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.”

They’d done this enough times to be good at it. The early exploratory phases had terrified him in some ways, but no more than he imagined he would be terrified of showing his body to another human being. Sex would inevitably turn him into a prey animal exposing its pale underbelly, soft parts left at another’s mercy. Better to know the potential danger immediately, rather than to have it come out of hiding when he felt most secure.

And the feeling of being overcome by something beyond his full comprehension, it flipped a switch in his brain. Turned off all higher thinking. He could let it enjoy him as it saw fit.

The two of them fell back into rhythm, easy as breathing. As long as he didn’t think about it. As long as he didn’t let himself think about this massive, suffocating weight that seemed to bear down on him at all times ever since… ever since…

Pat craned his neck to press his face into a crevice in his ex’s body, a shoulder he was pretty sure, and worried the empty air with his teeth. Then he let himself be taken apart.

Ever since Pat was a child, he’d imagined what it would be like to be a ghost. The genesis may have been a costume his mother had dressed him in one Halloween when he was about five years old, a sheet ghost with too big eye holes cut out. She’d said it would fit him better. Better than what, he hadn’t been sure.

He drew ghosts in his notebooks often. Similar little sheet ghost silhouettes before graduating to shadows with no source, detailed figures he’d sketched in and then blacked out when he couldn’t find anything in them he liked. Teachers asked him not to leave them in the margins of his tests as they made them harder to read.

By the time he became intimately familiar with death, he’d already mostly disappeared. He talked to no one in the halls of his high school and none of them talked to him. He’d learned to avoid his mother in order to escape scrutiny, and now she rarely looked for him anyway. A weight in the shape of his father’s coffin had begun to press down on her and he worried she could see that he felt no such pressure. His one memory of his father was a man who bought him lunch at McDonald’s once when he and his mother were driving through North Carolina. They’d shared fries. He had seemed nice enough. Pat never saw him again.

He’d wondered if whatever death really was felt like that sheet draped over his head as a five year old, a bit warm and rough against your face and sticky from the humidity. Halloween always ended up being a warm night. Would it surround him? Would it hold him close? Would it suffocate him?

Or would it be as though he was always walking down the same street waiting for someone to hold his hand so he wouldn't get lost?

The box with the bowl in it remained under his bed. That was the first thought that occurred to Pat when he woke the next morning. Followed swiftly by the ache in his lower back as he shifted onto his side.

Something still depressed the mattress on the other side of his bed. He’d never been certain if it needed sleep as he did, but in their time together it had learned his cycles and attempted to follow them. Nothing stirred as he moved.

The bowl was still under his bed. The knife was coming in the mail. The incense was a block away at the specialty store that also stocked stones cut into pyramids and skulls and sold tarot decks in the back.

Pat rolled over and looped his arms around the air next to him and settled back into sleep.

His next moment of awareness slammed into him as he hit the floor, cold hardwood smacking into the side of his face. His head swam. He blinked, tried to bring his eyes into focus. Something smashed into a wall and broke noisily.

Pat propped himself up on an arm.

"Baby? What's going on?"

Even to himself his voice sounded bleary and thin. Petulant.

More things crashed. The last remaining books on his bookshelf toppled to the floor. Blinds ripped down from the window. Claws raked into the drywall.

The mirror still lay on the floor, a short distance from him. Pat inched closer and peered into it. To his own surprise, the first thing he took notice of was himself. Skin deathly pale with spiderwebs of veins peeking through here and there, deep dark circles under his eyes, and long, striped bruises laid around his hips and shoulders. They peeked around the paunch of his belly like grotesque wings. Forgetting himself for a moment, he pressed his fingers into them and savored the brief burst of tender pain.

He never liked to look at himself quite so much as when he could see the remains of someone else touching him.

Pat looked deeper into the mirror, beyond his own image. His lover's distorted form blurred around the room, bouncing off of walls and tearing at whatever it could get its hands on.

He glanced underneath his bed. A box lay on its side, packing peanuts littering the floor in a cascade around an overturned bowl. His eyes widened.

"Wait, Baby, please let me explain. I wouldn't— Not now that—"

The radio alarm clock blared to life and hissed.

GO.

Pat sat up.

"I wasn't going to! I want us to be together!" his voice cracked, tears springing up without warning.

It felt as though the cycle kept on spinning, no matter how desperately he tried to stop it.

GO. BETTER WITHOUT.

"Well, I'm not!" Pat hung his head and sucked in a shuddering breath. A life better without him in it, that's always been it. Hasn't it?

"Is it so bad? Loving me?"

YES.

HURTS.

It hit him like a blood vessel had burst in his brain. First, pain. Then fear, sour and curdling. All at once he felt his own nakedness, his soft underbelly exposed to what now looked very much like a predator stalking the corners of his room in an agitated circuit.

Pat drew into himself, curling up in a ball and staring at this thing that he loved.

OUT OUT OUT OUT

It took purposeful, slow steps toward him. The details of its form shifted back and forth between textures and relative size, one moment looming and sharp and the next compact with smudged edges, and a heaviness settled into his limbs. As though an anchor's chain had tangled around him, and his own strength was the only thing keeping him from being pulled through the floor by the weight of it.

"I—" his voice cut out. He couldn't seem to remember how to force air through his throat.

In the mirror it waited just behind him. The suggestion of a single claw pressed into his bare back, right in between the notches of two vertebrae.

LEAVE. NOW.

A heated, trickling sensation down his back. A single rivulet of blood. A hot pulse of want that evaporated as quickly as it appeared.

"I—" he tried again, pushing the words out in a whisper with ten times the usual effort necessary. "Don't make me get rid of you. Please."

His back hit the floor with a smack and, a stinging arc cut across his face. The space above him shimmers and twists. Another trickle of blood oozing over freshly split skin.

Pat's face went hot, and new tears sprung up. He threw himself to the side and stumbled up, a sudden burst of wild energy carrying him up. Throwing on a t-shirt and pajama pants left discarded on the floor, he grabbed the nearest pair of shoes, his keys, his wallet, and let the front door slam behind him.

Passing through the apartment building's hallway and pushing open the front door, fresh air met him like another dimension. Autumn was setting in more seriously now, with a chill in the air that lightly punished him for forgetting to grab a coat on the way out. Blood from the wound on his back seeped through his shirt and cooled quickly, leaving him with a damp, clinging sensation running down the length of his spine. He stood still in front of the door for a moment. There was a whole wide plane of directions he could go. What if he just started walking and never came back?

On the breeze, he caught the scent of incense burning. The shop down the street would light multiple burners outside some mornings, he remembered, either trying to lure people in or just to make its presence known amongst all the other shopfronts that blended together in the city's landscape.

He turned and started walking.

The smell intensifies around the entrance of the shop, smoke carried in through the door that's been left open. A young woman with dark hair pushed back with a bandana at the front desk looked up from her crossword puzzle with mild interest. She tucked a pen behind her ear.

"Anything I can help you with today, sir?"

Pat opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He closed it. Swallowed. Tried again.

"M— Uh—"

Something held his throat in a vise grip.

He motioned towards the pen. It seemed to take her a second to fully process what he wanted, face scrunching and tilting a bit as she worked it out but handed it over easily enough. He scribbled a quick note in the margins of the puzzle.

●               frankincense & myrrh oil

●               Two sticks juniper incense

●               One stick Palo Santo

Sorry!

She read over it for a minute. Looked back up at him and he could see her eyes trace the fresh scratch across his face.

"Yeah, I can do that. One sec."

She rifled through the set of shelves directly behind her, a honeycomb set of compartments with different scents organized by some indeterminate system. Without turning around, she asked, "So what am I helping you with today, if you don't mind me asking? Trying to cleanse your space?"

Pat cringed.

The cashier looked back over her shoulder at him.

"That bad, huh? Don't worry, we actually get more folks in with that kind of stuff than you think. Should be an easy fix if it's just bad energy."

Pat shook his head.

"T's— uh… It's strong. It lives. With me."

She turned back to him fully, incense sticks in hand, and frowned.

"Like a poltergeist? Moves stuff around? Or more of a demonic presence?"

Pat shook his head slightly. He'd researched his personal phenomenon extensively over the past year, and it had turned up little. Most relevant information he could glean came from forums run by people who believed in things like "etheric spheres of influence" and "cross-dimensional supernatural phenomena". Their solutions ranged from blood rituals to large hadron colliders. The blood ritual seemed simplest.

"Uses the mirror."

He couldn't fully read her expression, but he suspected that meant that she didn't have much of a solution for him that was any better than what he was already doing. She set the sticks down on the counter and said, "Just take them."

The woman made an attempt to look him in the eyes. It took some effort, but he held her gaze for a moment. She was making a face.

Pat nodded, picked them up and waffled over whether it was worth trying to stick them in a pocket before remembering to thank her.

She shook her head slightly.

"Good luck, man."

The smell of the shop stayed in his nose all the way back to his apartment door. He took one last deep breath and stepped back in.

Right.

Step 1:

Get into his room, the focal point of the anomaly. Step over the fallen bookcase. Dodge the bedside water glass hurled at his head. Don't stop to think about it, just be in the right place.

Step 2:

Align two mirrors across from each other so that his room extends into a long, infinite hallway. Try not to pay any attention to the dark figure moving erratically around the room, seeming to grow closer by the second through that mirrored tunnel. Concentrate on how there is just one of it. Concentrate on how he is now infinitely many.

Step 3:

Situate himself between the two mirrors on his bed. Set down the ritual bowl. Light the sticks of incense and set it in the bowl. Raise the ritual knife. Consider the right place to cut. The right direction. Settle on two clean cuts across, one on each arm, careful to mirror the placement. Ignore the cry that vibrates through his bones as the knife first breaks skin. Focus on the cold feeling of flesh parting and blood beginning to seep out.

Step 4:

Let his blood fall into the bowl. It needs to fill up to the line of symbols etched around the inside of bowl. Don't think about whether that's a safe amount of blood to lose. Does that even matter to him at this point? He may as well be cutting his own heart out. Ignore the noise that rattles louder and louder as a feeling like static courses through his body.

Step 5:

Blood is at the proper level, inside and out. Pour the frankincense and myrrh oil in with it and let them comingle. Dip both hands into the mixture so that it covers the surfaces of his palms. Then, reach out in each direction. Try to place a handprint at the center of each mirror, straining the reach of his arm span. Reach out. Feel the connection run down through that infinite line.

Ignore the presence bearing down on him. Pressure at the nape of his neck.

Step 6:

Step 6.

Please. Don't.

I live here.

Tears poured down Pat's face as he fought to hold his position. The voice in his head hummed at a desperate pitch, words and ideas accumulating and clumping together.

You are endless. You can be anywhere. I can only be here.

"I wanted to be here with you," Pat gasped out.

You can be anywhere. I can only be here.

"You can't just… Is it not my choice? To stay?"

Built for different things.

Pat hung his head. His hands remained in place, but in that moment, it felt as though all the gravity in the world was dragging him down. His arms were numb. The scent of the incense mixed with the blood loss left him lightheaded.

"If I do this, do you know where you'll go?"

idon'tknowidon'tknowidon'tknowidon'tknowidon'tknow

"I don't know either. Where I would go if I left."

And that same cold fear that trailed Pat all his life, the fear of that wide expanse outside of himself, froze his insides over. It gripped his heart and squeezed.

"I love you. I'm sorry."

Nonononononononononononononononon

pleasenoimsc—

Step 6:

Feel the strength of his infinite circle. Smell the incense. Acknowledge this space as his. And speak the words: "You are not welcome in this house."

"Begone."

A ripping sensation tore through him, sucked the air out of his lungs, felt as though an intangible fist had pulled his nerves out like an overgrown root system. Something severed. A door slammed shut. And then everything rebounded back into him at full force, nearly knocking him over.

Pat pulled into himself, drawing his hands away from the mirrors. He shivered. Something felt as though it was leaking from his back.

Shaking, he probed at his skin and twisted to see in one of the mirrors.

In that long line of himself all he saw was the deep red line of gash running down the length of his spine. A single claw mark. There was no one else in the mirror.

Pat lay back on his bed and watched his blood stain the sheets. He tried to remember how to sleep alone.