Aberrations
Thirteen Tales of Terror
By Matt Dymerski
Copyright © 2012 by Matt Dymerski
You can follow my work at MattDymerski.com,
Aberrations
Table of Contents
A Strange Kind of Journal
Still Life
Staring Contest
Final Exam
The Everest Corpses
Something’s Wrong
An Overheard Conversation
Smoke and Mirrors
An Unhappy Awakening
The Unseen Hands
The Hungry Lights
The Television
An Impossible Window
About
****
A Strange Kind of Journal
I keep an orange in my car. It’s important, you see. It rolls around in that sloping bowl beneath the dash where I throw my loose change, and it never, ever falls on the gift-wrapped present with the life-saving silver bow on top that rests on the floor in front of the achingly empty passenger seat. I can’t bring myself to remove either object.
Sleep deprivation is a clever demon. The chronic case, as I know well, adds the subtle spice of cruelty to its nebulous tortures. It takes from you, from your very essence, and gouges out the knowledge of what it removed. Three months in, I even lost the notion that I was unwell. I struggled through each day on the verge of collapse, oblivious to the simple idea that something was wrong.
It is only now that I am better that I detect a certain logic to my experiences, a certain underlying web of connections between the waking nightmares and difficulties I suffered, that leads me to believe I might have been afflicted with something more than simple exhaustion.
I know the point at which the clear lines of reality began to waver. My job was as any other office job; repetitive, restrictive, routine… when I began experiencing micro sleep blackouts, I had the genius notion that I could cultivate them to ease the day’s struggle. Imagine my fatigued sense of victory when I found the right caffeine manipulations - when I perfected the art of blacking out and waking up to a completed task. I built my own warped science around skipping as much of the day as possible.
It was not without its dangers.
Without most of my higher functions, my animal mind could only do as it was trained. Issues cropped up slowly at first, but grew as my sleep deprivation worsened. I would wake to find that I had prepared a hundred envelopes instead of fifty. I would wake to find I’d eaten the wrapping around my sandwich. I would wake to find staples along extra papers and up my arm, blood dripping on my desk.
Nobody seemed to notice my status as a virtual zombie, so I struggled to keep these problems secret. The worst was that last staple curled around a vein in my forearm, and digging it out with pliers in the supply hallway. I can still remember the vein’s stringy texture and consistency as I worked the staple around it. It reminded me of those little ligaments in cooked meat.
I thought about that for a while afterward. I started observing my coworkers in my fuzzy waking periods. They were all like that – filled with little stringy bits and pulsing meat. I grew disgusted by the very sight of another person’s face, seeing only underlying hard bones and exposed soft organs throbbing with juices. Sometimes they touched me by accident, leaving - ugh - a subtle trail of grease.
It was this unfiltered and horrific vision that eventually allowed me to notice an even more disturbing oddity. Some men and women I passed on the street did not throb the correct way. They had all the right squishing and twitching bags of tissue in their sacks of flesh, but something inside was… wrong. I had the unfettered night and unending time as my allies, and I took to following them in the dark.
They were good, I’ll grant you that. It took many late-night ventures to finally catch two of them meeting. They turned their pulpy sense organs this way and that, closing flaps of flesh to moisten them – but they couldn’t see me. I was too smart for that. They made noises at each other, strange and unintelligible noises, but I realized that was just a cover. There was another sound, a second sound, underneath… ethereal whispers that spoke of plans and violence.
I lost even that obsession as reality became mutable. My office changed daily, and then hourly. Tables moved, walls shrank, ceiling tiles laughed. Through it all, I continued working, too tired to care or act.
I was sitting at my desk the moment I finally broke. I was contemplating the others, the possible intent of their conspiracy, when I noticed a silver bow on the floor. I stared at it for a good long moment, until a rare complete thought entered my mind: I’m driving.
I slammed my foot down on instinct, and a tidal wave of sensations crashed over me as my car swung and smashed into a ditch. I had no idea how or when I'd started driving, but the jarring impact cleared my senses for a scant moment. I saw myself, I saw my mania, I saw a moldy orange and a gift-wrapped present with a silver bow left unopened on the floor of my car, and I knew I was in trouble. I used a marker I found in my back seat, and I wrote something on my arm across bulging black-and-yellow staple wounds.
go to sleep
So I did. For an unknown blessed time, I slept. I kept sleeping, each night, letting the weird human impostors go about their conspiracy. One day, I woke up, and… I was awake. I rushed to the hospital to save my arm from the horrible gangrenous infection that had consumed it. I spent a work day conscious. Most of all, I watched those men and women I'd deemed doppelgangers, and they were… men and women again. My filters were back, my perceptions restored, and I thought I understood - for a time, I’d lost my mind. It was only when one of them gave me a nod and a secret smile that the true revelation hit me. I’d lost my mind, yes, but…
Nobody noticed.
I walked the line between us and them. I know what it is to be insane, and I know what it is to be sane. The wrong, as I call them, were never demons or monsters. Worse – they're exceedingly human. They’re crazy, and they hide it well, better than I ever did. They draw conclusions and allegories where none should exist, and that is how they communicate, beyond and below the actual words they exchange. They’re crazy, and they’re all around us, all the time… coworkers, friends, leaders.
What happens when there are more of them than there are of us? When the beliefs we all exchange every day slide toward madness? When white becomes blue and black becomes white, when an orange rots to dust and a present is left unopened under an ever-empty seat, when men read stories of suffering and nightmare only to delight and glee and support madness, then you will know that existence has snapped, and all is lost.
****
Still Life
I was idly clicking through profiles online one evening when I found something that disturbed me. A friend of a friend of mine had a series of odd pictures... clothing and styles I hadn’t seen in the better part of a decade graced his page. I read some of the last comments. They were all, to the last, memorials.
My thoughts raced with confusion as I examined my vague memories of him. I had no idea that he had been dead for several years. I was a little put off by the fact his profile still existed, hanging there silently in space long after he was gone.
I began a search through his list of friends, heading for names I didn’t recognize. After a few tries, I found another page that seemed wrong in some subtle manner. There were no memorial posts, but the last activity she’d taken was five years past. A chill shock ran across my skin as I realized that this wasn’t just a fluke. There were profiles whose owners had died - many, many profiles - gathering dust in the dark corners of the internet.
I lost myself in continuing my search, unearthing page after page of still life. It seemed the deeper I went into the network of ties from that first acquaintance, the more silence I f
ound. Grandmothers, children, husbands, friends… they all smiled in cold photos of warm days and danced motionless at unknown parties. These events must have meant the world to these people, but they were nothing now but a few images. A growing sense of dread began to build in me as I continued to search.
My heart beat faster and I began to feel a vague sense of sourceless resentment, as if I’d trespassed somewhere I wasn’t meant to go. The feeling of distant hostility grew even as I clicked and scanned faster, unable to stop. My rushing pulse and that feeling of empty rage peaked as I found myself in a community of families and friends whose pages all had memorials for some type of tragedy. Ten, twenty, thirty… it kept going. Every single picture, every post, every conversation they’d ever had… they were dead. They were all dead!
I stumbled out of my chair and turned off my computer.
Reality quietly pooled around me, slowing my racing heart. I didn’t know what to think about what I’d seen. While I tried to focus, my legs took me outside. It was definitely time to go. I was supposed to be somewhere…
The gloomy grey evening sky drizzled a fine mist over the parking lot as I approached my car, parked at the far end earlier that day. My steps echoed in the bleak stillness. During that lonely quiet walk, it occurred to me that profiles were not all that the dead left behind. Bodies and bones littered the world, twisted with the pain and suffering that took their lives. Not just graveyards, either… surely someone had died, at some point in time, virtually everywhere.
The misty rain swirled around me, but I felt no wind. I looked around, feeling that vague sense of trespass again, as if my dark thoughts and echoing footsteps were treading too far into loneliness and silence. Those that died left so much of themselves behind… their bodies, their images, their hopes and dreams… What else might remain?
My jaw slackened and I stopped in place halfway to my car. My eyes traced the delicate curtains of mist. A horrible thought had occurred to me: if, somehow, the essence of the dead lived on… how many of them were there? What was their existence like? Were they trapped in the ground where they were buried? Did they wander the Earth in eternal exile? Were there countless millions of them all around, flailing without body and screaming without noise, desperate for life to notice them again, even if just for a moment?
My heart furiously pumped in my chest as my eyes followed the lilting path of the droplets of mist drifting around me. I could almost see them now, the barest ethereal outlines of shoulders, arms, faces… that vague hostility, that hatred and jealousy and thirst to be acknowledged… they had gathered around me like moths to a flame, attracted by my trespass into the realms of despair. I shook my head and laughed nervously. I was imagining things.
My shirt pulled back hard, and I stumbled. Lithe cold tendrils of wind tore at me, pulling my hair, grabbing at my clothes, and shoving me with horrendous force in every direction. I hit the pavement bodily, and struggled in terror and pain. A maelstrom seized me from every angle, and the chaos blinded me for a moment. A microburst, some sort of freak weather occurrence… my mind raced for understanding as I struggled to breathe, but my animal instincts cried out.
“Get away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
The parking lot was silent. The gloomy grey evening sky drizzled a fine mist over the wet cement. I looked around in panic, but there was nothing to be seen. My clothes were torn and I felt bruised. I stumbled to my car and drove out of that bleak place with one last look back. I saw nothing in the dancing mist, but I knew they were there… watching, always watching. My mind had processed my senses. It hadn’t been the wind. I knew what I felt. They were hands… thousands of them, desperate, clawing hungrily for what they would never have again.
****
Staring Contest
"We need you!"
Three simple words shouted in breathless desperation by one of the neighborhood boys caught my attention.
"The old church!" he screamed at me, and then continued running down the back streets of our small town. Big brother said he was going to pass that way... I bolted from the porch, my feet pounding across the fresh mud from the summer afternoon storm that had just passed.
The old church loomed over the trees. Three boys lurked at the edge of a large bush, eyes locked on something ahead. One of them was older and larger. It was big brother.
"Sis, you're here," he said in relief, without looking my way. I crept up to the edge of the foliage and peered around... it took all of my effort not to scream.
Near the shade of the overhanging roof, just in front of the black maw of the ancient door, stood a rotted corpse of a man. It wore a tattered trench coat and a fedora, and its head was pointed at us as if it was watching us. At its blistered, oozing feet was one of the neighborhood kids.
"Watch that thing," my big brother ordered, fearful but determined. "All of you."
He crept forward across the rain-soaked ground.
"And don't blink."
The three of us watched as he gingerly made his way toward the unconscious boy. The corpse-thing followed him with its gaze. Big brother circled it for a moment to confirm that its silent and lifeless eyes were tracking him. He slowly took a step toward the boy lying in the mud.
A rotted arm shot out, freezing in the air in front of my brother. The three of us jumped, but kept our eyes on it.
"Sorry, I blinked!" the boy next to me shouted. My brother looked wild-eyed at the near disaster, but continued to slowly lean in toward the boy. I tried not to follow his motion, and I tried not to blink, but I felt my eyes drying out. He suddenly moved swiftly, grabbing the kid and dragging him away. I blinked by accident.
My brother shouted as he was jerked backwards by the curled fingers of the corpse-thing around his shirt collar. I trembled in horror, feeling my eyes well up with tears that tried to force me to blink as he struggled to escape the thing's frozen grasp. I couldn't hold it much longer...
"What's going on?" came a shout from behind us as seven boys ran up from behind us, along with that first boy sent for help. There were shouts of terror and confusion, but my brother's quick words gathered their spirits. The ten of us fanned out, all eyes on the dark space between that tattered trench coat and fedora.
My brother broke free, scrambled about in the mud, and pulled the unconscious boy to a safe distance. The corpse-thing's head turned to follow him, still tracking him with its decayed gaze. Before we could decide what to do next, its head turned, and I felt it watching me.
"Next time, Becca," it rasped. Before I could ask who Becca was, it looked down, tilting its head. I realized what it was doing too late - the muddy fedora slipped off, and all eleven of us followed it for a split second. Before we could look back, the corpse-thing was gone... and a set of irregular footprints, fresh in the mud, led off into the forest.
The fedora splashed in a small puddle moments later. We kept it, but none of the adults believed us, even though they couldn't explain the strange welts on the rescued boy's body. It's been twenty years, and I have kids of my own now... and I still fear the summer rains... because, once I see muddy footprints in my house, it'll already be too late...
****
Final Exam
Most of the other students in my dorm, done with their finals, had taken to the kind of raucous celebrations that took over the entire building. That night, attempting to study for my last final through constantly assaulted senses, I found myself consumed by a quiet rage.
My anger had crept toward a peak all semester long, fueled by the pressures of med school and the late-night disruptions of my nocturnal and perpetually drunken roommate. I found myself fantasizing about locking all the doors and burning the entire place down… not a healthy thought, I know. Still, I persevered, and believed myself ready for my final exam the next morning – only to find four feet of snow and ice locking us inside.
An email informed me that the final had been moved to after the winter break. Relieved, I found myself with a spare day in wh
ich I had nothing to do. I wandered the silent halls of my dorm, taking no small pleasure in the building-wide hangover. They deserved it, after all.
That was when I heard it for the first time. I turned my head to listen for a barely audible sound, as yet beyond description, directionless and out of place in the stairwell. I had the strangest notion that the sound involved me in some manner, and, after I fruitlessly peered around for a moment, I bolted for my room.
I entered to find my roommate playing video games and talking over his headset, his back to me. Taking my laptop to my bed, I resolved to ignore him as I always did. It took several minutes for me to notice that something was wrong with him.
There was the slightest hesitation in his constant babble, and he swung between topics at random. At times, it seemed he was having trouble thinking of the right way to say something, and instead opted for a simpler word. I chalked it up to a hangover at first, but I couldn’t shake the premonition that something was seriously wrong with him.
I slowly circled him, trying to get a glimpse of him from the side. His skin was flushed, and the lymph node under his jaw seemed swollen. He kept playing, ignoring me. As annoyed with him as I was, I let him be, and headed for the floor’s bathroom.
In the hall, which was strangely warm, I noticed a few odd marks in the corners of the ceiling. It looked as if small bits of black mold had taken root. I didn’t remember seeing it earlier… and then I heard that noise again, from some unknown direction. I still couldn’t quite analyze it. I didn’t have time to think about it, though, because a door next to me creaked open.
A neighbor I recognized looked up at me from the floor, drool hanging from his mouth. His face was bright red, and his skin shone with sweat. He looked up at me with happy but dim eyes, speaking a few words of gibberish. Immediately worried, I took off my sweater and used it to wrap him up and place him on his bed. I didn’t want to touch him, in case he was contagious. On the other bed, his roommate groaned, and I noticed similar symptoms.
Now convinced something was wrong, I covered my mouth with my sleeve and examined my neighbor. I took a pen from my pocket and used it to tilt his head… swollen lymph nodes, puffy eyes, fever… and he cooed at me like a child. The fever might have been affecting him, or he might have had something very dangerous. It was then that he turned his head, and I leapt back in horror.