
“Son, I left the force years ago,” the old officer interrupted gently (or at least, what could be interpreted as gently. Everything that man said came off as gravelly as a grizzly.). “You can call me Denim. You are a fellow man now, aren’t you? Twenty…”
“…five. I was fifteen then,” he explained, grimly.
To think. Ten years had passed. Actually… it was late September. In a matter of weeks – days – it would be the ten year anniversary. The thought burdened Sean like a dumbbell for no consciously known reason. Why did it matter to him? Ten was just a number anyway. So what if The Cataclysm’s birthday was approaching?
Sean shook his head and found that Denim was patiently waiting for him to explain himself.
“Denim, it’s…” Sean took a breath –
A token of your old hobby…
-“It’s about Bethany… I think she’s been kidnapped.”
Keith Andrews – 19:32:23 – September 28, 2008
The clock ticking life away monotonously above Keith’s bed served as a metronome to his conversation with Carly. Below Keith’s feet, the muffled sounds of the Andrews family restaurant padded the air. It was as if their back and forth talking were a musical piece, rhythmically attuned to the ticking tempo of time and strangers eating dinner downstairs.
Keith was listening to her. But it was difficult to concentrate on her as long as that tick tock kept it up beside him. He could always count just how many seconds went by every time someone said something.
Her muffled words came through the phone, strangely distant.
“I don’t know… and they’re getting worse too,” Carly replied, monochrome words rising from the speaker like bubbles on a calm lake surface. Six ticks went by as she spoke.
“What do you mean, worse?” Keith asked, concern advancing to the forefront of his voice. Three ticks gone by.
While he was indeed involved in the conversation with his sister, Keith was mindlessly squeezing a random rubber ball. Keith didn’t know why, but he could never concentrate on a phone conversation as long as his hands weren’t preoccupied with something else. If he were ever to reflect back on his phone talking habits (though ‘reflecting’ wasn’t his thing), he would find only about a quarter of his brain doing the talking, the rest busy minding the ticking clock or playing with the rubber ball.
“I mean, they’re worming their way out of sleep,” she said bluntly. Three ticks gone by. “You know what it feels like when you wake up and you’re on the edge of a dream, right? You can still hang on to it for a second, maybe two, but after that, your waking mind takes over, and you lose almost all memory of that dream. Consciousness just shrugs it off for you.”
Fifteen ticks gone by.
Carly paused, and Keith wondered if he was supposed to respond. Honestly, these talks were getting stranger and stranger every time. Half the time he wondered how her roommates at the college even understood her.
“Um, sure, I get what you’re saying… but what does that have to do with your dreams?” Keith inquired, now laying back on the bed and tossing the ball towards the motionless ceiling fan. Five ticks gone by.
“I’m saying that I don’t have that anymore. I can’t shake off the dream world like everyone’s supposed to,” she said, sounding slightly more distressed to Keith. Six more ticks gone by, “I wake up, and I can still picture everything that went on last night. I go to class and all I can think about is what I saw in my sleep. But that’s been a problem for a few days. Today, it took another step up. Now, I can still feel it going on, as I’m awake.”
Thirteen ticks gone by.
Keith sat up. The ball he had just thrown plummeted to the mattress behind him, rejected. He was starting to get a weird feeling about this. For the first time in a long time, Keith was completely, utterly focused on something.
“You mean… you’re still dreaming? Like right now?” he asked the phone, chills twiddling their way up his spine for some reason.
“Yeah, kind of. I know it’s there, in the back of my head, tickling the back of my skull. I can even sense it directly if I focus on it, but I have no part in it as it plays,” her voice explained the abnormality. “At least, I really don’t want to try. It’s freaky. Everything that happens there is strange and dark and… well, I don’t want to look at it any more than I have to.”
“You’re not, I don’t know, in pain or anything, right? Do you need to see a doctor? Or do you want mom or me to come to the college? It wouldn’t be a bother or anything, only an hour’s drive. We can always close up the restaurant ear-“
“Please, Keith, don’t spaz out on me,” she cut him short. “Really, I’m fine. The best you can do is just stay the twin brother that always keeps his chill, and I’ll stay the nerd.”
There was a hint of humor in the last line, but Keith pressed on.
“Alright, it’s just what you’re telling me doesn’t seem fine,” he replied, uneasily glancing around his bedroom as if a night terror like the ones she always described to him were going to suddenly jump out from behind his piles of dirty clothes.
A pause on her end, then another hasty, “I’m fine.”
“Okay, if you say so Carly,” he shrugged and laid back on his rumpled up bed sheets, forgetfully smushing the ball beneath his lanky frame. And without anything else to say (and out of curiosity), “So, can you see it right now? Can you tell me what’s going on in dream land?”
A sound like Carly snickering, then she said, “Yeah, I’ll check in on ‘dream land’ for you, but I can’t see much. It’s almost entirely made up of sounds and other… stuff.”
Then there was silence for several ticks of the clock. Keith could hear her breathing, grainy echoes through the speaker.
When her voice eventually returned, it was different to Keith. Like she was sleep talking. “It’s… a tunnel. A dark tunnel, and filled almost to the top with water. Water feels… There are voices, many voices, echoing in the distance… chanting, but I can’t hear clearly. The water. A slowly moving stream. Someone floating just beneath the surface. It’s so hard to… hard to-“
“Carly, you can stop,” Keith offered, getting nervous for her.
She stopped talking, much to Keith’s simultaneous relief and anxiety. After several ticks had gone by without a peep from her end, he sat up straight again and said, “Carly? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m still here,” she replied. But her voice sounded drained, as if she’d just competed in a 5k in the course of half a minute. “…Look, Keith, I know how crazy it must sound to you.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Keith followed up assuredly. There were several words he could use to describe Carly’s dream pocket – like weird, scary, or even vaguely familiar (as Keith was currently awash with inexplicable de ja vu) – but ‘crazy’ was not one of them. Maybe because he could relate to these visions somehow.
Chanting voices, a water filled tunnel, a body beneath the surface… why is that so familiar?
“I just wish I could wake up completely,” she pleaded the dream genie wispily, “I still feel like I’m dreaming…”
“Well, sounds more like a nightmare than a dream,” Keith said.
Then there was yet another strained silence. All the while, Keith could only imagine what Carly was thinking. There was a reason she was the one who went to school out of high school and he stayed behind at the restaurant with ma; she was a smart sister. So why did her plan exclude a trip to the doctor? It sure seemed like that was the sensible thing to do in such an alien situation. She surprised him by breaking the silence with something more.
“Hey, Keith. One last thing. Do you remember our old home? Do you remember dad?”
…
“Why? Was he in your nightmare again?”
“Last night,” she said, “He was different in this one, though. He’s normally… you know, crazy, but in this one he seemed more at peace. He said he was glad I was coming back… you know what, no more of this talk. It’s starting to wear on me.”
“You’re telling me,” Keith exhaled, almost relieved she decided against talking about dad again. To Keith, dad was among the worst night terrors Carly could have – same for Keith. “I swear these phone calls are getting more and more dire. Pretty soon, you’ll be calling from an asylum.”
That got a painfully forced laugh from Carly which didn’t really help lighten the mood but didn’t darken it either. Keith sighed.
“Alright, I gotta go, Cool Keith. Keep your chill till next time,” Carly said in her usual sign off.
Keith didn’t really want to say bye just yet but didn’t know what to say otherwise, so he resigned for a, “Yeah, your alliterations and rhymes still suck.”
“Oh nice, you know what alliteration means,” she prodded, though not unkind. “Anyway, I want to hear more about you next time. I need to stop talking about these stupid dreams. I feel like if I ignore them, sooner or later, they’ll go away.”
“Yeah, hope so,” Keith responded. “But you will get help if it starts to get out of control? It seriously sounds like something –“
“Don’t worry, bro. I’ll handle it myself if it gets out of control, bye,” was all she said, and Keith barely got in a ‘bye’ before she hung up.
Keith pocketed the phone and reached behind him to grab the rubber ball. The soft texture felt empty now. He tossed it to the clothing-strewn floor and got up to return downstairs. Ma might need him by now, as he’d taken a break during dinnertime (cause Carly was calling). Ma would probably be wondering where he was any minute now.
He went to his bedroom door and stopped beneath the peeling frame.
I know it’s there, in the back of my head, tickling the back of my skull.
Keith half turned to look back at his messy room in the dimming sunlight of both late afternoon and early evening. Nothing but the usual disorder and filth of the bedroom stared back at him. He wondered why he was still standing here instead of downstairs, helping out ma. Then he pulled himself away from the room into the hall and trudged to the stairs.
Carly, are you really sure you can handle something like this yourself?
Essentially, it's about a mountain with a sketchy past that involves curses and cults. Settlers slaughtered the indians, then the settlers started disappearing and going insane, then a cult secures the town's safety, then something messes up and one night in 1998 all the inhabitants commit suicide leaving a ghost town. It focuses on a handful of people connected to the mountain that have to return to understand what happened to the town, confront their PTSD, and find loved ones who were kidnapped and taken there. Anyway, I'll release bios soon, explaining things more straightforward. Who knows how far I'll go on this one?
Bethany Salts – 0:26:42 – September 20, 2008
The taste of blood, pungent and thick in her mouth – the first sense to grace Bethany’s awakening mind – induced a disgusted recoil away from its unmistakable flavor. It was an appropriate and blind response. However, when she gave such a jerk, Beth realized, with a bewildered start, that something was very wrong. Gravity was eerily stunted. She could hear nothing through blocked up ears. In fact, for an entirely surreal and groggy moment, she couldn’t bring herself to move beyond that jolt, and instead opted for a peaceful drift in whatever medium she had found herself in.
Water… I’m underwater!
Of course, the dreamy feeling didn’t last very long after that revelation. It was but an instant later that her eyes snapped open and legs jutted out from their balled up position beneath her. Yet another instinct, this one driven less by confusion and more by a sudden flip of the switch – a natural compulsion, plain in its purpose – that is, survival.
Survival – blind, but very potent.
Within a second of the realization, instinct drove Beth to practically flail all limbs in a mad rush for air. She was underwater. She was without air. She needed to change that, now!
It didn’t take long. Her left hand broke the surface of the mysterious pool she was confined within, and suddenly, her entire upper body forced up and through the surface she had been searching for, breeching the water’s razor edge like a whale. Beth spewed the loathsome water out and swigged the much preferred, pitch black air on her arc up then back down into the equally dark water. Beth’s legs stretched out indefinitely below her, swiping the dense liquid for anything within her personal space, just trying to stay afloat, stay calm. But no, to her growing despair, there wasn’t a bottom to the pool.
No, wait, not exactly a pool. Pool water doesn’t move. This body of shadowed over water was shifting away in a very subtle current. Slow and almost undetectable, but there was definitely a flow.
No light. There was no light in this place, and the way Beth saw it (though she knew it was stupid to think ominously in a time like this), there wasn’t an absence of light, rather, a presence of darkness. The way her frantic gasps immediately echoed back to her ears gave her the impression of a fishbowl. Her confusion and noise folding in on itself. The confining way sound existed in here – it didn’t travel, it sat. Just sat and waited and made her voice sound flat and hollow to her own ears.
It was all… malicious. Quiet, observing malice.
Blind! Am I blind?! Why is it so dark in here?
As she reached out with a shaking right arm to find anything solid in the darkness, she felt the blessed texture of a naturally formed rock wall. Running her hand over its surface as her other limbs worked double time to keep her afloat, Beth detected it to be completely smooth and slick from ages of watery weathering. Thus it was nothing short of impossible to lay against its surface and rest from all this ceaseless floating. Moving her blind palm higher up the wall, she found it curved overhead, seamlessly becoming the stone roof above her as well. She was in what seemed to be a watery cave. A cave, filled almost to the roof with water. Her head was about a foot underneath the ceiling, just as she had predicted before – she was breathing very tightly meshed air.
Beth’s tongue, textured like a sodden rug on the floor of her mouth, rolled past then back behind her lips for no reason.
What am I doing? Tasting the air like a snake, she thought with a rare hint of humor. In this darkness, however, she seriously would’ve welcomed the addition of a new sense, as her sight had promptly thrown the towel and abandoned her completely. However, her humor faded fast, as that swipe of the tongue had given her a fresh taste of the mysterious bloody flavor from her awakening. Its savor was still in her mouth. A thought that made her almost freeze up and sink beneath the pattering waves of the dark water. She didn’t want to think of what gave reason to that distinct taste. But it was too late, and she retched in the water, an act just short of vomiting. Her gagging bounced off the restrictive walls and made it sound like she was revving up a go kart with a corroded battery.
Beth had to keep exploring this place. Had to find how she had even gotten here. Couldn’t afford to think of anything else and sure as hell couldn’t stop to think what could be in the water with her.
Beth, her breath coming in increasingly short, hurried bursts, pushed away from the wall and did her best to aim for the inevitable opposite side of the chamber, mindless of nothing but completing a self-administered objective. It didn’t take long thankfully. Beth almost ran into it headfirst, as her robotic and clumsy strokes barely reached a foot in front of her. She didn’t know what to expect besides an identically smooth wall to the one ten feet behind her. She only had to know that it was there. And it was.
This was an underground stream. Another prediction – this one even surer of itself. And if that was true…
Beth paddled as best she could in another direction, into the current. Eventually, she hoped she would either reach the third wall to her watery cell, or maybe even an exit to this wet corridor. She had to explore everything. Her limbs slapped and swiped around the water, not unlike like a spider trapped in a toilet bowl, but slowly, she made her way ahead. With a guiding hand on the wall to her left, she was moving against the feeble current (not that big of a feat to most, but definitely a milestone to Beth). She didn’t want to start thinking needlessly right now, but as far as she could remember, she’d only taken one swimming lesson from her mother when she was little, hated it, and never returned to the water again. Until now, of course.
Mother…
Mom? Where are you? I just want to get out of here. I want to see you again. I want to get OUT of this damn fishbowl! Think. Why am I here?! Think!
Seconds crawled into minutes. Her legs felt so tired. Her head was getting woozy, like she was short of breath. And still, there was no sign of an end in this direction. If anything, the ceiling was descending closer and closer to her head. As a result, her breaths echoed flatter and flatter, like the falling pitch of a tire running out of volume.
She knew she wanted to scream. Call out for whoever could hear her and bring someone – anyone – running to help her out of here. But she couldn’t bring herself to holler. And suddenly, she couldn’t even open her own mouth to do anything. Just a second ago, she was spitting and gasping in the damp air around (now more above than around) her. Just a second ago!
And now… no matter how much she willed it, her jaw would not comply with her mind! Only confused moans escaped her throat and filled the low hanging chamber, making her useless eyes widen at the thought that those sounds were coming from her.
“Mmm, MMM! MMMM!”
What the hell?! My mouth! What happened to my mouth?! Why can’t I…
Despite herself, she was slowly panicking in the confines of her aqueous cage. Ever so slowly… barely noticeable at first… she was sinking. And she had been from the beginning, though she refused to acknowledge it for the longest time. Her tightly shut mouth and flaring nostrils was coming dangerously close to the surface, as her frail attempts to stay afloat repeatedly met a brick wall. Just her head and neck above the water. Her stamina wouldn’t hold out forever, not at this rate. No. No. No…
“Why did you have to go?”
The words cut through the air and rested softly in the lobe of her ear. Beth froze. Her arms and legs stopped where they lay in the water. That voice… whose is it? Some boy here with me… I can’t turn around. I can’t face him…
She couldn’t see him. But she could feel his breath on her shoulder. On her ear lobe. And… peculiarly enough, an annoying buzz began in her ear. Like a cross between a tiny, invisible bee and a slow, deep ringing.
Beth was still now. Her chin was now caressing the water’s surface, gently asking permission to enter its depths, neither cold nor warm nor any sense at all.
“Why were you chosen? I wanted to see again, Beth. I wanted to see…”
Her lips, ever clamped shut, descended down, down and through the steady threshold of the water. Its surface calmed down, soothed by Beth’s surrender, slowly returning to a still equilibrium. Her nostrils now quietly exhaled, causing the smallest of ripples to form beneath them. Then her head sunk down and away, and all that was left on the surface was a few strands of brown hair (colorless in the dark) and ripples nodding in approval.
Only two bubbles appeared on the surface. Beth’s lungs were already flat tires.
“Come back… come back and let me see again…”
Beth inhaled. The bleak water rushed within her, quelling her life. Her larynx spasmed, closing off her lungs to the rushing waters in an instinctive attempt to hold off against death. But still, she wouldn’t resurface. Her mind closed off what little thought was left. Unconscious, but still loosely alive, she soon accepted another breath, this time senselessly allowing the water, the traces of blood, and the omnipresent darkness to spill into her lungs.
Finally, consciousness prevailed over unconsciousness. Will over instinct. Death over the insistence of the body to live on. It had to be done.
Come back… come back-
“GAAAH!”
A sudden breath, a burst of feeling. Numbness, deepening into red hot sensations spinning on high alert!
Bethany was up, her torso perpendicular to the starkly soft bed and its tornado of sheets. Darkness – she was in darkness!
Wait, no. No, not complete darkness. The grainy image of her nocturnal room slid into focus. Her room, my room…
She could see, thanks to the slits of sneaky moonlight sifting beyond the blinds and playing over the bed and room around her. Moonlight, her room, and…
She opened and closed her mouth rapidly, working her tongue over the gums and testing the now unlocked lips with a fear driven fascination. Her mouth working. Her eyes working. Normal, just normal…
Did I scream? Did I wake up the Hudsons? Not again…
As she remained upright, still, listening, and breathing, she waited for the red to work its way from her eyes before reflecting on whatever the hell she had just experienced. Her pumping heart seemed like it was working against cholesterol drenched blood, as each deep thump caused a fresh dose of red in her vision and sizable pain in her chest. For a good thirty seconds, she was afraid something much more tangible than a night terror would seize her – a heart attack.
When nothing happened and she had fully accepted this waking reality, she sighed, refusing to lower her head back to the pillow.
“Just a…” Beth began to say, then stopped and swung her legs around and out of the mess of covers. Breath blasting at hyper speed once more, she gusted out of bed, bee lined for the door to the adjacent bathroom and barely had enough time to locate the toilet before the vomit was out of her mouth. Her aim was questionable at the very least; she knew that once the lights came on, her marksmanship would be challenged. But for now, she just sat in this uncomfortable but familiar embrace of the toilet, contemplating what could have possibly caused this sudden onset of sickness. Not that she didn’t already know what had provoked it. This late night toilet trip wasn’t something new.
My breathing in this bathroom… sure sounds like it did in the cave. Confined echoes… weird-
“Hweh!”
A fresh wave of the spew. This one much harsher to her already sore throat. Hmmm.
Beth took the hint and clammed up. It was as if the very mention of that dream made her want to purge her guts. She shivered bitterly against the cool air.
Damn… It’s getting worse. Much, much worse. Every night now. And every time I go back to that place, my mouth just disappears. And then his voice, it reminds me…
Her eyes slid back to the bedroom beyond the slammed open door. The numbers on her digital nightstand clock read 12:27. It was late. Quiet. Dark, but not too dark. Not that dark.
No, I can’t think about it anymore… I gotta take my mind off it.
Beth, now with a purpose, slowly pulled herself up from the brisk tile floor and retreated back to the bedroom. She strode across the mostly barren abode (not a single article of stray clothing or other displaced knickknacks in sight) and stood by her lonely shelf of books in the darkened corner. It was indeed a lonely shelf. The collection of books here, numbering around 20, sat bunched together in a sad little jamboree of novels, albums, and various papery items that all held some form of personal sentimentality.
In the curious moonlight, Beth decided to reach out and select one book at random, as the obscurity of the shadows kept her from seeing each paperback and tome in detail. As her fingers grasped one such large book, she tugged it out and recognized its bloated weight immediately.
It was none other than her collection of closely kept pictures and mementos of her family. Hanging her heavy choice at her side, she strode over to the bedside and turned on the night stand lamp, strategically placed behind her pillow so as not to wake up the Hudsons during her late night reading.
Beth’s increasing night terrors and spontaneous nighttime activities were largely ignored by the Hudsons, and that was fine by her, since she largely ignored the Hudsons altogether. The tightly knit keep-away-from-my-life relationship definitely applied to all of them very well.
Positioning the tome under the well concealed light of the lamp, she opened it to the random pages she wedged her thumb between, the spine crinkling under this exhaustive opening pattern. Two glossy pages of preserved pictures of the old family life smiled up at her. Each photo and scrap of nostalgia on the page seemed just as faded and worn as her own memories of the events they showed.
The first one at the top of the left page consisted of all four of the old Salts family fellowship at a sunny Florida coastline. Six year old Bethany smiled radiantly beside her twin brother, Daniel, who was busy smirking mischievously at the camera. Their parents, towering over the dynamic sibling duo, looked content, if a bit weary from a day at the beach with the ‘twin hedgehogs of energy’ (as Beth’s father had once called the two kids). In fact, glancing at the caption she’d written below the photo, she remembered how she had remembered her dad’s hedgehog line. A few years ago, she had scribbled the caption, ‘Mom, dad, and the twin hedgehogs of energy at Daytona’ so as to set that seemingly insignificant phrase in stone. Through it, who knew, maybe she could even hear her dad’s voice again. At the very least, she would remember the words, right?
Next, Beth focused on that stupidly unaware girl in the picture. She wanted to mirror her past self’s kiddish euphoria, of which only lucky boys and girls can carry throughout their entire childhoods. At the very least, she wanted to be able to smile for real again. But something kept her from doing so. So, the solemn expression remained firmly set on her face, her mouth a straight, sealed line.
Hmm…
Reflecting absent mindedly on these things, she almost failed to catch the steadily rising stench of something in the room. But once she caught whiff of it, it was impossible to miss. Beth looked up from the scrapbook’s interior and realized with a start that she had completely forgotten to get rid of her puke in the bathroom.
“Ah, shit…” she exhaled.
Rising wearily from her seat on the bed, she pattered over to the adjoining bathroom. Her hand fumbled around beside the doorframe for a second, eventually finding the switch much higher than originally thought. She flipped it up weakly and looked, blinking at the toilet.
What looked like discolored sewer water coated over the white tiles nearest the toilet and lathered a good deal of the lid for good measure. The very idea of that liquid – like gunk from an old bathtub drain – having been inside her made her dizzy. However, that wasn’t the only thing that kept Bethany blinking dim-wittedly at the doorway.
Lying in splotches among the muck that had come from her stomach was none other than bright red blood. Its deep crimson colors contrasted the dark hue of the rest of the vomit. No doubt, that was a sizable sum of blood.
And along with the puddles of said internal matter, strings of something long and black and thick stretched out playfully on the tile and toilet lid. Strings, like long black hair, thick and unspeakable.
Blood, pungent and unmistakable.
“Ohh,” Bethany faltered and slumped to her knees, hand still reaching up for the switch as if turning off the lights would return everything back to normal. As if she could ignore such signs.
Come back. Come back…
“Please,” she begged the snickering strings caked in blood and ‘bile’, as if she could convince them to leave her alone. “I didn’t deserve this. My brother didn’t deserve this. Please, tell me why.”
Sean Carter – 20:44:23 – September 27, 2008
‘Resting his eyes for a bit’ turned out to be a trap for Sean Carter. As soon as his eyelids closed and head slumped forward onto the desktop, he was out like a busted fuse.
No wonder. These days, it was as if he couldn’t get words out of his head and onto the computer even if his life was on the line. Whether he was wide awake or dead asleep, he seemed to get the same amount of the novel completed. This, of course, didn’t sooth Sean’s incessant need to do something, to be actively getting something done. As a result, several recent late nights had been wasted away in the den, staring away at the maddeningly blank screen. He couldn’t satisfy this ever growing need to unclog the mess in his brain and get the pages flowing again.
This worried dear Douglas very much. If it wasn’t that dammed up writer’s block, it was his assistant friend Douglas nagging on about his authorship habits. Irritating. Frustrating. A mental and social traffic jam seemingly without an end.
Awakening slowly with a dry, rubber taste in his mouth, Sean reluctantly opened his eyes and found his computer asleep along with him. Jiggling the mouse with his right hand while brushing off the loose leaf paper stuck to his cheek with his left, Sean thoughtlessly smacked his lips. It had gotten dim outside. Not that Sean could really see much daylight in this plugged up study/den (another thing Douglas couldn’t stop prodding him about – his hermitlike habits and heavily fortified windows).
What time?
Glancing at the bottom right corner of the freshly woken up screen, it said 8:45. Great, a fine hour gone by. And what had he gained? Nothing at all. The first draft of The Shadow Within is still a solid 19 pages short. Nothing but-
-an email. I’ve got mail.
A slightly too excited notification was busy flagging his attention to a newly received email. Strange. He and whatever friends he had rarely ever used email. As it was, he didn’t have all that much contact with the outside world except good old stick in the mud amateur assistant Douglas and the guys at the bar. So who could it really be? Besides the nearly impossible chance that some magazine was willing to pick up his latest shitshow of a short horror story – Her Children.
Nah, that couldn’t be it… Then what?
Sean realized he was stalling the confrontation of this email. He looked down at his hand, still sitting on the mouse doing nothing, and told it to move. It obeyed, and the cursor crept up the monitor like a scared little insect on an excursion outside the hole in the wall.
Now coming into view of the email’s highlighted title, Sean did freeze. At first, he couldn’t bridge the name of said email with reality. It was as if a crucial server had malfunctioned in his noggin, sparking uselessly instead of conveying information. Then it clicked and his next breath came in an erratic gasp.
In plain text,
Eastbog Mountain Dear Mr. Carter, witnesses of the end shall… Sept. 27
Eastbog… Eastbog Mountain.
Sleep induced grogginess long gone, Sean snapped out of the temporary paralysis and clutched the mouse as if it were a baseball ready to be pitched at a mean throwing speed. He clicked on its beckoning title, not nearly as prepared as he wanted to be.
Enclosed was a short letter addressed to none other than himself. One which made his vision spin with the force of a memory beating and rattling its chains within the prison of his head.
Dear Mr. Carter,
Witnesses of the end shall be joined together once more in the viewing of the beginning. Join us, for the time of the Nameless One’s rebirth is upon us. The first spectators have already arrived. Hurry now.
Sean, his thoughts like a deer trapped in headlights, couldn’t quite grasp everything just yet.
But there was more. Scrolling down the page numbly, he discovered a single file attached. Photo, it was an innocent, unopened photo. Beneath it, more text appeared – a caption: A token of your old hobby.
Oh… please, god no…
Sean rocketed up from his seat, sending the wheeled chair sprawling behind him. Clutching his head, he squeezed his eyes shut, if only to quell the rising sea of churning waves in his sight. Waves, pain, crashing over one another, blurring his vision like an uncontrollable, dismal kaleidoscope.
He had to do it. He had to get it over with. He was either going to look at the pictures or rip his monitor off the table, one or the other.
So, tearing his eyes open, he attacked the mouse and brought up the enclosed photo. It took only a second to load up.
Then pixels formed into a coherent picture on the screen. Except, it wasn’t at all coherent.
Whatever it was Sean was looking at seemed like some joke, like a weird ‘when you see it, you’ll freak’ type illusion. The harder he stared at it, the stranger and… more cryptic the image seemed to become.
He could make out… the grainy image of someone standing in the foreground, dressed all in white, and something shrouding the edges of the frame, surrounding him or her. Like a… crowd of dark clothed onlookers. So much shadow, so hard to see clearly. Could it have been taken late at night? Dark trees, their trunks mere mysterious shades of foliage in the background.
The whole picture had a surreal, Francis Bacon-esk style – the grotesque shapes and obscurity of the figures depicted.
But that person – that unidentified girl in the forefront, clearly the object of those onlookers’ eyes… who was she?
Sean took a knee and cautiously brought his face inches from the screen, as if afraid that the hazy collections of pixels would try to pull a fast one on him. Trying to decipher her obscured facial features was proving to be an impossible task. But he definitely was getting an idea of who it might be. A heavy, sinking feeling bubbled up in Sean as he looked on.
Witnesses of the end shall be joined together once more… The first spectators have already arrived…
At long last, Sean pulled his eyes away from the image, shakily reaching for his fallen chair. Propping the poor furniture back to an upright position, Sean used it to rise from his knees and step away from the computer.
Resting on the opposite side of the room was a three compartment filing cabinet filled to the brim with mostly useless but occasionally useful junk.
Needless to say, this was one of those moments. Approaching the cabinet edgily, he thought of all the good reasons why he should’ve better organized this chest of messy information ranging from ‘temporarily unused’ writing research to passwords for various online forums and sites.
Opening the topmost drawer was like opening the floodgates. Papers stacked on papers of near pointlessly stored information on one subject or another.
How am I ever going to find those papers in this? I need to get them-
The Nameless One’s birth is almost upon us. Hurry now.
-quickly.
Then he remembered. Without a doubt, it was the first thing he’d filed away in this chest of messy organization. It was the very first thing buried, so that it couldn’t be stumbled upon and remind him of Eastbog and his time spent there.
So Sean closed up the top drawer and opened the bottom, sunk his hand into the flurry of papers, and searched for the very bottom. When his fingers grazed the floor of the cabinet, he grabbed for the poor file that lay flat at the very bottom, practically crushed beneath the weight of all the other papers.
Clutching the file tight, he pulled it out through the literary thicket and into view. In doing so, he accidentally spilled several other documents across the floor, though he did not care. The giant words on the front of the fat file sneered, Eastbog Mountain.
He could hear the unholy letters, written out by his own black pen years ago, calling out to him, taunting him.
Heyya Sean! Been a long time. Got a lots to catch up on all of a sudden, don’t we? I know you’ve been ignoring me. You’ve been ignoring part of yourself. Hurry up, Sean. Pictures can’t lie! Hurry now!
As if guided by some meticulous ritual, Sean slowly brought the envelope to the desk and set it down gently, afraid that the slightest upset to the file might cause it to turn on him. He stepped back as soon as he set it down. He took a breath. He stepped forward again and slipped a thumb beneath the wrinkled front cover.
In five minutes time, he had found it. Grabbing up his cell phone from the table, he hastily dialed the number listed beneath Bethany’s name.
Could this still be her number? The last time we talked was… gosh, at least three years ago.
He remembered so little, even though they had kept in touch immediately following The Cataclysm. But over the years, interest in talking to one another faded away. Although they were the only ones who could fully understand what each other had gone through that hellish autumn night of 1998, it was exactly the act of reminding one another of that time that was the bane of their bond. Eastbog had become helplessly associated with each of them. Every time one would try to meet up with or call the other, it would bring a flood of memories, each one worse than the last.
Whether they admitted it or not, they knew they would forever be tethered to that mountain in memory and (if you believed in that sort of stuff) spirit. Sometimes entire days (and in later years, weeks or months) would go by without either having to remember that night in detail, just as long as neither called or saw the other.
So both Bethany and Sean formed an unspoken agreement to just stop several years after they left that mountain, one that would close off communication for a few more blessed years – until now. Until that damned email decided to ring the bell once again. This time, though, it seemed worse – much, much worse.
Could it really be… there’s still someone, something, messing around with that lost village?
The phone rang obediently, over and over, each little beep vindicating Sean’s suspicions further. After what felt like 20 beeps, the call failed and Sean was left to his own beating heart again. He had been inadvertently looking at the computer monitor again. He couldn’t help but stare. That picture. That figure in white… it had to be her. Beth. Who else could it possibly be?
There was still one other he could try. One more who could understand. Hopefully.
Glimpsing the name and number he needed on the same page as Bethany’s, Sean dialed up someone else. The same tense process ensued, nothing but frustrating beeps filling his ear. Just as Sean was getting ready to give up, there was a click and then a pause from the mysterious other end of the line.
Then a man’s gruff, unmistakable voice answered Sean’s phone and prayers and said, “Hello? Who is this?”
Sean swallowed and replied, “Uh, hi. This is Sean. Sean Carter.”
There was complete silence. Sean paused to allow the man on the other end think over his name a bit, fairly certain that if he was indeed the name written on the paper, he would remember. The pause widened and became pregnant before the man finally broke it.
“Sean… Carter, eh? So it’s you. I almost forgot about that name. Not quite, though,” the gruff voice responded.
“Yeah, I thought you’d say something like that,” Sean said without much enthusiasm. He cut to the chase, “Detective Nix, I-“
“Son, I left the force years ago,” the old officer interrupted gently (or at least, what could be interpreted as gently. Everything that man said came off as gravelly as a grizzly.). “You can call me Denim. You are a fellow man now, aren’t you? Twenty…”
“…five. I was fifteen then,” he explained, grimly.
To think. Ten years had passed. Actually… it was late September. In a matter of weeks – days – it would be the ten year anniversary. The thought burdened Sean like a dumbbell for no consciously known reason. Why did it matter to him? Ten was just a number anyway. So what if The Cataclysm’s birthday was approaching?
Sean shook his head and found that Denim was patiently waiting for him to explain himself.
“Denim, it’s…” Sean took a breath –
A token of your old hobby…
-“It’s about Bethany… I think she’s been kidnapped.”
Keith Andrews – 19:32:23 – September 28, 2008
The clock ticking life away monotonously above Keith’s bed served as a metronome to his conversation with Carly. Below Keith’s feet, the muffled sounds of the Andrews family restaurant padded the air. It was as if their back and forth talking were a musical piece, rhythmically attuned to the ticking tempo of time and strangers eating dinner downstairs.
Keith was listening to her. But it was difficult to concentrate on her as long as that tick tock kept it up beside him. He could always count just how many seconds went by every time someone said something.
Her muffled words came through the phone, strangely distant.
“I don’t know… and they’re getting worse too,” Carly replied, monochrome words rising from the speaker like bubbles on a calm lake surface. Six ticks went by as she spoke.
“What do you mean, worse?” Keith asked, concern advancing to the forefront of his voice. Three ticks gone by.
While he was indeed involved in the conversation with his sister, Keith was mindlessly squeezing a random rubber ball. Keith didn’t know why, but he could never concentrate on a phone conversation as long as his hands weren’t preoccupied with something else. If he were ever to reflect back on his phone talking habits (though ‘reflecting’ wasn’t his thing), he would find only about a quarter of his brain doing the talking, the rest busy minding the ticking clock or playing with the rubber ball.
“I mean, they’re worming their way out of sleep,” she said bluntly. Three ticks gone by. “You know what it feels like when you wake up and you’re on the edge of a dream, right? You can still hang on to it for a second, maybe two, but after that, your waking mind takes over, and you lose almost all memory of that dream. Consciousness just shrugs it off for you.”
Fifteen ticks gone by.
Carly paused, and Keith wondered if he was supposed to respond. Honestly, these talks were getting stranger and stranger every time. Half the time he wondered how her roommates at the college even understood her.
“Um, sure, I get what you’re saying… but what does that have to do with your dreams?” Keith inquired, now laying back on the bed and tossing the ball towards the motionless ceiling fan. Five ticks gone by.
“I’m saying that I don’t have that anymore. I can’t shake off the dream world like everyone’s supposed to,” she said, sounding slightly more distressed to Keith. Six more ticks gone by, “I wake up, and I can still picture everything that went on last night. I go to class and all I can think about is what I saw in my sleep. But that’s been a problem for a few days. Today, it took another step up. Now, I can still feel it going on, as I’m awake.”
Thirteen ticks gone by.
Keith sat up. The ball he had just thrown plummeted to the mattress behind him, rejected. He was starting to get a weird feeling about this. For the first time in a long time, Keith was completely, utterly focused on something.
“You mean… you’re still dreaming? Like right now?” he asked the phone, chills twiddling their way up his spine for some reason.
“Yeah, kind of. I know it’s there, in the back of my head, tickling the back of my skull. I can even sense it directly if I focus on it, but I have no part in it as it plays,” her voice explained the abnormality. “At least, I really don’t want to try. It’s freaky. Everything that happens there is strange and dark and… well, I don’t want to look at it any more than I have to.”
“You’re not, I don’t know, in pain or anything, right? Do you need to see a doctor? Or do you want mom or me to come to the college? It wouldn’t be a bother or anything, only an hour’s drive. We can always close up the restaurant ear-“
“Please, Keith, don’t spaz out on me,” she cut him short. “Really, I’m fine. The best you can do is just stay the twin brother that always keeps his chill, and I’ll stay the nerd.”
There was a hint of humor in the last line, but Keith pressed on.
“Alright, it’s just what you’re telling me doesn’t seem fine,” he replied, uneasily glancing around his bedroom as if a night terror like the ones she always described to him were going to suddenly jump out from behind his piles of dirty clothes.
A pause on her end, then another hasty, “I’m fine.”
“Okay, if you say so Carly,” he shrugged and laid back on his rumpled up bed sheets, forgetfully smushing the ball beneath his lanky frame. And without anything else to say (and out of curiosity), “So, can you see it right now? Can you tell me what’s going on in dream land?”
A sound like Carly snickering, then she said, “Yeah, I’ll check in on ‘dream land’ for you, but I can’t see much. It’s almost entirely made up of sounds and other… stuff.”
Then there was silence for several ticks of the clock. Keith could hear her breathing, grainy echoes through the speaker.
When her voice eventually returned, it was different to Keith. Like she was sleep talking. “It’s… a tunnel. A dark tunnel, and filled almost to the top with water. Water feels… There are voices, many voices, echoing in the distance… chanting, but I can’t hear clearly. The water. A slowly moving stream. Someone floating just beneath the surface. It’s so hard to… hard to-“
“Carly, you can stop,” Keith offered, getting nervous for her.
She stopped talking, much to Keith’s simultaneous relief and anxiety. After several ticks had gone by without a peep from her end, he sat up straight again and said, “Carly? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m still here,” she replied. But her voice sounded drained, as if she’d just competed in a 5k in the course of half a minute. “…Look, Keith, I know how crazy it must sound to you.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Keith followed up assuredly. There were several words he could use to describe Carly’s dream pocket – like weird, scary, or even vaguely familiar (as Keith was currently awash with inexplicable de ja vu) – but ‘crazy’ was not one of them. Maybe because he could relate to these visions somehow.
Chanting voices, a water filled tunnel, a body beneath the surface… why is that so familiar?
“I just wish I could wake up completely,” she pleaded the dream genie wispily, “I still feel like I’m dreaming…”
“Well, sounds more like a nightmare than a dream,” Keith said.
Then there was yet another strained silence. All the while, Keith could only imagine what Carly was thinking. There was a reason she was the one who went to school out of high school and he stayed behind at the restaurant with ma; she was a smart sister. So why did her plan exclude a trip to the doctor? It sure seemed like that was the sensible thing to do in such an alien situation. She surprised him by breaking the silence with something more.
“Hey, Keith. One last thing. Do you remember our old home? Do you remember dad?”
…
“Why? Was he in your nightmare again?”
“Last night,” she said, “He was different in this one, though. He’s normally… you know, crazy, but in this one he seemed more at peace. He said he was glad I was coming back… you know what, no more of this talk. It’s starting to wear on me.”
“You’re telling me,” Keith exhaled, almost relieved she decided against talking about dad again. To Keith, dad was among the worst night terrors Carly could have – same for Keith. “I swear these phone calls are getting more and more dire. Pretty soon, you’ll be calling from an asylum.”
That got a painfully forced laugh from Carly which didn’t really help lighten the mood but didn’t darken it either. Keith sighed.
“Alright, I gotta go, Cool Keith. Keep your chill till next time,” Carly said in her usual sign off.
Keith didn’t really want to say bye just yet but didn’t know what to say otherwise, so he resigned for a, “Yeah, your alliterations and rhymes still suck.”
“Oh nice, you know what alliteration means,” she prodded, though not unkind. “Anyway, I want to hear more about you next time. I need to stop talking about these stupid dreams. I feel like if I ignore them, sooner or later, they’ll go away.”
“Yeah, hope so,” Keith responded. “But you will get help if it starts to get out of control? It seriously sounds like something –“
“Don’t worry, bro. I’ll handle it myself if it gets out of control, bye,” was all she said, and Keith barely got in a ‘bye’ before she hung up.
Keith pocketed the phone and reached behind him to grab the rubber ball. The soft texture felt empty now. He tossed it to the clothing-strewn floor and got up to return downstairs. Ma might need him by now, as he’d taken a break during dinnertime (cause Carly was calling). Ma would probably be wondering where he was any minute now.
He went to his bedroom door and stopped beneath the peeling frame.
I know it’s there, in the back of my head, tickling the back of my skull.
Keith half turned to look back at his messy room in the dimming sunlight of both late afternoon and early evening. Nothing but the usual disorder and filth of the bedroom stared back at him. He wondered why he was still standing here instead of downstairs, helping out ma. Then he pulled himself away from the room into the hall and trudged to the stairs.
Carly, are you really sure you can handle something like this yourself?