For Peter Straub

1
Most people favor the light and fear the dark. Sarah could explain to me in stark evolutionary terms why that was so. Fear of predators. Animals must've seemed like monsters to prehistoric man. They could see in the dark.

I am a rarer breed than Sarah, my fraternal twin—one that dreads the grayness of gloaming. Neither light nor darkness frighten me, particularly. I cannot endure the murky spectrum of grays that live between day and night. The type of gloom that forces one to squint in order to detect that which lies just a handful of inches from one’s face, such dimness awakens a deep, abiding anxiety in me. It’s comparable to a sound just barely within the range of human hearing—the eerie point where disquiet waits patiently, causing one’s heart to mislay its rhythm.

It is impossible to completely avoid such gloom, hence my proclivity to take four to five Xanax per day. My shrink, Dr. Kasdan, doesn’t like that I use so much medication. However, he dislikes panicked emergency phone-calls during early evening even less. I usually end up disturbing him just as he sits down to supper with his family.

2
Sarah and I were as close to each other as a pair of identicals. It was strange and wonderful that we could sense each other’s emotions across vast distances.

It was not enough to save her ... or me.

What happened to Sarah is the worst thing that could happen to any self-aware being.

*     *     *
In 2015, Sarah graduated summa cum laude from Cornell. Simultaneously, I graduated from Glyph City College, lacking any distinction whatsoever. Grove Collins, PhD in underachievement.

Mom and Dad, of course, took the Mercedes up to the Cornell commencement rather than attend mine, for Sarah was graduating with the highest honors. They brought their phones, as well as a digital camera capable of taking high-resolution video.

Sarah, always reaching for the stars, was also valedictorian. The speech she delivered was good. Better than good; it was exceptional. If the book she’d been working on was half as powerful, had it ever seen publication, my sister would have commanded a large advance against royalties from any major publisher. She could have written many such books, had she survived long enough to finish that first one.

After the commencement, Mom mentioned, pointedly, that there wasn’t a dry eye in the auditorium. My parents took Sarah out to dinner that evening and I begged off, claiming a manufactured fever.

Sarah was the only person who bothered to place her cool hand to my forehead. She gave me that infectious elfin smile. “I hope your gala graduation masturbation celebration goes well tonight,” she whispered in my ear. I still hadn’t completely finished laughing by the time my father’s Lexus pulled out and drove them away. Apparently, dinner in town was not an occasion deserving the extravagance of a Mercedes Benz.

I took my time, popping out the SD card from their camera and slotting it into my laptop. A handful of seconds, and there was Sarah, crossing from stage-right, resplendent in her matte red graduation gown. Mom was right. I was weeping by the time she came to the end of her speech. A standing ovation followed, and there ended the recording.

I still tear-up whenever I watch that 15-minute valedictory speech. Really, that video file is all that I have left of her.

Well, almost.

3
My brilliant, beautiful sister had anything a good teenaged girl could want: top GPA in our class, check; varsity jacket from the swim team, check; a nice boyfriend of whom I completely approved, check. An opportunity to visit Washington, D.C. with her Debate Team. Yes, she wanted that as badly as I could ever recall her wanting anything, especially when one of the chief bonuses of going on the trip included an opportunity to meet one of her idols, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So she was understandably devastated to learn the bus would be too full. She was low person on the totem pole; she had only just joined Debate earlier in the year. Just one spot above her, the last student, also a sophomore, had been on the team since late last year. It all came down to seniority, even though she had led her team to more victories than him ... but she was only a freshman. She couldn't possibly have been on the team last year!

Devastated. At least that's what I tell myself in my weaker moments—how important it was to her, even in the face of all her other good fortune. She never knew which kid got her spot on the team, but it wouldn't have mattered to Sarah. She would have been pleased on that person's behalf. She didn't even know his name. They moved in different social circles.

I was able to get his name by simply glancing at the roster pinned up outside the large classroom where the Debate Club met. I was a bit stunned by the name, and then pleased enough to grin like an idiot for the rest of the day. His social circle overlapped slightly with mine, like a Venn diagram.

And surely she was distraught over such a prestigious missed opportunity.

Surely!

4
Henry Dross barely had the chance to be a teenager. The day Bobby, Nicky, Jessica, and I mercilessly teased him was about two weeks before the trip. I selected that day with great care. It was his birthday.

The things we mocked him for: his proclivity to wear the exact same generic pocket T and rumpled pants ... every day!; his acne-spattered cheeks; his oily-gray, thinning mop of hair, a shade darker than cigarette ash, well-highlighted against his irises, which were a vaguely yellow-green tint, like polluted lake water. I told myself that those eyes birthed an intuitive hatred in me.

Many years later I would recognize the intuitive emotion for what it was. Fear. My fears generally pissed me off, too.

As was usually the case with these things, I was the instigator.

I suppose I was always a bit of a bully; then I crossed all boundaries.

That day in 2012 when we ruthlessly cut down Henry Dross was the last time any of us saw him. He did get home that evening—this much I read in the newspaper the next day. Mr. and Mrs. Dross attested that he ate supper at home that night, as every night, but then, uncharacteristically, went off to bed early. They also stated that they weren’t aware of when or how he left the house. Police noted in the Glyph Herald that Henry’s bed was neatly made that morning, and the Drosses denied having made it. Later on, I heard through the grapevine that a sergeant on the force, Derrick Reynolds, was overheard saying that "that bed was so tight, I was able to bounce a quarter off of it.” That detail, the perfectly made bed, I found particularly disquieting, whenever the entire mess rolled through my head like the Zapruder Film on amphetamines.

And there is also one more circumstance that left me ensconced in the certain knowledge that I didn’t deserve forgiveness. On March 15th, just two days after the incident, Bobby, Nicky, and Jessie went behind my back and confessed about the entire bullying incident, about how particularly vicious it was, first to Principal Gwynne, then to Glyph Police Chief Anthony Brubaker. They didn’t mention me, didn’t so much as allude to anyone else’s involvement. They were given an initial twenty-day suspension while the school board decided on their cases.

We were acquaintances at best, and yet they never mentioned my name to anyone, even though I was the person who instigated the bullying of Henry Dross! At the end of their suspension period, Bobby, Nicky, and Jessica were all expelled. They never, to my knowledge, even whispered my name.

I only ever saw them again in dreams, periodic nightmares in which each of them appeared alone. They were in various places in their homes: Nicky, a gifted artist, sat on her bed with her enormous sketch pad in her lap, rendering the most meticulous and sensitive pencil portrait ... of Henry Dross; Jessie was doing savage pushups in the family's basement, trying to forget that she ever met Henry Dross; Bobby was turning a wrench under the hood of his 1970 GTO. In the dismal garage space of this particular nightmare, Bobby had removed the oil drain plug, and endlessly recalling the filthy things he spat at that lonely and friendless Dross kid, let the hot, used oil drain directly into his mouth. At a certain point in each nightmare, the light illuminating the various places where my co-conspirators were doing their own private thing visibly dimmed, then went out. This is the point where I felt their terror, Bobby, Jessie, and Nicky. Something was done to them in all that dark; a warning that sounded like a chorus of drowning men bubbled into each of their ears right before I woke up, bathed in sweat, my heart doing overtime at an unhealthy rate.

*     *     *
Anyway, the upshot is that Sarah got to go on her trip. She returned smiling, her eyes so alive, and showed me a photograph of her shaking hands with Secretary Clinton. In my mind, at that time, it had all been worth it ... but I never stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop.

*     *     *
The fact that Dross was another word for "garbage" haunted me for years, through what remained of my education. I would sit in a chair, in my dorm room, for hours, and ruminate about the meaning ascribed to Henry’s last name.

Sarah never found out the part I played in it. To the best of my knowledge, nobody ever saw Henry Dross again.

At the end of my education, Graduation freed me from these obsessions. I finally felt able to forgive myself.

5
Our first summer after receiving our bachelor’s degrees, neither one of us had a job lined up. I had been looking forward to relaxing, spending time at the beach, and performing a leisurely job-hunt. Sarah, however, wasn’t given to enjoying recreation time. She was sending out letters and applications in order to pursue her master’s degree. And even then, she still remained antsy. I think she got that trait from our mother.

Apparently, the process would take quite a bit of time. Some bright ambition burned inside her of which I’d failed to receive a single spark. It was as if my parents had placed all their eggs in one single brilliant and beautiful basket.

6
As usual, over the summer holiday, Sarah and I stayed in our old rooms at our parent's house. I don’t know where or when she’d connected with the mysterious Mr. Drexel. In hindsight, I should have been more curious. I just assumed that he worked in real estate and needed to unload the house soon, in order to make a rapid turnaround so he could earn his commission before the holiday season.

Sarah had just come back home and I was helping her unpack her college trunks. Her childhood bedroom assaulted me with a particularly Pepto-Bismol shade of pink, which just reminded me of mornings following a kegger. I mentally swallowed my nausea by focusing on Sarah, a girl who never got drunk. “So we have to help him clean this house ... but just the basement?”

Sarah rolled her eyes, smiling; my head was perennially in the clouds. “We have to clean out the cellar! There’s several decade’s worth of junk that needs to be hauled out, soon. And I need your muscles to help me. Some of it is furniture.”

“And I get $1000 for that, under the table ....”

“Gotta' love that selective hearing. Yeah, he’s offered $2000 to empty the cellar. I’ll split it with you. We could do this in record time if we work together. You could finally afford a proper wardrobe, or like, maybe a boyfriend?”

Laughter bubbled up in me. “I could use a thousand bucks ... when do we start?”

*     *     *
One Monday in the second week of June, we spontaneously erupted from our parent’s house with a cooler full of ice-cold sodas and the requisite bag of protein bars. The deep blue sky above seemed like a promise, and Sarah had no interviews, or whatever she does, until tomorrow. I automatically headed towards the curb, where my '99 Acura Integra, aka BOME, sat comfortably beneath a blanket of dust.

“Where are you going, Grove?”

I turned with the superior smile of one who has driven the loneliest highways and most treacherous winding mountain roads in the state. “I’m driving, of course!”

“Grove,” she said gently, and slowly, as if addressing a simple child without a working knowledge of the English language. “Going to the shore in BOME is one thing, because it’s just you who’ll have to pull into the breakdown lane and fiddle under the hood. But not me. Besides, I don’t want to arrive there soaked in sweat.”

“BOME,” named by me six years ago, before I got a handle on how to manage her, stands for Bane Of My Existence, and it lacks both air conditioning and responsive brakes. I’d used a substantial amount of my savings, money earned mowing hundreds of lawns (or mowing the same six lawns hundreds of times) to buy her. As one would do with a wild Bronco, I needed to break her spirit before she was mine. Driving to and from City College was no great strain on her. It was the journeys I alighted upon after hours that left her in her present condition. I blew off steam by going for long, fast drives. Sarah had a good point. “Okay, okay!”

We took her Kia Soul, a squarish green box on wheels which she insisted on driving at or below the speed limit.

I yawned.

“Cut that out!”

“Hey, we forgot to bring the Bluetooth speaker ... or boom box.”

“We didn’t forget. I deliberately didn’t bring one. Mr. Drexel said we would have to work quietly.”

“Okay, go ahead. Tell me how we shift thousands of pounds of junk—up the steps, no less—without making atrocious amounts of noise.”

“He meant no music. And no laughing or goofing off.”

“And no cursing, either, I’ll bet. What is he, a nun? Are you sure he said the place was gonna be empty?”

“He most emphatically did.” She turned on a Sirius station on the radio, loudly cutting short any further possibility of argument.

I felt, suddenly, like I wanted to back out. Turn around and go back to our parent’s house and plop down on the family room couch with the satellite remote in my hand. And there was some good stuff on Netflix I’d been wanting to binge until my eyes bled. However, I could not leave Sarah to deal with it all alone. It would be heavy work. No, I definitely couldn’t let her go off alone to some strange house.

She turned off the highway and took us through a warren of streets. The deeper we penetrated this neighborhood, the worse the road conditions became. Shattered asphalt. Mashed garbage. Broken beer bottles. A weight of oppression bowed my head, and for the next few minutes, I stared at my sneakers, silently berating myself for not putting on my steel-toed boots. There was a strong likelihood of dropping some heavy furniture on my foot. A quick glance at Sarah’s feet depressing the gas pedal and brakes revealed that she wore her Doc Martens with steel tips. That made me laugh.

“What?” She smiled quizzically, so I laughed some more, picturing her pulling on a pair of heavy duty work gloves and assuming I’d have the good sense to dress protectively as well. It wasn’t that she didn’t bother to look out for me; it was that her level of intelligence had a blind spot. I’d seen it over and over through the years. She just assumed that I possessed the same minimum common sense that she did. I just hoped that her loyalty to her dimwitted brother wasn’t holding her back in some way.

Looking out the windshield again, I was stunned by how quickly the tenor of the neighborhood had changed. The streets were wider and recently paved. Neat sidewalks were bracketed by immense lawns and smaller strips of perfectly lush, green grass, manicured not by cheap lawn-boys like me, but clearly the work of professional landscapers. Any evidence of garbage or broken glass had clearly been swept under the lush green lawns. Stately trees, oaks or elms, rose up from isolated strips of verdant grass bordered by immaculate sidewalks, rising up to “join hands” above the street. The overall effect was one of driving down the expansive nave of an immense church. Driving beneath the vaulted ceilings of such a vast cathedral, built by Mother Nature, one could easily believe in an all-encompassing, Judeo-Christian God. Or the Goddess Nature.

7
Moving through this beautiful housing development, I pictured a larger home with a stupendously hilly lawn, perhaps offset by a barn-like shed and bracketed by two lengths of white-picket fencing.

The reality was disappointing. Our destination was a single-story ranch house. The yard was neatly kept, the lawn recently trimmed. Painted brightly, but not too brightly, in shades of indigo with immaculate white trim, it was certainly well maintained. Although, with a three-story mansion standing at either side of it, 222 JFK Drive (North) resembled a felon under escort by two brutish prison guards.

Outside, breathing the clean, flower-fragrant air, I became abruptly aware of something missing; where were the sounds signifying the presence of wildlife? The chirping of birds, buzzing of insects, any sounds of capering chipmunks and squirrels dashing up and down trees, or even a single barking dog—none of the sonic background of a normal spring day in the ’burbs were present. A deep unease settled in the pit of my stomach as, simultaneously, I felt Sarah’s nerves rev up to some higher frequency. I could feel her emotions to an extent, but that didn’t mean I could read her mind. The blank expression on her face told me nothing. When she caught me looking, a warm smile alighted upon her face. “We go around to the side door,” she said.

“Ah, of course, the servant’s entrance.”

Outwardly, Sarah laughed. Just below the surface, she was deeply unsettled by something, something besides the absence of nature. I could not even begin to guess what that might be.

Around the right side of the house, we found a short set of cement steps that descended about two feet to a cheap aluminum door. Sarah pulled a key from her pocket, held it up as if she had just performed some amazing feat of legerdemain. Taking a deep breath, she unlocked the door and led me inside, through a small mudroom, and down a rather dim stairwell. I felt my mood begin to slide downwards; it was an empty feeling familiar from an extended period of depression I suffered during freshman year. But that wasn’t something I wanted to ponder before starting some seriously heavy work.

8
The house was indeed deserted. We walked the main floor and checked out all of the rooms ... together. They were barren. No signs of furniture or hanging décor, like crappy garage sale paintings or old clocks. No discarded bags of garbage. No dust or dirt. It was all immaculate, to an almost improbable degree. They must have hired professionals to do all of it. So why hire a couple of college grads to tackle the basement, or cellar—whatever they wanted to call it?

When I gave voice to this, Sarah exploded, “Who cares why! It’s Two! Thousand! Dollars! You should be seeing the “S” with the vertical line through it. Times two-thousand! Where’s your sense of mercenary greed?”

“When have I shown the slightest sign of mer—”

She burst into laughter. “Spoken like a truly committed lawn-boy. So now we know. It was about the lawns. Never about the money.” She had a point. I never did anything other than complain about all that mowing. Rather than take the time to find a less back-breaking job, one with a steady paycheck, I overcharged our neighbors and then worked fanatically so that I could claim that I earned it. But I never possessed an ounce of genuine ambition.

Abruptly, I realized that she had cleverly dispelled my unease about the state of the house. Yet she seemed to forget, almost ignorant of the fact, that I could sense the burgeoning fear inside her. We went downstairs.

9
We decided on a strategy of moving out the larger, heavier stuff first. According to Sarah, we were to take it out through the side entrance via the mudroom—it made sense as it was our most direct route to the outside—and deposit it as neatly as possible upon the side lawn. Again, I wondered why the owners hadn’t let the same moving men who emptied the rest of the house haul away the mass of junk in the cellar. And junk it certainly was: two mismatched, badly scarred wooden end tables; three metal file cabinets so severely rusted that nothing short of strategically-placed plastic explosive could possibly get them open; a large, very ugly wardrobe which was likelier to deliver us to Hell than Narnia; an oblong ottoman, clothed in black faux-leather; and a series of broken wooden chairs and the ostensibly matched dining table.

We cleared a path by moving piles of paper and magazines to the edges of the cellar. As we worked, the room seemed to grow vaster, as if stretched by some enormous, unseen hand. To dispel the feeling, I really put my back into shoving the file cabinets, issuing a roar which Sarah summarily shushed. Already, I had forgotten Rule of the Cellar #1: no noise. The cabinets themselves made oddly little sound and slid as if their bottoms were oiled. Once through the mudroom, I struggled to push the cabinets up the cement stairs, severely scratching their metal backsides and causing a shrieking sound reminiscent of a protracted automobile accident.

As I continued similar struggles with each oversized piece of furniture, Sarah took the cleanest area she could find for a workspace and began to sift and categorize papers.

Drenched in sweat, my T-shirt was stuck uncomfortably to my body. My jaw ached from clenching my teeth as I heaved giant pieces of forgotten, dust-enshrouded junk up the stairs. The path I raked across and around the side of the lawn created a bed of bare soil surprisingly appropriate for planting a garden.

I took an extended break to suck down a twenty-ounce bottle of Diet Coke, still quite chilled from the cooler. I drew in deep lungfuls of air, and after a pause to consider how much I had accomplished, went downstairs and grabbed another Diet Coke.

As Sarah seemed well occupied sorting papers, I stole back up the steps and leisurely enjoyed my drink, the burn of chilled and carbonated, artificially-sweetened liquid racing down my throat. I listened for Sarah to call my name, to begin hounding me back to work.

When she did not, I resumed dragging up the remaining Colossuses, Leviathans, and Goliaths. When it was done, I clapped the dust off my hands. I walked over to the ottoman and threw back its lid. With gratitude, I took out my third bottle of Diet Coke and consumed it like oxygen. I leisurely drank, watching the sun.

For countless minutes, I heard only the stirring of branches and a rising wind whistling through gaps amongst them. Something immeasurable moved in the firepit of my stomach—something eternally patient easily side-stepping my feelings of unease.

How long had I stood there? I wondered why Sarah hadn't called me back down, if for nothing else, then at least for company. Didn't she wonder where I'd gone off to?

There were leaves blown in around my feet, climbing my shins. My eyeballs constricted, dried and rough as river-stones. I bent as a cramp gripped me about the abdomen. In trying to divest myself of the red-gold-green apron of leaves, I tipped forward, barely breaking my fall with my palms. An electric current coiled up my forearms to my elbows. I grew still, blinking madly against the acidic burn around and over my pupils.

At long last, merciful tears flooded my eyes, blurring the landscape.

And that’s when something moved across my field of view, leaving me grateful for my overheated tear-ducts. Something dark, huge enough to block all daylight. A single point of deep crimson flashed right-to-left, bobbed back to sit directly in my field of view, as if noting me. Abruptly as it appeared, it was gone.

I tried to call out to her, but my throat felt full of sand. I managed only a cracked whisper. Then I fell, coughing.

Once I'd recovered and found my way back downstairs, Sarah was enshrouded by paper. Wrapped mummy-like in sheaves of it, a rainbow of whites from the bleached hue of fresh-fallen snow to the pale grey of old men's briefs.

The next moment Sarah sat up cross-legged on the floor, sifting pages. I wanted to scream my mortal terror, bellow like a foghorn. What I managed sounded like me clearing my throat; too rusty from disuse. For just a moment, I vividly recalled the crimson eye. Sarah looked up at me, startled into a tired smile. "How's it going, He-Man? You just about done?"

I searched my mind for some routine, predictable response. That's when we found the door.

10
It can be uncanny and disturbing when something you didn't notice before unexpectedly catches your attention. I remember the first time I helped my Dad with his woodworking, which he did in the basement. There was a large surge protector with electrical cords filling every socket, itself plugged into an overloaded wall outlet; the outlet was one of a pair situated to the left and right of his high worktable. They were painted two different colors, the overloaded one a bright red, and the other the exact same shade of blue as the painted cinderblock wall behind it.

I asked about the surge protector, since he had given both Sarah and I a lecture about the dangers inherent in overloading AC connections. I said, pointing at the second, available wall-socket, "Why don't you use that one, too?" His double-take remains one of the funniest gestures I have ever witnessed, and that includes cartoons.

I deserve credit for not giving away my own startlement ... or fright, when I saw the previously hidden door. My expression must not have changed at all.

Sarah said, "Please tell me you weren't smoking weed out there, in plain sight!"

I pointed at the door with my chin, behind and to the right of her, and said very casually, "Sarah."

She raised her eyebrows and smiled, then leisurely turned, as much as a person can turn while seated on the floor. "What, did you make a mess in the corn—wha! " She rapidly leaned away from the door, but otherwise took it better than my father had the painted electrical outlet.

"You see it."

She nodded once, a protracted up and down.

*     *     *
I was against opening it, never mind going inside. Sarah, however, cherished new experiences. The door was painted blue; it did not match the variegated shades of the cinderblock wall which it inhabited. The door's knob was a cheap, gold-tinted chrome. Probably aluminum. As she turned that knob and flung open the door, I was prepared for anything surreal, anything that would wake me from the depths of what I had come to believe might be a dream.

*     *     *
It was a room, and a well-appointed one at that. Sarah had no qualms about setting foot on the luxuriously thick, indigo or navy-blue carpeting, despite the dirt and grime that we would transfer from the basement, pasted on the soles of our shoes.

When I stepped into what appeared to be someone's home office, I felt my eardrums pop, as if the room were pressurized. Directly ahead sat an enormous oak desk, behind which was a high-backed chair, itself backed by a richly curtained window. A series of wooden file cabinets lined the left-hand wall. All these pieces were antiquated, like something from the 19th or early 20th century.

Sarah had, meanwhile, made her way around the desk. She pulled back the chair and proceeded to go through the drawers. "Sarah," I said, hoping she heard my note of caution. Even as I spoke, she opened the center drawer, pulling it wide. Only a single sheaf of papers occupied the drawer, leaving plenty of empty space, which I noted was lined with a waxy, pale blue paper.

"Sarah, don't ... "

She lifted out the stack of pages, all very thin, almost like onionskin. Several objects decorated the desk's glossy-wood surface. There was a fountain pen, antique in appearance, as well as what I assumed was a ceramic ashtray. There was a small scattering of vintage paper clips to one side and a loose pile of long, blank sheets of paper that I would learn, in subsequent years, was called foolscap, or Foolscap Folio, a British paper size replaced in 1911 by the A4 standard. A watermark adorned the lower corner of the foolscap. I picked one up for a closer look. It was a watermark shaped like a court jester, sporting a pair of horns.

The odd little watermark made the hairs stand up along the back of my neck. Even as I dropped the piece of foolscap back onto the desk, Sarah said my name, her voice heavy with a note of disquiet. She had been paging through the manuscript from the drawer, and apparently found something a few pages in that maxed-out her fear limit. As her terror set me vibrating like a tuning fork, I looked down at an ordinary, if somewhat thin, piece of standard-sized printer paper.

“This is a letter for us, and it’s dated today,” Sarah said, then read the date at the top of the page aloud, "June tenth." Even though I knew it could not be, I turned to Sarah and asked her if it was a joke. Her fearful eyes confirmed the reality of the document. “I never told Mr. Drexel that we would be here today. It really was spur-of-the-moment, you know that!”

The text of the document was a flowing, looping script reminiscent of a wedding invitation.

“Okay," I tried to soothe her, "breathe, try and calm down while I read this.”

11
10th June 2019

We cordially invite you, Miss Sarah Georgia Collins, to vacate THE PREMISES and join us for an eternity of unendurable agony. RSVP is unnecessary, as you do not possess right of refusal.

THE PREMISES are forthwith the property of Mr. Henry Constantine Balthasaar Dross.

WHERE: 222 JFK Drive (North), Starkly, NJ 00000, The Interstellar Cellar.

WHEN: Now

WHY: Ask your brother, he who treasures you above ALL THINGS.

Tenancy of THE PREMISES will thereafter be granted to Mr. Henry Constantine Balthasaar Dross, esq.

Looking forward to meeting you ...

Yours in Perpetuity,

BA'AL

*     *     *
"This is a sick fucking joke!" I remember saying that with a vivid clarity, those moments always faithfully played back in my thoughts with utter exactitude, like Memorex as our Dad would have said. I remember turning to find Sarah sitting calmly—too calm. "Sarah?"

Her continued silence, the sickly, yellow cast to her eyes, were very familiar, but they were not my sister's.

*     *     *
What happened to Sarah can best be explained through the usage of analogy:

Sarah is an unwary tourist whose local guide leaves her with a series of false directions. Through no fault of her own, she is set upon by a pride of starving and bloodthirsty lions, animals that have somehow learned to savor every morsel of human flesh that passes between their teeth. The tourist remains completely aware of exactly what is happening to her, as she is progressively torn apart. Her left leg, now bare right down to her toes, twisted, almost playfully, before it’s jerked from her pelvis; simultaneously, her right arm is mangled and pulled off in a single wrenching bite, producing an audible pop! as her shoulder is dismantled. No amount of blood loss produces the dimming consciousness she craves. Instead, her sanity fractures, but she remains very much aware.

Right up to the very end—as the alpha male manages to get her head between its jaws, gradually increasing pressure until her cheekbones shatter and her crown collapses like an overripe coconut—she is utterly aware. Only as the alpha slurps out her pre-frontal cortex with its abrasive tongue does that curtain of night come down ... only to lift again, with a complete and intact version of Sarah once more, helplessly, the clueless American tourist, on her final yet unending safari.

I know this because I feel it. Most nights. My twin, suffering.

Although the nightmares were sporadic in the beginning, exactly one week to the hour after I lost her, I had the first dream of this terrible obliteration. I now dream it on most nights. Its steadily increasing frequency does nothing to dull the horrific nature of these dreams. In each indistinguishable nightmare, I am Sarah. Needless to say, that which devours us is not a pride of lions, but an unseen and unseeable demon.

12
The yellow-eyed thing masquerading as my sister did not deign to drive us home. Any thoughts I had of leaving it behind were crushed when it opened the locked passenger-side door. The heat inside Sarah's Kia was hellish beyond that allowed by physics on a hot day in July. In the coming week, I discovered that suffocating torridity traveled with it, everywhere it went. Once I figured this out, I stopped chauffeuring this monster. I had held onto a small droplet of optimism that she was still in there somewhere, but that ceaseless broiling airlessness murdered all hope.

I listened to its comings and goings. One day, it charmed my parents with an award-winning imitation of my sister. They went out to dinner and never returned.

*     *     *
I used to have a twin sister. What happened to her is the very worst thing that ever happened to me.