by Jason Arnopp
All that beauty hurt my mind. I just wanted to lie down and sleep forever.
It seemed strange to finally know Josef’s name. The more I ran my mind over the child’s story, the more tragic it seemed. Back in 1898, Czechoslovakia was an insanely superstitious place, much like the rest of the world. It wouldn’t take much for a paranoid, God-fearing man to believe his troublesome son was in league with Satan. The poor kid probably didn’t even kill that dog.
I still despised Josef for what he had done to Tom, but felt conflicted. I wondered if there was a chance of reconciliation between him and I. Maybe ‘reconciliation’ was too strong a word. An arrangement. Could we co-exist?
(Incidentally, I know you may now be planning a visit to San Sebastián’s Old Town, in the hope of prising more information from the Filischkins. Please be advised that Vsevolod no longer runs Bar Plaza. Wanting to thank the Russian for his help months later, I could find no trace of him in the entire city. He and his family may as well never have lived there.)
That night in the hotel I slept on my front: an experiment, to see if it prevented Josef from gaining access to my airways. It had no effect, since my head still needed to rest on one side to allow me to breathe. In the depths of darkness, I felt the opposite edge of my pillow crumple as someone, something, exerted weight on it.
There he was, Josef, beside me.
Undead eyes wide. Fleshy mouth gaping, choking, tremoring.
Staring at Josef as he drained air so urgently from my lungs, I now realised that those eyes weren’t blank after all. At the top of those rancid orbs, you could discern the lower crescents of his irises. His eyeballs were rolling up into his head as he relived his father throttling him yet again.
With a swipe of my arm, I pushed this spirit off into temporary oblivion, but did so with less malice than before. As much as I despised this phantom child, he clearly didn’t know what he was doing. I had begun to perceive him as an echo, trapped in time, doomed to repeat himself.
Even if Josef was essentially a victim, however, my predicament remained. He and I were predator and prey, and as such I could only last so long.
Come morning, I felt 80 years old. Killing time before my journey home, I meandered around the Old Town, often feeling faint and having to lean against walls.
I chanced upon a shop which dealt in strange, occult items. At first I had no wish to enter, after all those pointless rituals back home.
Then I saw it, sitting there in the window.
I saw the Ouija board.
That board came back with me, to the place which you now call home. It was dispiriting to walk in and see those same walls staring back at me, but at least I had a mission in mind.
Lighting the living area with candles alone, I removed the Ouija board from my suitcase. I felt no shame in attempting this. My world had become so grotesquely distorted that a séance made perfect sense.
I hadn’t yet tried talking to Josef out loud, but figured the Ouija board might improve our chances of communication. It was fashioned from cheap plastic, but bore all the letters, the numbers. The ‘YES’, the ‘NO’, the ‘GOODBYE’.
A small spark of optimism burned within me. I would make Josef realise he was slowly killing me. Upon understanding this, he would relent and move on.
Perched on the sofa, I balanced the board on my lap. I put the cheap marker-device on the board, holding it with the fingertips of both hands, just as I’d seen people do in horror films.
I looked around the living area. I’m sure that, even by candlelight, it appeared much as it does to you now, although Tom and I never had a television. We never had time for one.
As my sight adjusted to the gloom, I was able to discern the letters on the board.
I wondered what to say. Finally, I decided to start with his name.
I spelt it out, letter by letter.
“J-O-S-E-F”
I carried on until I had spelled out the following:
“I…
“… M-U-S-T…”
“… T-A-L-K…”
“… T-O…”
“… Y-O-U”
Another pause. Next I spelled out:
“A-R-E…”
“… Y-O-U…”
“… T-H-E-R-E”
The room seemed intensely silent as I waited.
There was a brooding, loaded hush.
Raucous laughter exploded, from out of nowhere.
I quickly realised it originated from passers-by outside and tried to relax again. I was so highly strung that even this false alarm had me close to tears.
I wondered what was supposed to happen next. Would an unseen force compel my hands to move the marker?
The seconds crawled by.
I wondered if Josef understood English. As he had presumably haunted some English speakers in his time, I hoped he had picked up a few words.
All of a sudden, my hands were moving that marker.
A very odd feeling. I hadn’t initiated this activity in any way and yet it was happening. I had no idea where the marker was going, but it was going there nonetheless.
The marker stopped over the word ‘YES’. Then it was back off across the board in search of new letters. I watched as words formed.
“I…”
“… A-M…”
… H-E-R-E”
I swallowed hard, feeling more awake than I had in some time.
Various replies jostled for pole position in my mind. Before I could settle on one, the marker was back in play. At first, the action was repetitive, sliding to and fro between two letters.
“H-A…
“… H-A…”
“… H-A…”
“… H-A…”
“… H-A”
I suddenly felt very cold. From here, the marker moved more quickly.
“T-O-M…”
“… I-S…”
“…H-E-R-E…”
“… I-N…”
“… L-U-N-G-S…”
“… O-F…”
“… H-E-L-L”
From there on, the marker wanted to repeatedly alternate between ‘H’ and ‘A’ again, but I wrenched my hands away from it. My brain surged out of control as I snatched up the board and hurled it against a wall, shattering the marker.
I tipped over the sofa on which Tom had died. I smashed everything within arm’s reach.
I wanted to kill that little bastard so badly. So very badly.
Unfortunately, Josef’s father had already done the job in 1898. How could you kill something which had already been dead for so many decades?
To think I had begun to sympathise with the child! Josef’s father had been right: he really was possessed. The thought rocked me, as the light at the end of my tunnel winked out of existence.
Outside, the sun had already begun its descent. I watched shadows lengthen.
Night ominously drew closer with every jittery heartbeat.
I wanted to lay a trap for Josef. Stretching out on the bed, I feigned sleep. This was harder than it might sound. Every fibre of my being was so cooked that I could easily fall headlong into genuine torpor. It took immense self control and constant mental awareness games to keep my consciousness afloat as I lay there on my back, waiting.
Come the small hours, silence reigned.
Silence was all.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the room’s atmosphere thickened and congealed.
There came a low, breathless rasp.
The rasp grew in intensity and volume, becoming a splutter.
This time, the splutter was different. It also sounded like… laughter.
Josef was laughing at me.
Sensing him above, I flicked my eyes open.
The child grinned as he descended towards me, displaying tiny brown stumps which may once have been milk-teeth, his blue-moon eyes aglow.
Enraged, I reached up and seized him around the throat with both hands.
The room’s temperature plummeted.
I swear the very foundations of the night itself shook.
Josef’s grin became a grimace, his lips afflicted by a rabid-dog twitch. Yet my hands had not actually reached his neck. They had instead stopped about an inch from the rancid flesh, prevented from touching it.
Some kind of hellish protection system had been triggered.
I realised I couldn’t move. I was paralysed from head to toe.
My eyes darted around as I tried to cry out. The message left my brain but never made it to my vocal cords.
Josef’s face twisted with spite, transforming dramatically. Demonically. Real hellfire raged in those eyes.
This snarling, transparent beast drifted out from between my rigidly outstretched hands, passing through my very bones.
Slowly, deliberately, Josef continued his journey down towards my face.
That grim suck-hole of a mouth hovered near my own.
Josef fed upon me, his face a sadistic mask. It was a mercy that I was able to close my eyes.
He devoured my air so ardently that I couldn’t breathe at all for extended periods. Consciousness often began to slip away… only for this demon to grant me a moment of respite, allowing limited oxygen back in.
As I urgently sucked in gulps of the air I needed so badly, Josef’s obscene laughter rang in my ears. The process amused him.
As he tortured me, I was denied oxygen for increasingly long stretches.
I was completely powerless. I could live or die, entirely at Josef’s discretion.
The one thought which gave me hope throughout that whole, terrifying ordeal? It was in Josef’s interests to let me live.
When it finally ended, maybe two hours later, I was a sobbing wreck. My body felt ruined. I winced, moving slowly and awkwardly as I reached to turn on a light.
Getting dressed took some time, but I was determined to get out of that place.
In the middle of the night, I headed out through the streets.
I tried to come to terms with the fact that Josef and the demon which seemed to drive him were in total control. The boy’s ability to inflict paralysis explained all those early nights when Tom and I felt we couldn’t move while asleep. When I’d previously managed to touch Josef, I’d taken the spirit by surprise. This time he’d been ready and I’d provoked him by going for his throat.
I had incurred the wrath of the devil within him.
Was Josef’s demon a separate entity or were boy and demon the same thing? To whom had I spoken via the Ouija board? Perhaps the demon – Satan himself? – had possessed Josef while he was alive and would continue to tug this Czech boy’s puppet-strings even in death, for all eternity. Perhaps the two of them had become indistinguishable across the long decades.
Either way, it was clear I could not win. It all seemed hopeless.
In a café, resolving to make myself eat breakfast, I slumped my broken rag doll self onto a seat. Seemingly through sympathy, I was offered two free coffee refills.
The rest of the day was spent in a downbeat stupor across my sofa, neither asleep nor awake. All the fight had been knocked out of me.
Over the next few nights, I slept all the way through ’til morning but woke feeling horrific. My limbs either tingled or were numb, which always suggested that Josef had feasted royally. Perhaps I had finally become so weak that I had lost the ability to wake up at all as he gorged himself on my oxygen supply.
One morning, when the worry became too much to bear, I somehow found the energy to flop into a taxi. Receiving a quizzical look from the mildly alarmed driver, I managed to say, “Hospital.”
Since you may already have guessed this, I may as well come clean: I worked at this place. I was a consultant there, until Josef wrecked everything.
The building may have been familiar, but as the taxi pulled up in front of it, I felt sick. Dealing with other people’s health was a matter of routine, but when it came to being treated myself, I turned pale. To be precise, I had tomophobia: the fear of surgery.
Thankfully the initial tests weren’t too stressful. It was no surprise to learn that I was suffering from hypoxemic hypoxia: an inadequate supply of oxygen to the body as a whole. I nodded as a concerned registrar told me the things I already knew. He ran through all the risks, such as seizures, coma, priapism and good old death.
One of my former colleagues ran up to me, shocked by my condition. The bags under my eyes, the dramatic weight loss, my delayed responses, the fact that I was barely able to focus on her. The rest of my so-called friends completely blanked me. My guess is that they just couldn’t handle it.
The whole thing was depressing and my fear of treatment spiraled out of control. I made my excuses and headed towards the hospital foyer, a ghost among the living.
I intended to go home and let Josef drain the last vestiges of life from me. My mind was in tatters, my legs concrete slabs. I knew I was beyond saving.
An orderly crossed my path, pushing a patient in a wheelchair. They disappeared through a doorway with the word ‘Transplants’ above it.
I stopped for a moment. Swaying, I sat heavily on one of a row of plastic chairs.
In my deteriorated state it was all the harder to piece things together, but after a while I got there.
I thought about what I had just seen.
I thought about what Vsevolod Filischkin had told me, when I asked how his father became free: “In the end, they wouldn’t take.”
In this context, the meaning suddenly became clear. Why hadn’t I grasped it already?
I thought about Vsevolod’s description of Josef’s link to his victims. “It is not your thoughts he is linked to.”
If not the mind, then the body. Some part of the body…
Wait a minute…
Or parts of the body…
I thought about the wording of Josef’s Ouija message to me: “Tom is here in lungs of hell.”
Lungs.
Yes, oh my God, the lungs.
I thought about my connections in this hospital.
After some time in that corridor, I realised what I had to do, even though it felt akin to scaling a mountain. I felt confident I had solved the riddle. As I hope you will appreciate, my friend, I am also solving it here for you, even though I originally had no intention of doing so.
Why am I being so charitable? Part of it, I confess, is sheer guilt. The rest has arisen from the process of writing this letter. In reliving the lion’s share of my experience, I have been vividly reminded of what you yourself may now endure if you have tuned into Josef’s frequency, registering the physical and mental toll of his nocturnal visits. I have also painfully recalled how it felt when Vsevolod Filischkin shut me out and would only offer me the slightest hint at a solution.
It all goes back to that day when I saw you outside your new home, my old home. I suppose I made a judgement call which lives on today. This may have been an incorrect assumption, but you didn’t look like someone who deserved to have Josef in their life.
After my corridor epiphany, I retched and was violently sick. I was so scared by what I would have to do.
I forced myself to remain in the hospital and visit a surgeon friend. I didn’t explain everything, because he would think me insane. I was stammering and jabbering enough as it was. I simply impressed upon him, at torturous length, my dire need for a lung transplant. At first, he was incredulous, horrified by what I was asking him to do. Then I offered him most of my savings as an added incentive. Yes, a bribe.
I’m only slightly ashamed to say that the results of tests on my lungs were subsequently faked, to conclude I had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. I wonder, to this day, whether Dimitri Filischkin was stuck with Josef for so many years that he genuinely contracted a terminal illness which necessitated a lung transplant. Perhaps he and Vsevolod thereby chanced upon the solution to Josef’s curse. They might have realised that the devil-child twinned himself with the lungs of whoever was unlucky enough to sleep where he currently called home.
Me? I had to pull strings in order to do something which petrified me. I’m convinced several members of staff saw through my and the surgeon’s deception, but turned a blind eye. And yes, as a result of my jumping the queue, someone else on the waiting list may well have died. All I can say, is that I was driven by a sudden will to live which overrode all other concerns.
A suitable set of lungs became available after five days. Without them, I would certainly have perished. As if he knew what I was planning, Josef seemed to feed on me all the more ferociously back home. I would wake up wheezing, panicked, wondering if this was the morning my heart finally gave out.
An ambulance had to ferry me to hospital for the operation. As I was carried out through the front door of my home, I barely gave a thought to the fact that I would never, could never, return.
After my operation, Josef would be trapped back home. He would wait for me to fall asleep, in order to zero in on my lungs. However, the next time I slept I would have new ones. There would be nothing for him to locate. He would be stuck in the place you now call home, waiting for a signal which never came.
Lying on a trolley in a pre-op theatre, I did my best not to tremble. I was loaded with fear and nausea, as a stern, bearded anaesthetist who I’d never met tapped the back of my hand, trying to find a vein.
I kept telling myself: soon, you’ll wake up. The operation will have been done and you’ll be free.
I tried to keep my mind off the thing in my hand. Vsevolod’s words ran through my head.
“He will remain wherever you last sleep…”
“All right,” said the anaesthetist. “Just going to thread a line in...”
I shuddered as the thin ‘line’ entered the back of my hand.
“If you go somewhere else, he will come to you only when you sleep again.”
That’s when the fog cleared in my mind and a train-load of truth hit me: I was about to sleep.
As soon as the anaesthetist knocked me out, Josef would come to me.
My beleaguered brain tried to work it out. Yes, if I went to sleep now, Josef would home in. He would come here. When the old lungs were removed, he would lose his link to me. This room, maybe this entire hospital, would become his new haunting ground.
