Alphabet Soup for the Tormented Soul

by Tobias Wade

  Ring.

  “Please, I don't want to die.”

  I was glad that I wearing boots and jeans. The shrubbery cut into my hands but I didn't stop.

  Ring.

  “Hello, 9-1-1. What is your emergency?”

  “Help me, please. It's following me. Pine Grove Mall, Pinewood, Pennsylvania.”

  “Help is on the way, sir. Can you give me more details? What is following you?”

  “My name’s Ezra, I’m being followed. It's a creature, humanoid. I'm not sure. There's blood. Sable.”

  “Uh, sir are you sure that-”

  Tone. I pulled my phone away from my ear and saw that the call got dropped after 26 seconds. I yelled out a loud curse and jumped over a puddle. I saw another tree marked in black. I ran in that direction. Then I stopped. The trees thinned out a little but what was in the middle of the trees is what scared me. It's revolting, terrifying. I took a few steps forward using my phone's flashlight, unable to believe what I was seeing.

  “Oh God.”

  I proceeded to puke in front of It, my vomit mixing in with the blood. It wasn't black after all. I turned around and the creature was watching me as if waiting for my response. It looked hideous in the light of my phone. Like an inside out human being, thinner, taller. Its stance looked like a crouch, somewhere between an animal and a human in its mannerisms, with its arms hanging the fingertips were barely above the ground. Thin walls of flesh hung in a way that just seemed wrong. Like a human puppet that had been turned inside out. I don't know how else to describe it. It took a step closer to me, an action that made me take two steps back and fall into the blood and my own vomit. Something fell from It onto my shoulder. I looked up in fear.

  It was a tree. No ordinary tree, however. It was completely human. Made from human parts held together by… actually I'm not sure what they were held together by. There were faces opened in screams and where a skull seemed to be crushed was what looked like a back. A woman's torso was cut open with a leg sticking out of it. Shoulders with hands attached to them. It branched upwards, the parts getting smaller as It rose to around 26 feet easily. On my shoulder was what looked like a hand ripped off brutally. I held my breath as it almost seemed to twitch. The creature stepped closer and I just sat there frozen in shock. It lifted the hand from my shoulder and twisted it, using both hands, as bile rose from my throat. The hand twitched as the cracking sounds filled the silence. The creature’s mouth opened like a vertical crack and snapped one of the fingers off. The sound reminding me of a chicken leg being pulled away from the hips. The creature tilted its head back, letting out a moan as it swallowed the finger. Then it started climbing.

  I didn't dare look back. I ran as fast as I could. I drove my car to the main highway with the punctured tire and then drove a little farther up towards Pinewood. I changed into different clothes, cleaning up as much as I possibly could in a dimly-lit alley. At the police station, Sheriff Jake Hammond let me into his office after noticing I was in shock. He asked another officer to have the tire repaired as he got a blanket for me. By the time they got some caffeine in me I was crying.

  “Son, what’s your name?”

  “Ezra.”

  “Ezra, you can tell me what you saw?” he said. “ A lot of weird things happen ‘round these parts. I've seen a lot.”

  “You wouldn't believe me.”

  He sighed and looked towards the picture sitting on his desk, his hand immediately placing it face-down. I looked around, focusing on everything, the background sounds. I couldn’t hear traffic or people at Sable Lane, I realized. I could hear nothing.

  “I will. I've seen a lot in my time.”

  I stayed silent for a few minutes, not sure of what to say as I continued to cry.

  “I went to Sable Lane,” I finally said in a choked sob, the noise almost deafening as I tried to burrow into the blanket.

  “And you saw the tree?”

  I nodded, my sobs getting louder. “I saw...him...too,” I said.

  “Sable?”

  I nodded softly.

  “I've never seen him myself, but every now and then someone who has comes by. We can't do much about it; every time we take the tree down there's a lot of disappearances all of a sudden. When we go back, the tree is taller than it used to be.” I continued to cry for what seemed like an hour. The Sheriff got me another cup of green tea and a light snack. I couldn't eat, though, everything tasted like blood and flesh. He took me to his house that night after he got to know that I was on the road. I took a really long hot shower to the point my skin went red, my fingers scratching my shoulder as I stood there. It was long enough that the Sheriff thought I was trying to drown myself and opened the door to check on me.

  I spent the night in a room that seemed a little too lived-in to be a guest room. I'd say it belonged to a guy about my age. I was too out-of-it to really care at that point. I curled up, unable to find comfort as I fell into restless sleep.

  The next day I drove non-stop to Illinois. I spent the following nights in dingy hotels, grabbing coffee at diners on the roadside.

  Even three states away I didn't feel safe from Sable...

  T is for Time Travel

  John Buffalo

  When they came home and saw the device on my wrist, my parents acted without a word to one another. My dad immediately went back downstairs, and my mother sat down next to me on the bed and began tenderly rubbing my back.

  “It’s okay, baby. It’s alright,” she had reassured me. “Just tell mommy what happened.”

  And this is what I told her.

  “This sucks,” I remember Martin saying. “Your party blows, Harry.”

  We were all clustered around the living room table. Sarah and Ron were sitting in the chairs next to me while Martin was on the other side of the table. He was tilting his chair backwards, balancing on the two back legs, and I remember at the time thinking how cool he looked.

  “C'mon, man,” Ron piped in. “Lay off. It’s not, like, Harry’s fault his parents had to leave. They had to go into work. They have like, really important stuff to do, right Harry? Tell him.”

  I remember staying silent. I don’t know if it was because I had been homeschooled for years or from moving around a lot, but I didn’t handle tension or nervousness well. Whenever I would get really nervous, I would clam up. It’s been this way since forever, it felt like. No matter where we were, Nebraska, North or South Dakota, and now in the sticks of Iowa, I always feared things would come out wrong. I felt like if I talked or put myself out there I might mess something up. Like I would be tipping my chair back like Martin, but I would fall instead.

  Sarah responded for me.

  “Yeah, Ron is right. Quit being a jerk, Martin. You’ve done nothing but complain since you got here.”

  “Look, guys,” Martin said. “The only reason I came was ‘cause I heard Harry’s parents were mad scientists or some shit. I thought they would have some interesting stuff knocking around, but I get here, and all I find are two clumsy dopes and their loser son. They didn’t even take us to Disneyland like he promised. They even took off before they got the cake.”

  The cake was in the fridge, pristine and untouched. I didn’t tell them that though, but I should have. Maybe if I had told them, then we wouldn’t have done what we did next, maybe I wouldn’t have damned them all.

  Instead, I said:

  “I could show you.”

  That got all of their attention. Especially Martin’s.

  “What?” he said.

  I spoke slowly but firmly. “My parents work for the government, that’s who called them, that’s why they had to leave. They do most of their work at a lab, but they have something downstairs, and I can show you.”

  That left them speechless. Ron and Sarah were the only friends I’d had since my parents stopped homeschooling me last year and sent me to a public school. And even they had never seen any of my parents’ work, and by
their request, I had never broached the subject with them. Of course, not until then.

  “Well then,” said Martin, smiling for the first time since my parents had left. “Let’s get to it.”

  As I took them deeper into the bowels of the house, I fielded numerous questions from Ron, Martin, and Sarah:

  “Why have we never seen anything weird around your house before?”

  “Your parents seem like dopes; you’re saying they actually invent stuff? Like really cool shit?”

  “What are you taking us to see?”

  I answered them without stopping.

  “They keep most of their stuff at work, at a place called West Bale Path, but there’s some things that they hold back. Some things they keep for themselves.”

  “They only seem like it. They both have PhDs in Biochemistry, doctorates in Engineering, and a bunch of other stuff.

  “A time machine.”

  That brought on another flurry of questions, but as we were almost to the machine. I decided to show rather than tell. I pulled a book off of a bookcase, and so revealed the secret stairway behind it to the astonishment of my friends. I beckoned them down and down, until we reached those giant metal doors. I took a packet from a compartment on the door and opened it. Inside were the 26 identical devices I so often used without my parent's knowledge. They looked like bulky watches with blue lights on them, and I used that similarity to explain to my friends how to put them on.

  They got them on quickly as I herded them past the metal doors and into the dark room within. As I locked the door behind us, we were shrouded in darkness, the only lights coming from our devices.

  “So,” inquired Martin as he rubbed his own device. “How do these time machines work?”

  “Actually, there’s only one time machine,” I said, pressing a button on my device causing the lights in the room to come on. “And we’re all standing in it.”

  It was a large room with a high ceiling and many doors that led into smaller rooms. The ceiling, walls, and floor, were made of a strange metal, and there were crude building materials scattered around the floor.

  Ron couldn’t hide his shock. “You mean this whole room is the time machine?”

  Martin piped in. “Yeah, can this room really travel back in time?”

  “No it can’t,” I say. “Because that’s impossible. What it does, is let time pass faster or slower in here than outside.”

  I held my device up. “These things, make sure that our physical bodies aren’t affected by the field or whatever that makes time move faster.”

  Martin nodded his head in time to my words. “Yes, of course. I know what that means, but could you explain it again, as if I had no idea what you just said.”

  I fiddled with my device for a bit. “Now, for every second that passes outside this room, 5 seconds would have passed in here. So in five minutes, if we leave this room, we’d find that we’ve only lost a minute.”

  “That’s amazing,” Sarah said. “But how does it work, exactly?”

  I shrugged. “No idea. I’m not the one with the PhDs.”

  “Forget how it works.” Martin interrupted. “What cool shit can it do?”

  ‘Well, the device I have is a bit different to your guys’. In addition to the lights, mine can also control how fast time travels. Here’s something cool I figured out how to do a while back. Sarah, stand still.”

  “...Okay.”

  I press a few buttons and the display on my device changes. I make some quick changes before addressing Sarah again.

  “Now take a few steps back.”

  She does and I press a few more buttons. The lights in the ceiling turn off and then some lights in the floor turn on. Suddenly Sarah and Ron screamed and Martin cursed. For, standing in front of Sarah, was what appeared to be a translucent, caricatured version of her, except that it lacked Sarah’s long hair and it had holes where her eyes were supposed to be.

  I quickly turned back on the lights and tried to reassure them. “Don’t worry guys, it’s just some dust.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” shouted Martin. “What was that?”

  “Everybody has a thin layer of dust on their skin. I used my device to make it so that the time around us in the room passed much more slowly. I think we’ve passed an hour in the world outside. Our devices made sure that our bodies didn’t age as fast as time actually passed in here.”

  Martin looked at the place where the ‘ghost’ had been before saying, “Ok, now I want to try it.”

  After we messed around a bit with the dust some more, Ron asked me why there were different types of building materials on the floor. Some of the rods and such had the color and texture of silicon, while the rest looked like regular construction materials.

  I told him that the odd-looking materials were made special so that they too were resistant to the time machine’s effects and so were used for actual building. The regular materials were for tests, as they acted peculiarly in here. I demonstrated by holding up a metal pole, pressing a button and then letting go. To my friend's amazement, the pole slowly fell through the air before coming to a gentle stop on the ground.

  While they mimicked my actions with the other materials laying on the ground, I quickly made my way to the door and with a call of “be right back” I slipped out of the room, made sure to close the door so the machine would keep on running and they could keep playing around. I rushed upstairs and into the kitchen taking out the cake that read “HAPPY 11th BIRTHDAY HARRY”

  I carefully took it out and did a weird, involuntary waddle as I made my way back to the room. As I went down the stairs behind the bookcase, I gasped as I tripped and almost dropped the cake. At the time, that had puzzled me. Why did I lose my balance? I had been careful.

  The answer was simple. I had tripped because while I had been being careful, when I reached the stairs, I had rushed down the steps like the million other times I’d done it before. Sometimes I would even jump near the end to skip a few.

  I had done that so many times that it was second nature, almost a reflex. Everyone has something like that. Flipping a particular switch when coming into a room, sitting in a particular seat when you get to class, rushing down some stairs even when you have something in hand, setting the time machine back to its default setting when you left so that your parents didn't know you were messing with it...

  I dropped the cake as I frantically checked the device on my arm. It was set to 100 hours inside for every minute outside. I almost had a heart attack as I set it back to normal, clawed the door back open and rushed inside.

  I was in such a panic that I didn’t even wonder why the lights were off again.

  “MARTIN! SARAH! RON!”

  There was a dull clattering near the back of the room, but no answer. I tried to switch on a ceiling light, but it didn’t work. I tried the rest, one by one, and it’s only when I’d tried the ones near the center of the room that I realized what had happened, for two of the lights in the floor came on, but barely. There were hairline fractures in the glass of both the lights, like someone had tried to smash them out with something heavy. One of the bulbs was thin, while the other flickered wildly, so they barely lit up the center of the floor much less all of the room. But it was enough for me to find Sarah and Martin.

  Martin had been impaled through the neck with a steel bar, one end was embedded in the floor while the other end pointed upwards, supporting his body and making it look like he was kneeling. His teeth had been smashed in and his eyes plucked out. His limbs were bent and twisted into extreme angles.

  Sarah had also been impaled, but unlike Martin, she had been stripped of all her clothes. A longer metal rod had been stuck through the chest, with one end stuck in the floor holding her body mostly upright. Her hair had pulled out of her head, her breasts torn off, and her groin had been pounded full of nails.

  At the sight of them, I clamped up again. Not moving and barely
breathing. I might have stayed like that forever if he hadn’t called out to me.

  “Harry, is that you?”

  The voice that said it sounded weird, like he scarcely knew what the words he was saying meant, but I could still tell who it belonged to.

  “Ron, what happened?! Martin and Sarah—”

  “It’s been so long, Harry.”

  The voice sounded closer. As I squinted past the two bodies, I could make out a vague outline of a person—, but there was something wrong with him. No, it couldn’t be…

  I quickly turned off the lights and it was. It was a shadowy figure that had on three glowing devices.

  “You said you’d be right back.”

  The voice was even closer now, too close. I ran right out of the room, closing the door behind me and heading back up to my room until my parents found me.

  We ended up moving away after that and I never saw the house or the time machine again. I still have nightmares though, where I’m sleeping in bed, and in the corner, shrouded in darkness is a figure. Sometimes it’s Sarah, sometimes Martin, and sometimes…

  Sometimes it’s Ron. And when it’s him, just before I wake up, I feel him walk over and loom over me. Then quietly and gently he says,

  “Happy Birthday, Harry.”

  U is for Undelivered

  Harrison Prince

  I just got home from the hospital after what has to be the strangest Christmas I've ever had. It was absolutely terrible and frankly bizarre.

  Christmas Eve came along, and the kids were hyperactive all day. They couldn't wait for Santa to come, and their energy was amplified by the inches upon inches of snow that were falling outside.

  The weather channel said the snow wouldn't end until the day after Christmas, so it was going to be a very white Christmas.

  My wife and I convinced the kids that Santa was on his way and that if they didn't go to bed by 8pm, he'd miss the house. They ran straight to bed, terrified they might lose their presents if they fought us. Oh how I love the threat of a reverse burglar.