Chapter 1
The wild winds weep,
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold…
- William Blake, ‘Mad Song’
Oskar’s eyes opened and his trembling hands let go of the tightly clenched motel bed sheets. Screams faded as he worked the feeling back into his hands. Sweat rolled down his body, and he felt the damp sheets beneath him. He took a deep breath and regretted it immediately. The stale smell of the yellowed room hit him as he pushed himself up slowly to shake off another night in a string of bad nights.
The dreams started half a year after his brother’s death. They were persistent, strange dreams. Dreams that didn’t float out of memory the way dreams often do. They started gently. Like a faint voice in the wind, but over the course of the next three months they became screams. Screams of pain. Screams of torture.
As if that weren’t bad enough, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were not dreams at all. When it all began, there were strings of days he didn’t sleep. How could one expect to sleep, serenaded by the screams of their dead brother?
Depression had set in, marked by hours of staring at nothing. It felt external, though, like it was being inflicted upon him somehow. He felt so disconnected from it, that more than once he’d felt tears on his face and wondered how they’d gotten there. Food, when he forced himself to eat, was tasteless. He didn’t care or even remember what his favorite foods had been. Hopelessness and anxiety were his constant companions.
His sense of self felt like grains of sand falling through an hourglass and both he and time itself were wearing thin. He felt old. Not his body, but his spirit. His soul. Despite his missing foot, he was in decent shape, physically, but Oskar Dorn wore the heaviness of life in a way that he had never experienced before.
He retreated from almost all social contact, afraid that someone could see him unraveling. He was afraid he’d never find peace again and didn’t want to drag anyone else down with him.
It was late September, almost 6 months after the dreams began, that they stopped. They did not go gently but crescendoed into a nightmarish week where every dream chased him into the waking world. For minutes... or hours... they refused to ease their grip on him.
The final night of that week, he was convinced he was hearing his brother screaming from the very depths of Hell. He could almost feel the torture himself and he’d spent the night screaming himself hoarse to drown out the noise. Oskar came closer to insanity than he thought possible without tipping over into the abyss.
It was when he woke from that last awful night that the distinction became clear; the screams were coming from the north, no longer in his head, and he was left staring and listening as he fought to not go numb.
Even with the newfound tangible sense of direction, a lingering ethereal feeling served as a constant reminder that something was still very much off-kilter; FUBAR as his brother would say. It was more of a presence than a sound calling to him, but calling to him it was.
He had a surreal feeling of time thinning that was becoming increasingly familiar. Eventually, he realized it wasn’t just time that felt thin, but reality itself. And it felt thinnest to the north. The dreams shifted, no longer nightmares, but more like he was falling through the sky waiting to hit the ground, and every night that he stayed in the same place, the ground grew closer. Eventually, the fear of hitting that ground outweighed the anxiety that grew with every day that he fought it. So, finally, he was driven from his bed, and instead, drove himself Northeast like a moth to a flame. For three days, he drove until exhaustion made going further suicidal, and only then tried to find a place to sleep in the hopes he could eke out an hour or so of sleep.
***
He listened to music to distract his thoughts as he drove North on his brother’s motorcycle, a 2012 Victory Hammer, and despite the layers he wore, he was chilly. The temperatures only got more severe as he drove; a cold front was moving in, and he could feel it in his bones. He didn't mind too much. The cold had always felt clean to him. These chills, though, eventually sunk through the leathers and ran down his spine until he felt it all the way down to his feet… both of them, somehow, despite having lost one of them to the Marine Corps.
With weariness settling in, pulled the bike into an old brick motel off an empty stretch of HWY 41. The units were scattered across what looked to be three separate buildings, the white room-numbers clumsily painted as he drove slowly past. Most were barely visible in the fading light of dusk.
He rolled into a spot in the almost empty parking lot across from the mirrored door of the motel front desk, and turned off the bike. The wind was really picking up, and he regretted pulling his helmet off when the wind hit his damp hair, sweaty from the helmet that he hung on the bike’s handlebar.
Freezing, he turned and hurried across the parking lot toward the mirrored door, slowing as he walked past a beautifully restored sixty-something Impala. Oskar noticed the overflowing ashtray and stared for a moment. Why the hell would you invest so much in a car just to smoke in it? A shiver startled him out of his thoughts, and he continued to the door, looking down and checking his jacket pocket for his cell phone to avoid his reflection.
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As he pushed the door open, the smoggy room came into view, and Oskar looked over the desk to see a greasy bald head looking down at a novel with a pretty redhead on the cover. She was showing a fair amount of skin and the scrawny man was breathing heavily and biting his lip.
Gross, Oskar thought, but kept his face nuetral as the motel clerk’s yellowed eyes snapped up sharply from his book. The man’s breath caught in his throat with a sharp cough. From the look on his face, he’d never in a million years expected someone to walk up to the faded desk, scattered with dated brochures that, as Oskar looked down, seemed far older than-
“Hey, uh, mister,” the old man said hurriedly, tossing the book behind him as he stood, and looked relieved when Oskar glanced up from the desk to meet his eyes.
“How can I help ya?” the man asked, staring intently.
“I need a room.”
“Right. Sorry. I just wasn’t expecting ya. What’s yer name, son?” The clerk’s voice was wheezy and sounded as reedy as the man looked as he grabbed his stubby pencil. Shifting his book closer, he leaned over the desk towards Oskar.
“John Smith,” Oskar replied, on edge, and the man relaxed, putting on an oily smile.
The room smelled like it had been built out of wet cigarettes. Oskar’s eyes watered, and he could taste the stale air when he spoke. Some part of him had been picking up on the irregularities, but Oskar was just now realizing why he’d felt like he shouldn’t be here from the moment he opened the door. No computer, no laptop. The 50-year-old cars on the trifold brochures scattered on the desk.
The guy began writing the name down with a too wide grin on his face. All traces of trepidation from the minute before were gone.
His wild grin didn’t touch those clouded eyes at all, though, as he said. “We get a lot of those up here.”
"Those?" Oskar asked. He knew what the clerk meant, but his body was suddenly filling with adrenaline as his brain shifted from trepidation to alarm.
Suddenly predatory, the thin man tilted his head and made a tsk sound that threw spittle through his crooked teeth and onto the desk. It sizzled as it hit one brochure with a brown Ford Pinto and a grinning family whose too-wide smiles, like the clerk, didn’t reach their eyes.
The little girl on the cover of the brochure winked at him from between her mother’s too long arms. The little girl’s eyes were streaming bloody tears. Oskar drew in a sharp, stale breath and stepped back, blinking, but then the spittle was gone. The brochure was simply sitting there, yet the family was now faceless instead of smiling like maniacs. Oskar swore he could hear his own heartbeat.
I need to go. I need to go. I gotta get out of here.
Looking down, his breath started coming faster, and he had to fight down the panic building in his chest.
“John Smiths. We get a lot of those. Almost exclusively,” the clerk spoke slowly, his face lowered and tilted as he leaned in closer. Oskar looked up from the brochure, and he noticed the man’s teeth were all jagged and broken. Had they been like that before?
“How much for the room?” Oskar whispered, ready to get the hell out of this place.
The man stood but didn’t straighten. “Problem is, ya don’t even have a reservation. You don't belong here, and I’m not sure ya got enough to pay, boyo.”
The man’s eyes finally showed the emotion clear on his face, and he licked his cracked lips with a raw, sore covered tongue. His eyes, suddenly cloudy, blinked out of sync. The abrupt change sent a shiver down Oskar’s spine, and the man was no longer smiling at all. Instead, he was clacking his teeth together in a sickening sound that terrifyingly, perfectly matched the heartbeat Oskar could feel trying to beat out of his chest.
The wind picked up outside. Creaking for a moment in protest, the door blew wide open, slamming into the wall with enough impact that it seemed impossible the glass hadn’t shattered. A wild gust of wind followed that blew all the brochures off the desk in a wild swirl. The ravenous look disappeared from the clerk’s face, and his eyes went wide.
Oskar glanced behind him as fast as he dared but didn’t see whatever had entered the room. However, as he turned back around to the desk, Oskar couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing at all.
As if nothing at all had happened, the brochures were all stacked perfectly back on the desk, exactly as they’d been when he’d walked in. The chill that had blown into the room remained, and instead of smoke and mold, the room smelled clinical. The clerk was positively panting, his breaths coming in rapid inhales and exhales. His cloudy eyes stared at the floor by the desk and then darted around in clear panic, searching.
There was movement below him, and Oskar looked down to see a large calico cat weave between his boots. It stopped briefly to rub its head across Oskar’s booted prosthetic foot. He could, in a surreal moment, swear he felt the warmth and pressure from the contact, and then it was gone.
Oskar noticed the cat had a bobtail as it stretched for a second and then hopped up onto the desk, causing the clerk to scramble back, his head jerking upward to follow the big cat. Turning its head, the calico gave the clerk a disdainful glare that seemed to physically push him further back into his cracked leather chair. His cloudy eyes were suddenly clear, focused, and sober.
The cat stalked across the desk before jumping into the old man’s lap. The clerk squeezed the arms of his chair in his grip, and old man or not, Oskar heard the wood creaking.
Looking down at the cat in the man's lap, He felt a calming effect wash over him as the cat stared back, blinking its impossibly golden eyes slowly and purring.
I’m pretty sure calicos are almost always female.
The odd, mundane thought distracted him for a second before reality pushed its way back to the forefront. The clerk, though, was sitting like death itself was curled up in his lap. He held his arms far clear of the creature, which now looked to be falling asleep, but his grip remained tight on the armrests.
Motion drew his eyes briefly back to the brochure. The family on the cover were now facing the opposite direction, covering their faces with their hands. The father was rocking back and forth, a “World’s Best Dad” hat forgotten in the dirt at his feet.
What is happening?
The clerk closed his eyes as he sobbed quietly. He then reached behind him to a wall of keys, blindly grabbed one under a handwritten “3” and tossed it at Oskar without looking.
Oh hell no.
Oskar leaned away to avoid the the key, but there was a moment where the air in front of him seemed to warp, and suddenly he was unable to move out of the way in time. The key hit his chest, almost gently, just to the left of the zipper on his jacket and before he could react. There was a sudden weightlessness and he felt a twisting in his chest.
He took in a surprised deep breath of the balmy, still air, and staggered back into the glass door. His vision flashed and his hands flattened against the door behind him to steady himself. Instead of cold glass, though, there was solid wood.
His lack of any proper sleep these recent months might be the only reason he didn’t lose all sense of reason the moment he realized he was no longer where he’d been two seconds ago. He just assumed he’d already lost it.