…and as the pus bursts against the mirror, immediately a small stalk sprouts outward from the center mass, giving life to two tiny toothed mouths . . . around the edge three petal formations unfurl and stretch outward, delicate and pale pink in the overhead bathroom light…
Author: T.M. Camp
-
argument
Arguing with two women to whom I am both somehow married. One is younger and very ambitious, middle eastern descent. She is furious with me, holding onto some misconception that I am preventing her from pursuing her career.
Furious at the accusation, I point out how my first marriage was nothing but supportive of my wife’s efforts, even to the ultimate detriment of my own life and our relationship.
It’s a frustrating exchange and it only ends when a reporter arrives to interview her.
They leave and the other woman—my other wife?—somewhat older and milder, leads me away to reassure me.
As the evening settles into night, we stand near a chain link fence supported by thick wooden posts overlooking a high canyon.
The fence sags in places and we step out onto it, bouncing together.
-
brute
After my wife woke up, I lay in bed for a long while.
The door opens.
A large misshapen brute of a man enters the room.
Muscular and twisted, his hulking form loomed over the bed. Stripped to the waist and swollen with rage, he paced back and forth, stabbing a rusty handheld sickle down into the bedclothes as he muttered and growled at me.
-
parking
At the gateway of the ramp, I take the ticket from the mechanism and slyly point out that we can go through the first level without being detected. My companion is skeptical but follows along as we pass through the gate without being stopped.
On the other side, a woman in uniform stops us for confirmation and I show her the ticket. She waves us on but my feet lose their purchase on the ramp and I begin the slip away, falling upwards into the sky, pulling her along with me.
I tell her that she has to be in trouble for me to be able to do anything, that my own power cannot be activated unless another is in peril.
“Help me,” she says unconvincingly at first. “Help me.”
It does not work, though her sincerity increases as the danger grows and I jerk awake.
-
the last house
(This dream was predicated by the delivery of some cardboard boxes from U-Haul. I had some old items in the basement that needed to be packed up and so when the boxes arrived I placed them in the back hallway. Later that evening, this is what I dreamed…)
…from one side a spirit approaches me, draped in ivory cloth and vibrating with agitation. The spirit’s face is pressed forward through the gauzelike wrappings covering her head, frantic with worry as she confronts me.
“What’s going on? Where are you going?” She cries hoarsely, shaking her hands. Her distress and misery are palpable, distorting the air around her, warping the edges of the room like the radiating waves coming off of a heat mirage. “Why are you leaving me?”At first, I thought this apparition was some sort of ghost but it occurs to me that she is in fact the spirit of our house—literally, she is the house—and the boxes in the hallway have upset her. She thinks we’re moving away. And she is upset.
I assure her as best I can, patting her shoulders at first and then hugging her, telling her that we aren’t going anywhere. Eventually I lead her in an awkward dance around the living room, hoping to cheer her up.
—
Over the next few days, when I think of it, I pat the walls of our home or briefly lay a palm on one of the doorframes, and say “It’s okay, we’re not going anywhere…” hoping to reassure her.
-
winterly
She approaches, clothed all in white and crowned with gold.
Her hair is dazzling white, almost difficult to look at, as with fresh snow in the sun.
A gold chain hangs think across her shoulders, resting atop the white fur collar of her heavy coat, cinched at the waist with a belt of gold disks.
Yet there is a puzzling detail, as she is bearded in ice—her cheeks and chin bristle with icicles that shatter and fall when she kisses me.
“Who are you?” I ask, confused.
“Winter,” comes a voice behind me.
I know her then.
–
I am still trying to make sense of the icicle beard. It was not unpleasant to the touch and it didn’t repel me. I am wondering now if it was some kind of muff around her next, pulled up close around her cheeks.
It’s also worth noting that this is the first time she has appeared in white, with white hair.
-
flirting
Waking from a dream of Winterly, I turn in the bed and shift my position to ease my sore back.
And back into dreams I go…
–
For some reason, I am in drag. I am wearing a black bodysuit and corset, covered by a long draped coat in ivory. I wear a white bob wig.
I do not know why I am wearing what I am wearing. I feel self-conscious about my weight and waistline, even with the corset. I draw the coat around me as nonchalantly as I can manage.
Somewhere downtown at an event, possibly a wedding shower. I am sitting at a round table, chatting with a young woman and man seated next to me.
She is dark-haired and has an appealing, if somewhat conventionally contemporary, appearance. Like a secondary charter in a TV drama about corporate attorneys. Not my type and yet I find myself drawn to her.
Her companion is effeminate and flirting with me as we talk, touching my forearm or shoulder to make his point. I don’t want to embarrass him and, always trying to adapt to others, I return the same flirty energy.
It’s a pleasant conversation and I am enjoying the back and forth with each of them. I’m even starting to feel comfortable in my drag ensemble. Empowered even.
When the man excuses himself and gets up to leave, I am genuinely sorry to see him go. Though I am not the slightest bit gay, it’s always nice to be noticed.
I get up and shift into his seat, turning to the woman. The flirty pose is gone and I am more my authentic self, just chatting with her a little more directly.
She is clearly confused. After a few minutes of conversation, she stops me and asks “What is going on?”
“What do you mean?”
She gestures after her departed friend, then back to my outfit. “All of this, I mean, why are you acting like this with me… aren’t you gay?”
I tell her I am straight and I apologize for the confusion my outfit might have caused.
“It’s not that,” she says, implying that she finds it somewhat attractive—or, at least, interesting. “I just didn’t think you were interested.”
I tell her I am and for a moment we both sit and consider where to take the conversation from this new common ground.–
And then I wake up.
-
robbery
Armed men have taken over the store. I manage to get out before they lock the doors, but I can’t just leave everyone else there I have to get back in. I have to try and do something, to stop whatever they have planned.
I keep going from door-to-door, surprised at how easily they assume I’m one of them.
But once I am back inside, the panic takes over.
I can’t do this. I can’t do any of this.
This is a difficult time.
-
doo wop
I wake, half asleep, in the downstairs guest room, fumbling for the alarm clock on the bedside table. The clock radio is warbling a doo-wop tune from the 60s, the music is tinny, fading in and out of the radio static.
“Let me in…” the voice sings, mellow and soothing. “You can’t resist me… Let me in… Let me inside…”
I struggle to sit up, sleep still heavy on me, weighing me down.
The radio, the song, louder now, insistent: “You cannot resist me, let me inside…”
My hand finds the nightstand, flat against the tabletop. Nothing.
I realize then that there is no radio in this room, no clock.
The music, the song, the singing is coming from outside the window.
A shadow looms there, just visible between the half-drawn blinds. Tall and dark, learning down to peer in at me, singing… cajoling… calling softly…
“Let me inside, you cannot resist me, let me in… let me in…”
I put my hand up, the selenite ring on my finger like a little moon, a bright ward against the darkness outside.
The singing fades. The shadow slowly withdraws. Maybe it hisses as it does.
-
the assassin
Somehow, I’ve been asked to participate in a rehabilitation program for dangerous prisoners. The prison is large and gray and nondescript, and you can’t escape the feeling of being trapped once you’re inside.
The prisoners are terrifying. And these are the ones ready to be rehabilitated.
My initial assignment does not work out well, since he appears to be more interested in adding me to his list of victims, rather than enjoying the freedoms that await him outside.
The second charge is a bit more promising, while still more likely to end in tragedy than success.
He is elderly, Japanese. Very thin and tall. I only know a few phrases, not nearly enough to actually communicate. He is uninterested, and may or the program, and there is a patient menace, fairly perceptible beneath his, silent frailty.
Leaving the facility takes me through the library, which is a ridiculous assembly of shelves and stairs and books. I’m surprised that the corrupt administration officials, let me wander on my own, even though I have no interest in wandering. I want to leave.
Finally, above ground, I am close to my goal. Two large concrete buildings sit, flanking the gates to the outside. I walk across the flat open courtyard, pale light sky overhead. A familiar sky.
-
Terminus
The department has a new manager and she’s been placed in the cubicle with me, which means I have to shift the sprawl of my stuff in order to make room for her things (which are more important than dusty action figures, artifacts of personal flair, and binders full of meeting minutes no one if ever going to read).
Within a day, I’ve been terminated. The packet she hands me is very well designed and includes a stack of little infographic cards detailing my various transgressions—loading up my work computer with personal music and movies, incessant and unapologetic use of profanity in meetings, and falling asleep at my desk.
(To that last point, I woke up nestled against her midsection, cradled in her arms—so I feel like maybe that’s on her too. But she was very kind when she woke me up and handed me the termination packet, so much so that I almost went back to sleep.)
No one is sad to see me go and they barely look up as I pass with my two cardboard boxes full of personal belongings (including the dusty trench-coat I wore every day of my senior year of high school, which was a nice discovery under some forgotten invoices at the bottom of an old filing cabinet).
I am not upset, although I already feel the financial dread of “what am I going to live on?” once the severance runs out. It’s probably for the best, though. The building is so dimly lit that there was no chance I’d ever be able to stay awake. They should do something about that.
A little while later I am standing on a crowded platform next to myself. My hands are empty but the other me is still struggling to manage the two boxes of office detritus. In the dim light people shift and mutter all around us, waiting for the gates at the top of the steps to open.
“Don’t worry,” I tell myself. “It’s like ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. I’ll be here to guide you.” The trench-coat has given me newfound confidence as a psychopomp, but I can tell that my charge (my self) is not convinced.
…
Later still, in another place located well past the the margins of what any reasonable person would call “livable”—it’s an old refugee camp decommissioned after the Salamander Wars—the non trench-coat me is alone once again and I struggle with the boxes as I go up the dusty path to the corrugated iron shack where I live.
Next door, the neighbor’s dogs are whining and barking. One of them has been caught in some kind of snare—and not for the first time. The neighbor is always setting them, though if it’s to catch game or trespassers I don’t know. The dog dangles a few feet off the ground, whining like a violin while two other dogs bark up at it as though offering advice (or perhaps admonishing it for having gotten itself into this predicament).
The door opens and my neighbor’s sullen teenage spawn spill out to inspect the dog, but none of them try to get it out of the snare.
Above, the sky is flat and white. Featureless. There is no sun in this place and never has been.
I heft my boxes again and go inside.
-
Chet
This afternoon I was in the living room and looked up to see our cat Chet coming around the corner to sniff at our new cat’s scratching pad.
Odd thing is, Chet died last year.
-
“She won’t rest.”
My daughter is almost nine but we still use a monitor so that we can hear her if she wakes up in the middle of the night.
My wife has gone to bed and I am up late, doing some work I brought home from the office.
The monitor crackles and my daughter calls for me.
When I head upstairs, she is already out of bed, standing there in the semi-dark.
“What are you doing? Are you okay?”
She looks at me, eyes clear but confused. “She had to… she wasn’t…”
I try to lead her back to bed but she stays there, looking around the room.
“A lady was… she had to get up, her daughter… She won’t rest. She won’t rest.”
I help her back into bed, make sure she’s settled, and head back downstairs.
-
alarm
Last night at 3AM the alarm clock on my wife’s nightstand went off, without any cause or reason.
My wife never uses the clock for anything other than to tell time. It’s been sitting there for years. No one had been in our room, no one had any reason to fiddle with it or set an alarm… but it went off in the middle of the night.
All by itself.
-
hereditary
Sitting at the dinner table, my daughter suddenly turns and looks over her shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
She turns back around. “That was weird,” she says. “I heard someone say ‘Yeah’ behind me.”
We go on with our dinner and I make a mental note to talk with my wife.
We’re starting to see more activity around the house. There’s a little bell in my head ringing, signaling that our daughter might become the focus for it.
I also can’t help wondering if, somehow, this is inevitable for her. If this thing I’ve carried for so long might turn out to be hereditary.
-
unseen
Dozing on the couch this morning…….I come into the room and see a baseball cap suspended in the air at about waist height, nothing apparently holding it up. It is not frozen in place, immobile — rather, it drifts and bobs slightly, like a magician’s trick.
I reach out to grab it, try to push it down, but something unseen resists. Try again, but it is like pressing against a powerful helium balloon.
And then it has me.
An unseen pressure wraps around my forearm, climbing to my shoulder, tightening around my chest. I try to raise my arms but something forces them back down. I try to speak, to banish this entity with my words of power, with the names of my gods, but my jaw is held fast and my lips will only allow a burbling mumble to escape.
I push backwards to escape its grasp but it is like moving through taffy. It is all around me now, forcing my head down and holding my arms in an invisible half-Nelson.
It throws me against the wall and I try again to speak, to banish. Nothing but idiot sounds and whimpers escape my lips.
I raise my hands against it, try to snap my fingers or clap, anything to break its hold… But the unseen dread forces my arms back down to my sides, pressing me harder against the wall.
No, it’s not a wall. It’s the closed door of the room.
I wrap my fingers around the knob and twist, throwing myself backwards out of the room. But I can’t escape the grasp of this thing which now pulls me backward down the hall, upright and heels dragging on the floor.
In the family room, my wife sits up on the couch as I fall, stumble in slow motion through the room. Still captured, I stare at her and mumble my pleas for help as the unseen force slowly lifts me and proceeds to throw me around the room while my wife watches in horror.
I wake up, my arms tingling with pins and needles, still trying to speak… and failing. -
my phone buzzes
Message from my wife this morning…
Just another day at The Last House.
-
not a cat, not a dog
This evening as I was taking my daughter upstairs to bed, she froze outside her open bedroom door.
“What’s wrong?”
Staring into her room, she said “I just saw a cat or a dog or something on my bed. It looked up at me and then slid under the covers.”
I turned the lights on and we went in. Of course there was nothing there.
-
trail
Walking to work this morning, something caught my attention: Small bits of red licorice scattered along the sidewalk, trailing over three blocks.
I didn’t follow to find out to where they led. I know better.
It’s October.
-
by the pricking
The theater is crowded with people, waiting for the play to begin. My wife and I sit and wait, looking through the program and studying posters for past productions lining the walls.When the show begins, I am transfixed. I’ve seen Macbeth a few times before, but this is just amazing. The witches scene is easily one of the most unsettling, disturbing experiences I’ve ever had in a theater.
The lights darken, the stage and audience in complete blackness. A flicker of lightning, a woman’s voice over the speakers, harsh, rasping out the classic line “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
I’m a little irritated by this shuffling of the text, but then the darkened theater is overrun with murmurs and whispers . . . feet scuttle up and down the aisles . . . something, someone crawls over me, panting out Shakespeare’s lines . . . hands tug at my arms and legs . . . the footsteps rattle off towards the darkened stage.
When the lights come up, half of the audience has already left their seats. I assume they just couldn’t handle the intensity of it all. I barely kept it together. I note my wife’s seat is empty and I rise to go and find her.
Through the shuffling crowd, I see an old acquaintance — a theater director from years past — sitting stunned in his seat. I wave but he looks right through me. I can’t tell if he recognizes me, if his glare of baffled fury is for me or for the production.
At the concession stand, I buy two candy bars and head back into the theater. Somewhere along the way, my clothes have been lost. I’ve got a white towel wrapped around my waist.
I sit and wait, a little uncomfortable about my limited attire, and wonder where my wife has got to…
-
rush
As I’m setting up the ironing board, something rushes towards me from the living room… low and broad and dark, like a wall of shadow.
I do not flinch.
It breaks around me like a wave around a rock, dissipates into streamers of fading black and gray… and then is gone.
-
pest control
Here’s an e-mail i sent to my wife this morning, slowly starting to put together a plan to exorcise the entity that currently occupying our house…
What I know (or think I know) about the entity in our house…
- It is not human.
- It never was human.
- It is a conscious, aware entity.
- It is negative.
- It is drawn to insecurity, anxiety, and fear.
- It can induce insecurity, anxiety, and depression.
- It is not affected or intimidated by anger.
- It can vocalize. It can speak.
- It can make itself physically visible.
- It is small but likes to pretend to be larger than it is.
- It can imitate or impersonate different forms (male, female, animal, shadow).
- It’s actual form is small, hunched, twisted, emaciated, pale.
- It wears a mask.
- It’s real face is humanoid but damaged, skinned with exposed flesh, eye sockets, and teeth.
- It can make physical noise in the environment.
- It can have physical contact with people.
- It can have physical interaction with objects.
- It does not appear to be related to other phenomena or spirits in the house.
- It does not have any apparent connection or claim on our house or land.
- It does not have an apparent connection or claim to anyone currently living in the house.
- It appears to have full run of the house and is not limited or confined to particular rooms or areas.
- It does not want us to leave the house. It is not trying to drive us away.
- It goes inactive for periods of time.
- It increases activity when there are significant shifts in the weather or seasons.
- It is more active at night.
- It can manifest in or affect dreams, particularly during the hypnagogic stage.
- It manifests most often in the bedrooms, presumably because that’s when people are alone or vulnerable.
- It does not appear to target animals or pets.
- It tends to avoid attacks or activity when multiple people are present.
- It attacks individuals when they are alone.
- It attacks women more than men.
Now, a couple of assumptions of which I am fairly confident…
- It is not particularly strong.
- It avoids direct confrontation or interaction.
- It prefers indirect or surprise attacks.
- It is not old.
- It does not have a name.
- It feeds on negativity, sadness, mental instability, or suffering.
- It most likely is a manifestation generated by the grief, guilt, and suffering that occurred after Chris and Kelly’s [the previous owners] baby died.
- It did not cause the death of their baby.
(I suppose it is possible that it existed before Chris and Kelly, and it just attached itself and fed off of their misfortune. But I don’t think so.)
_____
We lead an interesting life.
-
feet wrapped in rags
…the children come out from the alcoves and holes, ragged scavenger ghosts huddled together and shuffling along the dusty floor, their hollow eyes sweeping back and forth, mouths gaping . . . they are in thrall to an old woman, an older ghost, who herds them like cattle and feeds off of their misery…
I stand on the rickety wooden steps, watching them from above, not daring to step down into the range of their clutching hands.
-
dancing
…in the middle of an utterly boring and banal dream, I pass by a group of young women dancing on the sidewalk and one of them catches my eye. She motions to me, to get my attention, and mouths “Where have you been?”
I keep walking, dragged along in the wake of my nonsense dream, looking back as she gestures once more…“I… miss… you…”
I wake, her name — like the dream — just out of reach.
Winterly.