Turning quickly, the tail of his physician’s coat rustled like the door flap of the Bedouin tent, and he left the room. Left me alone with that twist of flesh in the jar. My embolus. My morbid souvenir from a near death experience. But, as I recalled, I’d been slowly coming out of a near death experience for years. Healing, I thought, as my eyes continued to linger on the mysterious calamari floating in a flaxen liquid for what might have been eternity, yet all crammed into a single minute. At last I reached up and touched the bottle. Picked it up –– there was that delicate clack again. I brought it close to my eyes and rolled it slowly, studying the embolus within. But then I stopped and emitted a barely perceptible sputter. There was something scratched ever so lightly into the hide of this flat worm that had been slithering it’s way toward my brain. As I read it, the words were a whisper in my head: “I am here...”
2
Once again I rotated the bottle and the pale scrawl –– I AM HERE –– such an unnerving note-to-self, gently corkscrewed through the shallow liquid within and out of my sight. My focus pulled back and I aligned my eyes on my sandblasted rucksack now askew on the overly ornate dresser, of my garish Egyptian themed hotel room, situated against the adjacent wall. Two days ago in the hospital it had been a struggle to climb out of bed after Dr. Zayed had left, but I’d managed out of sheer desperation. I’d had to check my violated rucksack and take inventory of its contents, if they’re still was any. I had crept up on the bag slowly, as much from the dread that there would be nothing within as from weakness. Only my hypodermics and collection of anesthetics (certainly pilfered by the Bedouin) were missing, all else was accounted for. At least what I feared losing the most.
Now, resting on the bed with my legs outstretched and my back up against the headboard, I let my eyes fall from the rucksack to the small, dark wooden box next to me on the rumpled bed sheets. It was crude with a rough grain, and with its six corners I’d always thought it anthropoid in shape, resembling a squat coffin. I remembered the day it arrived on my doorstep in a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with coarse twine –– and with no return address. Stepping out onto the front stoop of the family brownstone I’d scoured the street for any sign of a deliveryman. Holding my breath, I’d even listened for giggling children or chuckling teens –– tennis shoes on pavement, sticks on sidewalk railings –– but there weren’t any clues implying pranksters, either. The entire street was dead silent with a chilling calm that was unprecedented, even in this sleepy district of Boston. The parcel had come to me with just a few deliberate, hard knocks at my front door. As time passed, however, I came to realize those innocuous raps never stopped echoing through the halls of my mind. I’d even heard their rumbling chorus as I’d stumbled toward the Bedouin tent in the desert.
And, I thought now, their witch-lady wants me to go home.
But I didn’t want to go back to that 18th century catafalque. Home was what I was running from in effort to escape back into life. My mother had also suffered from chronic depression, her own mother and sister having drowned themselves before she was 15. After the untimely death of my father, her genetics exploded within her, releasing an hereditary poison that I had believed I could cure with an aggressive medical career and relentless psychopharmacological research. But I was wrong. Less than a week after Father’s funeral –– on the cusp of consigning her to a hospital for an intense psychiatric treatment –– I’d rolled over in my bed and found Mother next to me, her eyes open and staring. She wasn’t moving. I froze and listened intently...but there was no breath escaping her lips, now glued together in what seemed a peaceful, flat-line smile. She had succumbed to her grief and simply passed away at my side, watching me sleep, as she had so often done when I was a boy.
Mother always said it took only a cup of water to drown someone –– anyone –– but it was a deluge of tears that finally drowned me. How much time actually slipped by after that torrent of misery first washed over me, I had no idea. But then one day the tears receded; and then there were none. I, the vigilant Ark, had been overcome, rattled, and bashed about until suddenly, without a whisper of warning, I was grounded. And it was I alone who stumbled from the vast hull, the husk that had been me, now devoid of life with only fleeting echoes of memory. I was not the same. And I saw that I was truly alone for the first time in my life.
I never returned to Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. With Mother gone there seemed no point. My passion and belief systems had collapsed. At 27 I did nothing but wander the family brownstone to no valid end. I didn’t bother to seek treatment; all of the therapeutic, medicinal avenues had been traversed by my mother, and they all had led to the same precipice. I did, however, diagnose myself with Prolonged Grief Disorder and, as time progressed, Cotard’s Delusion. I was certain I was dead and my internal organs were rotting into dust with every passing moment. Foolish as it might seem to the to passersby –– who spied me languidly staring out through the front window, searching their faces of nothing for nothing –– that I was actually peering out from the grave and hope of recovery was not an option. But as my own time continued to stand still, a litany began to distill itself from “not an option” and roll around my mental tomb, echoing back on itself until all I could hear was: ...not an option...an option...not an option...an option...
I had begun to sense a dull pressure in my head that, at first, I could only vaguely equate to actual thought. It was being squeezed upward and outward, like old toothpaste worked from a tube with both thumbs, until at last it presented itself as a desiccated shrivel. But it wasn’t just a dried up, moribund thought anymore, it was a memory of Mother. There was only one avenue of treatment she had never sought.
The Devil, I realized. Why not call on the Devil?
It seemed so ludicrous, though, to seek intervention from the supernatural in effort to rescue oneself from oblivion. But that’s exactly what I did. I called on the Devil over and over and over again, until my pathetic incantation was blaring from my mouth as a boorish demand for Damnation’s King to appear. And still I persisted, certain the passersby –– the outside-people –– saw me as some Mickey Mouse Faust, calling on all broomsticks to come alive and tote buckets of water to douse my insane fire. Of course, it was myself I was calling back to life as I finally buckled with genuine, diabolical laughter that bounded about the halls and rooms of the brownstone, battering me into collapse and finally a jittery sleep on the front-room floor.
When I awoke, I dragged myself to the foyer, hauled myself up by means of the umbrella stand then the coat rack, and stared into the oblong mirror on the wall. I blinked listlessly; other than being able to acknowledge the bruises around my eye and on my temple, I knew I was backtracking down the spiraling, insular roads of Cotard’s Delusion. My efforts to roust the Devil had proven futile and absurd. Not even a menial demon had materialized –– not even to this day, post-stroke and again staring at myself, although now into a mirror above the dresser in the gaudy hotel room in New Cairo City.
My eyes shifted to the reflection of the now open coffin box on the bed. Abandoning the mirror, I made my way to the far side of the bed and knelt down before it. Inside was the astrolabe: a shining brass disk nestled in a bed of crimson velvet. Its age was indeterminate, but all others boasting such old-world craftsmanship only existed in museums or rare private collections. My father had owned one once, and had taught me the basics of using the device when on evening excursions in Boston Harbor. This astrolabe, however, was altogether different –– divergent in its purpose –– which, when I had deciphered the reasoning of its mechanics, had steered me from the incessant, closed topography of Cotard’s Delusion. As I’d further broken down its construct and gleaned its usage, I dubbed it the corporeal astrolabe, then simply the corporalabe, because it was not a device for calculating the declination of stars and assessing time, but for divining the astrological sign, birth date, latitude and longitude of specific human beings: the outside-people that would help me heal mys
elf. Simply type the coordinates into the GPS app of any smartphone.
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Climbing the last of the stairs to the hotel roof, I stepped out into the breezy night. Spying the nearly full moon, I walked to the far corner of the rooftop to be clear of the brightly lit helipad and whirring air conditioning units. From my pocket I extricated the smartphone I’d just lifted via a tourist in the lobby and checked the time –– 11:54pm –– nearly the witching hour. Magic hour for the corporalabe: which I’d only discerned after finding the encaustic painting of the figure of a man hidden beneath the velvet cradle within the coffin box. It was a duplicate of the figure painted on the inside of the lid of the box, except for the markings on the anatomy. The figure on the lid was adorned with logos of the twelve astrological signs, each labeling the parts of the body that they were believed to influence. The hidden figure, however, was what I concluded to be a Chakra Man. Although out of the seven primary energy centers there were only three marked: the muladhara chakra, located at the base of the spinal region; the anahata chakra, located at the center of the chest; and the sahasrara chakra, painted as a colorful, multi-petal flower blossoming from the top of Chakra Man’s head. Instead of the Gemini twins, one clinging to each arm of Zodiac Man, the Chakra Man’s arms implied the Earth’s horizon, the flaming sun setting below the right arm and the glowering moon rising above the left, suggesting the dominance of night over day. Noting the Roman numeral XII on Chakra Man’s forehead, it was clear that the moon’s angle of declination should be read at exactly midnight.
Setting the smartphone’s alarm for lunar magic hour, I placed it on the concrete balustrade edging the roof. Removing the corporalabe from the leather satchel I’d also acquired from an unwitting hotel patron, I lifted the device up before my eyes. With my thumb hooked into the atypical northern armilla, I pivoted the corporalabe so that it hung with its narrow circumference perpendicular to the moon, then placed my right palm flush against the flat backside to steady the it against the growing evening breeze. Taking hold of the alidade between my finger and thumb, I closed my left eye, rotating the site rule until my right eye could see the moon aligned through the viewing holes at either end. A moment later the phone alarm sounded and I held my breath, minutely adjusting the alidade.
A heavy gust of wind came up and I squinted against it, trying to focus on the measured angle of declination the alidade was pointing to –– but before I could read the degree, my eyes clamped shut and I flinched with the sharp prick of something blown into my left eye. I tried to blink it away, then licked my finger and ran the tip over the sclera and cornea, but the scratching persisted, my eye tearing profusely. Wiping away the fluid, I saw that it wasn’t a clear, cleansing discharge; it was dark and lubricous. I flinched again and groaned as more blood hemorrhaged from between my eyelids. Grabbing up the smartphone, I clawed at the back until it popped off and the battery fell out onto the rooftop. Throwing the phone over the balustrade with all my strength, I tucked the corporalabe under my arm and raced back to my hotel room. Once inside I threw the deadbolt and stumbled to the bathroom. Flipping on the light, I hung against the doorframe, panting and looking like a drunken Popeye. I could just make out my gory face and figure in the mirror. Launching forward I dumped the corporalabe next to the sink and took hold of the edge of the counter to steady myself. I attempted to open my bloody eye and again the debris dug into the meat of the orb. I buckled with the torture until I was nearly face down in the sink. I sputtered, spitting mucous as I twisted on the faucet and frantically splashed cool water onto my face. Fingering open the lids of my injured eye, I forced water into the socket and, after what seemed like endless minutes, the biting pain faltered...then assuaged, becoming a dull throb that echoed my heartbeat. I began to breath easier. Blinking cautiously, I observed that the bleeding had nearly stopped. “Fuck,” I exhaled.
Leaning toward the mirror, I pulled down my lower left lid to survey the severity of the damage and shuttered with a chill. Whatever had infiltrated my eye had left its mark crudely scratched into the now flushed sclera, below the cornea, as a series of 6 letters: SHAKTI
Exposing the inside of my stinging lower lid, I found another 6 letters excoriating the flesh: SACRUM
“Shakti,” I whispered. “Sacrum.”
Until this moment the embolus and its message –– even the corporalabe –– had seemed like found fiction: some kind of joke to transcend my ludicrous invocation of the ever-absconding Devil, but the scarification of my eye brought the truth into focus. My studies of Chakra Man had revealed that Shakti was the corporeal life force; and now it was speaking to me from within, coiled at my root chakra, my Sacrum.
I released my lower eyelid and glared at the corporalabe on the counter next to the sink. My blood on the alidade and swathing the etched surface beneath had coagulated, gluing the site rule to the last reading I’d taken on the roof of the hotel. I knew that latitude.
What have I done?
3
My first instinct had been to run. And as I’d cleaned my blood from the hotel room and bathroom, I devised a plan of escape that first led me to old Cairo, by taxi, and then to Ramses Train Station. Now on a French Turboliner, racing north to Alexandria, I sat ensconced in my window seat, staring out at the desert, wishing I could vanish into the blur of the landscape. At a pharmacy near my hotel, I’d purchased an innocuous rucksack to replace my violated one, a pair of sunglasses, and a flesh-colored patch to conceal my horrifically bloodshot and swollen eye. Nonetheless, I still felt like a pirate that was failing miserably at playing inconspicuous. And to make matters worse, I had no time to secure a new identity and counterfeit credentials, so I was using my own name and bank access codes to acquire tickets and currency. Thus I was already naked on the radar of whatever international crime agencies had grown savvy enough to connect Seimen Cade Kleinend of Boston to the global Splitfoot Killer. I felt certain there was some sycophantic go-getter monitoring the lines of direct access to my suspiciously scattered accounts. As my acute paranoia blustered, I thought how it in itself was a sign of how much more alive I’d become since the corporalabe had steered Splitfoot to his first victim. My chakras really had been healing. But again, at what cost? I knew that karma would find me wherever I tried to hide.
So why the hell are you running? I asked myself. I didn’t know.
Pulling back from the window, I licked my upper lip and tasted copper. My nose had begun to bleed. Grabbing my rucksack with one hand and cupping the other over my nose, I shot up in my seat and nearly tripped as I traversed the outstretched legs of the man sitting next to me. Stumbling into the aisle, I hurried to the restroom at the rear of the car and locked myself inside the cramped compartment. I was breaking out in a cold sweat, my head ached, and I felt faint. Yanking off my sunglasses, I placed both hands over my nose and mouth and collapsed over the sink, dark blood oozing through my fingers and spattering the aluminum basin. I gurgled, struggling to breathe, and felt a distinct burning in my sinuses and palms, as if my blood pH was bottoming out, turning the plasma to acid and sending my body into hypovolemic shock.
“Christ!” I spluttered, spraying more blood into the sink. The burning was intensifying. I put my lips to the faucet, pressed the lever, and scooped water into my mouth, hoping it would reconstitute whatever chemical imbalance had erupted within me. I gulped and gulped, choking and regurgitating as much liquid as I shoveled in –– but as I continued force feeding, the blood coating my palms diluted, finally revealing a stigmata in letters seared into the flesh. I stopped drinking and glared at the word on my left palm: Breathe
Then the words on my right palm: Me In
This was my cannibalism coming to haunt me –– what I had done with every human organ Splitfoot had excised from every victim. I had methodically simmered them in a crucible, to release their chakra energies, and inhaled the curative vapors until nothing remained of the viscera but charred gristle.
&
nbsp; A cramp racked my abdomen and I fell back against the wall, slowly dropping to the floor. Closing my burning hands into loose fists, my head lolled back and I stared up at the glowing translucent window near the restroom ceiling. I dreaded to fathom what part of myself was insisting I fire it and breathe it in.
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I rode out the remainder of the two-and-a-half hour journey to Alexandria locked in the train restroom and deflecting passengers needing to use the toilet, to the next car. Upon arrival at Misr Station, I sluggishly stepped off the train and out into the chaos of the city. My lips and the skin below my nose and on my chin were chapped from my caustic nosebleed. I had changed my blood- and mucous-drenched shirt, but knew I looked like a zombie as I navigated my way to the West Delta Bus Station and plopped down cash for a one-way ticket to Mersa Matruh, a coastal town several hours east. It was still January and, this time of year, the tourist getaway would be nearly deserted.
After boarding the bus I was lucky to find a seat in the rear and promptly fell into a daze. I don’t think I moved an inch for most of the ride and only awoke when the bus driver honked the horn repeatedly on arrival at the station, a couple miles outside of town center. From there I took a taxi to Romel Bay, where the driver informed me the majority of the fishing boats were harbored. After purchasing a light jacket and work gloves, I tracked down a cash-hungry sponge boat captain in need of a vacation and willing to rent his vessel to an adventurer for a few days travel up the coast.
Journals of Horror: Found Fiction Page 26