Dreams and Legends

by Spadaro, Jason

  I'd met Selena when we both were young and confused. We fell into a sort of love, not of each other, but mutually of all. This is not to say that we had never spent a night together, or thought of having the normal trappings of a romantic relationship, but it never seemed to fit us. It never seemed to be along the path we walked together.

  I sat down on my bed and turned on the television.

  I watched dull and inane programs for a while, nothing like The Man On the Television that brought everything into focus. As the pictures flew past my eyes, the numb horrors of the news and the pale vomit of the sitcoms, my mind started to drift. Then the idea popped into my head. Sitting there, on the bunk with its white painted steel supports and minimalist mattress, it came. In hindsight the setting is so mundane, for an idea so shaking and humbling. What if there is reincarnation, I thought.

  Medicine had killed death several hundred years ago. In a post-death society, the idea of an afterlife or being reborn is laughable. I know it was very popular up till the twenty-second century, but when people stopped dying unless they wanted to, they stopped believing in it. Those that believed in it would typically feel a hole in their existence and eventually euthanize themselves, while everyone else just... continued. It was only a matter of time, really. But what if those devoted suicides had it right? What if there was a natural order being held up, that was being prevented, by ignoble arrogance?

  I felt sick. I walked out into the kitchen area and got a glass of water. I needed to lay down. "I'm taking a nap," I yelled towards the cockpit. I assumed Selena was still up there. Despite the coffee, I needed to rest before I could approach her, or our mission, again.

  I went to sleep eventually, on the firm bed of my quarters. I was sure to set an alarm to give me a couple hours before our arrival to wake up, and maybe talk to Selena.

  Vision quests have always been a pathway to or from faith. As I lay dreaming en route to The End, I had my vision.

  I had never been to a funeral, but I had seen video of them in documentaries before. I was at one now, in a black suit standing by a black casket. There were other people there, family and friends of the departed. I looked into it and I was laying there, cold and lifeless in the coffin. I... didn't identify. Even as I drifted up as a spirit and became the me standing by the coffin, I never identified, or felt like any other portion of the process was me, or that it even mattered. This happened several times, all with complete disassociation, a simultaneous exist with no attachment.

  Then one of the staff came to me, and said, "Excuse me sir, I'm sorry. You're here for the other funeral." He ushered me into another room. Different people stood in mourning, but I still lay in the casket. I stood by, the final guard. I looked into my dead face and still did not feel...anything. It was a numbness...not physical but divorced of interest. Identical to what I felt during the spectral loop of earlier.

  "What does it matter, damn it," I said in a hushed breath.

  I awoke to the beeping alarm, with dry mouth from the coffee I'd had earlier. Groggy, I moved to the kitchen and filled a cup with water. I took a sip, and sat down at the table. I didn't know anything. I had to give up knowing...that wasn't something that was coming with me. It was time to leave it behind.

  With slight hesitation, I stood up, and moved to the cabin of the ship. Selena sat there at her station, arms wrapped around her knees and feet planted with toes dangling over the seat's front edge. She was deep in reflection, in her underwear and bra, smoking a joint. Her other clothes were in a disheveled pile in the corner. She glanced over quickly. "Hey."

  I sat down next to her. "Hey. Mind if I take a puff?"

  "Go for it." She held it out to me with two outstretched fingers. I took it, and took a drag off the cigarette. The entire cabin smelled like marijuana. I looked at it, and slowly handed it back to her.

  We were quiet, watching out the shielded window, pseudo-Christ watching us. She gently rubbed her hand across her cheek, and I saw tears well up in her eyes. She finished the joint, and rolled another. She took a drag and passed it to me.

  Taking it, I said, "I had a thought earlier."

  "What was that?" Her voice cracked.

  I took a long drag. "What if reincarnation exists?" I reached over to her, to hand back the smoke.

  She took it with a sad, half-smile. "I know, right? Scary, isn't it?"

  I couldn't look her in the face; all I could manage to do was say, "Yup."

  We sat in silence till we reached the center of Omega Sector, the end of our paths, the path to The End.

  Our Spot

  It was a dark house, on the edge of town where no one ever came back. On the edge, man. I mean, you try to work through all the little details, but they don't fit together as simple and easily as you hoped.

  Things get complicated. One, two, three, *thud*, and then you're there, covered in blood and covered in eyes and lesions. So much blood.

  It all started with Tommy, and his great idea. He'd had a fetish for the macabre for a bit; that's all he was talking about. He wanted to try something. Alice thought it'd be a laugh, and I was in it for the chance to chill and have a few beers.

  "Sure, sounds like a great time," I said.

  "I don't want you to just tag along for the hell of it. This is big stuff, John. Really big stuff." It was comical, the level of seriousness in his voice, standing there in his sports jacket looking over the frame of his glasses at me. He had a pretentious, academic look to him. I was always content with a pair of shorts and tee-shirt without any stains.

  "I get it."

  "Alright. Meet Alice and I at the old Dobson place tonight around 10. Be ready."

  "Sure."

  ~ ~ ~

  Alice looked left and right down the hall. She felt like hell, and was covered in sweat and fear. Her blue jeans had a hole in the knee from when she'd stumbled and scraped her knee on the stone floor of the tunnel. Her key chain flashlight flickered for a second.

  "Where the hell is John?", she asked to no one in particular. She heard something behind her and ran to the right. More dragging and wet slapping echoed down the hall. It was right behind her.

  Right, left, right again, down a staircase, up a staircase, left.

  "Where the hell am I?" she whispered under her breath. After they ran out of the kitchen and into the basement, she had lost track of John. You could tell she had no idea what happened to him. It'd become hectic after the ritual was fucked up. A shudder ran through Alice's body, and she looked up and down the halls.

  She ran left again, and bumped into John.

  "Have you seen it?" He was panting and worried.

  "No, but I heard it a while ago. We need to keep moving."

  "Yeah."

  They ran past me, down the hall into a large empty room.

  ~ ~ ~

  The old Dobson place had been abandoned for years. After the third or fourth time that a family dies in a place, it tends to be left alone. I know. It definitely had a history, without a doubt. About two hundred years of cursed history.

  We all came in Tommy's car, as arranged. Tommy walked in and got to work. He was looking for a spot. Alice and I went into what was left of the living room. Moldy furniture and decades of graffiti, used cigarette butts and peeling paint. It was obvious we weren't the first ones there, and we knew occasionally a squatter would pass through. Sometimes a squatter was found dead.

  I set down the backpack and the twelve pack of beer. "Want one?"

  Alice was taking in the room. "Sure," she said in a kind of distracted way. "I don't even want to know how many people have died in here."

  "That's part of the draw, though, right? That's why Tommy wanted to try to contact this thing here?"

  "Yeah. He said there'd be a lot of energy around."

  "Why's he trying to contact it anyway?"

  "He just wants to see if it's possible. Boredom, I think."

  "Heh. Great..." Tommy had to get a new hobby.

  "Yeah. So, assuming it
works, do you know what you want to ask it?"

  I thought about it for a second. We each got one question, and I wasn't sure what mine would be. "Dunno. Maybe what my life will be like five years from now."

  "That's not a bad one. Simple. To the point." Alice had a half-smile I'd seen before but could never read. Was it condescending? Maybe just amusement.

  "Yeah. What about you?"

  "I'm torn between what life is like after death, and next week's winning lottery numbers." She grinned and took a sip from her beer.

  "Tough choice there."

  "I know."

  Tommy leaned in from the doorway across the room. "I think I have our spot."

  ~ ~ ~

  We ran into the room, it was massive, covered in stone. "Where are we? How is this under the house?"

  "I don't know. Maybe when the ritual got interrupted..."

  I looked at Alice and said, "I don't even want to think about what else could be down here if the ritual made this place."

  "Yeah."

  Then the thing we brought through appeared in the door. Just like I remembered it, Hell's reruns.

  ~ ~ ~

  Tommy carefully sprinkled herbs and salt around the table in the kitchen in an esoteric sign. It looked old, like he'd pulled it from some long-dead religion. "This is for protection."

  "That's good." I sat down at the table and put my beer on the floor.

  Alice followed. "So...what do we have to do?"

  "Okay, you and John just need to read this with me." He handed us each a piece of paper. "When we start, we don't stop. We need to finish or it supposedly won't be bound. After it's bound, we each get to ask it a question and it leaves."

  "Sounds simple enough."

  "Should be. Ready to see if it works?"

  "Yeah, let's do this." Alice was skimming over a page with the ritual.

  "Wait," I said. I finished my beer quickly. "Okay, good to go."

  Tommy held out his palms; "Okay, let's all take each other's hands and start at the beginning."

  Tommy started chanting in a low tone. Alice and I started chanting with him. Thankfully, Tommy had written everything we were supposed to say phonetically. He threw some sand into the center of the circle, and a mist began to come up from the center of the table. A tentacle began to push through.

  Then a quick flash from the other side of the room. I fucked it all up.

  Tommy broke off the chant. "What was that?"

  Alice also saw it. "John, it was you. Covered in blood and eyes."

  "That's fucked."

  The tentacle whipped around, sweeping away the circle and knocking Tommy across the room. Two hair covered arms appeared and the thing began to pull itself out. It was a mass of horror and mutation, something beyond real, beyond nightmare, beyond God.

  Not even of this universe. All teeth, and arms, and whipping tendrils.

  Alice and I ran. We went towards the basement, and I looked around just long enough to see Tommy running up the stairs, with that thing behind him.

  ~ ~ ~

  I remember it all so clearly now. Time's lost a lot of its meaning for me, but moments seem to stick. They are snapshots, burned into my mind.

  The thing came into the room, that massive room, and seemed to be bigger than than the room itself, and smaller at the same time. It grabbed Alice around the waist, and dismembered her. First her legs, and then her arms. The screaming...it still doesn't seem real.

  There was nothing I could do. I couldn't even escape. All I could do is watch it eat her. Those hundreds of teeth...

  Then it came for me. Two arms ripped me in half, while a tentacle ripped a hole in the air, and it threw me in. I don't know who was worse off, Alice or I.

  ~ ~ ~

  When Tommy got to the top of the stairs, all I could do is watch. I knew what happened. I couldn't watch what happened to Alice and I again, but I couldn't talk to Tommy again, either.

  Tommy got to the top of the stairs and saw written in blood across the far wall at the end of the hallway, "Tommy, I'm sorry." When he saw it, he stopped cold, just long enough for it to grab his leg and pull him into its maw before it went down to the basement.

  I didn't mean for that to happen. I just...fuck.

  ~ ~ ~

  Two hundred years is a long time. When I fell through the rift in two pieces, there was no house there. It was woods. I died before I hit the ground. No funeral. No burial.

  Two hundred years is a very long time. A lot longer than five.

  It took me six months to realize I was dead. At that point, I lost my mind. Some years I would just wander in the trees. Others I would just stare at my bones for weeks.

  Then they built the house there. By that point... I wasn't even human. I started building tunnels from the basement, hoping to get lost and forget, behind the wall so no one would know. When the anger got to be too much, I...a few families. The occasional drifter. My pain and rage gave me control.

  And then I went to kill three stupid kids I heard in the kitchen, because I was sure they'd never know the pain two centuries could cause.

  The Lock And The Clock

  I sat in the room. The room with the clock. The room with the clock, and the door, and the lock.

  And the creature.

  The creature, the thing, with crowning jaws sprouting from the top of its hell born body, surrounded by insect legs, and bigger than a man. It sat in quiet absorption of the circumstances surrounding it. It sat waiting for its time to strike. It sat, silent. It sat.

  I stood looking at the lock, across the floor. My feet stood on checkerboard tile to the door. The creature guarded the lock, was sent by the clock. It had me trapped, but there was more.

  Observing it, I would see it twitch. And a spasm of life would go through its limbs, where life should not have been bore. It would shift its weight, upon those insectoid spindles. Its matte black skin, foldless and taught, concealed the muscles that drew the jaws and legs.

  I saw the clock, and knew the time. The time to leave approached. The time to go. But I could not pass; the beast in the way, seemed more impassible as I encroached.

  And what of the lock? It was the final block. I could not even tell if it was open or closed. The lock, the block, before my goal, another barrier imposed.

  How can I pass?

  It had been such a very long time since I was placed there.

  I called out. I begged and bartered. I swore.

  "Thing, let me by! I need to go go go!"

  But it was silent. So was behind the door. No fellow voice to comfort me, and no companion to sympathize. I sat upon the tile floor.

  The thing was deaf; at least I thought the thing was deaf. Its unnatural form included no ears. I my silent thought, I asked what was left, other than the clock, the lock, and my fears?

  Hellbent, hellbound, I looked at the clock, and saw the time had arrived. That moment of escape, in whatever form, that moment where I survived.

  I pooled my strength, and at great length, moved past it with resolve. It bit, and it scratched, but it never did catch me before I burst through the lock and the door.

  The way open, it stopped.

  I looked back.

  Without a motion, it whispered, "In dreams and legends, we'll meet again."