by Wade, Tobias
“Then drink.” My eyes were still closed, but I could feel the glass of wine being shoved into my face – spilling over my chest. I grabbed it with both hands and gulped it down like I had been lost in the desert for years.
Mr. Jacob’s presence immediately lifted. He must have moved away to the other side of the coffee table again. That all-consuming perfume began to clear from the air, but I kept drinking. I didn’t want to die. I don’t care what happened to me in that moment. I never wanted to die.
Crunch. Something hard slipped into my mouth from the bottom of the wineglass. I opened my eyes. The bottom of the glass was crawling with beetles. I tried to cough, but the one already in my mouth slipped down my throat. I could feel its legs struggling against my esophagus all the way down.
“Do not worry, child.” Mr. Jacob’s voice was soft as a purring cat. “You never will. Now go home, and do not return without your Grandmother.”
I got up and ran. Once outside, I fell to my hands and knees and heaved on the ground. I forced my fingers down my throat, but I didn’t need much help to induce the vomiting. The red wine poured out in waves, splattering all over my hands and knees.
Still gasping for breath, I ran my hands through my own vomit – searching. It was all liquid. I squeezed the wet dirt with my hands. The beetle hadn’t come out.
I took off my shirt and pants which were soaked in vomit, and put them in the back of my car. I drove home, trying my best to pretend nothing happened.
But it was hard not to think about when I could feel the beetle crawling around in my stomach the whole way back. I don’t know what that beetle I swallowed was, but it’s doing something to me.
The squirming sensation had abated for awhile, and I figured it would be digested. I wasn’t feeling as nauseous anymore, so it probably wasn’t poisonous. I told myself he was just some crazy hermit who got his wrinkled old rocks off by playing tricks on people. It wasn’t that my Grandmother was afraid of him – she must have just known he was a fraud.
I was almost home before the sharp pain in my stomach doubled me over the steering wheel. It was like an ice-cold knife trying to force its way out from the inside. I had to pull off into a gas station to wait for it to pass.
The pain quickly faded into a gentle numbness, the sensation replaced by a soft tickling working its way up my chest cavity. I lifted my shirt and fought the urge to be sick again.
There was a lump under my skin. And it was moving.
I poked at it gingerly, and could feel the hard carapace of the beetle underneath. It must have bitten free from my stomach and begun to crawl around. I briefly considered trying to smash it, but what if I didn’t kill it? What if I just made it mad and it went on a rampage inside of me?
The lump wasn’t moving fast, but it was persistently crawling toward my heart. I took a deep breath and felt it holding onto my rib-cage as it expanded and contracted.
The hospital. Now. I slowly pulled out of the gas station, trying not to turn the wheel too fast for fear of agitating the beetle. It reacted to even small movements, biting and scratching in protest. I don’t care if they made me drink a whole bottle of bleach, I was getting this thing out of me.
I pulled right up to the emergency room doors and left my car there. I practically had to crawl up to the desk to keep the beetle still. For every foot I made, it was wriggling a few centimeters closer to my heart. What would happen when it got there?
“Somebody help me!” I shouted, lying down on the ground to keep it still. I stared at my reflection in the polished floor tiles, now damp with the cold sweat flowing down my face. Was I delirious? The face looking up at me couldn’t be my own. I was so… old. My hair was grey and patchy, my eyes sunken and hollow, and a network of lines mapped the journeys of an un-lived life. I tried to touch my skin, but the jerking movement caused the beetle to bite down hard on one of my lungs.
I was coughing blood when the nurses lifted me into a stretcher. I slipped in and out of consciousness after that. The nurses later told me that I kept mumbling “I don’t want to die. I want to live forever”.
“Any allergies?”
“No.”
“Medications?”
“No.”
“Please think hard. It’s rare for someone your age not to be on any medications.”
I glared at the doctor who perched on the end of my hospital bed. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but it was afternoon when I went to visit Mr. Jacobs, but now the morning sun was filling my room. I squinted against it, then back at my doctor. He looked bored and annoyed and… fuzzy. I squinted again.
“I’m 19 years old,” I said. The events of the other day immediately came back to me, and I clutched at my chest. Ancient withered hands held loosely together by a mesh of bulbous veins gripped my hospital gown and pulled it open. I couldn’t feel any lump, but… was this really me? My skin sloughed into sagging pouches around my skeletal frame. I was more than old. I was what old could only dream about becoming when it grew up.
“Do you remember what year it is?” the doctor asked. “Don’t worry if you can’t. It’s common with cases of delirium –“
“It’s April 13th, 2017. I’m not delirious. I’m 19 years old, and was perfectly healthy yesterday. There’s something inside of me which is causing this…”
“Causing what, exactly?”
He was writing something down in his notepad, but he wasn’t really listening. He must deal with a dozen old people every day, each more blithering and nonsensical than the last. But if they could find the beetle and reverse this…
“I want a full body scan –“
“You’ve already been checked. It was probably nothing but heat exhaustion which caused you to feel dizzy. I’d like to keep you here through the afternoon and get you re-hydrated, and then you’ll be as good as ever. Is there anyone you’d like us to notify?”
“My grandmother.”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Just give me the damn phone.”
Grandmother Elis and I stared at each other. She recognized me the moment she walked in the door. She didn’t say a word – just pursed her lips and sat down. She opened her handbag and began fiddling with something inside.
“I’m sorry…” I said. This was all my fault. I should have asked her before visiting Mr. Jacobs. I should never have gone through her stuff in the attic without permission, or pretend I was supposed to accept Mr. Jacob’s offer on her behalf.
She took out a hand-mirror from her purse and held it up to me. I screwed my eyes shut tight.
“Look at what you’ve become.”
I forced myself to look. If I – the old me – had seen someone who looked like I did now, I would have made some cruel joke about old people ‘outliving their usefulness’. Now I felt like I wanted to cry, if these puffy old eyes could even do that anymore.
“My Grandfather doesn’t know how to extend life,” Elis said. “He shifts it from one person to another. The only reason he has lasted this long is because he passes his years into a victim who must bear his burden in his stead.”
“So the reason you never accepted his offer…”
“Because I couldn’t do that to someone else. One lifetime is more than enough if used properly, and a thousand lives aren’t nearly enough when used as he has done.”
“But I only want one life, I swear,” I said. “And I can get it back, right? All I have to do –”
“No. You do not have the right to give your years to anyone.”
“But I could give them back to Mr. Jacobs.”
She shook her head. “You will not win. He has been doing this for over a hundred years. If you go back to him, he will only add to your years until you’ve been turned to dust.”
“He told me not to return without you. If you accept his deal –”
Grandmother Elis put her mirror away. I hated how much her hands were shaking.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”
“P
lease don’t leave me like this…” I said.
“There’s hardly anything left of you to leave,” and she was gone.
I wanted to say more, but my words caught on a dry itching in my throat. I felt like I was suffocating, and if that had been the end, I would have accepted it. I’d rather die than live like this. But the itching turned into squirming, and the squirming into thrashing. I clutched at my throat, but I was helpless as the beetle crawled up my trachea and out of my mouth. It plopped down into my lap, and I held it in my hands.
But these weren’t my years – this wasn’t my fault. If I could just pass them off to someone else, then…
I’d rather die than live like this.
But I’d rather live forever than either.
The Psychopath in my house
There’s a psychopath in my house.
No he didn’t break in. He sleeps in the same room as me. It’s not my brother’s fault; this is just who he is.
If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s my parents. My Mom left when I was six and my little brother was four. She never wanted us, or at least that’s what my Dad said, because I don’t remember her very well.
Dad said she used to be a perfect student with big dreams, then she got knocked up and had to drop out of college to take care of us. He reminds us all the time that it was our fault she left, and how happy he was before we were born.
That’s the nice version of what he said anyway. Lots of stuff about her being an ungrateful slut who will burn in Hell, but I don’t think of her that way. If I was married to someone like my Dad, I would have run away too.
My Dad needed “medicine” to cope with her leaving. Every time he took it, he would be gone for a few days. It would be just me and my little brother in the house, and I took care of him the best I could. My Dad wouldn’t usually leave us with any money, but I got pretty good at hiding things under my dress at the grocery store.
I thought things would change when I was 12 and found a paper bag with 1,000 dollars in our backyard. I thought Mom had sent it – that she’d heard about how hard things were and mailed us some money.
I could usually find food when I needed it badly enough, so I didn’t want to waste it on things like that. It was my brother’s 10th birthday coming up, and that seemed like a big deal. I hired a van and brought him and seven kids from his class to spend the whole day at Sea World.
It was so much fun I thought about never going back. My brother didn’t want to run away though, and I couldn’t leave him. Besides, the van driver was keeping an eye on us and said he had to bring us home or he might get fired.
We should have run away though. The money hadn’t come from my Mom – she’d forgotten about us. That’s when I found out my Dad’s “medicine” was meth, and that he’d been selling some to his friends when he dropped the money by mistake. I tried to tell him that it was my fault, but since it got spent on my brother’s birthday, he got the worst of it.
My brother didn’t walk again for two years after that. He needed even more help now that he was in a wheelchair. There were more bills that weren’t being paid – the electricity, the gas, even the rent sometimes. I had to be out a lot trying to find money, sometimes for days at a time when I was staking out a house to steal from.
I couldn’t leave my brother alone too long though. My Dad would just ignore him, and if I didn’t check in at least twice a day then I’d find my brother sitting in his own piss and shit. I think he could have made it to the toilet by himself if he really tried, but he just gave up caring about everything.
There is one thing my brother started doing to pass the time though, although this I wish he hadn’t. I noticed his growing collection of small animal skulls for awhile, but I assumed they were just plastic until I saw how he was catching them.
I watched him put bird seed in a 2L soda bottle with the opening cut wider. Once a squirrel crawled in, he would pull a string which slid the bottle down to cover the opening with a piece of cardboard. It would struggle frantically to get out, but when it was near the opening, its own weight would hold the bottle into place against the board.
I would have congratulated him on his contraption except for what happened next. He picked up the bottle – cardboard still covering the opening – and slipped a couple razor blades inside. Then he SHOOK the whole thing until it looked like the inside of a blender, the squirrel SCREAMING the whole time.
I took it away from him, but he just kept building little things like that. It wasn’t just squirrels either – mice, small birds, even a raccoon once. After he’d killed them, he’d BITE the head straight off and then spit it into a bowl of water to clean the organic matter off the skull.
“Please stop. God didn’t make those animals just so you could torture them,” I said to him.
“Then why did he make it so much fun?”
It’s not just animals anymore. I found a big cardboard box out on the sidewalk near the bus-stop. Inside was a bag of M&Ms, a couple comic books, and his old Gameboy Color. There was a rope tied to little hooks inside the box which led toward my house.
If someone were to pull that rope, the box would close and the whole thing would be dragged down the sidewalk. I don’t think he’d be strong enough to pull anyone bigger than a six year old, but the school bus stopped here.
I ripped the box into pieces and ran to confront him. I found him sitting on his bed – he was out of the wheelchair now – waiting with a knife in his hands.
What the Hell are you trying to do?”
“Set a trap.”
“It’s not going to work,” I said.
“Don’t worry. It’ll work.”
“I destroyed it. Why are you trying to trap some kid?”
“I’m not. I’m trying to trap you.”
That’s when I noticed that the TV was suspended with ropes above me. He cut the cord, and it landed right on top of my head.
He must have counted on that knocking me out because he was already coming at me with the knife. I was dizzy, but I managed to scramble out of the way and slam the door in his face.
After that, I was too scared to go back inside the house. I called Child Protective Services and reported the meth deals my Dad was doing in the home. I didn’t mention what my brother has been doing, because I thought once he was out of here he’d have a chance at a fresh start. I didn’t want his life to be over before it had even begun.
We were both put into separate foster homes, and it’s been two years since I’ve heard anything from him. That was until last night.
My adoptive parents – wonderful Asian couple who couldn’t have kids of their own – sat down with me at the kitchen table. They told me they had some good news: they were going to adopt my brother as well.
I guess the family that took him in suffered an unfortunate accident. They didn’t tell me what happened, but by the look they gave each other, it must have been gruesome.
I hope he’s changed. Telling people what he did will stop him from being adopted and ruin his life forever. I can’t say anything until I’ve seen him again. If he hasn’t though…
Well that’s why I’m writing this. If he hasn’t changed, then at least someone will know what happened, and have a shot at stopping it from happening again.
How to Start your own Cult
Let me preface this by stating I am a firm atheist. There is no life after death, although I will go to great lengths extolling its beauty to my subjects. We do not grow older because the Reaper is always siphoning our life energy. I was not born from a dying star, and I am no prophet of the Divine Cosmic Order.
I am a nihilist – I do not believe in anything. And as much as I do not believe in the supernatural, I believe even less in mankind and their ability to govern their own lives.
Do you really need proof of that? Fanatic mobs begging for their religious oppression to be protected by the government, junkies in the street surrendering their will to anything they can boil into their veins, a narcissistic idiot
elected president of the United States – you get the idea.
The church-states, the cartels, the two-faced cooperations – none of them will hesitate to manipulate the population for their own selfish purposes. The vast majority of people will always be susceptible to being manipulated, because it is so much safer and easier to be told what to think than to think for yourself.
My reasoning dictates:
1) People will always be susceptible to manipulation. If you aren’t manipulating them, then someone else will.
2) The manipulator will always profit at the expense of the people. That is the purpose for their influence.
3) The only way to protect people from a selfish manipulator is to become a benevolent manipulator yourself.
For these reasons, in my senior year of college, I decided to start my own cult.
Step One: Identify your targets.
People will not run to you unless they are already running away from something else. Now, where could I find the most fearful students?
I formed three support clubs and put up fliers around campus. One for the socially anxious, one for those needing financial assistance, and a third for victims of sexual assault.
Step Two: Amplify their fear
Ever wonder why priests scream about Hell while politicians rant about terrorists and economic collapse? There is nothing like fear to get someone’s attention and follow you for relief.
To the socially anxious, I forced them to give speeches. I asked them embarrassing questions, put them in awkward situations, and generally ridiculed them, all in the guise of helping them gain confidence.
To the financially stressed, I gave lectures about how student loans haunt people for the rest of their life. I told them how the job market is over-saturated with college degrees, and how slim their chance of employment was. I told horror stories about homeless drug addicts who graduated college but couldn’t make anything of their lives.
The sexual assault group was the most fun for me. No I didn’t rape them – I needed them all to trust me. I did however convince them that I was the only one looking out for them – that there was a rapist in every party, and down every dark alley.
