“What are you doing here?” he asked.
He stepped forward and his eyes grew blurry with tears. He wiped them.
“Ma? Ma? Answer me. Why are you here? What’s wrong?”
His mother raised one of her needles and pointed it to the floor just in front of the couch. Haunt watched as a crack began to form, growing longer and wider as it traveled across the middle of the room. A tearing noise, like a carpet being ripped from the floor, filled his ears. Within seconds, the crack raced across the floor and split the room in two. Fear gripped his chest, but he was too scared to scream. His feet now stood on either side of a glowing purple void.
“No,” Haunt shouted as he fell to the right side of the splitting floor, his hands gripping the ragged edge. “Ma!”
But Ma didn’t respond. She sat with needles in hands, staring straight at him, her eyes chalky white.
“Ma! Help!” Haunt shouted again as the ground began to pull him under, “Help!”
He couldn’t hold on any longer. The floor sucked him under and he fell through the void. The last thing he saw looking down at him was his mother. She looked just as lost as she had the last day he saw her alive.
Chapter Twenty
Haunt landed in a seated position with a thud. His head throbbed and black dots floated and swirled before his eyes. He sat on a bed with a flashing TV screen in front of him. He heard static-like noises and a dull explosion that could only come from an Atari 2600 game. Things took shape.
He peered down and saw a joystick in his hand. He wobbled it back and forth and pressed its single red button. A sprite that looked like a fly shot at a sideways triangle. Hey, wait a minute. This was Yars’ Revenge! He used to play this game all the time. Thank God he was finally able to get out of that white room. Falling through it had been a blessing in disguise.
He felt his thumb tapping the button, but something was off. His back and shoulders began to tremble like a running motor and everything in front of him got blurry with…what were these? Tears? Wait. Why was he crying? He didn’t feel sad. In fact, he felt the opposite.
He tried to turn his head to look around, but couldn’t. He began to panic. The room was familiar and as he strained to move he realized why. This wasn’t his body. Or rather, it was his body, but a younger version of it. He sat inside this younger self, like a ghost inside a machine. He tried to move again but felt like he was being constricted by a set of crisscrossed seat belts across his chest. He struggled to free himself from the confines of his younger body, but couldn’t get out.
“Hey!” He yelled, hearing his voice resonate all around him. “What is this?”
His teenage wrist went up to wipe his eyes, and for a moment, all he saw was a flannel sleeve.
“Hey,” Haunt screamed again. “Can you hear me?”
The boy didn’t respond, and this got Haunt thinking. Why was his younger self crying? Inside the body, Haunt felt like he was restrained and yet, like he was floating at the same time—it was limited liberation. He saw colors dance before him. For some nebulous reason, he knew these were emotions, and sadness was the most distinguishable. It was a cold blue color. It kept drifting away from him like a receding tide.
But there were other colors, too. Red. And black. Haunt felt them drift about and he knew he could catch them if he focused. He just needed to stretch his mind.
As Haunt closed his eyes, he mentally reached out and got a hold of them. The colors felt hard and substantial in his brain, and he knew they were alive. When he opened his eyes, they twirled in front of him like a double helix.
Haunt knew what the emotions were. The red one was hatred, and the black one was fear. But the black one was the more dominant of the two.
Through the boy’s eyes Haunt searched the messy room for clues. But he could barely see out of the corners of his eyes. What he saw were clothes strewn everywhere. It was gross and yet comforting. It reminded him of better times. He didn’t feel like a man in his late 40s dreading emails about signing up for an AARP card. He felt young again. Alive.
The “Rock in a Hard Place” Aerosmith poster hung above his TV. He remembered hating that album. All the songs on it were too heavy and awful. Maybe he just liked the image of Stonehenge plastered on the poster. He remembered being interested in things like that: Conspiracy theories. Druids. Aliens. The beyond.
His eyes continued to roam as far as they could within the perimeters of where the boy’s eyes looked, but they couldn’t go far. Out the corner of the boy’s right eye he saw a sliver of the Farrah Fawcett poster on his closet door. Her bathing suit body was as sexy now as it had been back when he used to jerk off to it.
He got to thinking of what Farrah Fawcett looked like toward the end of her life when she got cancer, and how strong she had been in her last days. He began to feel a dull throb underneath his eyes thinking about her. Her tired, defeated face reminded him of his mother’s haggard face.
That’s when he saw something else, but it wasn’t inside his room. Rather, it was beneath it. A supine and convulsing woman gushed blood all over the kitchen floor in gurgling black spurts.
Everything became crystal clear.
“No,” Haunt said. He tried to shake his head as he stared at the blurry screen from the teen’s perspective, but he couldn’t. “Not that day. Any day but that day.”
He searched inside the boy’s mind for some kind of a button to get him out of here. But there wasn’t any. There was nothing inside himself but himself, and he couldn’t wrap his head around that. It didn’t make any sense.
At first, he was lost about what to do. But then, an idea came upon him. It lit up his body—Maybe he could make things right.
“Get up, get up, you lazy bum! You might still have a chance to save her this time! Stop thinking about it and do it. You still might have a chance.”
But his mullet-topped, 16-year-old self didn’t budge. He continued tapping the controller’s red button, the character on the screen constantly exploding.
“Turn off the game and get going! Come on, get up!”
He heard a hollow voice, like that in the depths of a cave, and Haunt looked up.
Why does Dad have to be such an asshole? Haunt pricked up his ears and listened.
How does he even know that they’re right anyway? They could be wrong. They’re only doctors. They’re not God.
“What are you talking about?” Haunt asked, but the boy continued to talk from a distance. His voice rebounded like sonar off the inner walls of himself.
All she wants is to be comforted.
“And you can comfort her once you get down there. Now, come on. Let’s GO!”
Is that too much to ask? If I just tell her that I can hear the voices like she wants me to—
“Wait, are you…thinking?” Haunt asked. The swirling colors vibrated and turned piss yellow, as if they communicated with each other, arguing.
Haunt knew that if something was going to happen, he had to do it himself. He tried putting his foot into the foot of the teen, but it wouldn’t budge. It might as well have been plastered in cement.
He tried to move the arms, but that didn’t work, either. It made him feel ancient. As much as he wanted to do something, there was nothing he could do. A somber realization washed over him. He wasn’t meant to take action. He was just meant to watch. This wasn’t fair. Why did he have to suffer this a second time?
Below, he heard the thump, thump, thumping on the kitchen floor that he heard all those years ago in this room. Haunt screamed because he knew what the sound was. The teen raised an eyebrow to the noise. He leaned forward and turned down the volume on the TV.
“What the hell is that?” he said.
“She’s convulsing, you idiot,” Haunt spat. He yelled more to the devil that put him here, rather than his younger self as the boy couldn’t have known that his mom was dying downstairs.
The boy got off his bed and turned off the game. He left the room and went down the stairs.
> When his younger self got to the bottom floor and walked through the living room, Haunt tried to cover his face but he couldn’t put his hands over his eyes. He was meant to see this.
His younger self walked into the kitchen and Haunt felt his stomach plummet like the big drop on a roller coaster. Please, whoever’s doing this to me, don’t make me see the centipede again. I know that I’m going to have to see Mom, but PLEASE don’t make me see that centipede again. I’m begging you. Please!
His younger self shrieked when he walked into the kitchen.
Dark blood covered the floor, and even more of it was on the table. A huge red puddle dripped off the side of the table like a leaky faucet, and it landed by an overturned chair where a corduroy covered leg stuck out. Blood pooled around her brown moccasin.
“Ma!” his younger self screamed. Haunt fought to keep out the sight, but he couldn’t. It was as horrible as he remembered it. His mother’s haggard face was as pale as snow and her dead eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her mouth hung open, her thin lips sagging into a crooked frown like some horrible Halloween mask. Still, even seeing his mother dead again, he had another thought on his mind that shook him even further. Just spare me the centipede! Please!
The boy collapsed by his mom’s side, and his teardrops hit her face. A small razor blade was by her left hand. A large, gaping cut went right across her throat, and blood still spurted out of it as if she were trying to breathe or say goodbye. His younger self reached over to grab the blade, when he saw a flash out the corner of his eye.
Oh, God, Haunt thought. Here it comes!
His younger self sprung up. An oil-black centipede ran out of his mother’s black hair as if it were a part of it and ran onto her forehead. It looked like her hair had come to life. Both Haunts screamed at the sight, but the older Haunt screamed louder. The bug’s segmented body was as thick and as long, its legs just as yellow and as pointy as he remembered it. It raced toward her open mouth, and then ran around her lips until it slipped off her pale cheek and scampered away underneath the kitchen sink. His heart pounded against his ribs.
He felt woozy and fell back. In the darkness of his mind, his body was cold and weightless.
Chapter Twenty-One
When Haunt opened his eyes, he was back in the white room. He was face down on the floor, his arms stretched above his head. The crack that had once ripped the room in half was gone, but the sofa was there. But someone new sat on its dense cushions.
Instead of his mother’s moccasins, a set of penny loafers rested on the floor. Above them, a pair of dark denim jeans. Haunt could see the fine white stitching that ran along the hem and inseam and just above a polished belt buckle a red flannel shirt.
He pushed himself up off the floor. His cheeks were wet from either tears or slobber. He wasn’t sure. He reached up to wipe them off but stopped short when he made eye contact with the man on the couch. He took a step back, his jaw hanging open in disbelief.
“Grandpa?” Haunt’s heart leapt, but a feeling in his gut told him to be wary. Something about the man…
His cheeks were wet as he got up and he took a startled step back. The man on the couch was his grandfather. Haunt’s jaw dropped.
When he looked at him, his heart leapt, but in the back of his mind, he was wary. Something about the man wasn’t right. It was his eyes. They were blue instead of brown. Sky blue. They made his whole face look younger by about twenty years. But why were his eyes different when everything else about him—the short white beard, the desert brown skin, the bald head, the liver spots, the wrinkles under his eyes—were the same?
“Welcome,” the old man said. “Sit down. We have much to discuss.”
Something deep and tight inside told him that the man in front of him was not his grandpa. But Haunt didn’t care. He took a seat anyway. He was too tired to care and it was somebody new to talk to, someone to distract him from the thoughts of the centipede. At least it wasn’t his mother.
“Hi,” Haunt said.
“Hello. I take it you’ve realized that I’m not your grandfather.”
“Yes.” Haunt nodded. He didn’t know why, but he started to tear up at this admission.
“There, there,” the old man said, frowning. “You’ve been through a lot lately, haven’t you?”
“I have,” Haunt admitted. He remembered Marigold in the hospital bed with the tubes hooked up to her body. The memory pushed him over the edge and his tears began to stream down his face. He had left his son all alone.
He covered his face with his hands. The thought of Marigold’s visage, still and bruised against the white hospital sheets made him sob. He had failed both her and their child. What would she think of him?
“She’d think you’re a quitter,” the old man said.
Warm anger rested in Haunt’s heart at those words, and he raised his face from his hands.
“What?” he asked.
The old man smiled.
“Who are you?” Haunt asked, edging to the right side of the couch, making it squeak.
“Now don’t be scared, Jeffrey. I’m going to tell you what I told your wife a few hours ago.”
“My wife?” Haunt said, his eyes bulging. “What are you talking about?”
The old man smiled again. He crossed his legs at the ankles and leaned back into the couch as if he owned the room.
“I’m your Imagination,” the old man said. “You’re currently inside your own head.”
Haunt’s mouth twisted and his stomach dropped. What did the old man mean, “Inside your own head?” But then, as he stared into the old man’s flaming blue eyes, he knew it was true. He didn’t need to argue. Here in this white room, this man who looked like his grandfather was not his grandfather at all, but rather, his imagination, in the flesh. And this room was inside his head. Haunt grew cold at the thought of it. What was he doing here?
“What do you want?”
“To help you,” Imagination said simply. The smile never left his face. “I’m here to help you save your wife.”
“Save her from what?” Haunt asked. “Is she…here?”
“Well, not here exactly,” The old man said, who suddenly looked like he had a blue aura engulfing him. “I made this room just for you, Jeffrey. But she’s close. In fact, the two of you have never been closer.
“I want to see her!” Haunt exclaimed.
“And you will. But you have to do something for me first.”
“Anything.” Haunt said. The man who wasn’t his grandfather could have told him anything, the world was flat, the moon was made of cheese, that the Tooth fairy was real, and Haunt would have believe him. Imagination held the key to finding his wife and a huge part of him, the part that still held on, couldn’t bare not to believe and absorb his every word. “I would do anything to see her again.”
“Words are words and turds are turds, Jeffrey, but only turds measure up when you stack them. So, no. I don’t care about your words. If you’re really going to save her, then you have to give me more than that. You’re going to have to prove it to me. I need to believe that helping you wouldn’t be a waste of my time.”
“What do you want me to do?” He asked, practically feeling his wife’s presence, like the shirt on his back, just beyond these walls.
“The time for tests is out there, Jeffrey,” he shouted, pointing to the wall behind Haunt, “Out there is a man known as the Great Deceiver.”
Haunt scrunched up his nose. “What do you mean?”
“That man is your Instincts, Jeffrey. The force that always made you succumb to your fears rather than confront them is out there. And he wants you desperately. He’s waiting for you. Once you leave this room, he’s going to want to steer you away from the trees.”
“Trees?”
“The trees are where your wife is, and your son.”
Haunt felt his heart shatter. He knew that this was true. He felt it. He had never been so certain in his life.
“You’ll see the trees
as soon as you get out of here. But Instinct will try to hide them. You must fight him, Jeffrey. And you must win. You need to get to your wife. I sent her to get your son but she’s been knocked out and she needs you.”
“When can I leave?”
“You’ve already left,” Imagination said, snapping his fingers and disappearing.
Just like that, the walls collapsed.
Haunt now stood in a desert—a hot, stifling desert. The old man hadn’t mentioned anything about that.
His head started to throb from the heat. The light breeze that lifted several strands of his thinning hair did nothing to keep him cool. He unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt, but then, thought it foolish as what relief would that give him? He was in a desert. He unbuttoned his entire shirt. He looked out at the wavy horizon, and saw the giant trees that Imagination had mentioned. His eyes trailed their height until they disappeared into the clouds.
Haunt wiped his forehead. Sweat ran down his face, making it itch. But he would walk until his heart gave out. He stomped forward in the searing sand and headed toward the towering trees.
Part II
The Internal Landscape
Chapter Twenty-Two
The plump king leaned into the silver armrest of his throne and tapped his fingers as he waited. He shifted his heavy girth and adjusted the crown that made a perfectly round divot in the short, bristly hairs of his buzz cut. His fingers drifted over the rows of rubies and sapphires, as he shifted the heavy metal forward just a smidge.
He much preferred a slimmer, better coiffed form, but his appearance always reflected the figure of whomever he was thinking about, and right now, he thought about Mr. Jaffe, the man who fired Jeff Haunt and sent him spiraling out of control.
The Darkness of the Womb Page 7