Altered Gate

by Altered Gate (retail) (epub)

  “Good. That’s very good. Tell me what you remember.”

  “I was in there, in the store picking up the booze,” I began, but was holding onto the image of Rouge. I didn’t want to let go of her. “I was over in the rum section, and these three guys came up to me. They kept trying to tell me they knew me from YouTube, but I told them they had the wrong guy. They wouldn’t leave me alone. They just continued to say I was the monster guy they’d seen in a video and wouldn’t drop it. Then, one of them grabbed me and I don’t like that, so, I sort of lost control.” It was an easy and believable lie, one that came without thought and as I said it, the doctor flipped through some pages, and then a few more. “I was arrested by a cop working in the store, and when another showed up, I was tasered and blacked out. My next memory is being here.”

  “You said one of them grabbed you?”

  “Yes, the one I jumped on.” And that was the truth as far as I knew it.

  “Very good. It actually matches up with the video footage transcript, Dillon, so I want to tell you, that is some great prog­ress.”

  “That’s all I want. I just want to get better.”

  “But, what about the YouTube video they mentioned? Do you know what they were talking about?”

  “I—”

  There was a loud knock at the door, and then it flew open. One of the male nurses barged in, a bad look on his face.

  “I’m in the middle of a session, Doug. What’s this about?”

  “We got a problem with one of the patients. It’s bad. Real bad.”

  The doctor jumped up and ran out of the room, following the nurse. I left too, since there was no reason to stay behind. In the TV room, there was a horrible smell. Most of the on-duty staff were also in there, and just outside of it was a gaggle of patients looking on. I stepped up and saw the entire room had had been repainted poorly with what could only be shit. I could also hear someone screaming in there, but couldn’t see who it was. I turned to one of the other patients, a woman some called Spacey Tracey, and asked her what was going on.

  “It’s Harrison. His dad came to visit today, and when he came from the meeting room, he went and started pooing in there. First he covered himself in it, and then the walls. Bobby was in there, pretending to watch reruns of Judge Judy, but the TV was off. That’s when Harrison started. Bobby stayed until he started smearing it on the walls. He loves Judge Judy. I hope they clean it before movie night.”

  More screams from inside the TV room. The words were unin­telligible, but once I knew it was Harrison, I could tell it was him. More nurses ran in, and before I knew it, the show was over. Someone must’ve already brought a gurney in there before I arrived, because when they all started to leave, they had him strapped to it. The smell hit me even worse as they began to wheel him out, and it was so bad that it almost made my eyes water.

  “Everyone out of the way!” one of the nurses at the gurney barked, and we listened.

  I took a few steps back and wished I’d backed up even further when I saw him. He was naked, dressed only in straps and a coating of light brown shit. I could tell he’d had corn the night before. He wriggled around, still screaming, but when I saw his face, the cries turned to something else. His voice turned down to the muffled echo of a scream as black sludge bled from his open mouth and his eyes wept black oil. He stared at me. His eyes had liquefied and dribbled down his turned face, pooled on the white sheets; I could still tell he was looking at me.

  I turned from him, faced Spacey Tracey, but she only shook her head and looked mildly disgusted. She didn’t react to Harrison’s melting face.

  What was wrong with me?

  “Are you okay, Dillon?”

  I turned, and the doctor was there. He looked at me with a face clearly full of concern. I bit back the terror I felt brimming within me, and tried my best to look normal.

  As though I knew what normal was any more!

  “Yeah. Fine. I just, you know, hate seeing him like that.”

  “Are you sure? You look very scared.”

  “Just worried about Harrison.”

  “You two are friends?”

  “We talk. So, yeah, I guess we are.”

  “He’ll be okay,” he told me, placing what was supposed to be a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “He’s just having a bad day. We all have them.”

  I nodded.

  It seemed as though mine day had just turned down the same road.

  I wanted this bad day to come to an end.

  I wanted to get out of there.

  Most of all, I wanted to stop seeing these things.

  That night, I took my pills and went to bed. I woke up a few hours later by the return of a man I knew to be dead.

  “You’re here again? Really?”

  “I don’t know, Dillon. Am I here, or is this all you?” he asked, crossing his hands on his lap.

  “It must be the pills,” I said, and closed my eyes. “These new pills are doing this. It has to be the damn drugs fucking with my head.”

  “That very well could be. I don’t know, but I feel pretty real. Well, as real as someone with a body can feel, Dillon.”

  I sat up in bed and looked at him again. He appeared the same as I remembered him. I used to go to the church, and we’d sit for hours in his office. He loved tea, and telling me stories of his youth, and his quest to find faith. I’d tell him all about my latest exploits and he’d usually feel sorry for the creatures I dealt with. He’d explain to me the reason these things were drawn to Earth, that regardless of their origins, they were all God’s creatures and should be allowed to be as they wished, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone.

  I miss those days. I knew they weren’t imagined.

  At least I hoped they weren’t.

  “Why are you here, Ted, assuming you are real?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Are you going to keep doing that? Answering my questions with the same one aimed back at me?”

  “No. I just want you to figure out what you’re doing here. This isn’t your place, Dillon. You belong out there in the world, doing what you do. You are someone who does good work, even if I didn’t agree with all your methods. Even though you sometimes stray off your path, you keep people safe, and that’s not being done while you’re in this place. You need to get back out there and do what it is you do.”

  “What I do? I’m not even sure what I do any more,” I confessed.

  “That’s the problem. This place has you mixed up, lost, and confused. You need to get back out there, Dillon. Something bad is coming. It always is. And if you’re in here, there’ll be no way to stop it.”

  “I can’t just walk out,” I said, a little louder than I should’ve, and my roomie mumbled for me to shut up. I lowered my voice. “And even if I could just walk out, I’m not sure I want to. I keep…seeing things, and I don’t want to see them any more. I just want it to stop.”

  “I’m sure it will, when you figure it out.”

  “Figure what out? What’s there to figure out? I keep seeing people melting, and it’s a nightmare I want to wake up from. Nobody else sees it. Ever. I don’t want it in my head any more. I don’t want to feel it. You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “You’re right, I don’t. But holing yourself up in here is not going to fix it, Dillon. You’re starting to see it here too, aren’t you?”

  Harrison’s face came into my head, and I tried to shut it out.

  “Yeah, but that just shows you something is wrong with me. They had me on meds and as soon as they took me off them, I started seeing the melting faces again. And you.”

  “So you think the pills were helping you? Do you want those images blocked out?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “You’d rather block them out and live in a waking coma rather than figure out why you’re
seeing them at all? Don’t you think there’s purpose to the visions you’re having? Things happen for a reason, Dillon. You know that.”

  I did, but that didn’t change the fact that I’d prefer never having to see, smell, or fear those melting faced things ever again.

  “I’m so lost right now, Ted. I can’t tell what’s up or down, what’s real and what’s not.”

  “Maybe reality isn’t something anyone really knows. Before I met you, I thought monsters were a thing adults told children about to keep them afraid to be out after dark and to go to bed when they’re told to. Then, you came along and my world was turned upside down. I didn’t run and hide from it, though. I accepted what I could and tried to understand what I couldn’t. That’s why I cherished our visits. I miss them, Dillon. You were a great friend and listener.”

  “Is this even real?”

  “Do you want it to be?” he asked, and I nodded. “Then just let it be real. I promise, I won’t tell anyone.”

  Two days passed. That was progress too. I was actually starting to be able to know one day from the next. I still didn’t know what day of the week it was, or how long I’d been at CAMH, but at least there was something showing my improvement.

  Over those two days, I didn’t see the doctor or Harrison. I wondered what had been wrong with him, what made him freak out and cover the TV room and himself in the previous night’s digested dinner. His stench lingered, even though cleaning crews had bleached and scrubbed every surface. I was sure there were going to be bits of shmear ingrained in the carpets and walls for the remainder of the time I was forced to stay there.

  I steered clear of there for that reason, not to mention the fact that nothing was ever on the TV except for the few nights a week we were allowed to watch Jack Nicholson make the biggest mistake, pretending to be crazy until he was lobotomized. Spoiler alert!

  The few times I did pass by the TV room, though, I was forced to think about Harrison. The smell brought him to mind, and I wondered again and again why he’d freaked out, and also what made him become one of the melted-face people. Since being locked up, I hadn’t seen any of them, so what happened that made him change?

  I tried to convince myself that it was the change of meds. I was taken off the anti-psychotics and started to revert to my clearly crazy ways. I fought myself over that very fact. It was as though there were two other me’s in the room, arguing over my sanity.

  Me One, I’ll call him Pro-Medication Me, tried to convince the real me I was crazy and needed the medication I was on to stop believing in monsters, and seeing molten-faced people. Pro-Medication Me said that as soon as I had my next meeting with the doctor, I should tell him about what I believed I saw happen to Harrison’s face, and about the nightly visits I’d been having with Father Ted. Since the time my meds were switched, the dead priest had come to see me every night. Usually, we talked just like we had before. We shot the shit about a lot of nothing, but in the end, he would keep telling me I needed to get out of the hospital. Pro-Medication Me explained how I was wrong. Ted had been simply another delusion, and not telling the doctor would just take me further down the rabbit hole. I didn’t argue with that me. I didn’t need to. That was Pro-Monster Me’s job.

  Pro-Monster Me was very vocal about getting the hell out of there. That version of my psyche made some good points, too. He said there was Rouge out in the real world waiting for me, and there was also my life. Not to mention all the people who counted on me to rid them of the things that went bump in the night.

  “There’s a reason you’re seeing these people come apart the way you are. You need to find out why. Get to the source, and then it’ll stop. Just like those headaches you had when there’d been a parasite attached to your brain. You didn’t know about it, but you found out and dealt with it.”

  “The parasite wasn’t real, idiot!” Pro-Medication Me cut in. “None of that was real.”

  “Of course it was. Are you really trying to convince us that the monsters we’ve spent years fighting aren’t real?”

  “Prove they were. Prove they’re not part of a bigger issue: our mental health.”

  “Prove it? Are you kidding me? How about the tattoos we’re covered in to ward off certain demons and spirits? How about the fact that there’s a YouTube video of us fighting a monster, part of the reason we’re here?”

  “More delusions just piled upon other delusions. Can’t you see you’re rehashing the lies we’ve made up, spewing out the very falsehoods which brought us here? We need help and that’s what we’re getting here.”

  “What we’re getting here is a mind fuck. We’re being fed drugs meant for humans, and we aren’t exactly human, are we?”

  Pro-Medication Me turned to me and made a face to say can you believe this guy?, but I kind of did. After all, I was sitting in a room with two other versions of myself, listening to a debate over my own sanity and identity.

  “Are you listening to yourself? We’re not exactly human? Look at yourself in the mirror. Of course you are.”

  “Not really. Not down where it counts, and these drugs aren’t meant for us.”

  “Of course not, you’re so right. You’re an alien who hunts monsters down, has a gorgeous girlfriend, and keeps the world safe. Sounds like delusions of grandeur to me.”

  I watched them argue back and forth; as though it was the worst tennis game I’d ever seen. Each of them made some good points, but I needed to eventually choose one or the other. The question was: which side did I need to true? I didn’t want to stay in the hospital any more, but I also didn’t want to keep seeing the things I had. It wasn’t just like seeing a monster, or getting an adrenaline dump when put into a life or death situation, seeing the melting-faced things, and feeling their touch and their goop was like nothing I’d ever felt before. It made me feel as though I was dying, rotting away, ten times worse than when the shadow person entered me.

  “Where’s my son! Where is he?”

  I heard the loud, gruff voice of a man yelling in the hallway, and the two Me’s disappeared. They just went POP! and then they were gone; no decision made. I stood up from my chair in the rec room and went out to see what all the hubbub was about.

  Over by the nurse’s desk, there was a man in a red and black plaid jacket, wearing a black winter hat low on his head. His pants and boots were caked in white plaster and mud. He was husky and kept slamming ham-sized fists on the desk asking where his son was.

  “Mr Manatalas, if you would just calm down, the on-call doctor is on his way to speak to you now,” the male nurse behind the desk said. A second nurse, a woman who’d I’d only talked to twice, came around and tried to calm him down. She put her small, but no doubt strong hands on his shoulder and told him in a soft, gentle voice everything was going to be fine.

  “Just take a deep breath and calm down,” she said.

  “Get your hands off me, and don’t tell me to calm down! Tell me what the fuck is going on,” he said, and pulled his arm away from the nurse, nearly knocking her over. “You people said he’d be fine here, that you’d take care of him because he couldn’t live on his own. Then I get a call that there’s been some sort of accident! Where the hell is my son?”

  “Sir, if I could tell you, I would, but hospital policy—”

  “Oh, Jesus… what happened to him? My other son was here once and overdosed. You people said the same thing when I got here. I was told they couldn’t tell me anything, only the doctor could. Bullshit hospital policy.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Manatalas.”

  “Just tell me, is he dead?”

  She said nothing, but her head dropped and her body language told him everything he needed to know. He began to sob, no longer angry. His shoulders slumped and he looked as though he’d given up any fight he’d had in him. His son was dead.

  Harrison was gone.

  I felt weird.

&n
bsp; What the hell was going on?

  “You and Harrison were friends, weren’t you, Dillon?”

  I was sitting across from the doctor the next day in his office. I was still a bit numb after hearing about Harrison’s death. I’d kept listening when the on-duty doctor had come to speak to Mr Manatalas. He’d refused to go to her office, so they stood near the nurse’s desk and she’d told him how his son had somehow managed to break free from his restraints and used them to hang himself. Mr Manatalas had asked a lot of questions, most them about why his son was locked away and restrained in the first place, and why nobody had been watching him, but in the end, he left to prepare to bury his second child.

  After that, I was left to ponder.

  Even when Ted paid me a ghostly visit that night, he wasn’t very helpful in pulling me out of my confused and disconnected state. My mind had become a multilane highway of thoughts and inner dialogues. I searched for answers in a world where everything was written in a language alien to me.

  “Are you okay, Dillon?” The doctor asked, and I looked up for a second “You seem to keep drifting off.”

  “I’m just thinking. But yeah, Harrison was sort of a friend.”

  “I know this must be hard for you, Dillon. This is no place to deal with loss, on top of everything else. Especially since things have a way of not always being as they seem.”

  “It is hard. But I think the medication and these talks are helping me see what’s real and what I’ve made up.”

  “I guess that’s part of the problem now, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” I was rightly confused.

  “I’m at a real loss here, with how to start this, but I think we need to try. We need to work through some things that have been weighing on me a bit. In the last few days, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research, outside of my normal way of thinking. First thing I need to ask, though: have you had any issues with the new medication?”