Part 1| Part 2| Part 3| Part 4| Part 5| Part 6| Part 7
My memory of the events that happened before my trip to the afterlife are hazy at best. As if I was a different person, entirely. I had lost some part of myself there, and I fear it is gone, forever. What that was, I don’t know, and through telling my story I hope to discover that fragment that went missing.
Then again, things happen for a reason, right?
From this point on, my memory of what transpired gets clearer the closer I get to the present. With the aid of a journal, I documented these events in detail, so that I might share it with you.
Before he could say anything else, I looked at my mom. She didn’t looked surprised at what he said. She knew.
“Everybody out, please. I need to talk to these guys.” I said.
At the same time, Tracy sat up. The lines from the seams of the chair were pressed into her cheek from sleeping.
“Baby? I knew you would come back!” she said, throwing her arms around me. Hugging me too hard, I gently eased her away. She saw John squatting near me, and looked concerned.
“Who are you?” she asked John, timidly.
“They’re with the police department, sweetheart. I need a minute or two. Okay?” I didn’t feel like being nice, but I was trying.
“Alright. I’ll be outside with your mom. I love you.”
I didn’t respond. Shaken, to the point of shattering, I looked back at Detective Coyle. When Tracy and my mom shut the door, Det. Jenson came closer, sitting at the foot of my bed.
“What is going on? Tell me everything, and I mean EVERYTHING.” I commanded, pointing my finger at Coyle, “If I can help you with anything, you better know I will.”
Clearing his throat, he began.
“A few years ago, I was in charge of an investigation involving the deaths of seven children. They were reported missing from their beds in the morning by their parents. In each case, there were many factors that were the same.” Coyle paused to check his phone. After a second of texting, he continued.
“All of the children were taken from their beds. On the floor of each bedroom of the victims, were muddy footsteps. Each home’s front door was left open, with trails of mud leading in, and out. No DNA, no fingerprints, and no fluids of any kind were found at each crime scene, either. The direction of the investigation was leaning towards missing persons, or kidnapping, until we got an anonymous call.”
“And? How am I involved in this?” I asked, frustrated.
“Well, I’m getting there. The tip we got directed us to a section of forest near the Olympic National Park. We organized a team, secured a warrant and went out there, to the coordinates we were given. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen.” he look spooked as he continued. His eyes were wide and alert, and I couldn’t detect a single shred of insincerity in his voice.
“The section of land we got the warrant for was owned by a man named Tim Galladoone. He was a real-estate broker that got rich during the computer boom in the eighties. Upon looking into him, we couldn’t get any additional information other than a birth certificate and a social security number. The rest of his info; financials, work history, criminal record, all were sealed by the government, and when we requested it to be released, we were denied; being given some bullshit about needing clearance.”
“Did you say, Tim Galladoone?” I asked Coyle, accentuating the Galla-doone part.
“You know him?” John asked me. Jenson seemed interested, and he prepared to take notes.
I figured on waiting on telling them until he was finished. I shook my head and motioned for him to continue.
“Anyway, we arrived at the spot sometime around dusk, and proceeded to searching the area. It was fenced off with barb wire, and near the road going in, was an old dilapidated sign that said “Non-stop good times!” near the entrance gate. The grounds were heavily wooded, and searching would be difficult at best, we thought, until we found the grove.” John’s face turned solemn and dark when he said the last part.
So did mine. An orchard. Or a grove, on a slight incline.
“A grove of Japanese Maples? On a hill?” I asked John. Jenson shot John a sharp look, as if I knew a secret I wasn’t supposed to know. John stood up, and walked across the room, as if in thought. Slowly, he began nodding in affirmation, and Jenson was the one to ask the ever present question:
“How did you know that? That information was never published.” he said, succinctly.
“I told you I would help you any way I can. You guys have been waiting for me to wake up, apparently for a reason. So go on. What did you find?” I said, clearing my throat.
John turned back and faced me, standing at the foot of my bed. As if to find the right words, he stood in silence for a minute.
“It was a patch of land that only had these huge maples growing. In perfect neat rows, down a hillside, as far as the eye can see. The tip we got, said that there were fresh grave sites at the coordinates we received from him. And just as he described, there were seven small mounds, lined up in the same file as the maples.” John got silent for a minute, and when he spoke again, it was raspy and stoic. His eyes went far away, then he finished.
The trees.
“We dug up the seven graves. Some of the bodies had barely decomposed. When the coroner did his examination of the first body, we found wounds on the left breastplates of the victims. A thin blade of some sort was the cause of death, we thought. The children, all between the ages of six and eight had been missing for months at that point, so we weren't sure if we could find a cause of death at the crime scene."
“As we dug up more of them, we started seeing the sprouts. It wasn’t until the autopsies that we realized just how dark this case actually was.” John, who looked exhausted just from telling his story, stopped, and Jenson went on.
“Each of the victims had seeds planted in their hearts, just like you, Jimmy. Some of which were already growing, up and out of their esophagus’s, and.... Scary shit...” Jenson trailed off.
"The pathologist concluded that they were smothered in their sleep, and that the wounds in their hearts were done after they were dead." John said, reluctantly. He seemed passionate underneath his blue eyes.
“And you, Jimmy, are the only person that has survived an attack from this... monster.”
I now understood why they were camped outside my room for eleven months.
The room got real quiet just as he said that. All three of us knew that something had entered the room, and was watching us. Even Detective Jenson looked around like he felt it too. I suppressed a shudder, then I asked them both, very frankly:
“Did you feel that?” I knew they did, but I asked anyway. Looking directly at John now, I could see a shadow dancing on the ceiling above his head. Terror filled my mind and heart, and I thought it would jump off the ceiling and rip his head off.
But nothing happened. It retreated into a shadow in the corner of the room, then was gone.
I pictured the bodies. The new growth of the maples protruding out of their mouths, and anuses. Up through their stab wounds. Their dead eyes wide open, as their corpses belched out blood red tendrils of woody roots. As time-lapsed photography speeds up footage, my minds eye saw their bodies shrivel and disintegrate as the trees grew from within them. Like they were plant food. I watched their eyes drop into their skulls as they became nothing. As they were absorbed.
I snapped out of it, regaining my composure slowly as John went on. My stomach turned, and I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything in a year.
“We both are breaking some pretty serious rules by talking to you about this, but basically, we are desperate. Since we found that grove, we have exhumed over two hundred bodies, all planted in the same way. All children. Some of them had been there so long that there were just bones left. We are dealing with one or more mass murderers, and other than that one tip, we have had no hits. No leads.” I could see it now. John and his partner had been hunting this killer, and it was taking its toll on him. The age in his face and demeanor was apparent now; the creases near his eyes, the gray hair prematurely growing on his head and beard. This was personal for him. He was tired, and he needed me.
I knew the feeling. But I wasn’t sure who I needed.
“We appreciate your time, Jimmy. Please get back to us as soon as you can.” Jenson said, ending the conversation. He seemed to be able to tell that I was in no shape to talk. He gave me his card, and told me he would be in touch. As the detectives left my room, I can remember John looking at me for a good long time before Jenson broke his gaze by walking by him.
“Get better soon, Jimmy.” he said, reluctantly. Looking defeated, he shut the door quietly.
Before I could even take a breath, the door opened again.
It was the doctor, and a few nurses. I remember seeing his face, in the darkness, before I woke up.
His voice was strange, like he was too old for it. He was mid-fifties, but his voice was that of a sixteen year old, cracks and all.
I knew what he was going to say before he spoke. The rather attractive nurses began probing and prodding, bending my legs, testing for sensation, and the like.
He gave me the whole spiel, speaking in a droning tone.
From the amount of rehabilitation I would need, to the drugs I would need to take. He told me, in detail, about my injuries, and the atrophy I had suffered from being in a coma. The stabbing had left me paralyzed from the waist down. When the blade went into my chest, it pierced through my heart completely, fracturing my spine behind it. In turn, my spinal cord was damaged. He told me I would feel pain in my back, probably for the rest of my life. And the kicker was,
I would never walk again.
When he said that, my life flashed before my eyes. All of the things I wouldn’t ever do again smacked me in the face. I started crying, and he tried to console me as best as he could, but I was inconsolable.
Wouldn’t you be?
I don’t remember anything else he told me.
“Get out. EVERYBODY OUT!” I said, not being able to hide the vehemence on my face. I should have stayed with her.
He nodded, in understanding, and him and his entourage left the room. I was alone.
I have never believed in the supernatural, or religion for that matter. Until Groundhog’s day, when I lived through a whole rotation of the earth twice, it was easy to believe in nothing, because it required no effort. That there was nothing that science couldn’t explain for me.
My whole life changed after that unreal day, and not for the better. I met a woman that I fell in love with, under really strange circumstances. Shortly after that, my friend died, then disappeared, but not before I received that envelope from Tim Galladoone, with the money and the tickets. And the note for Tracy. How was she involved in this?
Then, seeing him waving at me....
Like the trees in the land of Death.
The fridge magnets, how they formed those strange phrases, as well. All anagrams of “All in Good time”. Jay’s death, as sudden as it was, happening during those occurrences, I began to form a kind of web between the strange things that were cropping up.
And the box. I don’t know how it’s involved, but it is, somehow. Finding that journal with the tragic entries, it felt like some kind of warning. Or a promise.
Jay’s father, Walter, and his total objection to the box when he looked into it. Pistachios. What is so scary about that? And why did Jay lie to me about what was in that soiled box in the first place? And how in the flying fuck did it get in the house, from his locked car? Then I wondered where the journal was.
”Did I have it in the ambulance?” I said and thought out loud.
Questions reeled in my head at a million miles an hour, and without answers, I felt a really powerful sense of dread fill my body. I wondered how I was involved in these child murders, and why I would almost meet the same end as them. Being twenty-two now, I didn’t fit the bill. What made me different?
And what of what I saw when I died? Was it the same terrible place that John Coyle described? All of this was so insane that my mind battled between what I remembered and what I knew was happening. The correlations were too much. I was more scared than I had ever been in my whole life, because it was real now. Crippled, and victimized, the repercussions of the realness of the situation now had a permanent effect on me. I would never be the same.
For the first time in my life, I began to pray to God. Then, before I uttered a single word, I remembered in detail what the entity said on the refrigerator; derived from the same thirteen, rainbow colored letters. When I asked it who it was.
It told me:
i Am God.
I kept my mouth shut.
Submitted November 04, 2014 at 07:25AM by jwwmaster http://ift.tt/1x3LSVr nosleep
No comments:
Post a Comment