She whipped around, the scream still ringing in her ears. “Rachel? Rachel?”
The room fell silent. Her legs knocked against tables and chairs in the darkness. “Rachel? Rachel! Where are you? Please! Rachel!” Her stomach lurched and twisted. She abandoned all caution, all discretion, desperate to find her sister. Something soft caught her foot. She stepped back and cast the light from her phone towards the object.
Rachel’s severed face stared up from the floor, her body nowhere to be found.
“You’ve always been a selfish sonuvabitch.”
“Fuck you! You always thought you were better than me!”
“Until now, I was.”
One.
Two.
Three.
The gun exploded, a deafening staccato ripping through the malformed mockery. He felt no remorse. No pity. No regret. The thing writhed and screamed in his brother’s voice, but it stopped being his brother long before the infection, before the parasite took hold. He always knew it would end in blood between them.
The gun rang out.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Four shots tore through her chest. All five feet, seven inches of her crumpled to the ground. Blood soaked the moonlit shore as the lake lapped at her flesh. The boy stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, gun still trained on the fallen woman, breath caught in his throat.
“It’s over.” He exhaled.
“Is . . . it?”
Her body convulsed, bones snapping out of place, limbs twisting and elongating. She rose like water and held him in two fathomless pools. Her jaw popped and jerked, unhinging itself, mouth stretching unnaturally wide revealing row upon row of jagged teeth. The dead woman bellowed a scream so primal the boy collapsed to his knees, sobbing.
“No need to cry, boy.” Her voice was like a skittering swarm of roaches. Her laugh like an electric guitar. She towered over the child and whispered, “Now, come to mommy.”
He is neither kind nor jolly. Every year he enters the homes of especially unruly children and snatches them up, leaving behind no trace or memory that they had ever existed. By night’s end, with his sack full of naughty children, he slinks back to his lair to gorge himself. When the last child is devoured, bones and all, he falls into a deep sleep for another year, with none of us the wiser.
Until now.
The Hundred-Acre Woods had changed in the wake of Christopher Robin’s disappearance. Pooh blamed himself—if only he held on for just a little longer. No one else blamed him. No one could have stood against those awful impossible things. He did everything he could, but guilt broke him, changed him.
In the aftermath, Pooh was found deep within the shadows of the forest, stuffing spilling out of grievous wounds. Had he been a real bear, he wouldn’t have survived. Pooh, however, like his friends, weren’t real—not in the conventional sense—but play things brought to life by the ancient spirit of the woods for a little boy who sought solace among her twisted and gnarled branches.
Through them, she was able to love the cast out child. He had been brought to die, but his courage and wonder evoked sympathy from the spirit, and she vowed to watch over him. Pooh, Piglet, Owl, Tigger, and all his new friends guarded and taught him the deep secrets of the Hundred Acre Woods. That which inspired fear in the hearts of men, that unconsciously drove them to give wide berth to the forest, was to him, a friend.
Of all his friends, it was Pooh that loved him most, with same heart of the ancient spirit. In turn, the child loved Pooh above all others, and for a time, before the horrors which now stalked the woods, they were happy. But that happiness had long since vanished with the boy. After thirteen years, Pooh had given up on ever finding the child and turned his rage toward the things stalking the dark places of the forest, corrupting its woods, and poisoning the ancient spirit that birthed him.
Dividing flesh from spirit
Requires precise incisions.
Quick and defined strokes
Setting souls free,
Though—
More often than not,
Most, I admit,
Go quite unwillingly.
Morgan stared into the deep darkness, watching massive tentacle-like arms breach and retreat back into the infernal vortex. He never felt so aware of his own insignificance as he did in that moment.
“Okay,” he answered, “who are you?”
“How can you know the unknowable? Or apprehend a god? Can a mote of dust lay hold the heavens? Can you devour entire worlds? Two more left.” Its voice echoed across the galaxy, shaking heaven and earth.
“That’s bullshit! That’s not an answer!” Morgan shouted.
“Rebuke me again, and you will have never existed.”
“What does that mean?”
“You will have never been born, never lived, and never been known. Whatever pitiful sentiments anchor you to this life will have never been. Your thread will be plucked from the Great Tapestry. One.”
“No! Please! That wasn’t a question!”
“You have asked, and We have answered. The bargain is kept. You have one more question.”
“I need a moment to think.”
“I have eternity.”
Morgan wracked his brain. His first question resulted in more questions. His second was an accident. The last question had to be carefully woven if he were to find some way to stop the entity from tearing apart the universe.
“Okay . . .”
Knocking, Tapping
Against the wall,
Skittering, creeping
Down the hall.
Scratching, scraping
Beneath the bed,
Laughing, screaming
They woke up dead.
October 14, 1991
Patient A.
Transcript.
The mind’s eye sees and remembers. A sudden rush, and then the sweet scent of summer catches in her hair, follows in her wake like wind caught sails racing towards safe harbor. She was harbor, ship, and sea; we felt safe with her, even as we weathered through the storms.
I see her eyes, an endless descent into the Abyss, always staring back—even when we averted our gaze. She watched over us from the periphery of our vision like a shadow that vanishes the moment you try to capture its presence.
Maybe we weren’t so safe? Screaming, hands reaching, grabbing, hurting, choking. Please, let her go! She didn’t know! Delilah collapses. She never got back up again. Devin disappeared. Then there was me. Why was I spared?
End of Session 1.
These are the ghosts that wander through the infinite corridors of a divergent, and admittedly, unsound mind. Some belong to a troubled past, others arise from social decay, while others are utterly fabricated. I speak them into being, bring them out for examination, and in doing so, unintentionally examine and critique myself.
Continue reading “The Inevitable Introduction”
Void Engineer 