So, like dad always says, leave it on the page and walk away from it. And I will never tell Dad he was right because he thinks he's too smart anyway and he doesn't have a clue what my life is like. But it does help to write it down. Maybe I will look back at these diaries when I am a crank-ass old lady and I'll just laugh at all these hateful futhermuckers then.
Well, I'm audi 5.0 for now. Dad's working late which means it's pizza and totally bad horror movie night. I wanna watch something where zombies eat a bunch of mean girls LMFAO
***
My name is Eric Crockett and this is my confession.
Dr. Boron has left me my writing hand. It is bound, but flexible and I am able to put this pen to paper. So now I leave my last thoughts in this pink notebook.
I have read Sharon Boron’s diaries back and forth. There’s not much else to do in this chilly and dark basement. I read during the day by sunlight which penetrates the unburied planks near the small and high window of the cellar.
Of everything Dr. Boron has done, making me read his daughter’s journals is the cruelest thing. Sharon was fourteen when she began putting her raw thoughts in these girly notebooks. And she was sixteen when she was killed and the last entry of hers was the night before that. Sharon had just started a new journal in this pink notebook that is decorated with a unicorn on the cover. Seventeen was coming quickly for her, but seventeen may as well have been a million years away. I can still smell the child on the pages of this journal. Her ideas and experiences and rants shape the dreams I have when I am able to sleep. Sharon spoke to the world here, in this pad and the others I have read, and her words remain and remind and they haunt me.
I think back to the accident quite often. It was a dark and stormy night, as the literary hacks would say. When I struck her with my car, my eyes were on my phone. And, yes, there were three beers in my system. I held the girl in the rain and cried and spoke to her until the ambulance and police came. But my assurances had fallen on cold ears.
I got off, because I am a highly-educated and successful Caucasian businessman in America and my golf buddies are judges and attorneys. It is funny how people of the higher class will do whatever must be done to protect one of their own; favors to put in back pockets should shadows ever fall their way. The criminal case against me failed, and I waited for a civil suit, quite prepared to settle out of court. I let my lawyer buddies save me from jail and I was informed that I would most likely lose a civil suit, but I was okay with that. I wanted to account for this on some level. But I required my freedom. How arrogant the affluent to assume that they can pay for their crime in whatever form they choose. The rich always presume that money is the most important thing to anyone.
The lawsuit never came. Dr. Boron, a widowed general physician, disappeared from my life after the trial. My soul needed resolution and peace, but Dr. Boron made no attempts against me, though I had taken all that was left from the man. I waited and hoped he would try to at least extract financial revenge upon me, but I didn’t see him again; until, and I am guessing here… a month ago (I can’t say for sure, without a calendar or watch or a phone on me).
It had taken a year for people to forget my name and stop looking at me like a privileged monster. Dr. Boron is African-American, as was his daughter. I am white and wealthy. So you can imagine how the news stations handled this.
Excess is how people with money deal with their pain. I drank heavily during this dark period. As a matter of fact, I was in a downtown bar when I encountered Dr. Boron again. I didn’t recognize him, of course. The man was balding and overweight, though he knew better, and I didn’t think I would ever forget the sad glare he pointed at me in court. But he wore a hoodie and dark glasses that night to disguise himself, and I was drunk, so it was relatively easy for him to spike my drink and shoulder me out of the place. He offered to see me to a cab and I passed out.
When I woke, I was here, in this basement. I sat here for two days in a haze. I was finally jacked into an IV while I was sleeping. I don’t know what the doctor is pumping into me. But whatever it is, it keeps me weak but allows me to think fairly clearly. It was four days, I think, before I awoke and noticed that Dr. Boron was standing in front of me. He had the first of Sharon’s notebooks. He gave me the earliest volume, without a word, and then he left.
It was shortly after this torture had begun that the doctor returned to my gloomy prison. He came down the stairs with a foul-looking black stew in a bowl. I ate it, hungrier than I could ever remember being. After I finished, I noticed that my left foot was gone.
It took a few meals to make the correlation but there is now no doubt; Dr. Boron is coldly and neatly erasing me. Whenever I eat, I lose something. This ritual has continued without a word or a curse or a plea between us.
Surprisingly, there is little pain involved with these procedures. Whatever it is that he serves me through the tubes makes this a relatively painless torture. I kick out in my sleep with sewn stumps. I try to scratch an itch sometimes with a hand I devoured days ago.
My lower legs and my left arm to the shoulder are gone, now; carved off, boiled and sprinkled with things from a spice rack. My right arm is the only functioning limb I have left and I realized only today why that was.
When I awoke this morning, I noticed the pen near my shackled hand, and I have decided to follow the doctor’s quiet prompt before he serves me what is left. My last meals are going to taste like sin and regret, and the good doctor is going to have to help me eat them. I will be vanished soon, and all that will be left of me will be a sizable bank account that my siblings will fight over in my absence. My dreams of taking a wife and raising children of my own died on a cold rainy night. I have no heirs.
Dr. Boron is doing me a kindness, really, as this would have killed me at a much slower rate over the course of years. I am prepared to pay, and my money and friends can't twist the rules in this court. My captor is judge and stoic executioner. There are no appeals to be found here and I wouldn't pursue them even if I could. Let the darkness come and take this miserable life of mine.
I don’t expect Dr. Boron to read this until I am gone. And I want to take this opportunity to ask for his forgiveness. I never meant to destroy what little light he had left, and what he has taken from me doesn’t equal the debt I owe, and I know this.
I think I am going to stop now. It has been two days since my last meal, and I am getting queasy from hunger pains.
God help me, I am starving.
Author bios: Terry M. West is the author of Heroin in the Magic Now, What Price Gory, and other twisted tales of terror. He is also an artist, filmmaker, actor and the creator and editor of the anthology you are currently reading. Visit his site: www.terrymwest.com
Regina West is a former live television news director, a filmmaker, journalist, editor, member of American Mensa and she has traveled the world and studied numerous foreign languages, including Japanese, Spanish, French and Hebrew. She is an animal rights activist. She is married to author Terry M. West and the two have a son, Terrence.
Note-To-Self
By Christopher Alan Broadstone
Case #BF7008269305
Journal transcribed from a diary of events originating from external and internal messages materialized on the author Seimen Kleined’s own body, as told by the author.
1
Lost in utter darkness I felt the slightest sensation of floating, rising –– then a gentle nudge at my lower back, as if a ghostly hand had slithered inside of me, the fingers coiling around the base of my spine and pushing me upward from the depths of oblivion into the light. But, as yet, I could see no light and my eyelids were too heavy to open, forcing me back onto myself in introspection. As my spine arched in ascension, my head lolled backward, reaching a plane with my feet, which were dangling at the extremity of my legs, like two anchors begging to stall my buoyancy. So I remembered myself; the why of me. I am what the police call a serial killer. In all truth, a global killer. Thinking that
now, it seemed so absurd. A global killer was supposed to be an asteroid the size of Texas. But I’m much more like a microorganism, a virus or flesh-eating bacteria, although one that is randomly –– almost abstractly –– subjective in its choice of human, rather than pandemic. Even so, I have become pandemic in name. The moniker started with local police detectives in Argentina after what they described as my third mutilation murder, and as time crept by it spread to Interpol and its 190 member countries. They all now call me Splitfoot, or the Splitfoot Killer. Sensationalism, however, was never my goal. Splitfoot was simply born out of my endless grief and was always an in-joke sprung from my futile effort to revive myself. But it became my calling card.
Suddenly but gently twitching, the ghostly hand gripping the root of my spine continued to push me toward the surface of consciousness. Languidly rising, I became aware of my arms outstretched in a Christ-pose at my sides.
I clenched my fists and felt only the flesh of my palms, no nails, no restraint. The latter thought seemed to reverberate sonorously in my mind –– no restraint –– and my leaden eyelids fluttered for the first time. I attempted to move my arms and they swayed in the vast nothingness. With some effort I pulled them to my sides and corkscrewed my wrists. No restraint, I thought again. No chains, no chains, no chains...
And it was at that moment the dead air that had been trapped in my lungs expanded my larynx and puffed up beneath my lips, parting them. I breathed in a sterile coolness. My eyelids fluttered once more and they also parted, revealing a blur of white that quickly whirled into a vertiginous rectangle that could only be the ceiling of a room. A jail, I feared, as I again corkscrewed my wrists and my eyes closed one more time. But no chains.
Abruptly, I heard the sound of a door opening and footsteps coming closer. A man’s whispery voice fell over me, “Mr. Kleinend...”
I was reluctant to move, but then fingers lifted my right and left eyelids in succession, allowing a bright light to burst over my retinas, jarring me into a more resolved state of consciousness.
“Mr. Kleinend,” the voice said again, no longer a whisper. I stared up at the jail cell ceiling and it slowly spun to a stop.
“How are you feeling?” asked the man standing at my left. He was clearly of Arabic descent, and wearing a knee-length, white physician’s coat over green scrubs. Without moving my head I surveyed my periphery, quickly surmising I was in a hospital bed in a hospital room, not on a filthy cot in some third world jail. I wasn’t handcuffed to the bed railing either, and there were no madman’s restraints securing my arms at my sides.
“Good to see you finally awake,” said the doctor, reviewing a clipboard.
Finally? I wondered. I could vaguely recall a dream now, of being lost in a desert for what seemed like days. Then falling down a dune toward some kind of tent. As I grew more aware, I knew this dream was a genuine memory, not a paranoiac phantasm. The world’s airports really had been looking for me, the global killer: the infamous and elusive Splitfoot.
The doctor spoke again, “Mr. Kleinend...”
It seemed so odd to hear my own name, I’d used it less and less often as my bogus credentials had changed more frequently over the years. And now I remembered I’d tossed my last identity and cell phone into that vast desert the moment my feet hit the sand and my ride sped away, the tires of the truck spitting up enough hot grit to bury it for decades, bolstered by the constant eolian dust. As if on cue I spied my rucksack setting atop a sterile white cabinet across the room from the foot of my bed. There was a ragged tear in the side seam, where I had stitched-in my genuine passport, other credentials, and credit cards. At the moment I couldn’t remember how many ages ago that was.
“I’m Dr. Zayed,” said the doctor. “You are at New Cairo City Hospital.”
“New Cairo,” I repeated to myself.
“About 20 minutes outside of Cairo proper.”
I again remembered the tent. A tent painted crimson by the setting sun, a candle burning in the darkness within. I looked up at the doctor and he answered my unspoken question.
“Bedouin found you about 3 kilometers southeast of the city. You were very lucky, Mr. Kleinend.” But the look on his face seemed to imply just the opposite. From against the wall, he pulled up a tall chair and sat down next to the bed, bringing us on to a more level field of view.
“You suffered an ischemic stroke,” he continued, “collapsing at the foot of a Sheikh’s encampment.”
Whoever was in that tent, I remembered –– Sheikh, man, woman, or child –– was supposed to have been Splitfoot’s last victim. The Bedouin had disrupted my course, leaving me an anachronism to be sorted out by fate. I didn’t care for that at this questionable moment in the grand scheme of things, and looked away from Dr. Zayed to the rucksack. I focused on the tear in its side. It was now obvious it had been deliberately cut. This is it, I thought. This is when the Cairo police detectives and Interpol burst in like the Gestapo.
“Mr. Kleinend,” muttered Dr. Zayed –– there it was again, my real name. I swallowed and felt something stir deep within me. I cringed with it.
“Is there pain?”
I blinked away the cramp and shook my head in the negative. “How?” I whispered, my eyes still glued to my rucksack.
“The Bedouin you happened upon are Fellaheen,” said Dr. Zayed, “and are a simple people. Many clans still have what the western world would call a witch-lady, for healing. After running your toxicology and MRI, we’re still analyzing the pharmacology of the desert cocktail you were given. It acted as a neuroprotective agent preserving––”
“Neuronal structure and function,” I interjected without really meaning to –– glutamate excitotoxicity, oxidative stress –– I knew about all of it.
Immediately, Dr. Zayed lost interest in the technical bent of our conversation in favor of the philosophical. “They said you were a wanderer...like them. But one who needed to go home.”
With that, I looked Dr. Zayed straight in the eyes. It was evident he could see the fear in me. The words “go home” sparked an anxiety I hadn’t expected. What else could it be? It was obvious I hadn’t been identified by the local police, nor was I in Interpol custody. As I continued to ponder this, Dr. Zayed slowly put his right hand in the pocket of his coat and even more slowly withdrew it. I watched his clenched fist with an earnestness I hadn’t felt since I saw that single, speck-of-a-candle burning beyond the blowing door flap of that Bedouin tent. As I blinked the tiny flame hemorrhaged and bled into a 3-inch tall, cylindrical glass bottle Dr. Zayed sat on the overbed table at my left. It touched down with the most delicate clack. But it should have rumbled like an angry thunder bursting from Hell’s sphincter.
“This was the embolus we removed during surgery,” said Dr. Zayed. The embolus, I thought. My embolus. As with “neuroprotective”, I knew exactly what an embolus was; I had once been a grad year med student specializing in psychopharmacology. I stared at the embolus in the bottle. It looked like a twist of rubbery flesh, a calamari preserved in urine.
“Mr. Kleinend, this was blocking the internal carotid artery and was nearly into your brain.”
And why are you showing it to me? I nearly blurted. There was no reason to show a patient an embolus. It wasn’t a souvenir.
“It’s tissue,” informed Dr. Zayed. “The morphology suggests an anomaly.”
“Cytology?”
“It’s still in work up.”
The embolic tissue isn’t part of me, I realized. I wanted to blurt “impossible”, but the single word I spoke aloud was, “Paralysis...”
Dr. Zayed once more mistook my rhetoric as a question and shook his head, “No...you were fortunate.” Then he added, “The Bedouin saw something in you that frightened them.”
I could see that the good doctor had also seen something in me that frightened him. It was the embolus, of course –– not of my DNA –– likely making me the first genetic chimera he’d ever come face to face with. As if reading my thoug
hts, Dr. Zayed abruptly stood and replaced the tall chair next to the wall near the head of the bed, the metal feet stuttering against the floor. “I’ll return after my rounds, Mr. Kleinend. We’ll talk more then.”
Journals of Horror: Found Fiction Page 25
