Trembling With Fear 06/19/2022

When You See It by F.M. Scott

Shopping done.  Check.  Car gassed up.  Check.  House cleaned for Maya and Gahan, due back tomorrow.  Check.

Everybody out and about seemed to amp up their visible behaviors—counting objects unseen, nodding and agreeing on things unheard, declaring war upon presumed enemies.  The Target clerk hummed long notes behind unsettled, nearly nystagmic eyes.

Hauling things in from the car: something like a flash of breeze encircling my neck.  Nothing seen or heard, only felt.   Gone as quickly as it came.

*

New stuff streaming this week.  You click through icons.  They disappear.  A solid screen replaces them—black, with the faintest of greens straining under it.  You click.  The screen won’t budge.  Click again.  Same.  A low, sedate hum fades up.  Words pierce the darkness of your living room.  You forget.

<<<<<<<< A SPECIAL HELLO. >>>>>>>>

The tone rises a half-step or so.  The greeting disappears.  New text types itself:

<<<<<<<< WHAT ELSE CAN YOU SEE TODAY? >>>>>>>>

Your head plays along as aptly as a flipped switch.  You seem to keep up.

<<<<<<<< I WANT TO SHOW YOU. >>>>>>>>

The hum crossfades into a chorus of chimes—louder and bending, elongating with every stroke.  Try the vol—no, of course.  You know better.  Unplug the power strip.  Right.

<<<<<<<< I NEED TO SHOW YOU. >>>>>>>>

You’ve gone numb where you stand, numb to the program of your new breathing, new moves.  The machine of you, hypoxic and expulsive, hovers at the edge of paralysis.  The smells of your house disappear; you gasp in vain to recover them.  

The chimes fade, giving way to the hum again, higher.  The screen goes full black.  A new face appears—bright and blue-tinged, almost gibbous, perched on a long, thin neck.  The nose is angular, the mouth pulled into a toothless, anaemic grin.  The eyes—somewhere between human and porcine—house dull, affected pupils.  You stare into them; they sting your own.  The light from the screen flares, bathing the entire room.  You fall back onto the sofa and struggle again.

<<<<<<<< WHY DO YOU FIGHT? >>>>>>>>

No smell, no ambient noise, just the same dull hum.

No living room.

What hangs before you isn’t even a screen anymore, only a face and text suspended next to it in dark space.  It moves with you, 360.  Somehow you manage to stand again.  The real floor of your house has become something softer and flexible, a loose trampoline; you stumble but manage to avoid falling.  Your only firm grasp is on the knowledge that

<<<<<<<< THIS IS ALL YOURS. >>>>>>>>

The grin broadens, brightening the eyes.  And something else—you haven’t bothered to address it, let alone try to do something about it until now—comes into play: you are mute.  You close your eyes and strain to convert the respiratory into the acoustic.  Energy to energy.  Harder and harder.

You hold your eyes shut to clear and reset.  But all remains, moving with you.  On feet of liquid you mince your way to the back door, open it.

<<<<<<<< ARE YOU SURE? >>>>>>>>

You can’t answer but you reason that drawing a blank and straining to block this visitation will help you.  But it counters, its surrounding light now bright enough to hurt.

You strain harder and harder.  The hum grows louder, riding a glissando to a high, feverish whine.  One sign of the real begins to seep back in: the taste of sweat dripping into your mouth.  A few seconds pass.

<<<<<<<< YOU ARE STRONGER THAN I THOUGHT. >>>>>>>>

The light dims.  One by one they disappear: the mouth, the nose…then the eyes.  The sound cuts off.   The now faceless thing hangs in the dark, then disappears altogether.  A few seconds pass and a final message appears, as definitive as a point of ceremony:

<<<<<<<< WHEN YOU SEE IT. >>>>>>>>

With that, the living room returns around you.  The fresh night breeze in the doorway.  The ambient sound, the floor under your feet.  The icons on your TV as they were.  You shake and try to swallow the dryness in your mouth, quell the hammering in your chest.

When I see what?  The Light?  The Error of My Ways?  A door to some magical land, all for the taking if I go there?

You want to sit, but in keeping with an instinct that has served you throughout time, you go to the kitchen for a drink of water.  This revives and calms you a bit.  Leave the screen as it is, yes.  Every vestige of normalcy adds up.

*

The breeze tranquilizes you further in your cushioned patio glider.  It does and it doesn’t—your stare and your drawn mouth hold you in check.  You peer through the back door into your living room, and it’s there: a faint movement amongst the shadows on the wall near the sofa, bathed in the light of the screen.  You FIGHT to hold yourself back but you fail.

Inside, you find a roiling of black particles instead of shadows.  A hum rises, louder and higher, into a squeal that renders you immobile.  You want to run but the impulse to do so won’t transfer to your feet.  And with that, it’s my move.  You’re easy to overtake but tough to wrap around.  Your body feels like a bag stuffed with agitated earthworms.  You writhe where you stand as I finally begin to SHOW YOU what is now ALL YOURS.  A scream won’t transfer to your throat, loud though it is in your head.  Choked cries, staccato and arrhythmic, come out in its place.  You barely feel the crash of your body against the glass of an end table, its thud on the living room floor.

*

Sight and sound have eluded you.  Ditto feeling.  You try to move; same result.  You’re left with only your labored, pointless breath.  The coppery taste of blood where you’ve bitten your lip.  Thoughts of loved ones’ faces that will pull taut at the mute, leaking, wheezing shell of you.  The knowledge of the other room in the other house on a street leading to all otherness.

*

You weren’t like the rest of them.  Not at all.  They’re still milling around out there, going about their usual.  At least until they start destroying themselves and each other over how best to deal with what I’ve put on them.  But I watched you watching them, all your looking and questioning, and right then I knew you’d be a handful.  But don’t get me wrong.  You let me in.  You showed me all the places I needed to be in at once.  I watched myself on the screen from inside you, seeing and hearing all, feeling your synaptic jolts.  I moved when you moved.  You were leader and teacher.

You gave it all to me.

And for that,

A SPECIAL THANK-YOU.