I remember the first time the other kids called me creepy.
I was used to being left in the background most of the time, rarely being acknowledged by others. When I decided to make an effort and put myself out there, everyone was quick to label me as the creepy kid.
It made me happy. I felt like I was finally being recognized by my classmates, and had been given a role that would set me apart from the rest; Maggie Sutherland was the prettiest in the class, Josh Hodgins was the class clown, Jason Bello was the strongest, Richie Fontaine the dumbest… You get the idea.
I really didn’t care what I was called, because the way I saw it, the fact that I had been noticed to the point of earning something of my own surely implied I was one of them as well, no more just some nameless and forgettable individual at the far end of the classroom.
My happiness didn’t last.
Each and every day, it seemed as if everyone did their best to remove themselves from my presence. Some would just avoid me entirely, others doubled down on hurtful remarks hoping I’d leave them alone.
Even back then, at 9 or 10 years old, I could tell that everyone was dead serious about not wanting to associate with me. At the time, I didn’t understand why, but I was so distraught and hurt that I could barely put any real thought into trying to work out what it was that I had done wrong.
Things got even worse when several parents complained about my so-called strange behavior. My mother was asked to come to the school on several occasions because of this, and every single time she ended up doing what she did best: berate in an explosive manner every single person that wasn’t on her side.
Whether it be parents and how they raised their kids, or my classmates and how they behaved like entitled bullies, she never spared a single living soul.
She never did this out of love, it’s just that she simply did not want to look bad. As far as she was concerned, she could do no wrong. The others had to be at fault, and if that wasn’t the case, then I had to be the root of the problem.
As it turned out, I really was. *** Once my mother realized what I could do, she pulled me from school and spent a long time trying to shape me into something that could be of some use to her. I wouldn’t say she had finally become affectionate towards me, but I liked the attention I was getting and enjoyed spending more time with her, even though her renewed interest in me was solely due to the fact that she now saw me as a cash cow of sorts.
I’ve never written or told anyone about the things I’ll be disclosing shortly, so if this seems hard to believe or to understand, I get it. I’m not too sure myself what would be the best way to go about explaining or describing something like this, but I’ll try.
I guess the short, simple version would amount to “I can see things”, but it’s a bit more complex than that.
You know how a mirror fogs up when you blow hot air into it, but it quickly goes back to normal after a few seconds?
Well, if I focus hard enough on a person I’m interacting with, there’s these extra “details” that slowly begin to take shape and manifest, which only I am able to see. Said details can take almost any kind of conceivable shape, but they’re always intrinsically tied some way or another to the person I’m actively focusing on.
Typically, these details fall into one of two major categories, which I’ve called “floaters” and “weights”.
“Floaters” are pretty straightforward, they’re like gaseous forms that hover around whoever I’m interacting with. Their outline can sometimes resemble a person’s, but not always. “Floaters” tend to be a sort of embodiment of people who have already passed, more often than not they stick around due to some unfinished business, such as wanting to relay a message back to the living, but in rare cases they’re the ones waiting for something in return, like an apology for example.
As for what this means regarding the likelihood of a soul or an afterlife, I don’t know nor do I care, I can’t say it’s something I’ve given much thought to, would rather leave that topic for others best suited to tackle it.
“Weights” are far more interesting as they’re quick to reveal what a person is all about, assuming I manage to properly interpret them. As the name suggests, these could be seen as props or physical changes that appear on a person, usually showcasing their greatest sins, regrets, traumas, etc.
Imagine being turned inside out and having your deepest, most personal secrets made bare as they take on some sort of metaphorical (or at times far too literal) physical shape.
Local priest with snakes for hands, an old war vet covered in dog tags from head to toe, women with countless eyes on the back of their heads…
That’s what the “weights” are.
As for how I go about interacting with these elements, that’s a whole other can of worms.
For those of you familiar with videogames, you know how some of them sometimes feature certain prompts, as well as button mashing sequences? I’d say it’s something like that. I don’t see any actual prompts or literal words floating in the air, what I do see are things that are simply far too abstract for me to be able to describe. What’s important is that those things, “threads” if you will, convey everything I need to know.
Afterwards it all comes down to deciding on which end of which thread I want to pull, depending on where I want the discussion to be headed. It’s easy for me to visualize what it is that I have to say if I want the discussion to go down a certain route, but whether they’re the right things to say, that’s not something I can actually predict.
If this sounds too abstract to grasp, I don’t blame you. Even after all these years I wouldn’t dare say I’ve got this figured out, because I really don’t. This isn’t something that I got to discover on my own and perfect over time. Instead, I was forced to use this mostly to take advantage of others.
“A window to their soul is an easy way into their wallet”, is what my mother used to say.
The way this worked was pretty simple:
Knock on people’s doors, get a read on them, do the thing, ask for cash.
Ideally, I’d always cross my fingers hoping for “floaters”, seeing as 9 times out of 10 the whole thing would turn out to be a positive event, often bringing some kind of closure to both the living and whatever those floaty things are.
With “weights” however, there was always a high chance that the conversation would turn sour and typically end up in some kind of blackmail.
“Don’t want others to find out you tampered with your wife’s car before her fatal accident? Pay me. Want me to tell your kids what actually happened to the cat? No? Pay me. Does your husband know two of his kids aren’t his? I’ll take cash.”
I know it’s hard to picture a small kid going door to door to shake people down, but you didn’t meet my mother. But more importantly, you’d be surprised how easy it is for most people to throw money away when they’re at their lowest, whether they’ve had this huge burden lifted off their shoulders or if they’re just desperate to keep certain secrets from getting out.
It was easy, and in a way I guess my young age also helped because it made others less likely to react violently. Seeing some random kid on their doorstep spewing some forbidden knowledge would be enough for anyone to go “take the money and fuck off” if that’s all that was needed to make him go away, although that didn’t stop me from getting kicked and receiving a black eye a few times.
This isn’t something we’d go around doing all year long, much to my mother’s disappointment.
The month of October is when we’d really get to work, with October 31st being the day where we’d pull an all-nighter, as trick-or-treating gave us the perfect cover to go over to people’s houses.
Why October? Because it’s Halloween season, and everyone tends to be a little more aware of spooky things than usual, as well as more receptive to them in general. Halloween decorations wherever you look, new horror films coming out, special themed programming on your favorite networks… The combination of all these things made everyone a lot more susceptible.
At least that’s what I told my mother. It wasn’t a complete fabrication, people’s heightened awareness did in fact make them a lot more receptive around that time of year, which in turn made my readings a lot easier and accurate, but it took a lot of convincing on my part to have her believe that I could only get this to truly work on Halloween night, because this isn’t something I could bring myself to do throughout the entire year.
She eventually relented, but not because she believed me. She just said something along the lines of “I guess you’re just not that good at it after all.”
Nearing our first Halloween doing this, I was actually sort of excited because I assumed I’d be able to dress up and mingle with other kids in the process, but my mother was quick to shoot down both of those ideas.
I didn’t understand why she was so against me dressing up, especially considering we’d be doing this during actual treat-or-treating. Not only would it make sense, it could also help in keeping my identity a secret, considering I hated having to confront neighbors I’d gotten to know in some way or another and having to just stand there on their doorstep to rip them off.
My mother didn’t have an issue with the latter because we’d always end up moving somewhere else once we got enough cash. As for why she insisted on me not dressing up or even wearing a mask, she said-
“Because you look weird and it’ll be even creepier for them to actually look at your face as you share the dirt you have on them.”
I never got the courage to ask her what she meant by that, and I often wondered how she would feel knowing I spent countless nights just sitting in my bed, silently bawling my eyes out as I asked myself whether my own mother really believed her child was that ugly. *** Things worked out for a few years. Wasn’t enough to make us rich by any means, but we could hop between cities and live somewhat comfortably. Not every move was for the best, and of course, I didn’t have much of a life or friends during this period, since we’d move every 8 or 10 months or so which meant leaving everything and everyone behind.
I stopped caring too much about it when I turned 13. Figured someone like me who had taken advantage of so many others no longer deserved a shot at having a normal life. I didn’t take any pleasure in using my ability to that end and struggled to come up with alternatives, but there weren’t any. For better or worse it was just my mother and I, and it was unthinkable for me to even think about crossing her in any way.
Little did I know that salvation would find me before I turned 14, on the last Halloween we would spend together.
That night of trick-or-treating started out pretty normally, at least by our sketchy standards. I’d gotten pretty efficient at doing my thing and had even started pushing for larger sums of cash, as well as nabbing some extra items like jewelry every now and then, while my mother waited in a rental car just upfront before we moved on to another house on her hit list.
Late into the night, I went up to this one house. I knocked, and a man answered. I’m sure it was a man, a very disheveled one at that, but other details are just too far gone. As anti-climatic as this might sound, I also couldn’t tell you what my reading of him was.
I’ve completely forgotten about it, then again it’s not really important, only the aftermath matters. And to be honest, after a few years I started to feel like I’d seen it all. Maybe it was an addiction issue, or cheating, or some sort of shameful secret that I brought out into the open. Sure, the “weights” could look different, but at its core the issues people had were fairly trivial and similar to one another.
I don’t recall the face that he made as I talked to him, but I remember my reaction to it, like I’d just witnessed something breaking apart somewhere in his mind. He was still very much there in front of me in a physical sense, but it’s almost as if a light had gone out and he was now in an absent-minded, auto-pilot mode of sorts.
He handed me a stack of bills without a word as he stared at me with an empty expression. I walked back to the car, and every time I looked over my shoulder and back at him I could tell he hadn’t moved a muscle.
I remember thinking that something felt incredibly off, but lost my train of thought as I got in the car. My mother promptly snatched the money from my hands and started counting the bills while simultaneously letting the car slowly creep forward and away from the man’s driveway.
It’s hard to say what happened immediately afterwards. Every time I try to recall the sequence of certain moments, there’s always something different taking up the first place.
Sometimes it’s the sound, sometimes it’s the searing pain of having pieces of glass blasted against the side of my face. Usually, it’s the sensation of something warm suddenly getting on me, always followed up by me turning to the driver’s side and seeing my mother slumped over, forehead against the wheel with a hole on the back of her skull.
Salvation came and went in the shape of a bullet.
I looked through the shattered back window of the car and saw the same man drawing closer as he reloaded what I think was a rifle.
I was next.
Before I could begin to process that my mother had just been murdered and that I was moments away from suffering the same fate, a second shot rang out just as the man reached my side of the car. He lost his footing and fell against my car door, before slowly sliding all the way down towards the ground, revealing along the way a fatal gunshot wound to his own head.
I never found out whether he initially meant to just kill me but happened to miss and hit my mother instead. Due to how accurate the shot appeared to be, I guess it’s very likely he wanted to make sure the car wouldn’t be going anywhere without a driver.
He wanted to make sure he could get to me, no matter what.
That night I was saved by a gun-toting neighbor a few houses down from where the other guy lived. Not only had he seen the whole thing go down from his own porch, both men were known to the locals and law enforcement as having a history of disagreements and physical altercations between the two, something anyone in the area could vouch for. Some said this was like a perfect storm, providing an excuse for one of them to finally get rid of the other, once and for all.
Both guys were also heavily intoxicated at the time, so I guess everyone just assumed my mother and I were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, caught between yet another one of their heated arguments that just so happened to turn deadly this time around.
Our luck had to run out at some point, and to be honest, the fact that we got away for so long without any real consequences only made me feel like this was a long time coming.
They called us “victims”, but little did they know that I had been the actual trigger that led to two people dying on that night. It wasn’t until my mother’s passing that I started thinking about all the lives we had messed with in our wake, leaving them in the dust as we high-tailed out of the city or state before ever witnessing the ramifications of our actions.
To this day I am still haunted by the thought of it, the idea that my actions might’ve pushed people to harm themselves and others around them.
All for money.
There are nights where I find myself thinking about my mother, but the only thing I can picture is the hole on the back of her head. Sometimes I’m glad she’s gone. Sometimes I find myself crying for her.
And sometimes I wish the bullet had found me instead. I wish my life had already concluded in some way a long time ago, but it hasn’t.
I’m still here, and there’s a reason why I’m still typing. *** There isn’t much to say about how things went down after I was left alone. You’d think it would all just magically get better once my mother was gone, but no. Jumped around from foster home to foster home for a good while. Everyone tried their best, and I’d like to think I did too.
I stopped using this ability of mine for a good while. Couldn’t tell you how long exactly, but a few good years at the very least.
Eventually I became an adult and tried to make a living by doing whichever odd jobs I could find, seeing as finding myself a proper honest job wasn’t in the cards for me. Needless to say, it was hard, and when I inevitably found myself between the sword and the wall, I resorted to doing the only thing I could do, just like how my mother had taught me, which only made me hate myself and my memory of her even more.
As much as I hate to admit it, it did save me a couple of times. I could be completely broke and without a place to sleep in the morning, and by dinner time I’d have made enough money to rent out a room for a few weeks, sometimes even a whole month.
Starving one day, a fridge full of groceries the day after.
I wasn’t proud of it, but I’d like to think that the fact that it saved my life somehow proved that it wasn’t an objectively bad thing for me to be doing, but that’s just what I told myself whenever my conscience was on the verge of gaining the upper hand.
If it were up to me, I’d focus on trying to help only those that either deserved it or would benefit from it in some way, but I would feel terrible having to ask those people for money. Either way, the sad reality is that no matter how hard I looked, most people I’d come across would always have an element of rot to them.
I was no different.
So I did what I had to, always dismissive of the fact that the more I kept at it, the more I was asking for a repeat of what had happened all those years ago on that fateful Halloween night.
Fell in with the wrong crowd and got myself into some debt, the kind you’re best paying off sooner rather than later if you know what’s good for you. Fortunately for me, I knew just what to do to quickly come up with some cash on a very short notice.
And just like that, I found myself in front of some random house. Nothing in particular drew me to it, I could’ve ended up on any other porch on that street. I never gave these things much thought and would simply go for it. If one was a dud, I’d just move on to the next one in line.
As far as I was concerned this was just a regular house with regular people in it, as most of them are.
I rang the doorbell. There wasn’t an immediate response, which in hindsight might’ve been my cue to leave, but I felt like I could sense that someone was definitely home, so I waited.
After I rang a second time the front door was quick to open, revealing a middle-aged man with no noteworthy features. Definitely in good shape, well-built, wearing jeans, sporting a burgundy cashmere sweater and some horn-rimmed glasses, short blonde hair combed to the side. Just an average looking, middle class kind of guy.
“Can I help you?”
I started stalling and making some small talk, something I’d gotten pretty good at over the years, just talking a bunch without ever really saying anything of substance, hardly leaving the other person any time to interject. I could do this without much effort, in fact I had to if I wanted to be able to concentrate and bring out their unseen elements in a timely manner.
But as much as I tried, I couldn’t observe any sort of change happening on or around the man, which I found odd.
There always had to be something, no matter how insignificant it might be, even if it was just a sliver or a hint about whatever people had going on in their lives. I might’ve not always been able to properly extract the information out of them, but there always had been something for me to try and work with.
Always.
This man however, for the lack of a better term, was absolutely barren, which left me perplexed.
“Look man, if you’re trying to sell me something-”
I stopped listening to what he was saying and inched closer towards him, doubling down on my efforts to unveil whatever he was hiding under the surface. Thought maybe I was losing my touch, but that couldn’t be it, I had this inkling, this weird sensation in the pit of my stomach that something was off.
I began to sweat, unsure if it was caused by the strain I was putting my mind through or if it was due to something else.
Then I noticed some slight shifts in the fabric of the man’s pants. When I looked down at his feet I saw a number of small skeletal arms reaching from under the ground, the hands helplessly tugging on his pants.
It was a grotesque, unnerving sight, and the implication and realization of what it all surely meant made my blood run cold. The moment I realized what I had walked into, the man spoke again.
“Hey-”
I looked up and met his eyes. The expression on his face was different. His head was slightly tilted to one side, his eyes wide open as he eyed me up and down. He seemed to be in disbelief, yet amused at the same time.
Before I could even think of anything to say, I heard the following words-
“Who said you could look?”
I froze.
He reached for my head and grabbed a fistful of hair, then proceeded to viciously pull me into his house while making sure he’d trip me in the process so I’d land face first on his marbled floor.
I fell hard on my face with such force that I instinctively checked to make sure my head was still attached to my body. My face was numb and wet with blood.
The front door slammed shut.
While my hands were still up near my face as I tried to make sense of what was happening, he punted me straight in the stomach. I reached for my midsection in pain, the wind knocked out of me, and he took this opportunity to grab me by the hair once more as he dragged me across the floor.
Then, for a brief instant, there was no longer any floor beneath me, and before I knew it I found myself tumbling down a concrete set of stairs, all the way down into the man’s basement.
Somehow, I didn’t pass out. Maybe it was the adrenaline or the pain keeping me awake, likely a combination of both.
I struggled to get back up on my two feet before he came all the way down to meet me, but I managed, mostly because he seemed to be taking his time for some reason.
He walked down the stairs but stopped himself a couple of steps before reaching the floor, making sure he had the high ground while also obstructing my only possible way out.
Neither of us said anything for a solid minute or so, and he was the one to break the silence-
“Well,” he said. “This is interesting. Unusual, unexpected, but very interesting.”
I didn’t reply.
“What did you see?” he asked. “When you looked at me. What did you see?”
I lied, said I had no idea what he was on about, but my voice betrayed me.
The man shook his head.
“You saw them little things, right? Them bones.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Which means,” he said as he sat down on a concrete step, “you probably have a good idea of what’s down here. I mean, the smell alone, am I right?”
He laughed.
I hadn’t noticed the smell until he mentioned it, then again my nostrils were still filled with my own blood. A part of me wanted to look around for the source of that vile stench, but I did not want to take my eyes off of him.
He, too, stared at me intently for a bit, before producing a sound-
“Uh.”
He didn’t say anything else until I asked “what”.
He smiled, and pointed at me.
“Those are some heavy mommy issues you got there”, he said. “I mean look at all that luggage, holy shit.”
I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing and what it meant, but at that stage I knew it wouldn’t do me any good to deny what I knew to be real, no matter how unlikely the whole scenario seemed to be.
I couldn’t believe the odds, but the more I thought about it the more I started to believe that this was simply karma catching up to me. I had brought myself to this place, and once again, everything that was happening was my own doing.
I knew I had no one else to blame but me.
This wasn’t how I envisioned I’d go out but I accepted it, and in doing so, weirdly enough, I found it oddly comforting. Relaxing, even.
“Want me to tell you?” he asked.
I stood there, silent, my eyes still locked on him.
“Want me to tell you what I’m looking at? Or should I say, “who” am I looking at right now?”
He drew some little circles in the air as he pointed towards the space above my head.
I clenched my teeth as he continued-
“Yeah, I think you already know. You can’t hear her though, can you? But I can tell you what she’s saying-”
I wanted to kill him, even though I couldn’t possibly hope to take him down, especially in the sorry state I was in.
But I also knew I would rather die right then and there before he’d get the chance to speak on my late mother’s behalf. If she truly had something she wanted to tell me, then she’d need to wait and tell it to me herself when the time came, which could be just moments away at the hands of that man for all I knew.
So I walked in his direction, mostly dragging my feet along the way.
He promptly stood up, slightly taken aback-
“The fuck you think you’re going-”
“Seventeen”, I said.
His eyes widened.
“I count seventeen of them. Kids” I said, as I looked at the build-up of floaters that surrounded the man, like a dark, vengeful mass just about ready to explode and tear everything apart.
I met his eyes once more and told him-
“Seventeen’s a lot of bones, right? You see them too, don’t you?”
I pointed at his chest and he quickly looked down, just in time to see little holes starting to form on the fabric of his sweater, as bones of different shapes and sizes started slowly coming through from the other side.
His face went pale.
“No-” he said, as he began to furiously swat at himself. “No, I know this isn’t real, I know this isn’t-”
He stopped to look at his hands when he noticed something: pieces of bones poking through his fingernails and in-between his ligaments, stretching them apart. He yelped.
He made a desperate attempt to tackle me, but he lost the use of his legs before he could reach me. As I passed by him, I saw additional bones spilling out of his mouth, bursting out of his tongue and gums as they split flesh and teeth apart.
He stretched out what used to be his arms towards me, a pointless plea for help. There was an indescribable look of horror on his face as it slowly and painfully annihilated itself along with the rest of his body.
I proceeded to make my way up the stairs, not wanting to stick around any longer. When I looked back down, I saw him surrounded by a number of small shapes, all unmistakably humanoid despite being mostly featureless.
One of them waved at me, and I waved back before leaving the house for good. *** I made sure to knock on a few doors nearby before leaving the scene, instructing the neighbors to call the police. I didn’t keep up with how that whole situation developed, but I know it was handled and taken care of.
I left the state the next day. That was three weeks ago.
There’s a lot I still don’t fully understand, maybe in time the answers will come. Maybe they won’t.
Back when I was a kid, when my mother was still around and forcing me to use it against my will, I used to fantasize about what it would be like for me to use this power for good instead.
How good it would feel to help others as opposed to taking advantage of them. For a long time, I would daydream about the time where I’d finally be allowed to repent and start putting some good back into the world.
I know now that it will never happen, as I have decided to never use this ever again, under any circumstances. The risks are far too great and unpredictable, and a wicked person such as myself doesn’t get to decide what is or isn’t good.
The main reason I decided to write this all down is mostly due to the discovery that there are, seemingly, others able to perceive things the same way that I do.
If you’re out there and happen to be reading this, I do not know you, and it is unlikely that I will ever meet someone like me ever again.
I don’t know whether you’re a good person or a bad person, or to what ends you may or may not be putting your ability to use. Your heart could very well be in the right place, but if there’s anything I hope you will retain from all that I’ve written, it’s this-
Do not use it.
Pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Hide it and look after yourself, try your best to live an honest life without taking advantage of it, or you might find yourself inexplicably drawn to others similar to you, and if that happens there’s no way to know what could happen to you or the ones you love.