The Narrative of Victor Chaldeon
The First Notebook
(Note: The first composition book jumps right in without any sense of when he began writing, as though Victor thought it more important to relay his frame of mind rather than placing himself in a chronological context. None of the entries are dated. We can only deduce a rough timeline. – AC)
Once again tonight I woke up screaming.
Night--that profound period of silence and darkness that spans from dusk until dawn, a time of passion, love and mystery for many, has become for me a torturous and slow moving abyss of pain and fear.
Those long hours are not merely filled with nightmares and restless sleep. The intensity of mental anguish is far beyond that of a mere insomniac— for now, every night—They are always with me.
Where others see only darkness, I see Them.
While others may relax, pray, make love, reflect on the day’s events as they lie awake in bed, all I experience is Their shrieking.
They haunt my dreams and invade my space wherever I roam.
Soaked in sweat, my pulse racing, giving in to one more wasted night’s attempts to rest, I rise and head for the living room. I turn on every light in the room and then the reading lamp by the recliner I flop into for good measure. All this light floods the room and, while I am not naïve enough to believe They are gone, at least the light makes Them easier to deal with.
I have held my silence far too long. The events of the last few months demand that I now write it all out, hoping that someone somewhere will believe me and offer some help. But even if there is no help, and nobody believes a word of it, I will at least get it all out.
Perhaps I can write myself sane. Perhaps I can write Them out of all the fibers of my being They desire to possess. My will is stronger than Theirs— this I have proven over and over—but They still seem determined to at least torment me if They can’t have me.
For it to make sense I must start at the beginning—or at least at a beginning.
I
My wife is a missing person and presumed dead, and if it was murder the case is cold. So ends the official story. Though the truth was far more complicated, I chose to remain silent until now. While I will stick to the facts, my story is not one that would be traditionally referred to as black and white. This story is constructed largely of gray areas. I now understand, hopefully not too late, that much of our existence resides not in absolutes, but rather in these shades of gray.
The police, of course, feel entirely the opposite. There is simply right or wrong, guilty or innocent, hence black or white. The ideal candidates for their ranks are cynical individuals with enough intelligence and imagination to be dangerous. They scoff at the concept of gray areas. Indeed, our country’s legal system, their frequent adversary, thrives on shades of gray, blurring right and wrong, raising doubt and uncertainty. Thus, they lose cases, and in their minds this makes our world less safe.
This was the paradox for the police in the situation I am presenting. Since in my conversations with them I assured them there was no reason Rita would make herself vanish, Rita had to be considered dead simply because she was no longer considered to be alive. Logical enough, I suppose. So once they realized they had no case for homicide they filed it with all their other unsolved cases and moved on.
The old “get back to us if you think of anything else that might help us” routine. Gee, thanks. I thought it was their job to think of new possibilities.
I consider myself rational, though slightly more open minded than the best police officers I met through this ordeal, but now I am stuck with the gray areas, and for the duration of my tale you will have to agree to explore them as well. If you pronounce me mad after hearing me out, it will come as no surprise nor will it offend my sensibilities, for I have already lived among madmen.
So what we have here is a largely a tale of grey areas and matters of the heart, and for these I make no apology. I cannot present these facts in a cold and distant voice, for they involve the loss of all that was important to me. You must experience it all through my eyes, and take for granted that I am telling you the truth, as hard as some of it may be to believe.
Ah, that brings us to faith, another term I scoffed at before all this lunacy unraveled. Believing in what cannot be proven, that the air we breathe is there even though invisible, this was a struggle for me as well, but I must ask you to suspend your disbelief and have faith in me, just once though this journal, before you pronounce judgment.
The night of Rita’s disappearance, I came home to an empty house. This alone was no great surprise. I assumed Rita was shopping, and my daughter, Amanda, was out more often than home. She and Rita’s relationship had always been rough, but at that time it was particularly strained, largely due to Amanda’s choice of boyfriend.
Doctor Radford Strather was twenty years older than Amanda, and Rita assumed he had one thing on his mind when he began dating our twenty two year old daughter. I didn’t care for Strather much either, but when I saw the two of them together they seemed to have a little more in common than simply both having human bodies. I didn’t completely agree with Rita, but I didn’t like Amanda’s psychology professor enough to side with him either.
Rita and Amanda’s mutual need for avoidance, then, was the most likely reason the house was empty. I saw no reason for alarm when I arrived there after work at six thirty. And by eight, when I had called most of Rita’s close friends, my curiosity had risen no higher than concern. I was a bit irritated not to hear from her, but assumed she had her reasons. By ten, I was officially worried, and was annoying more of our acquaintances by disturbing them at that late hour. At midnight I called the police. They told me to wait forty-eight hours, and then file a missing person report. I then drank my seventh scotch and stayed up all night thinking of all the possibilities. None of them were comforting.
Forty-eight hours later, my wife Rita was officially a missing person. Amanda and I began an organized campaign to find her, with the aid of a local group that posts signs around town and puts missing persons’ faces on milk cartons and flyers sent in the mail. The police opened a worthless investigation, for there were too many Ritas in the world for them to get too worked up over the situation.
I realize this kind of situation has become all too common in America. I know many Americans have lost their wives or children, never to find them again, and have told their story much better than I could. But this isn’t that kind of story either. I have found my wife, and it is the place I found her that makes this story unique. All those other people haven’t met their loved ones again, as I have, and if they receive that opportunity I would advise against it.
Sorry, jumping ahead again. This is the place where I lay it out for you, slow and steady.
Rita’s disappearance certainly started the whole chain of events into motion that eventually landed me in the so-called “nut house,” but it wasn’t that alone that drove me to the brink. Several far more harrowing events were to occur that could not be rationally explained. In short, my madness began to germinate along with the haunting.
II
Rita’s appearance in my dreams was natural enough; what else would a person dream about every night under these circumstances? But after a few weeks, my dreams became more detailed, or at least I remembered more details when I woke from them.
In my claustrophobic dreams, I was with Rita, trapped in a dark, freezing cold chamber or vault. Sounds of small animals scurrying were heard in the distance, though I sensed those scavengers were unable to penetrate this vast cold nothingness. There was another inexplicable detail in the dreams, a high-pitched whirring sound, an electronic sound I could not quite make out, though it sounded eerily familiar.
Within this awful chamber, I caught glimpses of fragmented sections of Rita’s body, decayed by death. Her lips would open but no words ever came out. I sometimes heard her calling out from the black void, but never when I saw her body in the dark.
Though these recurring dreams unnerved me, they still were not the source of my madness. Eventually, Rita’s visitations no longer remained in the form of nightmares.
She began to appear as an apparition at the edge of my bed, a product of my deteriorating mind, I thought. Her frame was life-size, long auburn hair flowing freely, brown eyes sparkling with life. I would have sworn it was Rita in the flesh, if not for the glowing yellow light emitted from her body. Tiny sparks sputtered at the ends of her hair. “An angel?” I thought, the first couple times she appeared. But no, that didn’t seem right. If she were at peace in the afterlife her appearance should have calmed me, but it had the opposite effect. I knew something was very wrong, wherever that cold dark place was. My wife, either dead or being held captive in some sinister place, was attempting psychic contact with me.
A couple weeks prior to that development I began to take Strather up on his offer for free sessions. The doctor is primarily a professor but takes patients that help him with his work in parapsychology. I was a godsend for him. I talked and he never seemed to run out of paper. Strather had a mixed reaction to the physical manifestations of my dreams. On one hand, he felt I might be having paranormal episodes worthy of study that might lead not only to solving the mystery of Rita’s disappearance or death, but also provide him with the kind of scholarly breakthrough he longed for. On the other hand, it may have meant I was merely having a breakdown of some kind.
Reluctantly, I agreed to come to the sanitarium that was to be my home for a few weeks, and to be studied by Strather. I figured--what the hell? I had been little use to my employer or my family and friends since Rita’s disappearance anyway, and I wanted answers.
The drug Strather insisted on using was supposedly an essential part of my treatment. Eventually, the idea of a “treatment” was no longer part of our agenda; something far more impressive occurred, something beyond our wildest aspirations. The drug became a catalyst for events with far-reaching consequences. But again, I am jumping ahead. I must write this out patiently.
Initially, Strather flat out lied, telling me the drug was only to help me relax. I took him at his word, cautiously, but the drug’s appearance made me more than a little uneasy. It was always administered intravenously so I got a good look at it; a thick ooze that glowed a fluorescent green. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I was being injected with some kind of toilet bowl cleaner. Normally, when you have a drug in your system, you hardly know the difference, but as this new substance traveled through my bloodstream, during the first few minutes after injection, I felt a strange sensation within me, hard to explain, as though its presence were unnatural. Of course, the presence of any drug is to an extent unnatural--“Man” did create it--but I mean unnatural in a more connotative sense. Preternatural may be a better word. Those kinds of words were not in vocabulary before Rita disappeared. I thought everything, every event, had a natural, rational explanation. The drug was the first thing in my life to receive this new label, “unnatural.”
Still, I took the drug. I was much calmer, but how was I to know if this was really the work of the drug? I was voluntarily spending my days and nights in the nut house. Wouldn’t being freed of the stresses of the outside world have a calming effect anyway, if you gave yourself over to it? I took the drug, met with Strather, let him pick my brain, and waited.
Waiting was all I could do.
The haunting continued after coming to the sanitarium. At first, the level of its intensity was about the same as before my arrival. Then, about three weeks later, Rita’s hauntings became more physical in nature. The visions themselves remained the same; Rita at the foot of my new bed, strangely aglow, her hair looking as though she had stuck a finger in a light socket. But now, I felt more like a participant than observer in her world of imprisonment. I sensed the cold dark place. Goose flesh covered my body and I smelled a sickly odor, a staleness that seemed somehow linked to the freezing cold weather of this dark void.
You’re dreaming, I would tell myself. Then, the Rita-apparition would mouth the word “no” toward me. Each time Rita vanished I would realize I was indeed awake. After three consecutive nights like this, devoid of sleep, experiencing these visions, now always accompanied by the physical manifestations of freezing flesh and pounding heart, I decided to inform Doctor Strather of the latest.
III
An orderly entered the room with my morning medication. I recognized Hans, a short fat man about fifty, the only employee I had any rapport with. “Can’t that wait until after I’ve seen Strather?”
“Sorry, Victor,” Hans answered. He began to draw the familiar liquid into the syringe.
“I just wanted him to know I was definitely straight when I spoke to him. That’s all, Hans.”
“This doesn’t affect you in any way that will interfere, Victor. You know that.”
Grumbling, I rolled up my sleeve. As Hans injected the medication, I glanced down at the syringe. There seemed to be quite a bit more than the usual dosage in there, but I didn’t say anything. I could tell Hans was not in a chatty mood.
“Doctor Strather said he’s running late. Told me to tell you to relax. He may be an hour or two.”
“Great!” I shouted, louder than intended. “Didn’t you people tell him I said it was important?”
“Don’t kill the messenger,” Hans said flatly as he left.
The door made a noisy thud, reminding me that, while I was there voluntarily, I was a patient, little more than a prisoner really, and I had signed on the dotted line to make that okay. Much was done to make my cell look pleasant. I had a television, reading desk, a couple chairs, all quite nice but bolted to the ground, never to be rearranged. I sat at the desk and sighed, with nothing to do but wait for the dear doctor.
I stared out the window behind my bed, another nice touch this room had that I’m sure few others contained. They knew I wasn’t mad enough to hurl myself out that window or cut myself on the glass, yet I was being treated like an idiot. That day, even Hans was condescending. They were holding out on me.
As always, the drug sent great warmth throughout my body; a little sweating at the extremities, an overall feeling of numbness. It had been administered a bit earlier than usual and, as I said, I suspected an increase in the dosage. Those facts seemed logical enough; I knew the drug was experimental. But nothing could have prepared me for what occurred in the next few minutes.
Sweating profusely, my breathing irregular, I cried out for water as my tongue swelled, filling the back of my parched throat. Nobody came into my room, however, until it was all over. Presumably, those were their orders.
I fell to the floor, gasping, my body drenched. I coughed so violently I thought I would vomit. My pulse soared. “What have the bastards done to me?” I roared in my brain.
These are the only tangible memories I have of those moments before amazing things began to happen. It seemed only a second, or even less, passed between the real-world sensations I’ve described and the transportation of my being into a place of wonder.
When you are hurled through whatever threshold or portal that exists between these two realms, the first perception is of radiant amber light, about as bright as a late spring day. The light is soothing, drawing you into the region where you will soon discover time and space are without reason.
I glided through this amber illumination, as a bird flies freely through air. Then the light toned down a few degrees, and I began to discern a mist surrounding me on all sides. The mist had a pale yellow hue as well, or the amber light reflected in it made it seem so perhaps. As its moisture passed over my face I sensed it had a scent as well, refreshing, like a subtle expensive perfume. The light and the mist gave me the impression of a dream-state, but my mind, in its current state of anxiety could never have imagined such a peaceful place.
Traveling further, shapes began to form within this strange new world, not solid or wholly discernible, but more like vapors traveling through the mist. These vapors were taking on forms that resembled familiar objects from my “known world,” but were not these things themselves, only shadows of them. The space these forms filled did not hold to the rational laws of our world; a mountain range could float by me as freely as a form resembling a human or a dog. All forms were as one in this swirling primordial mist.
After my eyes adjusted to this new realm’s visual wonder, I also began to hear voices all around me. Like the vapors, the sounds blurred together, making it impossible to distinguish what any one voice was saying. Many were speaking in tongues foreign to me and others murmured repeated phrases more than putting actual sentences or clauses together. The effect was more ritualistic than it was a sense of an attempt at communication.
Out of the mélange of images, one specific form took shape, and then I knew the reason I was there--Rita. Her form was still recognizable, but obscured by the same thick mist that engulfed everything around me. Her body shimmered with amber light and then I realized that the mist itself had formed her.
“Victor,” she breathed, though I did not see her lips move. “Where are we?”
“You see me too?” I answered.
“I’ve been seeing you on the other side. But how did you get here?”
“I’m not sure. Some drug that---”
In that instant, it was over. I was back in my room, sprawled out on the floor on my back. Strather and Hans were kneeling above me, their huge grotesque faces staring wide-eyed.
“Get off of me!” I cried. “I’m fine.” I jumped up from the floor.
“Whoa. Slow down, Victor.” Strather said in his condescending voice. “You’ve had some kind of a reaction to--”
“Don’t give me that crap. You gave more than usual.”
Strather was silent for a moment. “That will be all, Hans.” Hans seemed quite happy to scurry out of the room.
As I continued my watchful eye on the doctor, he didn’t move or say a word for a long time. He was used to patients much crazier than me checking him out so he didn’t appear the least bit nervous by my constant eye contact. He seemed, on the contrary, rather at home with my behavior. Somehow, he managed to fit his hulking frame into one of the plastic chairs at the table. He then took out his notebook and began another of his ridiculously long entries.
I sat on my bed silently, wondering what my daughter could possibly see in this man nearly my age. His red pudgy face reminded me of some villain from a Dick Tracy cartoon. I couldn’t imagine the attraction being physical in any way, since all of Amanda’s previous boyfriends had been of the dumb jock variety. Strather must have thrilled her with his intellect, but that seemed weird too since Amanda was not prone to hitting the books. She had been mostly a party girl, a disappointment to her parents and professors. I mused silently that perhaps he had given her some magic love potion, but then the thought that might be true made my gut quiver.
Finally, after observing me like some zoo animal, Strather stopped his infernal note taking and spoke. “Now, will tell me what that was all about?”
“First, you tell me. What exactly is that drug you’re giving me?”
“You have known for some time the drug is experimental. You signed the release papers for it.”
“Why did you give me more than usual today?”
“Listen, Victor. It’s important to record what just happened to you while it’s fresh in your mind. I’ll come clean with you, but first tell me what happened while you were out cold on the floor.”
“How long was I out?”
“Less than a minute. Forty seconds maybe.”
“All that in forty seconds,” the words escaped my lips involuntarily and came in a whisper. Then, louder: “After I tell you, you’ll really think I’m insane.”
“Maybe not. I’ll tell you something about that drug you may think sounds a little crazy. It’ll be an even exchange.”
He took notes furiously as I told him about my out of body journey. I was amazed to see that nothing I said seemed too much for him; he really seemed to believe what should have been considered a preposterous tale.
“You see,” he said almost immediately after I was done. “I didn’t laugh or scoff at a single word, Victor. Now I’ll tell you what the two of us are up to. I couldn’t tell you up front because I wanted to be certain that, if something like this occurred, it was the real thing. To rule out the possibility that your mind was controlling the situation. That has always been the argument thus far in the earlier experiments.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Quite simply this, Victor. You and I are going down in history. Your brief encounter with the other side proves that the drug works.”
I didn’t say another word until Strather was done with the ensuing overly long narrative. I opened my mouth several times in anger, but never interrupted. I wanted the truth no matter how much it pissed me off. In summary (you’d thank me for this if you knew how he could go on and on) the doctor told me this drug stimulated a part of the brain he and some others believed was accessed when one came into contact with what he called “the other side.” This other side was the sum total of all those places various humans throughout time have spoken of and usually were deemed crazy, places where they met spirits, had psychic experiences, and so on. This kind of talk would have caused me to laugh hysterically weeks before that morning, but after all I’d been though it made as much sense as anything.
I was silent for a while when Strather seemed done and then asked him for a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke,” he answered.
“I don’t care. Get me a cigarette.”
He pulled a pack from his pocket and shrugged. “Maybe occasionally, but I still wouldn’t call myself a smoker.”
I took one and he lit it for me.
“So, Victor,” he began as I puffed hard on the butt. “What do you think?”
“I think you should have leveled with me.”
“I told you why I could not. We needed to observe somebody who didn’t know what was being tested. You didn’t know we expected you to experience something like this, so now your encounter can be considered genuine. You see?”
“So what happens now?”
“That’s really up to you. Of course you want to know what happened to Rita, so you do have some stake in this. But I wouldn’t blame you if you told me to screw myself and checked yourself out of here.”
I finished the cigarette and ground the butt into the table. There was nothing in my room that could pass for an ashtray. Strather grimaced disapprovingly but didn’t respond.
“Tell me one thing,” I demanded.
“Maybe. Depends on what it is, of course.”
“I want to know about the people before me.”
At this, Strather hesitated. I mean really hesitated, not just the usual groaning or heavy sighing I had grown accustomed to. This request had hit some kind of nerve. In his long moment of vacillation, my imagination went wild with thoughts of his previous patients catatonic somewhere in the hospital from overdosing. Suddenly there was an “us,” not just a “me”.
“The others are still involved with this project,” he decided to say finally. “They have moved on to the next stage. Full knowledge and cooperation with the experiment.”
“So I’m not the first by any means.”
“No and yes. Like I said, you were the rawest subject initially. But now that you know what’s happening, you are like the others. It will be hard to know when you’re having a true psychic experience and when your mind may be creating something on its own.”
“You’re forgetting one thing, Strather.” He watched my curiously, making me feel again like a bird in a cage. “I’m Victor Chaldeon. Insurance broker. Mister Facts and Figures. Skeptic. Atheist. I’m not about to make up some crap about life after death. I don’t know what happened a few minutes ago, but one thing’s for sure. I didn’t make it up. And I won’t be making it up if something happens again.”
IV
I was released from the hospital that day and taken to the site of phase two of Strather’s research. Though removed from the hospital as permanent residence, I remained self-committed and under his care. Strather mumbled something about waiving responsibility in case of a tragic encounter which made me a bit nervous, but I was glad to be out of there, no longer maintaining the same address as the man caught last year with a few hundred human body parts in his basement.
The research center was only about two miles from the hospital; a building I had driven by plenty of times in the past. It was in a residential zone of town, where several of the larger Victorian homes were converted into businesses and offices. The center looked more like the home of one of the wealthiest citizens in town than a medical facility. The fence surrounding it was chain-link and about eight feet high, again not unusual for a mansion nowadays. Three stories tall, it was freshly painted a tasteful gray with peach trim, and its elaborate gables made it look like something out of a gothic novel. Strather’s team had gone to elaborate lengths to make the place look like a fancy home whose inhabitants simply valued their privacy.
Strather pulled into the driveway. Removing my one small suitcase from the back seat, I silently followed him into the center. Directly behind the front door was a foyer that looked like the entrance to a restaurant. A tall middle-aged woman about forty stood behind a desk.
“This is Laura,” Strather said. “You will be able to come and go here, unlike the hospital. But I want you to check in and out with Laura. I’m still responsible for your actions. Laura, this is Victor Chaldeon.”
We shook hands and smiled vaguely at each other and then she returned immediately to her work. Laura was certainly going to be all business, which was fine with me. I was happy to be out of the hospital but not exactly ready to make new friends here. I just wanted the truth about Rita.
The building was chopped up into narrow hallways leading to several rooms. All the doors were closed. Strather led me upstairs, where the corridors were a bit wider and some of the doors up there were open. He unlocked a door and opened it, and we entered my new home.
Definitely an improvement, but what wouldn’t have been, except maybe a prison cell? There was a full size bed, a chest of drawers and a desk, and those furnishings took up most of the floor space. There was a small window looking out over the back lot of the center. A door led to a private bathroom, and I was happy about that since I was expecting to have a roommate.
“This beats the hospital,” I said. “Who’s paying for all this?”
“There are several groups of investors. This work has many different possible applications.”
“What does that mean?”
“Victor,” he breathed wearily. He gave me one of those looks doctors give to make you think they really care for you. “If I were you, I’d concentrate on the reason you’re here. If you’re having legitimate psychic contact, you’re going to find out what happened to Rita. Leave the details to the rest of us.”
I began to take the few clothes I had out of my suitcase and put them in the chest of drawers. I could hardly wait to meet “the rest of us” if they were as charming as Strather.
“There’s one more thing before I leave you, Victor.” He paused and looked at me cautiously. “Amanda wants to see you.”
“Now that I’m out of the loony bin?” My daughter had only seen me once in the hospital, which really pissed me off. If her boyfriend worked there, she certainly must have been accustomed to it, but when she visited me she acted like it freaked her out.
“Please, Victor. She feels bad about how things went last time.”
I laughed lightly, which made Strather nervous. Of course I’ll let the spoiled brat come, I thought, I always give in. He should have known that by now. “Maybe in a couple days,” I mumbled. He didn’t say anything, just nodded and left me alone.
The next few days were spent learning the center’s routine. I felt like I was in a halfway house or something, attempting to kick a drug rather than trying out a new one. We ate our meals communally and had one group session a day about ten in the morning where we could talk about anything that was on our minds, or what was left of them. There were six of us at the center, each at different levels of exposure to the drug.
There was Alice Goldman, a plain looking young woman in her early twenties who never said a word to me. The gossip on her was she had the ability to start fires with her mind. I knew who not to piss off. Tom Robinson was the youngest here by far, an African American kid, seemed to be about eighteen or so at most, with a chip on his shoulder and a strange faraway look in his eyes all the time. His vocabulary was colorful, largely co