Apexology: Horror

by Anthology

  “Good morning.” She says. She’s got a great voice. “Come here.”

  I come there. She pulls me in and kisses me. But there’s something in her eye. Her thoughts are elsewhere. I draw back. I want to ask what’s wrong.

  Suddenly she pulls out a knife from behind her back and lunges me, plunging it into my chest. I yell, first from surprise, then from the pain. I leap back. The knife is lodged in my ribs. Blood geysers out of the wound. It hurts to breathe. I’m not prepared. This isn’t how I wanted to go. My heart! My heart hurts! I look down—

  There’s no knife. I stand there, panting. No knife, no hole in my chest, no blood anywhere. I look at her. She’s either asleep or faking it. She shifts slightly, probably from the noise I made, but she’s still asleep.

  Whatever this was, it was not a dream. I’m standing. I don’t dream standing up. I screamed, and she heard it. The pain was real, although now it’s gone.

  She probably still has the knife.

  I pull the covers and search for a knife. There isn’t any sort of weapon anywhere. Either she hid it, or this was one of my false memories. I’m still breathing hard. She’s still asleep.

  I sit back down and tell myself that it doesn’t matter. I gave up long ago trying to understand what’s really happening. The past never makes sense. Weird things keep happening. Sometimes they resolve, sometimes they desolve.

  I wonder if she’s really here.

  She’s asleep. I’ll wait. Maybe she’ll disappear.

  4.

  She doesn’t disappear.

  She wakes up again. It’s been an hour since she tried to stab me.

  She looks at me and smiles. Oh, what a gorgeous smile!

  “Good morning,” she says. She’s still got a great voice.

  “Good morning,” I say. Dangerous as she may be, I can’t help but smile back.

  She stretches. My heart leaps. But I don’t dare come too close. I learn from experience.

  “Did you try to stab me?”

  Her forehead crinkles, and she squints slightly. She’s still wearing that smile, though. “No,” she says simply.

  She could be lying. I choose to believe her.

  “Do you walk through walls?”

  She laughs. “No.” Damn.

  “Do you sell life insurance?”

  She blinks. “No.”

  “Then you must have left your groceries in your car.”

  “Brilliant deduction, Holmes.” And she smiles again. I’ll take that as a yes.

  So. The woman I met in the store was called Sharon. I wonder where the other memories came from? Did I have other women here? Why did they all look like her? It doesn’t matter. The past never makes sense. Only the present matters. And in the present, there’s a gorgeous woman that in all likelihood did not try to kill me sitting naked in my bed.

  “Would you like breakfast, Sharon?”

  “Sure. I’d like dessert first, though.” She gestures for me to come closer. I climb into bed. We kiss.

  “I’m disappointed,” she says as my kisses move south.

  I withdraw. “Why?”

  “No coffin. From the way you talked, I was sure you slept in one.”

  “I admit,” I tell her, “that lying dead in a coffin is my life-long ambition. But it usually takes years of hard work and dedication to achieve your goals.”

  She looks at me strangely. That look I have seen before, on many different faces. This is the look people give me when they don’t know what to make of me. But it passes very quickly, and she laughs. “You are wa-a-a-ay out there, Joel,” she says, and leans closer to kiss my chest.

  Actually, I’m way in here. Inside my head. All three of me.

  We have sex. And the crowd cheers.

  5.

  “So what do you do,” I ask her, “when you don’t sell insurance?”

  We’re sitting at the kitchen table. I made some eggs. Or she made some eggs. Or someone made the eggs before we came into the kitchen. In any case, we’re eating eggs.

  “Since I never sell insurance, everything.”

  “Let me rephrase. What do you do instead of selling insurance?”

  “Selling insurance was never an option, so I don’t do anything instead.”

  “Last try.” She gestures ‘please’. “What do you do for a living?”

  “Oh, is that what you wanted to know?” I like her. She’s not scared of me. She doesn’t let me get away with anything. “I lift crates at the peer.”

  “Really? I didn’t think you had enough muscles.”

  “For advertising?”

  “Advertising? I thought you said you lift crates at the pier.”

  She stops in mid-chew and looks at me. “Are you serious?”

  I shrug. “It’s what I heard.”

  “It doesn’t even sound alike!” I shrug again. She seems to consider something, then keeps on chewing. “So what do you do when you’re not contemplating coffins?”

  “Actually, that’s mostly what I do all day. You’d be surprised how much variation there is in—”

  “I’ll rephrase. What do you do to earn a living?”

  “Nothing. I’ve already earned my living. I used to... tinker around with gadgets. I invented a couple of patents that allowed me to retire for the next few centuries.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  “I hang around the house. And think.”

  “Think? Think about what?”

  “Life, death, that sort of thing.”

  “Coffins?”

  “That, too.”

  “Doesn’t that get tiresome after a while? Just you and your thoughts?”

  “Actually, there aren’t enough hours in a day for me to cope with all my thoughts.”

  “Hmm...” She takes another bite as she mulls something over. “Are you also working on something, now? I mean, inventing something new?”

  “Actually ... “ I begin, but then I wonder how much I should tell her. Not all. Not yet. “I am kind of working on some new field of research. It’s still... in the thinking-about-only stages.”

  “What is it about?”

  I open my mouth, then stop. “Next time. If there is a next time.”

  “You’re right. I need to go. Don’t want to be late for my job, do I?” She looks at me and smiles. “If I’m late, who’s going to lift all those crates?”

  I don’t say anything. Either I heard wrong. Or I heard right now and heard wrong before when she said she worked in advertising. Or she made a joke. Or something.

  “And as for coming back? You bet. I like sleeping with walking dead men.”

  “So you’re a necrophiliac?”

  “Oh, absolutely.” And she kisses my cheek.

  “Good. Me, too.”

  She begins to smile, then half of it drops, and half of it freezes. She’s not sure if it was a joke. I’d reassure her, but I don’t remember what I said.

  6.

  I close the door behind her. I look out the window until I see her get into her car and drive away.

  Now I’m alone. And I start to think: Was she ever here? And the truth is: I don’t know.

  She felt real when she was here. But right now is right now, and right now she’s not here, and all I have is a memory. And I can’t trust my memories. All I have now is a wonderful feeling of having spent a night and a morning with the most incredible woman I’ve ever met. That doesn’t mean it really happened.

  If she shows up again, that would mean she had been here before. Unless, of course, her showing up again would also be a false memory. But even if she comes again, she’ll have to leave eventually. And I’ll be left with myself and my thoughts and my doubts. It’s like the only time that anything real happens, anything I can truly depend on, is when I’m alone. My thoughts are real, whether they’re in a false memory or not. My feelings are real, whether the people I have feelings for exist or not.

  Other people always leave and become part of the past. I’m always the only one
who’s constantly here, in the present. And the present is the only thing I can trust. That’s the bottom line: I’m always alone. Just me and my thoughts.

  Now, where did I put that knife?

  7.

  I never liked the concept of life after death. It seems ridiculous. Since death is what comes after life, we can’t expect it to have any life in it, because it is our afterlife. If there was life in death, death would be life, and it wouldn’t be death, would it? The question is not whether there is life after death but whether death is not nothingness.

  That question has intrigued me ever since I can remember. And when I died it became even more intriguing.

  I was seven years old when I drowned in the pool. The life guard resuscitated me. But for a while there I had no pulse and I didn’t breathe. I remember that suddenly I wasn’t at the pool anymore. I was back home. My mom was there, too, and she was crying and telling me that dad is dead. And I also remember that there was some woman in the window, looking at the two of us, curious, amused. But then I remember thinking, I’m not in the house, I’m in the street. And I was in the street, and there was some blue Volkswagen that skidded to a halt just as I—an older, teenage me—was crossing the street. The car stopped an inch from my teenage leg. And then, suddenly, I was back at the pool, coughing my guts out.

  I only have one memory of my death and everything that happened during it. Everything from before also has only one version. But after this incident I suddenly had this triple-memory problem. Doctors said it’s due to oxygen deprivation, that I suffered some sort of weird, irreversible brain damage. I mean, I can still talk and think and write, but ... my memory is unreliable.

  They also said that my out-of-body experience was an illusion. I believed them, obviously. But seven years later, I realized it wasn’t.

  A car nearly ran me over. A blue Volkswagen. At exactly the same street corner, on exactly the same spot I’d seen in my near-death experience. The VW stopped just an inch from my leg.

  I came back home, shaken, and looked in the journal the psychologists had me write seven years earlier. And it was there. This exact incident, written in detail, down to the same, precise number of the VW’s license plate!

  When I was dead, I had somehow gotten a glimpse of the future. Half of it, at least, was accurate: that part about the VW. The part about my father dying was false. My mother died only a couple of years ago, and my father’s still alive. Other people have reported out-of-body experiences, hearing and seeing things which they couldn’t possibly have. Maybe some of it’s the brain playing tricks. But I had conclusive proof, at least in my eyes, that some of these incidents—certainly mine—are real. There is some thing after death. There is something. It isn’t life. But it isn’t nothingness, either.

  Something happens after we die. And, soon, I’ll know all about it.

  8.

  I’m standing on the roof. Ten floors up. Sharon is with me.

  “I go first,” she says.

  “Go ahead.”

  She kisses me, then lets go of the railing and jumps.

  She sails through the air, and lands face first on the pavement below. She actually bounces once.

  She lies there, pieces of her everywhere, her body probably no more than a pulp. Someone will have to peel her off .

  She knows what’s on the other side, now. She knows the whole truth. I’m jealous.

  No hesitation this time, no fear. I don’t even think about my experiment, I let go. Gravity takes hold, and I fall through the air. This is slower than I thought. I crash into branches. Oh, no, please, don’t let them break my fall! The branches break, my fall doesn’t. Here comes the ground—

  I sit up. The faint light of sunrise comes through my window. I’m in my bed. Sharon, beside me, looks up. “What’s the matter?” she says through sleep-hazed eyes. “You screamed.”

  “I screamed? Did I?”

  “What did you dream about?” She puts her hand on my cheek. Somehow, it feels wrong, unreal. Maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe it was real and this is the afterlife? Or maybe I’m still dreamin—

  I sit up. The faint light of sunrise comes through holes in my window. I’m in my bed. Sharon, beside me, looks up. “What’s the matter,” she says through sleep-hazed eyes. “You screamed.”

  “I had this strange dream.”

  “What was it about?” She puts her hand on my chest, rubbing it affectionately.

  “It’s just—” Her hand feels wrong. Can I still be dreaming? Can’t be. I already woke up twice. Sharon looks at me, wondering why I stopped. What if I try to wake up? What if I—

  I sit up. It’s the middle of the night. I’m in my bed. No Sharon. Oh, God, what a nightmare.

  I get up, go to the fridge and get myself something to eat. After this kind of dream, I am not going to sleep again. I make a sandwich and settle in front of the television.

  The Nature Channel has something about maggots. Cool.

  I take a bite out of the sandwich. It doesn’t taste right. Oh, no. No, no. Come on! It’s already been ten minutes! This is as real as it gets! I can’t be dreamin—

  I sit up. In bed again. Sharon’s here again. Didn’t scream this time. I feel nauseated.

  I wake up twenty more times before I decide I’ve had enough. Whatever happens, whatever this present state I’m in is, I refuse to wake up from it. As far as I’m concerned, from this moment on, this is reality.

  I don’t wake up again.

  9.

  “The first dead person I saw was when I was five,” Sharon tells me. We’re snuggling in my bed. “I was walking back home from kindergarten with my mother. We were waiting at the intersection for the green light. On the other side of the street stood a very beautiful young man with black hair and one of the strangest faces I ever saw. The light changed, the cars stopped, and he leaped into the intersection. Suddenly, you know, for no reason, one of the cars just started moving. The driver must have pressed the gas pedal by accident or something, and his car just slammed into the man with the weird face.

  “My mother covered my eyes. But the picture of that man, lying, dead, in the middle of the road, in the middle of the intersection, with one leg skewed a bit to the side. He lay there, and he looked normal. Only now he was dead.

  “And I remember thinking: Where did all of him go? A moment ago, he was a person, he walked, he talked, he moved, he breathed, he had thoughts. And now, he lay there, looking just the same as he ever did. But there was no ‘him’ inside him. The difference between the man’s empty shell and the man’s ‘full shell’, when there’s a ‘him’ inside. It was creepy. It was beautiful. That thin line between the living and the dead, the person and the non-person. We don’t have a word for this. We don’t understand what it is. One minute, that man in front of me is a person, the other ...

  “That’s something I never forgot. Even ... “ She takes my arms off her, sits up, turning around to face me. Her face is very serious. She looks straight into my eyes. “I’m going to tell you something. If anyone ever has a chance of understanding it, it’s you. But you have to promise me ahead of time, you won’t leave me because of it.”

  I nod.

  “All right, this is ... This is kind’a weird. But a while ago, I realized that all of my, uh, my previous boyfriends, shall we call them, or lovers, or whatever, they all look kind’a like him. The more they looked like the young man that had lain dead in the street across from me, the more attractive I found them.”

  “And me?” I ask.

  “You’re a dead ringer.”

  I smile. Competition from a dead man. She smiles back.

  I couple two of my fingers into a gun, and put them on her ribs. “Boom,” I say softly. She falls backward on the mattress, and does not move. I lift one of her arms then let go of it. It falls down, lifeless. I lift it again, and throw it to one side. Still, no reaction. I caress Sharon’s body, then slowly undress it. I do what I do. She doesn’t move. She’s dead.

&nb
sp; Later it’ll be my turn.

  10.

  It’s one minute away.

  It’s six forty-four p.m., and I have two pills in my hand that will cause my death. Can’t buy those. I had to make them myself. Question is, is Sharon going to be here when I die? I remember I made her promise to be here exactly at seven. On the second. And to use her key. But that’s only a memory.

  I go to the board I put up on the other side of the front door. I put my hands in my pockets, making sure I don’t touch it. The notes are still there—special stick-up thingies that can be bought in the center of town, but nowhere near here, the small radius of my existence. I remember I asked her to buy them. The fact that they’re here doesn’t mean she did.

  Each of the notes is signed in what I remember to be her handwriting. It’s clearly not mine. I’d made her put up a note each time she came. It’s as close as I can come to proof that she had been here. But I’m interested in the last note: I peer closer, keeping my hands away from it. It says she’ll be here, today, at seven, on the second.

  I look at my watch. It just became six forty-five.

  I gulp down the pills.

  Wait! Is Sharon coming? What day is this?

  11.

  My chest hurts. I can’t breathe without pain.

  My left arm hurts. You took pills to give yourself a heart attack, you idiot. I didn’t think it would hurt this much. Oh, damn, oh, damn, the world is melting away and there is so much pain.

  The doorbell rings. I hope that’s Sharon at the door. I hope she’d brought the key I made for her, because I can’t make it that far. In two out of three memories I forgot to tell her to bring it. If she’s not here when I die—

  The sound of a key turning. The door’s becoming a blur. There’s her hair swimming towards me.

  “Joel?” That’s her voice swimming toward me. “Are you all right?”

  “Hi.” That’s my voice, I think. Oh, my god, she’s gigantic. Every part of her is two stories high.

  Hi, Sharon. Did I say this, or did I think it? Doesn’t matter.