Tim Meyer - The Switch House

Whatever the presence was, it waited in there with her. And it didn’t want her to leave.

From somewhere off in the distance, Terry screamed again. The inarticulate call for help seemed several houses away.

How was this possible? She’d gone downstairs fifteen minutes ago. How could this happen so quickly?

She was hallucinating again. There was no other explanation for the cobalt scenery, at least nothing logical. She needed to ride this waking nightmare out until Terry came to her rescue and towed her out, lugged her back to reality.

But that scream.

His scream.

It sounded so real.

And so far away.

She had no choice. Moving into the mist, drifting along with the tumbling waves of fog, she concentrated on the invisible course she had set, toward the bed. The bathroom door was next to it, and she figured, if she could reach the threshold safely, she could crawl out the window, onto the roof, and figure out what to do next once she got there.

Deeper into the cerulean mist, she traveled. A few steps in, she glanced back over her shoulder and saw the door was gone, enveloped in tufts of foggy barricades. A part of her, the rational half, the part which hadn’t lost itself in her own delusions, realized this couldn’t be real. That this wasn’t a hallucination; it was a living nightmare. That she was currently in bed, her overactive imagination dealing her a doozy of a dream. She convinced herself she’d fallen asleep and soon she’d wake to her little slice of American Pie, next to her loving husband who’d shower her with hugs and kisses and morning cuddles. But then she peered down at the fleshy ruin that was her palm and her mind suddenly went to dark places, allowing the other part of her—the sinister half—to speculate. This part of her persuaded her to believe she lived in a bewitched house, that this was a product of the woman who had lived here for two months, hexing the place, spreading her witchcraft throughout every room, casting spells on every material thing she owned. She directed her attention back to the blanket of blue fog before her, the direction of the path to the bathroom, and raced toward the threshold.

What should have been a three-second march turned into a thirty-second hike, and she was no closer to the bathroom than she had been half a minute ago. There were no doors ahead—just an endless stretch of turbulent brume.

Impossible.

But was it? Was it any more impossible than peering through a hole in her bathroom wall and witnessing a tiny pirate ship suffer destruction under the beastly force of an enormous Kraken? Or being the only person on the planet tuning into Let’s Switch Houses! that saw the old woman conducting some sort of sinister séance in her living room? What about the dream she’d experienced? The one where her house sat in the middle of a place known only to her as The Everywhere, though, she had no clue how or why she knew it was called that. That was when dreams were just dreams and they were allowed to be nonsense. Now she had different opinions on dreams and how they should behave.

She longed for the days when dreams were just dreams and not horrible realities.

Ignoring her thoughts and the hopelessness they tacked on her shoulders, she surged ahead, pushing her way through the mist. The acrid stench that had made her want to revisit her dinner grew bolder. The sound of air whooshing past her ear became distinct, louder. Almost inside her ear. Like a ball pitched at her head, missing by mere inches.

A shadow materialized in the mist. A figure. A man or a woman, she couldn’t tell which. Whoever ( whatever) it was acted as if they were dancing, frolicking in the blue haze overlaying the bedroom.

If this is still my bedroom, she thought irrationally. She couldn’t shake the feeling that her body and mind were somewhere else now, lost in a place between places.

(The Everywhere)

(Ma-me)

The figure bumped into her, knocking her back a few feet. Upon closer inspection, she realized the phantom-like being was a man, and he was naked, his body taking on the same hue as the rest of the room, that cobalt glow. His back faced her and his arms were moving as if entwined in some Egyptian boogie, mimicking the flow of octopus tentacles waving through the depths of the ocean. His limbs moved awkwardly as if he were double or triple-jointed. The unsettling fluidity of his movements made her instantly nauseous, and she felt stomach bile burn her throat upon its ascent.

Then, the figure turned and faced her.

Her heart hammered, slamming against her chest cage.

Both of the figure’s eyes and mouth were sewn shut, black wire laced up over them, the healing wounds oozing with infection. The man whimpered, or maybe laughed—Angela couldn’t tell which—and then disappeared as rolls of fog draped over him. She watched his shadow dance into nothingness.

Angela shrieked, but her voice received no echo, no play anywhere except the few feet in front of her mouth. The dense mist smothered her sound, absorbing the echo of her shrill outburst.

Another figure appeared; this one female. She was also naked, walking slowly as if she’d died and reanimated. Exiting the mist, the unclothed woman entered a small clearing about three feet from Angela. Her mouth and eyes were also wired shut. Dribbles of blood ran from the incisions, leaking down her cheeks and the sides of her face. She stumbled past Angela, paying no attention to anything except whatever she was striding toward. Angela kept completely still and clapped her hand over her mouth, careful not to utter a single noise.

Where am I? she thought as thick loops of fog swallowed up the woman’s shadow. What is this place? It certainly wasn’t home and certainly wasn’t Red River, New Jersey. Once, when she was about nine, she’d gotten lost, turned around, in the woods near her parents’ home. Every path looked the same, every tree. It had taken her hours to wander her way out. The dread of becoming lost, coupled with the plausible possibility she’d never be found, was a unique experience, one she thought she’d never feel again. But now, in the place that wasn’t her bedroom and likely wasn’t anywhere , that odd sense of being misplaced nestled against her bones once again.

She continued on, mindful of the shadows forming at the edge of obscurity. A few more naked shufflers scurried past, some more grotesque than others. Some of the walking corpses wore zippers on their flesh, the kind found on puffy snow jackets. One gentleman cruised by, opening the zipper across his stomach as he passed Angela, letting everything inside tumble out onto the floor. To Angela, the spilled contents looked like a heap of uncooked meats mixed with a few jars of chunky tomato sauce. She avoided contact by simply dodging past, preventing her curious eyes from wandering. The man didn’t follow her but his head spun in her direction as she skipped by. She felt his eyes—not that he had any—on the back of her neck until she had made it far enough into the mist to where she felt safe.

She walked for ten minutes. More of the shambling dead came and went; each one eager to show her things that brought forth disgust and bouts of nausea, things she couldn’t possibly conjure on her own. A man walked by with a hacksaw blade halfway buried in his throat, and he was hellbent on working the fine-toothed metal all the way through, streams of blood pouring from the ragged slice. A woman plucked her own fingernails off with her teeth, laughing hysterically as each one tore free. Two children were dragging a toy behind them, tugging on a piece of rope, only it took a moment for Angela to notice the toy was an adult (possibly a parent) and the long rope was the man’s intestines. They skipped happily off into the mist, reciting some nursery rhyme in a language foreign to Angela’s ears.