She looked down at the bounty she’d gathered for herself, and decided to head on over to the canned section to pick up a few more things. Might as well stock up while she was here.
As she pushed her buggy down the isle, she heard footsteps behind her, matching her pace at first, and then moving faster, catching up.
She resisted the urge to step faster herself.
A hand touched her shoulder, followed immediately by the sound of a deep voice behind her: “Simone? Is that you?”
She barely managed to hold back a scream of surprise as she jerked away from the touch and spun around.
There was a man behind her, shabbily dressed, smiling. He was a little heavyset, and…
Familiar…
But from where?
Then suddenly she knew: it was Chance Garnett.
He looked completely different—shockingly different—but it was him.
Chance had been one of her boyfriends in high school. Back then he’d been a lean, muscle-bound football star. Now he had a gut, and glasses, and flabby cheeks, and greasy skin, and his formerly long, luxuriant hair was clipped down close to his skull.
There was also something different about his eyes: something hard and calculating. The way he looked at her made her skin crawl.
She had the urge to back away from him, but couldn’t bring herself to be so rude.
“Chance,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I heard you were living in Richmond.”
“Until a few months ago.”
“You got a place up here now?”
“Actually, I’ve been staying with my mom, temporarily, til I can find something else.”
“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “I know how it is. Had to move back in with my folks for a couple of years myself. Just moved out again recently.”
“Yeah… It’s kind of a bummer, I guess. The economy and everything…”
At that point an uncomfortable silence descended. He just sort of stood there, hands in his pockets, looking at her with a weird intensity.
What could she say to disengage before he could think of anything else to ask her?.
Fuck it. I don’t care. I’ll just throw out some random shit.
He started to speak again, but she cut in before he could get the first word out. “Actually, I hate to rush off, but I need to hurry. I’m supposed to be meeting somebody and I’m already late.”
“Oh… Okay. It was good seeing you. Do you have an account on Facebook or something? I’d like to stay in touch.”
“Uhhh… Facebook? Actually no,” she lied. “I deleted my account a little while back.”
“How about an email address then?”
She was trying to think of a semi-polite way to dodge that question, and wondering how easy it was to block somebody on Facebook so he wouldn’t be able to find her if he searched, when a red-headed woman walked up behind him, and stood there with her arms crossed, glaring at Simone over his shoulder.
The woman was pretty, in a porn star kind of way: big busted and skinny, tons of makeup, red her hair up in a pony-tail.
“Who’s this?” the woman said.
Chance turned, surprised. “Oh, honey. This is an old friend of mine from high school. We were just catching up.”
“An old girlfriend?”
Simone was oddly irritated by the woman’s instant hostility. The bitch probably had plenty of reasons to be mad at Chance, but Simone hadn’t asked him to hit on her while she was innocently trying to buy groceries.
Actually she was more than irritated.
There was rage there, a surprising rage that, when she thought about it, made no sense at all.
She certainly had no interest in Chance and shouldn’t really give much of a fuck if his girlfriend was jealous or not. But still, she couldn’t help but glare right back at the woman, her muscles tensing up, her cheeks growing hot.
Fuck her, she thought, and in her mind she saw herself pushing a finger into one of the woman’s eyes, very slowly, a mist of blood spraying out of the violated socket as the finger forced its way in. Simone could practically feel the blood droplets shower down on her face. It was so real that she even tasted copper.
The image was so bright and vivid that it was almost like she actually saw it happen.
Like one of her hallucinations.
What the fuck is wrong with me today?
She closed her eyes, swallowed, and took a deep breath.
“Actually,” she said. “I was just about to leave.”
Chance started speaking again, doing his best to make a hasty introduction and settle his girlfriend down, but Simone could barely hear him over the sound of her own pulse beating in her ears.
She suddenly had to get out of the store right away. There was some weird energy surging through her.
She didn’t even take the trouble to exit gracefully, just grabbed the handlebar of her buggy, and hurried off while he was still talking.
She wanted to get out of there fast, but when she got to the front she found that most of the counters had long lines of people. She was about to settle for self-checkout, but then she spotted one clerk who didn’t have a line, probably because of his appearance. He had long red hair, and tattoos all over his arms, and lots of facial jewelry. She thought he was probably some dude who worked in the stock-room, filling in for a more conventional looking person who was out sick today.
He gave her a strange look as he rung her up. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Me? Sure. Why?”
He gave her face a long careful examination, then shook his head and laughed nervously. “Oh it’s nothing… For a second there I thought you were…” He waved her off dismissively, seeming embarrassed. “Forget it.”
“What?”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Come on!” She laughed. “You can’t just say something like that and then leave me hanging. You’ll make me feel self-conscious.”
“It’s just…” He sighed. “When you first walked up, you looked like you were really pissed about something. I shouldn’t have said anything about it. I’m always blurting inappropriate stuff. I think it’s all the weed I smoke.”
“I looked angry?”
“Yeah. I thought you were about to start raising hell at me or slapping me or something.”
“I’m not angry at all, just in kind of a hurry.”
He shrugged. “You seem gentle enough now. I think I just saw your face in a weird light.”
Man, Simone thought. I must be wearing my bitch face today.
Chapter 7 - The Hand of Fate
By the time she got home, Simone was so hungry she felt like she might be dying.
She didn’t even finish putting away her groceries. She just dug into the bag that had the ice-cream, and opened one of the containers with the plan of eating it straight out of there with a spoon.
She had the container under her arm, and was on her way out of the kitchen when the wall of pain came down on her.
The explosion centered behind her eyes, just like the pains that often hit before her hallucinations, but if her normal pains were like tiny knives piercing her skull, this was like being chopped in the head with a machete.
Suddenly the idea of remaining standing was so laughable that her body simply rejected it. Her leg muscles relaxed of their own volition, and she fell into the kitchen floor. The ice cream box flew from her hand as she dropped, and went sliding across the floor, right out the kitchen door and into the dining room.
This is it. I’m dying.
Simone had long suspected there was something physically wrong with her brain, causing her hallucinations. Her worst imaginings included all sorts of ticking time-bombs: tiny tumors and blood-clots and other nasty possibilities.
She’d been to dozens of doctors over the years. Her brain scans showed nothing abnormal and she didn’t respond to medications. Some of the doctors actually seemed to think she was jus
t making the whole thing up for attention, and none of them had found a way to help her. Still, somehow over the years Simone had managed just fine. Her condition was a part of her life, part of her, and she had long been resigned that it always would be.
But, then again, it had never come on her like this. Never even close. This kind of pain wasn’t something you could cope with.
As she lay in the floor, it seemed that the agony was actually, somehow, getting worse, like a great wave coming in. She pressed her hands against her head on both sides, gripped handfuls of hair, gritted her teeth. Tears came into her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She couldn’t help but let out a long moan.
And then it got even worse.
She screamed and thrashed. The pain was beyond anything she had ever imagined. It was so bad she wished someone was there so she could beg them to kill her. It almost felt like she didn’t have a body. Just a head that was on fire inside.
And when it finally got so bad that it couldn’t get any worse, something… gave…
It registered for her, mentally, as a ripping sound, like a piece of meat being pulled apart.
The pain stopped instantly, like flicking off a light switch. Everything went blurry for a second. Everything dimmed till she could barely see.
Death, of course. It’s all over.
She waited for the light of the world to fade to nothing, but instead, it faded back in.
There was something in front of her, greenish brown, rough in texture, blocking her vision.
A tree trunk.
She sat up, looking around in confusion.
There were tree trunks everywhere. In her kitchen. The trunks were coming up through the floor. Most of them appeared to be very large trees, so large that the branches would have to be very high up—higher than her ceiling, presumably—but one of the smaller ones had visible branches that seemed to disappear into her walls. Another was positioned in the center of her dining room table, passing right through it. And all of them went straight up through the ceiling.
Okay, I had the pain, and now I’m having the hallucination. This is weird, but that’s all it is.
She looked closely at the tree nearest her and noticed that it wasn’t really all there. She could sort of see through it. That was a bit odd. Most of the things she hallucinated seemed pretty solid.
She reached out to touch it, and her hand went inside—as expected, of course, since it couldn’t be real.
But—not so expected—as her hand penetrated the trunk she could actually feel something, like being immersed in liquid. She wiggled her fingers, and there was a definite sensation of some substance resisting the movements.
She pulled the hand back, half expecting it to be wet. It wasn’t but there was a strong aroma coming from it.
Pine tar?
This was getting a little too real. She had never been able to feel one of her hallucinations before, let alone smell one.
She closed her eyes.
It’s not real. It’s not real.
She opened her eyes.
The trees were still there.
She stood up, walked into the living room, stopping a couple of times on her way to test other trees. All of them seemed to possess some degree of substance, and it struck her that the whole house smelled faintly of pine-tar now.
In the living room, she noticed something strange about the quality of the light coming through the windows.
She walked over to one of them, pulled the curtain aside, peered out.
Her yard was now full of big pine trees, and they were blocking the sunlight that would’ve normally hit her windows.
There was also something bizarre happening on the ground, so weird that it took her a whole minute to figure out what she was seeing.
It was as if another landscape had been superimposed on top of her lawn: a semi-transparent landscape, covered with pine needles.
And off in the distance, where the road in front of her house should’ve been, there was a clearing and a small white house.
And yet, beneath it was the ghostly outline of the road.
She let the curtain fall back into place and stepped away from the window.
This was unlike any hallucination she’d ever experienced. Normally she saw people, or objects, or animals. Sometimes she saw scary things, or things so strange she couldn’t really understand them, but they were always very isolated. It wasn’t like the whole world just fell away and she started dreaming a new reality.
She walked over to one of the trees in the the living room, an especially large one, and put her hand into it, nearly up to the elbow.
Was it even more solid than the others she’d tested?
Yes, she thought so.
And maybe it was less transparent as well.
She looked around then, and decided that all of them had become more solid. More real.
And the pine-tar smell was even stronger. She was sure.
Can’t be good… It’s getting realer and realer.
A horrifying thought occurred to her: maybe this time it wouldn’t go away. Maybe she would get stuck like this. It didn’t seem the least bit unlikely. Not after the pain. Not after the ripping sound.
Tears sprang into her eyes, and she felt her throat tightening.
No goddammit! I’m not gonna cry. That won’t help. That’s just giving up. I’m not gonna give up. I have to do something to make it stop.
She tightened her jaw, fought back the tears, and tried to think of something she could do. There weren’t many options really. As far as she knew, these experiences were essentially driven by her unconscious mind. She had never been able to control them in any way, all she could do was endure them.
Endure. Maybe that was the key. Maybe there was something she needed to endure.
Sometimes during her hallucinations she had the intuitive sense that her mind was putting on a little play for her, like it was telling her a story and it wanted her to experience the whole thing. Sometimes she thought this was why closing her eyes and trying to wait out the pains wouldn’t let her avoid seeing things.
Maybe this was like that. Maybe there was something else that needed to happen.
Maybe I need to go outside.
Yes, it made sense. There was something out there, definitely—a little house, another landscape covering up her yard. It didn’t feel random. It felt like a part of the experience.
But she didn’t want to go. Not really. There was no telling what she might see out there.
Just go out on the porch, and maybe that’ll be enough. Baby steps.
She took a deep breath and started hesitantly towards the door, but with her first footstep, she noticed something else that shook her sense of reality even further.
The floor seemed to give a little under her feet, like rubber.
She stopped in her tracks and looked down.
The boards appeared solid enough, but when she tested by tapping with her toe, the sense of pressing against something soft was very noticeable.
She knelt and brushed her fingers across the wood.
The texture was all wrong, almost like clay, and it felt slimy.
Okay, this is just too much…
It was like the whole world was falling apart around her ears.
She hurried to the door, taking a somewhat circuitous route to avoid walking through the tree trunks crowding the living room.
Outside, the air smelled even more strongly of pine, and the porch surface was just as soft as the living room floor had been. Maybe softer.
The hallucinatory pine-tree forest had become so solid that she could barely see her own yard under it, and the little white shack in the distance beckoned. From this angle she could also see that there was an old burgundy van parked in the phantom driveway.
She stood there for a long time, waiting for something to happen, something that might satisfy her crazy brain and end this experience.
She’d been waiting for about two minutes when she suddenly
started sinking down into the porch.
Jesus Christ!
She took a stumbling step, and her foot made a sucking sound as it came loose from the planks.
When the foot came down again, it was like stepping on a very soft mattress. The feeling caught her by surprise. She lost her balance, started to topple.
She made a grab for the door frame as she fell, but it was already too late.
When her body hit, it was like landing on a thin layer of jello.
She went right through.
- - -
Thackery stared down at the gleaming page, unsure how to proceed.
Any time he used the Ouija-Pad he always took the trouble to flick through the last few pages, but it was just for the sake of being thorough. He never actually expected to find anything back there.
In fact, he really didn’t want to find anything. Not something powerful enough to show up that late in the book.
He’d heard horror stories from mediums who found themselves caught up in the games of gods. It was, apparently, no fun to be a puppet.
Should I even try to communicate with it?
He was debating the question when writing appeared on the page in red:
Listen very closely Malcolm Thackery. I am about to give you some advice.
At that point Malcolm knew that he no longer had any options in this situation. You couldn’t exactly ignore something with this much power if it was actively seeking you out.
He picked up the pen, started writing his response underneath the entity’s statement:
Advice? Who is this?
The writing lingered for a second, then both statements faded out of existence on the page.
A moment later the entity’s response appeared:
Don’t ask me questions. This is not that kind of relationship. I tell you things, you listen. That is all.
A snarky reply came into his mind, but he suppressed it. Being very polite seemed like a more prudent strategy, so he wrote:
The DARK Trilogy: Titan's Song Chronicles Volume 1 (Books 1 - 3) Page 6
