Retrograde

“You’re not real.”

I stared daggers into its gaping black eyes. It stared back, emptily. This thing couldn’t stare daggers if it tried. There’s nothing inside it.

“Aren’t I?”

I felt cold inside. I couldn’t say anything more, I was simply too afraid to blink. Too afraid to breathe…but I did. I was panting. As cold as I felt inside of my body, my mind, my lungs, I was sweating on the outside. I was terrified.

The next thing I could comprehend was waking up. I know I wasn’t dreaming. My pillow was drenched in sweat, how could a dream have done that to me? Some time in between being face-to-face with that thing and right now, I laid down and went to sleep. I know how it sounds, but to me, that does feel more likely than me having dreamt that experience. My subconscious couldn’t make up the feeling of simultaneous chills in every cavity of my body and sweat on every surface of my skin.

Where did it go? Is it in my house? What should I do? Do I go back to sleep?

I go about my day. I get dressed, I have breakfast, I see my mother. She’s been on end-of-life care for a few months now, here in my home. I have a spare bedroom and I don’t want her to die alone, so I figure it’s worth it for her to be here with me. I give her the pain relief medication she needs to get by, I kiss her on the head, I go to work.

The bus ride to work is always mundane. I don’t really look forward to it, but I don’t really dread it. The bus always smells musty, like dirty, wet newspapers, but I don’t mind it. I sit in the back so the driver won’t talk to me because conversation on my way to work in the morning is not how I like starting my day. I sit down, I check my phone, I look up. I’m looking at nothing. I’m looking into concave circles of soot-black nothing. I feel its breath on me again. I feel the ice in my organs, like I’ve been frozen inside of a glacier. I feel beads of sweat careening down my back. I say nothing. I don’t know what it wants but I’m waiting for it to ask.

Ask me. Ask me for what you want.

Ask me.

Ask me.

Ask me.

“Ask me.”

“You know what I want.”

I say nothing. Do I know what it wants?

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly it feels as if I’ve been struck clean through my chest. Sheer terror pierces through me like a spear through flesh. Nothing has ever made me feel so frantic, so panicked, so helpless. I open my mouth to scream but as soon as I do, I can see. I’m not staring at it anymore. I search around wildly, my head looking like a spinning top on my shoulders. It’s not here. Was it ever?

I get off the bus at my stop. I walk home.

—

I lay in bed. I ignore the phone when it rings. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I’m afraid to close my eyes. This thing wants something from me. I don’t know what it wants, but then apparently I do. I get up to give my mother her medication. I get back in bed and wait. I wait for the thing to return. I wait to find out more about what it wants from me.

Laying in bed, I stare at the ceiling. I wait. I can’t close my eyes. I have to blink when my eyes get too dry from frying inside of my skull, and every nanosecond that my eyes spend shut terrifies me to my core. Eventually I drift into a dreamless sleep and see nothing. No thing. Not the thing, not anything at all. Somewhere in my subconscious there’s a dream waiting to be had by my sleeping body but it’s interrupted by a voice. The thing. I hear him in my unconscious state, and suddenly I begin clawing to wake up.

“Give her to me.”

Is that what it wants?

“Who?”

“You know who.”

Do I?

“You keep saying that, but I don’t. I don’t know. Please stop. Leave me alone.”

Listening to the words I say in response feels like listening to a conversation from the other side of a door. It doesn’t sound like me. Is it?

“You have nothing to be scared of. Not now.”

“When will I have to be scared?”

“Don’t think about it. Give her to me.”

“Who?”

“You know. You know.”

I wake up screaming.

—

The next day is normal. I get up. Medicate my dying mother. Take the bus. Work.

There’s nothing interesting about my life, but when I take the thing into account, there’s nothing believable about it either. I can’t tell anyone about this thing I keep seeing, hearing, feeling. Nobody will listen to me.

I get home from work in the evening and sit in my living room, more on edge than I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t think there’s a single thing that wouldn’t frighten me in this moment. I go to turn on the TV and I’m met with it. The thing facing me. I want to turn the TV off; in my head, I’m screaming at myself to turn it off, but I can’t. I won’t.

“You know. You KNOW.”

“I DON’T!”

“YOU DO! YOU KNOW WHO I AM!” Its voice gets increasingly more hoarse, almost impossible to understand, yet somehow I comprehend it clearly.

“IT’S TIME. LET GO.”

Everything goes quiet. It feels as if a tornado has just swarmed through my house and then left. It feels like the aftermath. My eyes open for real this time, and I realize.

I walk around my apartment. It smells like horror, like microorganisms and old flesh and the stink of depravity. I walk around as if touring a museum, terrified of what I’ve lived in for months. I walk down the hall, into the kitchen where my fridge is leaking something dark and disgusting, the floor is coated in dirt so thick you can’t tell what color the tile underneath used to be. I walk to the spare bedroom where my mother is. I stop in my tracks and vomit. Her decaying, mutilated, contorted body lays in her bed more lifeless than a mannequin. Flies of all different species buzz around where her organs used to be, where her flesh now sits as a pile of putrescent dust and mucus. Her limbs have been separated from her body, her head is separate from her torso and her arms and legs sit beside her like they’re entities of their own.

I stand frozen, unable to move, suddenly fighting off memories of the feeling of separating flesh from itself, tendon and bone coming apart under my hands; memories of the sound of a scream so debilitating that my mind fought it all off for months and allowed me to live my life as I was before.