The Forgotten Ones

In my previous life I was a young psychical researcher, and like many of my kind I decided to visit the site where a farmer named Orion Williamson mysteriously vanished into thin air in July 1854 while walking across a field in the town of Selma, Alabama. Many others had gone there before me, some of them locking arms and walking across the site en masse which I thought was terribly foolish, without any result. But as I told my romantic partner most feverishly, it was a case where the exact spot was known to history so why is it still a field and not a lab?  The reason there weren’t any results was that they weren’t wearing my equipment, which she dismissed as vanity, to which I said a machine is only something that detects a difference between one spot and another. If a man can stumble into a fold in spacetime so can a pressure sensor, not because of some unsung genius but because it could have followed him into it and possibly find his bones there still. I had theoretical materiel that needed to be proved, so I had to go to a place where I could test it.

I brought a vanload of equipment to the site which is still a farm whose owners allow inquisitives. A gas-powered portable radar system, a little four-wheeled drone that goes ahead of me while I hold the controls, three separate recording devices and a paracord tied around the subject’s waist as well as a self-charging flashlight and emergency kit including a week’s worth of dehydrated rations. After Williamson disappeared his family could still hear him calling for help for several days, his voice growing gradually weaker, suggesting he was trapped in some unseen place where he eventually starved to death. I explained this to my partner as well as the need for a second person to accompany me which led to a lovers’ quarrel, since she would normally never do such a thing. We were students together, but she thought my methods were delusional.

Unfortunately it didn’t make any difference because I failed to find the portal to start gathering data. I walked the field multiple times, after which I heard the engine cranking in our gray van and to my surprise she drove off without me, leaving me standing there with everything I had unloaded as it started to rain.

I waited several hours for her to return, trying fruitlessly to reach her by phone. Eventually I was forced to walk to the owners’ farmhouse but they weren’t at home, so I had to hitchhike into town. She always made no secret of her opinions, which made it unlikely she would do this without explanation. I wondered what her reasons were. If I could have her cell phone located she might be stewing in some hotel or diner about our disagreement.

Not a single Alabama driver would stop or even slow down for me, one motorist almost intentionally trying to run me down. I called everyone at university I could think of in the off-chance I could get one of them to come get me, wondering if there was something wrong with my phone service.

I walked six miles to a motel where the employee at the desk downright ignored me, and then finally crossed the street to a diner full of people. There was nothing I could do to get the attention of anyone there, staff or customers who acted as if I was invisible. I got up on the counter and banged a metal saucepan with a ladle and they still ignored me, neither noticing those things were moving by themselves nor that I had moved them at all. I played a little game with a couple having dinner by moving their wine glasses around and they reached instinctively for wherever the glass was never breaking their conversation.

Watching them eat made me realize I was famished so I scavenged a woman’s spaghetti right in front of her. It was tasteless and disgusting; after I forced myself to swallow it I realized I was unable to digest it and promptly threw it back up again.

As twilight came I returned to the motel and spent the night in one of the vacant rooms. As I showered the water felt strange to me; it rolled right off of my skin and I smelled as if I hadn’t taken one. That night the temperature outside dropped to 20 degrees and I awoke to find my teeth chattering and my body curled into a fetal position from hypothermia as if the walls and bedsheets weren’t there. I had to go back into the shower just to make it through one night, and although I could tell the water was warm it didn’t do a thing for me, going ice cold again in a matter of minutes.

I learned several new things about myself in the next few days. One was that the dehydrated rations I had intended to take with me into the void were the only food I was able to eat. Another was I would have to move to a tropical climate like a lizard to avoid freezing to death. Hitching a ride back to my home city required me to wait at a major intersection for the right kind of vehicle to stop so I could jump into the back of it, and then jump back out of it again. Days later I found myself walking to the house my girlfriend and I shared, where I immediately discovered her in bed with another man.

I couldn’t figure why she was still driving my van (which I found parked in the garage) if I had been forgotten or erased from existence. It was as if she had never known me, and yet my belongings were still there. I watched her drive out of Selma and yet no one had reported me as a missing person. There must have been some third alternative if only I was able to ask her.

As I went through my possessions I could find no correspondence between us, which led me to think I’d better move them to another location or they would be gone too.

My thoughts moved to university and the psychical researchers there and at other institutions, brainstorming ways I might be able to communicate through their methods. Perhaps the long-defunct use of devices to record the dead at a volume that is simply too low for people to hear, or making the needle move on an EEG machine. Someone somewhere was waiting for a communication from the afterlife.

As I researched both at home and at the school the number of people interested in this had gone more downhill than I realized, or else they simply didn’t admit to it for fear of humiliation. I would be lucky to find a single amateur still using them that I could find within several days’ journey, avoiding the northern states entirely.

On my daily walk to campus through the city I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time, a feeling of being watched. It was an instinct that was nothing to me in my past life. As I scanned the countless faces ignoring me on the street I imagined it must be someone behind-the-scenes like myself, someone who moves like a shadow just out of sight. And then I got an actual look at them.

She wasn’t a shadow but someone who walks around the crowds as I do, someone who is no longer one of them. A woman with long, unwashed dark hair wearing a black trench coat a woman might wear if she was naked or unpresentable underneath. She was extremely malnourished, her face was pale and gaunt which combined with her makeup made me think of a vampire.

The day I figured this out I decided I would just stop and allow us to meet. It made no difference if it was a public place, so I chose a little alcove near a streetcorner and waited. I thought if I stood there long enough she might develop the courage to step out into the open and approach me. (After all she must get dressed up for some reason.)

But she didn’t come, if anything the feeling went away and I had wasted precious time. Then as I turned the corner she jumped out of hiding and attacked me with a shard of glass! The blow wasn’t particularly strong but she did break the skin and she immediately jumped on me and started sucking the wound. I pulled out the gun I kept locked in the house for emergencies and shot her through the heart.

Her body sounded like a bag of sticks when it hit the ground. Her trench coat fell open releasing an unimaginable smell. She was naked underneath as I suspected, a living skeleton with black mold growing between the white bones of her ribs.

I was dumbfounded at what had just taken place. We weren’t vampires, we were the last two people from our world left alive in this city, and at great risk especially from the cold.

As I wondered where this woman came from my research took a different turn. Perhaps there were people who stepped through the portal or other portals and no one noticed because they had been forgotten. I wondered how one would find that out, and how soon the same fate would fall upon me.

I figured someone in this same situation had had these same thoughts before me and found a way to identify others like us. How would you find out if someone can hear you in a world where you have no voice? I powered up the old HAM radio in the basement and started broadcasting on every frequency I could find, and that is how I made contact.

“I can hear you” a crackling voice came through the speaker one night. The man was Russian, on the other side of the world, an ex-FSB agent who had fallen into a spacefold while training in Siberia and had no way of knowing exactly where it happened. He was now living in a vacant house on an estate where he had found himself a much-younger woman.

He told me not only were my dwindling rations the only food that would ever sustain me, but that the clothes I wore into the spacefold fell into this category as well including my leather shoes. The only way to warm myself was to burn items I had brought with me. Then he wanted to know what I had done with the dead woman’s body, to which I replied I hadn’t done anything with it. He had dealt with these creatures before and was good at it.

He explained that the reason my personal items were still there even though I no longer existed was that it wasn’t until that moment that reality changed, leaving my equipment and my vehicle sitting there without me, and it would continue to change whenever I moved people’s things around as if it had always been there, which was why I shouldn’t draw any attention to myself or my girlfriend would be throwing my things out as soon a she discovered them, the radio included. I asked him what it was they said to themselves to explain it, and he said our condition was so rare they just dismissed it anyway they could.

He seemed intelligent and had found a good situation for himself, letting me speak to his younger companion for a moment which made them seem like a regular couple. His experience with this was more military-related than mine; he had chosen the wooded estate because he believed there was a portal somewhere on the grounds. The leaves he burned in his furnace sometimes generated heat he was able to feel, and portals also attracted people like us sometimes in a bad state.

He invited me to come to the house to live with them before our communication was cut off, making sure I brought absolutely everything I had taken into the portal with me. He was particularly interested in my emergency kit which contained an emergency candle as well as my flashlight’s self-charging rubidium batteries. He could use a younger man to help him guard against the undead with his arsenal of weapons, and in return would show me how to distill them into something useful as well as our own urine. If we combined our resources perhaps we could learn more about the portals and return to our own lives.

It took me several days to board a passenger liner and then ride across Europe to Western Russia. Indeed there was a large vacant house surrounded by a grim wooded estate waiting there for me. My friend was an older man with a sunken face emaciated from hunger, and I offered him what was left of my meager rations; a white stick of animal fat of which I took just one slice per day, a dark stick of jellied meat juice and a white protein bar that broke into little squares like a Hershey bar.

He showed me his feet which were becoming gangrenous. Then he showed me his private arsenal of weapons which made me wonder about the dangers we were facing. He spoke of a North Korean soldier living in the woods somewhere who tried to get into the house at night, either drawn to the heat of his furnace or the scent of his mistress he didn’t know. But he spoke of the man as if he knew him, his rage bordering on paranoia with protecting what was his.

This brought up the subject of what he did with their remains as well as how to decide if someone was still human enough (over the radio he had implied I might find a damsel-in-distress of my own). His barn-turned-laboratory was disgusting, human bones strung up to dry for kindling and skin stretched out on its way to becoming smoked jerky.

It was late in the day when I finally got to meet his “wife” who spent the day sleeping in their upper room. She was a beautiful young country girl more plump and healthy than either of us men, though the smell of her yeast was a little overpowering and she was confined to a wheelchair because one of her plump legs was already missing at the socket. She was a native of Moscow who had somehow gotten separated from her class and was living on the street when he rescued her. Now she was dependent on him for everything.

In the short time I stayed with them it occurred to me if we did find the portal there was no reason to think it led back to our world or even if we came from the same world, they might all be unique. Months of scientific prep work was needed; in fact what I should have done was go right back to my own portal and try to go back through it, but the subject made him uncomfortable since he and his companion couldn’t do the same. He became cross with me and I saw a very different side of him.

One early morning I heard the sound of a gunshot coming from upstairs. I rushed out and laid eyes on the empty wheelchair in the foyer, then I felt the strongest instinct to rush out the front door and away from them in the next few seconds, not knowing which one of them had shot the other one.

I made it back to the States, my rib cage starting to poke me and my limbs reduced to toothpicks, and then back to the Williamson site. My radar equipment was still sitting there after many rains, and the little 2.5 millimeter cord that was connected to my portable sensor had fallen out at the exact spot I stepped through. The hardest part would be finding out if it worked; I stood in the road after each attempt and finally a motorist blared his horn and swerved around me. That was my welcome.

I called my romantic partner and everyone I knew from a public phone just to hear their voices. I’d been reported as a missing person months ago.

And so my third life began. My breakthrough in understanding the portals made me a successful academic (along with selling some things I pilfered from the other world I’d ashamed to admit). The field was enclosed and made into a lab where I learned how to detect them. My search for the short-lived people living unseen among us concerned me however; I pictured a scene from the movie The Seventh Seal where Death is leading them all by the hand.

It wasn’t until a year later that I was able to return to the house in Russia to see if anyone there was still alive; either the ex-soldier, his mistress or the supposed North Korean. The house was still vacant and in poor shape, like returning to a nightmare. I searched all the rooms and there was no sign that anyone had lived there, despite my own knowledge that they had. My assistants helped me set up our scanning devices outside and indeed there was a very small spacefold.

I was barely able to squeeze through, tethered with multiple lines connecting me. I had intended to return to the house but night had fallen, and I glimpsed something I thought was branches blowing in the wind. I shined the beam of my flashlight and there were three legless, hideous living skeletons hobbling on their pelvic bones in single file along the edge of the woods; a male, a female and a male. The first one lost a collar bone and passed it back, which the third one saved for later.