“Yo...Miss Turner is a bitch...”

“Yo...Miss Turner is a bitch...”

Vincent found himself stumbling down a drab hallway, tripping foot over foot until he caught himself on a door. Overhead, florescent lights hummed as they illuminated walls of concrete brick, which were painted a pale green. Lockers flanked both sides of the hallway, their doors all dented and vandalized by years of abuse. Tiling was missing from several places along the floor and old pipes snaked along the ceiling with bits of paint hanging from them in flakes and strands. Black cobwebs fluttered between them.

Confusion wracked Vincent’s brain and he found himself yelling. Menik? Sperloc? Madrian? His ghostly self paced around the contemporary, yet familiar setting, shouting for his escorts. He walked down the passage in a state of disorientation. He passed by tall familiar doors with narrow windows of reinforced glass. He could hear yelling and for a moment, he thought it belonged to the shandan. Were they all right? He then noticed the paper projects hanging from the ceiling: cranes, airplanes, spirals. Memos and posters plastered the bulletin board, flanked on both sides by paper stars awarded to well-behaved students.

No, he realized, that’s not them.

It took him a few minutes to calm down and realize this was a setting from his past. It was a memory. A teacher on the other side of the door was trying to gain control over an unruly classroom. He did not want to be here, soldiers were fighting and dying. Why was he back here?

“I like pooping my pants!”

“I like pooping my pants!”

Vincent heard a voice, turned around and stopped to look at three giggling kids in the hallway skipping class. One of them held in their hands a small purple recording device. He pressed a button, spoke into the microphone and a few seconds later, it played back his words. His friends started laughing their asses off, covering their mouths.

“Yo, let me try: 'Jordan has a small penis.'”

“I do not–” Jordan said.

“–Yeah he do! Yeah he do!”

“'Jordan has a small penis. I do not– Yeah he do! Yeah he do!'”

“Man, you's stupid as hell.”

Vincent stared at the kids in disbelief. He couldn’t focus. Jordan grabbed the device back from his friend, held it to his rear-end and let one rip. The speaker played back a low-fidelity rendition of his flatulence.

“Wait...wait...I have a funny idea,” Jordan said, then he pressed the record button. “Mrs. Turner is fat and smelly...and she sucks.”

“Mrs. Turner is fat and smelly...and she sucks.”

“Man that's lame.”

“Wait...I'm gonna play it to Mrs. Turner and say Freakman did it.”

Freakman, Vincent realized with a jolt, that’s what they used to call me.

It all clicked into place. He immediately remembered where this was: the elementary school he attended when he and his family lived in Chicago. He stared at Jordan. He seemed so small now, so naive. It was hard to believe that he used to be Vincent’s bully. He knew what was about to happen. When the three boys headed toward their classroom, Vincent’s phantom followed. They knocked on the door and entered. The teacher, Mrs. Turner, put her hands on her hips.

“Jordan, Lucas, and Barrett!!” she demanded, “class started 10 minutes ago! Why are you walking in just now?! To your seats, now!”

“But Mrs–”

“–But nothing! Sit down, shut up, and pay attention!”

Her words were like a dream, so distant from Vincent, yet so familiar. The shandan had taken him into the storm for this. They were dying so he could remember Jordan being a dumbass. Vincent glanced toward the back of the room where he saw his younger self sitting. It was only a brief glimpse before he averted his eyes. Young Vinny sat brooding, a dead-eyed depiction of misery. Earlier that day, he had his ass kicked by Jordan at recess. Jordan wasn’t punished, instead, Vincent got in trouble for daring to defend himself. He didn’t remember what asinine explanation the teachers gave. It did not matter. They never gave a shit. He was the one who got penalized. But instead of being angry, Vincent simply stared at his past. It seemed so irrelevant now, so mundane.

Jordan, Lucas, and Barrett took their seats as Mrs. Turner wrote their names on the board, right next to Vincent's and Robert's. She set the chalk down and turned around to give the class a dressing down.

“Five names!” she spat, “you all need to stop with this nonsense, I ain't playing! Getting into fights, throwing spitballs, coming in late, I've had it! The next person who steps outta line, I don't care what excuse you have, you're going straight to Mr. Griffin's office!”

As she spoke, her cheeks flapped and she glared wide-eyed at the class, allowing the words to sink in. Somebody snickered and she immediately homed in on them.

“Mr. Cole, principal's office now!” she barked.

“B-but–”

“–Go! No 'buts', get your tail-end to the principal's office right now!” As he left the classroom, she gave one last warning, “next person who laughs is going to join him! Understood?”

Nobody answered, though a few kids near the back were trying their best not to laugh. “Now...get out your books...”

Jordan and his friends began to scheme in secret while Mrs. Turner continued her lesson. Vincent remembered that his schizophrenia “projected” their thoughts. He knew they were planning something because they kept snickering and glancing back at him.

“Mrs. Turner?” young Vincent said.

“What now?” Mrs. Turner sighed.

“Barrett just called me an a-hole.”

Barrett, Jordan, and Lucas looked at each other in genuine confusion. Barrett had done no such thing.

“Did anybody else hear it?” Mrs. Turner asked. Everybody shook their heads. “Well, Mr. Cordell, if nobody else heard it, it didn't happen. Now cut it out and stop being a fool.”

A few people had to cover their mouths to hide the snickering. Vincent’s phantom clenched his fists. A few minutes later, she had people break out into groups, assigning each by number. As everybody moved around the classroom to join their groups, Vincent watched as Jordan took this opportunity to approach her desk with the toy in hand, knowing what was about to happen.

“Jordan, why aren't you in your group?” she demanded.

“Um...Vince stole this from me earlier.” he explained.

“Why do you have a toy in the classroom?”

“I had it during recess and he took it from me. I got it back.”

“And?” she waited. The class became noisy as the students moved chairs closer to each other to form their groups.

“He...recorded himself saying you was fat. I wanted to tell you earlier, but you was yelling at us.”

“Baloney. Sit down!”

For a moment, it did not seem like she was going to play along with Jordan's bullshit. But he insisted, so she reluctantly took the device from him.

“You press 'play'?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

The device played back Jordan's distorted voice calling her fat and smelly. It sounded nothing like Vincent's and yet she played it back again and somehow, the wheels in her brain convinced her to believe Jordan's lie.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Mr. Cordell, come over here right now!” she commanded. Young Vinny looked up in confusion, got up, and approached the desk. When he reached it, she played back the recording. “You want to explain this to me?”

“What?”

“That's your voice,” she said, “Jordan says you took this from him at recess and recorded this on it.”

“No I didn't! He's lying!”

“Then why does it sound like you? That's your voice.”

“It sounds nothing like me!”

“Jordan, how do you record yourself?” Mrs. Turner asked. He showed her, then she spoke into it. “My name is Bianca Turner.” It played back a poor rendition of her voice. “See? It sounds like me.”

“I swear I didn't do it! He's lying!” Vincent watched numbly as his past self broke down.

“He ain't setting nobody up!” Mrs.Turner yelled, “that's you on there and I have had it! You're going to get detention. You're coming with me, I'm taking you to Mr. Griffin's office myself so I can show him this.”

Vincent's phantom followed them both into the hallway. Behind him, Jordan returned to his group and began to laugh his ass off.

“I have had it,” Mrs. Turner repeated, “you are one of the worst troublemakers in class. I don't even know why you're allowed in school.”

“You're going to die on a toilet,” Vincent's phantom said.

“If your parents cared, they'd put you in a school for the special.”

“A few years from now, you're going to have a blood clot because you're so damn fat. You're going to sit down to take a shit...then you're going to start screaming. You’re going to have a heart attack fall over, then shit all over yourself. That’s how it ends for you: alone and miserable, dying in a pile of your own shit.”

“Oh, stop crying! That is nonsense. You're gonna own up to your actions, this is what you get.”

“Nobody's going to mourn you. They're going to call you Toilet Turner and Marlo is going to re-enact your death and become one of the most popular kids in class because of it.”

Vincent turned away from them and went down the stairs. He was finished with this memory, he did not need to see any more of it. He remembered the rest. He got detention, he got in trouble with his parents, and nobody believed him. This had been his life. He was an easy scapegoat for everything because it was easy to pin the blame on the lunatic. The elementary school was also a joke. None of the teachers gave a shit, they knew most of their students didn't care about learning, many of them would join gangs or end up on the streets.

He saw a box of pencils sitting on top of a heater and swept his hand through them. The box didn't actually move, but he sent ghostly afterimages of the pencils rolling across the floor. He came upon an emergency exit and pushed on through it. He headed toward the street and stepped out onto the sidewalk, then he chose a direction at random. He had no particular destination, he just went, knowing the storm would find him. He kept walking, passing by several dumpsters and came across another street. He checked both directions before crossing. He passed through a gate and entered a park.

Autumn had long gone, stripping the trees of their foliage, leaving their branches with a bone-like complexion. The sky was darkened with winter clouds. Salt deposits from the last snowstorm swirled on the sidewalk pavement, glimmering in the sterile orange light of the streetlamps. As he weaved his way through pedestrians, ruminating on the clashing worlds of Falius and Earth, he wondered how far this recreation went. If he took the right roads, would he be able to find his way back home, and sit on his couch as a phantom? No, his current home was far away in the countryside, and he did not remember the city apartment they used to live in.

As he proceeded further toward the boundaries of his past, the people whom he passed by became like shadows: faceless and featureless. The winding sidewalk that cut through the park resolved into one straight path. A feral cat stood on the edge of a trash can, attempting to fish out a discarded chicken sandwich. It fled into the bushes as somebody approached. A moment later, he found the same feral cat, trying to get the same chicken sandwich out of the same trash can. It fled from the same shadowy figure that had frightened it before. The scene repeated itself several more times, growing fainter with each passing, until the cat became a shadow and faded away into the incoming fog.

The trees disappeared, leaving behind only the streetlights to illuminate the path. But these too, grew dimmer with each passing until all that was left was the sidewalk...and the yawning black storm at its end. Vincent stood on the concrete slab, which extended out like a diving board over a sea of black fog. Implications of limbs and shapes churned within those clouds. Fear and anger stabbed at his gut, but he took a deep breath.

“Why...why this?” he demanded. “Why this one in particular? Is there a reason you're showing me this moment or are you just trying to fuck with me?”

His voice echoed out over the expanse, but he received no response from the moiling clouds.

“Why are you after me? What do you want?”

Nothing. No answer. The clouds churned and the void yawned with the storms’ grumbling. Still, nothing answered his challenge.

“I know you can hear me! For fuck's sake, that thing bowed to me! That was you, wasn’t it? Then you sent the storms toward Meldohv as soon as one of them discovered I was there, so I know you have some sort of sentience! You want something from me and I don't know what that is, or even know who or what the hell you are! So, stop screwing with me and say something!”

Vincent waited for a response as he sat on the sidewalk. He let his feet dangle over the edge, not sure what to think. He picked up a pebble and cast it into the void, his mind flitting between his past and the present. He felt torn between two identities: a lacertine form who was asleep on Menik’s mount as the latter escaped the grinning horrors. The second was the one who had no choice but to receive the blame for a crime he did not commit, many years ago. This was the schizophrenic, the madman. He was condemned to fight a battle he had no chance of winning until the day he died. But he did fight.

Irrational people always caused harm, no matter what their intentions were. Bianca Turner was proof of that. She had been an irrational bag of flab who couldn’t once think critically, and Vincent was the one who suffered for her idiocy time and time again. Whether she was truly stupid or she simply didn't care, that wasn’t the first, nor the last time she would penalize him for something he didn’t do. It was an observation he had made repeatedly: emotional people, illogical people, always caused harm. It was one of many reasons why he didn’t want to be one of them.

Yet here he was, terrified for the shandan. He insisted they weren’t real, but he was afraid for them. Who was being irrational now? He thought about Menik. Did they get away? Did anybody else die?

Shaking his head, Vincent laid back facing the sky and closed his eyes. There was nothing he could do. The storm's surreal, yawn-like rumbling could almost be peaceful and calming in any other circumstance. There was an ebb and flow to its thrumming cadence that lulled him into a state resembling the space between sleep and wakefulness. He drifted on the floating plank of concrete, believing he was the only living thing in this realm of memories and dreams. If he allowed himself to stay still, he thought he could pick out gentle whispers behind the storm's droning. They had a calming quality to their murmurings.

Now that this memory was fresh in his mind, a few more had been unlocked by association, particularly a confrontation that happened a few weeks after this one. Most schizophrenics were not violent, despite what the stereotypes would have people believe. That was not true for Vincent. He could be violent, and he often had to be. Nobody came to his defense, and so blood had to be spilled.

He didn’t remember how the fight began, it seemed so distant now. But it went down on a playground. Jordan was by himself. None of his buddies were around to help him. Vincent ended up with a mouth-shaped bruise on his forehead while Jordan ended up on the ground kicking and screaming after Vincent came in for a headbutt. Vincent swung a few well-placed kicks to the chest, then he bolted.

As he savored the memory, a soft rattling broke him out of his reverie, and he sat up. The sidewalk was no longer connected to his past. Instead, it floated in isolation above and below two seas of churning systems. The air glowed with a salmon-colored luminescence, painting the horizon between the two storms with a fleshy haze. Something behind him rattled. He turned around. A score of thin threads hung from an unseen anchor in the clouds above. Suspended from their ends was an object draped in a ragged white sheet of linen. Its size, being no bigger than a basketball, was not large, but something about it unnerved him.

He looked for a stick to prod it with, but there were no trees nearby. It was just the sidewalk defying gravity. He leaned in and tried to get a better look. Something beneath the fabric twitched. He swore and stepped back. The object twitched a second time, sending itself into a gentle sway. Another spasm, more violent than the first and second, sent it bouncing against its threads.

“What the hell...”

Pink fog arose from the depths below and began to trail onto the sidewalk. The object twitched several more times as red spots bloomed on the fabric, growing until they seeped with wetness. Beads of blood, crimson and human, gathered into droplets, swelling until they ran down its sides.

More seizures jerked the object until it danced with frantic desperation. It bounced from one side to the other as if fighting to break itself free from the threads that kept it aloft. It flung red stringers onto the concrete, painting the slabs with crimson lines. The substance gathered into small rivulets and poured into the seams before racing toward the edges of the sidewalk and raining into the abyss. More blood than the object could possibly hold continued to leak from the rags, which were now soaked with the color of coagulation.

The drizzling weight threw itself in every direction that it could, sending its form swinging over the abyss and back like a wet pendulum. Every tangle, every criss-crossing of strings in the object’s frenetic dance sent it spinning. It threw out crimson sprays in pirouetting spirals. Vincent stumbled backward, narrowly avoiding being hit by the thing. The trails it left behind spread of their own accord, sending out rivers like tendrils to flow, in defiance of nature and gravity, over the sidewalk like a disease, like an infection. Vincent tried to back away, only to find the sidewalk had shortened and he had no room to move. Before the tendrils of blood could reach him, he did the only thing he could: he leapt off the platform.

He found himself falling toward the yawning storm. He plunged into its mists until his world became nothing but black fog. His ears were filled with the sound of bestial panting. It was the respiration of the tantalons, malformed by whatever eldritch power sustained them. He could feel their moist breaths tickling his skin and rushing down the nape of his neck. He landed on something wet and felt it closing around him. A maw. It was one of the grinning aberrations, swallowing him whole into its warm, pulsating innards. It was also the Stalker, returning to finish its work, ready to sculpt him with new venom and a thousand knives. It was that channeler back in Pearl Wood, staring right at his face. He could not move, he was trapped in their iron vise. He could not–

“–Calm yourself, Vincent!” Menik commanded, “you are in danger. I trapped you in a shryken to save your life. If you withdraw it, you will fall to your death.”