Travis Besecker's Blog: Apocalypse Coming, page 19
October 31, 2012
It’s finally Halloween!
It’s finally Halloween!
October 30, 2012
Lost in Infinity - an excerpt
Another excerpt from “Lost in Infinity” in honor of Halloween… enjoy
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My co-pilot sat silent. I think he was giving me space. Maybe time to breathe? It didn’t matter; the peace and quiet in my head was nice for a change. I will admit that every time I got behind the wheel of my car, it took everything I had to resist the urge to drive back to the house I’d stumbled out of at 2:00am in the pouring rain a few nights before. The house seemed familiar, but unrecognizable. Each time, I pictured it in my head; I drove it back and packed it deeper in the cellar of my subconscious. I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I’d lost control. It would not happen again.
“I think we need to talk.”
The five most dreaded words to every man with enough intelligence and experience to know how they are most often followed. I ignored them all together.
“I think we need to talk. Itʼs time.”
“I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk to you.” I shut out the voice and focused on the Rubik’s cube I had in my hands. If it wasn’t in my hands, it was in my pocket. I’d become so obsessed with the mechanical muse that the sequence to solve its colored conundrum was burned into my brain. My fingers worked it over without the necessity of neural involvement. Bringing it solid over and over again was numbing. Mix it up, solve it, mix it up, solve it. Faster. Do it faster. Do it faster. Just do it.
“Itʼs time.”
I ignored.
“I donʼt want to have to do this the hard way.”
I ignored.
“Fine. If youʼre not going to listen to me, youʼll have to listen to him.”
I ignored. Again my co-pilot went silent. I think he was giving me space. Maybe time to breathe? It didn’t matter; the peace and quiet in my head was nice for a change. For two more weeks, I functioned as a normal adult.
Something pressed down on the end of my king sized bed. My eyes were still closed tight, yet my brain spun up and relayed the sensation optically. Problem was, at this point, I was still too tired to open my eyelids to confirm said phenomenon. The pressure on the mattress was likely my youngest, climbing up onto the bed to let me know he’d wet his own, he couldn’t sleep, or that Spongebob was his favorite sea creature. Who knew… but at that very moment, it seemed like a much better idea to pretend to still be lost in dreamland than to open my eyes and face the ascending toddler. After all, if he thought I was fast asleep, maybe he’d go back to his own bed without incident. Wishful thinking.
“Wait a minute, this is way too much weight for my little monster…” I worried. No answer from my co-pilot. The pressure on the end of the bed felt more like a gorilla than a toddler. Still half asleep, I tried to rationalize the situation as my Weimaraner, Dexter, climbing into bed. “Too heavy to be Dexter,” I argued with myself for a change.
The mattress collapsed on either side of my stacked legs, rolling me slightly to the side. Making it’s way toward my torso, the pressure on the bed felt as if someone was walking up the mattress, straddling me with each footstep. My eyes still shut, half stuck in a dream, I continued to analyze the situation. Until…
What could only be described as a large strong hand gripped my ribs and rolled me onto my back. What was before the state between deep sleep and fighting for consciousness immediately became the state of wide the fuck awake. I tried to sit upright and face my attacker in a startled panic, but was met with a second hand, pressing down on my chest and a third hand covering my eyes in total dark. The same shadowed darkness that had frightened me as a kid.
Since I was a child, I’ve always had a fear of being tied down. I hate to be pinned or tickled and when faced with such situations, anxiety kicks in and I often experience a panic attack. My breathing became frantic and my heart tried to burst through my chest to report the situation to my still obstructed eyes. My attacker steadied his grip and stance, settled on my chest and removed his hand from my eyes. Completely pinned to my mattress and held in place from my fingertips up to my neck, down my torso, past my waist, all the way to my toes, it felt as if an elephant had fallen asleep across me. Each breath was a struggle and even my heart felt as if it was being crushed under the weight of my own rib cage.
Bravery fought its way to my eyelids and peeled them up and away, revealing a bright overhead light. I tried to focus on the painful brilliance, but could only see a swirl of spots. I tried to thrash and wrestle free, but it was if each and every muscle in my body was on break. The paralysis was painful. My limbs had fallen asleep and the pins and needles were being worked through flesh, through bone, to sample my morrow. I tried to scream but my mouth and vocal chords were also affected by whatever drug had obviously been forced through my veins. The panic attack met a new hurdle and leaped over while the crowd looked on in amazement.
The blinding white light surged brighter, then dimmed, then brighter still before clicking off with a pop as the filament met its breaking point. My pupils at full contraction started to slowly spin outward to a normal operating diameter, allowing the light from my open master bath to spill in over the shoulder of the figure perched on my chest. My eyes slowly adjusted revealing a thick shadow in the shape of a man straddling my chest. His hands on my shoulders pinned me to the bed. Still I could not move.
The incandescent light filtered through his hair like the morning sun winding it’s way through bedroom blinds. I tried to focus on the face, but the contrast of shadow and light gave me only a silhouette. As if letting me know he could see me struggle to make out his features, he slowly cocked his head to the left and pressed harder against my chest. My breathing ceased and my heart thumped harder to make up for the loss of sound.
Focusing on the black hole that sat in the middle of his face, it was as if I was gazing into nothing. An empty vacuum stared back. The harder I focused, the more black the face burned. Franticly I looked side to side, as far as my eye could see in my peripheral. Dexter lay beside me still, fast asleep, paying no attention to the black shadow that choked the life from me just inches away.
I returned my attention to the black hole in the center of his face. Maybe because I was looking so intently into the nothing, seeing what I felt should be there, I started to make out tiny pinholes of light. Distant stars in the night sky decorated his face, bringing my heart to a near critical beat. Just then, to my astonishment, he opened his eyes. Wide round orbs of pristine white, veined pink from the corners to a glassed center where the pupil and iris should have been burned holes through me. My heart stopped. All sound faded to a hum as if the air were sucked out of the room.
Tunnel vision started to set in, either because of the pressure on my chest, the panic attack or unadulterated fear. Black engulfed the edges of my sight and narrowed my view until only the two glowing orbs of pristine white remained, like a pair of distant lit doorways. The doors closed, leaving only black. Silence. Nothing.
“I am you.” The Shadow Man whispered into my ear. “Do not be frightened. You bid me to come.” Despite his words, I was frightened; I had never been more frightened in all my life. “I told you we needed to talk, but you did not listen. Are you listening now? Where is the end to the farthest reaches of space?” I curled in on myself trying to shut him out as he laughed through dead eyes at my despair.
Then black. Silence. Nothing.
I shot up in bed, my lungs empty and my throat shaking from strain. In the doorway my son stood crying, holding his face. I looked down and realized I’d pissed myself clear through the comforter. It took a moment to realize where I was and that I’d been screaming so loud, I’d woken my son, forced Dexter out of bed and damaged my throat in the process. I calmed down, wiped the sweat from my face and tried to climb to the end of the bed. The light from the bathroom barely illuminated my bedroom. Trying to force my eyes to acclimate to the room, I made my way to my son.
“Calm down, honey. I’m so sorry I woke you up,” I said in the most calming voice I could muster in this still rattled state. I bent to comfort my boy and reached up to flip the light on at the same time to facilitate the cleaning and damage control that was about to take place.
Nothing. No pop. No flash of light. The bulb was burnt black.
In the coming week I shared the experience with my mother. I told her it was the scariest dream of my life and that it was so real the thought of it scared me even thinking about it.
“You’ve had these before, when you were a small boy. Don’t you remember? We were taking you to a psychiatrist for your insomnia at the same time so we thought it was all related. They told us it was called Sleep Paralysis. After therapy you never complained about it again.”
I was shocked, disgusted, scared and appalled. “I went to a psychiatrist? When?”
She looked at me confused. “When? Don’t you remember?”
I did not. “Something like this happened to me when I was a child? What the fuck?” How could I not remember it? In fact, I still didn’t.
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chills.
and i don’t know why.
chills.
and i don’t know why.
Apocalypse Coming
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