The Guest

Copyright © 2003 De Rozario Jesse

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THE GUEST

One

Take a seat and let's talk, you and I.

It's high time we had this discussion, and tonight is a good night to finally address the question. Indeed. The fireplace is stoked well and warm; such a thing is good for you. Such a thing helps the mind relax and open itself to things that it would otherwise cower from.

Outside, night has settled deep into the wet countryside like a thick blanket—comfy and comforting—but the storm only promises to swell as the night progresses. Even now, the wind smothers all sound—except the rain whipping outside the glass windows of this dark, little house, and the sound of my voice.

It is a night for discussion. A night of vivid dreams in our waking.

The glowing logs, giving off the occasional crackle and pop, like a box of old fireworks, are comforting, aren't they? You would think so. That's just the way it should be. Let the weather do as it wishes to the fields and forest outside, but in here we are safe. In here, nothing rules but the warmth of the fire and the topic of our speech. For now, at least. While this tense tranquility lasts, let us enjoy the agreement that your body shares with the heat of my fire. Soon, you might be shivering despite the heat as your mind allows itself to open up to the darker side of its own nature. Such is inevitable. Before it does, let's talk.

Come. Sit down across from me on the lounge seat. You look tense. Afraid, I might say.

Cigarette? What do you mean you don't smoke? I chortle, and light one myself anyway.

The cushiony leather has a way of making you feel secure and more at home as we broach this subject. We haven't even started to talk yet but you're already starting to shiver. Relax.

You jump when I put my hand on your knee. A stifled scream turns into a nervous laugh—the kind that suggests they won't expect to be repeated, but almost always will. The tiny hairs on the back of your neck begin to wake.

There's a crack in one of the walls, maybe, or a gap between two shingles on my roof. Whatever it is, tonight's wind is playing hell with this advantage, howling in strange, unearthly moans that resemble human voices with a frightening proximity. But it is only the wind. The wind has that habit of mimicking all ranges of human sounds—from the low groaning of the long undead to the shrieking cry of a disturbed woman restless in her everlasting eternal. The wind can do all sorts of things to this susceptible mind of ours on a night like this. A night for unwanted visions brought on by unwanted sounds, but now, there is only the howling wind and our fireplace.

The storm remains outside, thrashing its relentless fury against the blackened hill of this deserted countryside. This house is alone at the top of the highest knoll in the vicinity. The nearest civilization is...well, let's just say that nearest is a false expression. Hope the electricity stays. Ha-ha. But if not, we will still have the fire. In the end, it may be all that is left for us.

I exhale a puff of smoke. When I throw a peculiar smile at you, the unwanted guest of your nervous laugh returns.

Leave him be to roam and let us talk.

Let us talk about something that is known to all, yet fully understood by none. Something that every man woman and child have experienced to some degree—from a mild ripple to full-fledged motor skills' lock-down. Something they are never truly free from. Let's talk of something close to home, but at the same time so far and distant that it might be an alien thing altogether. An entity that has been around since the beginning of creation and will continue to manifest its existence as long as living beings continue to have a free mind that can be controlled. A mind that is still easily manipulated by outside forces, and not yet mastered by our own. An ancient thing, yet never fathomed or understood. Ancient as it is, it eludes us when we are calm and composed and wish to comprehend it, yet returns to us in full force in those out-of-the-blue moments of the mind's dull unexpectancy. Let's talk about all those hidden things that cannot be based on reason though the mind tries to give it one, things we don't want explained, those thoughts kept buried deep down where they endanger the soul, not brought up to the surface and the light because we are afraid of what we will find. And as we brood it in the darkness our minds, it grows like a tumor. A slinking, shadowed tumor.

Your throat is dry and tight. You need to relax.

The wind has found its way into our presence. It chills you with a sudden snatch. Like long grabbing fingers of a cold dead hand. The sounds of the storm remain, but they are starting to settle into the background of our conscious thought. Let's move on without it and on to our topic, before the subject itself devours our minds. Talk about what? Maybe you know already. Maybe not. Let's talk about the deepest, darkest matter ever to plague the mind and vex the soul.

Let's talk about fear.

Two

So what is fear?

There are countless definitions to a word that has no concrete meaning, and the thought of which conjures unpleasant, but abstract images. Images of things that lurk in darkness, waiting to grab. Things that raise shivers and gooseflesh, that unwarranted need to scream your lungs for no explicable reason until they burst, that irrepressible feeling of a hand about to fall on your shoulder or to turn and see something in the window that you should not see—do not want to see, because it will drive you insane—that need to run, run, as if your life depended on it, when there is no perceptible threat. Worse are those that are neither true images nor feelings that can properly be assigned. The milky glow of unblinking red eyes under the bed and in the cupboard. What is under the bed or in the closet, and what is the shape behind those red eyes?

A monster, maybe. A monster of the mind.

Age has no boundaries over such a plague. It ruins us in our childhood and terrorizes our old age. It clings to us with the arms of a desperate refugee and sucks us dry of our life force like a parasite. But what is it?

There have been many who would argue that the root of all terror is a fear of the unknown. And those names who side such a notion are such that I would not go straight out against, or even mention their names. Their popularity would instantly render them right against me before I can even state my point—

There you go again with that tittering laugh.

—so I will not contradict them tonight. My only goal here is to open your eyes to another path that leads back to this same great. This same unknown. I am here simply to present another option to your sleepless nights filled with cold sweat and shivering blankets that aren't able to protect you in the way that they used to when you were eleven. I hope to open your eyes to the root of fear, and to show you, that as much as we may wish it to be, the thing is real. It is the shape behind the fantasy, the fact inside the fairytale.

The crawling shape roaming unseen, large enough to cast shadows on whole cities yet go undetected as it lurks in dark hidden alleys. Lumpy, slimy, dragging its formless shape from place to place with painful slowness. But it hides a speed under all those folds of dripping flesh, a speed that strikes and bags you in a blink—head, toes, bait, line, and sinker—and you are dragged away into that place of forever.

You need to swallow. That lump in your throat may swell and suffocate you.

Knock! Knock!

Three

An eerie moment passes as the sound of the hollow knocking on my front door sinks in to its full reality.

Honestly, I find it extremely odd.

Who, or what, could be out knocking on a night like this? I would never answer such a knocking. But what would happen if I were to send you?

Oh yes, the thought is delightful.

I can see you trotting to the door, dragging the bolt off the catch, turning the key and letting the tumblers of the lock fall back with the dull deep clang of bells falling in wells and dry bones rattling in restless closets.

You grab the handle, push it down, then yank the spread of oak open to welcome in the storm and the night-caller on the doorstep.

Knock! Knock! Knock!

There it is again. More forceful. More inviting. It's calling you, I joke, then laugh. Wants you to let it in. Your terror amuses me, and I laugh with true delight.

You say you do not want to go. You are afraid.

Afraid of what?

You don't what is outside the door, what might be waiting there for you on the drenched WELCOME mat, crooked footprints mapped out behind it on the porch, down the stairs, and through the mud that comes from the shadowy forest on the other side of the field. A forest that you would shudder to enter during the day at high noon, and this is your reason for that fear.

Pray tell, if you can, what is out there?

You say you do not know.

Then go look!

But you do not want to know.

I laugh. Deep, roaring laughter that shakes the house and silences the rain. For a moment, you forget even about the thing on the porch.

Wait...I raise a silencing hang...Do you hear that?

A quiet shuffling sound comes from the porch. Something is dragging itself across the wet boards of floor. Something large and heavy with a labored, crooked step. It's moving off the porch. The sound hesitates at the top of the stairs and your heart pauses with that hesitation.

It lumbers down the steps, going away.

Your hands fly to your mouth, covering the smile that is growing on it but not hiding the sheer joy in your eyes that erupts even as the silence settles in. You start to laugh a little. It starts with that same signature of nervousness, then progresses into something that is one-hundred-percent relief.

I look at you and smile, not wanting to break the truth to you just yet.

You look back at me, your laugh dying, but the smile burning like a torch; you tell me what a relief, you were so scared, what on earth was that, why did it leave, doesn't matter now, it's gone, it's gone, it's gone gone gone!

Something taps the window behind you and you scream.

The warm honey-wine in your hand falls, exploding the wineglass into a grenade of crystal and reddish-brown droplets.

The front door and porch are far away. Near enough to hear the knocking, but far enough for safety. You could escape away from the front door, if need be. But the window is in this room, nothing between you and it except for the high back of your leather seat and twenty feet of Persian carpet.

The tapping repeats.

Fear strangulates the scream in your throat. You are afraid to turn and look, terrified out of your mind of what you might see. Yet at the same time, you fear what may happen if you don't turn—that a hand would fall on your shoulder with cold grasping fingers and a grinning face above. You turn.

You start to turn then shoot your head back to the front before you are allowed to see, your eyes pleading with me for an explanation or comfort. But there is none. I am, after all, here to test your limits. You feel that the thing can do me no harm, as if I was not really here, and these two realizations only catalyze your terror.

I coax you to turn around, not to comfort you, but to see how far you can be pushed. When you are convinced that the curtains are drawn shut, you jerk your head around in tiny movements, like a robotic mime. As I promised you, the curtains are drawn shut.

So fling them open!

Ha-ha! My laugher is real, deep, and unnerving. Real.

Your mind takes a pause before lapsing into hyperdriven terror. You look back at me just before the lightning strikes and casts a silhouette against the back of the curtain. You do not see it. My eyes flicker to the image but it disappears.

Your lips and face are drawn into a taut leathery line. Your teeth show, and you can't stop shivering.

Go open the curtains.

My smile returns. There is no compassion in that smile, only cold steel.

You beg me not to make you open the window, plead, you don't know what it is and don't want to don't want to, pleeeease!

But in truth, you do know.

Yes, you are starting to understand.

Man's fears find their roots in the unknown and the things over which they have no comprehension or understanding. Such is the same with all living things. From the housecat who attacks its own reflection to the infant that smacks away at shadows. There are those that you do not understand, of whom the very thought spurs your mind into short-circuited panic, but the greatest fears are not the things of which we know.

They say ignorance is bliss, and by God, those words are truth.

The deepest veins of terror run in the flesh of not what we are uncertain, but what we know as fact. Things that our mind refuses to believe, things that we try with all we have to erase from our memory and knowledge and to drive out from our brain. Things that our mind dismisses as superstition or downright fantasy because if it accepted the truth, it would be destroyed. Things we cannot help encountering in those quiet moments when time seems to temporarily pause, when the air is as electric as a wired fence and every insignificant sound is amplified to the nth power. At times when the window between reality and madness is uncertain, and the gray area has never been so large. The white vanishes into the world of black, and yet it is not a smooth shining black of concrete fear, but the moldy melting gray of a rotting uncertainty that crumbles and shifts steadily into something else, and carries enough knowledge with it for your mind to regard as fact. There is too much there for it to be simply thrown out as a figment, and yet your soul screams at you from behind the bars of its helpless self-imprisonment not to believe such a thing, because such belief would mean its destruction.

But when the door starts a-knocking and the window starts a-tapping, then it's time to leave the fireplace, baby. It's time to run. Time to run and scream, my dear, because the grabbing arms are on your trail.

So says the prophet Bosch, anyway.

Lightning flashes once more behind you, casting a twisted shadow against the rough grain of the curtain.

I didn't want to look, didn't want to see it...but I did.

What's wrong, you ask.

Nothing...

A lump in my throat goes down with a heavy, frog-like gulp. My hand brings honey-wine to my lips and I sip it. Thunder booms. There is one more tap, and then a scraping sound of metal (I should have oiled those sliders) against metal. You're shaking in your seat but refuse to turn.

Another flash, another glimpse, and this time my eye catches the image clearly. This time, there is no mistake.

My confident smile drops.

This is wrong.

A gust of wind beats against the side of the house and the curtains blare open as it pours through the hole of window. You feel it hit your back and shoulders with an electrifying shock, but it is a long moment before the truth bolts into you. When it does, your eyes fling wide open like you had no eyelids. Your chair is rattling, your lips trembling, your face shivering. Wh...wh...what, you ask in terror.

But you know that something opened the window.

There is a dull thud. The thud of something large, something wet, something large wet and hairy falling through an open window and onto a carpeted floor.

A shuffling.

I push myself to my feet, my eyes never leaving the thing that is dragging itself up to stand with thick, sluggish movement. Rain water drips from its oily skin and long matted hair, soaking puddles into the carpet. The sound of the falling droplets is audible.

You continue to shake, unable to get control of your mind and turn around, much less get up from your chair and run. But that is good for me. If it gets you, perhaps it will forget about me.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Wasn't the plan! Something, somewhere, went horribly wrong.

The thing (what thing?!) is in my house. I don't know what it is, and yet I do. It is the thing of my imaginations. The thing of my darkest fears and my most deeply ingrained terror. If I run now, I might make it. Run out of the lounge and across the hall. Fling the door open and dash across the porch. My Ford is parked in the driveway. Thankfully, its keys are in my jacket pocket. If I move now—

It stands all the way up and looks at me with silent maroon eyes that glow cigarette holes in the darkness behind you. The window slams back down with a bang. You jump again, still refusing to turn and look. I move and stand behind my chair, never taking my eyes off it. Your eyes are glued to mine.

It's been nice talking to you. Nice to meet you, but now I must (make a getaway!) take my leave. Goodnight.

I walk away from the table and chairs, moving to the door. The thing does not move and its eyes do not follow; the eyes are now on you.

With the window shut, the sound of the wind is blocked out. You can hear its heaving breath as it shambles towards the back of your chair, limping unevenly on its dragging foot-things.

I turn the handle of the door and exit. I do not need to see what will happen next because I know. In a way, that is why I called you here tonight. One reason, one frail slip of hope borne by my concrete mind, told me that there might still be a chance for redemption. That you might avert such awfulness, or at least attract it to yourself. The other reason, a reason I knew to be more true, proclaimed that my fate was sealed and inevitable. I would go down tonight—but at least this way I would not go alone.

At the last possible moment before the thing closes onto you, you turn your head and look.

This is my nightmare, not yours. I know of it and have always known of it. You did too, but you refused to let yourself believe. And when I see your mouth and face stretch into an inaudible scream because sound refuses to come from your throat—like a rubber mask from a Wes Craven's slash film—I am not surprised.

At the sight of the thing, your mind instantly snaps. Blood vessels exploding inside your brain, the optic nerve of one eye burning into blindness.

One hand grabs your shoulder, the other skitters up the center of your back with prickling claws. You lock eyes with the red, glowing lights in its head and the thing grins at you.

In that final sinking moment before your sanity flees forever into the hollows of those eyes, the last flicker of reason returns to your mind and your lungs and your voice with its final bolt of fear. The reality grips your heart with a steel fist and icy claws, and you scream with everything left inside you. You scream for all the terror you've bottled up since childhood, for the nights left shivering alone under thick blankets, for the forced showers when no one was home, hearing things in the pipes that could not have been air or moving water, for the shadows that have been living under your bed and in your drawers and wardrobe, hiding among the boxes of old forgotten toys and dark rows of clothes on hangers. You scream for the loss of sanity, scream because now you believe and it's too late, scream because the thing's hand is on your shoulder, his face above yours, and your mind is devoured.

The thing continues its silent grin and you continue to scream.