having an allergic reaction to it?”
It was too dark to see the dumb look on Ernest’s face, but I’m sure it was there. The fucker had forgotten ask me if I was allergic to anything.
The door opened swiftly, spilling light into the dark dungeon that was my office. My eyes had so adjusted to the darkness that the hallway light was blinding me. I shaded them as she entered.
“What happened?” She said with alarm.
“A bad dream,” Ernest said. “We’ll be fine.”
“No. No we won’t be fine,” I said, and collapsed back down into my seat, wincing as it felt like I was being stabbed in the stomach with an ice pick. Still shading my eyes I asked Emmy to close the door. She did.
“What should I do?” Emmy asked.
“I don’t know.” I hissed. “Maybe… maybe I should go to the hospital. Something’s wrong.”
“Let’s do,” she agreed.
“The doctor’s,” Ernest mocked. “Yeah, they have all the solutions.”
“Thanks for stopping by,” Emmy said to the man, “but I think we’re done here. How much do I owe you?”
Just as I uncovered my eyes, Emmy flipped the lights back on.
For a split second my brain processed a coat rack in the corner of the office, south. A large black trench coat draped over it. I looked at it and that’s when everything turned to shit. It was as black as a shadow in the night, save for its face. It wasn’t a mask, it was a part of the entity, the only part exposed. A coalescence of bone, tendon, muscle tissue, and lidless eyes with large black irises, scarcely visible under its low hanging hood. It was smiling at me, but it wasn’t smiling. It was a skeletal grin.
My horrific reaction to it was as such that both Ernest and Emmy flinched as they turned to face whatever I was looking at.
I screamed and screamed and screamed. It didn’t move as everything around me faded to black, as the invisible blade of the guillotine reached my neck. Those big protuberant eyes boring into my own, clear to the foundation of my soul, were the last things I saw.
We continued along the barren wasteland. There was silence now. Julie was deep in thought beside me.
“When did this happen?” She finally said.
“I don’t know, but it’s the last thing I remember.”
She stopped walking. I then stopped, looked at her.
“That’s… that scares me,” she said. And she was scared, I could hear it in her voice.
“It scares you? You should have seen it, Julie. It was the most repugnant thing imaginable. Something so repulsive that when viewing it your body thinks it best to just shut down, lose consciousness.”
“That’s not what scares me.”
Yeah, that’s not what scared me, either. Presently, at least. What scared her is what it all meant, and why that was the last thing I remembered. And how that fits in to where we are now. She was having less luck recalling her past, so she was left to make theories based on my own. And it all pointed to one thing, that of which I had already mentioned and am loath to repeat. This wasn’t exactly heaven. Not to say that we had died, but if we had, might it be so different? I didn’t feel dead. How absurd is that statement? How is being dead supposed to feel?
“And you know what else?” I said. “The pain wasn’t in my arms. It was in my arm. My left arm.”
She gave me a look conveying that she knew exactly what that pointed to: a heart attack.
“I’m sorry, Julie, for disquieting your mind.
She nodded and retook her pace along the dirt and rock hard-pack with me close at her side. She surprised me by taking my hand in hers. With her eyes she asked if it was okay: I nodded my consent. Truth was, I wanted it too. The comfort of being touched. We were in this together, whatever it was. Wherever it was. Have you ever noticed that oftentimes people enter or re-enter our lives when we need them most? Emmy back then, Julie now. It’s as though fate or Ka or God knows that we can’t do it alone, and provides us companionship.
“I could offer you some optimism, if you’d like,” I said.
She grinned feebly. “Yes, please.”
“If we’re dead, we can’t die of thirst.”
She found no humor in it. Of course she didn’t. It was tasteless. “We’re not dead,” she said adamantly. “We aren’t.”
I nodded in agreement, though I was far from convinced.
“If we were dead we’d be in heaven or hell,” she said. “This sure isn’t heaven.”
“I was just thinking that.”
“Leaving hell as the alternative. If this were hell, don’t you think there would be more people than just you and I?”
“Absolutely there would.” I found comfort in that. “Maybe you’re right, then.”
“Mabel Street,” she said.
“Mabel?”
“Yes. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Actually… actually it does. Mabel Street. Anna lived on Mabel! Which would mean you lived on Mabel!”
“I think I remember the house I grew up in. The one on Mabel.”
“Good for you,” I encouraged. “Keep remembering, fill me in on anything you come up with. I’d love to know what happened leading up to you arriving here. And anything you could tell me of Anna would be great. I bet she has a husband and kids.”
She nodded.
“She does? She does have a husband and kids?”
“Oh I don’t know, I was just nodding out of politeness.”
We continued along. I looked up at the sky in every direction, hoping to spot the sun. There needed to be a sun. A sun would make this place more like a locality on earth and less like one in hell. Nothing had changed with the cloud cover.
“I can think of a lot worse people to be alone here with,” she muttered.
It touched me, irrationally so. I smiled sincerely at her; she reciprocated a lesser one, but a smile nonetheless.
I spotted something in the distance, shooting out from behind a rock formation. I nudged Julie and pointed. It was what she had earlier described to me. A sickly green simian-looking thing, only hairless. A biped utilizing its arms in its gait. It was exceedingly fast and running laterally to us. Then another came into view from behind the rocks, and it was a trifle larger, putting chase to the other. If it weren’t for their tails, I’d have considered them to be more human than primate. They were demonic. Their presence uprooted what little optimism I maintained. Nothing like this existed on earth.
The one being chased shrieked, and there are no words to properly convey their register. High-pitched and wavering, almost as if it were giggling and screaming in tandem. The pursuer responded with a shriek of its own, and it registered lower. A male chasing a female was my guess. The male quickly caught the female and pounced on her. I thought they were playing at first, maybe a mating ritual, but the larger put its hands around the smaller’s neck and throttled it, eliciting a more shrill ejaculation than before; begging for her life, she was.
The smaller quieted, stilled. The larger then sat beside her lifeless body and took her hand in his, brought it to his mouth and began chewing on one of her fingers.
I was aghast and my expression surely mirrored that emotion.
“What?” Julie cried. “What do you see?”
I looked at her, confounded. “What do I see? What do I see? Don’t tell me that—” I looked back to the demons and was thunderstruck to find nothing there. Vanished they had. “They’re… gone.”
“What was it?”
“What you had earlier described to me.”
“The ape-like thing?”
“Yes. Two of them.”
She hummed meditatively. “I wonder if I had described it differently, if you’d have seen it that way instead.”
“You think I hallucinated it.”
“Well you did.”
We continued along silently. My calf had been starting to burn some time ago, and when it began to itch as well, I stopped to have a look at my scrape. I knelt down and hiked up a pant le
g.
“Ooo,” she moaned and positioned herself to better see the injury.
It was worse than I had imagined. Several inches long and a couple inches wide; the top layer of flesh had been scraped off. It was red and scabbing over already. I touched it and consequently hissed. There was a little flake of a scab at the top of the wound. I dug a fingernail under it and peeled it off. Below it was darker red, blood-colored, but there was no blood. I stood up and regained my pace.
We directed toward the spot I had hallucinated the demons. I wished to see if there were any traces of them, such as footprints in the dirt.
As we strode along, we were both remembering the same afternoon without knowing it. She’d tell me soon enough what she had remembered, but for the meantime I was sitting on that wooden bench on the front porch of the Macintyre’s. For having issues with my memory, the ones I did possess sure were clear. Crystal clear. It might have been just this afternoon that I sat beside Anna on that bench. She wore a summer dress, light pink with big white flowers. So clear was this image that I saw the peach bra-straps to the side of the pink straps of her dress. It was before either of us had a license to drive, putting us at about fifteen years old. She had been working diligently on growing boobs that summer, and I was appreciative of her efforts. When she leaned forward to open her purse between our feet and extract Chapstick, the front of her dress hung from her chest, affording me a clear view of her boobs (albeit they were in a bra; frowny face). In my memory I was trying to see her breasts, but the fifteen-year-old Jeffrey had looked away from them. How about that? I had morals. But I did wish to see them, even back then. More than that I wished she’d want me to see them, and not for the reward that is actively staring at her breasts: I wanted her to want me to see them.
It wasn’t then that I had decided I was in love with her—her boobs had nothing to do with it. I had decided that a long time before that afternoon, but it was then that I resolved to confess my love to her. I never went through with it though, as you well know. The closest I came was just after she applied Chapstick to her lips and straightened her posture, smiled over at me for no reason at all, and that’s when smiles are at their prettiest. Wanton smiles.
Anna’s kid sister zipped by us on the sidewalk riding her pink bike with an exaggeratedly long banana seat, honking her wha-ooga wha-ooga horn as she passed. And she was wearing that same white dress, and it fitted her young body much better than it did currently. She disappeared behind the tall hedge of the neighboring house.
“Are there any boys you like at school?” I asked her. Nervous sweat dotted my brow.
She grinned wryly. “Why, would you be jealous?” She was playing with me, but now that I think about it, I think she was fishing for the truth. It had been lost on me back then.
“Just wondering. Jacob can’t be the only one chasing after you.”
Jacob was a boy our age, and overtly enamored with Anna. Whenever I hung out with Anna (which was most of the time) I could always spot Jacob somewhere not too far away. He liked to follow her around. He had some nerve, too, initiating conversation with her and inviting her to every dance that was on the horizon, no matter how distant and unlikely. Even Sadie Hawkins, the dance where the girl is supposed to invite the guy, Jacob had proposed that she go with him even then. She turned him down time and time again, but he never gave up. I thought Jacob was a good looking boy, too. And if he couldn’t win her over with that coupling of looks and persistency, what chance did I have with her? But I had the great advantage of being her best friend. Maybe there would be no dating between us, no taking her to the big dance, but in a way what I had was better than that. More than just an ephemeral encounter with her before saying our goodbyes. What I had was her daily affection, her utmost devotion as my dearest friend, and though it was strictly platonic, she loved me. She had once told me that, and did so when I needed to hear it most: when I was crying from