I’ve always had terrible stage fright. Growing up, one of my worst nightmares was to speak in front of the school. Hell, even speaking in front of my class was bad enough. Every talent show, or reading, or presentation, was a sweat-fest of insecurities. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Luckily, times change. I made it through college and got a job as a technical writer. Mostly repair manuals. The company I work with need to update their products and documentation every two years as part of their government contract, and I’m pretty much the only one who knows enough to get the job done. It’s technical, dull, and amazingly well-paid.
I’ve come a far way from that nervous kid I used to be. I’m a husband, and a father of three. I drive a station wagon. I put up my own wood paneling in the kitchen. I go fly-fishing in the summers, and I got a weekly date night that I wouldn’t miss for the world.
Some time ago, I noticed my second child (I’ll call him Kevin for privacy reasons) having trouble with stage fright as well. Kevin was in middle school, and they were having a class about classic American lyricism. They could choose to either do a written exam on a novel from a selected list, or do a reading of a poem, but Kevin had just overcome a nasty bout of strep throat and didn’t have a lot of time. He had to settle for the poem reading.
He was devastated. He had trouble eating and sleeping. Being a middle child, I think he sometimes felt a bit left out, so I wanted to go out of my way to give him a bit of extra attention on this. I promised I’d get him something to read that no one else would, and that I’d help him practice. Kevin wasn’t convinced, but hopeful.
That was good enough for me.
I asked around, and most people I talked to claimed there were rumors of a few first editions stashed away in the old library. It’d been closed off for decades (and it showed) but it hadn’t been cleared out. I figured if I could find something valuable or cool for him to read, Kevin would get that extra push. Maybe some obscure work by Poe, or something.
I had a high school friend who worked with property management for the town. Jonah. He’s basically the guy who holds the keys to those abandoned places that no one really needs anymore. The town of Tomskog (MN) has a staggering amount of buildings like that. Hell, they still had keys for the church. That thing is literally on the bottom of a lake.
I called Jonah up, and he was eager to help. I don’t think he gets out a lot.
Jonah and I went to the Tomskog public library one late afternoon after work. The place had been locked and barred for years. There was a defaced sign out front that once said that it’d been “closed for reconstruction”. Most of it had either been crossed out or filled in with obscenities.
We made our way inside. I had to stop to get a handkerchief to breathe through – the mildew and moisture was so thick it stung my eyes and burned my nose. I could taste it. Jonah didn’t seem to mind. Apparently, it was perfectly safe as long as we didn’t stay too long.
Since the place was so tightly boarded up, it was dark. There was a strange discoloration on the windows, and there were patches of moss growing on the floor. There were cracks along the walls where a sort of ivy had grown and died, letting flowers bloom among its roots. A couple of daffodils and a few budding sunflowers. Strange little blue things. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them outside of Minnesota.
Jonah and I made our way to the back section. We rummaged through newspaper collections and unsorted miscellanea, looking for any kind of first editions that might’ve been put aside. I didn’t find much. Almost got bit by a centipede though.
We’d been there for about an hour, and I could already feel my lungs close, when Jonah whistled me over. He’d found something. He held up a small leatherbound book, no larger than a DVD cover. It was untitled, with a beautiful blue silk bookmark.
“I heard this might be here,” he smiled. “This is an original.”
“An original what?” I asked.
“A notebook of none other than E. A. Rask,” he nodded. “Poet and novelist. Turn of the century kind of stuff.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Well, it’s as unique as unique gets.”
Jonah looked through the book, mentioning a couple of passages out loud. Nothing that could really pass for poetry, or even the beginning of a short story. Most of it was just personal notes and incomprehensible nonsense. But by the middle of the notebook, we came across a couple of lesser-known works. One in particular stood out.
“The Almost-Man,” Jonah said. “Listen to this.”
And he recited it. I wish he hadn’t, but he did. The Almost-Man goes like this;
Bug-eyed boze whom well-nigh died,
plods of droe and dew, outside.
Gobbles the paint, the man, the whey,
crybound gags and bloodrun play.
Throg of squab, of black-eye daw,
suckled marrow,
milk-soft maw.
I read it myself a couple of times. There was something about that last line that sent shivers crawling down my spine. I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“Let’s keep looking,” I sighed. “This one’s just… wrong.”
We found an early collection by Langston Hughes, which we finally settled on. It’d turn a couple of heads among the faculty at least, but it wasn’t the kind of home run I’d been looking for. It might be enough for Kevin to get a bit of air under his wings, but I still felt like I’d failed him. I kept the notebook just in case I found something else – Jonah didn’t seem to mind.
On my way home, I got stuck waiting for a train to pass. I skimmed through the notes, finding myself reading the Almost-Man once again. It was such a strange piece, completely out of touch with the rest of the notes. It was beautifully written in cursive. I could tell there’d been a lot of effort to put it to words. There were a couple of pages ahead that’d been ripped out – probably early drafts.
“Plods of droe and dew, outside…”
It was nonsense. But I sort of felt it. I didn’t like that I felt it.
I didn’t think too much about it, at first. I forgot the notebook in the glove box, and sat down with Kevin that night. We went through a couple of poems by Hughes, and I taught him a bit about the Harlem renaissance. I think that gave him a bit of a boost – to not just know a piece of work, but the history of it. Made him feel a bit more connected to it.
My wife was just happy to see me so engaged. I might look disinterested when I spend so many hours in solitude on my work, but it’s never been a matter of excluding my family; I’ve just wanted to separate them from what can be mind-dulling labor. My wife understands this, but the kids were a bit harder to convince. To them, there was no such thing as ‘working from home’. I mean, I was right there – what was stopping me from watching movies with them, or playing video games?
That night, I had trouble sleeping. There was something about the library air and the words of that poem that just made my stomach churn.
“Milk-soft maw,” I thought.
I could taste the words. I got this sickening image of malleable bones and baby teeth, and a smell settled in the back of my mind. Like the memory of something vile. I couldn’t stop burping, accidentally waking my wife up a couple of times.
There was also this strange noise, somewhere outside. Like a slow grinding against the side of the house.
See, my wife and I managed to afford a pretty cheap home after she inherited a significant sum of money from her late mother. A one-story house not too far from Frog Lake, right next to a jogging trail. It’s actually cheaper than a small apartment in most mid-sized modern cities. Turns out, not a lot of people move to this part of the country.
Just three summers earlier, we’d hired a couple of painters to turn the house a sort of midwinter mint green – my wife’s favorite color – with white detailing. It makes it stand out, but in a good way. Three years might sound like a lot, but paint jobs are supposed to last for longer.
As my kids went to school the next day, my youngest ran back in. He wanted to show me something. I could tell it was serious – he had that tone of voice that he just can’t fake.
On the outside of the house, right next to our bedroom window, was this large splotch of paint missing. It looked like it’d been melted off, or grinded. The edges were flaked, and the paint was still peeling. After sending my kids on their way, my first thought was just anger. I was pissed. The painters had screwed me.
But as I turned to make a call, that line from the poem came back to me.
“Gobbles the paint, the man, the whey.”
I turned back to the wall, looking it over.
Gobbles the paint? What are the odds?
I spent some time looking up the author of that piece. Apparently, a big theme of his was the transfer of information, and how knowledge was a living, breathing thing. That the knowledge of something makes it come alive – effectively resurrecting the dead and forgotten into memory. E.A. Rask really believed that by putting as much of himself into his work as possible, he would live forever in a very real and literal sense.
But that also went for things beside himself. Things that weren’t real, or never had been. That by choosing the right words, and conveying the exact emotions and sounds he wished, he could make things come to be.
I found this lecture by a man studying Raskian philosophy, who illustrated it beautifully. I watched it over a skipped lunch.
“Think of a blue giraffe,” the lecturer spoke. “Imagine the long neck, the slightly darker blue of its spots. Imagine the shape of the little horns, and the size of the hooves. Let that image sink in. Can you see it?”
He argued that just by him giving us that description, we had conjured a picture – a being – into our minds. Something that had never been, now was.
That was the basis of Rask – the transfer of thought and information, through words.
Thinking back on that notebook, I got this strange, uncomfortable thought.
What the hell was he trying to put into my head with that poem?
What image did he want me to see?
Over the next couple of days, I felt a sense of unease. Like I could feel the presence of something. Once, as I was cutting leeks in the kitchen, I felt absolutely certain that something was watching me. That if I turned around and looked out the window, something would be there, looking at me. I could feel it, like an invisible hand reaching for my neck.
Something that gobbles the man.
There were a couple of strange noises at night. A few more splotches of paint peeled from the walls. In the early morning dew, my wife and I could see tracks leading through the back yard. Some kind of animal.
Or, possibly, a person dragging their feet.
It was a Friday morning when I decided to just get rid of the damn book. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up before sunrise. I forced myself to the car, opened the glove box, and read through the entire journal. I needed some peace of mind as to what it was about, and what it meant.
I started to get a feeling. Much of the nonsense written in that journal wasn’t just make-believe; it was descriptions. They weren’t established words, but I could still feel what they meant. They conveyed something to me that just settled in my mind, painting this picture. An uneasy, ugly picture.
My wife called out, and I snapped out of a sort of half-conscious stupor. She was standing on the porch in her bath robe, baggy-eyed, tussle-haired, and gorgeous. I threw the book back in the glove compartment and went inside to have breakfast.
We decided to make it a bit of a special morning. We let the kids sleep in. My wife had a few hours of flex work. She could postpone a bit and drive them instead of having them take the bus. We had pancakes and hash browns, watched some morning cartoons, and finished off the last orange juice. As they all went on their merry way, all thoughts about that cursed notebook vanished.
As I settled down to review some schematics, I heard something. It was that grinding noise again. I figured it was the paint peeling. I opened the window and looked out, but there was nothing there though. Curiously, the sound stopped.
Sitting back down, it resumed. This time, I was quicker. I looked out. Still, nothing.
But as I leaned my head back in, another line got caught in my throat.
“Crybound gags and bloodrun play.”
Play?
Was this play?
Folding up one of my backup schematics, I waited by the open window for the sound to resume. Once it did, I folded the paper into a plane and tossed it. It sailed through the air, making a sharp turn downward. I got up, looked out, and… nothing.
It was gone.
I questioned myself. Maybe it’d passed into a strange angle. The noise stopped, leaving me to wonder what it’d been in the first place. What even was an Almost-Man? I couldn’t picture it.
Except, in a way, I could. I just didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to.
As I got back to work, there was a tap against the window. Just a single tap. Looking up, and out, I could see a paper plane on the ground.
Someone had thrown it back.
I was flip-flopping between violent paranoia and trying my best to ignore it. It was crazy. There was nothing out there. And yet, that paper plane was as real as real gets. Then again, it was only a plane. Then again, there was a noise.
About an hour before lunch, I decided to go for a walk. I left a note by my keyboard in case my wife got back, wondering where I was. And still, I couldn’t ease that feeling in the back of my mind. I decided to use my permit to carry and brought my handgun along. After all, there are other things out there than mind ghosts.
I checked the side of the house from afar. Just as I feared – there was a big splotch of missing paint just underneath my window. It really was a botch job.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
I took to the jogging trail, following it further north to the more sparsely populated section of town. There was a mild fog in the air; cold moisture drifting in from the lake. Little droplets formed on my arms. The steel of the gun felt like ice. I didn’t even notice that I’d been holding it this whole time.
I stopped myself from going too far. Following the trail all the way around could easily take over an hour, so I turned around after about fifteen minutes. I hadn’t seen a single living soul in all that time. I was making a fool of myself.
As I turned around, I stopped.
There was a paper plane in the middle of the trail.
I picked it up, looking around. I clutched my handgun, searching the treeline.
“Throg of squab,” I muttered. “Of black-eye daw…”
I looked to the side, thinking I saw something glistening. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a couple of darkened leaves playing tricks on my mind. Figuring I’d been close to putting a bullet into an innocent berry bush, I relaxed my shoulders.
But only for a moment.
It sounded like a pained moan. Somewhere half-way between a yawn and a drawn-out grunt. A rumbling gargle.
I swayed around, only to be knocked flat to the ground.
My eyes blacked out as all air was knocked out of my lungs. I landed flat on my back, looking up at the gray-clouded sky. Something large moved past me, and into the woods behind me. I could hear saplings crackle and break.
I rolled onto my stomach, aiming my handgun into the forest. I could see something moving up ahead.
I spotted a pair of antlers, along with two frightened eyes. It looked my way, only to immediately set off in the other direction.
Something had spooked it.
And with that dawning realization, something in me screamed that I wasn’t alone. That if I were to turn around, there’d be something there. Just like I’d felt in the kitchen, or in my study, or in the bedroom. It was there. It was real.
As I spun around, handgun drawn, my world went dark with a wet thwack across my temple.
I must’ve been out for at least an hour, but to me, it was like blinking. I opened my eyes; looking into a mirror. A dusty old thing stuffed away into some old shed. I was sitting on a milk crate; barely held together by rusty nails and long-forgotten care.
There were two hands on my shoulder.
One with three massive toe-like fingers, and one with four. They had no nails.
I realized something was suckling on my scalp.
A massive mouth with soft baby-like teeth, bending every which way against the skin of my head. And again, that inhuman groan. That low, droning noise. The same noise I now realized I’d been hearing pressed against the side of my home.
I looked down at my right hand. I was clearly out of it – my thoughts moved in slow-motion.
I was bleeding profusely.
My right index finger and thumb were… gone.
At first, I didn’t know what to think, or how to process it. It had to be my imagination. It couldn’t be real. But looking closer at the mirror across from me, it was as real as it gets.
It was at least eight feel tall. This massive wet-skinned thing. Like a cross between an overgrown infant and a mole rat. Its pores were large enough for me to count. I could barely see where the neck stopped, and the body began. And there, in the middle of what could be considered a face, were two round, black, button-like eyes.
It met my gaze through the mirror and snorted; a move that made one of its teeth come loose. It didn’t seem to care but was eager to lap up my blood. I noticed the specks of midwinter mint green paint at the edge of its mouth.
I made the laziest, slowest, attempt to move. It gently pulled me back, like a puppy pulling on a rope toy. My gaze flickered back and forth.
“Stop,” I wheezed. “You shouldn’t-“
It groaned again, squeezing my shoulder until something popped. I cried out, and the thing snorted again. It was funny. To it, I sounded… funny.
Bloodrun play.
With every attempt to squirm my way out, it pulled me in tighter. It was getting annoyed. I tried sudden jerks, slow creeps, and everything in-between. But for the better part of an hour, it just held me there. At one point, it just started to bite off hair; like a cow munching on fresh grass. Huge swathes of hair torn out and swallowed.
I managed to get my shoulder loose, but before I could take a step, it pulled me back. It pulled me back so hard I fell off the milk crate, rolling back into a box of tools and a half-cracked rake. Fumbling around with my healthy hand, I felt a handle.
As it reached for me again, I held on tight, and swung.
Turns out I’d grabbed the handle of a trowel. While still rusted, I managed to swing it hard enough to open a nasty cut along the creature’s triceps.
It reeled back, crushing the milk crate. It lunged at me. It came down with its full body weight, but I got out of the way just in time to see it pulverize a rotten shelf. Termite dust and old wood puffed into the air as I tumbled away on the floor; finally finding the familiar handle of my handgun.
I tried to grab it with my right hand, but this massive jolt of pain shot all the way from my hand to my neck. I didn’t have a trigger finger anymore.
I wielded it in my left hand, swung around, and aimed down the barrel.
A crooked half-smile with teeth no larger than a corn kernel. An amused huff.
I blinked the sweat out of my eyes.
And it was gone.
I just looked around, firing a couple or bullets into nothing. Punching holes in the decayed wood and rusted metal. My ears rung as I made my way outside.
There were no signs of my fingers. Just blood and bite marks.
I made my way back home. My wife had come home for lunch and left just as fast. I called for help. I didn’t know how to explain it all – I just told them I’d been assaulted.
The rest of the day was a circus. Panicked phone calls, worried voices, pointed questions. My wife came by to sit with me, leaving the boys with her sister. There were doctors, police officers, nurses, administrators… so many faces and names.
It wasn’t until the soft lull of the late hours that I managed to think. My wife was sitting to my left, holding my healthy hand. Our tears had dried. There were no sounds but the humming of machines.
I’d tried to make sense of it. A creature that came to be from hearing a poem. By thinking about it. Then again, I’d read it a couple of times to my wife, and she hadn’t seen or heard anything. I figured maybe it was the notebook itself that was the deciding factor. That somehow reading from the book made it more authentic – conveying the right cadence.
I turned to her as she kissed my forehead. The lights were dim. I was to be kept overnight because of the blood loss.
“How’d it go with Kevin’s, uh… presentation?” I asked. “I know he’s been worried about it.”
“It was the damndest thing,” she smiled. “He found just the thing to read just before class. He was excited about it too. It had this funny sound.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” she smiled. “From that book you found.”
My heart went cold.
I’d forgotten it in the glove box.
She’d driven them to school.
“The one you told me about,” she continued. “He really liked it.”
If there was any truth to this. Any truth at all, even the most miniscule kind of it. If having it read to someone could make it, somehow, come to be.
I hyperventilated. She clutched my shoulders, pressing the emergency button, over and over, calling out for help. I felt faint as I watched the room spin. My pulse was going haywire.
I just had to scream.
I don’t want to go into detail about what happened.
Not about the abductions, or the maimings, or the rumors. The paint peeled from walls across the neighborhood. The whispers of roaming things trampling the sunflower fields on the east end of town.
I don’t want to think about it. None of it. Not the ones who made it back, and not the ones who didn’t.
Today, I wear a prosthetic. I cover my scars and bald spots with a baseball cap. I think others do too.
The poem doesn’t work unless you’re reading it from the source. But when you do, it works. It is real, and I can’t wrap my head around it. Kevin doesn’t understand what happened, and I intend to keep it that way. If I can spare him the knowledge of accidentally causing this, in any way shape or form, I will.
Jonah never experienced anything strange, and he was the one who first read it to me, so I think it’s fine if you’re the one doing the reading. Maybe there is something fundamentally different in the way the reader and the listener experience this transfer of thought. I don’t know. Ask a Raskian scholar.
I had to say something, to someone. I figured this community might understand.
And be careful what stories you tell.