Tether

Pat had recently gotten really into staring at ceiling fans, primarily the one in his bedroom, but he wasn’t particular. The one in his bedroom was good. Well not good, but interesting. Sort of. What he meant was that he could look at it for a long time without feeling like he wanted to stop and do something else.

Most of the time he spent looking at it he was committing the bits and pieces of it to memory. At its lowest speed it completed a full rotation in about two seconds. Higher speeds were harder to tell. He’d considered putting colored tape on each blade to help him keep track more easily but that seemed like it would disrupt something important, make the fan a different fan by marking it up for his own benefit. So, his observations weren’t so much a catalog as they were a sort of collage. How the fan casts shadows in different light, like right now in the dingy light of the sun setting on the opposite side of the building; right now, it was sort of yellowy with dark smudges of shadow muddling around. He hadn’t decided if he preferred that to the sharp white angles that hit in the morning.

Part of him considered closing his curtains so he could see some new color palettes, but the effort didn’t seem worth it when he still didn’t have the existing spectrum committed quite yet. And don’t even get him started on the sounds. He could write a dissertation on the frequency of creaking and its correlation with axis wobbles at this point.

The words GET OUT began to carve themselves into the ceiling plaster.

Pat closed his eyes and turned over onto his side. He considered the ambient whir of the fan’s mechanisms, tuning out the nauseating scratching noises. Time to move on to a new hobby then.

Maybe he could become a wood grain guy. Yeah, plenty of that to look at.

In the hallway beyond his door, he heard the landline begin to ring again. It rang the standard five times, which always felt like two rings too many, before it went to voicemail. Pat folded his pillow around his ears as the rough static feedback started back up. He could make out the vague forms of words like GO and PAT and HURT even through the barrier, curling further into himself as he did his best to flex some muscle within his ears that would blur it all out.

The voicemail cut itself off after a few minutes, and then silence that hit Pat like a brick wall. See, the fan was a great distraction because it had so many factors to take into account and mull over but unmoored from any item it was the silence that distressed him the most. It almost made him want to start screaming just to fill up the dead space. However, that would require movement and effort and all of those things he just could not be bothered with at that moment.

The phone rang again.

Once. Twice. Hit five and went to voicemail.

Uh, hey Pat. I know you’re taking some time off, but we could really use your help if you have time. It’s getting into the busy season, and you know, this new software is really kicking our asses-

The sound of another human being sent a shock through him, enough to jolt him into a sitting position before he fully considered the action. God, how long had it been again? He scrubbed a hand over his face, then stood up on shaky feet to go pick up the phone. The sensation of a thousand needles piercing him and pinning him in place like a mounted butterfly greeted him as he tried to take the few steps to his bedroom door. That prickling pain at least had the benefit of distracting him; he made it past the threshold before realizing he managed to avoid looking at the covered mirror propped against the wall. Small victories.

It took a more concerted effort to ignore the ones in the hall. He’d stacked them all up together on the floor and dropped a quilt over them, but he still found his eyes drifting habitually to the places they once hung on the wall. The pain faded incrementally as he hobbled over to where he had the landline plugged in. Just in time to catch the tail end of his boss’s message.

-nyway, call me when you get the chance. Hope you’re doing alright-

Pat picked up right as the call cut off. What met him was a wall of sound, and the garbled static sound of the word OUT being yelled into his ear. He jerked back and hurled the phone at the wall, nearly bursting into tears when the phone punched through the drywall but remained intact enough to keep spewing that awful sound.

He sank down and curled himself up into a ball as the phone droned on, roaring about pain and suffering and him and leaving. Always leaving. Pat hugged his knees to his chest. A sob crawled up through his throat and wracking his body.

Down the hall he could see a hint of his kitchen from around the corner, mostly just the sink. It looked unfamiliar from this angle, some alien thing growing out of his home. Just four days ago he had washed dishes there like it was nothing, like it was a mild inconvenience even. And now…

Pat lifted his head as the static continued. He set his jaw and pushed himself up to his feet, before striding back to his room with a purpose.

“You want me out?” He called out.

He stalked over to the full length mirror and whipped the cover off of it.

“This is my house. Not yours.”

He was immediately confronted by his own reflection, looking at him with eyes that somehow held both a frenzy and bone deep weariness. Both bloodshot and underscored by dark bags. His whole face carried a deeper pallor than typical, and he looked gaunter in a way that his mother might ghoulishly commend him for. Glad to see you're finally taking care of yourself and losing some weight, she'd say, or something to that effect. Pat dimly registered that he hadn’t put his glasses on in days. He needed to change his clothes, wait no, he needed to shower and then change his clothes, change into something he could wear outside not the same disintegrating pjs.

But first. First, he needed this goddamn apartment to himself.

“Come on. You wanted to talk? Let’s talk. Be an adult for god’s sake.”

The phone’s static ruckus cut out abruptly. Silence for a moment. Then, the slow creak of his bedroom door shifting further open. A dark, spectral talon poked around the wall at the edge of the mirror’s view. It shuddered in and out of focus like a digital camera, one moment entirely physical with muscles and skin shown in stark relief, the next fuzzy and all but translucent. The figure was just as he remembered: tall, at least a foot and a half taller than Pat, with a shape that suggested humanity but couldn’t fully commit to it. Its limbs were spindly and the only recognizable features on its face were two shining points of light situated where eyes might be on a regular person. They shimmered in the low light, looking expectant.

Pat’s voice caught in his throat, choking off whatever proclamation he had planned on next so that all that came out was, “...hi.”

No sound came from the other side of the mirror, but the figure squared itself onto all-fours in a defensive position. He imagined it was hissing. A familiar, traitorous shiver ran down his spine. Not taking his eyes off the mirror, he moved over to turn on his radio alarm clock. The signal crackled to life and an ad for car insurance took up the dead space that had hung so heavily a moment before. The figure in the mirror stalked over to the radio on the other side of the mirror in flickering, jerky movements.

The ad suddenly distorted into static. Words came in short bursts, the figure beginning to vibrate with apparent effort.

…LEAVE…NOW… GO…PLEASE

“Baby, I already told you that it’s complicated,” Pat faltered, suddenly realizing the only name he’d ever called the creature wasn’t one he could use anymore. 

“I-I can’t just leave. My lease has another four months. And anyway, I’m not… I don’t want to leave. I like this place.”

The static growled and popped.

“Listen, it’s not fair for you to push me out. It’s not. Look, I’m trying here but if you don’t want to be around me so badly then why don’t you just–”

The radio suddenly blared a distorted pop song (add detail about it here later), drowning out Pat’s words. He could see his face go an unattractive red in the mirror at the same time as he felt heat flooding his face.

“Fucking listen t-” the radio station changed abruptly to music.

IT’S NOT FAIR, TO DENY ME-

Pat pushed the mirror down flat onto the floor and snapped the radio off. He ran a hand through his hair. Two blades of the ceiling fan snap in half and crash down onto his bed, the fan suddenly thrown off its axis with a horrific grinding noise. He fought down the hysterical urge to laugh.

After a bit of triage cleaning, Pat sat down in front of his home computer and typed in the word “exorcism”.

Pat nudged the front door closed behind him and set the package he was carrying down. He grabbed some scissors from a kitchen drawer and set to work, slitting the tape open and pulling the cardboard open with a rough yank. Amongst a sea of pink packing peanuts lay an ornate bronze bowl. He muttered a half serious prayer of thanks to whichever god had ensured that the guy on eBay hadn’t scammed him.

Running his hands over the hammered surface, he peered at the collection of symbols engraved around the rim. Nothing he could read, unfortunately, but he was told by several pagan message boards that it should work for a mirror cleansing ritual. He still needed to run to the store to get the right incense and wait for the knife to come in the mail, probably another day at most. Just hold out one more day.

In the living room a lamp toppled over. Pat heard the lightbulb shatter and winced. He’d gone through five in the last week and had taken to staying as far away as possible from any objects substantial enough to hurt him if they fell over. There had been one close call with a bookshelf that he was not eager to repeat.

The rate at which his ex’s activities had ramped up concerned him, not only with the danger to himself but the amount of effort he knew it took for it to affect physical objects, especially ones not directly in front of a mirror. He set the bowl gingerly back in the box and pulled it into his room to stash it under his bed, running a hand through his hair once he’d managed to shove it into place.

Was he really going to do this? Seeing the bowl, it all became suddenly more real. One year’s worth of memories left dragging him down like dead weight, no more use to them beyond sad pondering of what might have been. Because it had been good once. He remembered that clearly enough.

Their song playing on the radio for the first time as he held it close, dancing together in front of the mirror with no real rhythm to speak of. The air next to his ear had hummed and buzzed with words just out his reach. But they never were big on talking. 

No, most of the time they communicated by touch. A brief brush of his hip as he rifled through the fridge to unearth something worth eating. Playful tugs at his shirt and hair while he sat in front of his computer to work. The first time he had ever held it, the feeling of closeness had shocked him. Up until that point part of him had assumed that there would be nothing to feel. Whatever veil hung between his world, and it seemed heavy, made of some thick, intangible material that repelled the two like magnets with the same charge. Maybe their worlds were simply too alike.

But then he felt its breath against his cheek, its arms around him, not quite as there as another human might be but certainly not absent. Something in him flowered and soaked the sensation up, suddenly aware that he was starving. Pat wrapped his arms around the presence holding him and held it back.

The memory of it possessed him. He could feel that vague impression of texture, not something he could name but simply the presence of it, where he’d inscribed it onto his fingertips time and time again. He sat down on the floor, leaning his head back onto his bed.

Something in the kitchen clattered.

“Baby…?”

The name clawed its way out of his throat almost unconsciously. He reached a handout, leaning over until he flopped fully onto the ground, stretching out to grasp at the full length mirror he’d left lying face down on the floor. Flailing a bit, he managed to flip it over and scooch himself over to stare down into its depths.

“Baby, please. I’m sorry. I miss you…”

His own eyes looked back at him, desperate. Above him, the ceiling– still devoid of a working fan. The tail end of the last T in GET OUT scratched into the plaster.

“I’m just… I need to see your face, sweetheart,” Pat blinked back sudden tears. Everything seemed to be happening to him, words and emotions and sensations all rising up before his consciousness could fully process them. But even so, he knew they were true.

He watched the mirror intently. Silence hung heavy.

A dark, warped claw came into view on the periphery of the mirror. His ex crawled slowly across the ceiling, and he watched it carve out a single word: WHY

“Can we– can we go back to the way things were? I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much,” he turned over and looked up at the empty spot on the ceiling where he knew it looked back down at him. He told himself he could almost see its outline warping in the sunlight. Tears soaked into his skin.

A gentle pressure bore down on him. Hesitant. Ephemeral. It wrapped around him with a low static hum, wicking moisture from his face with the barest hint of a touch.

Pat sucked in a shuddering breath and kept his eyes on the ceiling, convinced that if he moved even a fraction of a centimeter, this fragile peace would disintegrate. The presence around him nearly overwhelmed his nerves even as a shadow of something beyond his reach. It felt like his spine was a canal lock filling to the brim with static energy, waiting to cascade out into the rest of him and overwhelm his senses in a haze of pure energy.

The impression of closeness, like a human hand hovering just over his skin but refusing to touch, captured his chin in its suggested grip. He closed his eyes and arched into it.

It dragged down at the collar of his T-shirt until the fabric split from the strain of two opposite forces. Cool air hit bare skin. His blood heated. His face flushed.

“Please.”