How to Disappear Completely

by Melody Ann Ross

  Copyright © 2019 Melody Ann Ross

  How to Disappear Completely is a work of fiction; this does not mean that it has not been meticulously researched, nor that elements of the characters, locations, institutions, and situations described will bear no resemblance to real life. This is, of course, entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-578-66701-0

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Alias Anthea Menzies

  Chapter 2: The Phone Call

  Chapter 3: Night

  Chapter 4: Secret Treasures

  Chapter 5: The Baby in the Big City

  Chapter 6: Curiosity

  Chapter 7: Szyrus the Seer

  Chapter 8: Trickster

  Chapter 9: The Flame

  Chapter 10: Spring Cleaning

  Chapter 11: Vital Energy

  Chapter 12: Farmer's Markets

  Chapter 13: Night Feed

  Chapter 14: Salt and Earth

  Chapter 15: Hello

  Chapter 16: Answers

  Chapter 17: Bureaucracy

  Chapter 18: Faces

  Chapter 19: Leaving

  Chapter 20: Re-written

  Acknowledgments

  Up Next

  Chapter 1

  Alias Anthea Menzies

  Anthea Menzies sat down at her ancient desk and glanced hesitantly at her desktop. Her computer was dated, but it was still the newest thing in the small room. The musty smell of furniture older than half her co-workers invaded her breath just as offensively as the faded yellows, oranges, and browns of the upholstery assaulted her sight and the quiet hum of the fluorescent lights buzzed into her psyche.

  She was not the first person in the building, but she was the earliest to arrive in her wing. It was just after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and the paper pushers of southern California were slow to return to their end-of-fiscal-year fervor. Even still, she knew that as soon as she fired up her ancient computer and logged in, her intranet icon would switch to ‘on-line’ and her inbox would begin its torturous pinging, just like it had done yesterday; just like it would do every day, forever.

  “Not forever,” she chided herself and switched the computer with business-like precision. Only until she worked up the courage to either apply for a promotion or find another job.

  “Nothing is forever” she murmured to herself, and how well she knew it.

  Anthea worked in a massive government-contracted business that had something to do with the construction of government and government-related buildings and infrastructure. Originally she had applied to be an accountant for the company, but she had instead been hired as ‘file girl’, receiving incoming license applications and records, and filing them for re-distribution to other divisions.

  Five years later, she was still working in licensing but she had worked up from the incoming applications sector (something a teenaged intern could do, she quickly found) to statistics, where she kept meticulous records of the license applications and results.

  It’s incredible how many things people and organizations need licenses for— their costs, their timelines — and Anthea had bored her few blind dates to tears by expanding on this topic.

  While her career stagnation may have felt eternal, nothing else in Anthea’s life ever seemed stable. She had never dated the same person for more than a few weeks at a time before pulling away. Her car always seemed to need another expensive round of maintenance. If it wasn’t her car, it was the small disaster of a house she’d naively overpaid for. If it wasn’t her car or her house, it was some sudden and unavoidable health issue.

  It seemed like every week, her car was in the shop, a handyman was at her house, or she was in a doctor’s office. And of course, all these things came with bills, invoices, receipts. Anthea often wondered if her house would actually fall down if it wasn’t bolstered and buttressed in every corner by piles of papers.

  But truth be told, she preferred it this way. She had control over her home, her car, her job, her body. The chaos and instability were trophies of life fully lived. She was proud of this.

  While her computer labored through its re-animation processes, Anthea got up to go make the morning coffee in the break room, every surface of which somehow contrived to be both sticky and dusty.

  Anthea was an obsessive coffee drinker and had no pretensions whatsoever about quality. She found peace in the methodical, never-changing process; everything in its place and every step the same, day after day. However, on this day something out of the ordinary caught her eye.

  The communal refrigerator was as stereotypical of an ‘office fridge’ as it could be: corny printouts of comics vying for space next to newspaper cutouts of painfully heartwarming think-pieces or editorials, obnoxious signage from over-zealous rule-followers.

  Tucked behind a calendar magnet from a local car dealership (now several years out of date) was a sloppily printed business card advertising the unlikely services of someone calling himself a “computer shaman” and a second card, outlined with curly hearts, broadcasting “NO COMMITMENTS. MEET, GREET, and CHANGE SEATS. Find love in only 5 minutes: try speed-dating today!”

  Anthea found that she was still alone in her wing of office as she slipped a sly glance toward the break room door and palmed the card into her pocket.

  At the end of the day, Anthea turned her small car into the crunching gravel of the driveway next to the small stucco house that she owned, carefully avoiding her trash cans. She slowly and deliberately got out of the car, walked to the end of the driveway and looked quickly around the quiet street before gingerly opening her mailbox and removing the mail. She then slowly rolled her trash cans up to the side door, positioning them precisely upon their concrete platforms.

  She looked carefully at the door and then turned away, going in a circle around the house and looking at each of the other two doors and each scroll-ironwork covered windows. She then began a second circle around the edges of her property, which was hedged in on all sides by scrubby bushes and a few struggling, knobby trees.

  A casual observer would have been forgiven for thinking she was a house-sitter or a real estate agent on a routine property check, not a woman arriving at her own home at the end of her workday. When she was satisfied by whatever she was looking for, she entered her home through the back door after fiddling with something behind a stack of gardening pots.

  Anthea then began a tour of the interior, stopping in each of the few rooms to turn a light on and then off. There was no need to open any closet doors, as she had removed them all shortly after moving in.

  If she’d had any close friends, they likely would have found this routine peculiar and alarming, but for Anthea it was a calming daily routine, one she repeated in reverse every morning.

  Anthea Menzies was not her real name, of course, but her longest-running and most peaceful identity had found success precisely because she now insisted on this level of caution.

  As she settled in for the evening, she thought again about the speed-dating advertisement she’d picked up. Anthea had never had much luck in dating, although lately what she wanted more than anything lately was companionship in what was turning into a lonely life. There were so many new things to learn and to try, and she desperately wanted a partner to experience them with and to teach her things. She’d been on a few dates before, but they had been painfully awkward. Even the most well-meaning dinner companion couldn’t fathom the hurt they were inflicting by asking that most basic of questions, “So, where are you from?”

  The simplest answer was that Anthea was from Burbank, but the truth is that she was from New Mexico. She wasn’t
able to talk about her family, she had never set foot in a school, and for the first 16 years of her life she’d never seen a movie, listened to a radio, or read a book apart from The Book. She had almost no common ground with any person she met, and it made for a rough time on the dating market.

  Anthea was first approached by the FBI when she was 16 and had her first job working at a video store in Las Vegas, NM, although she hadn’t realized it. Joel, the owner, was your average Rocky Mountains Mormon and treated Anthea and her ‘family’ at the Apostolic Oneness Chapel of the Holy Pentecost (locally referred to as The Camp) with pointed disinterest and paid her in cash.

  The job was nothing special, but it was next to a motel and would occasionally get out-of-towners in to rent a video overnight. Employment had been a huge concession on the part of the Helpmeets, the group of men chosen by the Message to lead Heavenly Father’s chosen people at the Camp. Anthea had grown up learning from the Helpmeets all the terrifying reasons that women should not work outside the home, that all media is forbidden, and that talking to strangers was discouraged.

  Anthea’s mother convinced the High Helpmeet Concord that the Camp needed more members who were able to move freely in the system, and that training a soulful bride in a secular place would strengthen her witness for her future husband’s mission. Anthea was chosen because her mother was trusted within the camp as a strong guide for her daughter.

  And, her mother presented to the Concord, Anthea was hardly the first to learn a trade. Perhaps if she was successful and pure in learning to work in the system, she could go on to gain a credential in woman’s work like midwifery. The camp’s midwife was starting to become frail, she informed the men, and they all knew that births of the last few years had been few and fraught with complications and the shadow of death. The topic of women’s work and the declining birth rate in the camp made the Helpmeets uncomfortable, and Anthea’s mother won her suit.

  So Anthea was allowed to leave the camp a few times a week to learn how to interact with the system, on the condition that she attend prayer meetings every morning and evening of her shift. Meetings took place twice a day every day except the sabbath, which was for private fasting and worship. The most soulful of women attended prayer every morning, and spoke in tongues every night. Anthea had only rarely been filled with the spirit and spoken in tongues, a fact which visibly worried her mother and frightened Anthea considerably.

  The truth was that Anthea was frightened of most things, not least her mother’s glacial affections and volcanic tempers. She was very afraid to spend time alone in the world beyond the camp, but curiosity overwhelmed her fears.

  Expecting to encounter demons and terrors at every turn, she was almost disappointed to instead spend her time alphabetizing, organizing, and filing. Joel did not encourage her to interact with customers, and didn’t give her much attention either. There were no other employees. She passed the time sounding out the unfamiliar words and names on the video boxes and suspiciously eyeing the computer at the checkout counter, trying to work out if it was alive or not.

  After about six months of this, Anthea was forced to quit the job suddenly when another teenaged girl from the camp claimed she has seen her watching a demonic video in the shop with a man. Anthea had grown up with this girl and could only believe that she was mistaken in some way. She couldn’t possibly be lying on purpose, could she? Anthea protested her innocence to deaf ears. Having been convicted without discussion in this fabricated act of pollution, Anthea found herself in serious trouble with the Concord.

  She was not yet at the age of accountability, so the Helpmeets would lay hands on her and pray over her for Heavenly Father to expel her demons while the brides looked on in silent condemnation. When that didn’t produce dramatic, spirit-filled confession (Anthea merely cried a lot), she was condemned to isolation for her failure to repent.

  At the liminal space between the Chihuahua desert and the Rocky Mountain foothills, the camp was a sprawling expanse of rocks, vicious bushes, and sparse evergreens. Short mesas shared space with deep arroyos and inconvenient and inhospitable piles of boulders. In one such inconspicuous corner, a one-room brick storage building had been constructed by the previous owners to protect their mechanical equipment from the elements. The camp used it now as isolation chamber for members who were in danger of pollution.

  Even completely empty, the dirt floor interior still smelled like engine oil, rust, and gasoline. A member of the camp would enter the room and pray over Anthea for an hour or so in a non-stop procession that lasted days. They called it a ‘prayer marathon’. They called the isolation chamber the ‘Holy House’. Most of the camp’s children had spent a few hours or a day in the Holy House for their pollution, but it was rarely used for more than a couple of days at a time.

  Anthea was sent to the Holy House. Indefinitely.

  On the evening of the third day, Anthea still hadn’t confessed to any wrongdoing. The minute taste of the world outside the camp had given her an almost manic strength. For six months, those few hours a week she spent at the video store had quietly, secretly, violently opened her soul to the new sensation of a curiosity met turn for turn with the brilliance of answers and more questions. She felt illuminated from the very threads of her soul. She treasured the glow of this feeling in her heart of hearts.

  She closed her eyes against the constant cloying of prayer and she dwelled on the memories of her experiences with strangers outside the camp. The strange ways people talked, the outlandish hairstyles they wore, the visual saturation of their colorful clothing, the unending stream of questions that she wanted to ask every single person out there. Anthea had not acted sinfully with a man, of this she was sure, but she also knew that she was sinning in her heart of hearts. She knew that her emotional purity had been damaged and that she would never be considered a godly bride for her eternal companion.

  She might have slept. She wasn’t sure.

  On the fourth night with no water or food, almost no rest, and constant company in prayer, Anthea wasn’t sure if she should be shocked or worried to see the face of her video store boss enter the Holy House. She knew of people who had been violently shaken by the spirit at the 3rd or 4th day, and had been cleansed of their former selves, never the same again. She was worried that perhaps she was having a vision, and that her secret thoughts would come spilling out of her mouth, damning her forever.

  Instead, Joel handed her a bottle of gatorade and a granola bar. She was too weak or too stunned to open either of them, so he twisted the cap off the bottle for her, and unwrapped the granola bar while she frantically drank. She could hear someone outside the door performing the usual prayers of salvation over her but didn’t recognize their voice. Joel helped her to stand and then led her silently out of the Holy House and down to the camp’s nearest property line, where he helped her into the bed of a truck and covered her with a tarp.

  At first she was frozen with absolute terror, peeking up at the dark sky above her as it whipped past, carrying her into the unknown, but eventually she fell asleep. She woke up around sunrise when the truck came to a halt. Joel jumped out of the front seat, uncovered her, and handed her a backpack.

  “This should be everything you need for a while. Change clothes in the bathroom. Don’t tell anyone who you are and don’t come back. After you get on that bus, you no longer exist here.”

  He paused then and looked at her sadly, “Those people were going to kill you, you know. It’s a miracle you can even move. Good luck."

  And so, “… Burbank. I’m from Burbank. How about you?” was her default response when a stranger asked her the dreaded question.

  Sitting in the warm glow of her reading lamp, a romance novel open on her lap, Anthea made a decision. Before she could think about it any longer, she jumped up and walked to her kitchen where she snatched the speed-dating card from her pocket and dialed the number.

  Chapter 2

  The Phone Call

  A few miles a
way, in a somewhat disordered garage, a tall man was rummaging around his belongings while talking on a cordless phone.

  “Well, I think it’s haunted,” said the voice on the other end of the line, nervously.

  “What makes you say that?”, asked the tall man.

  “Well it flickers off and on and sometimes the colors go all screwy, and lately the printer has been spitting out total garbage.”

  “Hmm... that sounds more like a possession to me,” answered the tall man confidently.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Oh yes,” the tall man stopped rummaging, stood up, and began a matter-of-fact monologue. “With a haunting you’re dealing with a disgruntled spirit of some kind or other and you have to figure out what it needs. To be at rest, you see. And then boom!, gone. But with a possession you’re in for a tougher time,” he began to drone, and was staring up at the ceiling, "because you’ve got gateways and portals to open and close, true names to discover and a whole heap of chanting and your occasional bloodletting, depending on the type of demon and on and on.”

  The voice on the other end of the line blew out a long breath and said, “Well this is why you’re the expert… I had no idea. How soon can you take a look?”

  “I’m pretty booked up with iPhone software update blessings at the moment, Apple really bought the brick factory with this one, don’t you think? If you’re interested, I’m doing a group cleanse tonight. Yeah? Ok, great. It’s $25 and bring a personal item for the blessing part of the ceremony. But, yeah, for your other thing I think I can squeeze in an exploratory summoning consult on Saturday to figure out what’s going on. Midnight is best, but would 6pm work?”

  As the man finished his phone conversation and put down his cordless phone, he began a serious exploration into the contents of a colorful plastic bin. With a triumphant smirk, he finally pulled out a tatty yoga mat wrapped in various scraps of tie-dyed cloth and walked back into the house.