by Tobias Wade
He wore a German industrial band tee shirt, jeans and a jacket, and his hair was all wild and he would just stare into my eyes and just sorta gently probe, and I think I told him a bit too much about myself and my breakup with David, because let’s be honest here, dudes don’t want to hear about exes. Also it’s just bad manners to talk about your ex on a date, you know? I have no idea why I’d even bring David up like that, it’s been forever and I’ve been over him for ages now. Anyway, he asked about my family, my friends, you, he asked about… oh my god, he asked about all the people who would notice if I went missing. Yeah, for real! I just now put that together, it’s all kinda hazy.
I had no idea at the time, his voice… it was just like honey dripping from his lips, and his gaze... he had these deep hazel eyes, I remember thinking they were the color of coffee with just a splash of milk, and they just pierced into my soul, you know? We were there walking around, browsing and talking, hell, we even hugged each other twice while we did… he was really warm. I remember now that he was just radiating heat, and it made me want to curl up next to him under a blanket while it’s raining outside and read some poems and stuff. I know, I know, he really got me, you’re right. He was my match! Jake was my match. It’s so fucked up.
He didn’t really reveal too much about himself, but everything that he did reveal just led to some additional suave thing. He’s the son of an art teacher, so that segued into a four block walk to an art museum. We were in there for another two hours, and by that point it was starting to get dark. He works for an engineering company so that translated into a walk down to the old water pumping station by the river, since the weather still held this last gasp of fall. Weird for late November to be this warm, right?
The one thing I didn’t like about him was that he’s a smoker. He’d hand-roll his own, uh, unfiltered cigarettes and then lights them with those wooden stick matches, so I STANK like smoke by the time I got home that night. No, I don’t put out on the first date! I could tell he really wanted me to come over to his place though. I had to take a shower before I went to bed. Yes, we kissed. I couldn’t not kiss him, he had some sort of, like, sway over me or something, I dunno. I’m just now starting to put all of this together, Sharon.
Okay so, I went on two more dates with Jake before The Date happened, one of which was a bust because the band that was booked at the brewery kinda sucked that night. I think the lead singer was on something, he was stumbling around and I’m pretty sure he fell at one point. Anyway, the bar we went to for the first, no, that’d be the second one, then the third was at the brewery, and then yesterday.
Honestly, didn’t learn too much more about him from those other two dates. He was raised by some religious sect which he fled twenty-something years ago, he won’t go into much detail about that. He was basically homeless for years before scraping up enough to start attending college for computers or something, I... I can’t really remember exactly what he said. I think I remember him saying something about him getting his BS just recently. Huh... what else I remember about him, is just how intensely he handled his cigarettes and those damned matches. He’d purposefully light a cigarette while he talked about how much he liked to write poetry and gave me some line like “we have to cradle our little flames close to ourselves, and sing songs of the bonfire to them”. Something like that. When he said it, it was beautiful but now it’s sorta slipping away, I mean, when I say it sounds dull, when he said it, there was this… light… in his words. Don’t look at me like that, I know I sound weird!
Okay so, The Date, it was the fourth date and I went over to his place. I was planning to get lucky this night, my winged eyeliner was on point and remember that vintage black velvet dress I wore to David's party last year? That little short thing with the plunging neckline? I wore that. Yeah, I know, it was so expensive! And it got fucking ruined. But damn, that dress on me was fire, and Jake noticed right away. So, I walk up to Jake’s house, and, Sharon, this house, fuck. It’s one of the few single family detached homes between the Sicilian Lake and Clover street and the train tracks. I honestly had no idea that little neighborhood existed, it’s basically the one enclave of not-urban-blight for dozens of blocks in every direction.
Wooded lanes and everything. His wasn’t the largest, but I think it had the biggest driveway AND a really tall iron fence around the property. A three story house in this city, and it had the cutest yellow window dressings, and he had a garden, and AAAHH dammit, he was so perfect for me; when I walked in he was playing Tom Waits and he got up, put his finger to his lips and welcomed me in. We just stood by the door and listened to it, then he whispered “that song is my spirit animal” and...I can’t remember which one it was! Oh. My. God. I hate my fucking life this is so fucked up. This is what I get for dating I should just stay single forever, Sharon!
Ugh, anyway, then he asked me take off my shoes and we walked hand in hand into this, just, ridiculous kitchen. Here, I have a picture of it. Oh my god, right? It’s so the kitchen of my dreams and I wish I could have just stolen the whole damned thing and walked off with it. So he walked me into the kitchen and then we started making dinner together, and it was… I mean, he pushed me up on the counter and he was kissing my neck and I couldn’t stop myself. We ended up fucking right there in the kitchen. Fried chicken croquettes, that’s what we were making. Have you ever done that with someone, and they keep touching you in that way you like, and they’re just SUPER into you, Sharon? Cooking is, so intimate... whoof, I’m getting shivers just thinking about it.
Then we ate, YES DINNER, SHARON, in the dining room. Ok, so let me tell you about this house. It’s gotta be one of the oldest in the area, it’s got two wrap-around porches on two floors, six bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, oh ho ho ho! Lemme tell you, the basement. That’s where the trouble began, and ended but- INVITATION TO THE BLUES! That’s the song that was playing when I walked in!
Okay so, this is where it gets fucked up. Oh, and he was smoking inside of his house, which was kinda gross and odd, right? Those wooden match packs everywhere, in every room. Anyway, we went upstairs to one of the bedrooms that had a bed in it. He just sorta led me around by the hand there was something so fucking enchanting about his voice and his eyes, and the way he would just slip past and caress me and I felt like putty in his hands. PUTTY, SHARON. There wasn’t something in the food that was making me feel weird, or maybe it was something in the candles he used on me, I think? I didn’t realize how weird it is to have a whole room full of ‘em, I think at the time, I just found it romantic. But in hindsight, it waaaas kind of creepy.
The art that he had was really weird too. I didn’t notice it at first but he had only one picture, and it was everywhere. Bosch something? It’s that big three-paneled painting of Eden, Creation, and Hell. Well... he had those three panels everywhere. Didn’t have any pictures of family or band posters or anything, it was just that creepy painting in every goddamned room. I shoulda just nope’d the fuck out the moment I saw the “candle” bedroom though. But I couldn’t, Sharon. He had me wrapped around his finger and I can’t shake how fucked up it felt. So, apparently, and I had to look this up, the outside of this ‘triptych’ painting shows Earth during creation. Well, the entire ceiling in that room was a fucking bas-relief carving of that. The Earth, during creation. There was something really, really wrong with it.
Yes, I was on my back when I saw it, Sharon, Jesus just let me tell my story! Okay so, he was kinda talkative and vocal during it and then I sorta noticed this figure on Pangaea, it looked like a little humanoid thing covered with spikes, but if it were to scale it would have been a dozen miles tall, and it was so clearly cleaving a swath through the landscape. And then I saw it again, and I looked this up as well to confirm it. Hieronymus Bosch, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights.’ I saw that same figure in the paintings when I snuck out later. But yes, we were fucking and he was just so warm and we were both getting really sweaty but then he… said something that I can
’t remember and I bit my cheek and then accidentally kneed him and that was that. He said he wasn’t upset but he did go out onto his balcony, the second floor one, to smoke. I took that opportunity to sneak out into the hall and look at the picture.
This figure, this THING that was in the paintings, but not in the original, was so clearly a giant, stretching out from beyond the horizon with these horrifying weird spiky growths that pierced the skin like some nightmarish chitinous fungal growth. This... thing... seemed to be in inordinate pain and everything else in the painting was acting like they were- Sex candles? One track mind Sharon. Oh right... yeah so, I came back in and flopped back onto the bed to try to not think about it and then I noticed that the candles were lit but Jake was still out on the balcony. I couldn’t see him but he must’ve been on his phone because I heard him talking. Something about more eyes, my burger, and something else about a church congregation taking him somewhere, I dunno, I didn’t want to spy on him too much. He was out there, and get this, for twenty six whole minutes. I fucking timed him. I had gone down into the kitchen to eat more of what we made, oh god it was so good.
I was about to open the door to the basement when I didn’t even hear him come up behind me and practically envelop me with his warmth and searching hands. “We should go back upstairs and do something fun” and again, I melted into his hands. Ok, so there was something weird going on with his voice every time he suggested something to me, Sharon, it was some kind of compulsion. Look, you know I don’t believe in “woo” and shit, but I can’t explain what happened in that house. I didn’t even realize it until afterwards, but every damned candle in that bedroom of his was a hand of glory. Look, I’ll show you, here, look at this. A fucking Hand of Glory, and I’m pretty damned sure now that they were the real fucking deal. Sure, I guess I just didn’t notice that there were actual peoples’ hands burning in the room. Sure, I guess I just didn’t notice it when he started drizzling the hot wax from these fucking corpse candles onto me.
OKAY, SO OF COURSE I didn’t recognize that he was tracing a design on my nude flesh, or that he ever so carefully used each of the candles on me. I dunno, it was like I was in a dream, it’s like I couldn’t really do anything but accept what was happening to me. I don’t know how many there were, I didn’t count them. There may have been twenty something. I can only remember a few weird details. After a while, I finally noticed that Jake had stopped making some kind of sibilant whispering noise when he suddenly yipped with unmistakable glee. Something about a match. My skin felt really funny, like it was loose and burning. My skin felt… runny. It was sick and it made me sick because the next thing I remember is throwing up all over the floor and then here’s where it gets real fucked up.
There was this big heavy rope piled up in the corner and I thought it was just another kink of Jake’s when I first saw it, but boy what a surprise it was when he fucking wrapped it around one of my arms and throat! I kinda saw red and lashed out and broke his grasp when I smashed his toes with my elbow, but then it felt like my arm was melting into the floor, so I threw myself off the bed, and rolled right under it and kept on going until I was at the door to the outside balcony. I barely got to my feet as I saw Jake limping out of the room and start heading down the stairs.
All right, I know you know I wasn’t about to let this fucker do this weird shit to me, but I felt like I was way too high to even fucking move. I lurched forward and through the bedroom, threw up down the stairwell and I think I nailed him with it too. I heard him limping back downstairs and then he started moving towards the basement door, which was through the kitchen. I was having a hard time not falling over at this point, Sharon, and I had no idea what I was doing, but that deep fryer we used to make the chicken? Well that oil burned the shit out of Jake when I threw the damn thing at him.
I could hear him screeching when he fell down a flight of wooden stairs. He fell for what seemed like an eternity then I could hear him, his voice, calling out. I was almost delirious so I opened the door to the right of me. It was like being blackout drunk plus your skin is sloughing off in rivulets. Remember that time we were being hazed as pledges to our sorority and they covered us in KY Jelly? Right! It took forever to wash that shit out of my hair! Well, It was like that but a million times worse. Anyway, so, I’m stumbling around all faded, and managed to grab the first thing that looked heavy, and found it was heavy. And full of gasoline.
Oh shit I--yeah, the fucking paintings. So, I was delirious and that thing in the pictures, it was moving. It wasn’t watching me, no, but I could begin to hear the clatter, the chittering clinking of chitin, a terrible scraping and ripping sound begin to hum in the air around me. It was from those protrusions coming from within the giant in the painting.
Jake was down in the dark, and it sounded like he was frantically screaming at his phone. It sounded so weird, it almost sounded like some kind of... deformed... giant… mewling and wailing but I could hear some of the words. I could hear that I had to leave now before Jake’s friends show up. I could hear that I was some kind of match for a portal. THE MATCH, he said, for a portal. I think I saw it too, in the basement, on the floor, right at the end before the smoke got to be too much.
Okay so, if you have this thing, and it’s full of gas, and you’re out of your goddamn mind, and you have a bridge that you don’t want to be a bridge anymore, what do you do? You fucking burn it. Jake must’ve been laying on one of the stairs because as the two gallons of gas poured down the steps his shrieking increased in volume and definitely became directed at me. I emptied the can and then realized that I didn’t have anything to burn it with. I turned, and that’s when he grabbed me.
I woke back up just as the fucking...I mean this was like a guillotine Sharon. This thing, this fucking fucker had a setup for cutting off people’s hands nice and clean, oh oh… oh, Sharon and I mean, I know you can see, but he took my hand Sharon, that psycho-cult-worshiping-fucking-psycho-asshole took my fucking hand! But I got him one better.
I don’t know how I got loose, or how I fucking hit him, or what, but the fumes from the gas and my temporary state of insanity, ugh and my skin was just glopping off, fuck. I can tell that it’s not, but Sharon. I can remember one last thing. I made it back up the stairs.
And then, from the darkness I heard Jake gargle and spit before bleating a wounded “You think I’m the only one doing this? There are hundreds of us! You’re not stopping a single thing by-” I shut his fucking face up with the empty gas can from the top of the stairs. And the last thing I said to that fucker?
"Is this your match?"
& is for Ampersand
Christopher Maxim
There was once a small business in New England by the name of "Grovewood & Co.". It existed for roughly seven months; from April 27th to November 22nd, in the year 1913. At least, that's true for one timeline. I'll touch more on that later.
Masquerading as a cape-side souvenir shop, most of Grovewood & Co.'s customers were oblivious to the store's true nature. Only the rich elite were granted access to their secret arsenal of products. You see, during the brief period of time that they were operational, the company collected, tinkered with, branded, and sold various objects, each one of which had otherworldly properties, giving their owner a unique power, supernatural in nature. How they acquired such artifacts, no one knows.
On 11/22/13, in its original timeline, the building vanished without a trace. Not only from sight, but from the memory of everyone who had ever interacted with it - like it never existed in the first place. It seems the building and its inhabitants fell victim to an object malfunction, more specifically a temporal hiccup caused by a time travel device as it was being sold (the origin of this anomaly is more than likely a defense mechanism of the device itself. It would appear that some of these objects are sentient to some extent and can "flee" when they detect a nearby threat. That's all I'm at liberty to say about this particular event).
So, where did Grovewoo
d & Co. unwillingly relocate to? That's a loaded question. The building, it seems, is constantly jumping from place to place, year to year, and timeline to timeline. It's a bitch to track down, but with a little luck and great deal of skill, I'm able to do my job just fine. What is my job, you ask? Well, I'm responsible for keeping the building and its objects from destroying the multiverse as we know it. You know, the usual 9-5 bullshit.
In all honesty, I'm a lowly office peon where I'm from. There are people getting paid a hell of a lot more than I am doing much more important work. All I do is tap into the Multiversal Time Grid™ and post messages in timelines where the building is likely to show up, in the hopes that some might believe me and heed my words of wisdom, should they need them. BUT DON'T WORRY. There are greater precautionary measures in place. This is just a small, added measure of protection.
(NOTE So far, the building has been spotted in 432 locations. Exactly twenty-six timelines were discovered to be worthy candidates for the next jump. Twenty-five of those are now considered safe. Your world is #26)
Without further ado, here is my warning:
***
HELLO. I AM HERE TO WARN YOU.
Your timeline has been deemed a likely landing zone for Grovewood & Co. Though we can't pinpoint the precise date or location of the impending dispatch, we can tell you what to look for and how to avoid total annihilation at the hands of an object.
The building will take the place of another building in your town. You won't remember the previous building, and you'll know Grovewood & Co. as if it was always there, as will its workers. Upon entering, you might feel like something's not quite right. Though it exists in your memories, part of your brain may fight the narrative and make it feel increasingly unfamiliar. If you're lucky, you may even recall this post and some of its details. We can only hope.
