Consider My Enemies, For They Are Multiplied
Author’s Note: This is being uploaded early in the interest of celebrating All Hallow’s Eve. As such, what you are about to read is, most generously speaking, a second draft that will inevitably contain some (hopefully) minor errors and various passages yet to be properly wordsmithed. Those interested in the final version of this story will have to wait another week or two and, at that point, subscribe over at either Patreon or Ko-Fi in order to read it.
Consider My Enemies, For They Are Multiplied
1.
“…Consider my enemies, for they are multiplied, and have hated me with an unjust hatred. Keep thou my soul, and deliver me: I shall not be ashamed, for I have hoped in thee. The innocent and the upright have adhered to me: because I have waited on thee. Deliver Israel, O God, from all his tribulations.”
The man in the black cassock stopped before the hole dug nearly square into a grave no deeper than a few feet. Off to one side, the digger stood hunched in solemn attention next to the machine that carved the last place of rest into the earth, and a single chair stood behind the grave draped over in a black cloth. The young woman who followed the priest hastened to the chair, eyes cast downward, black from exhaustion and red with grief still as-yet not fully realized.
“Eternal rest, grant to him O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.”
The service was brief and the coffin only slightly larger than a shoe box. It was already in the ground when they had arrived, the funeral director who stood observing some discreet distance off had assured her of every detail having been attended to. The sum total of the minutiae for such a small service, Allison, guessed, would have had to have been almost nonexistent. She knew that this was a day she would remember for the rest of her life and one she would carry, on her own, forever. The same size hole that gaped open from the ground had been dug into the unwell flesh of her mind, and the same tiny body that lay soon to be covered over with earth would too be interred there in a minuscule chamber of memory.
“…And dear Lord, deal graciously with Allison in her grief. Surround her with your love that she might not be overwhelmed with her loss but be confident in your goodness and faithfulness. Amen.”
With these words, the priest finished the ceremony, gave benediction, and stepped away from the hole. Allison stood up as he approached and he grasped her hand with seasoned tenderness, enunciated what kind words he could muster from the long archives of his ministry, and, as he turned away, suspecting that she would be one more distant member of the baptized who, having never seen her before the events of this funeral, would again disperse as a drop into the great chaotic sea of disbelief. She could see the brief microsecond of this thought flicker across his eyes as he removed his hand from hers and turned to leave. The thought left her there by the grave, immensely tired, on one hand, relieved, in another, and in still another sense, filled with overwhelming loss and dread. Scooping up a handful of dirt, she dropped it onto the little box. She turned to leave, but the box was there also already, in her mind. A grave she would carry inside.
She spoke quickly and quietly to the director. The woman smiled some painfully attendant smile made with every obvious indication of charitable kindness and sympathy, but Allison couldn’t stomach the woman’s gaze and nodded and shook her head at the proper intervals and, eyes still dry, left to return to her car and her apartment as she left her son, her only son, her young grayed and decaying son here in a place where he didn’t belong. And she would leave him here because this was where he was going to stay.
*
She returned to her apartment as the sun began its decent down from its midday zenith. Her phone, still silenced, alerted her to a missed therapist’s appointment from that morning. It also flashed a new text from Scott, who had apparently landed now in Milan for the second leg of his business trip. He’d left two weeks ago and was due to be back in about eight more days.
The days passed. She returned to work. She told her therapist things were going fine and that she was finally feeling better. The woman scheduled her appointments further out. Her medications through her doctor remained unchanged. Inside, interiorly, that little box underneath in the disturbed soil of her mind lay heavily like something filled with molten lead or tungsten, weighing down the subterranean earth of her unconscious, seeping something black into the soil as its contents decomposed.
As a child, she had found a garden in her dreams that she did her best, as her early doctors and therapists had recommended, to keep it well-tended and pruned; to weed it regularly with good mental habits and to maintain her will in the environment that threatened always to overtake it. But now that garden held a grave beneath it, and as it happened, became a cemetery to which she returned every night not to mourn but to tend and to carry on as if nothing had ever happened. As the days passed, however, her garden seemed trespassed, occupied, as if there were creatures in it that were just out of sight every time she entered. And every time she returned, it was more disheveled, more out of place, there was more work to be done and she never seemed to have the time or energy to do it all.
When Scott had returned from his trip, she hugged him and kissed him and she drowned the increasing ache in her mind with his body in the dark. He didn’t know anything. When she looked at him, she placed something in the narrow vacuum between her eyes and her mind: a lens or some pane of glass, a stand-in she could observe and interact with that resembled Scott in some general way but filtered out all authentic identifiers which might cause her to come clean, to break.
This went on for months.
“Allison.” Cars passed by the plate glass window. Their headlights sprinkled through lazy rain that coated the autumn evening in a slick chill darkness that pressed against the window.
“We haven’t gone out like this in a little while, have we?” Juice trailed out of the line she carved through her steak. “I’m glad the project went well.”
“Allison,” Scott said again. “I noticed that your therapy sessions are spreading out more. From the calendar in your apartment. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“I thought we were celebrating your project tonight?”
“We are,” he said. His hand kept brushing the small dimple over the pocket beneath the corduroy of his sport coat. “It’s just, with your condition and all. The new meds must be working well.”
The filter in her mind flickered for a moment and nearly let through a genuine image of the man, but she looked away from him and steeled herself with another morsel of food before replying. A dash of rain hit the window. “They’re okay,” she said. “I don’t really want to talk about any of that tonight, though. If that’s alright with you.”
“Of course.” He seemed to change the topic of conversation with a deliberate ease. He was being careful around her, again. Maybe he had something on his mind he couldn’t get to, or something had aroused his suspicion about her behavior. But she hadn’t acted much differently, had she? She listened to him mention something about the food overseas and his desire to bring her with him on his next trip abroad, but interiorly, she felt something in her mind change, as if there were footsteps treading through flowerbeds, hoes being sunk into soil freshly laid just an evening prior, clippers pressed with threatening intent against fine saplings.
“Allison.” She gave a start. “Are you feeling alright?”
“Yes.” She put her fork down and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Yes, I’m fine. Sorry. I guess it’s just been a long day.”
Scott’s hand retreated from the unconscious dimple beneath his corduroy and moved to a gentle hold over hers. She returned the gesture by interlacing her fingers and slowly circling her thumb around the tip of his, moving her gaze up his arm to his eyes and offering him a different gaze.
“I don’t mind if it gets longer, though,” she said. She watched him steel himself.
That night, exhausted, she saw the footprints and tracks through the garden. It was almost imperceptible: a mislaid leaf here, a hint of indentation there. Little creatures had to have been through it, disturbing the place, creating more chaos.
Sleep barely came. A large weather front began a slow traverse, and on it rode thunderheads and a long soak. Thick cloud cover obscured the morning light and filtered Allison’s commute to work into a grey haze that reflected her interior life. The morning turned to noon and turned further to mid-afternoon through a disgruntled shuffle from meeting to meeting, task to task. Perhaps these served some greater purpose to the corporate entity, but to Allison, the value of each defied scrutiny.
“Team lead wanted the dev team’s reports, but I’m not sure where any of those are for this project. Did you handle all of that last week?” Vanessa’s bracelets clanked together when she stopped at Allison’s desk. Allison paused before responding.
“I think I did. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” Allison could sense the faintest hint of patchouli from the other woman’s hair as she leaned a little closer, taking a hint to observe Allison more closely. “You look exhausted.”
“I just haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Scott keeping you up that much, huh?”
“Nothing like that.” Allison had looked away.
“How long have we known each other, Allison?”
“Come on.”
She straightened, having decided, in her usual fashion, everything herself. “Let’s get drinks tonight,” she said. Someone passed behind her carrying something awkward, muttering a dim apology for navigating the walkway. “It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? The bar by my place that has that flan you like. You look like you need a break.”
Allison watched the text cursor blink against her screen. “I don’t know.” She could feel something in her mind, again, traversing, interfering, making some deeper mess. It worried her, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to properly check on it until after work, after everything. On the other hand, isolation, as her therapists frequently reminded her, solved nothing. “Alright. But I don’t want to be out for too late.”
Five hours later, Allison sat deep in a booth assaulted on all sides by the corny paraphernalia of mid-century advertising and cardboarded nostalgia. Vanessa had ordered drinks for them before the blonde had arrived. Now she listened as Vanessa filled the space between them with idle complaints about the last man she’d brought home and his apparent aversion to astrology and her particular brand of new age esoterica.
“He just said it was all weird but I could tell he thought it was disgusting. It happens, though. He wasn’t that great, anyway.” She pulled her beer off the table while they waited for the appetizer to arrive and took a long swig. “You and Scott still doing okay? Managing?”
Allison hadn’t told her about the miscarriage. She hadn’t told anyone.
“Yeah, we’re doing well.”
“Has he proposed yet?”
“Don’t, hey.” She averted her eyes by focusing on the bubbles on the surface of her own drink. A polite sip followed. Vanessa watched her carefully and, perhaps in a gesture of sympathetic nervousness, slid her large bracelet rings around her forearm. She continued. “I can’t blame him, given everything. How I am.”
“Scott seems like a good guy. He has to see past all of that. But anyway,” Vanessa took another drink before she finished, “this exhaustion. You alright?”
“Not great, but okay. Managing.” Interiorly, she sat down by the patch of disturbed earth. There were marks in the ground, and footprints, this time discernible, bordering its edges.
“New meds?”
“No. Just a lot on my mind. Distracted. I have a practice that helps, but. I don’t know. It’s gotten more difficult.”
“Meditation probably helps.”
“Something like that,” Allison said. Her beer’s cold sparkle glittered under the table’s light. “I don’t know the name of the practice. You imagine a space you can relax in and you make a mental habit of checking that everything is where it should be. And you clean it up. When I was twelve, the therapists taught me this method so I could calm down and manage my condition.”
Vanessa considered her with rapt attention. “Fascinating. You never mentioned this before.”
“It could be any place. A house, a forest, a beach. Just someplace you don’t have to spend much time imagining in your head.” Allison went quiet when the waitress returned with their appetizer and plates.
“This requires quite the imagination,” Vanessa said.
“Well, yes. It was designed for people with certain mental conditions that have, I don’t know, overactive imaginations, I guess. It helps direct that so it doesn’t impede management or recovery.”
Vanessa sipped at her drink and reclined. “There are esoteric practices that operate in a similar way.” A large white truck drove past the window and flashed a painful glare of setting sunlight across the table. Allison winced but it didn’t seem to have bothered Vanessa, who at that moment looked up from her beer with a small smile. “Have you ever heard of thought forms?”
She shook her head. “Is that something you mentioned to me back in your Wiccan phase?”
“It wasn’t a phase, it was an evolution.” She gave Allison a smirk carved across a well-practiced scowl. Then her gaze softened and she took another sip of her beer. “Tibetan Buddhists had something they called a tulpa, which is sort of like a fairy or an elf sent by their Buddhas to help us out. Involved a lot of deep, psychological meditation and in theory, at least, the result was something like a spiritual guide. A helpful egregore, or something.”
“Do you believe that?”
Vanessa smiled and shrugged. “Depends on who’s asking and how much I’ve had to drink. Why, are you in need of spiritual direction? My office is always open. At least in the evenings.”
Allison finished her beer and picked at the food in front of her, unable or unwilling to reconcile the extension of Vanessa’s camaraderie with the sunken grave in her mind. She watched the girl twirl her bracelets as the light outside turned from extinguishing reds to artificial blue-white glare, her dark braids and ethnic patterns across thin textiles a modern contrast to her own presence opposite her in the booth. Allison went silent as she recalled their time together as dorm mates.
Vanessa caught her gaze and smirked, looking down at her blouse. “You like the top? I think you could pull it off, but it would make some people mad. Appropriation and all that. I’ll send you the link.”
*
Another two rounds of beers later, the pair emerged from the restaurant in time for the storm to announce itself overhead. The air weighed thick around them between gusts and the damp smell of an impending torrent. Allison felt her friend’s eyes on her as she shivered, her own gaze directed too far inward and around. Her head hurt.
“Why did you ask,” she started to say, but stopped and then finally asked, “why did you ask if Scott had proposed yet?”
The question seemed to take Vanessa by surprise. “I don’t know. You two have been together long enough, and you both seemed like it’s just inevitable, right?”
Allison didn’t understand. The ache in her head began to get stronger. Its intensity seemed inhibited some by the evening’s alcohol, but to the same degree it amplified her disorientation. Images of the garden now came into focus more vivid and real than the sight of Vanessa before her on the sidewalk. Passing cars and the pedestrians pushing around the pair of them sat at the far end of a narrow tunnel, a vision beamed to her from her real location: that dark and now overgrown patch of lawn and bed in a forbidden wilderness. She blinked from the scene in front of the bar and moved to check on the grave site. Something had been digging there. A predator, maybe. But the gashes in the earth were more deliberate than the frenzied curiosity of a hungry animal. They were pushed into the ground and then left like scabs over old wounds. The footprints around it had deepened. The trespassers were no longer interested in concealing their activities. She pulled back to observe the rest of her garden only to find that it had not only been overgrown but indeed subtly vandalized.
“Are you alright? You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine, just a bit light-headed. Sorry for asking something weird.” She offered a weak smile and the feeling subsided, only for it to be replaced by greater pain in her head. “Just got a headache, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, maybe we shouldn’t have drank.” The girl’s bracelets rattled as she pulled a sweater around herself. But Allison shook her head.
“No, it’s probably the storm,” she said. “Barometric pressure. I should have thought about that before I came over here. I’m sorry.” The pain was getting worse. “I should probably head home in case this gets to be too much.”
“Let me walk you to the station,” Vanessa said. “It’s not far. You’re only a few stops away, aren’t you?”
“I’ll be fine.” She pulled her sweater back on and stretched her hamstrings where her legs had stiffened in the booth. “You live pretty close. If the storm opens up, better for just one of us to get caught in it than both.”
Had she realized the quickness and severity with which the pain would accost her, Allison might have instead accepted the girl’s offer to walk her at least to the station. The rain turned to sleet, and the sleet to frozen embers when caught in the bleak attack of lights. Vision gave way to black-marked uncertainty; Allison’s cold limbs feeling along railings, bracing against the metal pipe of a seat’s armrest. The metro lurched and lulled. Disorientation matured into nausea. Blindness blossomed into a pain brighter and more brilliant than the florescent strobe caught reflected in her sweat.
In moments like these, Allison was not sitting on a metro, participating, active, and only dimly aware. She was in her garden. The world lay forbidden by a tight alley of pain down at the far end of a tunnel. Here, the pain was just as vibrant, just as antagonistic, but here experience lay closer to being and somehow more vivid. She hurried to the grave. Each pulse of her heart throbbed violently against her mind, against the ground beneath her feet, digging, pressing into it. But the paths twined around trees she hadn’t planted, beds of herbs overtaken by ivy, wisteria gnarled across sapling and shrub to blot out a black sky. Allison’s ankle caught a stray root that crossed the path. She couldn’t find it. The grave. Her own garden conspired to obscure this last place of solitude.
Through the tunnel of her agony, she witnessed herself in motion again. Off the train, off the platform, across an urban torrent of reflected light that scoured angrily into a gaping storm drain. She cut through the park next to her building, drenched, freezing, her knuckles white against a bench there obscured by a dead lamp. Her legs had given out. Alone in the park, she turned away, the black splitting into black-red, she searched again. What shovel or plow sank into the grave now chiseled at the inside of her skull as if scraping against the top of a coffin. It was too late.
She heard it at the same time the world in the tunnel flashed open. The whole sky blinked illuminate and the park exploded into white-blue and then black again in urban gloom. Air around her roared. At last, she had reached the clearing: disheveled and unkempt, ruined, the place of the grave attacked and its violator now long gone. She could feel her head splitting open, splitting apart, the black-red cracks across the sky of her garden themselves tearing across her head with every throb of her blood. Like a cracking shell, her head gestated this pain, and now some greater pain emerged.
Then she felt it. Something indeed had been given form. These had been birth pangs, labor. The crevice wrenched open along the ridge of bones in her skull had been a cesarean section and now, as the pain subsided, there on the bench she could feel behind her the result of the mental procedure. The grave before her gaped open again now now this time empty, the entrant in its care both stolen and disabused of its containment.
2.
Allison remembered walking home. She remembered keeping her eyes ahead. She remembered the soft, unassuming footsteps behind her. She remembered the ascent to her apartment, the echo in the stairwell, but worst of all, she remembered the way her hair stood up on end, the press of a gaze against back her with a deliberateness heavier than a normal man’s glare.
She remembered stepping into her apartment and hearing the door shut behind her. And she remembered the familiar gap between these two actions taking a half-second longer than usual to complete. And she remembered hearing the Creature step into the space behind her. Only when she was out of the public eye, here in her lonely apartment, uncluttered by the stares of unprying eyes did she resolve herself, steady her nerves, and turn to look at the thing that emerged from her head. The Creature.
Scott stood in the antechamber. Tall, dark hair. Fit. Pale. Too pale. Paler than Scott. And still. The Creature looked as if blood did not pulse through its veins, and it stood still enough to be a mannequin or a household appliance. Uncanny enough to be an animatron or puppet. But when, without thinking, her hand drew towards the cords of muscle in his forearms and her fingertips brushed their length, the supple flesh yielded with unmistakable and familiar warmth. This only deepened her revulsion and caused her to recoil with greater horror. Finally she found words to address the Creature with.
“Why did you come here?”
That wasn’t what she’d intended to say. She’d meant to ask what it was, what was happening, if she was hallucinating: all questions she intuitively knew the answer to, however incapable she might have been in expressing them.
The creature’s face hadn’t moved. “You brought me here. You took me with you.”
“But you followed me.”
A malice moved behind the blank expression, churning, increasing in quiet violence. Its posture had shifted, poised as if ready to strike. And yet it remained still. A constant stillness wrapped in venom.
“I don’t know you. I don’t know what you are.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I didn’t bring you anywhere.”
“You brought me here,” it said again.
Her eyes were wet. “I didn’t bring you anywhere,” she said. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything.”
It didn’t respond. Under the cold light of the apartment’s antechamber its skin glowed paler, slick with rain. She closed her eyes and slumped against a wall and turned away from it. Echoes of the evening’s agony still pulsed in her head. Between the fear and the pain, her nausea ebbed with an apparent intent to return. Inside, still crouched in anguish before the empty grave.
She left it in the vestibule where it remained. She took a shower. She steeled herself into numbness. She dressed in her nightclothes and when she stepped back into the hallway the Creature watched her with the same threat glimpsed under its posture coiled there like a spring. Feeling like a thief or criminal within her own home, she slunk by it into her bedroom, closed the door, put a chair against the doorknob, and lay down in bed.
No normal person would go to sleep in this situation. That’s what occurred to her as she lay down. She should report this. Call somebody. Vanessa, maybe. Her mom. She should do something. She should sleep. She was exhausted. She closed her eyes, visualizing again the empty grave but again she couldn’t find it. Instead, briar had taken over a bed of roses and stretched across a pathway she barely recognized. Footprints damp with wet mud and dirt cluttered around. There were things here, little creatures just out of sight, obscured by the black curtain of the garden’s eternal evening gloom. The thorns scraped her skin.
Sleep would not come. Not a sound emerged from the space beyond the closed door of her bedroom. The building’s HVAC system hummed to life for a while and then passed back into silence. For a moment, Allison considered whether the Creature was real, if her ordeal in the park had been part of her imagination, brought on by the migraine and the stress and the fatigue.
She rubbed the ridge of her skull where the pain had been the worst. As expected, no evidence existed that her head had split apart. Of course it hadn’t. There had been no blood on the bench. Her brains didn’t leak out. It felt like all of that had happened or could have happened, or at least what she imagined that probably felt like to those unfortunates who suffered such violent ends. But she was just a weakling who couldn’t deal with pain.
Surely. There was no Creature. It never happened. It didn’t exist. It was a one-off hallucination, a one-off experience. She had imagined it, maybe to justify either her pain or her weakness or perhaps what still remained of her grief and anguish, her confusion, frustration.
Soft footsteps passed in front of her bedroom door and moved into the living room. They were identical in soft cadence to Scott’s gait whenever he stayed the night in her apartment and moved around after she had gone to bed, quietly stepping throughout the rooms in an effort not to wake her. This collision of present and memory made her blood chill to throbbing ice. She hadn’t imagined it. It wasn’t any sort of bizarre hallucination. The Creature was still in her apartment. It had moved to her living room. It hadn’t sat down.
*
“It’s real,” she said. Her hand gripped Vanessa’s arm only with desperation. “It’s real. What you said about thought forms. I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. It’s real.”
Vanessa had frozen when Allison reached out and stood gazing blankly at her with some inscrutable expression. She left the house in the morning. The Creature had greeted her, a naked and stark error in the dim predawn light, but Allison refused to acknowledge it and had left her apartment with only barely enough of a pause to put shoes on her feet. She had wanted to call Scott, to go to his place, to cry in his arms while he fixed everything, but every time she recalled Scott, the Creature stood in his place. By the time she had made it to the metro, she was already headed toward Vanessa’s apartment building, ashamed and aware only then that she had left her own without a phone.
Gradually, Allison understood her friend’s shocked expression to be a brief one of panic. She released Vanessa’s arm and recoiled, her presence ill-fitting, herself dragged open. She pulled herself away. “Sorry,” she said. It was all too sudden. She turned to leave but Vanessa this time lurched to catch her.
“Allison,” she said, “Allison, wait. You’re still in your pajamas. What’s going on?”
Cold broken sweat already slid down her arms. “Sorry,” she said again.
“We need to get you home. You look awful. Do you have a fever? Let me feel your head.”
“No, I’m—I’m sorry, I need to go. Forget about all this.” Vanessa released her but her expression continued to shift as if into recollection.
“What did you mean, thought forms?”
Allison ducked to the side of the building, imagining stares never leveled at her by the morning pedestrians too absorbed in their own business to look at her. Vanessa followed her.
“It’s real. It’s in my apartment at home. I don’t know what it is, but. But. I don’t even know, Vanessa. I need it gone.”
“Slow down, wait.” Vanessa moved closer to her and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder as an attempt to calm her nerves. “Tulpas aren’t real. That’s impossible. Thought-forms aren’t like, they’re not real. Allison, that’s all just voodoo stuff, nobody believes in it except loonies like me and some monks in Tibet.” She seemed to notice the panic gape behind Allison’s eyes and then quickly looked around. “Let’s get you back home. Take a sick day today. Drink some herbal tea and relax for a bit. It’s just the stress getting to you.”
Allison couldn’t believe her ears. “I don’t want to go back home, Vanessa. That’s where it is. I don’t want to be around that thing.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“Allison, that’s not fair.”
“I know how it sounds, I really do,” Allison said. “I know things don’t just suddenly come out of your head like this. Believe me, I think I’m crazy, too. I know I am, I know all that. I know it’s all, I know the, the.” She stopped, held her head, felt the creatures leaving tracks again through her mind, almost thought she heard the things whisper or merely inclinated some collective disposition. She shook her head. “This is something else, Vanessa. I want to believe I’m just seeing things or just hallucinating but it’s real, I’ve touched it, it talked to me, it’s unnatural. I’m terrified.”
“Let’s calm down for a second.” Vanessa’s hands cradled the sides of her arms with the grim double edge of reassurance and uneasiness. “I’ll come with you, we’ll go through your apartment together. Maybe it’ll be gone. Did you call the police?”
“Of course I didn’t call the police.”
“That’s what you should have done first—”
“This isn’t just some home intruder, Vanessa. It’s a monster.” Allison lowered her voice. “Ask me how I know. Go ahead. Ask me how I know. It’s Scott’s doppelganger. It looks exactly like him. Every single part of him. Every single part.”
Vanessa blanched. She gently pushed Allison toward the street. “That’s not possible.” Her steps were hurried. “Are you sure it isn’t just Scott?”
“That makes even less sense!”
“Maybe he’s just playing a prank.”
“Scott would never do that.” Allison dried her eyes against her sleeve as they walked.
Vanessa’s breathing had increased pace as their walk quickened. “If it’s really just a thought form then it should go away when you stop thinking about it,” she said.
“You think I’m hallucinating.”
“No, hallucinations are totally different. You know that.” A shadow of fright passed across her features with the passing shade of street foliage. “People don’t hallucinate that way.”
“But you think I’m crazy.”
“Come on.”
Vanessa’s phone went off. She stopped in mid-stide to check who it was and quickly stashed it back in her purse after silencing it. But she wasn’t fast enough. Allison had seen the name on the screen.
“No.” Allison stood frozen to the sidewalk. The world had darkened again. Now there were not just hooks and trowels and claws digging into her mind but searing pokers next to frozen picks. Her garden shook with a breeze that carried with it a chorus of laughter. She saw Vanessa’s expression contort.
“No, Allison. It’s nothing like what you think.” The girl faltered. “I just didn’t want to upset you. He wanted to talk to me—about you.”
“Of course he did—I can’t believe this. Everyone. It’s always like this.”
“Allison!”
She’d broken off and fled across the street against a red light. A bus horn tore past her as she sprinted, Vanessa stood caught at the far curb like a passenger having just missed the last boat. She called her name again but the wind picked up and Allison ignored it, sprinting to her apartment.
It was just paranoia. She knew it was just manic paranoia. It was diagnosed. She had medication. Maybe it finally stopped working. She knew all of this and calmly reasoned these things in a distant corner of her garden where, overwhelmed, she focused on pulling a few weeds out of a bed that now only seemed to house wilting dandelions. Indistinct whispers flittered in where deep tracks had been torn through the trail to get here. The paranoia was just an excuse. All of it was just an excuse.
The walls shuddered as she slammed the door to her apartment shut. The Creature stood staring at a television that hadn’t been turned on. Almost imperceptible wrinkles around its neck had grown just a little deeper, casting that shade of pale into deeper grey. The world again played like a film witnessed through the far end of a tunnel. She watched herself push it down, straddle it, kiss it, kiss it through tears. She watched it get hit, first with her fist and then her open palm, hit in the shoulder, the face, the gut. She watched herself pull back and, laying there in a blackened patch of a darkened rose bushes surrounded by greenbriar, she watched herself pull at her clothing as if flaying herself alive.
“What’s wrong?” It asked.
She wiped her eyes with her pale arm and breathed, pinioned. “Nothing,” she said.
The evil consummation that followed seemed to her the only alternative to the horrible image that played and replayed itself in her mind: herself, her body, her mind, pierced and mangled, ripped to pieces and violated in that very garden, opened up and placed inside a grave thrice larger than the one there now beside her. She didn’t watch anymore. Her entire attention had turned then to the grave. That little patch of sullen earth called, yearned, ached for her. At the bottom of that hole lay a place of rest that resolved all contradiction.
The Creature still upright on the couch, unmoved, still meeting her gaze. It was a statue, worse perhaps. An effigy. Its wrinkled skin greyed a bit more. What evil presence required some evil rectification.
She brought the Creature to the bathroom and lay it down in the tub as she descended into the hole. The trespassers in her garden were leering at her, just out of sight. It didn’t lift a finger when she pressed the cold edge of the blade against its throat, pressed it there as hard as she could, pressed it as she sobbed, and then with a quick jerk tore across the white stretch of flesh. An eruption of blood nearly caught her eyes before, with a horrible wheeze and gasp, the Creature twitched. Blood flushed in rivers down the front of its pale body. In moments it pooled between its legs.
She wiped her brow. She wiped her eyes. There was no distinguishing between tears and blood, much less sweat. Everything was wet, hot and cold. Hot that turned cold. She wiped again, cold sweat smearing more across her brow with the sleeve of her shirt, realizing only then that she had put on one that Scott had left in her apartment. It was stained. Her forehead still felt wet, and when she wiped it again, she realized that she had smeared the Creature’s blood all over her face every time she had thought she was just wiping her brow, parting her hair, pulling a lock of it behind her ear, wiping her eyes. She looked in the bathroom mirror, gripping the sink edge with her free hand to steady her flipping stomach. A terrible crimson monster gazed back, white eyes wide and manic. The world again began to darken. Was she in the grave or standing at her bathroom sink?
She set the knife on the side of the sink and sunk herself down to the floor and lay down. Cold tiles pressed frozen against hot flesh. The slippery floor spun even as she stilled herself prone. Then darkness came.
3.
She was with them now. They had revealed themselves. The trespassers. Who or what they were, she didn’t know, only that they were there and that she was among them. They could always see her, but now she could see them, too. Their movements and mechanisms. Their mania. And they hated her. And they wanted her to suffer. Migraine creatures. Mania creatures. The creatures who vandalized her only place of rest, who planted the wrong things, who pruned violently and trod with reckless abandon. She had killed one of them, hadn’t she? Wasn’t that what that was all about?
No. Their mania continued uninterrupted and yet some obvious sense of their chaos made it clear: the Creature was not one of theirs. One had a shovel in the ground. Another a hoe. A spade. Clippers and an edger. Shears. A limb saw. They tended her garden with deliberate movements, handing tools back and forth, always looking back at her when they carved something, cut something, ripped. Tending, pruning. But the ground was alive, the plants alive, and they tore at all of it. Where plow wrenched deep into feverish soil, black foul-smelling fluid rushed upwards out of the wound. Where clippers cinched around a limb, blood pulsed out of the stump. The plants all throbbed, and those tasked with their assault grasped their stems luridly before ripping them out or shearing them flat. Every act against this place by these horrible creatures sent into Allison another spasm of pain.
At some point in the night, she woke up and dragged herself to her bed and lay down again, tormented by pain again and the creatures naked before her mind’s eye again. Dangerous thoughts churned and bubbled, leaking up hot where the creatures exposed the bleeding ground beneath. This paralysis slid into troubled unconsciousness without apparent distinction. Dreams turned to wakeful agony which turned again to nearly-lucid nightmares. Whenever she looked down at her arms, the little creatures painted long red slits into the pale flesh of her wrists that blinking made disappear.
Hours turned to a day. A day to two days. Two days slid into a week. From her position in the grave, she watched herself call out from work citing a medical emergency. She watched herself tormented by pain she felt too in that hole in the garden, watched herself too when the pain eventually subsided after a day or two. What came after the pain was worse. Confusion, disorientation. The sun never seemed to be up, but when it was, the light was a force that burned and blinded. The more vividly things were cast in light, the more she saw their edges, their definitions, sharp outlines straight and thin enough to cut; when she moved about her apartment in daylight, it seemed transformed into a maze of blades. Only when the light was darker were the lines less sharp.
The Creature in the bathroom hadn’t moved. It didn’t rot or decay. It didn’t smell. Its black blood had long since drained, and where it had spattered during the incident had faded to thick stains. Eyes, once rimmed with quiet malevolence, now sat dark in a skull covered in pale skin turning grey, more wrinkled, thinning into translucence. It seemed as though it had shrunk just a little bit, leaving less volume for that skin to enclose; wrinkles bunched up around its neck and under its face. When she entered the bathroom, she avoided looking at it.
As the days passed, she found it increasingly difficult to look at anything, to see anything, to do anything. Now that the creatures in her mind were exposed and tearing apart her sanctuary, they pushed themselves into every place they could fit. Sometimes, while she observed her life from the grave, she thought she saw them there, too, skittering around corners at the edge of vision, whispering things from behind doors, inclining her toward more paranoid ideas. And behind it all an empty glee, a maliciousness, and behind that, she sensed during the brief moments they allowed her some mild quietness in her mind, an extraordinarily deep and otherworldly despair.
She didn’t know the hour nor the day, but the dim and indistinct morbidity of that apartment rapped into sharp focus after all this had started. A knock. She didn’t respond, paralyzed by the sound, as if caught out in the open while trying to remain hidden. The knock came again, unthreatening yet penetrative, and the thought occurred to her that the owner of this knock brought with it one last chance.
Scott stood in front of her door. Real Scott. He leaned against her door frame with one hand outstretched, looming.
“I knew it,” he said.
“It’s—this is my apartment,” she said. She did her best to mask her nervousness, her fear. She couldn’t hide it from what was in her mind, though. She knew it didn’t work. Standing up from the grave to get a better look, she thought of the Creature behind her in the tub. The fact she hadn’t bathed in days. And all of a sudden, “Oh no, I’m so sorry, I’m—I know how this looks—”
“Allison, relax. It’ll be alright.”
“I’m covered in blood, Scott!”
“That’s just sweat.” He moved to comfort her but immediately ceased, recollecting old episodes. “It’s just sweat. Here, get some clothes on. Let’s get some fresh air.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then a shower, maybe.”
“I can’t do that. I can’t.”
“Can I come in?”
“No!”
She closed her eyes. The grave seemed deep enough now that she’d have trouble getting out. All around her, above ground, she heard the sounds of the trespassers’ violence and laughter. Then she took a deep breath.
“I’m trying. Really. I know it’s all… it’s… I know. I know, I know.”
It was late afternoon then and cold, but he seemed to warm the air between the two just by standing there. “I called. Vanessa called. You blocked our numbers. Vanessa came to check on you but said you didn’t answer the door. We even made a wellness check, but they said you were fine. Do you remember police coming to your door?” She didn’t remember anything. Perhaps it had happened when she hadn’t been watching. “They said you were fine, but a little tired. You turned them away after a few minutes.”
She wanted to close the door. She wanted to hide. Everyone in her garden wanted her to do that, too, to retreat back into the hole there as they continued to dismantle the place so that this person that played her the apartment could go back inside and live with the corpse of that monster in her bathroom. Keep everything simple. Immediate. An existence totally erased and hidden away, until she just faded away, ceased to be.
“We shouldn’t see each other anymore.”
“That’s the condition talking.”
“I know. I told you, I know. I’m sorry.”
“How about I wait here and you get some heavier clothes on and we’ll take a short walk. Get some food downstairs. Relax.”
She pulled back from the door frame. “There’s so much I want to tell you.”
“There’s plenty of time for that, Allison. Let’s just get some fresh air.”
A minute later she walked with him at some distance, one foot still planted in the grave while the other tentatively pressed against grass claimed by the trespassers. They regarded her with silent animosity.
Our son died, she wanted to say. Maybe I killed him, by some accident, she wanted to say. You didn’t even notice. I hate you. That’s what she wanted to say, too, but she knew she loved him. She knew that what she hated was the thing walking next to her. No, the thing that stood there a week ago. The greying thing with too many wrinkles, the sick thing. The deceased. She hated the grave and she especially hated the garden in her mind that a therapist had architected in some self-interested effort to make her sane. She hated the terrible, impossible loneliness of that garden almost as much as she hated the trespassers that had kept her company in it all week. Even if all this now had just been her condition, her instability, her weakness that might just as quickly reverse back into normalcy, even if this was just an episode, the trespassers, she knew, intended nothing for her but total and absolute harm.
“When you’re quiet, I’m always in for it,” he said, breaking the lapse that had started as soon as they left her apartment door.
“Are you here because,” she said, but stopped. One of the trespassers wrapped a pair of pruners around the branch of one of her favorite trees, threatening it. She knew what it was trying to do. Her words caught in her throat as it blocked her speech, attempting to get her to say something she didn’t mean, or even just to more thoroughly confuse her. “Do you… regret…” She watched from the grave with horror as she stumbled through a disgusting combination of weakness and manipulation, emotional blackmail, a contortion of evil emotions that she seemed on the brink of pouring into the only man she’d ever loved.
“What kind of food are you in the mood for?” Then he scowled into a short gust of wind and shook his head. “Wait, I should know better than to ask my girlfriend what she feels like eating.”
He must have known what was about to happen. Sensed it, somehow.
“I know,” he said. “We’ll get something from that food truck in the lot on the corner. It’s chilly out, anyway.”
She watched him look away, over at the buildings on the far side of the street. Domestic scenes of young couples and families lurked behind their dark unassuming facades, locked behind urban doors, tucked away, hidden. Then he turned back to her.
“Vanessa mentioned you were having a bad go of it on Friday. Met her outside her apartment and said something about a monster.”
Several more trespassers joined the one holding the tree hostage. One held a saw, another an ax. Their instruments glided along the bark with obvious threat.
“I’m, I think, I know,” she said. “I should apologize to her for that.”
“She understands. Just buy her coffee or take her out to dinner next time you see her.” With his hands in his pockets, she could see him toying with something. “Did she ever get herself a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“I’m not surprised. Here we are. I can order for you, if you’d like.”
She looked at the food truck and her stomach seemed to growl under another gust of wind. “Just something light.”
They ate on a bench near a vacant dog park and he mentioned how much he liked the color of the leaves this time of year. He talked a little about work, about the next trip they’d scheduled him for, his hope that she would go with him and could use some time off to extend it to sight-see. He talked a little more and Allison heard more the sound and cadence of his voice than the content of his words. The garden lightened a little, the tunnel drew closer, the trespassers had ceased their violence and stood silent around her, observing, hating, perhaps waiting, but she focused instead on the baritone melody of Scott’s one-sided conversation instead of the mire around herself.
“Do you regret being with me?” She hadn’t meant to say it. It had just slipped out. Her heart dropped into her stomach. She looked up through the tunnel again and found the world retreating away, getting increasingly harder to scrutinize. But she saw him pause before responding, his hand again brushing against the small box-shaped dimple in his pocket. She cut him off, pulse quickening, before he had a chance to respond. “What’s that?”
“Something for another time,” he said quickly. One of the trespassers began to laugh. Then they all laughed. Scott’s gaze returned to hers, a seriousness under it, but she knew she’d be unable to hear anything that he was about to say. The trespassers were too loud. Rough, evil laughter. Overpowering laughter. Maliciousness echoing through a great emptiness, a great despair. She watched Scott’s mouth begin to move when suddenly the trespassers stopped laughing and froze in palpable fear.
Bells. Scott had stopped, too. Bells were coming toward the pair. Bells and chant rounded a far corner and began up the street they sat alongside. A procession of people: children throwing rose petals with haphazard grace, a line of teenagers hoisting religious imagery draped in purple regalia up above their heads on brass poles. Then came a young priest holding the monstrance up, flanked on all corners by pole-bearers carrying the canopy. Carried up behind them, a choir of chant: men and women, a whole parish, singing Latin hymn while children marched at their sides, some solemnly, others with curious gazes taking in the common, familiar neighborhood as it transformed beneath the indelible presence of the God-Man out for a walk.
Scott stood from his seat and nodded with his head. “A procession. I didn’t know.”
Allison had followed his gaze and stood by his side. As the procession approached, he dropped down to both knees and crossed himself, remaining there until it passed. Allison repeated the motion but with less enthusiasm, bones hardening against the cold ground.
“Fitting,” he said only loud enough for her to hear. “It’s All Souls Day. A good day for this.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. Halloween was a couple days ago.”
Incense writhed and coiled through the air in striking plumes.
“All this time, I didn’t know you were Catholic.”
“I haven’t gone to Church since my parents divorced. Back when I was a kid.”
She didn’t have anything to say to that.
Her mind had quieted. Whether it was a transformation of the real into the surreal or of the mundane into the holy, in that moment, she did not know. But as the Eucharist passed, the world bent inward around the monstrance and carried all things with it: Scott, herself, even herself all the way removed from the world was dragged garden and all into a great ringing totality that swirled around the glinting circle. All lines of sight refracted back toward the Eucharist at its center. Incense and chant, the sound of indistinct steps against macadam and concrete: the world turned and the procession carried on, unfurling again, reorganized and reset with utmost precision, rose petals left in its quiet wake where it rounded another corner.
Allison suddenly felt like she’d just come to. She looked quickly over at Scott, who seemed carefully deliberating on his own thoughts, then back at herself. Her garden was empty. The trespassers had left, either of their own accord or by some other means. The damage remained. The grave still lay open and empty. But the garden seemed farther away from her now, as if it were the garden on the other side of a short tunnel rather than the bench she sat upon and Scott beside her.
“Are you alright?”
Allison turned to Scott who had been observing her with mild concern. She looked at him with a closeness of vision that she hadn’t experienced since before the horrible year had begun, before all of it had gotten away from her. Maybe longer than that.
“Our son died,” she said.
No one else would have caught it. Perhaps his own mother might have. Had she not studied his movements so deeply, been so acquainted with his mannerisms, so accustomed and, yes, perhaps, so obsessed, she’d have not seen it herself. But his posture faltered. It was gone as soon as it happened.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve known, Allison.”
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