Twilight Nightmares (Twisted Tales Special Edition Book 1) (18 page)

Sometimes We Escape

 

 

 

 

Humans are a waste of existence
, I thought as I waited inside the mirror. A filthy human named Brent stood opposite me on Earth. A soft afternoon light filtered through the frosted glass window of the bathroom, casting a fuzzy bar against the white wall behind him. The bathroom was unkempt, with clothes thrown all over the floor along with a couple bottles of liquor—one partially shattered.

Brent boldly used a large piece of the glass to cut his right palm. The blood quickly pooled in his cupped hand, and he dabbed his finger into the sweet liquid. I licked my lips as he drew upon the mirror, which, by consequence, drew a wide grin upon my face.

First, he created a circle, and the blood dripped down from the highest and lowest arcs. Inside the circle, he drew a crude version of the Aramaic sign for life. Sweat beaded upon the tacky skin of the pathetic mortal as he finished, and then he wrapped his hand in a rag, which quickly turned a magnificent crimson.

He laid the glass next to the sink near a small rectangle of wrinkled paper. The human pinched the corner of the page, and lifted it. The paper trembled along with the human's own quaking body, and then he began to read it aloud.

I was already familiar with Aramaic, and it annoyed me how poorly he spoke it. To disgrace the language that came before humanity’s weak slobbering English seemed wrong, but I was content to know the result would be my freedom.

"
Orias
," Brent uttered nervously, "I call you. I beg for a favor, and in return I offer you my soul."

I felt the energy empower me to reveal myself. These humans could summon us at their will. For whatever reason the creator of all found it necessary to make such a weak being powerful enough to control us, but thankfully, our guile was always their undoing.

When fear fell upon his face, I knew he could see me. I spoke in his native tongue to ensure the easiest transition. I had to play it smart, perhaps even a bit dubious. I knew what he wanted, but to get what I wanted, I had to be clever.

I said, "Who calls unto me, bringing me from my slumber."

"I... I did."

"What is it you want?" I boomed, and then a soft scream of a distant soul tortured by a fellow demon added to my dark presence.

"I request a favor; I need your help. I need my family back." He said as tears journeyed down his face.

"I am limited in power to humans while I am bound within Purgatory." I
said,
which was true.

"What can I do?"

"You must release me. Free
me
from this prison and I shall grant your request." I lied.

"Okay." Brent agreed without hesitation.

It comes rarely when a human is so desperate that a demon need not try very hard to manipulate them. Brent's case was even more amazing than that. About a year ago human time, his meat-bag of a son
had been killed
on his way to school when two gangs got into a heavy shootout. The police couldn't find the shooters, so they closed the case pending further action only if they get lucky and recover the guns in the future. This news devastated his wife, and because she was unable to handle the lack of judicial convictions she so desperately needed, she hung herself.

I never had the power to bring back either his son or his wife regardless of where they went, but neither of them made it to Purgatory, anyway. His son was too young to have committed any serious offenses, and his wife hadn't done anything wrong her entire life. However, Brent assumed his wife had been damned because she killed herself, which wasn't the case at all. Humans were good at making shit up, especially when it came to their religions, which worked out for me because now this idiot summoned me to bring them back. I barely had a foot in the door, and he pulled it wide open.

"Very well. Speak the final words on that page. Once you free me, you
may
find what you're looking for." I said, twisting the truth.

He spoke another butchered version of my native tongue. As he repeated it, I felt the power surge deeper into my leathery skin, touching upon the place where I once had a soul. Immediately, a blinding pain consumed me. I screamed and deafened myself. I slammed my eyes shut, holding myself against the mirror, and felt my core burn as if no different from the molten core of Earth.
It was a pain I never felt before,
and when I opened my eyes, I was
in
the bathroom.

Brent had switched places with me. He stood on the other side of the mirror, within the darkness of Purgatory. Because I have no form in the human world, I took his. He remained the same as well. I watched him cry and pound on the mirror, because he instantly knew that I had deceived him. I smiled as several demonic hands wrapped in blackened skin grasped the poor man and dragged him away from the mirror. When I could no longer see him, I turned toward the filthy bathroom and ran my hands through my new soft human hair.

"Time to kill some humans." I said, and then left the bathroom.

Four, Six, and Three

 

 

 

 

Even before Rick put his hand on the doorknob, he knew something was wrong. The moment he placed his palm on the oddly warm brass, he became
certain
everything was wrong. He didn’t have enough foresight to turn and run, but even if he had been able to see the dark future, he knew destiny would never have allowed him the pleasure anyway.

He opened the door to his apartment and reached over to turn the light on. Before doing so, as he always did, he counted to six. Six was the magic number, and then he flicked the switch seven times to turn on the light. He believed that by counting and having a precise number of switch-flips, he might be able to avoid a terrible day. He used just write it off as one of his compulsive superstitions until they diagnosed him with an actual disorder. Despite that, he truly believed deep down to his core that he didn’t actually have a disorder, and that his rituals weighed heavily on the outcome of his decisions.

The light revealed his living room. It had modern design, mostly filled with furniture obtained from Ikea, so it had an obvious feel of minimalism, too.

He stepped through the door, and a soft shiver ran up his spine. It was the kind felt when alone in a room and a ghost has reached in and caressed the soul. The icy chill of death as it neared the body’s core. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and he closed the door.

Before entering the room, he pulled his shoes off. First, the right one, and then the left. One time he'd taken the left one off first and he slipped during his shower nearly killing himself. Ever since, he knew he had to pay particular attention to which one he put on and took off and in what order, always right first.

He crossed the living room, sneezed, and put his hands in his pockets to find a tissue. He was surprised to find paper in the front left, which was the prescription his doctor gave him. It wasn't strange that he had the note for medication; it was that he put it in his pocket at all. He kept his pockets clear of anything but tissues because they would inevitably lead him to a nightmare about his teeth falling out of his mouth. The one where the teeth seemed to crumble and
dissolve,
and the remaining holes in his gums would bleed for hours until his eventual death.

Damn it
, he thought.

When he neared the door to the kitchen, he saw a flash at the corner of his eye. He counted to thirteen—the unluckiest number—to ensure that if there was bad luck heading his way the use of the number would surely cancel it out. When he finished, he turned to his window, and looked through it. At the horizon, too far away to be dangerous, a bright flash began to rise from the ground. He closed his eyes and turned away as the light felt hot against his skin. When he felt the intensity finally wane, he opened his eyes to a large cloud in the distance. It raised from the earth like a fist reaching to the sky, no doubt someone's furious attack for his or her perceived indignations.

"Oh my God." he said, and as he turned toward his room to put his shoes on (right, then left), the door to his apartment exploded open. Splinters of wood flung through the air like tiny spears, and four men pushed their way into the small abode. They immediately grabbed him, one of them injecting him with some kind of fluid. A moment later, the world fell dark, much darker than it was already.

 

~

 

When he woke, he was slightly bleary and disoriented. He sat in a chair wearing a soft one-piece white jumpsuit. His arms and legs
had been strapped
to the chair with thick cuts of buckled leather.

He looked around, and a woman was sitting in front of him in a wheel chair. She wore no smile, and it looked like she hadn't in some time. Wrinkles of joy
had been replaced
by decades of pain. Behind those dark fissures was a young woman, probably no more than thirty-five, but her hair was as silver as the skin of a shark—and Rick wasn't sure he could tell that she was any different from the oceanic hunter, either.

"Rick." She said, smoothing out the microfiber blanket covering her likely atrophied legs. "Did you see it?"

Her face molded with genuine concern, a face he thought she wasn't capable of having. He counted to thirteen, and said, "I don't know what I saw."

"You have to tell us, Rick."

"Where am I?"

"Focus, Rick!" Her voice commanded him with a presence he couldn't deny. "Tell us what you saw? Tell us where it is!"

Rick tapped his left foot seven times and his right six times. He took a deep breath and told her what happened in his apartment. Immediately after, she pushed a small stick and moved her wheelchair to a metal desk. She leaned near it, pressed a small switch, and talked into a microphone.

"We got it, James. Tell them that the bomb he planned to set off will detonate on June 7 at 1300 hours on the north end of the city. I'll transmit the coordinates to you. I pray to God you get there on time."

Rick wasn’t sure to whom she talked, but was certain of one thing: the world was going to suffer. He knew that in exactly thirteen days from that moment, on June 8, a nasty virus would wipe the planet clean. It would spread fast, and the only way to stop it was to destroy the city and all of its infected along with it.

“You can’t! You can’t stop the bomb!” He said, but that was the last thing he remembered before a man appeared next to him and used a needle to force him to sleep.

The Life of Kameron Carpenter

 

 

 

 

The days turn to night, but I do not see it. The climate changes from hot to cold, but I do not feel it. The holidays come and go, but I do not celebrate them. The only thing I know is the blackness when the lights go out and the small room I'm in when the lights go on. I know only four walls, the bed, and the three square meals a day that someone pushes through the small rectangle on the door. The extent of my human interaction is the occasional glimpse at the hand that feeds me, but other than that, nothing.

When you have nothing but time to reflect on your life, you eventually realize that you made a mistake—or several in my case. Hindsight is the unfortunate ruler by which we all measure our regrets, and my regrets span miles. My prison is only one consequence for the actions I regret. Everything else is internal and seem numberless, which I would gladly switch with all the physical discomforts and pain in the world if only to live a moment longer without this turmoil.

There is no clock in my cell, but after months in confinement, I
know
when it is time for the lights to go out. Your body has a way of becoming a biological alarm for consistency. Every day, as if controlled by machine, the lights fade. Hours later, I don't know the exact timeframe because I make myself crazy counting past ninety minutes, the lights finally return. For now, they are on, but they'll go out soon, and that's my favorite time of the
day
.

Seconds pass, and then darkness. There's no click. No Ring. No anything. Lights just douse and leave me in this inky blackness. This is the time I spend imagining my memories. Even though they may be a mix of good ones that I enjoy and the bad ones I'd rather forget, they are more than anything I could ask for. I'm always afraid they'll take those away from me, too. Drug me until I can only think about this box, but for now I have a mental television that the loss of visual sensory allows me to enjoy.

I can't control which memories come to me, so I begin to think about my first day in college. I recall the warm September sun on my back as I entered the building, the smell of floor wax and fresh paint, the slight goose bumps I got from being excited. I see myself walking through the blue door, and actually feel what it was like to look upon all my fellow students for the first time. I remember the professor sitting at his desk playing with his cell phone.

My memory jumps ahead and I'm sitting in a circle on the floor. The professor told us about himself, and then asked the students, one by one, to tell everyone who they are. I only remember what Victoria said, because she would later become one of my regrets. When it got to me, I said, "My name is Kameron, and every day I play with purple and yellow bacteria."

At first, they were all confused by me, but I explained that I love science and that it was just something I studied. Most people thought it was strange, but not Victoria. She thought it was cool, which is how we came to know each other. That night we had our first date. It was the night everything went wrong. It wasn’t the first time things went wrong, it just happened to be the moment in my life things went very badly.

I open my eyes, or at least I think I do. I can't really tell because it is all the same kind of darkness. I blink a few times just to be sure, and then reach up to feel them open. The feeling of eyelashes against my fingertips is strangely sensual, and I immediately pull them away from my face. I do not like to feel things like that, because it takes me down a dark path that I cannot fully control.

I feel scared because I know that my memories this evening—or is it day because I cannot be certain—are going down the path of regret. I begin to think about her voice. Her laughter was musical, and she spoke wise words. I then hear her voice when tarnished with terror. I can't recall any specific words but I know they are the kind expressing her discomfort, fear, and even a little hate for me.

I suddenly hear the sound of shame and sadness, and when a tear rolls down my cheek, I realize I am the one making the noise. I wonder how I could be such a monster, but even as I ask the question, I can feel the tension in my pants. The stress of my shame presses hard against the fabric and pushes the elastic band away from my waist.

It is moments like these I hate myself the most.
People never understand how I feel on the inside. I don’t believe that to be an excuse, because I know they’re right in calling me a monster, but there's much more to it than that. Everything that I feel is an action that I cannot control. Even at this moment, I want to satiate my hunger, to feel good, but I resist. I resist as I do every time it comes to me these days.

I reach to the space between my pillow and mattress and feel around for a small triangle. The edge pokes my finger, and I grab it. I obviously can't see it, but I know what it looks like. It has a silver polished aluminum surface, and I imagine it as I turn it over in my fingers. It was once part of a dinner plate they gave me two days ago, but now it looks and feels like freedom.

As the warm blood drips down my hands, I lay upon the hard mattress. For the first time in a long time, I weep with happiness. Not because of the freedom that I may or may not find when my journey in this room concludes, but because I am avoiding my physical freedom. I should not be out in the world where I may find myself in the same place I was in that dorm room. I will never be able to live with the uncontrollable monster that hides deep inside me, and I truly believe that no one else should have to live with it. Just as a disease must be eradicated from this this planet, so must I.

The pain in my wrist feels good. Eventually, the blackness around me somehow becomes blacker and...