by K. C. Hunter
These were the words of a father at his wits end to protect his child. AJ understood that. Mark’s jaw tightened as he waited for an answer. How could AJ deny this man the opportunity to face down his daughter’s tormentor?
“Okay, you’re going.” AJ put his shoes back on. “There’re a few things we need to go over. But before we get into any of that, you should tell your wife what you’re doing.”
“Why?”
“Honestly? Because you may not come back.”
***
Convincing Alice to let her husband participate in the Ganzfeld Experiment wasn’t an easy sell. She had her concerns and fears. Chief among them was Mark’s safety, both physically and spiritually. AJ heard the conversation through the bathroom walls. Mark tried to ease his wife’s concerns, but she refused to have anything to do with it. The conversation ended. A few doors slammed, and then Mark burst back into the bathroom, raked his fingers through his hair, and sat down on the edge of the tub.
“I’m ready.”
The closer Mark got to entering the tub, the more his wife’s warnings about doing this weighed on him. If he died, what would she do? Did he trust AJ? Did AJ really know what he was doing. He forced those thoughts out of his mind and stripped down to a pair of swim trunks. He looked at his face in the mirror, rubbed at his ever-growing beard, and slapped the sides of his face to psyche himself up. It was now or never. He lowered himself into the tub, the salty warm water tingling his skin from head to toe like the sandy wash of an incoming ocean tide. AJ prepared the orange helmet, connecting the wires to each of the white nodes on the cap before fitting it over Marks’ skull.
A pair of golf balls, cut in half, were placed over his eyes along with a pair of waterproof headphones over his ears. “Breathe,” AJ instructed. “You must relax. Let the water do its work. Don’t fight it, just float.”
Relaxing had never been easy for Mark. The warmth of the bath water helped. As he adjusted to this prone position and the darkness behind his eyelids, AJ’s voice softened into the background. White noise, faint and haunting, filled the headphones while his body rose to the surface of the water, a million tiny pins pushed against his back.
So, this is what isolation felt like, he thought. Mark had never been alone for more than a few minutes his entire life. He came from a big family, always had roommates, and since he met Alice, he’d never spent a night without another human in the same house. This sensation—shutting out of the outside world for an inner one—felt foreign to him. Goosebumps rose on his arms, his insides clenched, and tiny invisible pricks nipped at his fingertips and toes. The darkness melted into a soft magenta, the outline of veins and cells dancing across his vision.
New images formed behind his closed lids, colors and shapes he had no words for. Blobs of auburn and splashes of ochre floated from the edges. A black dot, no larger than a pinprick, pierced the magenta and grew, second by second, turning and morphing as it expanded, eating away at the center. A chill built up at the back of his skull before it thinned itself out down the length of his neck and spine. He wanted to speak out, to tell AJ to stop the experiment, but his lips didn’t move, and he couldn’t summon the breath to form a word, his lungs feeling solidified. He was both slave and passenger on this journey, the destination unknown.
You dare?
A sickly voice overtook the white noise. Not quite man or beast, but something in between, coarse and deep.
You do not understand what you are doing, do you?
With each syllable the voice grew louder. Every word stabbed at the back of Mark’s skull.
Speak little man! Speak or leave!
His throat tickled as a bundle of words ached to challenge this monster. Mark found the strength and forced them through. “Leave her alone. My daughter… she is not for you.”
You’ll have to do better than that.
The demon’s bellowing pounded the inside of his skull. The more it spoke, the more Mark’s vision changed. He saw the outline of a chin and a nose, and later the furrows of a forehead, all sketched by the floating black mass swirling in his mind’s eye. “Who are you? What do you want with my daughter?”
Oh, you want me to tell you my name, is that it? You are a foolish, pitiful little creature who dabbles in what you don’t understand as if you have authority here. Of all places, here!
“You invaded my home, I invade yours,” Mark said, his voice deep and authoritative. “I am ordering you to leave my daughter, leave my home, leave my family in peace.”
Peace? Your family has never known peace. I have watched you all—yes, for some time. I’ve watched as you and your wife squabble and ignore your child. I’ve watched as you fumbled together in the night, her passion that of a slug, hoping to create another child that will never be. Your home is one you can barely afford. Day after day you toil at a meaningless job and come home to a loveless marriage and a daughter you have no hopes of understanding.
“You’re a liar! You’re a goddamn liar!” Mark yelled.
But I understand Melody. Oh, yes, I understand her. It’s why I chose her. It’s why she’s mine. She is a diamond hewn from the most unspectacular mounds of coal, and she will serve me in any way I choose.
Mark howled, his throat gargling salt water, his voice losing its authority. “No! I told you to leave! Leave my daughter alone! Or, I swear to God—”
God? The monster laughed. He has no power here. He left you long ago as you left Him. Your threats are as impotent as you are. On the other hand, your guests are making this harder than it should be. I’ll just have to… adjust.
“What does that mean?” Mark moved his head side to side.
Time is up.
AJ grabbed Mark’s forearms as he shot up in the tub, flailing his limbs and splashing water across the bathroom. He ripped the goggles and helmet from his head, blinking as water dripped down his face.
“You’re okay.” AJ helped Mark out of the tub. “I heard what happened. Well, some of it was garbled in the readout, but I got the general idea.”
A translation of Mark's conversation with the demon flashed on AJ's laptop screen. Words appeared as broken phrases and fragments, some of them were full sentences while others just phonetic clusters of letters. The last phrase, Time is up, lingered at the bottom of the screen. Mark stared at the words, wiped the water from his face, and grabbed a towel to dry himself off.
Alice’s scream pierced the walls. Mark pushed AJ aside, opened the door, and sprinted into the hallway, still dripping with water. AJ followed him to the child’s bedroom and came to a dead stop when he saw what was happening.
“What in the hell?” is all he could say.
Alice slammed her fist against Mark’s chest. “You did this! It was you! What did you say? What happened? That thing… It—” She covered her face with her hands as she fell to her knees.
Melody floated like a helium balloon over her bed. Her face was distorted, her mouth curved down and to the left, her eyes were open and devoid of color, blood trickling from her nose. The stuffed animals, music box, toys, discarded clothes, lifted into the air one by one and swirled around the room as if caught in a tornado.
AJ had never encountered anything like this before. He wouldn’t lie to himself, he was as fascinated as he was terrified of the vicious power on display. He thought back to the words on his laptop screen: Time is up.
My Own Prison
After the confrontation with Alice that morning, a long drive far away from the McNeil house proved therapeutic for Kana. The weather report forecasted clear skies, which turned out to be false. Showers pelted her Dodge Challenger as she left suburbia and entered the countryside.
Kana replayed Alice’s words over and over in her head, imagining different ways she could have handled it. The woman’s voice became an ice pick stabbing the back of her brain. She pressed play on her car stereo and selected one of her favorite playlists to drown it out. All the tracks were rock songs from several genres with howling guitar
riffs. One track gave her pause, an old gothic rock song titled Incubus Succubus, its chorus highlighted by the haunting vocals of the female lead singer repeating two words: incubus succubus. She skipped the track, realizing the inappropriate timing of such a song but skipped back to it anyway, the German lyrics stuck in her head. She put the track on repeat, tapping the wheel of her car in tune with the rhythmic drums while lip syncing to the lyrics.
The shower ended an hour later. Kana found herself outside an abandoned warehouse in an industrial park filled with buildings owned by failed businesses. The sun cut through the grey clouds overhead, highlighting flocks of birds fluttering down to the drenched grass, seeking morsels of worms summoned to the surface by the earlier downpour.
She stepped out of the car and walked along the wet ground. The air smelled ripe after the storm, the late summer heat created a natural sauna in the parking lot, the hazy steam rising from the asphalt and overgrown grass.
This far away from the suburbs, or any major metropolitan area, there weren’t as many eyes. No passersby. No wandering travelers who would ask her what she’s doing or why she was here. Long since abandoned, the warehouses and storage sheds here were in a gradual state of ruin. The rusty metal doors and cracked brick, the painted black windows, she found it peaceful. It represented who she was inside, and to a greater extent, how she saw the world.
Kana made a second trip around the parking lot, following along the edge of the faded yellow lines marking the empty parking spaces, and her thoughts turned to the child. Melody was too much like her, a reminder of a past she tried so hard to bury in drink, school, or work.
The screams of her parents haunted her, looped in her mind like a broken record. Years had passed since she had spoken to them. They were the type to sweep unpleasantries under the rug with the understanding that whatever was under there was never to be spoken of again. Pretend it didn’t exist. But how could they expect that from her? She had seen a glimpse of the paranormal underworld, knew it was real, and wanted to take her place in it.
A bird splashed in the puddle off to her right. She passed it by on her first walk around the lot, but this time she stopped and knelt beside it, the bird flying away before she got too close. Her face stared back at her, distorted by the uneven water. She saw her father’s cheekbones, her mother’s slender nose, and her Asian eyes, slightly rounder than normal, a result of her grandmother’s German lineage. She saw their disapproval of her in those features, mirrored by Alice’s words which rang loudly in her head, the ice pick still chipping away. It was also in her reflection, just under the skin. Nothing she did was ever the right thing, no course of action was ever the right road, and she had allowed these voices to cripple her every single time. She allowed them to control her, to force her to run and doubt herself.
“No more,” she said under her breath.
Kana stood tall and looked down at her reflection one last time before stomping the puddle on her way back to her car. No more running. AJ had been right; she had a chance to do for Melody what no one did for her. The girl had suffered enough.
She sped off from the abandoned parking lot with a new determination. She’d make sure Melody wouldn’t have to live with the same doubts about her sanity or her soul, doubts that plagued Kana since childhood.
Behind the Veil
Kana reached the McNeil’s home just after sunset. The crickets and owls were out in full force, a chorus of cheerful chirps and hoots surrounding her. The house stood in total contrast. Not one light shone in the windows, and no movement was seen on the ground floor. She stopped halfway to the front door and called AJ’s cell phone.
No answer.
Kana took her time entering the house, the foyer and living room empty and lightless. A horrid stench of rotten meat and human waste crawled down the steps to meet her, calling her attention to the flashing blue lights upstairs. The hairs on her arm stood on end as she climbed, the foul wind pushing against her. “AJ?”
No answer.
Kana craned her neck as she climbed the staircase. “Mark? Alice?”
Again, no answer.
She reached the top step. AJ’s Ganzfeld Plus experiment littered the upstairs bathroom, the orange cap and wireless headphones sitting in a puddle of water while his laptop screen flickered in the darkness. Still no sign of him or the family.
The door to Melody's room was shut. Kana crept toward it, her left hand extended with the right she balled into a fist. She heard a noise, a persistent flapping against the other side of the door. The stench was strongest here. Kana clasped the doorknob and closed her eyes before turning it. The door swung open, the hinges moaning, revealing the abomination on the other side.
“Damnit,” she said.
A foul wind blew through her black hair as she entered. Melody floated in the center of the room, her mouth frozen in a voiceless scream, her clothes in tatters, the cast on her arm broken into pieces. A whirlwind of toys, clothes, and furniture swirled around her, changing speed and direction in unison, maintaining a barrier that kept Kana from getting close.
On the floor next to the door was AJ, Alice, and Mark. Kana feared the worst seeing their bodies crumpled on the carpet. She put her hand to AJ’s neck to check for a pulse.
“Still alive.”
The parents were breathing too. Kana turned her attention back to the floating girl, hoping to see a way to break her from the spirit’s grip. The child’s eyes turned an obsidian black, and her lashes twitched to stay open. A shadow moved from her head to her torso, creating a massive six-fingered handprint on her clothes. The mark deepened as a cracking sound echoed through the room. Melody whimpered, her voice barely audible over the vortex of trash.
“Stop it!” Kana screamed. “Leave the girl alone.”
No response from Melody, no sinister voice from the darkened corners of the room, no words forming on the walls in blood, just the fluttering of the whirlwind.
Kana looked around the room, sneering at the invisible force hiding somewhere in the shadows. “Show yourself. Whatever you are, show yourself!”
Melody’s body sank a few inches before spinning around at a wicked speed, her arms frozen horizontal to the rest of her body as she twirled helplessly.
There had to be a way through this whirlwind, Kana thought. If she could just reach Melody, she could pull her away from harm. Her first attempt failed, the music box smacking the back of her hand. She reached out a second time only to be pelted by Melody's broken dolls, each toy crashing into her arm with such force it nearly broke her bones. There was no point in trying again, the whirlwind was too fast for her to penetrate without being bludgeoned to death.
“Ms. Kana.” Melody’s voice sounded froggy as she stopped spinning, “I’m… I’m not afraid of him. But he… he is afraid… of you.”
Kana’s relaxed her shoulders, glanced behind her at the open door to the bathroom, and then turned back to Melody. “I know he is, Melody. He wants to hide from me. I’ll just have to go to him.”
***
When Kana and AJ first started their paranormal practice, he showed her the Ganzfeld Experiment and convinced her to try it. The nightmares of her past revisited her on that day, bringing her back to her own childhood and the hauntings at her parent’s home. That was a distant memory. She forced those concerns out of her mind as she ran the water, stripped down to her underwear, and settled into the salt bath. She needed to do this without the program AJ invented. No monitoring or enhancements, just the cap, headphones, goggles, and salt water.
With her eyes covered, the headphones firmly on, and her body submerged in water, Kana’s consciousness drifted from the bathroom in the McNeil’s home to the darkness behind the goggles. She lost all sense of up or down, right or left, only the blackness behind her eyelids and the caress of salt water mattered.
A rush of energy tickled her stomach, a warming sensation brushing her insides and flowing up through her chest into her skull. The darkness gave way to a veil
of sienna behind her eyelids. Kana felt compelled to touch it, her arm rising from the salt bath and in her mind. But there was resistance. As motes of green and orange trickled from the corners of her sight, an invisible power pushed against her arm. She counted six digits pressing on her skin. Six, she thought, the same number of fingers on the handprint found on Melody’s body.
The spirit didn’t want her touching the veil, which encouraged her to rip it away. What was it hiding? Kana reasserted herself, using the feelings of desperation, anger, fear, and defiance to raise her arm. The demon continued to press against her, but underestimated Kana’s strength, its power slipping away with each inch she gained until she felt no pressure at all. With an anguished scream, she lifted her arm to the sienna veil, pinched the fabric between her fingers, and ripped it away. The illusion fell in a shower of ribbons.
Impressive.
The demon’s voice echoed beyond a benighted expanse, pulling Kana deeper within it. Her organs felt as if they were pushed against the front of her body. Her eyes, heart, lungs, and bowels all buffered against their encasings, almost slipping free as she was snatched up in the ethereal stream, her spirit now a pebble caught in the current.
I don’t know you. But now I see you.
“And I see you,” Kana said.
Caught in the same stream of matter was a single figure curled in a ball with its back to her. It rubbed the back of its head with a deformed six-fingered hand. She could only make out fragments of its form, an outline of musculature and skeleton barely holding its shape as the stream rushed over it. Its composition, much like hers, appeared as a luminous etching streaked across black paper as the stream erased and reformed it.
