I’ve been dead for four days. I know the people around me don’t understand because my heart keeps beating out of sheer mechanical inertia, but the process is already over. There is no oxygen in what I breathe; only dry air goes in and out. My stomach stopped processing food on Tuesday, and the skin on my hands has lost its tone. When I move on the bed, I can’t feel the weight of my bones against the mattress. Lifeless flesh has no weight. It’s a simple biological matter: the organism shuts down, but some muscles take longer to catch on. I only go out into the street because dust gathers on my skin and being locked up in here only accelerates the stiffness.
I walked down the building corridor toward the exit. The landing lights were on, but the light brought no warmth to my face. When I reached the bottom, the ground-floor superintendent opened his door before I could touch the front door knob. He had a strange grimace on his face and was holding a yellow envelope.
“Joel,” he said, taking a step toward me. “I’ve been ringing your doorbell for two days. Your brother came by yesterday looking for you because you’re not answering your phone.”
I didn’t stop, but he placed a hand on my shoulder. The pressure of his fingers felt distant, as if he were touching me through a thick blanket.
“There’s nothing to talk about, Troy,” I replied without raising my voice. My voice sounded flat, scraped dry from disuse. “The phone no longer serves any purpose.”
“You’re pale, kid. You look like a rag. Your brother left this for you.”
He held out the yellow envelope. On the front, written in blue ballpoint pen in my brother’s hurried handwriting, it clearly read: For Joel Brennan. Troy waited for me to take it, but I left my hands hanging loose at my sides. Seeing that name on the paper did nothing to me. It was just a label stuck to a container that was already empty.
“Joel Brennan doesn’t live in this apartment anymore,” I said, looking at the wall behind him. “That name belonged to the person who occupied this body before Tuesday. What’s left here is just waiting for the process to finish.”
Troy took a small step back. His expression shifted from annoyance to a mix of confusion and alarm.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Joel? Stay right there, I’m calling your brother right now.”
I didn’t wait for him to pull out his phone. I pushed open the street door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
The morning air hit my face head-on, but my skin didn’t react with its usual twitch. I walked slowly along the sidewalk, keeping a steady pace. Around me, people hurried off to their jobs, swerving past me. As they crossed my path, some discreetly averted their eyes and quickened their pace; others stared straight into my eyes with a mix of disgust and caution. I know perfectly well why they do it. A body entering the decomposition phase emits imperceptible signals that the instinct of the living detects immediately. They sense the lack of heat and the stench of stagnant matter coming off me, even if they can’t put it into words.
Halfway down the avenue, I went into the small corner grocery store. The place smelled of ripe fruit and dampness. At the back, behind the cash register, the owner was placing a row of cans on a metal shelf. Hearing the door chime, she turned to greet me, but froze as soon as she saw my face under the white fluorescent lights.
“Good morning...” she said slowly, lowering her arms little by little. “Mr. Brennan, are you feeling alright? You look terrible. Let me bring you a glass of water and a chair.”
Nobody wants to accept the evidence when it’s right in front of them. She spoke to me in that measured tone people reserve for the sick or the injured, expecting a coherent response that would fit into her framework of how things work. She doesn’t understand that there is no water or rest that can revive an organism whose primary systems have already stopped. They think it’s just dizziness, a drop in blood pressure, or a bad night’s sleep.
“I don’t need water,” I told her. My throat scraped as I spoke, dry like a pipe no longer in use. “I only came in to grab one thing.”
I walked over to the wooden counter where a broken fruit crate sat. Between the pine slats was a thick piece of glass, part of a broken green bottle that someone had left forgotten there. I picked it up with my right hand. The sharp edge sank slightly into my fingertips without causing me the slightest discomfort. The woman took a step back, her eyes wide open and her lips tightly pressed together.
“Please put that down on the counter,” she whispered, timidly stretching out her hand. “Don’t do anything strange.”
I held her gaze. I needed to end this misunderstanding once and for all.
I drove the piece of glass into my left palm until it touched the bone. The cut opened the skin into two thick flaps, but I felt absolutely nothing. There is no pain when the nerves have already rotted away. A thick, viscous stream began to flow from the gash, the stagnant residue left inside me. I stood there looking at my open hand, waiting for the tendon to give way completely to prove to the woman behind the counter that the body no longer responds. She began to scream hysterically, grabbed my wrist tightly, and pressed a white rag against the wound. The rag instantly soaked up the liquid dripping down my forearm, staining her fingers a bright red. She still doesn’t understand. She thinks she’s trying to save my life, but she’s just dirtying her hands with something that no longer works.

TERROR OF THE NIGHT

Albion’s journal

 

Entry number 70.

 

This is another case I had to write about, for this patient’s story became partially my story as well.

 

Perhaps I have not mentioned this before, but I do psychiatry work outside the Parkhorst asylum as well. Sometimes clients visit me at the asylum in my office, on rare occasions I also visit them.

 

One day, I was deeply stressed after one of the patients threw a fit and tried to kill himself, I simply went to my office and wanted to relax a bit, but in my life, every time I try to relax even more things come up, I don’t even know why I bother trying that anymore.

 

My assistant came to me saying that there was a man that needed my help and it was life and death. Typically they all say that, but when the man named Don peeked through my door, he might as well been dead already by the looks of him. He was in his thirties. but looked to be sixty, his face carried an imprint of horror, the very definition of the word. Don had the largest black bags under his eyes I have ever seen, a tremendous redness inside his pupils, top front of his head was balding and rest of the hair was half grey, his face was pale and long, his lips have lost their color and looked like a dead rose. Don scratches his neck and constantly pulled skin on his fingers, all at the same time as he was shaking his legs. Even after so many years in the profession I could not help but feel his monstrous anxiety rub of on me.

 

I asked Don what the issue was and it took him a few minutes to start, as if he was scared to say something, Finally, he spoke of “her”, something that tormented him at nights and he could no longer take it. I asked him to describe his tormentor and how it happens. Don said that she comes at around 2am every night, although he has never seen how she appears,  his body becomes paralyzed, although he can still feel pain, she scratches him and cuts him with her long nails, he cannot look away for she forces his eyes open, she screams into his face. He described her as green without legs. Don took of his shirt, he was covered in cuts.

 

Usually I’d contribute something like this to deep trauma, and due to cuts I would keep someone here because they were a danger to themselves, but for some reason my intuition told me otherwise and I never go against my intuition.

 

This man came to me because he still had hope.

 

Hope for the best no matter what the circumstance is the most remarkable human quality.

 

At least in my opinion, so I agreed to accompany this miserable man to his apartment that night and stay till 2am.

 

I let my assistants know that I would only be back around 3am. They looked confused. but made no comments, I liked that about them. Not nosy rats.

 

Don came in small beat up car. As we drove back the night has sat in and Don’s driving became hectic. He was looking out into the darkness on the side of the road and freaking out! I ordered him to stop, the rest of the way I drove.

 

When we arrived at the place he lived, I have to tell you, it was a dismal view, worse than my asylum. These apartments were run down, broken, cheap, ugly, tiny and depressing. How could anyone sleep here and not have night terrors?

 

We went inside and since we still had four hours left, Don made us some tea. It was by far the most atrocious tea I have ever had. Did he make it out of dirt? Oh poor man. Around midnight he lay down to sleep and I sat in the chair next to him. A silly thing, but I fell asleep, after a while I heard a creak in the room and woke up, I quickly glanced at the watch. It was just a few minutes till 2am. I heard the creak again, it came from the tall old mirror that stood next to the door, and then I felt my heart rate rise rapidly as I tried to calm my breathing, for a green transparent hand emerged from the mirror, then the rest of her, a hideous, dried out witch, with a large mouth and long sharp nails. She floated above the bed and I saw Don’s eyes open in horror, he tried to look at me but immediately they went back to her, I attempted to move my hand, but I too was paralyzed. I tried to talk, but I couldn’t open my mouth, then to my horror she turned her hideous face to me and brought a sharp fingernail millimeter from my eye, she laughed in a demonic voice and then I could hear screaming inside my ears that almost erupted my eardrums. The only hope I had at this point is the idea that this experience will soon end, but I was wrong, the screams, nightmarish images implanted in my brain and her scratching agains Don’s body continued all through the night, until the first light came. Don’s eyes were shut then and she floated back into the mirror. This poor man! How has he endured such a thing!?

 

The moment my body was released from paralysis I shook Don and he could barely open his eyes. I told him that I was going to get father Lucas, the exorcist, immediately. I hoped that Don understood me and I ran to his car and drove to the church. After seeing the state I was in, father Lucas came right away. I drove through the streets like a madman.

 

Once in the room I saw Don still in bed, he was staring at the ceiling. When I explained to father Lucas what happened he stared at me like I was some kind of imbecile. I still remember him saying that one phrase with tremendous disdain.

 

“You destroy the mirror, and bury it.”   

 

It was such an obvious thing, I almost felt like his tone of voice suggested that I was a bastard for being so ignorant.

 

Father Lucas smashed the mirror and took with him in a bag without looking at me or saying goodbye.

 

I came up to the bed, Don was still staring at the ceiling. His lips were constantly moving, he was whispering random senseless things.

 

He was completely insane and now he has become one of the asylum’s patients. What a sad thing that he waited too long to seek help.

 

I almost went mad myself, just from that one time. For weeks I could barely get sleep and had to take anxiety tablets and sleeping pills.

 

Interestingly, whenever I saw Don in the asylum, his eyes looked rested, with hope in them.

 

I could say that I’ve been through stranger things, but then I would be lying to you.

The Count was eating cabbage stew with potatoes in his shabby tenement apartment overlooking the street where workingmen and their tired horses pulled tovar to and from the manufacturies all day—the crampiness of the place a merciless reminder of the once-great estate he had been forced to sell to satisfy his debts; the family estate, with its magnificent portraits of distinguished forebears under whose gaze he would now feel small, undignified and ashamed—when he happened to scratch his ear and his ear fell off (...splash...) into the stew.

Hungry, he ate it.

Then he bandaged his head and went to the doctor.

The doctor was an old friend.

“Sasha,” said the doctor, “how are you?”

The Count showed the doctor where his ear used to be. The doctor examined him. “Sasha, you are suffering from poor health,” the doctor concluded.

“Don't I know it—but what is wrong with me?” said the Count.

The doctor explained that “the poor health” was a specific condition. “Your body is decaying. It is rejecting the state of being destitute. For your own good, make money, Sasha.”

“How?” asked the Count.

However, the doctor was unable to provide an answer, Sasha remained poor and his body began to fall apart, piece by piece.

History marched on.

Anarchists set off bombs, socialists agitated against the established order with western ideas, and a revolution broke out, led—and increasingly dominated—by a party of Marxists.

Without one arm and with his skull showing through sections of his missing face, the Count decided to beg for their mercy.

“I need money,” he implored the local peasant-faced leader. “It is a matter of life and death. I have a disease, you see…”

“What happened to the money you had?” one of the party members asked.

He would perhaps have cringed at the Count's appearance, but the experience of the revolution had hardened him against the grotesque.

“It was lost,” said the Count.

Another party member, a sneering woman in a suit, said: “Surely you meant ‘money inherited after centuries of ruthless exploitation,’ comrade Pavlovich.”

“Indeed, that is more accurate,” said the leader.

(Months later, he would be accused of contact with foreign enemies and exiled, and she would take his place as leader.)

“But I have read your books,” said the Count, “Your principles, they are egalitarian, noble. ‘To each according to his need.’”

The party members laughed.

The laughter was cold.

The street was cold, and the Count shuffled along it with what was left of his head cast down. He was wrapped in scraps of fur and rags.

Like a leper he existed, at the very edge of society, forgotten, consuming rodents and refuse, physically declining—diminishing—a limbless skeletal wretch from whom even the other impoverished dregs averted their eyes. Thus, he was consigned to the dustbin of history...

---

The boy knocked on the door again.

“Anybody home?” he said.

It was the 1990s.

A babushka opened the door—widowed, most likely; devout—and eyed him with a century's worth of suspicion.

The boy smiled.

He held out money.

“Has the voucher come in the mail already?” he asked politely.

“What voucher?” the babushka asked.

The boy described what it looked like. “The new government is giving ownership of the old, broken state enterprises to all citizens. But, because everybody gets it, everybody gets only a little.” He paused to let that sink in. “Tell me, what is the use to you of owning a tiny fraction of a factory, a malfunctioning power plant? Wouldn't you rather have money instead?”

After dark, he returned to the apartment where he was paid and left the bag of vouchers he'd collected.

He took his pay off the kitchen table.

Usually, the doors in the apartment were all closed.

Today, one was open.

He peeked in:

A woman was inside. She was naked, moaning and she was holding—caressing in a way that made the boy's guts want to invert themselves—a football-sized lump of hairless human flesh: a lump of flesh with an eyeball in it, an ear, a nose and lips, which commanded suddenly: “Shut the door!”

The boy was not invited back after that.

He fell tragically from a window.

---

The small, quiet drones drifted in peaceful horizontal lines before releasing molten thermite on the protestors below.

His purchase of the port at Klaipėda had recently been announced.

Elsewhere, the construction of the new, southerly pipeline was proceeding as planned.

The war continued.

The data centres on the vast, deforested Siberian lands hummed with artificial intelligence.

He switched off his infoview, returning him to where his body was: his country estate, where the Chinese cyberneticist had almost finished upgrading his bionic memory capacity.

That said, it was no longer accurate to say he was here—or anywhere.

He was everywhere.

Seated, he felt limitless within his osseointegrated beta-titanium endoskeleton. If he wanted to, he could have killed the cyberneticist at the snap of a nitinol tendon, with the superhuman strength of his electroactive polymer musculature. “Alexander,” he “heard” somebody say. “Yes?” he silently replied. The cyberneticist applied the final touches. It was the European President speaking. “Winter is coming,” she was “saying,” “and we've yet to agree how to reroute the gas to avoid running afoul of our sanctions.” It was amusing, he thought, to still be so theatrically staging the appearance of a rule-based global order in this era of pure power…

Later, he strolled through his estate alone, all comms silenced, considering the portraits of his ancestors on the walls. Each generation is capable of everything, he thought, except imagining its own obsolescence.

Then he sat down to dine.

Cabbage stew with potatoes and a human ear. Not his own, of course, but the power resided in the symbol. The game may be played always into the future, but one must never forget one's origin. Tradition was often the boot on the throat of the present.

After a slow start, it was truly shaping up to be a magnificent millennium.

It is not strange for cats to go missing in our village. With almost no natural predators, everyone's cats are outdoor cats. They sometimes wander off or get run over, but when the fifth cat disappeared, people started asking more questions and keeping their cats inside. Even I started letting my precious orange cat Gingy out less. She didn't mind much; she already spent most of her time purring on my lap inside.

Some suspected wolves when a deep, unnatural animal growl began echoing through the village at night. People stopped letting their cats out at night, and barely let them out during the day.

I stopped letting out Gingy too. She loved running through our yard at night, chasing fireflies and meowing at other cats. I could see her bright green eyes staring at me each time the sun set, but I knew it was for the best. 

After a while, Gingy got used to staying home at night watching TV with me, but when the growls came, her whole behaviour changed. She'd perk up her ears, run to the door, and meow at it. It would always take at least 10 minutes of pets and a treat to calm her down.

Some time later, after the growls appeared, the first death came. Mr. Harlow was an older man who had a few chicken coops and a nice garden. He always waved when you passed and stopped to talk about your day.

One morning, his neighbour came to visit. Mr. Harlow's fence was broken down, the chicken coops were empty, and his body was full of scratches and bite marks. Not even a feather was left behind. 

People stopped going out alone even during the day. More and more cats disappeared. The growls came more frequently. Gingy now meowed at the door all night, and even treats couldn't quiet her.

Around this time, another attack came. While patrolling his yard, Mr. Harlow's neighbour saw a few of the missing cats on the roof, watching him with their glowing eyes. Then the growl came, closer than ever. All the cats stopped and turned their eyes to him. He stood frozen. Something jumped at him and scratched him. He tried to turn, but a few other animals jumped on him. He fired his gun into the ether. The animals were gone before he got off the ground, and the cats disappeared too.

One night Gingy sat on my lap, purring, when the growl came again. Gingy perked up her ears, shot her eyes to the door, and ran to it.

"Gingy, not again."

The meows. She scratched at the door with her paw.

"Gingy, please!"

She let out the most bloodcurdling meow and got up on her hind legs.

"Jesus."

I got up and went to the kitchen for a treat, even though it probably wouldn't work. I opened the package. She went silent. Then, through the silence, a door creaked. I looked back. Gingy hung from the door handle with her front paws as the door slowly opened.

"Gingy!"

She jumped down and slipped into the night. The treat dropped to the floor. I opened the door and rushed out after her. The outside air was cold. The growls were so loud outside. The streets were empty; only the lamps shone down. Gingy ran in the middle of the street toward the forest. 

"Gingy!" 

She got off the road and ran into the tall spruce trees. I took a deep breath and ran after her. The trees swallowed the light. I couldn't see Gingy, but I could still hear the growls nearby, and I was sure she was heading there. 

The deep growl echoed to my left. I crouched down by a tree and slowly looked there. All the village cats sat around a strange creature; its large silhouette towered over them, its huge glowing eyes stared at them, and it let out another deep growl. The cats turned and began walking toward the village in unison. 

My heart beat against my ribs. So many cats, and the thing was so huge, but my Gingy was among them. I swallowed and let out a silent pst pst, the one she'd always listened to. Gingy stopped and looked my way. I gripped the tree bark and pst pst again. She let out a silent meow and walked toward me. I was scared the other cats would turn, but they kept heading toward the village, their leader at the back.

"Gingy, come."

I reached for her soft, ginger fur. Her eyes looked into mine, but no recognition passed through them; they looked empty.

"Gingy?"

She let out a loud hiss and jumped at my hand. Sharp pain shot through it. She scratched and bit it aggressively.

"Gingy, stop!"

But she kept biting. I hated it, but I had to punch her to make her let go. Warm blood trickled down my hand. Gingy ran back to the cats, and they all stopped and looked my way. Panic ran through me, but the large thing let out another growl, and they turned back toward the village. I turned and bolted through the empty forest. The twigs hit my face. My feet slipped in the dewed grass. I kept expecting the big cat to jump on my back at any moment, but before I knew it, I was out in the village next to ours.

They bandaged my hand and called the police. When the policeman arrived, the whole village was quiet. The doors hung open. Everyone from my village lay in their houses in a pool of blood, with scratch and bite marks all over their bodies. The police found nothing but a few whiskers and soft, orange fur on the floor.

They let me go the next afternoon once the houses were clear. I was barely able to function. Out of habit, I reached for Gingy's bowl. Then I saw my bandaged hand.