by Susan May
“How long before it closes?” Peter asked, thinking he’d dine out for years on this story.
“Fifteen twenty-one and thirty-two seconds. Please. Now. Help. We are near. Other side of vehicle-way. Please. You will take me?”
Peter stared at his watch. Strangely, the second hand seemed to tick more slowly as though at the mere mention of an interstellar portal time suddenly changed. He looked across the road to where she kept glancing. All the traffic had come to a standstill. People were out of their cars milling around, confused.
He looked back at the girl; her eyes found his. Again, he was struck by the strange glow. It had intensified.
Drugs? It had to be drugs.
He’d seen something like this with angel dust. Not quite this, but God knows what they put in the shit these days. This one, and her sister—clone, ha ha—would awaken in hospital later with the worst hangover of their lives. That’s if this one survived.
Regardless of her illusions, the fact now stood her imaginary portal would close in—he checked his watch again—seven minutes and twenty seconds. In her condition, her body so mutilated, she wasn’t going anywhere. Least of all across the road in that time, whether he helped her or not.
When Peter looked up from his watch, he saw she was now unconscious. Laying there, her eyes closed, she now looked like an ordinary, terribly injured, young woman. Nothing alien about her. He must be in shock himself for that thought to cross his mind.
Three minutes later, the ambulance arrived, and the medics raced over to them. Quickly, they began attending to her.
No longer needed, Peter stood, and backed away. He stood alone, off to the side, watching the men work on her, checking her vitals, placing a brace around her neck, before gently moving her on to a stretcher.
Peter checked his watch again.
Three-nineteen.
Without consciously making the decision, he walked across the road, moving between the still-milling people and the stationary cars. Nobody paid him any heed. The spectacle of the accident was all consuming. Reaching the other side, he climbed the concrete barricade, and then carefully slid-walked down the ten-foot grass incline beyond.
He now found himself in a small, open area, surrounded by trees and shrubs. He stopped, rotating on the spot as he scanned the vista.
What the hell was he thinking? Did he really expect some kind of alien portal? Really? The accident, the shock, shit, he’d need to get a check up because he even considered checking here.
His first thought when he saw the golden flash was lightning. He caught the vision from the corner of his eye, off fifty feet away just before a clump of trees at the edge of the glade. He raised his hand to his brow, thinking it was some kind of reflection from a car mirror from the highway.
He took a few steps forward and stopped, blinking. There was something there.
Actually something there. Not a reflection, at all.
Two blonde women—identical to the two on the freeway—stood, unmoving, staring at him. They dressed in brilliant, white suits that clung to their bodies like a second skin. Between them, hovered a shimmering, gold orb about the size of a Chinese gong.
A sudden brilliant color burst exploded outward from the sphere, piercing his eyes. Peter’s hands flew to his face. His palms dug into his eyes, pushing at the sharp pain.
Seconds later, when he opened them again, he was just in time to see the blonde pair step together, hover, as if frozen in space, before disappearing inside the glow as if forcefully pulled.
Then the image was gone. No glow. No golden light. No women. Just trees and grass and shrubs, and the sounds of emergency vehicles behind him.
Instinctively, he glanced at his watch. Three twenty-two.
The portal had closed.
Peter shook his head determinedly, as though the motion would somehow remove the image from his mind.
What the hell?
He rubbed his forehead and looked around. Nobody was there. Nobody had seen what he’d seen. Slowly, he turned and walked back to the road. His mind filled with just one thought: shock sure can mess with your mind.
Desperately, he hoped that was true.
© 2011 Susan May
From the Imagination Vault
It’s a while ago since I wrote this story. Desperate was one of the first stories I wrote in 2010, after deciding to pursue my life-long dream of a writing career. As I write this Imagination Vault five years later, I can still vividly remember watching the YouTube video which inspired it. https://youtu.be/47ZUI1TMoaU
During the edit for inclusion in this Behind Dark Doors collection, I re-watched the video. Intriguingly, and to my horror, I now learn two days after the video, one of these women went on to murder a man who’d taken the least injured of the sisters in to his home. A 2012 documentary details the entire incident and aftermath. https://youtu.be/9-bIWm08eJc
Warning: Both these videos include violence and swearing and are very disturbing.
More information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_and_Sabina_Eriksson
When I saw the initial video, the only explanation that seemed logical was a mind-altering drug. As it turned out, the truth was even more bizarre. The Swedish twins Ursula and Sabina Eriksson suffered from a rare psychiatric disorder folie à deux, a shared psychosis, in which Ursula’s delusional beliefs were transmitted to her sister Sabina.
Sabina, the lesser injured of the two, was released from court two days after the incident. On the same day, she went on to murder Glenn Hollinshead, a generous man simply trying to help her. He’d been walking his dog with a friend and came upon the woman behaving oddly. Worried for her, he offered her assistance and somewhere to stay overnight. The next morning, for his trouble, she stabbed him to death with a kitchen knife.
Fascinating and horrible in equal proportions.
When I wrote Desperate, the event had just occurred, and even though I Googled for days in 2010, I found no answers. This story was my science-fiction explanation of why two people would behave so bizarrely. Mine is fantasy, but the real life story still sounds just as fantastical. Who knows what is the truth. All I’m left with is, sometimes, fact is definitely stranger than fiction.
Gone
On a rainy night, Crystal’s husband disappears while fetching their car. She waits outside the theater they’ve just left, wondering why he’s taking so long. Should she go in search of him or will they pass and miss each other on the way? Her mind races with the terrible possibilities that may have befallen him. The truth is far more terrible than she can imagine.
Where the hell was John?
Crystal checked her watch yet again. She’d waited now for over twenty minutes, and irritability was rapidly biting into her happy mood.
She’d spent the waiting time dodging exiting theatergoers wielding umbrellas like oversized shields and being shoved by manic pedestrians who had developed a wild herd mentality due to the sudden downpour.
Ignoring the rain, Crystal moved to the edge of the pavement, craning her neck to look up and down the bustling street to better spot John’s car when he finally made his way back. Red and orange taillights winked and flashed as cars stopped and started, slowly passing the entrance to the theater. Horns honked their owner’s objections as vehicles merged in the traffic like a herd of weary elephants embarking on a trek. Despite the fresh rain, the smell of the congestion still permeated the air in a steaming, toxic mist.
Every few minutes Crystal ducked her head beyond the cover of the theater awning, hoping she would see their car in the traffic, John motioning for her to run to him. The front of her dress was now soaked, and she kept pulling at the bodice that clung to her skin like an uncomfortable wet t-shirt. Her carefully straightened hair had curled to a feral frizz.
Lightning flashed ominously, followed shortly by the cracking boom of thunder, while rain hurled down in sheets, as if the sky had something to prove. Now her hands were beginning to numb, and Crystal wished she
had accompanied John to the car. She’d ended up soaked anyway, and at least she wouldn’t have been here, wondering where he’d gone.
She had wanted to go with him.
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” he’d insisted. “You can’t run in those shoes, and there’s no sense both of us getting wet.”
Kissing her gently, he’d turned away. After momentarily pausing to pull up the collar of his trench coat to shroud his ears, he’d taken off, leaning into the rain and wind, dodging and weaving between the traffic and crowd, until he was lost from Crystal’s view.
It was just like John to take care of her; he was such a thoughtful husband. They’d serendipitously met three years ago while in line at an A.T.M. From then on, it was as though they’d settled in their own special world.
He was her perfect man—darkly good-looking, even-tempered, and attentive to a fault. The only small niggle came courtesy of her nagging mother’s continual comments.
“It’s peculiar, his lack of friends, don’t you think, love?”
“What about his family? Where are they? Are we ever going to meet them?”
She knew her mother had her best interests at heart, but Crystal wished she would mind her own business. Everything was so perfect; she didn't need her mother’s seeds of doubt to take root.
“So, he’s private,” Crystal countered. “At least I don’t have to deal with a difficult mother-in-law… like he does.”
Even his work was fascinating. He was a climatologist, passionate about protecting the environment. His work focused on minimizing and even reversing man’s abuse of natural resources. Carbon emissions, the poor choices humanity made in energy production, and the warning signs of the breakdown of Earth’s ecological cycles were regular dinner-talk topics. He’d even written several well-received essays on the collusion of the G8 governments to misinform the world of the precarious position in which their policies had placed humanity.
When he wasn’t travelling to some far-flung country for study or research, he worked from their little study. If he wasn’t with her, then he was at his desk checking data, refining his research, and collaborating with other scientists across the globe, pooling their research.
At catch-ups, her girlfriends would regularly regale the group with stories of their husbands’ inadequacies, but Crystal never joined in. She had no complaints. As the girls gossiped, just occasionally Crystal’s mind would wander to the one slightly odd thing about John. It wasn’t a fault, but more a peculiar fixation. Certainly, it was nothing so serious she felt compelled to complain about it or share with the girls.
The alien thing.
That’s what she’d labeled it. It was harmless enough. In fact, it was almost laughable. Her sensible, scientific-genius husband had formed an intense fascination with alien abductions.
At first, she was intrigued, but eventually her interest faded to a bewildered acceptance when she realized he honestly and passionately believed aliens came down and took people away. Their crammed bookshelves bore homage to his beliefs. She would so often find him reading and watching documentaries on the subject it crossed her mind, perhaps, he had been an abductee. That was, of course, if she believed in aliens—and she didn’t.
Sometimes at night, as they held each other, just before she fell asleep, she would gaze deep into his eyes, searching for an answer. Here was a brilliant technological mind, that had created ground-breaking mathematical equations capable of deciphering complex weather patterns, and yet this same mind believed steadfastly in aliens.
She would see something in his eyes—anguish—as if his mind were travelling somewhere distant to confront something wild and fearful. At these times she would jokingly ask if he was off with the aliens. His usual reply was to hug her tight, smile, and say, “It would take more than aliens to separate us.”
Tonight, though, it had only taken rain.
Random shivers shook Crystal’s body, as she pondered the irony of being married to a man who studied the climate, only to find herself in a storm without an umbrella.
She checked her watch again. 11:10.
Thirty minutes had elapsed, and that was too long. Reaching into her bag, she fumbled for her phone. It wasn’t there. She moved back toward the building, away from the street, and double-checked. Standing hunched over in the bright glare of the theater’s outside lights, she systematically checked each compartment, pulling and pushing the bag’s contents.
No phone.
Then, in her mind, she saw the damn thing sitting in its charger on the kitchen bench; she remembered she’d decided she wouldn’t need it. She cursed herself. Of all the nights.
While she pondered the irony of her situation, the thought something was wrong entered her head. It slipped in like a wisp of smoke sneaks under a door. Her mind conjured the image of two cars skidding on the wet, dark road, brakes screaming as they collided at an intersection. An ambulance, its siren heralding its mission, sped toward the injured drivers. In her imagination she saw John lifted onto a gurney, lifeless, bleeding, alone and dying, while she futilely waited for a man who would never arrive. Her throat tightened at the thought.
But she’d heard no sirens. Surely she would hear sirens with the car parked only a few blocks away. She scolded herself for allowing her imagination to get away from her. Then she cursed the rain. Then she cursed herself for forgetting the phone. Their wonderful evening at the theater was rapidly becoming an emotional roller coaster she did not want to ride.
A metal door slammed behind Crystal. Her body jumped and her heart kicked. A woman laughed loudly, the sound followed by several voices babbling excitedly. She swung around toward the sounds and saw several people emerge in a huddle of camaraderie from the side entrance of the theater. Recognizing one of the male actors, Crystal nodded as they passed by her. The actor smiled back, then continued his conversation with the other young woman while he opened an umbrella, attempting to shield the three of them as they crossed the street. Crystal watched them enviously. Even an actor had thought to bring an umbrella.
As they disappeared around the corner of the theater, Crystal saw the rain had eased, the torrential rain reduced to flurries of imperceptible watery threads. She looked up at the dark, threatening sky and saw the abatement was most likely only temporary. If she was going to make an attempt to follow John to the car, this was her opportunity.
The thought John might already be on his way made her pause. What if he’d simply been delayed by a chance meeting with someone he knew? Or he could have been stopped by a phone call; they didn’t have hands-free in the car. For all she knew he was already on his way back—maybe even just around the corner.
Then darker thoughts brought their own argument: a mugging; John slipping, falling, and injuring himself. Then she had the sudden flash of a crazy image of the sharp beam of an alien ship filling the car; John ensnared by a blue light pulling him outward and upward.
The absurdity of the thought shook her into action. She would go crazy standing here with these crazy ideas running through her head. As if pushed, she lurched from the pavement, hurrying across the slick black street, glancing left and right as she went, hoping against hope she would sight John’s car. Grasping the lapels of her blue jacket, she clenched it closed as she hurried past other pedestrians who’d also decided to make a run for it.
She reached the other side, turning to take one final look before leaving the theater behind and taking off at a slow trot in the same direction she had seen John leave. There were still many people on the streets, forcing her to dodge and weave to keep up her hurried pace. A gray-faced man with a grim mouth, wearing a black beanie, sideswiped her as they passed each other, bumping her backward and causing her to momentarily lose her footing. She turned, expecting an apology, but received only his retreating hunched back.
Rain turned people into creatures no longer participating in the etiquette of life. That wouldn’t happen with John. He had manners rain or shine, cold or hot. He was consid
erate—not just of her, but that same consideration extended to the planet.
“Every choice we make impacts our neighbors and the Earth,” he often said. It was the reasoning behind the myriad of lifestyle choices he made. His passion easily convinced her to adapt to a carbon-footprint minimization lifestyle. They’d traded their car for a Prius hybrid, designed their new house to epitomize green power, and even turned their courtyard into a small hydroponic garden utilizing solar energy and gray water.
They’d even considered taking the train tonight, but changed their mind when it began to rain. Now she regretted that choice, for if they had gone by train they wouldn’t have separated, and she wouldn’t be running around the darkened streets of the city in the wet.
Two blocks disappeared behind her splashing footsteps. With each step her anxiety grew, not just because she was worried about John but because to her the city never felt safe at night. The tall buildings unnerved her. Their gray, hard facades felt aloof and judgmental, as if all the giant buildings were malevolently looking down upon her, just as John must imagine aliens looking down upon their planet.
How stupid, thought Crystal… Aliens looking down upon them? She really needed to get a grip, and do it before she found John.
Finally, after what felt like miles of running but which was only a few blocks, Crystal felt relief at the sight of the luminous, flashing “24 hour parking” sign up ahead. Below it, white and red-splotched reflections glowed in the glistening sidewalk. She stopped beneath it, at the entrance to the parking facility, and glanced around, once again searching for John or the car. It was uppermost in her mind how easy it would be for them to bypass each other.
A couple passed her. From behind, she heard the automatic glass doors of the parking structure glide open as they entered. She couldn’t stand there forever. So, with a final check, she turned and followed them inside.
