The Narrative of Victor Chaldeon
The Second Notebook
I
Peggy and I were the only people from the center that attended Lance’s funeral, and there were only about ten other friends and relatives there. None of them introduced themselves, or asked who we were, or even seemed to care why we were there. The whole bizarre scene played out like something from a dream. Lance had not struck me as a religious or spiritual man, so it seemed surreal to hear the priest performing the last rites of a saint. Guess he had been born into the Church and would go out that way, regardless of the events leading to his death.
We left the funeral in silence and returned to the center, only to be greeted by the prolonged awkward silence that had played out there since Lance’s death. All our normal activities had ceased, yet there had been no official word yet either that all was finished. We were living in a vacuum. Back in my room, I poured us a drink and then Peggy and I spoke for what seemed the first time in days.
“What happened to him, Victor?” Peggy asked.
“Lance was playing a dangerous game.” I stopped for a moment, wondering if I had already said too much. Was she even ready to hear all that I knew? Then, I thought, why hold out on her? I hated that being done to me. “Peggy, I need to ask you something. Have you ever tripped on your own? No drugs, no machines?”
“Huh? Of course not. Is that possible?” Then it hit her. “That night he died. I thought maybe a trace of the drug was still in your system. But no. You—“
“Yes. That was the first time for me without any assistance. But Lance claimed he did it all the time. He got to the point where he couldn’t stop himself. I think they—whatever you call those things he was screaming about when he died—were pulling him through at times against his will. I fear we’re messing with something very dangerous here. But at the same time, I don’t care. I think I will find out what happened to Rita if I keep on. I just no longer believe that knowledge will come easily. There will be a price. I have lived my life as a confirmed atheist. What you see is all there is. If the five senses can’t rationally explain something then it does not really exist. Now . . .”
“You’ve met your match,” Peggy finished my thought.
“Exactly. So this is the first you’ve heard of tripping alone?”
“Definitely. Another drink?”
“Absolutely,” I answered, and she took my glass from me.
As we poured another of our triple strength specials, I asked her: “What was up with those zombies at the funeral? It was so emotionless.”
“Yeah, I thought the same thing. It was as if they all expected Lance to die soon enough anyway.”
“Maybe he had spoken to them about it. If so, that’s not the impression I got the other night. He seemed to be--” I was searching for the right word. “confessing to me.”
“Another thing that seemed weird. When you saw Lance, right before he died, you know, over there, didn’t you say he was waving and smiling?”
“Yeah. That bothered me too. That would indicate he was tripping voluntarily. But then, only moments later, he is in that violent state.”
“So many questions. Strather makes it seem so innocent and uncomplicated when he gets us to agree to come here.”
“Never trust cops, politicians, or doctors. They are professional liars.”
“You are bitter, aren’t you?”
I cracked a rare smile. “Sorry. Just been disappointed with people a lot since Rita died. You and Lance are have been the only ones who seem to want to help.”
We drained the last of our drinks. I lay down on the top of the bed and Peggy sat next to me. I put my arm out and she laid her head on my shoulder and moved in close. This had become our nightly routine now. No less and no further, just sleeping together, comforting one another for a while, and then she went to her room some time in the middle of the night to try to avoid the inevitable gossip.
We both fell asleep right away and I was dreaming again. I was back in Lance’s room, moments before his death. I saw the lacerations on his bare chest, but in my dream the wounds were far deeper and his flesh was torn and flailing in the air. A geyser of blood shot out from his body and splashed all over my face.
Lance was screaming at me again—“don’t you see them?”—and unlike earlier—outside the dream—as I looked around the room, I saw it was flooded with the now familiar amber light and mist, as though the room were in Shinneh-Sirrah itself. Objects formed within the mist, first as vaporous and nondescript as ever, but then, suddenly, I was seeing past the ambiguity of the mist and truly saw “Them” for the first time.
Those Who Sometimes Get Through are hard to describe with mere words. Lance had done so decently enough that night at the bar; they are formless and yet at the same time struggling toward some desperate design or existence in our world. One moment I would catch a glimpse of almost human faces and an instant later one of the faces would growl, exposing razor sharp teeth or drooling fangs. It was as though the creatures could not decide whether to take human form or some monstrous one to frighten me.
Fear was certainly the overriding emotion as I stood there, awestricken, watching the strange occurrences in the room. Sometimes they get through! Lance was dying again below me, but in far more graphic detail than my witnessed reality. From his torn torso blood and viscera spewed forth, and the formless beings in the mist attached themselves to the living tissue, creating an even more grotesque combination of forms.
“Okay! Okay!” I cried out in the dream. “I see them now too!”
An instant later I was awake, soaked in sweat and sitting upright on the bed. Peggy was sound asleep next to me, which surprised me since I was certain I had shouted in my sleep. I got out of bed and decided to walk the halls to shake off the dream.
Walking into the bathroom, I turned on the light and closed the door. I ran cold water and splashed it on my face and the back of my neck, trying to collect my thoughts and calm down. I reminded myself this latest horror was a dream, not a trip to the other side. It was my imagination, growing out of control lately, which had conjured all this nonsense.
Lifting my head with great trepidation, for I knew, based on past experience, I may regret it, I gazed into the mirror. As I described earlier, my own reflections in glass had disturbed me before, in a sense that I looked older than I should have, out of phase with reality somehow. But this time something far worse greeted me on the other side of the mirror: my face became a hideous travesty of the real thing, slacken, diseased in some way.
I touched the skin and it was like dough or clay, and I felt no bone structure beneath the surface. As I stared into the mirror in horror and disgust, my face literally began melting and falling into the sink below.
Then I woke up—for real this time--screaming.
Unbelievably enough, Peggy slept through the real screaming as well. I hated this shit. Was I still dreaming? Somehow, this felt different, more real, though that word was certainly losing its context. I was still freaked out. I put on some clothing as I had in the dream, but this time bypassed the bathroom and went out into the hallway. I was done with mirrors until I was positive I was awake, although I didn’t know what it would take to prove that to me.
I had no idea what time it was, but it was apparently late enough that Laura was off duty and the whole place was still, empty, all the others presumably sleeping away. The affect of the silence on me was more eerie than comforting. I wanted the hell out of there. Once outside, I was convinced I was no longer dreaming in about five seconds. As night surrounded me, a cold wind sliced right through me. Wearing only pajama pants my balls froze up immediately and I began shaking, but I did not mind. This was exactly what I needed. I was going to take a walk anyway and just deal with the elements.
I don’t know if I fell into some kind of trance or what exactly happened next, but in what seemed like only moments I found myself in the city’s main graveyard, several blocks away. Why in Hell would I go there? A graveyard? Certainly the last place for me to collect my thoughts and retrieve my sanity!
The night was clear and I looked out across the lawn before me, a flat plot of grass covered by all those concrete monuments, each one signifying a death that included the one aspect I craved—closure. The loved ones who had buried all these corpses here knew the truth, no matter how horrible, about their dearly departed. I wanted nothing more than that closure, a period at the end of the sentence, a concrete slab above Rita’s remains.
“I can help you, Victor,” came a voice from behind me. I whirled around to make sure I wasn’t imagining the voice was really his—yes, Lance stood before me. “Great! I’m still dreaming!” I cried out.
“No. I am here.”
“And so am I,” I heard her say, and then Rita was before me as well.
The two spirits standing before me didn’t look human, nor did they appear as different as those who dwell in Shinneh-Sirrah. They resembled their earthly counterparts but were like holograms, with mist swirling within their forms. It was as though they had been transmitted over on some kind of radio waves.
“How are you here?” I asked, slowly, dazed.
“When the others come through, they leave cracks,” Lance explained. “Usually the fissures are sealed, but sometimes they grow and rupture the fabric between realms, making all kinds of things possible.”
“You brought me here.”
“Yes.” Rita spoke this time. “We need your help and we will give you ours. This tripping and violating the realms must stop.”
“We can help you solve Rita’s murder,” Lance added. “I think we can do that if we three work together. But then—“
“Then this must all stop,” Rita said, interrupting. “You must promise to do all you can to make sure that happens.”
“I’ll tear the place down if that’s what it takes.”
Lance nodded in approval. “We must go. The fractures of the realms don’t last long. Not without letting more of them through. So we have a deal?”
“Of course.”
An instant later I was back on the front porch of the center. It was like something out of freaking Dickens or something! Just as I did not remember taking the steps to the graveyard, I had no recollection of how I got back either.
I sat on the steps of the porch, shivering and wondering if I would ever be truly warm again. I spoke out loud, but softly enough that my words could only be heard by myself, the night, and hopefully Rita and Lance, out there somewhere.
“I swear to you both. I will keep this promise. We will use this place to learn the truth, but then I will take it down. That is my valediction to you.”
II
The heater was probably running at about sixty five degrees, but stepping back inside the center made it feel more like eighty. As the heater’s warmth enveloped me, I decided to raid the kitchen to get something warm to drink as well. The place was still silent except for the humming of refrigerators, the heating system kicking on and off, little noises that make you jump until you got to know the place. Damn, I was awake now! I might as well make the drink of choice coffee.
I heard voices in the distance but saw nobody around. I was not in the mood for a haunting of any kind, so I decided to check this out. Even if the voices turned out to be Strather or some other staff member working late, I chose possible confrontation to any further mysteries or secrets in the night.
Following the voices of what sounded like a male and female whispering, as though involved in some secret rendezvous, I was moving down hallways unfamiliar to me. I may have been shuffled down this way once or twice, but it was definitely part of the medical office, not the common area where we guinea pigs were allowed to run freely.
I stopped just outside the room which seemed to be the location of the voices and waited there a moment to see what I could hear through the door. It was Tom and Alice. I could not make out all their words, but they seemed to be arguing. I had some suspicions about these two. Being the youngest of us, and closest in age to each other, I had wondered if they were involved, but that could be carried out in their respective rooms. Something else was going on inside.
When I opened the door, I heard them before I saw them, scurrying around like rats, and then I heard the sound of breaking glass.
“Fuck, man!” Tom exclaimed, still in a whisper but angry and shocked. “What are you doin’?”
“I just heard voices and followed them.” I answered, flatly.
“I told you to shush,” Alice said to Tom, more like a scolding mother than a peer. “Now we’re caught.”
“Caught?” I laughed. “I’m not in charge here.” Then I saw what I had interrupted. A large metal cabinet was sprung open and inside was a supply of the drug they had been giving us here. Jars of the stuff, as well as syringes filled with it. “But I don’t get it. Why steal it? They give us this shit all the time.”
“That’s just it,” answered Alice. “They decide when, where, how much. We want to be able to use it on our own, and see if things are different.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Think we give a fuck?” Tom said, with his youthful, limited vocabulary. “I’m not gonna end up like motherfucker Lance. Smiling and playing the dozens until I get myself ripped apart. Fuck that.”
“And you, Alice? What’s your angle?”
“Tom and me teamed up. Is that a problem? You got your private club up there with Miss Peggy. Live and let live, Victor.”
“Oh, no worry there. Just be careful. I’m not saying anything. I’m looking out for number one, trust me.”
“That’s what I’m saying, dude,” Tom chimed in again, “We all gotta do our own thing, or these fuckers are gonna just carve us up like Frankenstein.”
I assumed it would be pointless to remind Tom that Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster. His culture obviously consisted of movies and video games and had rarely cracked a book to discern such nuances. The only reason he was here anyway, instead of on the street, was he that could bend spoons with his mind and other such useless but intriguing talents.
“I didn’t see or hear anything,” I said. After pausing for a moment I added: “under one condition.” They shrugged, as if I held all the cards. “Give me one of those jars.”
They obliged, but seemed suspicious that was all I required. I left them to their plans and decided to just get back to my room. The jar looked like it probably contained many doses, perhaps even fifty or more. I walked briskly back to my room and slipped quietly inside. This proved to be unnecessary, however, since Peggy was awake and sitting in a chair, fully dressed.
“I needed a walk,” I explained. “The rest of the story will have to wait until later. I am very tired.”
I placed the jar on the table next to her.
“Is that what I think it is?”
I nodded. “Insurance.”
She smiled at that. I explained to her that, while I wanted to tell her all the night’s adventures, I was suddenly very tired. Not that I would necessarily get any sleep anyway.
“I understand. Tomorrow,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Or actually, more like later today. I have something to tell you also.”
I walked over to her as she spoke and we hugged. Realizing how cold I was, she rubbed my shoulders and back. Then, as she finished this last statement, I saw what had been lying next to her on the table.
“This sweater,” I stated, picking it up. “It’s Rita’s. Why do you have it?”
“Don’t be angry. Please, Victor. This was all just bad luck. I was cold. I knew you wouldn’t mind if I wore something of yours and—“
“Relax.” I hugged her again. “I’m not angry. It was just a bit of a jolt. Seeing it there like that. It’s just a crew neck sweater. Unisex enough. You couldn’t have known.”
“That’s not all. You don’t know what happens when I—when I touch—“
“Oh, God. When you touch dead people’s things. Something they wore, or touched often, when they were alive.”
“Yes.” She was shivering now as she spoke. “I’m not sure my story can wait.”
When Peggy touched the sweater, she knew immediately it did not belong to me. Since her youth, the gift/curse had been with her, receiving information from the dead, especially those who were confused--“the freshly dead,” as she called them--and now it happened again.
She felt a deep profound chill run through her, as though the room temperature had dropped thirty degrees in an instant. Breathing deeply, since hyperventilation was always a possibility, her pulse racing, she closed her eyes and let it all happen, for she knew these were the typical symptoms of one of her “spells,” as her family had named them. There was no word to describe it accurately—she just chose to call it “contact.”
After these initial symptoms subsided, Peggy found herself transported from my room at the center to a house unknown to her. Now, I had always been skeptical of psychic claims of every kind. Before the events that brought me to the center occurred, I had nearly zero belief in the paranormal. Even after my experiences of late, I was certain that the majority of the world’s fortune tellers, channelers, and the like, were quacks, either crazy or great scam artists. Though Peggy and I had become quite close, she never once offered her psychic services to me, so I had no reason to doubt her, to feel that she had some agenda. Only a stalwart conspiracy theorist would have such thoughts at this point in our relationship. Old habits die hard, however, so I must admit some hesitation on my part.
That uncertainty was quickly overcome, however, when Peggy described making contact. She had never seen the interior of my house, and only glimpses of the exterior in a few of my snapshots, but when she explained making contact with Rita, she also described my own living room perfectly in every detail. There was suddenly little doubt that whatever she was about to describe was genuine.
She is standing in my living room in the dead of night, only dim moonlight shining through the windows. She stumbles around, runs into unfamiliar furniture, groping in the dark, trying to follow the woman’s voice that she senses must be Rita’s, though they have never met. There is an electronic humming, a whirring of some kind of machinery, a sound that may have been in my house but I always tuned it out, but now in her vision, as in some of my dreams, it is accented as though important for some still unknown reason.
In her near blindness, she hears Rita screaming in the distance, calling her name! How does she know my name?, she thinks, but then she moves on, into the vision. Where is the noise, and Rita’s voice, coming from? She concentrates harder, then it comes to her—below—“come down,” she hears another, softer voice inside her say.
As in a dream, an instant later she is in a different place, descending a flight of stairs, and now the darkness is complete. She hears the sound of someone breathing deeply, this sound and that of the machinery grow louder and louder as she descends into the darkness in a state of trepidation. Her heart races. She wants to see this though, to discern what Rita wants her to know, but she also wants it to be over.
She waves her arms, flailing in the dark for something to grasp, to help her understand where she is, still in the house--just below?--or somewhere else entirely? Her pulse continues to race, its thumping merges with the breathing, the whirring, but at least now the screaming stopped.
Then, suddenly in the dark, she feels hands grabbing her biceps, squeezing very tightly, so hard that she feels they might be bruised. Then, there is a burst of illumination and she sees Rita before her. She recognizes the face from Victor’s photographs but it is a twisted, sunken distortion of the real thing. Her hair is much longer and disheveled, standing on end. In that instant, Rita’s fingernails grow inches longer and dig painfully into her arms.
Rita stares intently into her eyes and in a raspy voice speaks to her: “Tell Victor to come home.” She screams and Rita vanishes. Back in the room, she lets the sweater drop to the floor and it is over.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed, and then fell into a deep silence that neither of us broke for a long time.
It was past three in the morning now, and we both looked like the undead ourselves as we sat at the table reflecting on that busy night’s events. I surrendered to the fact that we were not going to get any sleep anyway and told Peggy about my venture into the night as well.
“What do you think she wants, Victor?” Peggy asked when I finished my tale.
“I don’t know. I was home for a while before I came to Strather. Why didn’t she make some more concrete contact with me then?”
“Perhaps she didn’t know anything then. Now, with all that has happened, your visits back and forth, maybe this has all helped her figure out what happened to her.”
“There’s a basement under the house. I think that’s where you were later in your contact with Rita. She wants me to go back, check out the basement? Does that make sense?”
“I did sense that eerie, stale air basements usually have. Especially one that’s been sealed as long as you’ve been away.”
“For lack of anything better, I guess that’s a place to start. So all you remember is exactly what you told me. Nothing specific about what might have happened to her?”
“My powers rarely work that way. When I make contact, the impressions I get are usually the same as those the spirit is feeling. If they are confused, so am I. I cannot see past events. That is Dot’s specialty. I don’t know her very well, but I’ve heard she is one of the top ten clairvoyants in the country.”
That night, or morning I should say, for the clock read almost five after all our talking, our plans came together.
III
The plan for the following day was simple enough, but its execution became quite complicated. I was going to leave the center that night and go check out my house for clues, while Peggy and Dot tried to make some contact with Rita that might shed some light on the recent past.
Peggy and I slept a couple hours and went down to the dining area to at least get some coffee. We didn’t care anymore if the others saw us together. They could judge the situation and spread any gossip around they desired. That kind of crap didn’t matter now that we were getting closer to discovering the truth, and I secretly knew that also meant Strather and Company’s days were limited.
Oddly enough, we walked into an empty kitchen. As I poured our coffee, Dot walked in. “You two know the news?” she asked. We looked at her dumbly as she continued. “Tom and Alice are gone.”
We succeeded in seeming surprised, I guess, as she began to tell us about the missing drugs as well. Strather’s awkward frame appeared in the doorway as she spoke.
“Did either of you hear anything out of the ordinary last night?” he asked, cutting Dot off in mid-sentence.
We both grunted and lied about a night of sound sleep. The doctor cocked his head and eyed us up and down curiously, but our deceit seemed successful. You never knew for sure with Strather anyway, for he was always a shrink first.
“Please come with me, Victor.”
I raised my mug. “A little java first?”
“Fine. My office in fifteen minutes?”
“Or twenty. Sure.”
“Amanda is here.”
“Then I’ll be there in ten.”
He withdrew from the room and the tension diffused.
“What do you suppose is going on?” Peggy asked.
“Dunno. I haven’t had a pleasant visit from her yet, so I doubt this is catching up on old times. I don’t even know her anymore. That bastard has changed her.”
I downed my coffee in two more huge gulps and poured another.
“Dorothy,” I said, then caught myself. “Sorry, Dot. Peggy and I had a question for you.”
She looked at us in surprise. The two of us had definitely been in our own world the last few days. Dot’s expression said it all. What do you want from me? Why else would you suddenly decide to talk to me now?
“You go on, Victor. I’ll talk to her.”
I nodded and left in silence. Probably better for Peggy to ask for Dot’s help, woman to woman, and I had my own problem. Walking down the hall to Strather’s office I prepared for the worst.
Not bothering to knock, I opened the door and walked right in. Amanda was in Strather’s arms and they were whispering about something. Strather glared at me and released my daughter. Walking out the door, he left us alone.
I knew I probably didn’t look so great to her either after all I had been through, but when I looked at Amanda that morning there was only one way to describe her. She was my daughter, and I loved her unconditionally, so I never thought such a thought could cross my mind, but in that moment it did—she looked like shit.
We stood several feet apart in silence, but we might as well have been in separate rooms. Her head was lowered and she did not look up for several long agonizing moments. Amanda had always been spirited, the epitome of youth and vitality, and now that seemed drained from her. Never overweight anyway, she now seemed little more than a skeleton and her hair was tangled and unkempt, also a rarity for the vain daughter I knew. When she finally raised her head and looked at me, a chill went through me. Her once beautiful blue eyes were sunken back into a hideous skull that was a mockery of her form months earlier.
The only explanation that crossed my mind for such a drastic change was drugs, alcohol, an addiction of some kind. Then I thought—shit! Is that why she’s with this guy? He gives her drugs?
Amazingly, she spoke first, just when I was about to break the awkward silence with a stupid platitude, anything to fill the empty space.
“The only way to say this is just to say it, Dad.”
Again, Dad, not Daddy. Great! I braced myself for a doozy.
“Radford and I are married.”
I just stared at her for the longest time. Expressionless, I suppose, for she fell silent again also. I was not going to speak first, I decided. I just stared, first at her for a while, then at the walls, as steadfast as a Texas Hold ‘Em Poker champion who just went “all in” and was waiting for his opponent’s next move.
“I . . . I don’t mean just married. We’ve been . . . for a while . . . I wish you’d say something . . . Jesus, Dad. Mom did the same thing!”
The last comment got a rise out of me, though I remained silent. Mom? Rita! What she was talking about?
“I . . . we went to tell her that night . . . the last night. Well, we went to see you, but you know how Mom is. She wouldn’t let it wait till you got home. She got it out of us.”
“You’ve been married since before she died?” My question was more a restating of the facts, but in a tone of disbelief.
Amanda nodded silently.
“You saw her that night? That night?”
Again, just a nod in answer.
“You lied to me. To the police. To everybody. Why? What difference did it make?”
“I didn’t want to tell you about us. It wasn’t necessary. If you reacted like Mom, well then, you know. You didn’t need more stress.”
I laughed, at first nervously and quietly, but then it welled up from inside, in response to the absurdity of it all. “Married! You two?” I managed to get out those three words, but then I was beside myself, laughing like a maniac.
“Stop it!” I heard her screaming at me, over and over. “Don’t laugh at me. Neither of you understand! I am an adult. You don’t own me. I marry who I want.” Then she looked at me, knowing that was not enough to get through, so she rephrased it. “I fuck who I want!”
Then, I snapped. I slapped her hard across the face. I had never hit her before, but she had struck the chord she had aimed for and I fell for it. “That’s right, make it about fucking because there’s no way that asshole loves you, Amanda!”
Strather burst in at that moment and rushed toward me, looking like a crazy man. “What have you done?”
I put out my forearm, strong enough to repel his attack if he came any closer. He stopped right in front of me.
“Just trying to knock some sense into my daughter!” I yelled at him.
“Your daughter is my wife.”
Amanda ran to his side and he held her, but the scene before me looked a lot more like a man holding a child than his wife. It was clear now. He had replaced me.
“What’s going on here, Doctor? Have you been giving her something for her nerves? Something that has a little more kick than you’re letting on?”
“Victor, you’re out of your mind.”
I pointed toward Amanda. “That is not my daughter. She is not