I walked into the apartment after a couple weeks of vacationing on the West Coast. The front room was an absolute horror scene. I saw tiny organs in a blender, trails of blood leading everywhere, socks and T-shirts covered in gore and, throughout it all, a permeating smell of rot and decay.
I should have walked out and called 911 immediately. Instead, I walked further into the apartment, wondering what could have gone so wrong in just a couple weeks.
“Trenton?” I called. For a moment, I wondered if a home intruder had shot or stabbed him to death. But that wouldn’t explain the organs in the blender. The blender had a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola next to it, and it looked like someone had been mixing soda in with the flesh to make some sort of horrid concoction.
Trenton came out of his bedroom, looking like an emaciated skeleton with haunted eyes. His black, stringy hair hung around his gaunt face. His jeans and shirt were covered in gore, and I saw a few dried rivulets of blood running down from his mouth.
“Oh my God,” I said, backing up instinctively, “are you OK?” He shook his head.
“My heart,” he said to me, “it’s stopping. It keeps stopping. The only way to keep it going is to give it fresh blood.
“And my blood is drying up, turning into a powder. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but…” I felt in my pocket for my pepper spray canister. Of course, I had left it in the car. The one time I really needed it, I didn’t bring it.
“Hey buddy,” I said in the calmest voice I could muster, “just relax. We’ll figure this all out.” Trenton reached into the back of his bloody jeans and pulled out a pistol, pointing it directly in my face.
“I can’t relax,” he said, his hand trembling, his lips shaking as he spoke. Foul-smelling droplets of spittle flew out of his mouth, hitting me in the face, but I didn’t dare move. “Didn’t you hear anything I said? I’m dying. My heart keeps stopping. I’m being followed by Nazis in UFOs. And it’s getting worse… Something’s wrong. It’s getting worse, and I can’t escape it.”
As I looked into the huge bore of the gun pointed directly at my right eye, I thought back to the first time I ever met Trenton Chaser.
***
A friend of mine was throwing a party at an abandoned mental asylum deep in the woods of Massachusetts. Very few people knew about it, and there were no neighbors nearby to call the police. It seemed like the perfect spot.
I brought some LSD to sell. At the time, I was only working part-time, and selling acid was a way to supplement my income. I could buy 100 hits of acid for $300 and sell it for $70 or $80 per 10-strip, more than doubling my money every time. And it was extremely pure. I had an acquaintance who was in one of the Grateful Dead families and traveled around selling tens of thousands of hits of white crystal or liquid acid.
There were dozens of people there already when I showed up. I could smell cologne and perfume on some of them, but behind it was the smell of mold and must that always permeated these abandoned places. The room looked like one designed for two patients. It was long and had a window with bars. It also had waterlogged textbooks in boxes along one wall. I walked over and read the title: “Psychopathy and Sociopathy Explored.” It was printed decades ago.
Weed smoke filled up the whole room. However, I knew most of the people there were waiting for me. I smiled and said hello to everyone while opening my backpack, pulling out the tinfoil with 300 hits of acid in it.
It was almost entirely gone within fifteen minutes. There had been a shortage of psychedelics in the area lately, so whenever I picked up, the stuff practically sold itself.
Because I had nothing else to do, I also took out seven hits from my personal stash and ate them all at once, folding a few irregular pieces of the blotter paper back into the tinfoil. The slight metallic taste of the acid and the sogginess of the white paper absorbed under my tongue. Someone had set up a speaker and was playing the Moody Blues.
“Do you know why a circle has 360 degrees?” a voice asked from behind. I turned and saw a young man. He was skinny, but had a big smile. I smiled back uncertainly.
“No, why?” I said.
“Ancient Babylon. They used sixty as their number base, and found a circle could be split into six triangles. That’s why a circle still has 360 degrees instead of 100 or 1000 or 10,000 degrees. Isn’t it crazy that we never changed it after all these thousands of years?” His eyes were very dark. I nodded.
“That’s pretty interesting,” I said, reaching out my hand. “I’m Mike, by the way.”
“I’m Trenton,” he said. We ended up sitting and talking for a little while. He was a strange man, and I had the feeling he had very few friends. However, he knew a lot of random and interesting facts about ancient history and medieval weaponry and World War 2, so I liked to listen to him ramble for a while. The acid had started to kick in for me, and I realized he was shifting back and forth, looking uncomfortable, his pupils dilated.
“What, are you tripping too?” I asked him. He gave me a ghastly smile.
“I ate twenty hits,” he said. I laughed, thinking he was joking. But apparently, he was not joking. He began to rub at his chest. “I think something’s wrong with me, though. Sometimes it feels like my heart stops and then starts beating again.”
“That’s probably just anxiety,” I said. “Lots of people get it.” He frowned. I got up to leave. Everything was shimmering and morphing, and the music sounded slowed down. I looked over at Trenton one last time. What I saw horrified me.
He was still twitching and rubbing his chest, muttering something I couldn’t hear. Behind him, I saw a dark shadow of a man. He looked seven or eight feet tall. There were no features except for two dark eyes and a Cheshire cat smile with countless translucent white teeth. And the shadow felt cold. There was an emptiness where the shadow man stood, one that radiated freezing pain and misery in every direction. I saw other people in the room avoiding that area, as if they had a subconscious intuition that something stood there that they should avoid.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette and look at the stars, and when I came back, the silhouette was gone. Trenton was up and about, socializing again. I chalked it all off to a strange hallucination, and soon after, I went home. I was up all night tripping and watching movies, but I kept thinking about that strange shadow figure I had seen. Every time I did, I got goosebumps all over my body and chills that ran up and down my spine.
I had been looking for a new place to live, asking everyone I knew, and the next afternoon, I got a call from a friend of mine who had been at the party.
“I found someone looking for a roommate,” he said. “Did you ever talk to that kid Trenton? He has a two-bedroom apartment and his former roommate left last month.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I got Trenton’s number, called him up, and within a few days, I was moving in.
***
Flies buzzed all around Trenton as he pointed the gun in my face. The dark silhouette was back, blacker and bigger than ever. It looked like the tall thing had his shadowy hands on both of Trenton’s shoulders, like a proud father putting his hands on his son. Trenton smiled.
“Look, you’re just sick,” I said, trying to calm him down. “I can get you help. Just put down the pistol.” He shook his head.
“No one can help me now, except for the Beast,” he said. “Don’t you see him? He follows me everywhere.” I looked up at the dark shape that stood behind him, feeling its cold, alien aura. “He says that, if I do what he says, he will let me go, and everything will be like it was before.”
“You have schizophrenia,” I said slowly. “You need medication. All of this stuff you think is happening, it is just a hallucination. Your heart is fine, you’re not dying, and…” I was going to say that there was no Beast, but I could still see the silhouette as clear as day right now, and I was totally sober. I stuttered on my last word, not sure what else to say.
“It’s too late for me, friend,” Trenton said. “He got his claws in me, and now the flies follow me everywhere. I always feel cold even when I’m standing under the summer sun. I can feel his hand on my heart, squeezing, hurting, and eventually, once he has used me up, he will kill me. I don’t know how to stop it, other than to die.” I shook my head, taking a small, tentative step forward and reaching out my hand to him.
“You don’t have to die,” I said. “Just give me the gun. We will figure all this out, together. We can get you professional help.” At that moment, I heard a commotion outside the door, the sound of many footsteps and steps creaking. Trenton’s eyes widened, and he moved the pistol from my face to instead point at the front entrance.
“This is the police,” a deep voice cried. “Open up!” Someone slammed on the door a couple times with their fist. Then I heard a loud thudding that shook the floor, then a second one that caused the door to crack and splinter along the threshold. Within seconds, two police officers with a portable battering ram were revealed. They moved quickly out of the way as an entire SWAT team ran in with guns raised, shouting orders. I used the moment of distraction to jump into the bathroom next to where I was standing, away from Trenton and his gun.
“Drop it!” I heard someone yell, then multiple gunshots rang out at once. My ears were ringing and my heart was beating fast. I wondered if I would get shot too. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I escaped Trenton only to get shot by the police, I thought to myself.
“Why didn’t I stay out in California for another day?” I asked myself quietly, putting my hands over my face. Then the door flew open, and Trenton stumbled in, bleeding heavily from multiple gunshot wounds spread out across his chest and legs. He fell, but the silhouette who followed him in didn’t fall or even stumble. It stood as tall as the ceiling now, looking down at me, grinning. Countless sharp teeth were revealed in the shadowy face.
“I never meant to hurt anyone,” Trenton said to me, looking up. I saw the man I had first met at the party- just a normal, sometimes awkward, guy with few friends. The darkness had gone out of his eyes entirely, and now they seemed to be filled with light as tears spilled down his cheeks. “I just want it to be over.” He raised the pistol to his head, his arm shaking as blood spurted out of his chest, leaving an ever-widening puddle beneath his body.
“Don’t!” I yelled, but it was too late. He pulled the trigger, and the left side of his head exploded. In slow motion, I saw pieces of skull, hair and gore spread out and cover the white marble walls of the bathroom.
***
The first few weeks of living with Trenton were pleasant. We had friends over to smoke weed and get drunk, threw a few parties and got along just fine. I liked to read a lot, and Trenton never disturbed me when I was in my room with a book.
But he was clearly getting skinnier, and over time, a haunted look started to appear in his eyes. His cheekbones grew more prominent as he lost weight, and his hair grew longer and greasier. His self-hygiene was clearly suffering, but I didn’t know what to do.
It started getting really strange when I had a couple friends from high school over, and Trenton walked out of his room, totally naked. He had the body of a death camp survivor, with stringy muscles and every rib showing on his chest. Everyone in the room gasped at the sight.
“Go put on some clothes!” I yelled at him, but he just laughed, an eerie, maniacal sound that reminded me of a hyena. My friends excused themselves a few minutes later, clearly uncomfortable, and they went home. I was furious. I locked myself in my room, packing my bags, then went to visit with my family in Maine for a couple days.
When I got back to the apartment, I could tell things were really going downhill. Trenton had taken a posterboard and drawn on it with either red paint or blood. There were eyes painted all over it, surrounding two sentences in the middle that caused chills to run down my back.
“Screaming insects hail the Beast. They welcome the killer home,” it read. Though Trenton wasn’t there, I felt an eerie presence, like the halls themselves were watching me.
I pushed open the door gently to his room gently. I thought at first that he had painted the walls black. Then I saw that the walls were shimmering, buzzing and moving around.
There were thousands of tiny insects on the walls of his room: flies, mayflies, gnats and countless others. I gasped, slamming the door behind me and spinning around. I came face to face with Trenton, who must have just gotten home.
“The Beast,” he said, dark circles under his eyes, “is watching you. He is coming for you next.” I saw the dark silhouette behind him. It extended its arms out in my direction. They seemed to stretch forever, across the entire room. As soon as the shadowy hands reached me, I felt my heart start to skip a beat, intense anxiety flooding my body. I gasped and took a step back, before running into my room and locking the door.
Though I had been planning the drive to California for a few weeks, I decided to leave earlier than I had planned, due to the bizarre experiences in the apartment. I figured that, once I got back, I could find another place to live.
***
As Trenton died in front of my eyes, I felt the coldness of the Beast rushing towards me. Before I knew it, I could no longer see it, but I felt it all around me. I tried to scream, but it was inside me, partially controlling me, and it shut my mouth.
The police swarmed into the bathroom seconds later, yelling at me to put my hands up. I did as I was told, hearing the Beast whisper into my mind as I looked down at the deflated head of my roommate.
“I’m going to have fun with you,” he said.
The police took me to an interrogation room in the station later that day, where I learned Trenton had killed seven people, including an entire family. He had apparently cannibalized their corpses and drank their blood. Even more disturbing, he took the body of an infant home with him, cutting it open to put its organs in the blender, thinking that the blood and organs would keep his heart from stopping.
The news stations were all over it, calling him a real-life vampire, but I knew the truth.
He wasn’t the vampire. He was just a puppet for one much darker than anything imagined by folktales.
And now it was inside of me, screaming in my head, telling me my heart was stopping and that I needed fresh blood.