The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
There is no Hand
7-31-2002

It is autumn, and dead leaves cover the ground. I'm staying in my childhood home, which is much more expansive than I remember it. There's a labyrinth-like cellar in it, for instance, and gothic iron gates out front. Every once in a while, I hear a voice in my head, an aggressive whisper, say one word. Often it's the last word I just said, as if it's some psychic palilalia.

At some point, I swim/fly barely above the ground, digging up some leaves with my arms, talking to a phantasmic woman on the other side of the gate, who's sitting at a table with another woman. Again the voice in my head, echoing my final word or thought. It bothers, even frightens me deeply.

I go up to my sister's old bedroom. It's changed now. Much more dark and gothic. The entire house seems old, with no electricity, just darkness illuminated by the light of the moon through the windows, or by my imagination. I feel my sister's presence. It seems like she's there, but I don't recall actually seeing her. She tells me she hears the voice, too.

A phone rings, but it's a phone that's not supposed to ring. It's old, with an antique handset that comes off the base. There's not even anything to dial on it with. I thought it was broken. I didn't even know it was connected, nor who would know the number if it were. I answer it, and it's a boy on the other end. I have a vision of him staying in a remote room in the house. "I wanted to thank you for letting me stay the past two days," he says, "and I wanted to pay you for my time here." "That's not necessary," I say, and continue with a few more words, the last of which are again echoed by the increasingly sinister voice in my head. It is really starting to frighten me.

I encounter my sister again, moreso in my head than in person, and she says, " nineteen ninety-five." It's a date, obviously, and it's accompanied by a vision of someone else, some shadowy figure, standing in the very spot I'm standing in by the bedroom window. I suspect the voice in my head is connected to this person, but whether male or female, stalker or victim, I cannot tell who this person is.

I find another presence, an unknown parental figure, and ask them who lived here eight years ago. Somehow, in my mind, while 1995 was 8 years ago (7 actually), it was also 8 years before I was born, and thus 8 years (10 years, actually) before I lived in my childhood home. In any case, I had the impression that my entire childhood was spent in the presence of a dead person, a spirit, and I was only now, after returning to this home, that I noticed it. With a quiver in my voice, I ask, "What lived here before us?" but receive no answer...none aside from the echolalia in my mind, that is, taunting me.

I leave to find the neighbors sitting on their driveway. I intuitively know that they can hear the voice, and that they avoid going into their own home, because out here they can't hear it as well. I ask them for help, and they take me into their home. They have a nice foyer just inside their garage, with a black and white tile floor, a nice couch-thing by the wall under a mirror, a tall wooden antique table by a railing in the middle of the room, and an odd music-stand-like bookshelf on top of the table, displaying a few large tomes. I can tell it takes effort for them to be here, listening to the voices.

I ask them about the voice, and with a sob, I ask the man, "What happened in 1995?" I can barely speak it. His expression indicates, "I think you already know," but I don't know. He takes out a mettalic box, some sort of old cooking appliance, and shows it to me. "See these numbers..." he says, and points to some serial numbers on a little piece of it. I can't believe I never thought to look at my own appliance for the answer, for I had the exact same thing back home.

As I read the numbers, which read like a metaphysical SQL statement, my mind sort of clicks, and darkness descends. I can feel my mind being tugged away by some other force. Frightened, I fight it off, and then I can see again. It all happens almost instantaneously. "Something was trying to take me away," I say. The woman laughs, as if it were a preposterous thing to think. The man doesn't laugh, however, and says, "You'll hear them soon."

I don't want to hear them. I don't want my mind to be opened up to these supernatural forces. I run from the room, and I make it to the open doorway before I hear millions of shrieks inside my head, like a harsh wind with a miscreant personality. It shocks me, and I grab onto the door frame with my left hand, maybe for balance, but maybe to make sure it's real. An ethereal hand grabs it from the void and holds it there. It seems very real, but I know it's not. I yell in panic, and then yell, "Let go of me! There is no hand! THERE IS NO HAND!" It simultaneously lets go and vanishes, and I stumble back into the room with the two other people, who stand there calmly. The voices continue to shriek in my head, but nothing I can understand. The room seems to ebb and swirl in a way that reality itself is but a flimsy fabric.

Abstract forces grab at me, and some rat-like things scurry around my feet. I know none of it is real. It's all in my mind. It can't hurt me. Yet I'm very scared. I decide it's my fear that's turning them all on me, so I discard my fear and turn it to anger, shouting something along the lines of, "Get out of here!" while I stomped after the ghostly rats and boldly stormed about the room. The voices got quieter.

It was then that I noticed that the room I was in was exactly like the same room in my own childhood home. How was this possible? I didn't understand it. I didn't understand any of what had happened so far. I decided I didn't want to, so I left the house and woke up, before the voices returned again.


posted by Phlegm at 11/26/2003