Eternal Return
by C. M. Barnes
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 4 |
part 3
6/6/16
Doctor, I have seen things that cannot be. I don’t know how else to describe them, so I’ll just do my best to report them as clearly and accurately as possible. God help me if I am wrong, because you will have no choice but to conclude that I have lost my mind. But God help me even more if I am right! You will see why in short.
After finishing my entry from last night, I turned for bed with The Key under my arm. Soon, I was reading in my usual room with a welcome drowsiness descending behind my eyes. That’s when I turned a page to find a certain invocation circled in lively red ink. Loosely translated, it was titled “The Price of Eternal Return” and, I have to confess, I began to read it aloud. I don’t know why I did this. It’s certainly not how I typically study unfamiliar texts, and even a bookworm like me has seen enough horror movies to know you don’t just lie around reciting spells willy-nilly. But I did it anyway, almost as if some force beyond me was animating my lips.
I won’t repeat here what I said, though the damage is likely done. Suffice it to say that there was the usual shadowed invitation to the beyond, the standard grim offering of one’s body parts as sacrifice, and the typical death promise of fealty in exchange for a dark boon. But what a boon it was! My God: eternal youth, Doctor! The great halcyon grail of your profession since the dawn of... well, professions! And at what price? you ask. Because all great gifts come at a cost, don’t they? This one was no exception.
But first, let me say here, now, in the sober light of morning cresting the bloody peaks to the east, that I was not so far gone as to believe I was actually accomplishing anything as I read. I am invested in such material for my own profession, of course, but I am not mad, as our mutual, Victorian forebears would have put it. Yet, no sooner had I put the book down and turned out my reading lamp, still marveling at the gruesome but creative sacrifice supposedly required, then I heard that same tell-tale tap tap tap on the window over my head, a tap tap tap like a single, overgrown green nail would make on cold glass.
I shot bolt upright in bed, my metaphorical night cap pointing straight at the ceiling, and turned to look out the window. What I saw next was, well...
(I promised to report everything as accurately as I can. God help me a third time.)
The Actor’s face was staring in at me. It was that same famous, beautiful face that has graced so many slick posters and silver screens. Except, this time, it was staring at me from a depth of about an inch beyond the window pane. There were those same dimpled cheeks. There was that same inverted-almond chin. There were those million dollar chicklet teeth form-fitted together like wind-whittled bones. I blinked, uncomprehending but almost able to hear his voice delivering one of those memorable catchphrases. You know, the ones he always deals out when smashing the bad guy’s jaw or quipping to his smitten love?
But he said nothing. And I said nothing. And we must have stared at each other for a full minute, maybe even more. It was only toward the tail end of that minute that I noticed something even more amazing:
The Actor was dead!
(God help me a fourth time.)
How did I know? It was subtler than you might think. Those cheekbones, while still beautifully crafted, were also peeling slightly where the flesh peeked over the skull. That chin, almondy and cleft as ever, was absent of the full roundness of skin. The teeth, while still ostensibly perfect, were not actually pearly, but instead mossy in the yellow light piercing the glass. They were also larger than they should have been, as if they’d been growing unchecked in a gaping subterranean mouth. And those eyes! They weren’t the sparkling, mischievous miracles he has used to rule the box office for decades. Instead, they were dark but for a single cold point of white light burning deep within each cavernous pupil — two cold, white burning lights that made a mockery out of all that is logical in this world.
As I peered through the window, the terrible comprehension of the Actor’s true state seized hold of me like a meat packer’s frigid fist gripping my spine. I didn’t move, but he must have seen the horrid understanding in my face, because he raised a hand — also bloated and misshapen — to tap the glass again. His index finger nail was sharp and long enough to curl — even sharper and longer than in that insipid film where he plays a vampire. Tap tap tap.
That’s when I screamed and fell off the bed. This ungainly motion must have startled him because, when I rose, his face was gone from the window, replaced only by blackness.
But the impossible events of the night were far from over.
I had hardly regained my feet and drawn a very non-metaphorical robe around my nudity when something knocked on the front door of the house. Knock knock knock. It was a surprisingly civil sound, actually. Not aggressive. Not urgent, just a simple neighborly knock, more like a casita guest seeking the WIFI password than anything wanting to suck at your neck. That said, I certainly wasn’t planning to answer, but I also wasn’t sure if I’d locked the door. Why would I, being so utterly alone out here?
I ran down the hall to check, and that’s when I heard the exterior door to the bedroom next to mine creak open behind me. I whirled, not sure which direction to go, and stood there, frozen midway down the hall, for what felt like another full minute. Only the sound of weighty, mud-clotted footfalls in the bedroom freed me.
Unlike last time, I’m proud to report that I didn’t run away. Instead, I ran for the bedroom door. As I ran, I heard a second, louder, viscous footstep inside the room, as if whatever was invading the house was gaining confidence. But so was I, and — God help me a fifth time — I yanked open the bedroom door to confront whatever was in there before it could come any further.
It was the Actor again. Except, this time, (how best to describe this?)... he was more dead!
I don’t know how else to say it. I could see his full form now, as he was standing upright in the middle of the room. He was even shorter than expected and dressed in the filthy remains of what might have been an overlarge suit from the ’99 Oscars. Hard to say for sure, as there wasn’t much of it left and, rather than the visual treat of his exposed, cinematic corpus, there was only the ravaged, decaying limbs of a corpse!
Repulsed, my gaze immediately sought solace in his face. At least the face I had seen in the window was close enough to life to look upon. But alas! I found no refuge there. This face was little more than a skull draped in a few tattered flaps of gray tissue the texture and shade of a desiccated moth. Only the eyes sparked with that same cold white light, and I could not help but think that, while we living range tremendously in our beauty, the dead are pretty much ugly all alike.
That’s when the smell hit me: a stinking rot the likes of which no desert clime should have been able to support. Like disgorged meat fumigating up out of the sweaty pit of an outhouse, it washed over me in a wave of putrescence that soaked deep into my robe, my nostrils, my mouth. I retreated blindly, gagging, eyes closed, and ran my back up against the wall in the hallway.
That’s when I heard another step to my right. I turned and — have you guessed it already, Doctor? — saw the first face, the window face, grinning demonically down the hall at me from the living room. That’s right! There were two of the creatures, one far more physically corrupted than the other but both the Actor in various states of decay. What’s more — always more, more! — they had me in a perfect pincer the likes of which must have been planned. That is, if the dead plan, which I now have reason to believe they do.
With no place to flee, I finally found my voice. It emerged as an asphyxiated caw.
“What do you want?” I squawked. “Who?... How?... Why?”
But they said nothing; they only held their respective positions, not advancing, not retreating, one before me and one to my side. Certainly, no melodious, seductive vocal timber of cocksure masculinity poured forth to reassure me. Perhaps those sweet vocal cords had already rotted away? I could hardly stand up myself. My knees were shaking. My throat had swollen to a close. Is it too much to report that I pissed myself, Doctor? I pissed myself, pissed a warm, verdant stream down the front of my robe and onto my trembling foot.
“It’s the spell, isn’t it?” I finally managed to say. “The invocation. The ‘dark boon.’ He has enacted it. There’s no other way!”
Have you ever seen a decayed corpse nod? Of course you haven’t. God willing, you never will, but God help you if you ever do, as I should have written “heard” as much as “seen.” The tiny joints comprising the upper spine click percussively without any skin to muffle them. They rattle like trilled, unstrung piano keys, the dry clackity-clack of literal bone on bone.
I was treated to the horror of this noise in surround sound.
“Then I have been left for you?” I whispered.
More piano keys.
“I am to be your... your... food?”
Piano keys.
And that, dear Doctor, is when I fainted.
When I woke, it was morning — this morning, the first morning I’ve ever come into consciousness balled-up on the floor in a hallway shrouded in a piss-stained robe, at least since my undergraduate days. Faint gray light was seeping through the open exterior door to the invaded bedroom. Its interior door was still thrown open before me. More weak, milkish light trickled down the hall from the living room. A faint rush of wind signaled that the front door was also still open. There was no sign of the creatures, per se, only a lingering stench that had faded from gagging to merely nose-wrinkling.
I crawled — and I do mean crawled — to my desk where I am typing this now. Why they left me last night, I haven’t a clue. But, just in case you’re planning to write this all off as some paranoid delusion or psychotic break, please know the Actor’s corpses didn’t bother to clean up after themselves this time. Foul, stinking mud — mud as filthy and sulfurous as a violated grave — streaks the living room behind my quivering back.
God help me a sixth time!
As I see it now, I have two choices. The first is to leave this place, e-mail this journal to you, and let your diagnostic chips fall where they may. Will I be reinstated? I doubt it. It seems far more likely I’ll be institutionalized. Of course, I could also simply not submit this journal to you or to anyone. Still no job back, of course, but at least my life and freedom would be preserved.
But at what cost, Doctor? I am a single man. A solitary man. I have no children, no close friends, no dependents. To the extent my life has held any meaning, that meaning has lain in scholarship, and not just any scholarship, but scholarship of the occult. Aren’t I now confronted with the greatest professional mystery of my career, so great, in fact, that it has transcended the academic to breach into actual life?
How can I run from such an opportunity? Who would I be if were to retreat from the precipice overlooking the dark valley of knowledge I have so long sought? To put it a little more crassly, this could be huge for me: the discovery of not only a working spell for eternal youth — of a sort — but also that it has been used successfully by a living, breathing celebrity! Just imagine the Entertainment Today headlines! And I would be at their center: me, a lowly, troubled professor from a two-bit, tumbleweed college. I would not remain as such for long!
Which brings me to option number two: Remain here for at least one more night. Study The Demonic Key thoroughly and “The Eternal Return” invocation in exhaustive detail. See if I can come to understand what has happened here, what is happening here, more fully, and document it all in exhaustive detail for the million dollar, fame-bringing, ego-boosting, pseudo-academic blockbuster I am going to write. Imagine the possibilities, Doctor. Imagine the possibilities, Hannah, for that matter! My own decrepit looks aren’t going to matter a lick after this literary juggernaut hits the stacks!
But now I’m wasting time, because the choice is already made, isn’t it?
God help me for a final time.
Copyright © 2021 by C. M. Barnes
