Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

The unseen creature was surrounding me.

I mustered whatever steely reserve this little girl contained, and drew the blankets down, uncovering my face. My tiny hands were balled into fists, still clutching the blankets for dear life as my eyes strained against the black. But it was no use. Whatever was out there could’ve been six miles, six feet, six inches from my face, and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

I heard an awful clicking noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and the image of a basement in the desert —of a ruined brown-red beak —bubbled to the surface of my mind.

The monster in the dark whispered to me, then. Not a threat, exactly. More like an invitation. It seemed to speak not in language but images, each somehow imbued with a tone of lurid suggestion —of it feasting on my flesh, of it subsuming me, of me joining countless others of the eaten in an eternity of torment, of oneness, of experiencing the beast’s relentless hunger. Those countless others called to me as well, their throaty, lustful whispers assuring me it only hurts a moment, that soon I’ll see how fun it is down down down where they are, all I have to do is let the creature (Abyzou they called her in reverent tones) take me taste me eat me end me and oh how lovely it will be!

Though my mind had once proven closed off to such suggestion, world-weary and guarded as I’d then been, little-girl-me was guileless and unprotected. The desperate pleas of the consumed held me rapt, revulsion and morbid curiosity forcing me to listen —and the more attention I paid them, the more voices joined the chorus. Some begged, some threatened, some cajoled, but all to the same end: to partake of my flesh, my innocence, my life. And as the pressure they exerted on my fragile mind increased, I was horrified to realize I was tempted to give in, if for no other reason than to get them all to stop.

But they wouldn’t stop —I knew they wouldn’t.

And then I remembered my flashlight.

To this day, I don’t know if it was the part of me that was still Sam who forced that thought to the forefront and latched onto it like the life-preserver it was, or if in that moment, I was rescued from oblivion by a little girl. I suspect the latter. Because even if that little girl was nothing more than an echo, the woman she’d become now dead and gone, that little girl still thought she had her life ahead of her —which was more than I could say. And I can’t deny the surge of confidence I felt in the moment I made up my mind to fight —confidence born of faith, of trust, of a belief that in the end, good will triumph and the monsters will slink back empty-handed to their closet lairs. God knows I don’t usually think any such thing. God knows I normally have cause to know better.

I’m just glad I didn’t know any better right then.

I cast the blankets off. Mom’s hospital corners yanked free, and, with a sudden snap of flapping fabric like a flag in a strong wind, the bed linens disappeared into the void. Apparently, whatever was out there didn’t want to afford me the protection those blankets bestowed.

That was fine by me. I wasn’t the one who needed protecting.

The bed pitched and shifted beneath me like a bull trying to buck a rider. My world seemed to spin like a house caught in a tornado. It tied my stomach into knots and made even the simplest movements monumental acts of will. Debris swirled around me —debris that had once made up my room. One by one, the floorboards tore free, disappearing into the oppressive black as my covers had. Bent nails and wood splinters loosed in the process tore at my nightgown, and the tender flesh beneath. My stuffed rabbit, Mr Fluffy, whacked me in the face and caromed away too quick for me to catch. My child-heart felt a pang of sorrow as he was lost to the darkness.

Clutching the bottom sheet in one clenched fist, I swung my legs off of the bed. For one terrifying moment, my tiny feet found nothing, and I worried my plan was all for naught —that too much of the floor had torn away, and the flashlight had long since been swallowed by the abyss. But then my toes touched something solid, and my confidence returned.

I said a prayer and let go of the bed. The insane yawing cast me to my hands and knees. Around me, the voices of the creature’s victims redoubled their efforts, shouting screaming begging threatening pleading until my only thought was make it stop make it stop make it stop.

But it didn’t stop. It wouldn’t stop, unless I made it stop.

Fingers splayed, I dragged my palms across the floor, groping wildly left and right in a desperate attempt to find the flashlight. All around me, the darkness was alive with the voices of the damned, and the creature’s wretched slithering.

My right hand bumped hard round plastic. My left ankle was ensnared by something cold and wet —tongue or tentacle I wasn’t sure —and I yelped, my fear redoubling. My fingers closed around the flashlight as whatever grasped my ankle yanked me backward, an obscene mockery of my father’s playful act.

I rolled onto my back, wielding the flashlight before me like an unignited lightsaber. Then the floor under me ended, and I was falling.

No —not falling. Swinging at the end of this appendage. Dangling over the gaping maw of this blasphemous creature —this beast that would consume me, that would make me part of it forever.

I thumbed the flashlight’s switch.

The darkness shattered.

It was as though I’d switched on a bank of floodlights —as though I’d turned on the sun.

For a moment, I saw a tangle of mottled gray flesh, a gaping rust-colored beak —a wet, pulsing black gullet. Then the creature shrieked —my whole world shaking —and, in a wisp of oily gray-green vapor that put me in mind of rot, of sickness, of death, it simply ceased to be.

Just like that, all was silent.

Silent, but not still.

When the creature vanished, I was released from its grasp, and felt a sudden strange sensation —like falling, only upward. Despite myself, I dropped the flashlight, so disoriented was I by what was happening. It fell not upward with me, but down, and I soon left its blinding glow behind. But I did not fall in darkness. Phantom images swirled around me, a zoetrope of paths taken and not taken, of experiences long forgotten and lives never lived. For a time, the little girl and I were one, our experiences intertwined —every possible iteration of both our lives projected all around us as though in mockery of the path toward damnation we both chose. But slowly, that little girl and her experiences bled away, and with her, her sense of hope, of faith, of happiness.

Above me, something glimmered, like the surface of the ocean seen from below. Consciousness, I thought. I rose toward it without control, without volition, at once aching for the reality I’d abandoned, and for the fantasy from which I’d been so violently torn. All around me swam the demons of my past, the horrors of my present, the false promise of fu tures never realized. They reflected off the shimmering membrane above, funhouse images that seemed to mock the man I’d become.

Right before I broke the surface, I heard someone call my name, in a voice as beautiful as love, as sad as heartbreak. That one “ Sam ?” carried with it years of bitterness and sorrow, now long behind. That one “ Sam ?” somehow suggested eventual acceptance of who I was and what I’d done that fell somewhere short of forgiveness, and yet still seemed a kindness of which I was not worthy. That one “ Sam ?” conveyed an eternity of peace and happiness forever marred by my absence —an absence for which I, now made aware of it, would never forgive myself.

When I heard that solitary “ Sam ?” I wept like a child.