Spooky Story by paurian
The old man watched the red and blue lights blaze through his window. He sat on the edge of the bed and pondered which of his friends would be missing from breakfast tomorrow. It was a nightly event for the Goodwill Fire Department to be pulled up in front of the New Haven Rest Home. He shambled to the window.
Three squad cars painted with the GPD shield and one more wearing the Mason County Sheriff’s. The whole department is out tonight…There was a wailing of sirens as an Ambulance pulled in. They were pulling into the dirt track behind the old Lakin Hospital.
The old man turned away from the window. His attention was grabbed by the concave mirror hung above the sink. He stared into that black void every morning. One of the volunteers from the offices downstairs gave him a quick tour when the State dropped him off here.
“This whole building used to be a town house owned by Jonathon Thomas,” he had said. “He was rumored to be head of a cult. Kept them all here before the town died. Must have been some truth to it, though. All the mirrors in the house are made of black glass. We’d take them down, but New Haven said that’d ‘disturb the history’.” He made air quotes. He noticed the old man was just staring into the corner and backed out the room.
The old man made a mental note to check the papers for what happened last night, but knew he’d forget. He glanced in the mirror again. His heart fluttered and his knees failed him. He tumbled backwards into the bed.
There was another face in the mirror. Except…except for the blue eyes. They were identical. They glanced in the direction of the old man’s simple twin bed. He clenched his chest and heaved. Reason started clicking in his head. Had to be a trick of the light…these God damn mirrors.
Then he had a far more disturbing thought. Far more disturbing than a different face in the mirror. Far more troublesome than an unfamiliar man peering at him from another world. Did I forget my own face?
He scratched at the gray stubble on his cheek. No, no. It was far too young. He looked for his wall clock closing his eyes to skip over the mirror. The hands were on eleven and ten. The news was already on; maybe they’d have a breaking new segment. Christ, am I really this old?
The floorboards creaked when he leaned forward for the remote. He looked down to see his slipper punch through the floor. He withdrew his foot and the board came clattering back down. He got to his hands and knees to push the board back in place. No, better leave it. Then I’ll never remember to tell housekeeping. He caught sight of something in the gap. He plunged his hands into the crevasse and pulled out a leather bound volume.
2
Jonathan sat on a bench in Olympic Park and sketched the wildlife as it passed. A man galloped past on all fours doing a crab walk. The man’s skin was gray and papery. It was tearing apart at the seams. It came to a stop in front of Jonathan’s bench, stretched his neck, and tucked its head behind its shoulders.
Jonathan recoiled when a red tongue slipped from behind its teeth and raked the side walk. He did a quick calculation in his head as to just how many germs would be teeming, how many passing children have dropped food, and how many dogs raised their legs.
“Look at that man, Mommy,” a little girl laughed.
He dropped his pen and looked up. Could she see it? She was wrapped in a wool coat and tugged at her mom’s sleeve.
“Mommy? Why is he crying?”
The mother’s hand covered in a red leather glove covered her mouth. Jonathan reached his hand to his eye. It tapped the dark lens of his sunglasses, and his finger dabbed at the warmth trickling down his cheek. He saw the splotches of crimson on the ends of his fingers. Shit. I’ve been out here too long.
The creature at his feet jerked and scampered away when Jonathan rose. He tucked the leather binder under his arm and bolted without a word.
3
The old man woke up in bed still wearing yesterday’s clothes and perspiration. A leather binder was spread across his lap. The page was open to a sketch in ink of a man on all fours. His tongue dangled over his upside down face.
He flipped back to the beginning of the book. The pages were cracked and yellow just like him, but unlike him these pages would never forget. Each one was devoted to preserving a singular thought and would hold it until the day it was destroyed. A pile of white lichen. A tall black figure without a face dragging a sledgehammer in its wake. A nude woman standing in waist deep water – a human heart in her hand.
Each page was more disturbing than the last, but the old man couldn’t help but feel a twinge of admiration for them as well. A jealousy crept through his heart, and he pushed the volume to the floor. He pulled his cane from the night stand.
The old man hobbled downstairs to the front desk. The nurse chatted on the phone. Her long purple claws clicked away at the keyboard.
“Did someone visit me this morning?” he said.
She paid no attention.
“Excuse me!” he repeated. “Did someone visit me this morning?”
The nurse sighed. “Can I put you on hold for a moment?” She looked up at him and never bothered taking the receiver from her ear. “What?”
“Did someone visit me this morning? Like my family or something?” He wasn’t sure if he had a family.
“Name?”
He searched, but it didn’t come to him. He stood there with his index finger and middle finger pressed against his lower lip. The nurse let out a monstrous sigh.
“Room number?”
He pulled a key from his pocket and checked the tag hanging from the ring. “634.”
She spun the clipboard on the desk in her direction and scanned it. “No visitors today. Or this week. Are you expecting anyone?”
“Never,” he sighed. Some kind of task for housekeeping tickled the bottom of his brain. Failing that he came up with something that would get them up there and fast. “I shat the bed.”
The nurse rolled her eyes and pressed the intercom button. “We have a code brown in room 634.”
The old man hobbled back to the elevator. He was intent on beating housekeeping there before he was confined to bed pan only. Hopefully what he actually needed was obvious enough.
He stepped back into his room. The binder was lying in the sink. Did I leave it there? There was a subtle difference between having Alzheimer’s and simply forgetting. It was a simple litmus test. Someone with Alzheimer’s cannot remember that they forgot – no matter how many reminders.
He picked up the binder. A folded sheet of paper slipped from its pages. He picked up the sheet and unfolded it.
A pair of black eyes stared back at him from the pages without even a hint of white. They belonged to a shriveled gray man that took up the whole page. His head was devoid of any hair.
4
“Here,” Jonathan said. “It’s weakest here.” The obsidian arrowhead spun in a furious clockwise motion from the end of its silver chain. He tucked the arrowhead back into the pouch hanging from his neck. He motioned to the men behind him and pointed towards the ground.
The men in black cloaks placed the massive black mirror on the ground. Jonathan pulled the compass in its gold case from the pouch and mimicked the direction it pointed. A figure bearing a black banner plunged it into the ground. Three more planted banners in a clockwise formation around the mirror.
A woman with raven hair brought him the Sword. She pulled the hood back over her head and knelt before the mirror. The two that were carrying their mirrors circled laying the protective circle. The four corners cried their Invocations.
Jonathan began the ritual proper. He beseeched the spirit Lam to appear for them in the mirror. Lam the famous Saturn spirit that communed with Aleister Crowley. Wishing to create the Moonchild, L Ron Hubbard conspired with this creature in his OTO days. This was only an experiment to reach out to creatures from another world. No motives.
“Nothing,” the Oracle whispered. Jonathan fought the urge to touch his eye patch. He did not have consistent Sight without the needle and it had been exhausted. He relied on his Oracle to be his eyes. His mind must stay on the Evocation.
He shouted incantations demanding that the spirit appear to them in the mirror. He poised the tip of the Sword over Lam’s sigil. There would be repercussions if it did not appear now.
“I see it now,” the Oracle whispered.
“Spirit!” Jonathan said. “I command you in the name of YHVH to speak only truth and identify yourself!”
“Something’s wrong…” the Oracle gasped. “There…there’s hundreds of them. They are dragging themselves through. There’s a tear in the window. They’re…They’re slipping through!”
“Everyone concentrate on the Circle! Don’t let them out!” Jonathan raised the Sword over his head. He began the Banishings. The Oracle gibbered and shrieked. He stopped mid-incantation. He could see the spirits now. One was through. It hovered over the mirror. A tiny and shriveled thing devoid of sex and hair. Its eyes were black, scrying mirrors.
Sirens wailed. Red lights flashed over the Ritual. Deputies shouted at them through megaphones from their Mason County cruisers. The color drained from the tiny man. Its eyes flashed red, and bat wings sprouted from its back. They beat against the ground and the thing took off. A myriad of tiny hands pushed through the mirror. Its black glass clung to their papery skin like film.
“Scatter! Leave the equipment!” Jonathan shouted. The men in cloaks ran. The Oracle convulsed on the ground. Two deputies leapt from the cruiser. Jonathan drove the Sword through the mirror and stuffed the parchment bearing Lam’s sigil into his mouth. He hooked the Oracle under her arm pits and scurried with her into the fog.
5
“How are you feeling today?” the red head asked. The old man looked at her sitting in the chair on the other side of the room. He sat on the edge of his bed. Adult Protective Services sent him a looker this time. Of course, he would have rather the State sent him a hooker instead of a Social Worker.
“Do I have a family?”
“I’m sorry to say no Mr. Thomas,” she said. “Technically, the State put you here.”
“Guessed as much. Um…is the feeling that you’re being watched and followed at all times normal?”
“No, that’s paranoia. How long have you been feeling this way?”
The old man shrugged. “I think I might also be seeing things. Out of the corner of my eyes. Can’t look directly at them before they slip away.”
“I’ll make an appointment with the physician for next week.” She made a note on her clipboard. “Please be candid- sexual encounters included. Syphilis has a high rate of occurrence in nursing homes.”
The old man shrugged. “I wouldn’t know if I’m getting any or not. Be news to me either way.”
“Right.” She made another note on her clipboard. “Is there anything you need? That the facilities are not providing?”
“Well, while we’re on the subject and before I forget.” He scratched his chin. “I could use some porno. I could use a hobby, and I’m pretty sure I can’t misplace my dick.”
One more note. “Anything else?”
He closed his eyes, ran his thumb and index finger over his cheeks, then his eyelids, and pinched the ridge of his nose between two thumbs. “Some smokes.”
“I’m required to mention that smoking has a proven link to lung cancer and encourage you to join one of the facility’s many programs.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered and rubbed his forehead. “But I’m pretty sure you’d say no if I asked for a gun.”
“Have you been having suicidal thoughts?”
The old man threw up his hands. “I forgot.”
6
Years later they regained their strength and found another weak point. A spot away from the highway. Down in TNT behind the Lakin Sanitarium – close to home. His Oboth urged him on in tiny whispers. Jonathan was still not blessed with the Sight, but his other senses were sharpening. He dragged the Sword along behind him returned to him via police auction.
“Here,” his familiar said in a rasp. Tiny invisible hands pressed against his chest. Not enough force to push him back, but tiny pin pricks like his chest had gone asleep. He raised the Sword and the procession behind him stopped. He gestured towards the ground and they placed the Mirror.
He peered at his reflection in the abyss. The Oracle was useless to him. She saw demons in every shadow and elementals under every stone. He took responsibility for her, paid her hospital bills, and kept his distance in hopes that one day she would forget.
A tiny silver glint danced on the point of the pin he withdrew from the inside of his glove. He clenched his right eye shut and forced his left wider with thumb and forefinger. The other hooded men milled around him tending to their various rituals and implements. The tip of the needle passed as if his pupil were a void.
He did not flinch. Crimson spread across the iris like the sun eclipsing. His Oboth appeared beside him. It took his visage. His blue, curious eyes took in the scene around him.
Jonathan Thomas began his incantations.
A woman hovered over the mirror now. She clenched a bundle in her arms. Her grey dress now in tatters swirled around her uncovered feet.
“Identify yourself!” he barked. “Draw your sigil, spirit!”
The spirit opened her eyes. They were pure black within black. He observed him passively and pushed the bundle forward. His stomach sank and saliva pooled under his tongue. His familiar turned into a wisp and hovered behind him.
“I command you in the name of Adonai to identify yourself!”
The shredded gray cloth unfurled around the bundle. The gleaming white head of an infant stared back at him. It seemed to stare straight right through Jonathan. Its very sight repulsed him and of all the otherworldly creatures he’d spied this one was the first that truly unsettled him.
The baby grinned.
“Spirit! I command you to withdraw from this world!” He bellowed the dismissals. The static in the mirror faded, but the Spirit remained. She stepped forward her feet held aloft. Jonathan took Lam’s sigil and dropped it on the black candle of the Circle.
Its center turned orange and the black spread gangrene over the parchment. It crumbled into dusk and scattered around the candle. She took another step and raised the baby overhead. The threadbare blanked spilled on to the ground and vanished.
Jonathan shielded his eye. The baby was too bright. It cast its own silver light over the ritual. He sprung to his feet and drew the Sword. The woman halted before the tip.
“Draw your Weapons and form on me!” The other hooded men gathered behind him. They bore their weapons Athame, Wand, Pentacle, and Chalice. He took a step back, and they followed his example. The woman took a step forward.
They continued this way back to their home. They picked up their pace over the highway. The man in the back unlocked their door, and they crossed the threshold. Jonathan slammed the door.
They took a step back. Nothing. Then another – still nothing.
They let loose a pained and collected sigh.
The black eyes of the woman glared at them through the tiny glass window set in the door. Silver light peeked under it.
7
“Three days.”
The old man sat up in his bed. His hands went to his left eye. The lights were still on. He looked down and found the leather volume in his lap- the sketch of a woman and child. The infant was constructed with only three simple lines. It reminded him of staring into the sun. The dogs of panic dug at the edges of his sanity.
He got to his feet and dropped the book from the window. He cut the cold air off with his guillotine window. He saw a sea of rodents pour from the woods. They dashed across the highway, and like lemmings half their number was cut down by passing cars. The survivors dashed across the lawn and vanished in a hole on the corner of the rest home.
The old man turned from the window. A pair of stolen, blue eyes watched him from the mirror hanging from above the sink. The young man that haunted his dreams was watching him. A voice boomed from all around the room.
“Three days!”
The old man fell back into the chair. He looked across the room and spotted the leather bound volume resting in his bed. He pressed his face into his hands and wept. In the morning he would request a room change, but probably forget.
8
“Three days.”
Jonathan’s chin rose from his chest.
“Three days! Three days! Three days!” his Oboth droned on.
He cussed and crawled to his feet. The Sword tumbled to the ground. He was cradling it in his sleep again. Rats scampered over his path. They were the first ones to figure out that that this ground was warded.
He twisted the key of his can opener and released the aroma of Chef Boyardee. He shoveled the cold macaroni and tiny meat balls into his mouth with his fingers. He licked his fingers clean and unfurled the map of Goodwill he swiped from Town Hall. The pendulum hung from his fingertips, and he held it over the map.
It passed over the map until the arrowhead circled a townhouse downtown. He marked the spot on the map – a new one. He pulled out his pocket watch and confirmed it was still broken. He trudged down the stairs. The blade of the Sword banged on each step.
And to think they called him a Cult leader. A cult leader wouldn’t put up with this shit. A cult leader wouldn’t have given all his followers an out. The followers of a cult wouldn’t abandon their Leader.
The occurrences were lessening after the people left. These things trying to worm their way into our world. Things that did not bow down to any Earthly god. Maybe, just maybe if they stay away, a day will come when he doesn’t have to do this anymore.
To think there was a time when he actually helped these things through.
He continued down the highway the sword dragging behind him. He caught a glimpse of something sliver from under the Lakin Sanitarium. Necessity was the invention of all things. He learned long ago how to watch things in his peripheral.
The thing hesitated and contemplated Jonathan. It could smell the wards still clinging to him from the house. He didn’t waste a second and dashed the thing’s brains out on the blunt edges of the Sword. He pushed the dented tip through the creature’s throat. He wondered when the day would come when he couldn’t lift the Sword anymore and knew it was coming soon.
9
Something dripped from the ceiling on to the old man’s face. He brushed his face and woke up. He looked down at his hands and spotted a red smear across the palm. He looked up and expected something as macabre as blood dripping from the ceiling. Nothing there.
He rubbed his forehead again and came back with nothing. He looked down and expected to find the leather bound volume. He didn’t.
Instead there was a highway atlas of West Virginia. A pin glinted silver by he lamp light. Its tip was dark and rested on an ‘X’ crossing town hall.
“One hour.”
The old man looked at himself in the mirror. He mimicked the phantoms movements. He stretched his eye lids between thumb and index finger. He slid the needle in with the ease of a contact lens. The room was transported to its decrepit state during the Exodus. He picked up the steak knife from his dinner tray and carved the Sigils down the length of his cane.
10
“Tragedy has struck again in Mason County,” reported the news Anchor, “Two injured and one dead in Goodwill today. Best known for his alleged cult activity during 1969, Jonathan Thomas beat two orderlies and killed a security guard in Town Hall. We go live to Stacy McCormick at the New Haven Rest Home.”
The image of the man was replaced with a blonde woman. Black circles of mascara run under her eyes. The caption Melissa Adkins – Nurse on Duty scrolled at the bottom of the screen.
“I knew there was something wrong when I saw him. He was wearing sunglasses, and I thought he was crying. He was heading for the door, and I called security. I’ve never seen anything like it; he downed them both with like one hit.”
The camera panned to a brunette in a smart, blue pants suit.
“He was found an hour later in Town Hall,” Stacy said. “Police found him beside the body of one security guard, Kenneth Roberts. Police stated if they had not found Thomas on the scene they would have assumed it was an animal attack. Due to his Alzheimer’s and dementia it is currently unclear whether Thomas will stand trial for this. He is currently being held in Sweetbrook Hospital’s urgent care wing due to self inflicted wounds. Back to you, Tim.”
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Roberts family tonight.”
11
Jonathan tumbled over the body of a security guard. The throat was slashed and eyes mashed in the sockets. Howling ripped through the air and slashed his forearm that instinctively covered his face and throat. He knocked aside the talons with his cane.
“You’re too late,” the lady in gray snarled. His younger doppelganger, his Oboth, leapt on her. Her talons reduced him to mist in an instant. Jonathan slipped the impaled tennis ball from the end of his cane. Screaming the Banishings, he lunged and drove the Sword through her heart.
Her legs melted into the mist that poured through the open door.
“How long Jonathan Thomas…” she croaked. “How long is it until you forget us?”
12
The old man thrashed against his bindings in the hospital bed. His left eye was covered, but he couldn’t remember why. Did he always live here? The machinery around him chirped in reply.
“I brought what you asked,” said a red head standing beside his bed. “Well, the other thing you asked for.”
The old man shrugged.
“But I can’t leave it here…” she said. “Bringing documents is more along the lines of your attorney’s job.” She unfurled a map in his face; it was covered with tiny black X’s that held no meaning for him. There were hundreds of the little marks. He stared at it and said nothing.
“For your sake I hope you never remember what you did,” the social worker said before leaving.
The old man thrashed. He was laying on something uncomfortable. His bedpan? The leather volume slide from under his cover and hit the floor with a plop.
“Five days,” the air whispered.
