Baked Scribe Flashback : From Life

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The dogs sounded like they were waging war out there. Grady looked out, to see what the hell they were up to and there they all were, crowded against the house and barking savagely. They all seemed to be staring past the fence, where the property dropped off severely into the valley below. Grady noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Other than the unusually cool breeze flowing over the farm, it was a normal night. He lifted the mug to his lips and took another long sip of the tomato soup. Diane had been gone for over a year now, but he still couldn’t bring himself to reject her preferred method of serving soup. “You drink it, more often than not,” she would say. “You don’t drink out of a bowl do you?

The picture frames clunked against the wall, as they often did at night when the wind picked up. There were times he couldn’t help but feel like the entire house was about to be attacked by flock of some kind of long dead, prehistoric monster.

Grady sat down and reached for the hardback he had been reading. He set the mug down on the end table when there was a soft knocking from the front door. Frowning, he looked down at his watch before standing up and walking to the door. The last time he got a visitor this late, it’d been a passing college student with a flat tire, just up the lane. A tiny voice urged him to peek through the window before opening the door, but he ignored it. The wind flitted into the house like a cacophony of screams as he did so, knocking him back on his heels.

There was no one there.

Grady shook his head and stepped out onto the porch, hitting the switch for the outside lights as he did so. Warm, yellow light popped on, revealing the expensive wooden deck and confirmed what he had already seen.

There was no one out here.

Had to be a fluke, a trick of the mind. Still, it was better to be careful. Grady stepped down off the porch and began scanning around the property. If this was kids screwing with him, then he would bring all holy hellfire down on the little bastards. The whole point of buying this property out in the middle of nowhere had been to get away from people.

Nothing was out of order, no windows open or doors hanging loose in their frames. He heard no sound, no snickers of suppressed laughter that he might expect from errant pranksters. Grady looked up into the sky, and took another moment to revel in what lay above him as the twinkles of stars tumbled off into the horizon of infinity. This really did make the rest worthwhile.

He turned to return to the house. As he began climbing the stairs to the deck, he glanced up at the bedroom window. It wasn’t until he took several more steps that he realized what he had just seen.

Someone was standing in the window.

Grady backpedaled down the steps looked up. There was now no one there. For moment, he considered throwing something up at the window to try and startle whoever had been lurking up there. He stood, fixed in place for several moments, reluctant to enter the house and wishing whoever had he had seen would return to the window.

The wind rushed over him, feeling even colder and, for a moment, he thought he could detect the sound of something screaming.

It was idiotic to just stand out here like this, afraid to walk into his own damn home. He tossed the soup out onto the ground and set the mug down on the porch railing, picking up a heavy pipe that was leaning up against the front door.

“Anyone in here?” He yelled out, holding the pipe in front of him like some kind of talisman. No one answered, but his nose suddenly exploded with a tickling sensation as his allergies started to flare up. He looked up, glaring at the dust trickling down from the floor boards above, which were flexing down, as if from the weight of footsteps.

He was going to give it to whoever was up there. This had been going on for long enough. Grady raced up the stairs and began marching down the hallway, banging the pipe on the walls in order to scare out the intruder that was hiding up here.

“Picked the wrong fucking place to break into, friend!” Grady kicked the door open to his bedroom, wincing at the sound of the door knob, punching a hole through the wall at the other end of its path. All the better for a dramatic entrance though. Drywall was cheap. “Get the hell out of here!” He reached out and yanked the closet door aside, half-pulling it off the track as he did so.

The closet was empty.

“What the Christing hell?” Grady muttered as he returned to the window, glaring out over the front lawn. He looked up into the sky above and in the glass of the window, caught the reflection.

There were people in the room with him.

Grady stared into the reflection, refusing to turn and look or acknowledge what he was seeing. There was nothing distinctive about them, faceless, with simple white dresses draped over frail figures. They started shamble forward, freezing him in place as he felt the pipe drop from his fingers. He tried to draw in a breath against the icy fingers crawling across his chest.

Grady set up with a start, looking around the room from the relative safety of his hospital bed. Why did he keep waking up here? He began to lift his hand to his forehead but, before he got halfway there, he felt the cool steel of the handcuffs linking his hands to the side rails.

“He’s awake officer,” the voice came from the darkness to his left. Grady looked, but saw no one there.

“Still with us then?” A cop was now leaning over him, his face coming so close that Grady flinched against the mattress to try and get away.

“Where am I?” he asked.

The man shook his head, laughing a little. “Still don’t remember, huh? It’s getting a little old trying going over this again and again. Or maybe someone is just trying to set himself himself up for a crazy defense.”

“I don’t…” He started to protest but, in an instant, the room swirled away from again, his head filling with howling wind. He shivered with a cold that he felt down to his bones. It was a feeling of death. He felt like his body had melted, leaving behind nothing but fragmented consciousness.

He was falling through open space. A lake shimmered below him and in the low ambient light, he could tell what he was plummeting towards.

The lake was filled with blood.

Grady bucked in mid-air and screamed out in anticipation of the impact but when he opened his eyes, he was on his knees, in the cellar underneath the house. He looked down at his hands and saw them streaked bright red with blood.

What was this he had wrought? Was he really here, or was he trapped inside of this memory? Was this his mind trying to—

“Wake up!”

Grady snapped his eyes open to see the attacker, the cop, once again leaning over him, and drawing back as if to strike. Grady suspected that this blow would not have been the first.

“About time. Tired of you drifting off like that. I will smack the feeling out of your face if you drift off again, motherfucker.”

Was he really just dreaming? Or was he actually being drawn out of this place, pulled into these varying times and places in physical form, as well as memory? Somehow, the officer was able to lean in even closer.

“One of those girls was my cousin, and I’m going to see to it that you burn for what you did.”

“Officer!” The crisp voice came, following the sound of the door opening and light, flooding in from the hallway. “The patient is in an extremely sensitive state right now. He does not need this kind of agitation.”

“Sure thing, cupcake.” The officer smirked down at Grady before heading for the hallway. The doctor followed him out, standing there in the doorway to make sure the man was indeed leaving. He lay back, listening to the sound of footsteps moving past, fragments of conversations and the occasional squeaky wheel of a gurney.

Would the blood ever truly wash away, or would the spectral taint be there forever, attached to him for the severity of his sins, for the lives he had taken? He couldn’t remember anything that happened before being in this room, other than the scattered images of his dreams,. He didn’t know what was true or false, but somehow he fundamentally knew that he had done every single thing that he was being accused of. The blood has been shed by his hands, no one else’s.

This was his purgatory.

“Wake up!” The cop smacked him again. Back to the reality of his hospital room. The avenging creature had evidently sneaked back into the room at some point. Grady tried to twist away from the man, and cried out before a hand came down and clamped his throat, cutting off the supply of air. He clawed at the sheets as the room began to swirl away, the vague sound of shouting somewhere. There was persistent pressure, and his head started to feel weightless and dizzy.

“Wake up!”

The slap again, this time from the other side.

“You don’t get off that easy, you don’t—”

Again, the pressure bore down, and the room blinked away. He wondered how long this would go on before the comfort of his final release? What act of internal contrition was required of him?

Maybe he had it backwards. Maybe the dreams he was having were real and the hospital was the hallucination. Maybe he just needed to make his own mind understand the reality, the fact that—

His head rocked forward from a savage blow, the source unseen.

“Wake up you son of a bitch!”

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