“Death is unfair, death is painful, he takes and takes till you have nothing left, then, and only then does he end you.” Those were the most memorable words my grandfather ever said to me. For five years he had watched as his wife suffered under Alzheimer’s disease, her mind slowly being corroded away till she no longer remembered her own name, no longer remembered if she was loved by anyone, or if she had even loved herself. I never knew my grandmother, not the genius she was heralded as at least. I only knew her as the old lady who made my mother weep and my grandfather pray to a God that would not answer.
She died when I was eight, alone in a hospital bed hooked up to more machines than I could count. I still recall the sterile smell of the hospital from when we would visit, and I remember her laying there, not knowing that she had a husband who would give the world for her, a daughter who worshipped the ground she walked on, and a son who would trade his life for hers. As you may expect my grandfather took her illness very badly. My mother would tell me stories of how he was the kindest man she had ever meet, and a perfect father in her eyes. The man I knew however was jaded and angry at the world, angry at the unfairness of death, the coldness and pain of losing that which he loved most.
That brings me to the creature. I first saw the Thing when I was eleven. It was around seven in the evening mid-December, and I was peering out the window on the second story, watching the snow drift downward. As I was watching I saw a figure standing in the road adjacent to our house. As I watched the thing begin to walk toward me, it was relatively small, only a few feet tall, and its entire body was covered in black cloth flowing loosely in the snowstorm. Time stalled into nothing as the creature’s head snapped towards mine. Despite the things size it moved at a speed that was unnatural, so fast that in seconds it was beneath my window and out of sight. I leapt away from the glass with my heart attempting to break free from my chest as panic ripped through my veins.
A small hand snaked its way onto my windowpane, pale and elongated fingers griping the glass, before in a less than a moment It was there, staring at me through the glass, its face smashed up against it. The thing looked almost like a child, but the dimensions were not quite right. Have you ever looked into a curved mirror? It was almost like that; arms a hair too long, fingers that were more akin to needles, and a face that… It is difficult to explain, but I’ll try my best to describe it. Imagine a little girl, with black hair, soft eyes and a happy smile; now imagine if that little girl was taken and reversed into a twisted vestige of that. Grayed hair like a withered crone, sunken and decayed pupils reminiscent of a dead fish, lips that held no mirth and were cracking open to reveal a slime covered tongue dripping black tar. Her smile spread across her face as if a knife had carved it into her, and her skin was pale and dead, withered beyond comprehension. Still a little girl, but more akin to a demon than anything else. The very sight of her brought fear so palpable it froze the blood in my heart and horror so overwhelming that I couldn’t even scream.
I stood there enchanted by her gaze, wanting to run more than anything, but too terrified to move. She watched me from the window, her eyes following mine, with an expression I can almost say looked gleeful. I heard a load clash from below me and the “girl” trained her eyes onto the floor, before in an instant darted from the window. I stayed there petrified for what seemed like eternity till I heard a scream so raw, so real that it burned away my fear. I ran downstairs and into the garage where my mother’s wails were coming from. As I reached the door, I saw my uncle standing in the entrance. I tried to push past him, but he wrapped his arms around me and forced me away. “Go call 911! Now! Go!” I did as he asked even if I didn’t know why. All I could think was how the thing I saw out my window must have been responsible.
My grandfather died that night. The doctors said he had a heart attack while on a ladder attempting to get some paint buckets. He fell on his spine and impaled himself through the windpipe on a loos piece of metal. My mother and uncle ran to him after the crash only to find a dying man paralyzed and gurgling on blood. He died less than a minute after he fell, dead before any emergency personnel arrived. I will forever be grateful to my uncle for not letting me see his death; not that it mattered in the long run.
Ever since I saw that thing outside my window death and tragedy followed me like wildfire. The first was Sarah. We had been best friends ever since preschool and we often walked home together. One Friday we were walking home from the local candy store and were about to walk across the street when I saw it. Standing at only a meter tall, watching me from the roof of an apartment complex, and despite the daylight its form was even more difficult to see. I was so distracted by its blurred and twisted body that I hadn’t noticed Sarah begin to cross the road, only turning my head when a horn blazed in my ear. I watched as Sarah was hit by a semi-truck she’d failed to see. In a moment her body was crumpled and folded into an unrecognizable paste of blood and bone. Do you know what a forty-ton truck does to a twelve-year-old girl? It flattens her, turns her bones to dust and her brain into strawberry jam. Bits of bone and blood splattered into my face, the force of it cutting into my skin. I remember the blood flooding the pavement as the screech of tires defended my cries. Dreed and despair overcame me with such ferocity that all I could do was wail, screams so raw that my throat split open, and my lungs were ripped apart, yet I still screamed. I screamed until my eyes stung and my body crumbled to the pavement, I screamed even as I was pulled away from the scene. I screamed and cried till I had nothing left to give, and yet I did not stop; I could not, for the bloody paste on the concrete before me was seared into my mind. The paste that had moments before been a young girl filled with ambition, love and joy; and in an instant all our memories, all our friendship, and all our years of life together were worth nothing, gone in one heart breaking breath.
Granddad and Sarah were the first of my loved ones to die; and Uncle Timothy was the next. In my adolescent eyes Timothy was Jesus reborn, the kindest, most companionate man alive. When my father abandoned me and my mom, he steeped in and helped raise me as if I was his own child, and when granddad died, he put aside his own grief to help us. He was a man who gave with such happiness and joy, always putting others before himself, that you couldn’t help but do so yourself. He married a beautiful woman, and he loved her more than life itself. If he was a flame shining in the dregs of humanity, then she was the oil that set it ablaze.
One summer morning I was going to visit him, we had planned a fishing trip that afternoon you see, and I was supposed to meet him at his apartment, which was about a twenty-minute walk from our house. As I was walking up the stairs to the third floor I saw it, the creature. It was atop the stairway walking downward, covered head to toe in rotten, tattered cloth. Its body looked even more decayed than the last time I’d seen it. As opposed to the first time we met there was a black veil over its face hiding its revolting features. I had not noticed the smell before due to my window, but now I did. It smelled like ash and mildew, with undertones of rot, all underneath a pungent aroma of iron. No, not iron, blood. I felt my heart quicken as fear turned my legs to quicksand and my blood to ice. The ungodly thing before me slowly walked down the steps, its bare feet echoing across the hall, and I knew that if it wanted to it could tear my eyes out and slit throat in an instant; I hadn’t forgotten the things speed on that first night a lifetime ago. Instead of attacking me it simply walked past my petrified body. I wanted to move, I really did, but I couldn’t, some invisible force prevented me from running, or doing anything at all. The moment the creature left my sight I ran, faster than I had ever run before, out the fire escape and all the way home, forgetting about the trip my uncle planned. All that filled my brain was the unquenchable fear of that monster I’d seen, something that didn’t just want me dead. It wanted to toy with me, it reveled in my fear and despair.
The next day my uncle was found dead in his apartment, a bullet through his brain. A numbness I’d never felt before consumed me when I was, after his funeral, given the full story. For the last few years he had been fighting depression and suicide, confiding in his sister and father about how he felt, and later his wife. He confessed to them how alone he felt, how overwhelming and crushing the feeling that if he didn’t give everything to others, didn’t spend every waking hour for someone else then they would abandon him. So, when he found out that his wife had been having an affair for over a year, and then left him for some rich asshole; well, I suppose that he, for reasons I don’t fully understand, chose to kill himself. I think the monster knew my uncle was suicidal. It knew, and by scaring me off like the coward I am, brought my uncle’s fear of abandonment to his mind. I played a part in his death, I played a part no matter how unwilling in the death of the kindest soul on earth, and I hate myself for that.
Grief is odd, it burns with the rage of a wildfire so hot that everything it touches is consumed. That was how my grandfather showed grief, hot, viscous and so very real. But not all grief is like that, sometimes the pain of loss hurts too much, shatters your soul so much that there is nothing left to feel. No more pain, no more hurt, and no more love; all of it merged into an oblivion of nothingness. That was the grief my mother felt; grief that did not burn with the ferocity of the sun, but with a chilling numbness. She had a hard life, a husband who never truly loved her, and a mother who forgot her own daughter’s name; and when Grandfather died, she braved it with the cold stoicism of a mother protecting her child from the cruelness of reality. However, when Timothy died that calm mask was ripped away, revealing the terrified child beneath it. The forgotten daughter who in the span of a few years lost her father, mother and brother. She may not have died with them, but to me it felt like a part of her did.
She died on a Sunday. Fitting I suppose, she always was religious. I had just turned eighteen when I got a call from the hospital informing me that she was in the emergency room and in critical care at a hospital a good thirty minutes away. I felt nauseated, a hole opening in my stomach and threatening to spill open. I ran to my front door where I kept my keys and desperately rummaged for them. Only to find nothing, they were gone. I searched the ground, I searched the coaches, opened every cabinet, and dug through every pair of pants I owned. I could have sworn my search lasted forever but in hindsight it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes. I was growing desperate and terrified, terrified that my mother would die without me being there. All at once I stopped as a thought so disturbing that I didn’t want to ponder it wiggled its way into my brain. I listened carefully, very carefully. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. I heard a soft tapping from above me. I didn’t need to pinpoint it; I knew in my gut where it was coming from. I slowly walked over to the stairs, past the garage were grandpa died, past the room my father walked out of for the last time, past the room that still held my uncles’ books from when he visited after grandmom’s death; a room that will forever remain untouched. I stopped at the closed door of my old room. Everything I knew told me to run, yet I knew that if I did, I wouldn’t see my mom alive again, so I opened the door and stepped inside.
After my grandfather’s death mom asked me if I wanted to be moved to his old room, and I agreed. I pretended it was out of wanting to feel his presence, but in reality, I was just terrified of seeing something in my window. The room was bare and covered in dust and cobwebs, just as I remembered; yet I only cared about the window in the far corner covered by a large curtain. I slowly inched forward, painfully aware of the sound coming from it. Tap. Tap. TAP. It was getting loader and I was only a foot away now. Fear filled every crevice of my soul, and my heart thrummed inside my chest with enough force to break through my ribs, but I still pulled back that damned curtain, fear for my mother overpowering anything else.
Hanging from the window was the creature. It was exactly as I remembered it, long needles for fingers, shriveled skin that was peeling away to reveal black flesh and rotting white eyes. All of it in the body of a disfigured little girl. It looked at me with the most delighted grin smeared across its face, like it had just won a grand prize. It slowly lifted its clenched lithe hand upward slowly unfurling it, dangling two items from its fingers. I recognized my car keys immediately; however, the second object took more time. A watch, but not just any watch, no, it was the watch I’d given my mother for her 30th birthday. A sick realization filled me as the thing pointed to the watch’s face, and then in an instant was gone like a leaf in the wind. It left the watch and the keys on the outside of my window. Time. My mother’s time. When the phone rang, I knew who it was. I didn’t even bother picking it up, simply got in my car and drove to the hospital. My Mom was dead, and I knew it was pointless, yet still I drove. I wish I could say I mourned but I didn’t. I wanted to scream till my throat was torn open, cry out in despair till my eyes bleed red like I had for Sarah, but I couldn’t. I had nothing left to give, no more tears left to shed, no more agony in my soul to express, and no screams to split the heavens, only the memory of her love to carry me forward.
That was fifteen years ago. After her funeral I got in my car and drove as far north as I could. I have changed quite a bit since those days. I used to dread hospitals, a constant reminder of my grandmother’s condition. Now I dread hospitals for the twelve-hour shifts I work through.
At 9:18 P.M on a Saturday a call came through from dispatch requesting a surgical team and operation room to be prepared. By the time I arrived at the operating room I knew our patient was already going to die. A seven-year-old girl had been inside her parent’s minivan when a speeding pickup ran a red light, slamming into it. Both the driver and passenger of each vehicle were declared dead on the scene, but by some miracle she survived. They spent over an hour tearing twisted metal away from her, only to find her right arm had been severed by crushed aluminum. The only reason she didn’t bleed to death right there was due to the arteries literally being ripped apart so violently that they twisted together. The entire ordeal brought me back to smeared flesh on pavement and heart-breaking sobs from a regretful driver. There were dozens of lacerations that needed stitches, and we removed at least forty glass intrusions. We worked for over fifteen hours cutting, stitching and mending the poor girl’s broken body, yet by the end, when we had done all that we could do, it proved pointless. Her heart beat by machines and her brain didn’t give a drop of movement. For all intent and purpose, she was dead. I knew that of course, knew that she wouldn’t make it; not by my skill as a doctor. No, I knew because when they brought her in, I saw in the corner of my eye a cloaked figure with mangled flesh and inhuman limbs, watching with a grin so large that it swallowed even the light around it.
Despite the girl’s condition we held back in declaring her dead as we still held hope for a recovery. We moved the poor girl to a specialized room filled with a plethora of machines to keep her heart beating. I should have gone home, but I suppose seeing her reminded me of Sarah too much, and there was no one else by her side; we failed to find anyone from her family, and I began to suspect that she didn’t have anyone. I sat nearby watching her. I wondered what she was like? Was she a happy child full of dreams and aspirations, loved by everyone? Or was she an unwanted pest in her parents’ home? Abused and broken like so many others? I sat deep in thought as the hours passed by, hardly noticing falling asleep until a knock sounded on the door waking me. “Come in.” I answered expecting a nurse or even a lawyer.
The door opened with a creek, before slamming shut. I turned my head slowly in horrific realization. Standing next to the closed door was the creature. It had no veil to cover its face this time, to blot out the reality of what I saw. Its face was exactly as it was in my nightmare’s, white eyes burning with hatred and bloating like a fish left dead on the ground, pale mangled skin that looked as if someone had begun peeling it away, and Its lips were covered in thick black sludge that reeked of feces. I stepped back, but I didn’t run. Not this time, I was done running from this thing, not that I had anywhere to go, and if it wanted to kill me after all these years then it would have to fight me. I wasn’t going to cower away like a child. “What is it you want from me?” I tried to command out, but all that followed was a soft cry. The thing before me that stole the look of a little girl just watched me with its ever-increasing smile.
“Times up.” The girl spoke, her voice sounding hollow and course, yet undeniable young and feminine, and once she began to speak, she wouldn’t stop. “Why do you continue living? Why won’t you just give up?” I could only stare in disgust and terror as she continued talking, her voice was laced with so much venom and pain that it hurt to hear. “You would have been so happy if you just stopped getting in my way. But no, you keep denying me the only thing I EVER WANTED!” She began to walk toward my petrified body as I choked forth a response. “What are you? What did I do to deserve this?”
She stopped and stared, her dead eyes that contained an unmeasurable amount of anguish and hatred peered at me as if she was looking into my very soul. “You can see me, simple as that. You didn’t do anything, your only crime is being able to give me what I want, what I rightfully deserve.” She began to slowly pace between me and the only exit. Well, beside the window to my right, but I was on the fourth story beneath solid concrete, and I couldn’t shake my grandfather’s death, him lying there drowning in his own blood.
“What do you want from me? I’ll give it to you, just leave me be.” I cried out, my voice feeling small like I was still a child watching the monster out my window. The Girl’s smile grew and grew till it threatened to split her skull in half.
“I want your soul. Don’t worry, I won’t eat it or anything, I just want to remove it. I want to replace yours with mine. I’ve spent so long in this rotten shell, waiting for someone to see me, someone with a soul compatible with mine. I’ve been so patient, waiting for the moment in which your soul gave up like mine did so long ago, I waited when I turned Sarah into a puddle of meat, and I waited for it to break when I left your uncle a loaded pistol on his bed. I thought your mom’s death was finally going to break it, but it held on by a thread. But I’m done patiently waiting like a good girl, I’m taking what should be mine. Right. Now.” Her dead eyes narrowed on me as she slowly walked forward. “Beg and whine all you want about fairness, but there is no such thing in this world.” She was less than a foot away from me staring up with eyes full of hate and hunger. She stopped and the rage in her eyes faltered “I did nothing wrong too, you know. This whole shit show started when my parents wanted to bring me with them on a missionary trip to the southern tip of the Americas.” She scoffed in disgust.
“It went well for a few months,” she continued, “until they were told about a hostile group of natives nearby who were rumored to follow occult teachings. They were young, white, American, and so painfully naïve. They never fought for anything, were always handed it on a silver platter, and they couldn’t resist spreading their religion. Predictably they were all slaughtered. But for the moment I was left alive, a small mercy, right? No. They tied me to a massive stone, twisting my limbs around it till they snapped like straws, and as they nailed spikes into my palms, anchored me into the ground, they began shredding the flesh off my fingers leaving only the bone. For weeks they ripped the skin from my body as if peeling an orange, and after braiding my hair together into a knot they pulled on it till my scalp gave way with it. Every square inch of my body was violated, whether it be by the shit they showed down my throat, or the worms they forced into my ears.” I tried to speak, to say anything, but my lungs held no air, and my throat was too closed to utter a single sound. I simply stood there listening to her morbid tale.
“After everyone had their fill of fucking me and disfiguring every inch of me, only then did they slice me down the middle and wrench out my heart.” She stopped and looked up at me, her dead white into my living blue. Her next words came out as a whisper. “But they wouldn’t let me die. I was their sacrifices, their way to reach immortality. I was offered up to death so that they would live for eternity. But they messed up, instead of gifting my soul and my body to death, only my body was given; my soul was already shattered into pieces and detached from its shell by what they did.” The girl stepped back and opened her arms showcasing her entire frame. “This is what I am now, a discharged soul incapable of death, yet never living, my soul forever bound to plane of existence. I prayed to God for death, but he would not answer despite however many times I begged.” She began walking forward again. “But now I want to live, and by taking the rebuilt pieces of glass that is your soul and using it as the foundation for my own.” She smiled with a grin that split the heavens. “Through your body I will live again.”
In the length of a breath, she was upon me, slamming me into the cabinet next to my patient’s bed and then onto the floor. “I will not spend another FUCKING minute trapped with this shattered soul! I don’t care what it takes, or how damaged I will be afterwards, I WILL see the stars with living eyes again and breath in one more breath if it is the last thing I do.” Her hands wrapped around my throat, spitting onto my face with every word. “Don’t worry, I’ll remember your name, I always do. I remembered Sarah’s, Timothy’s and dear old mom’s, besides, I killed anyone who could possibly miss you.” I tried to force her off me but couldn’t break her grip and as my vision blurred, I heard a small whimper. The grip around my throat lessoned as both me and the girl looked to the bed. Wide green eyes stared back; a scream trapped in her mouth as the formally braindead child watched the dead thing above me. “You can see me as well?” For the smallest of seconds all the attention was on my patient. A second was all I needed, and while the girl above me was distracted I slammed the full force of my elbow into her face. Inhuman strength doesn’t mean much when it is attached to roughly thirty kilos. She was slammed off me and crashed into the door with a satisfying crunch. I wish I could say I took my patient and ran, but I didn’t. The corpse was barely even dazed and was blocking the door, so I turned to my left spotting the closed window and ran, jumping into it with all my force. Hosptial windows are supposed to be reinforced for safety, but ours is underfunded and old, and the window shattered with ease. Four stories may not seem like a lot but when landing on concrete it is.
Pain like I’d never felt before encompassed me as my legs and back screamed in torment. I tried to get up, but my body wouldn’t respond, and all I could do was utter a pained moan as blackness overcame everything and I drifted into nothingness. In my unconscious mind all I could hear was the soft sound of a child crying; whose it belonged to I couldn’t distinguish, whether it be my own sobs, or the cries of the orphaned daughter mourning her parents’ death. Or maybe, just maybe they were the cries of a child forgotten in a faraway country, being tortured to death as no one remained to hear her weakened cries.
Seven months. That’s how long it took before I was able to get out of bed. Both legs were broken in at least three places and part of my spine was damaged, along with two ribs heavily bruised; honestly, I was beyond lucky to be able to move at all. Alena Hawthorn. That was the name of the girl that indirectly saved my life, and I wish I could tell her how much I thank her for it, but I can’t. No sign of her ever awakening was found, but I know what I saw, what I heard. She was transferred to a hospital that delt with long turn coma patients in the next town over at the request of some uncle twice removed or something along those lines. I never visited her, not that it wasn’t expected of me, but because I have a feeling that Alena died that night, and I think something took her place. Alena Hawthorn, remember her name, she deserves at least that little tribute. That should be how my story ends, but it isn’t.
You see, some trauma and pain don’t go away. My last meeting with the dead girl brought the memories of Mom and Timothy that I had been trying to repress for so long to the forefront of my head. Memories I hide for good reason. I want more than anything to say that I found happiness, that I found a spouse, or had kids, or even found a career to love, but I have nothing, just an empty soul barely held together by its seems. I have no friends, I barely tolerate my job, I feel nauseated when I see children, especially little girls, and I get a cold sweet even thinking about dating. I’m miserable most of the time, and it shows. I wake up wondering if I should just give up, end it all. Loneliness and desperation burled themselves under my skin a lifetime ago and no matter how deep the knife goes I can’t cut them out. As a child I opened my heart to despair and apathy in an attempt to understand the losses I couldn’t fully fathom, and the latch to my soul is too weathered to close now. Despite my current state I’m not always unhappy. For me It’s the small things that make life worth living. A soft bed after an agonizing shift, the friendly smile from a stranger, a patient humming a soft tune as they prepare for surgery, and the people who come by every Saturday to donate blood. All these tiny things are enough. It’s enough when I see mothers holding their children as they are given a shot. It’s enough when fathers hold their scared sons as they prepare for surgery. It’s enough when a son reads stories to his ailing mother, like she did when he was babe. It’s enough when I look into the night sky and behold the infinity before me, the northern lights dancing before me like a symphony brought forth for creation itself
But sometimes, it isn’t. Sometime the grief overwhelms my senses, sometimes I can’t find a smiling stranger, sometimes patients weep in fear before an operation, sometimes no donors show up, sometimes there is no mother to comfort her son, no father to hold his daughter, and no son to be with his dying mother. Sometimes even the stars and moon can’t shine, and no stardust dances before the cosmos. When all this happens, and it happens quite a lot, I pretend. Pretend I haven’t seen everyone I love die, pretend I am a normal person, like I haven’t lost the ability to love anything. I pretend I didn’t stare death right in the face. I pretend I am happy, pretend there is someone I can love. The thing is, I’m not the only pretender though.
Sometimes late at night on the last train out of town, I see a one-armed girl staring up into the unending void above her, watching with eyes that look lifeless and empty. We don’t talk, because like me, she pretends. She pretends she has a family that is waiting for her, she pretends that she never felt her skin being peeled away, pretends that she didn’t die a century ago, pretends that we never met, and she pretends that she was born in that body. I could blame her for everything that’s happened to me, for my countless tragedies, but I don’t; I can’t seem to muster the anger. We both pretend to be happy in a desperate attempt to trick our minds into believing we are. Instead of confessing who we are, we both just look out the window and admire the stars twinkling above us, the wind rustling through the trees, carpeted by the silver light of the moon, and sometimes, very rarely, we smile. Death isn’t fair, children die in agony, and parents die alone. But I have a feeling that when I die a one-armed will be there, with skin that isn’t withered, hair that is no longer grayed and torn, and eyes that hold a little less pain and anger. It’s not much, but she died with no one to remember her name, no one to hear her last agonizing cry. But she will remember mine, so when I lay in bed on cold December nights, with the wind howling outside my apartment window, and emerald stardust dancing beneath a brilliant silver, I sleep with peaceful dreams.