Tagged: Trembling With Fear

Chapter Three

A few days later Cassie guided my hand as I carved runes into a long birch spoon with a boline knife. The ritual, she claimed, required my hand to perform the rites. Sometimes I chopped what felt like dried herbs, other times I slid the knife through things slimy and rubbery. I lit candles, burned incense, and unscrewed glass jars filled to the brim with foul-smelling things. All of it went into a cast iron cauldron that we shoved into a fireplace filled with crackling birch logs.

As I stirred the bubbling potion with the birch spoon I wondered what I had gotten myself into, whether this was a harmless hobby or if Cassie had some strange beliefs about how the world worked, but I played along.

“How long does it have to brew?” I asked.

“Several days.”

“Days? Will your parents care?”

“They won’t mind. My mom used to do stuff like this all the time.”

I stirred the potion in silence. It gurgled and murmured and the birch logs popped and hissed.

“I should get home soon,” I said at last. “I can’t stir it for days.”

Cassie clicked her tongue and drummed her fingers against the coffee table.

“I think your hand has done enough. There’s more that needs to be done, but it might be better if I do it alone.”

She took my hand and led me away.

***

A few days later Cassie declared the potion ready. She scooped out the vile concoction with a wooden bowl and placed the bowl in front of me on the coffee table. The murmuring brew, the house, Cassie and her long hair, all of it reeked of charred rotten fish with a hint of something fruity like strawberries. I felt sick breathing in that air.

“I know how it smells, and it’ll taste worse, but I promise it’s not toxic. Worst case scenario, you wake up tomorrow still blind.”

I started to bring the bowl to my mouth, then stopped. 

“I don’t know,” I said.

Cassie sat on my lap, straddling me. Her body felt soft and warm against mine. The tips of her nails stroked my back under my shirt and she breathed into my ear. She pushed the bowl closer to me and with one hand I brought it up to my mouth and gulped the potion down. It was the worst thing I’d ever tasted. My tongue stung as it went down. It was more earthy than I expected, like muddy compost, and when it reached my stomach it felt like I had been kicked in the balls. At the slightest movement I thought I might vomit.

Cassie saw how I was feeling.

“Let’s get you home,” she whispered. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

I didn’t think I would ever feel better. On the drive home I started to sweat. Flashes of hot and cold raked my body, and I ached all over. More than once I demanded Cassie tell me what the fuck she had done but she just kept saying to be patient. When her car stopped in front of my house I didn’t wait for her to help me to the door. I bolted out and staggered to the door, threw it open, and stumbled to my bedroom. I thought I felt too horrible to sleep, but once my head hit the pillow I was out, and I stayed out for the next twelve hours.

***

When I sat down at the breakfast table the next morning Mom said she opened my door last night to see if I wanted dinner but all I did was mumble nonsense with my eyes closed so she decided to let me sleep. What a morning that was. The most magnificent morning I’d ever experienced. Even what came afterwards could not fully erode the elation of seeing shafts of yellow sunlight spill through the blinds, the floor that was covered in dirty clothing, the crinkled blankets that kept my body warm, my own hands opening and closing. A pretty mundane view, I admit, but it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

I called Cassie from my room barely able to suppress myself from shouting into the phone. I whispered that I couldn’t wait to see her for the first time, that I would spend the rest of my life indebted to her, that nothing I ever did could compare to what she had done for me. She had given back everything that had been taken from me, my entire life, but something was wrong. Cassie sounded like she’d gone without sleep for a week, her voice a distant croak, and her usual exuberance had vanished. She suggested we wait a few days before seeing each other. I told her that was the stupidest thing she had ever said, that I wanted to see her as soon as possible. It was Saturday so instead of the library we decided on the park around the corner from my house, where it all began, where we could watch the sunset.

I hung up and prepared to astound my parents at the breakfast table. 

***

A part of me felt lousy that I couldn’t share the full story with my parents. It made me wonder if I had done something wrong, but seeing the smiles on their faces, faces I hadn’t seen for over a year, was a great moment in my life. That day they took me for a long drive along a rural road that hugged the coastline, twisting and turning along rocky cliffs, then winded through green hills so high they could have been mountains. 

It was a great day, but night came fast.

The sun was already fading behind the horizon when I arrived at the park, which was empty except for someone on the swings. She faced away from me, hood over her head, but I knew it was Cassie. I sat on the swing next to her.

“Beautiful sight,” I said, thinking myself smooth. Then I looked left and gasped. A chill caressed the back of my neck. My insides twisted.

“Cassie?” I asked.

“In the flesh,” she said.

The woman on the swing had long graying hair, fingertips yellowed from cigarettes, crow’s feet and glabellar lines. She must have been in her late forties. Her smile revealed yellow, crooked teeth.

“Are you… is this… did the ritual… is this what you meant by… consequences?”

She burst into laughter.

“How flattering,” she said. “No, sweetie, this is how I’ve always looked.”

“I thought you were in high school,” I said.

“Honey, I never even went to high school. Does my age bother you?”

I didn’t reply. I looked away from her at the sand beneath my shoes. She placed a hand on my thigh. 

“You didn’t seem to mind yesterday.”

I jolted to my feet and stepped out of reach. Her giggle was as girly as the day I met her but this time it made my skin crawl. Cassie started to swing back and forth. The chains groaned and creaked.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“Is that really what you want to know?”

She rubbed her eyes. The last of the sunlight faded, leaving us alone in the meager light cast by the distant street lamps.

“Don’t you want to know how?” she asked.

Cassie swung higher and higher, and at her peak an awful change overcame her face. Her skin appeared stretched tight over a thin avian skull with a lopsided mouth, a wide black maw from which emanated her sickening girly giggle, like a horrid creature trying to burst through a membrane of flesh. But when she swung down low she was just an older woman again. A trick of the shadows, I thought.

“Was… anyone… hurt?” I asked.

This time she responded not with a giggle but a deep cackle so loud crows flew from the trees along the perimeter of the park, but something caught in her throat and the laugh decayed into a hacking cough.

“Sorry, sorry” she said, clearing her throat. “I’ll tell you what.” She spread her thighs. “Come over here and I’ll make you forget all about it. If you thought it was good before you wouldn’t believe the things–”

That’s when I started to run. A deep primitive fear compelled my legs to move, move, move. I heard an abrupt squeak as Cassie hopped off the swing, the thud of feet hitting the sand, but I didn’t look back. I ran out of the park, down a long quiet street, and turned the corner. I hadn’t run that fast for over a year. I thought my lungs might burst and my thighs might snap, but when I thought of that monstrous face floating high in the shadows tittering like a young child I was propelled onwards. When I reached my front door I looked behind me. The night was dark and silent and empty.

Chapter Two

I met Cassie on the tenth of February the next year while listening to an audiobook on the steps leading up to the school library. I was alone when she approached me. I was almost always alone. After a full year of blindness I’d given up on ever swinging a bat again, watching a ball fly over the fence, seeing the moon and the stars, seeing someone smile at something I said. I’d given up on a lot of things. For most of that year, I’d given up on being happy.

Right after it happened, the baseball team, my high school, the whole town, rallied around me with school assemblies denouncing violence, fundraisers to help with medical expenses, articles written about me appeared in the local paper, the police publicly vowed to bring my assailants to justice, and I was even gifted a baseball signed by all the members of the Boston Red Sox. But what gave me the most hope and the most comfort in those initial days were the eye specialists who told my parents and me that the blindness might be temporary. For a while I held out hope, but days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and then somehow half a year had passed without even the slightest improvement. My sight was long gone. 

Friends from the ball field stopped calling. Invites to dinners and parties and hangouts dwindled. Doctors no longer ended appointments with encouragement. My assault, once a subject of intense public outrage, became a sensitive topic to avoid and dodge, something spoken about in whispers. I realized that once everyone went through the motions of expressing their outrage, once they did something to prove they cared, people wanted life to go back to normal. But there was no going back to normal for me. I was alone in the darkness.

I don’t want to make it sound like I was shunned by the world. A few old friends and a few old coaches tried to keep in touch, but I pushed them away. I stopped taking calls, stopped talking to people at school, and when my parents asked how I felt I either ignored them or replied with sarcasm. I’m not proud of how I behaved. I was young, immature, and it wasn’t just my vision that was stolen. My identity, my future, my entire life had been taken away in a senseless act of violence by complete strangers. I became something of a loner, a ghost of that boy who wanted nothing more than to swing a bat and hear the crack of the baseball against it.

Towards the end of that year, something changed. Maybe I just got tired of being miserable, of feeling helpless, of wallowing in self-pity while millions of other people were out there living full and meaningful lives without sight. Those boys didn’t just take away my ability to see, what they took was my will, my drive, my desire to make something of myself, and I was determined to take it back.

 It started with an urge to understand what happened to me. I don’t mean the motives of those boys from the field. Any interest I’d ever had in them had long ago dwindled into nothingness. No. I wanted to understand the biology behind what happened to my vision. I realized that I didn’t know the first thing about why staring into the sun had blinded me. What was the exact mechanism behind it? I wanted to understand the gears and circuits of it all.

When I asked Dad about it, he admitted he didn’t really know the science, but after a few days he gave me several audiobooks about the biology and physics of human vision. For hours and hours I laid on my bed and learned about rods and cones, the retina, the prefrontal cortex, that the human brain fills the blind spots in our vision with what it expects and predicts should be there, all kinds of fascinating things. Things my old teachers probably talked about while I daydreamed about the big leagues.

My parents were concerned when I locked myself away in my room, coming out only for meals and to ask for more audiobooks. Mom, who never before pushed me towards baseball, even suggested I try Beep Baseball, a version of the great game using beeps and buzzes to guide the blind to the ball and the bases. It was interesting. I tucked that idea away in the back of my mind, but it was too late. A new obsession held sway over me.

As I listened to that audiobook on the tenth of February, a memoir by a man slowly losing his sight to a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, someone tapped my shoulder, pulled back my headphones, and whispered in my ear.

“Would you be my Valentine?”

Her warm breath, her husky voice, tickled my inner ear and a pleasurable excitement rippled through my body. That was how I fell in love with her. At that age, that’s about all it takes.

“Who are you?” I asked, removing the headphones.

Her giggle was girly. A small, soft hand touched my forearm. She said her name was Cassie and that she had been working up the courage to talk to me for a long, long time.

***

Things moved fast with Cassie. Too fast. Not that I minded, at the time. We met in front of the library after school almost every day then went to her house where no one was home. Before I met Cassie I’d never even kissed a girl but after a couple of weeks there was very little left to the imagination. It was all I thought about. Every class was an eternity. I had no appetite for lunch. Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about seeing Cassie the next day, the feel of her body against mine, the low moans into my ear.

Ever since I lost my vision, Mom and Dad drove me everywhere I needed to go, which was mostly home, school, and the doctor. When I told them Cassie could drive me home after school so they wouldn’t have to leave work early, they were silent. I hated those silences in which they communicated in secret using facial expressions, mouthing words, maybe even jotting down notes on a napkin. Sometimes I heard whispers, an exasperated sigh, the click of my mom’s jewelry when she shook her head. I know they didn’t mean anything by it, but it hurt to have my blindness used against me. In the end they didn’t object. Maybe they thought a girlfriend would be good for me, or maybe they were tired of watching me mope around the house. Their only condition was that I bring Cassie over for dinner some evening.

I didn’t know it at the time but Cassie was never coming over for dinner.

***

The first time Cassie brought me home and pulled me into her bed I thought there was nothing else in the world that I needed to stay happy, but no matter how young a man is, eventually the all-consuming potency of sex dwindles and evaporates. Something deeper was needed if the relationship was going to survive, and I had some concerns about Cassie. I hardly knew anything about her. Our conversations felt superficial, distant, like talking to a stranger on an airplane or a relative who only appears on major holidays. Outside of those few hours after school we never spent time together. There were other things too, things she said that never made sense, things she didn’t seem to know about sports and music and politics, as if she lived someplace where the wider currents of the world never reached.

One Friday afternoon while I lay beside Cassie in her bed, I decided to get some answers.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked.

“If it’s for another round, that’ll cost another shoulder rub.”

I forced a smile.

“No, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

I felt her body tense. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath.

“Why um… why don’t we ever talk at school?”

Cassie sat up.

“Do you ever try to find me at school?” she asked.

“As best I can,” I said, tapping my eyes. “Do you ever try to find me?”

“Well,” Cassie said, pulling the blankets tight around her body as she lay back down, “I was worried you might be… ashamed. If anyone knew. I never mentioned it but I’m not what you would call a looker. That’s why it was so hard to talk to you.”

I laughed. A cruel thing to do but I couldn’t help it. She slapped my arm but it wasn’t hard and I suspected she was smiling.

“Why the hell would I care about that?”

“Men always care.”

“Well, I don’t care what other people say, you’re beautiful to me.”

For a long time we lay in silence. I felt good. Relieved. That was one concern that had a reasonable explanation, even if it was silly. The rest of my worries could wait for another day.

Cassie broke the silence.

“I hope this isn’t a terrible thing to ask, but would you like to see me?”

“Why? You have a spare set of eyes I could borrow?”

She didn’t laugh.

“I’m just curious. If there was a way you could see me, would you do it?”

“Well, yeah, but why even ask something like that?”

“There might be something I could do.”

I scoffed and rolled onto my side. 

“I’m serious,” Cassie said, poking my back. “Don’t roll away from me, mister. If there was a way to get your vision back, would you do it? Even if it had some consequences?”

I didn’t like the question. The long silence that followed it was uncomfortable.

“You could play ball again,” Cassie said.

Less than a year ago, regaining my sight, returning to the field, would have been a dream come true. Not only did the idea no longer have the same appeal, it felt like stepping back into a life I’d already left behind.

“Sorry I asked about school, alright? Let’s just drop it.”

After a moment she pressed her warm naked body against mine. Her fingers swam through my hair. We didn’t talk much the rest of that afternoon.

Chapter One

Baseball every day after school, baseball every weekend, baseball on television every evening, baseball all summer long. Baseball, baseball, baseball. From the moment I could throw a ball it was the most important thing in my life. My parents thought all sports were for the juvenile and primitive, and weren’t exactly subtle about wanting me to pursue something more intellectual, but their disapproval only strengthened my love for the game. I was that type of kid. And it helped that I was good. Very good. Varsity as a freshman on a team that was top in the state, and already some colleges were showing interest in me. Instead of listening to my teachers as they droned on about algebra and physics and the Declaration of Independence, I daydreamed about making it to the big leagues, the crowd, the noise, the traveling, the cameras, the money, the fame, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking about women. As cocky as I was on the baseball field, I suffered from a strong case of crippling shyness around pretty girls, but that would change once I made it big time. It felt inevitable.

Everything changed in my second year of high school.

On a cold and clear Saturday morning I was running the bases at the park around the corner from my home. The cold wind was sharp on my face. My cleats threw dirt into the air behind me. I was so focused on the sprint, on lifting my knees and pumping my arms while an imaginary crowd cheered me on into home plate, I never even saw them coming. I was tackled from the right. The impact shocked me into a state of paralysis, cold dirt burned and scraped my face as I slid across the ground, and a swift kick knocked the air from my lungs. Rough hands pinned down my arms. Pointy knees buttressed by heavy weight stabbed into my back. A pair of large cold hands clasped my head on both sides and pulled it back until I thought my neck might snap. I gasped and wheezed and spat as large fingers forced my eyes open. I stared into a bright winter sun. The fiery white brilliance was so overwhelming that immediately my eyes filled with tears and my eyelids tried to shut, but the fingers stabbed into my eye socket, nails piercing my skin until blood dripped down my face. Somehow my burning lungs released a scream but help never came. What felt like an eternity was probably only a minute or two. That’s all it takes. Before everything went dark that bright yellow ball in the sky expanded and flashed like a lightbulb that’s reached its limit. Pain throbbed behind my eyes and somewhere deep inside my head. I screamed again but I still couldn’t shake free. The feeling of absolute restraint and helplessness, like my whole body was held in a vice from which I would never escape, was almost worse than the sudden darkness. Almost.

When those boys released me, I scrambled away on my hands and knees until the top of my head collided with the backstop, then I brought my hands to my face, curled into a ball, and cried like a baby. One of my assailants laughed, a hollow cackle lacking joy and bitterness. Their footsteps traveled away from me. When they reached the outfield, frosted grass crunching under their shoes, another one of those boys actually apologized, and I swear he sounded sincere, like he himself might cry. Not that I gave a damn. 

I remained against the backstop for a long time. Its firmness against my spine comforted the primal part of my brain while I opened and closed my eyes, waiting and wishing and praying for a glimpse of the diamond, the pitcher’s mound, the frosted green outfield, and the birds perched in the bare trees. But there was only darkness. Eventually I was found by a man teaching his own little kiddos how to play the game. He must have thought I was drunk. His foot tapped the bottom of mine and in a polite but firm tone he asked if I could move somewhere else to sleep it off, but his tone changed when he saw my tears, the bloody scrape down the side of my face, and the cuts around my eyelids. The fear I felt when he first approached me was intense. My heart pounded in my chest. I felt dizzy. I had never before felt so vulnerable, so weak, so fragile, but in the end that kind man drove me around the corner to my home and helped me to the door. His children whispered in the backseat the entire drive. I think they were scared.

Sometimes I still wonder why those boys did what they did, if it was their idea or if someone put them up to it, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. I had never seen those boys before and our paths never crossed again. This story isn’t about them, even if they are the ones who set things in motion, and it’s not about baseball either, even though that’s where it started and where it ended. This is about something worse, something that preys upon the world in quiet patience, something that reached down into the darkness and revealed an awful truth that cast the rest of my life in silent dread.

It’s about a girl named Cassie. 

After I met her, that’s when the real trouble began.