by Brian Harmon
“I fell through a rift,” he said. “A fissure. A simple crack between worlds. I fell…” He winced as another thunderbolt of pain shot through him. He didn’t have much longer.
Violet saw him fade a little, as if he briefly darkened. From the corner of her eye, she saw something flutter and then vanish again into the shadows.
Jeremy took a ragged breath. He remembered nothing from that other world except the dark and the cold. There were no feelings there, no emotions. But when he felt himself slip into the rift, as he fell through the hellish border-realm between the worlds, he felt something for the first time. He felt fear. Terror overwhelmed him, consumed him. And then he felt pain.
There were things in the border-realm, unspeakable things, things that should have killed him. Passing directly between worlds in such a way was usually fatal and always traumatizing, even to a creature such as him. “I was afraid when I first entered the light,” he explained. “My first instinct was to hide. I took my identity from the woman who was sitting in that office as I passed over her. The human resources woman. Jeremy was the name of her son. Gleer was her grandfather’s name. The truck that was never parked in that lot: that was her nephew’s truck. My apartment: her mother’s address. Five ninety-six Yender Street. But that building is in Texas, not here. I learned everything about this world from her. I took it right out of her head.” He gazed up at Violet, forcing his eyes to focus on her. It was so hard to remain. His time was almost up. “I lied about being inside that building for a job interview. I made all that stuff up. Then I forgot that I made it up. I forgot that it wasn’t real. I buried myself so fully within Jeremy Gleer that when I couldn’t find his truck or his home, my world started to unravel.”
Jeremy closed his eyes and gathered the last of his strength. It was so much to accept all at once, but it was the brutal truth. He was not real. He never was. His face was a lie. He was merely the delusional personality of a mysterious beast from a faraway hell, whose last rational thought was to hide itself amongst humanity. He remembered building this body and letting himself fall to the street with the broken glass. He remembered embracing his identity, his name, the fact that he was.
The wailing of the Ford Explorer’s car alarm had sounded like the voices of demons to him as he lay there. It was not a delusion brought on by his fall, but a reminder of the nightmare things he’d seen inside the border-realm.
Even the pain was a lie. He could never be harmed merely by falling out of a window. It was his fall through the rift that was killing him. The pain was simply his human body’s way of translating the slow death of his true form.
Even if he knew how to tell Violet these things, he did not have time. He opened his eyes and gazed up at her. She was crying. He watched her tears slide down her face and marveled that those tears were for him. He’d never felt such emotions before. “You were the first person I ever saw with these eyes,” he said. “And I took my first breath as I gazed upon your face.”
A soft sob escaped Violet’s throat. She wiped the tears from her eyes. She scarcely understood what he was telling her, but she understood fully that he was leaving her.
Something was moving around her. Dark shapes that never quite took form were circling her. They bled in and out of the shadows, confusing her senses.
Behind her, Corey watched the black shadows materialize and vanish all around them. He realized that this was Jeremy’s true form, the same form as the black thing they’d perceived as a monster.
“That thing we’ve been running from…” Jeremy continued. “It was no creature. It was… It was a part of me…a part of what I really am.”
Violet glanced up as something black and fluid slid up the wall and vanished.
“It’s so simple,” Jeremy said, smiling a little. “A piece of me I didn’t know I had… Like a tail, maybe… It swishes across my face and startles me, but it’s always behind me… It’s always hidden. It’s kind of funny when you think of it that way.” His eyes fluttered and rolled back as another wave of pain ravaged him. He swallowed hard, enduring it, and Violet watched as some of him melted into darkness for the briefest of moments.
He stared up at the fluorescent lights and smiled tiredly. “I like when things are funny,” he decided.
“Don’t go,” Violet begged him. “Stay with us.”
“It’s not a choice.” Jeremy met her eyes again. “Don’t be sad. I’m not. I got to see the sky. It was the first thing I saw when I arrived. I remember staring up at it. The color was…magnificent…”
“Jeremy…”
“I know,” Jeremy assured her. He reached up and touched her cheek. He felt her tears. They were warm and wet. It was one more experience he owed to her. “You’ll be okay. Thank you. For everything.”
She felt his hand disappear from her face. Darkness wavered all around her. He seemed simultaneously to melt and blow away. All at once his weight was gone and something like a dark cloud dissipated before her eyes. For another moment, dark, incomprehensible shapes fluttered around her, phasing in and out of view in the spaces between heartbeats. But then even these were gone.
Jeremy had vanished. He left her life as quickly and as mysteriously as he’d entered it. And now, as she knelt there on the dirt floor of the barn, she wept.
It wasn’t as if she’d fallen in love with Jeremy. But there was something there, something she’d felt deep inside, something significant. At the very least, she’d made it her business to take care of him and she had failed.
She felt Corey’s big hands grasp her arms and she let him lift her to her feet. She turned and buried her face against his soft chest. “He’s gone,” she sobbed.
“Yeah,” replied Corey.
For a long time they stood that way, embracing beneath the barn’s fluorescent lights as Violet let her grief flow from her. When at last she pulled away and looked around at the empty walls, she felt a little better. “He said there were other worlds out there,” she said.
Corey nodded. “Many worlds.”
Violet considered this. She even smiled a little. She lifted her face and gazed up at her best friend. “Let’s go.”
Corey smiled kindly down at her. “Okay.”
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About the Author
Brian Harmon is a writer of horror fiction, suspense and dark adventure. He grew up in rural Missouri and currently lives in Southern Wisconsin with his wife, Guinevere, and their two children.
For more about this author, visit Brian Harmon online at www.HarmonUniverse.com
More by Brian Harmon:
The Box (The Temple of the Blind #1)
Gilbert House (The Temple of the Blind #2)
The Temple of the Blind (The Temple of the Blind #3)
Road Beneath the Wood (The Temple of the Blind #4)
