A lost dream, forever left to the void proceeded it. The gulf that had no bearing and therefore no need to remember. Leaving nothing to worry about, even as-
*BOOOoooooooom*
Seth’s shot open to the deep thud ringing his ears. What it was, what it could mean, questions trying to coerce him wide awake. But still sleepy eyes failed to care, blinking the world back into focus in slow terminal relapse. His room was dim, the curtains still closed, morning light barely eking through across and shining across it nondescript surface. Those questions losing ground, more powerful urges countering. As pure justification smothered them whole. Because…
'Grrr, it's too early.'
Especially during ‘his’ summer break. He pulled his head back over on his pillow, regaining his lost comfort with slothful curmudgeon. Trying to get back to… to whatever he was dreaming of. But before he can drift back there, back maybe to anything, he realized something else.
'It’s so… quiet.'
He'd always been woken up by his parents’ morning routines. Almost like they were trying to annoy him awake most days. But... but now it is way too quiet. His drift was thoroughly shot, worry becoming antithesis to rest. He rolled up and on to the side of his two tone bed, still half asleep and oblivious to anything not worth his while. His room little more than a blur as he rubbed the grit from his eyes.
Hopping the slight fall off, he groggily shuffled and kicked through action figures all gathered up below. Most still stanced to fight whatever villain would be on TV next, whichever was brave enough to come out of hiding. A single one avoided, cared about amid the obscurity. Blocky red and green and yellow armor barely covering his tan bravado, feather headdress frilled out into mohawk to dare the sky, and shark tooth blade of hard to pronounce heritage somehow absent from his little plastic hand. Some weird feeling welling up as he looked down on it. On his favorite hero, Tlatoani, in his prime merchandising phase. But an equal force pushed him ahead. And away…
Muscle memory bade him to grab the windbreaker he always left draped over his chair. Putting it on over the thick comfy pajamas as the world played on. As he headed toward the door to the hall with questions rising in his throat.
“Mom? Dad?”
Nothing but continued silence as he stood there, just shy of halfway up the tallying frame. Small pride urging him out and into better action. He poked his head into his parent’s bedroom, but the bed was made and the curtains still drawn. His mom always opened them first thing in the morning, to everyone’s curmudgeon. The bathroom door was open, but the light was off so they weren’t in there either. His dad’s office was empty, but he’d always told him that productivity was pointless this early. He’d always repeated it like Seth would forget it or something.
But still, why was it so quiet? Surely there would be some noise, his mom making breakfast and clinking dishes, his dad making coffee from their overused maker, either of them talking. But there was nothing. And that was growing his worry into full concern, steering him toward the stairs down. Winding him down past family photos full of people he… he couldn’t remember. Distant relatives he just never cared to know.
Making it to the foyer, his bare feet stepped to the first floor. Right into the chilling morning air pooling over it. He turned, knowing full well the front door was open. But seeing it now for sure now was more anxiety inducing then it should be. Fully ajar, dim light illuminating the storage closet door that was directly opposite. And it was quiet, way too quiet.
No birds, no wind, not even someone driving by or mowing their lawn. It was like the world outside was standing still. Waiting for him. Waiting for him to make it all real. Seth inched ever forward to the door frame, heart beating louder in his ears than it should be. Little body barely able to keep from trembling.
And yet… yet the scene awaiting him was one of supreme stillness.
His overly friendly neighborhood at a complete standstill. His parents finally found there, standing apart. Mother halfway up the pathway to the door with her hand covering her mouth, father all the way at the sidewalk frozen with tension. Both staring straight ahead like everyone else on the street. Mr. Thomas next door at the sidewalk too, as was the whole Maltsburger family on the other side. Mrs. Buchanan leaning out her bedroom window, while Mr. and Mrs. Peirce were stopped halfway into their car on their way to work. Every one of them staring out toward the center of town.
And the slowly rising plume of black smoke over it.
“Mom!?”
As if the spell sealing this moment broke apart, both parents turned at this call. Allowing Seth to see their surprise and worry on… on what should be their faces. But all there was, all he knew… was a blur.
The red scarf around his mother’s neck was brighter than it should be. The one she would always wrap around him if he got cold. The one thing he could truly see. The only thing he could see. As it suddenly started billowing toward him.
A strange noise carried by the wind, from down the street, whirling both parents back around in time to see Mr. Farrow at the end lurch away before-*zzzzZZZAP*
Before the world came crashing to grim… slow… speed.
A bolt, no a tendril of electricity striking him from around the corner. Enveloping him in blinding light burning away detail and sanity. As two more arcs lurched out from where he stood. One struck out toward the O’Crowly house on the left, barreling through a window and detonating. The right hitting Ms. Mable on her front porch as she saw the horror too late.
But not Seth, he was forced to watch, as his heart sank to levels it should not go. And compounding this grim inevitability with the shock of his parents turning back around. In abject panic and… cruel clear focus. Like his mind finally caught and cleared away the fuzz that had been clouding his reality. Like it was something he knew, but couldn’t remember.
His father’s light brown hair and green eyes burning toward him in desperate fury, pivoting and reaching out for his family too far away.
“RUN!!!”
His mother closer, reaching for him instinctively. Dark brown hair flowing behind her, and shared hazel eyes staring out as if this is the last time she will see her son. All the while the tendrils kept stretching further.
The left bursting out and striking the Peirces, their car shattering between them, the right slamming through that porch’s awning and into Mrs. Buchanan, blowing out her windows and adding thunder to this too slow hell. The left hit Mr. Thomas as he recoiled from the shock, almost prone and pleading. The right wicked and chaining through the Maltsburgers on the other side. Then splitting again, one tendril tearing away down the street and the other…
The other slamming his father in the side.
The collective flashes washed away the street, Seth’s town, that smoke, his life. Yet the arc impacted as if it were a wanton blaring train. And stole away those features in pure plasma cruelty. Before he could even make it another desperate step. And still it arcs.
Whiting out the rest of the world from sky to lawn. And chaining toward his mother with no care for even this moment. Light haloing around her as the tendril bares its hungry teeth, striking her in the back and bending her upward. Forcing her teared up eyes away as everything disappeared in the blinding light enveloping her. As even her face disappeared from his life.
As adrenaline churned and mind realizes all too much what was occurring, and yet refused to let Seth move even a muscle. Even as that final rippling, jagged tendril left his mother’s blown out and indistinguishable form, and stretched out toward him. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe. Only be there, forced to watch as it grew slower, as grim inevitability burned the world into his brain, as it went into overdrive out of reflex and spite, trying to keep it like it never could before. As it came closer and closer.
Until there was nothing at all.
The world falling away. No blinding heat, no feeling of impact. Just a total loss of sensory input and necessary reaction. Replaced, consumed, by a darkness eating away at the edges of everything. A darkness encroaching upon his mind, blotting out what it could reach, tearing through it without regard or care. Taking what little he had. The candy and toys his neighbors used to give him to make him happy, the dead animals he used to cower from at the edge of the forest, the annoying way his mom forced him up in the morning, the way his dad ruined breakfast every day.
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Every emotion, every tiny memory, every… every memory he had. All of it ripping away like haphazard threading. Defiant holds try to grip but they keep fading away, the blurry fuzz he lived in filling every void in that blotted path. Leaving him nothing… but their absence. Their sucking void, their knowing loss, their known destroyer. So Seth was left with only the one thing that exuded from that swallowing abyss. The one thing it shared without cause or concern, the thing it left behind in its wake of nothingness. A burning, blinding, all-consuming-
A sudden new light flared into being, countering the darkness like heaven come to spare, overshadowing everything trying to take from him. Shattering even the white out of the real. Scorching the sky across the town, streaking as if it had no care for physics or grim perception. A massive bolt of lightning tearing over rooftops and blurring out all but its magnificent fury. As if aimed with purpose and wanton disregard for that dared spread darkness. With direction and condemnation of its burning siphon. It flies… straight for Seth.
It crashed into him with force enough to slam the world back to what it once was. Snapping that abyss to cowering recoil. Colliding with power enough to blow both the front door and the closet door off their hinges. Both smashing through the storage closet like a freak hurricane, sending everything falling from its shelf or rack. An avalanche of disuse burying Seth in a mountain of coats and cleaning equipment until the only darkness surrounding him was the real and true article.
The world refading away, more physical concussion than existential loss. But before his consciousness could drift away, Seth could see that dim light once again, finally through with its moment of blinding hell. A pinhole in the mountain of clear blue sky, fading away. Diminishing more and more before it all… faded too…
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“*Hassshh*…jish…xish…xing…xike…wake…WAKE UP!!”
Like it was the first time he'd ever had, Seth shot awake. But surprise was stifled by a weight pressing against him. The cloth mountain still in place, nothing had moved and the light outside remained shining through its upward pinhole. Though markedly shifted from the dim blue of dawn to the burnt orange of approaching dusk. He’d been asleep for a long while, the will to get up finally roused as he moved to free himself. Yet, his body refused to budge. Not from the weight of his mothballed articles, but from the weight of itself. The weight pressing him down was his own. So sapped and weak, his body couldn’t free itself from a few layers of clothing. Though the vacuum on his foot really wasn’t helping.
But, oddly, this weight was comforting. Surrounded by soft clothes and no energy to expend, that will was waning. Seth just felt like going back to sleep all over again. Back to the rest he was denied… before...? But as soon as he sunk his head down in confused drift, he regretted it. For every coat and jacket and forgotten piece of clothing in this closet was hiding something. A hanger.
He felt the cold metal poke spring him out of his drift, and bring attention to all the others in this mountainous pile. One was hooked around his jacket sleeve, one was poking him in the ribs, a further two were hooking his pajama pants, and finally one threatened his face if he were to ever rise out of this pincushion of a cradle.
Trapped, tired, and barely able to… to remember what happened.
‘What happened..?’
He remembered getting out of bed and seeing his parents but it felt… jumbled. Like he’d never remembered stuff before. He tried again, but all he saw almost literal static, heard words he… he couldn’t understand, and…
“*Haassh*…ecsh…ecoutez…liutez…listen… LISTEN!!”
Out of the mental fuzz came a voice, one he could understand. He looked around his hand-me-down tomb but saw no source.
“Lisshh… Listen!”
He looked again toward the opening, fruitlessly searching for where the sound was coming from.
“llllisten… to… Me!!”
At this, Seth’s head felt as if it were being held in place. His eyes defocusing, as if trying to see someone close up, but there was nothing there. Just the empty space colored dusky orange.
“ssssSorry, you were scaring us a little.”
The voice, clearer and softer, spoke as if trying to calm him. It sounded jaded, guilty, but still sincere.
“Don’t worry, we aren’t here to hurt you.”
The voice was low, almost inaudible, but then again Seth couldn’t hear anything else.
“h…”
He tried to ask who they were but… he couldn’t speak. It was like he knew what to say but couldn’t remember how to say it.
“*hissshh*…Oh, that’s uh… complicated.”
The voice responded, not to Seth’s failed words but his thoughts of them.
“Oh yeah... sorry about your uh *hhissh*… voice. We had to… borrow it. So we could learn to speak to you. Don’t worry, we can give it back to you. It just… might be a while. Each of us needs to use it to learn and there’s a lo- *hsh* *sigh* Just don’t worry okay.”
Seth’s vision refocused and his head seemed freed from its phantom grasp, but he knew now that the voices weren’t outside, they were in his head.
“Yeah sorry again, we needed someone to take us in, but we weren’t expecting to all be in just one… *hsh*…”
The voice responded to Seth’s thoughts, but also to someone else. He couldn’t understand them, but felt their apprehension… Wait, he could feel a lot of things. Fear, some loathing, guilt. A lot of guilt, and…
“heh… *hish* cat’s… out of the bag? What’s a cat? Anyway, yeah, what you’re feeling is everything we are. Call it a side effect of what happened… *HHHSSshhh* WE are a part of you now, and by extension you are a part of us. It’s just SOME of us are a little concerned what this might cause and want to keep separate. But I think you need someone to talk to, or at least someone to help you understand. And really, we are all in this together so leaving you out of this like some kind of… beast of burden, your sayings are weird. Its only going to make things worse for all of us. So, what do you saaa… oops sorry. What do you think?”
Seth thought, but felt as if he wasn’t heard, as if given time and distance to formulate his answer. He could still feel the others, but there was a thin wall in the way, like a curtain. He didn’t know what all of this was, who all these people were, or even what they were. But of all the feelings he felt, malice wasn’t one of them. He thought of what they needed from him, but couldn’t feel greed. He couldn’t remember what happened, but he felt as if these people were affected by it as well, like what was supposed to happen didn’t and now they are all stuck. Just like him. Or at least stuck with him.
He thought again, this time with focus, this time directing it at the others now seemingly camping out inside his head.
‘o… o… Okay.’
The curtain fell away and he felt the rush of the stifled emotions, but could make out relief predominantly among them.
“Thank you. And here, let’s see if we can’t get you out of this pile.”
At this Seth felt the weight of his empty body lift from him, in fact he felt lighter than ever. All the tired ache in his muscles falling away like nothing. He moved to lift the top off his thrift store sarcophagus, but despite his now revitalized body, he was stopped. More appropriately snagged by the ever present hangers.
“Oh, yeah, here let me get those for… wait why’s that-”
Without warning Seth felt every hair on his body stand on end and could feel the hangers seemingly recede into the cloth walls, but felt not just their absence, but their movement. He could feel every one of them, even the ones not close to him, even the ones that stayed up on their racks. But in the same instant he felt them, they not only receded but shot away at speed. Simple metal forms turned ballistic projectiles on all directions, imbedding themselves into the walls of the closet. The vacuum pinning his feet included. But now free of their cold pokes, their annoyance was replaced by stinging screaming pain. One of the hangers had hooked his thigh and gashed it on the way out, and warm wet blood was splattering his pajamas.
“*HHSH* OKAY!! That wasn’t supposed to happen!!”
Reeling, curling up in a pain he'd never experienced, throwing away the clothes from on top of him and uncovered himself as best he could. All the while the gash in his leg yelled for attention. Ripped edge demanding restitution for its loss and taking it out on him. But Seth couldn’t even vocalize this torrential agony, only managing whimpers and tears. Once his wound was uncovered he saw more blood than he’d ever seen, his grey pajamas now blotched and tattered, and the gash… was gone!?
“There… huh that was close. Didn’t think you’d take to the power so… easily.”
The gap in his pajamas, frayed and rippled, now only showed pale skin between dark red spread. Still covered in drying blood, but no grievous wound that had been demanding what he couldn’t offer. Seth was speechless… err…
“Yeah, that’s one of the perks of having the power, healing is easy if you focus at it. It’s just harder to numb the pain. But don’t worry we can teach you…*Hhsh* Yes WE can… *hshshhh* You saw…!”
The voice receded as if stepping away from a podium, leaving Seth to poke the now closed wound, probing for anything residual but finding nothing but phantom tension. And leaving him alone to take in his trashed closet proper.
Boxes on shelves had overturned into the pile, the racks were almost barren… and bent away in places. The walls were skewered with hangers, most so deep in that barely a corner stuck out. Seth turned his head around to look behind him and saw more violent hanger-wall interactions, but the back wall was dominated by a massive cracked and caved in crater. The one he made as… as he was shot back. As he was struck by that lightning bolt. As his mind faded away. As he was watching-
‘MOM, DAD!!!’
He shot up, ducking past the vacuum that was slammed into the wall, climbing over the discombobulated doors that leaned every which way, barely making out protests from within before finally making it to the door frame. Outside the sun was setting, hanging off to his left yet still lighting up his little street. The burnt orange light had darkened further, yet all he could see was… nothing.
Where his neighbors, friends, his parents were stood, there was barely anything even signifying they were ever there… Except for a red scarf caught on his front step, blowing in the wind, blowing away from the sun like it was a stellar wind. His breath caught in his throat, he could barely process what he was seeing, what it meant. In that moment though, Seth saw what else had been left.
The wind carried tatters, barely pieces of cloth, along with it. Pools of what were once pants and shirts in places the wind couldn’t touch and pieces draped and caught on every edge facing the wind. That hot oppressive wind. He turned to face it, but there was no sun to warm his face, only illuminated clouds and the scorch of something worse. Plumes of smoke blotting out the sky. As if the horizon was on fire, and he was given a front row seat.