Over the course of the next couple of days, strange things continued to happen around Magnus. There was nothing so outrageous that the happening itself frightened him — indeed, in many cases, much like when the door had seemingly unlocked itself without him using the key a few days earlier, he failed to notice that anything unusual had gone on until after the fact — but the strange, scrawled and apparently hallucinatory messages that had continued appearing troubled him.
They hadn’t added up to anything coherent as yet. So far there had been a “WELCOME”, a “GOOD”, a “KEEP GOING” and a simple “YES”. The messages seemed to approve of what was happening, though Magnus still didn’t understand what it all meant. He had become concerned for his mental health; he already knew that his emotions were in a somewhat fragile state following the collapse of his personal life, but had this crossed some sort of line into his brain actually not working properly, interpreting things that weren’t really there?
The messages most certainly weren’t really there. Sometimes they lingered longer than others, but usually they vanished as if they had never been there at all after just a single blink of his eyes. They were vivid enough that they certainly looked real, but if that were the case why weren’t his walls, by now, covered in graffiti?
He flopped into bed, exhausted. He hadn’t done much that day, but he had at least left the house and spent some time in a coffee shop in an attempt to feel like a normal human being. It wasn’t the most productive use of his time, of course, but it beat sitting by himself and letting the darkness of his depression close in on him.
Now, of course, it was night, and as he flipped the bedside light off he was surrounded by literal darkness; for once he had remembered to close the curtains, so the usual glare of the street lamps from outside was just a faint glow through the material. The only real light in the room now was the glowing red numbers of the clock-radio, ever-present by his bed, a relic of a forgotten age when he had a reason to wake up early in the morning.
“Hi.”
His heart immediately started racing. There had been no-one in the room when he had got into bed and turned the light off, but that was unmistakably the sound of someone’s voice. It seemed to be a woman’s voice; strong, but feminine, and not one he recognised.
“How’s the darkness treating you?”
Panicked, he fumbled for the bedside lamp and ended up knocking it — and a coffee cup from a couple of days ago — to the floor. Eventually he managed to pick it up and, wielding it like a lantern, he flicked the switch.
Instantly his room was bathed in light, and there was no sign of anyone. He looked around and gave a momentary start at the sight of his own enlarged shadow on the wall as he pointed the lamp around like a torch, but it was clear to him that he was the only occupant of the room. The voice — if indeed there ever was one — was silent.
He replaced the lamp on the bedside table and switched it off again. He lay down, his heart still thumping in his chest, took a deep breath and tried to relax, eyes closed.
“Don’t try to find me,” the voice came again, this time feeling like it was whispering in his ear. “You won’t be able to. Not yet, at least.”
He kept his eyes closed — tightly, now — as fear gripped his body and his pulse quickened once more. He swore he felt a chill wind move across his body, and then the voice was in his other ear.
“You’re making a good start, though,” it said. “Really good. But I can see you’re not quite ready for this yet, so for now I’ll bid you farewell.”
The breeze blew once again, but Magnus dared not open his eyes, even though he knew all he would see — even if there really was someone in his room — was darkness. It was several minutes that felt like hours before he felt his body starting to relax again, the adrenaline slowly draining and his muscles gradually switching out of “fight or flight” mode.
Still keeping his eyes closed, he rolled onto his front and buried his head in his pillow. It didn’t take him long to succumb to sleep.
* * * * *
The following day was uneventful. Nothing strange happened around him, and none of the peculiar messages appeared. It was the same the day after, and the day after that, too. He began to think that whatever strange illness had been clouding his mind had somehow passed, and that he was over the worst, so he gradually let the weird incidents of the last few days slide from the front of his mind.
He had been grateful for the distraction, if nothing else; having the odd happenings to concentrate on had taken his mind off the other things that had been going on in his life. He was brought back into the cold light of reality by a simple text message, though: she was coming by to pick up her things, and recommended that he wasn’t there while he did so.
The rational part of his brain knew that she was right, that it would be healthiest and safest for both of them if he were elsewhere while she went about her grim business of sorting out the things that belonged to her, packing them away and taking them with her, never to be seen again. That very act was definitively final; up until that point, he’d always carried the hope that she might reconsider and come back, even though she’d already taken a lot of her possessions — daily life things like clothes and toiletries — with her quite some time ago now.
He responded with a simple, blunt “OK” to her proposed time, which was later that day, and knew that he needed to make himself scarce as quickly as possible. But he could not bring himself to leave just yet; he could feel the emotions bubbling up inside him. A corrosive cocktail of intense sadness and burning rage, the toxic feelings quickly overcame him, and he found himself stamping around the empty flat, looking for something to release the anger on.
He settled on a pair of glasses that she’d left behind and had, until now, been avoiding. He knew she didn’t wear them often — she’d have taken them with her, otherwise — but they were still hers. And, right now, they made as good a target as any for his ire.
He took them from the shelf where they had sat, untouched, since she had walked out of the door. He threw them to the ground petulantly, then stamped on them one, two, three times. He picked them up and squeezed them tightly between his hands, bending the frames and making them useless as a facial adornment. To his intense dissatisfaction, though, nothing broke; the lenses didn’t crack, the frames didn’t snap. All he was left with was a mangled, twisted mass of wire and glass that was still recognisable as having been a pair of glasses once, but which wouldn’t be fitting atop anyone’s nose any time soon.
He fell to his knees and started to cry. The tears came quickly and flowed down his cheeks, plopping quietly onto the carpet as they fell from his face. He collapsed forward, his forehead hitting the floor with enough force to make him slightly dizzy, but the physical pain didn’t matter compared to the mental anguish he was currently in.
He didn’t even really know why he was crying or what he was upset about. It was just everything about the situation coming to a head. He scrunched up his face as he sobbed and gasped: he’d done this before, and would probably do it again; he just had to ride it out. That rational part of the brain speaking again, even amid the most chaotic outbursts of emotion like this one.
Eventually, the tears subsided and the sobbing stopped. He felt exhausted, and it was all he could do to pull his head up off the floor and get back to a kneeling position.
He wiped the last few tears from the corners of his eyes and his cheeks, sniffed and opened his eyes.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw.
He was in his flat, but it was not as he knew it. The strange words that had occasionally been appearing on his walls were now everywhere, and the room seemed shrouded in a black mist, lighter than smoke but heavier than fog. Everything about this was wrong, but he still recognised it. Why? What was going on.
A patch of the black mist ahead of him coalesced into a humanoid figure, though it was nothing more than a silhouette; he couldn’t make any features out, save for the fact that the figure was probably female.
“Oh, hi,” said a voice he recognised immediately as that which he’d heard in his bedroom a few days earlier. “Wasn’t expecting you quite so soon.”
He didn’t hear the last sentence, because he’d toppled backwards, the shock too much for his consciousness to take right now. He had passed out.
* * * * *
“There you are.”
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been unconscious, but he knew that he didn’t want to open his eyes. The voice — the strange figure — was still there, and that presumably meant that he was in that terribly wrong version of his living room.
“Look, I’m not going to hurt you,” said the voice, sounding a little put out by his lack of response. “I just need to talk. And you need to listen, otherwise you’re going to be stuck here, and I don’t think you want that. Sit up.”
Eyes still closed, he uneasily raised himself up onto his elbows, then pushed his back up off the floor. His body felt stiff, heavy and uncooperative, but he complied with the voice’s request nonetheless, even though his body was shaking with every movement. Then, he grit his teeth and let his eyes open.
The shadowy figure appeared to be crouched on the floor near him, and he could have sworn that if it had a face it would be looking concerned. Something about the way it carried itself and the attitude it was displaying towards him made him feel a little more at ease than he had been: maybe the voice really had meant what it had said, and that it didn’t want to hurt him?
“There we go,” came the female voice, somewhat softer in tone than it had been before. “That wasn’t so difficult, now, was it?”
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice cracking as he did so. He felt like he hadn’t drunk any water for weeks.
The voice chuckled. “Well, aren’t you straight to the point. I like that. But before we talk about me, we should probably talk about…” — here the figure gestured flamboyantly about the distorted version of his living room — “…this place, and what you’re doing here.”
He blinked. The nightmarish vision before him didn’t go away. He was really here. For some reason, though, he could feel his fear dissipating and being replaced with curiosity.
The crouching figure seemed to rock back onto where its knees would be if it was a normal human body. It looked like it was relaxing.
“Good,” it said. “Welcome.”
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You have a real knack with these eerie, off-kilter narratives, incorporating exaggerations of your own dilemmas – wonderfully cathartic.
Yeah, thats about it. I sometimes worry about being a bit too “obvious”, but then I figure I was the only one who was actually around for the “real thing” 🙂
Besides, what writer hasn’t drawn on their own experiences at least occasionally? Very hard to write about something you don’t know at all 🙂
Absolutely! It makes us stronger because we can use our writing to gain control over experiences that have caused us grief. I applaud you. And you are not too obvious – only to those of us who ‘follow’ you and care enough to remember things you’ve said. There’s a lot of my experiences in my works too – especially ‘Madam Pele’, my novel. Plus a few of my poetic works. But I am not daring enough to get stuck into the real problems in print because there are others who it might affect and hurt. Maybe one day I will. Keep going with the story – compile them all into one volume and get them published.:D