Ryan's Suffering

by Lloyd Paulson

  "Well, as you can imagine, when she told me that shit, I was fixin’ to go kill that prick myself. See how he likes it. Fuckin’ asshole. I don't give a fuck if it was almost two decades ago." He took a long swig of beer, and belched, slamming the can on the table.

  "But she said don’t bother. Gave me a damned good reason why, too. It’s just too bad I can’t let you in on the secret, though. Just trust us on this one, kid."

  I thought about my bedroom closet, and then decided to keep my mouth shut. Some things are better left unsaid. Let sleeping dogs lie, lest my uncle changed his mind about not lynching the bastard. Besides, what was my mother up to? Was she fixing to leave his fucking ass?

  Course, maybe I should have said something. Then again, maybe it didn’t matter. That fateful night was coming very soon, but I hadn’t known it. Premonition is fickle, and often not very useful. Like a distant radio station from another state that fades in and out late at night on the AM band.

  Dreamland Replicants

  "It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone."—Rose F. Kennedy

  As the thunderstorm tapered off, I fell asleep that night thinking about the strange encounter in the backyard, Shadow Lands, Tanner, and my father. About things that were, things that might be, and things that never should have been. I thought about the psych ward, and shuddered. It was no wonder I had strange dreams that night.

  In the first dream, I dreamt I was a young teenager again. The sun glared bright on a summer afternoon. I stood outside an old but hauntingly beautiful yet run-down two-story house with a wrap-around covered porch and a well-shaded yard on a cracked and broken concrete sidewalk. In the dream, I knew that I lived there, but it reminded me a house I had known as a teenager. It was the Mason's house, whose property was next to ours. However, in this dream, our family lived here. In bizarre dream logic, this was home. The paint on the sagging wooden porch was cracked and peeling and the paint on the shutters had faded with time. I could barely see the old, heavy curtains through the thick layer of dust on the windows.

  Despite its charms and potential, I didn’t like the house. It felt abandoned, but I knew my family was inside. Most houses have a vibe, almost like echoes of the people that lived there. Some houses were cheery, some were sad. I don’t claim that this makes any sense to anyone but me. Houses just feel this way to me. This house wasn’t haunted, and didn’t feel malevolent. The house just echoed loneliness, despite the cheery and bright sunny day.

  I stepped up into the shade of the porch, listening to the dry creak of the weather-beaten boards beneath my shoes. The paint was completely gone in a path from the steps to the front door. I opened the heavy wooden front door, and stepped into the cool gloom within.

  Outside, I hadn’t realized how humid and sticky it was. The cool air inside the dark house felt good on my damp sweaty skin. As the door shut behind me, I could barely see the outline of the furniture in the foyer.

  I walked slowly, the echo of my footsteps almost hushed in the murkiness within the house. Most of the curtains were drawn tight, and only a small amount of the harsh sunlight filtered around the edges of the curtains, highlighting slowly drifting motes. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that lights were on in upstairs rooms. I stepped further into the house, and I stopped at the entrance to what appeared to be the sitting room.

  I tried to peer into the gloom, but my eyes had not yet adjusted to the near darkness inside the house. The various pieces of furniture were vague shapes that I could only make out if I didn’t look directly at them. As soon as I tried to focus, the shape disappeared into the grey gloom.

  Something struck me as odd about the chair at the far side of the room. I realized someone was sitting in the chair, staring at me. I gasped, and then cleared my throat. "I didn’t see you there."

  He didn’t answer. I realized it was my father sitting there, staring. He wasn’t even blinking. I could barely discern the features of his face, but his eyes had a reflective sheen. They were wrong, though. They had a flat quality, with almost a luminescent effect, yet they weren’t glowing. I walked further into the room, and his eyes followed me, still never blinking. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I bumped my shin on a table. I glanced down, embarrassed, and when I looked back up at him, he was gone.

  He hadn’t bolted from the room, and I felt no movement in the stillness of the house. He was simply gone. I realized that the room felt the same as when I had walked in.

  To me, houses have echoes of the people that live there, and the events that transpire. People make the "silent noise" that echoes within like a vibration that is felt as a presence, instead of heard with your ears. People don’t echo; they are the transmitters. They are almost like speakers, and emit very strong vibrations.

  Dead bodies never have bothered me. At funeral viewings, corpses have lost their vibe. The mourners have a vibration to them that I can feel. Nevertheless, the dearly departed produce no more sensation to me than the table next to them. The dead bothers some people, but to me, they are gone. The vibration has left them.

  I realized as I looked around for my father, that I had not felt this vibration. He was never there. That was why I was so startled. If he had really been there, I would have felt it on some level. Maybe vibration is the wrong word. Maybe it’s just my body reacting to the subtle sound of breathing, the minor ticks, the minor disturbances of the air flow in the room that alert me that someone is there, and that these very minor effects are interpreted by my brain into this feeling. It might be perfectly natural, I don’t know. Whatever this sense was, I had no sense of my father having been in the room. It was disconcerting, because clearly, he had been there—I saw it—but I hadn't felt it. That's similar to vertigo, when your brain reports motion that your eye doesn't see, or vice versa. With vertigo, your brain's self-protect mechanism suspects poisoning from ingestion, and hence the urge to purge.

  I coughed nervously, and the sound echoed, flat. I left the sitting room, and walked deeper into the gloom of the house, feeling my heart pound in my chest. At the end of the hallway, past the staircase, I could see there was light streaming from the dining room on the right. I stopped in the doorway of the dining room, but was not surprised to see my father sitting at the far end of the empty table. In here, the curtains were made of a lighter gauzy material, and the windows looked out into a shaded section of the yard, providing a soft grey light that barely lit the room yet was still significantly brighter than the rest of the house. There was an overhead chandelier was thick with cobwebs and dust, and I reached over and flicked the switch that I presumed would turn it on, but the switch only emitted a dull click and the cobwebbed chandelier remained dark.

  My father’s elbows rested on the table, and he had placed his palms face down. He still had that flat, faintly iridescent, unblinking gaze that made my nerves tingle; yet I had no other sense of him being there; none of the 'living' vibrations that I expected. Normally the "vibration" idea was so routine it was background and I really didn't think about it. It was disconcerting. Like getting a tooth pulled, and you keep sticking your tongue in the hole where it used to be before the painkiller wears off and the pain sets in. You just keep tripping over it.

  I stepped slowly up to the table, regarding him, my face carefully neutral. After several seconds of watching his unwavering gaze, I slammed my fist on the table while yelling "Hi Paul!"

  He didn’t react. He hated it when I called him Paul.

  I laughed, nervous, and sidestepped towards him, afraid of turning away from him lest he disappear again. "You waiting for dinner?"

  His gaze followed me, but he moved his head, not his eyes. I thought I could punch him in the face with no reaction. Not that I had the nerve to try something like that, though. I still had no sense of him being there. I stared at his shirt, but he didn’t appear to be breathing. I wondered if
he was dead and alive at the same time, but in horror flicks, the undead chased you.

  I could hear the tinkle of dishes through the closed door of the kitchen behind my father. I stood three feet away, regarding him. Wondering if he was a ghost, wondering if this meant he was dead. I stepped closer, reached out towards him, and touched his shoulder. His arm was as cold as his gaze was.

  I jerked my hand back, and stepped backwards. He still never blinked, and I rubbed my hands together to get rid of the clammy sensation. I felt myself break out into goose bumps, and shuffled towards the kitchen, always facing him. He turned his upper body to watch me go as I backed into the swinging door to the kitchen and pushed on through.

  The lights were on in the kitchen, and I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights. As I had pushed through the door, I could hear the unmistakable sound of someone chopping vegetables. I turned around, and choked on my breath.

  My father was standing at the island in the center of the kitchen, paused mid-stroke while chopping carrots. I could hear the soft bubbling of boiling water from a pot on the stove behind him. He was staring at me.

  Still coughing, I pushed open the swinging door behind me, and looked back into the murky gloom of the dining room. He was still sitting in the chair at the table, his upper body turned so that he could stare at me from there, as well.

  I looked back into the kitchen, then back into the dining room. He was in both places at once, and my heart was still pounding an erratic beat. Adrenaline was coursing through me, and I had broken out in a cold sweat. It was at that point, I realized I was in a grip of a bizarre and terrifying dream. In reality, I wasn’t eighteen anymore. It was eleven years later, and I was asleep in my bed next to my wife.

  In my head, I yelled at myself to wake the fuck up, and gave the familiar mighty push that would force me into a dazed and dopey consciousness and interrupt the dream. Nothing happened. I felt my stomach wrench, nauseated as that reliable mechanism spun freely, as if the teeth were stripped from the gears. My twin dream-fathers, dressed the same, continued regarding me with that flat, icy and unblinking gaze from both rooms at once. I tried forcing myself awake again, but only half-heartedly. If it didn’t work, the dream would have to run its course. Fuck me, Freddy.

  I bolted, fleeing through the dining room back into the dim hallway. My father never moved in either room. I stopped in the doorway of the sitting room, expecting him to be there as well, but he wasn’t.

  I gasped for breath, knowing the trip hammering of my heart wasn’t going to quit even when I caught my breath again. I shook my head, trying to find a way to wake up. It was useless, though. There was nothing there when I shoved. My wake up mechanism was freewheeling sickly. There was no load on it. This frightened me; it was my defense mechanism to get out of the nightmare dream worlds. Once I learned the trick, it had always worked. I didn't know what it was like for it not to work. I was desperate for it to work. "Maybe it needed a new clutch?" I thought. I laughed a desperate high, thin, reedy laugh, and stepped back into the hallway, cackling madly at this random thought as I ran a hand through my hair. I stopped laughing and drew a shuddering breath.

  The stairway produced the familiar sick fear. I vaguely hoped this dream wouldn’t degenerate into the familiar territory of my childhood night terrors of stairwells. I stepped tentatively towards the base of the stairs. The light filtering down from the upper hallway did not reassure me in the least. In my recurring nightmare, it didn’t matter how well lit the basement was. Dark or light, the invisible hand would still drag me down into nothingness.

  I stepped onto the first step, listening to the soft squeak of the board. The boards had been varnished at one time, but had fallen into the neglect and disrepair that time exacts out of all things. The center of the tread was worn down to bare wood, with flaking varnish at the far edges. I stepped up tenderly onto the next step, glancing carefully behind me, although I knew from experience I would never see the hand that dragged me down into the blankness of oblivion. That hand was always disembodied, and watching for it never prevented it from finding me and dragging me away.

  I stepped tentatively onto the second step, and then more confidently up to the third. I felt another cold sweat break out on my brow, and reaffirmed to myself that no matter what happens, I was still dreaming. I continued up the stairs, concentrating on reaching the top one step at a time. It's like the old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, motherfucker. If I reached the top, I would be ok. I reminded myself that every recurring nightmare occurred in the basement, with a door at the top of the steps. There was no door, only a hallway lit by the rooms beyond, and this wasn't a basement stairwell.

  I stood on the final stair, and looked down into the gloom below. I stepped up into the hallway. I shuddered slightly and sighed. No fucking invisible hand, thank fucking God. I walked to the first doorway, where the light filtered out.

  Standing at the bathroom mirror was my father. He turned, and gave me a blank stare. I wasn’t surprised. "You are dead, aren’t you?"

  He kept staring at me with the dull, flat eyes.

  I stepped towards him. "You died last night. This is finally over."

  He shook his head no.

  I reached out and touched his face. He didn’t react. His skin felt like cool wax. "Who is Tanner?"

  He lifted his arm, and pointed down the hallway. I nearly screamed and pissed my pants when he moved. I didn't expect an answer or a reaction from him. He held his arm up, pointing. I watched him for nearly half a minute, waiting for but he just stood there, staring without blinking and pointing.

  I stepped out into the hallway, and walked down to the next room. My father was sitting in a chair near a bed, a book open in front of him. He was pointing further down the hall. I kept walking by this room.

  Each room I passed, my father stared out at me, pointing further down the hallway. A copy of a copy of a copy pointing the way. At the end of the hall, I found a closed door. Centered in the heavy wooden door was a brass plate that read "Tanner." I tried opening the door, but the handle didn’t want to turn. I tried rattling the doorknob. Then I tried using both hands. I couldn’t budge it. I kicked at the door out of frustration.

  I turned and yelled back down the hallway, "Hey assholes. How do you open this goddamned door?"

  In each doorway, my father stepped forward, and in unison, they turned to stare at me.

  I kicked the door again, muttering, "Some fucking help you cocksuckers are."

  I crouched down, and tried peering through the keyhole. I could only see darkness beyond the keyhole. I stood back up and tried knocking on the door. I waited, but heard nothing.

  Without warning, the door opened inward. I gasped in surprise, as I felt a pair of hands grab my ankles and jerk me inwards. The darkness pulled me in. I twisted around, trying to scream, but no sound would come out. I saw a single version of my father, standing in the doorway, staring after me with the same blank gazing expression.

  The darkness pulled me in, a firm grip on my ankles. I kept trying to scream, but heard nothing but a slight hiss. As the doorway slipped further away, my father still stared after me.

  "You are an abomination, quarter-breed. You aren't even fit to serve Mastema, and the destruction in God's Crucible at Dudael is too kind of a fate. You don’t belong in any world. At best, you belong with the shades." He shut the door gently, darkness encased me, and I was trapped in the soft crushing envelope of oblivion, panicking and trying to escape from the cold eternity of hell.

  I finally felt my wake up mechanism catch violently, and I bolted wide-awake in my bed, screaming at the top of my lungs and fighting with the sheets. I felt Trisha scramble out of bed, rapidly muttering "Oh fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh fuck." She turned on her bedside lamp, on the nightstand, nearly knocking it over.

  I stopped screaming and stopped fighting the sheets. I was breathing hard, and felt shaky. My wife looked like she was ready to bo
lt from the bedroom if I so much as sneezed.

  I took a deep shuddering breath, and forced myself to release it slowly. I looked over at her. "I’m okay. I’m awake now."

  She looked uncertain. "Are you sure?"

  "Yeah. I’m sorry to wake you up like that."

  I jerked, seeing the fucking cat on the windowsill inside our goddamned bedroom. I gave it a momentary baleful glare, wondering how the fuck it got inside the house.

  My wife glanced over at the windowsill, and looked at me curiously, and I knew she couldn’t see the little rat fuck bastard playing peek-a-boo with the curtains. I knew in that moment if I asked her if she could see a cat on the windowsill, she’d probably bolt from the room convinced I was loony. Hell, I probably was, but knowing that doesn’t help a fucking thing. I kept telling myself there was no cat, repeatedly like a mantra. The cat yawned, not amused with my antics.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. "It’s okay. You're fine now." She looked down, and stared at her clasped hands. She waited a few seconds, and then looked back up at me.

  I reached out and patted her leg. "I’m sorry. Weird dream."

  "Are you okay, as in…?" She pointed at her head, glancing at the window again.

  "Yeah, I’m just a little stressed out, I guess."

  She nodded thoughtfully, sat with me for a few minutes. Finally, she reached over and turned off the light. She slipped back under the sheets with me, but she wouldn’t touch me. It was a long time before her breathing slowed and became deep and regular again as she slipped back off to sleep.

  It was even longer before I fell asleep myself. I wanted to talk to her about the strange man in the backyard. I wanted to talk about my nightmares. I wanted to ask her about the fucking cat, and whether or not she could see the little striped bastard. I wanted to know why she was pissed at me half the time. She didn’t ask me to talk, but I should have talked to her anyway. Hindsight’s a real cock-knocking bitch, ain't it?