Until I Fade

by Kol Anderson

  He opened his mouth to say something, and then stopped, finished the drink instead and poured himself another one. “Are you a hooker?”

  “What?”

  “Just tell me, I won’t say anything. I just want to know.”

  “Even if I was I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “You and me Sam,” he said. “We’re a lot alike.”

  “I know. It’s called genetics.”

  “I don’t just mean looks,” he said, and looked up from his glass. “We’re both fighting our demons and losing. I can see it in your face. How much it’s hurting you stick to that straight line that comes naturally to others. Sammie,” he said and his hand came to rest on my neck. “We’re not like other people, we’re never going to be. We need to accept that reality. It’s the only way you’ll find any kind of peace. You can’t go through life trying to fight your own needs.”

  “I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink,” I said, and stood up.

  He gave me a bitter snort. “God,” he said. “You’re a fucking tease.”

  Okay, that was unexpected. “Excuse me?”

  He got up, started walking up to me. “When I called you the other night, you were clearly with someone. You picked up the phone and you made me listen to that, you getting your cock sucked all night. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice?”

  “Dad,” I said, still hoping he was going to come to his senses, and that he wouldn’t end up meaning what I thought he meant. “I was high. I don’t even remember doing it!”

  And then he was closing in on me and there was no more space to go back. “Sammie,” he said, placing a hand on my neck again. “I missed you.” And then he just drew me in and kissed me. And instead of running the hell away I just stood there. It wasn’t just the act that was surprising; it was the familiar touch of him. “You remember, don’t you?” he said. “I know you do.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Come on, Sammie. Don’t make me say it.”

  “Please, Dad. What should I be remembering?”

  “I used to come to you, Sammie. We used to spend hours, just kissing and touching and loving each other. How can you not remember?”

  It’s true I couldn’t remember anything, but I started trembling for no obvious reason and then I felt a strange rush that I’d never felt before and the emotions that I’d lost after what happened with Aiden came rushing back, out of control. Fear, anger and the kind of grief that knows no end.

  “Sammie. I've waited for you. I know you've been waiting too. I know you love me.”

  In my mind, Alex was going “You know daddy loves you, right?” And I was sitting on his lap, knowing that he wanted me and knowing that I wanted him even more. “Will you fuck me, daddy?”

  “Sam,” my father said, “This isn’t wrong. We’re consenting adults, what we do is nobody’s business.” He ripped the buttons on my shirt and his hands went over my chest. He kissed me there, and I closed my eyes. I knew what I was supposed to do. But I just stood there and let him do all that.

  I don't even know why.

  “God, Sammie,” he said. “You’re so beautiful.”

  I couldn’t form words.

  But every time he touched me it felt good. He was right, I had waited. Waited for him, even when I had no idea I was doing it.

  He turned me over, held me against the wall. I could feel him breathing in my ear, his weight on me and I could feel his cock, hard and erect and waiting.

  ***

  I was on the floor and my father was passed out right next to me.

  The spell was broken.

  No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t stop hating him or myself. A part of me wanted to kill him and another part wanted to put myself to eternal sleep, but I knew I wasn’t capable of either. I pulled up my pants. The room was suddenly making me claustrophobic and I was afraid it might eat me alive, so I ran.

  I ran through the hallways of the hotel like a mad person and down the staircase, and then I ran past the concierge and didn’t stop until I was out in the open, in the middle of the road where it had started to rain. The kind of heavy downpour that makes it impossible to breathe. I hadn’t gotten a new phone since I lost it during that incident with Aiden, so, I couldn’t call anyone.

  Who would I call anyway?

  Hello? Emergency Services? I would like to report a wrecked soul… no there’s no bleeding but there’s pain… a whole lot of it… and I think I’ve got permanent damage…

  I felt like screaming, but I knew no one would hear me.

  People don’t care about broken people the way they care about broken legs.

  From far away, I could hear a car blaring its horn, and I turned just in time to see a pair of headlights headed my way and then the intense screech of brakes… the sound of someone screaming…

  ***

  The car stopped inches away from me.

  The driver stepped out, started cursing me, told me to get out of the way but I couldn’t get my legs to work. And then another door opened and a passenger came out from one of the back seats. “Sam?”

  I recognized Alex’s face. “Are you hurt?”

  Still couldn’t say a word.

  Alex gestured to his driver and took me back to the car with him. “Let’s go to the hotel,” he said to the driver once we were seated in the back.

  I still said nothing.

  Couldn’t bring myself to speak.

  Wordlessly, Alex put his arm around me and hugged me close. “It’s okay,” he said, kissing the top of my head and I found myself leaning into him. “I’ve got you.”

  THE END

  FUGUE

  KOL ANDERSON

  JACOB

  I shouldn’t have been on that road.

  I shouldn’t have been anywhere near that deserted route. I remember the radio stopped working and then I saw a light and the fog was so dense I couldn’t see a thing. Before I could figure out what it was, a shape formed around that luminous glow, the shape of a man, tall and erect, and the light was emanating from a tiny, glowing orb in his forehead. Sure that I was seeing things, I stepped on the brakes but I couldn’t get the car to stop no matter how much I tried and before I knew it, my car hit the strange figure and I felt a jolt, pulling me toward the steering wheel. It took me a while to even realize that my car had hit a tree. I couldn’t move a muscle. A stream of blood trickled from my scalp onto the carpeted floor of the ratty 80s Buick that I have owned since I was in high school. There wasn’t much pain at first, but I felt a strange sickness coming on, the need to throw up. I heard something like a bird’s cry, shrill and high-pitched and then the grunts of another animal close by, like the creature was canvassing the accident. Something pulled me out of the wreck, I felt hands gripping my shoulders that belonged to the same creature I had seen standing in the middle of the road. As I started to panic two more creatures came around to help the first one, and they dragged me away from the site, into the woods. I would have run but I had no control over my own movements. It was like the signals from my brain were unable to reach my body.

  ***

  I must have lost consciousness because when I woke up I was in a dingy room that stank of rot and defecation. They tied me to a post by my wrists. I was on the floor, this time able to move of my own accord but try as I might, I couldn’t get out of the ropes. My mind kept going back to the memories of the accident and to the creatures. Finally, I was spared the silence. The door opened and one of the creatures came inside and this time I saw its face—it had a nasty, open mouth, like a wound and pointy, bloody teeth, something like skin but thicker than any human skin I’ve ever seen. This one did not have an orb on its forehead, but the skull had a jagged surface, no hair. Its eyes were pools of black. Just as tall and fearsome as the creatures that had dragged me here, this one bent to release me and despite my constant struggling to try and hurt him or escape, the creature hauled me outside.

  ***

  They are stron
g.

  I got a good idea of their strength the night of the accident, but now as the guard carries me through the hallways of a dark structure with odd, shadowy designs, I realize that each one of these beings must hold the power of at least ten humans. The creature places his palm on an odd geometric structure on a wall and the wall opens up to reveal the chanting, a hundred voices cantillating in some strange language as I am led into an enormous hall made with some kind of ancient masonry. Right in the middle is a large pyramid structure that glows a greenish-blue. Around it, kneeling with tiny glowing pyramids in their hands, about a hundred of those creatures, all reciting the same words. As I’m still wondering as to where this is going, the chanting becomes severer and an enormous creature with the same thick skin as the others materializes on top of the pyramid. The orb in the middle of his head is glowing like the one on that creature I hit with my car and the dark robes he is wearing are blowing in the wind. On his feet, he has on a sort of fabric that covers them in many layers. He floats in the air, and lands right in front of me, all seven feet of him on the smooth, stone ground and stares at me with his dark pool eyes. “Ro rhem sumph,” he says, or something like it. “Ro rhem sumph.” He repeats it and the hundred incanting mouths start bellowing with him, Ro rhem sumph! Ro rhem sumph! Ro rhem sumph!

  From somewhere inside his robes, a tentacle appears and lodges itself around my left leg, and when it constricts around my leg muscles, I lose my balance and stagger to the floor. The creature hauls me by the tentacle, drags me out of the hall while those mouths are still chanting.

  ***

  Everything here is large. The walls go so high the ceiling is barely visible from my vantage, every single one ending up in darkness. The guard creature that had been following us now stops and presses a hand to the pattern just like before to open another room. When the tentacle creature drags me in this time, we enter a dark room that looks like a dungeon of some sort. There are the strangest kinds of chains and shackles and the walls are bolted with golden fixtures. There are weapons too, strange knives and other things that I have never seen before in my life, all lying neatly on a flat stone surface. The creature comes toward me and takes me into a chokehold, and as I’m trying to breathe and struggle myself free, his tentacle grabs hold of me. Its cold roughness chaffs my skin. “Please!” I yell, realizing that it’s the first time I’ve actually spoken.

  “Vhey mha no ko,” the creature says. “Myn mei lo wa kolo.”

  “Please!” I struggle harder this time against the grip of the tentacles but he won’t let go.

  *

  I wake up on the floor of the dungeon, in pain. My throat is parched and my stomach empty. I can’t bring myself to speak, let alone get up. I vaguely remember one of the creatures attempting to help me but I can’t remember exactly what happened after that.

  Who knows how long I stayed there.

  All sense of time was completely lost on me.

  EVAN

  The first time I saw Jacob he came to visit me at work. Bloodshot eyes, swollen like he had been crying all week, fidgety and nervous as he paced about the small expanse of my office, afraid even of the air that surrounded him. The slightest sound jarred him yet there were times when he would disappear someplace, staring into space and wouldn’t come back no matter how much I tried to talk him out of his stupor. Those times, I practically had to scream in his ear to get him to pay attention to me. According to his file, he is twenty-four. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

  “Doctor Cunningham?”

  “Yes. Please, have a seat.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Why’re you here, Jacob?”

  “I want to know if,” he says. “If… If you can help me.”

  “Well,” I say. “How about you tell me what your problem is first.”

  He continues fidgeting. “Right,” he says. “So I… I was sort of, taken. You know?”

  “Taken?”

  He takes a deep breath, willing himself to speak. “Well, they, you know, they did things. To me. They, the aliens they…they took me.”

  I am a psychiatrist, used to people telling me outrageous things but alien abduction stories are always the hardest to handle. “The aliens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jacob,” I say. “What makes you think they were aliens?”

  “Well,” Jacob says, smirking. “They were aliens, that’s what! They had like, glowing orbs on their foreheads and tentacles and some of them could fly!”

  “And, so where did they take you?”

  “You see,” Jacob says. “I got into an accident. Some backroads route. And I’m driving and it’s past midnight and I run into this creature, like tall about seven feet and with that glowing light in the middle of its forehead. I swear I thought I was hallucinating. But I wasn’t on drugs. I haven’t touched that stuff since high school. Anyway, so my car hits some tree and I can’t get myself to move. And so the creatures, they…they got me out of the wreck. They were strong, like ten sumo wrestlers strong, you know what I mean? So they…they take me some place. I don’t know. I was unconscious a lot of the time.”

  “They took you in the sky?”

  “No,” Jacob says. “The woods. They took me into the woods. You see the woods I’m talking about, they’re just a ruse you know? Kind of like a decoy? In truth, it’s the hiding place for this huge alien city.”

  “Alien city?”

  “Yeah,” Jacob says. “Like an entire metropolis! I saw it once, when they were bringing me back. I got just a glimpse but I know what I saw. There were huge buildings and pyramids and monoliths that glowed with all kinds of symbols. Also this one building which I think was a religious place of some kind because that’s where they did all their rituals.”

  “What kind of rituals?”

  Jacob hesitates and runs a fidgety hand through his hair. “Like there was this huge pyramid and about a hundred of them would sit and kneel and chant something.” He lifts a nail to his mouth, but stops midway. “I have no idea what they were trying to say though.”

  And now it was time to move onto to the difficult part. “What happened while you were there?”

  Jacob withdraws.

  Looks like he needs a place to hide all of a sudden. “Jacob?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “You can tell me. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Isn’t this stuff in my file?”

  “It’s better if I hear it from you.”

  He seems to think this through then sighs defeatedly. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

  After a while, he speaks. “So first they kept me tied down in some place,” he says. “Locked up. Finally, this creature comes in and takes me to some place where everyone’s chanting in a language I’ve never heard before. And well, they summon this…this god…and he…he…,” Jacob squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again. “He took me…to some…I don’t know…it was a dark place, like a dungeon? Well, the thing,” he pauses. “Well, he…she raped me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t remember much to be honest,” Jacob says. “Just remember being in a lot of pain.”

  “Would you like me to get you a glass of water?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Jacob says.

  “What happened then?”

  “Well,” Jacob says. “Then they, they brought me back. Dragged me out of that place and they brought me back to the site of the accident. Someone saw me and called for help. I woke up in a hospital.”

  In his file, it says he was brought in with severe injuries. A blow to his head that might have been caused by the crash but there were signs of serious abuse, just like he says, though DNA tests were inconclusive. Whoever did this must be a disturbed individual. I can see why he’s taking the help of some delusion escape to make sense of everything. I close the file and set it aside on my desk.

  “Well?” he asks.

>   “Well what, Jacob?”

  “Can you help me or not?”

  I look at his face, nothing but apprehension and hopelessness. I see how much he wants someone to tell him it’s all going to be okay. “Jacob,” I say. “Of course, I’ll help you.”

  JACOB

  I’m not stupid.

  I know what people think when they hear an alien abduction story. I used to be that person, scoffing at those poor souls who were convinced they had been taken by some monster. I never gave it so much as a second thought. Which is why it’s ironic that I was the one to whom this happened. I know what Dr. Cunningham thinks. He thinks I’ve gone nuts. He’ll probably talk to me for a few sessions and then put me on some kind of schizophrenia meds. That’s what the others did, but that’s not going to solve my problems. It’s just, I can’t lose hope. Not now. I can’t let those jerk-off aliens win. There was just something about the doctor that was different from any other shrink I’ve ever met. He exudes something—I don’t know what it is but I can feel it. I can feel he’s different. And I don’t know why. But I have to believe that he’s the one. That he’s the one who is going to help me.

  EVAN

  “Your previous doctor,” I say, reading from the file. “Dr. Hawthorne prescribed medication.”

  “Not just her,” Jacob says. “All of them did.”

  “But you disagree with the assessment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why may I ask?”

  “Because,” Jacob says. “I took the medication. And it didn’t work.”

  “You have to give it time.”

  “Do you want to get rid of me?”

  “Jacob, no. Why would you think that?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I just thought maybe this whole thing is too crazy for you.”