Aberrations of Reality

by Aaron J. French

  Then the lake starts to tremble, just like he knew it would. He knew he hadn’t imagined the girls. They were out there somewhere, biding their time. Waiting for him.

  They weren’t going to let him off that easy.

  Because once you see a legend you instantly became a part of it. You never get to go and tell your friends. Not if you really see it. Not if you really get a glimpse into the unknown.

  He paddles faster but it’s useless. The oars pass through air, not even coming close to the surface of the lake. There’s no resistance whatsoever. He’s just winding back and forth, going nowhere, the metal hinges squealing and scratching.

  The boat begins to spin. Light erupts from underneath, highlighting the black water. He realizes he’s not even on the lake anymore, and stops paddling. Round and round he goes. The oars are wrenched from their holes, bent, torn out, cast aside.

  Round and round—round and round. The trees and mountains flashing by, gone, flashing by again. He feels sick. The beer is churning in his stomach, and before he can stop himself, he vomits. Is splattered with his own mess. Shutting his eyes, he fastens his hands to the bench, but in a whirl of confusion the sky dumps on end.

  He’s falling. Arms up, legs up. He thinks he’s screaming, but can’t tell if that’s his voice or someone else’s. In his mind he calls his father’s name. Beseeching, begging, pleading for his assistance. But all that comes back to him is darkness… and the sound of two weeping girls.

  He’s dashed into cold wetness, seized by tiny claws, dragged downward. Has he opened his eyes? Yes he has, but it’s still dark. Darkness everywhere now.

  A light. Rising. Ringed with bubbles and sinewy water currents. Long blond strands, snaking lengths of grass, bobbing reeds. They’re coming up to meet him, those two dead lights, two dead girls who used to be one—who aren’t really supposed to be at all.

  But I did it, he thinks, goddamn you, you little bitches, I did it! I caught my father’s fish! Do you hear me?! I caught his fish!

  More bubbles swirl around him; he’s drawn down, deeper into a watery blackness. Twin mouths open like twin dead fish. Teeth or rocks piled high, jumbled, sprawling about and below.

  There you are, Pop; thought I’d find you here, cleaning the catch of the day. What’s that? You want me to carry you up the side of that pyramid? Sure thing, Pop, anything for you. After all, you are the Pharaoh, are you not? And me, well… I am but a lowly Israelite.

  FLAME OF FREEDOM

  The thing dragged itself toward the building of Holtz and Associates. When Pete Ackerwood’s eyes first registered it, he lapsed for a moment and remembered the dream he’d had the night before.

  In the dream, he was running from something unseen at his ankles, nipping at the flesh of his calves. He’d awoken with a dreadful cry. Tearing the covers back to look at his legs, he’d sent Jemma lunging furiously to her feet shouting, “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter?”

  Nothing had been the matter. It was only a nightmare. And his legs were fine, not a single scratch on them. So they had gone back to sleep. But in the morning the feeling, the terror of the dream remained with him all the way to his office building of Holtz and Associates.

  So it happened like that: instantaneously, his mind vaulting back and forth between two states of consciousness—waking and dreaming—at the exact moment his eyes trained upon the crawling thing. He smelled burning chemicals and told himself he was imagining it. Dreams were funny in that they rattled in your head for a while, refusing to re-submerge into the unconscious.

  But when the thing didn’t disappear, he leaned forward with his face to the glass. What the hell?

  He stood at the window of his office, looking outside and watching the thing. Several possibilities flipped through his mind: a homeless man, a drunk who might’ve been hit by a car; a wounded animal escaped from the zoo; someone’s idea of a joke, a gag to frighten people and get captured on film, then later uploaded to YouTube; maybe someone actually was filming a movie in the gardens, and he had been too groggy this morning to notice the cordons.

  The thing resembled all these possibilities…

  … and it resembled none of them.

  Fear entered his heart.

  The thing reached the parking lot. Slinking, inching, clawing its way closer. The window to his office seemed to lie directly in its path. He was thinking that maybe he should leave, get out of the building… just in case.

  His cell phone rang, startling him. With great effort, he turned his attention away from the window.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.” It was Jemma. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t get back to sleep until almost 4:30 in the morning after your little screaming fit—”

  “You told me that already.” They’d had a fight about it over breakfast.

  “If you’d let me finish… once I did fall back asleep, I had a dream—a nightmare—which I didn’t tell you about.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, and I didn’t think it was a big deal, but it keeps bothering me, so I thought that if I told you about it I could get it off my chest.”

  “So tell me.”

  There was a pause, then Jemma continued, “Okay, but I warn you to brace yourself.”

  “Oh come on, how bad could it be, especially after the nightmare I had? You know, my ‘screaming fit’ as you called it?”

  “I was cheating on you.”

  She was right. It was bad.

  “Still there, Pete?”

  He swallowed—gulp—“Uh-huh.”

  “So there’s a new guy here at work. Dan O’Banyon. Yeah, so he’s cute, and yeah. so we’ve talked a little bit, but that’s all.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyway, he’s married too, as far as I know. He’s got a ring. In the dream, he and I were having an affair, and then you caught us in some dirty hotel going at it like dogs.”

  Pete caught the image and felt sick to his stomach. His skin crawled.

  “I was just about to orgasm—you know like how you do in a dream—when you barged in and stopped the show. You had a shotgun, and you were very angry.”

  He grimaced. “Damn right I’d be angry.”

  “You shot Dan right in the face and blew his brains all over the wood headboard. Then I hurled myself at you, wanting to claw your eyes out or something, when suddenly Dan’s mutilated corpse slides off the bed, crawls across the floor, curls right up to your feet, and—I dunno—he starts making out with your feet or something, using his gristly, broken-jawed bloody mouth, and then your feet begin to dissolve as if he was pouring acid on them. God, it was awful.”

  He didn’t know what to say. His stomach felt like the La Brea Tar Pits, and he rummaged through his top desk drawer, searching for the bottle of antacids.

  He muttered something in agreement with how awful it was. Suddenly she said, “Oh crap, gotta go, Mr. Leeds is coming and he’s been on our asses lately about making personal calls during work hours. But you forgive me, right? For the dream? Talk to you soon.”

  The line went dead. He lit a cigarette, knowing that smoking was not allowed in the workplace. Pete put his cell phone down, and tried to arrange the pieces together. There was certainly a connection—his dream, her dream, this ankle/feet thing—but hell if he knew what it was. His mind was racing.

  And then there was the thing outside—

  Remembering it, he was about to turn back toward the window when his office door burst open and there was John Holtz, his boss. A tall man with a barrel chest, Holtz always wore expensive Valentino suits, even on Casual Fridays. The boss had this Miami Vice air about him that women seemed to love, but which drove Pete insane.

  “Hey Pete, how’s it going, my man?” Holtz plopped authoritatively down in the chair across the desk.

  Pete extinguished his cigarette, knowing how Holtz hated them. The smoldering smell turned Pete’s guts. The man glanced at it, as though he wanted to say something, as if his own guts were turning,
but he remained quiet.

  “What’s up?” Pete said.

  Holtz sighed. “Well, you know I hate having to do this…”

  Suddenly Pete understood, and the knot in his stomach grew tighter. He listened for about ten minutes or so to Holtz reprimanding him—in Holtz’s sneaky, passive-aggressive way—for a host of reasons, principally his failure to complete the data entry forms on time, for the fact that he hadn’t gotten his entire list of “activities” completed these last couple weeks, not to mention his being late that one time several weeks ago, and well… Holtz hoped it wouldn’t happen again because he prided himself on running a tight ship… and one hole in the bulkhead led to one more hole, and so on and so on, until the ship sank…

  Pete listened patiently as he always did whenever Holtz came in his office, which was two or three times a month. Usually Pete hadn’t even done any of the stuff Holtz would complain about, and that had driven Pete crazy when he first started. It’d taken him a few months to realize it was just something Holtz did in his role as president of the company, like a captain monitoring the morale of his crew—though in the case of Holtz and Associates, the morale was supposed to be kept low, or at least in dire straits. It was sick, but Pete had gotten used to it.

  He listened until Holtz finished. Then (and he knew this was a fuck you statement but he didn’t care) he lit another cigarette and blew a smoke ring. “You got it, boss,” he said.

  Holtz acted as though he was going to have a fit about the cigarette, then abruptly his eyes flicked past Pete to the window, and he said, “What the hell is that?”

  Pete’s fear blossomed. He knew what Holtz was seeing. For a moment he had blissfully forgotten, but now it swam back into his mind: the thing scudding its way toward the building.

  He wasn’t sure if it was preferable that Holtz was seeing it too, if that made him less crazy, or if the fact that Holtz saw it too made it more crazy, made the whole world crazy. He steeled himself for total destruction and turned toward the window.

  The thing was gone. What Holtz was referencing was a squat homeless woman dressed in rags, pushing a shopping cart filled with bags and junk, with a makeshift flag of some sort poking up through the jumble.

  “Man, the losers they got in this town,” Holtz commented, making a whistling sound.

  Pete had the wild thought that he actually missed the thing, that he had expected it to be there, and wanted it even, and now that it wasn’t there, the effect caused a trauma. Now he had no idea what was happening or even what was real.

  “Yeah, quite the crop of losers,” Pete muttered, chewing on the filter of his cigarette. And when he turned again, Holtz was heading out the door.

  “Put out the cigarette, bud,” the man said before disappearing. “Against the rules.”

  Pete found himself alone.

  He toyed with the possibility of getting some work done but Holtz’s sudden appearance pretty much ensured he wouldn’t do a fucking thing the remainder of the day. It was, perhaps, a streak of rebellion, but he allowed himself this one character flaw. After all, he’d become one of the fastest working employees in the entire company since he started, with leading sales for three consecutive months at one point. The way he saw it, he had earned a little slack time.

  He turned again to the window with a screen of smoke before his eyes. And through the glass he saw it. He squinted. Was it…? Yes, it was back. Goddamn it, there it was. Not only that, but it was closer.

  Much closer.

  Terror. Panic. Dread.

  Run?

  He was positive that less than sixty seconds ago it had not been there. Holtz would have seen it too, but neither of them had seen anything. Now there it was, humped upon itself in a pile of misshapen black clods, like a Rorschach image come to life. Creeping liquidly across the asphalt of the parking lot, slipping between the cars…

  Coming for him.

  Now there was a paranoid thought. What had he ever done to deserve the retribution of a black distortion of psychosis? Did it exist inside his head? If not, surely Holtz would’ve seen it.

  Maybe he was losing his mind.

  But what were the implications of that? Did it mean he was working too much? In need of more sleep? A problem with Jemma, with their relationship?

  True: All of the above.

  But none of his doubts changed anything. The thing was still out there and getting closer, it was heading toward his office window, coming for him.

  He reminded himself to breathe.

  It was on the lawn of the front courtyard now, weaving between the stone benches, the flowering dogwoods, and the cement planters with shrubs of various genera leaning out. The sunlight struck the earth in a bright vision of fire, glinting off its back, casting out rings of diamond-like shards in tiny bursts. Pete thought he saw faces in that dark: his mom, his dad, his older brother Andy, Jemma, a couple of old girlfriends, even himself.

  He extinguished his smoke and turned away from the window. “Damn it!” he shouted, surprised by his own anger. He struck the top of his desk just for the sheer satisfaction of feeling his hand smart against the wood. He took a deep breath, tried to get himself under control, and hung his head. He was losing it. The fear was frying his nerves.

  That’s when a scratching sound drew his attention. His heart stopped, blood running cold. As rigid as a mannequin, he returned to the window. But the thing was gone. The quiet city scene of North Philly played itself out with becalmed regularity: cars whizzed past Thirty-Fourth Street and pedestrians in the gardens meandered about while the sounds of river boats honked in the distance.

  He leaned closer to the windowsill, inching his way forward, until his nose nearly touched the glass. Where the hell was it? Did he imagine it—

  A long wispy rope of black ichor flung itself up, slapping against the glass.

  “Jesus!” he cried, leaping back and slamming into his chair.

  Another rope joined the other, then more, until a bouquet of shadowy tentacles wove in front of the window, pressing in on it. The tentacles merged, growing globular, encouraging the black stuff to gather, pooling above the sill, until a grand portion had encompassed all the glass, eclipsing the outer world.

  The office darkened. Pete became a Gothic statue standing next to his chair.

  His cell phone rang.

  He groped for it in the darkness, just as the faces began appearing in the black canvas, the images of smashed children, smashed relationships, smashed broken family, his beloved Jemma looking scornful.

  Dear God, please save me from myself.

  “Hello?”

  “So I’ve been thinking,” Jemma said. “I know I told you about my dream, but—”

  “But what?” His free hand clasped around the lighter, gripping it like the hilt of a blade, when suddenly the glass split with a violent crack, and he jumped, nearly dumping the phone. A stream of black essence poured tarlike into the office, insinuating itself through the spaces in the glass.

  “I think there’s more I need to tell you…”

  “What is it?”

  “Are you okay? You sound weird.”

  “I’m fine, now talk.”

  “Jeez, no need to be a jerk. This is difficult for me.”

  As she began explaining to him her situation—confessing it to him, he thought—that she and the new fellow at work had done a lot more than simply “talk a little bit” (hence her related dream), the black stain upon this world impressed itself fully into the office, blooming before him like a demonic flower. He watched it weave like a psychotic undersea plant of pure dementia, with the faces from his life looking back at him.

  “Great pain… great misery…” he muttered into the receiver, before dropping it.

  “What’s that? I said it’s over, Pete!” came the muffled reply.

  “I’m sick and tired of my life.”

  The black appendages came at him like a clawed lion’s paw. He held out the lighter, thumbing it to glittering life. The
tentacles retracted, then came back with a roaring intensity.

  “And I hate my job,” he said. Now his heart was breaking. Something about the conversation he’d just had with Jemma… but he couldn’t remember what. Why did it feel like his insides were melting?

  The folds of the thing caught fire, turning into the flaming pyre of Lucifer, engulfing him in a watery web of dreamlike delirium. He flamed up with it, two balls of inferno, and down they went together into the caverns of the underworld.

  He screamed, but the black shot down his throat, silencing him, suffocating him. It invaded his eyes, blinding him. He fell back, jerking into the arms of some savage primeval god, and it gathered up his calves and began to gnaw on them like a dog gnaws a bone, until they had been picked clean of flesh, and at the bottom of this well of pain he splashed into the waters of his own salvation, taking up his lighter to the rest, until the whole effigy of his polluted past had been torched into ashes… and he was free.

  RAMIFICATIONS OF EMBRACE

  On Friday I met Darcia at a downtown coffee shop.

  November. Ice cold, with a sky like melting ruin. A crispness to the air, and a brightness to those streets bejeweled with snow patches.

  I saw her through the glass before I entered. Who was she really, and why was I allowing myself to get this close? She knew I was married and yet we were meeting in the chilly afternoon hours, prepared to drink hot coffee and chat and gaze into each other’s eyes, perhaps brush knees under the table… perhaps more.

  “Hello,” I said, sitting down.

  Her hazel eyes twinkled. “Hello yourself. Glad you came.”

  A young man in a stained brown apron approached the table. Darcia and I ordered a fresh pot of coffee then sat sipping the hot liquid, exchanging glances over the rims of our mugs.

  “I had a dream,” I said.