Finding Calebu nosleep

PSA: Don’t ever try to chase down a face changing demon. Turns out they’re EXTREMELY venomous.

I didn’t wake up until a couple of days ago. I can’t say I woke refreshed. But I’m out of the woods now, Caleb says. I just need to take it easy for a few days. I told him that wasn’t likely. He laughed. It was a kind of grim sound but I know we both feel a little bit better about things now that I’m not screaming and cursing and vomiting everywhere anymore. A seven day fever is nobody’s idea of fun, let me tell you.

I guess I should back up. Last you heard, I was waking up with the elusive figure of Caleb himself standing over me.

I was completely disoriented and at first couldn’t focus on anything. I closed my burning eyes and tried to breathe steadily while I flexed my other senses. I was lying on something flat and wooden with a lumpy bundle of cloth pushed under my head to elevate it. There was a damp cloth lying across my forehead, although damp with water, sweat or blood I couldn’t say.

I blinked a few more times. I wasn’t wearing my glasses so everything was blurry anyways. But my vision was going crazy. I was looking up at a dense tangle of tree roots overhead, and they seemed to be alive and moving, groping blindly for one another like worms in the earth. I shuddered. My belly was so empty it felt like it was knotted in on itself but I still felt nauseous watching the slow sinuous writhe of the ceiling. Slowly the figure standing beside me swam into focus – as much as my poor eyesight allowed, at least. My weak eyes couldn’t pick out the features of the blurry brown oval that comprised the figure’s face with any clarity, but the eyes were dark and kind. As I looked into them I was flooded with relief. I knew who he was, and that I was safe.

“Caleb,” I croaked.

He smiled (I think). His face was cast in shadow and my eyes were bad. But his voice was deep and reassuring when he said, “Let’s get you out of here, kid.”

“Where is here?” I gulped, sitting up slowly.

As soon as I was upright, a case of the cold shivers racked my body.

The blur of Caleb’s face looked concerned.

“Hey, take it easy,” He cautioned. “You’ve been sick, man, you’ve been laid out for days. Poisoned. That thing you thought you were chasing? Well, you weren’t. She had you right where she wanted you. If I hadn’t knocked you out of her orbit when I did you’d be dying slowly down there in her nest as a snack for her babies.”

I pulled the roughspun blanket I had woken up beneath over my shoulders. Caleb kept up a steady patter as I looked blearily around the root cave for my things.

“I couldn’t save you from the Dog Head Man, though. Sorry about that. He’s the one that brought you here. Looks like he piled you with blankets to sweat the poison out of your meat. Once that’s done he’s going to boil you in that big old soup pot over there on the fire, so you have got to get up, dude. Hurry, while he’s still gone. He always goes out during the day. I can help you but first you have to help yourself.”

My brother used to say that to me when I went to him with tricky homework projects or girl problems. I clenched my jaw, pulled the blanket tighter and stood up. My legs were shaky and weak. It took a minute to get my balance, but once I did I started shuffling slowly around, looking for my shoes.

I stumbled around in the half light from the open hearth in the corner until I found my shoes, hoodie and phone bundled together in a hole in the roots that formed the walls and the ceiling. I reached out for them but stopped when my hands turned into fat pink snails aimlessly bumping into one another.

“Caleb,” I said with what I thought was remarkable calm given the situation, “My hands are snails.”

“It’s the poison, man. You’re not clear of it yet. You’re almost there but the next few hours are going to be rough, I won’t lie. But I’ll be right there with you. We’ll get you through it. Put your shoes on.”

I waited patiently until my hands had turned back into hands and snatched up my things before they could morph too. My shoelaces turned into snakes, braids of human hair, and wet spaghetti before I was through with them. But I got my shoes on. Once I was ready Caleb directed my attention to a small gap in the roots. He pulled them aside to reveal a dark hole about half my height.

“In there?” I heard the note of terror in my own voice with disgust.

“I know, I’m sorry, but it’s the only way out. The Dog Head Man moves this huge stone over the other entrance every morning when he leaves, but he doesn’t know about this one. We’ll have to crawl. It won’t be so bad. Look, I’ll go first. You can hold onto my ankle if you want. Just…..whatever you do, whatever the poison makes you think you see or feel or hear, don’t let go, alright?”

The terror I felt was immediate as the roots fell back into place behind us, submerging us in darkness. I clutched awkwardly at Caleb’s skinny ankle. He crawled slowly, I’m sure for my sake, but I still fumbled in the dark. We crawled across loose, damp earth that smelled like rotten leaves and earthworms chopped into fleshy halves by the gravedigger’s spade. I cut my knee on a sharp pebble in the floor but I bit my lip and kept going. The last thing I wanted to do was stop down here.

Caleb’s ankle felt strange in my hand. One moment it felt like a living snake, smooth scales taut over sinewy muscle, then cold and slick as a rotting log in the rain, then hard and bony as if I were clinging to a skeleton crawling through the earth. I kept his words in mind and held on firmly, pushing away my disgust as his ankle changed and shifted against my fingers.

“You ok back there?” He asked, and his voice sounded distorted and muddy. The meat of his leg bloated beneath his sock like an overfull balloon, oozing slime through the material to coat my hand.

“Crawl faster,” I said through clenched teeth.

He sped up.

His ankle was changing sizes now, rapidly growing and shrinking as if it had a mind of its own. It swung between wild extremes, tiny and frail as a toothpick, then massive, so swollen that I was a gnat in comparison. I was an ant hitching a ride on a shoe. I was a flea clinging to a dinosaur’s ridge bone.

“Don’t let go,” He reminded me, and there was something so achingly familiar about his voice if I could only place it. But I couldn’t. All I could do was cling mutely to the twisted thing that I hoped was just an ankle and crawl after him, following with the faith of a blind man up out of the dark.

I burst through the ground in the back yard of Holly and Jude’s apartment, crawling out from a gap in the roots of the weeping willow.

I was met with a chorus of meows. I straightened up to see a whole fleet of cats perched in the tree branches. The biggest one, which I’m pretty sure was the same one that showed me where the music box was buried, leapt lightly down and set off across the yard.

“Follow the cat. She’ll get you home safe,” My guide said, his face a lighter patch in the black of the hole beneath the tree.

“You’re not coming?” I felt myself beginning to panic.

“It’s almost daylight. I can’t be above ground when the sun comes up……long story. Look, buddy, you’ll be fine. Just follow the cat and everything will be alright. I’ll take care of the rest. Go home. Get some sleep. Take a shower. I’ll meet you at your place right after dark.”

“Then what?”

“Then we set a trap.”

“A trap? For what?”

“Not for what, for who. For the Dog Head Man. Once he gets your scent he won’t stop until your flesh is sitting in his belly. You gotta mark your territory with salt and arm yourself with silver, make him bleed and banish him back to the boneyard where he belongs He’ll never stop hunting you if you don’t. He’ll come rap-tap-tapping round your windows and scratching at your door every night until you think sleep is just a fairytale. You’ll be so tired you won’t know what’s real. And when he finally catches you alone, off guard, he’ll drag you off to his cave to cut you into pieces and boil you up and suck the meat from your bones.”

I swallowed audibly.

“See you tonight, then,” I managed.

Caleb chuckled. “Good man.”

He disappeared between the roots.

I followed the cat.

It wasn’t as easy as it might sound. The ground bucked and heaved like an ocean in front of me as I walked. I did my best to just focus on the gray striped furry tail bobbing up a head of me, held in the crooked shape of a question mark. Somehow she got me home.

I stumbled up the front steps like a zombie. Checked the front door. Scrabbled under the flower pot for the spare key. When I got inside the light on the answering machine was flashing. My mom had left an exasperated sounding message. Something about plumbers not knowing how to do their jobs without having their hands held, and if you wanted something done right you had to do it yourself. Long story short, she was holed up in a motel in Springfield overseeing some unanticipated repairs in one of her properties there. Thank God.

I did some running around. Wrote you guys that last update. I still felt like a dog turd left out in the sun to dry, but I was limping along. I decided to lie down for a while. I fell asleep almost instantly but it was not a restful sleep. I woke up hot yet shivering in an unpleasant wet patch of my own sweat. I got back up and went downstairs. The last fiery glow of sunset was shining through the west windows. There were lines of salt poured along the baseboards and across all of the doors and windowsills. The air smelled like burnt sage. A shadow fell across the door to the kitchen.

“Oh, hey, good, you’re up.” Caleb said cheerfully. “I pulled out all the weapons I could find. Yours are on the counter. You can watch the back door, I’ll watch the front. Stay alert. He’ll be here soon.”

He disappeared, heading down the hall towards the living room. I went to take up my post. There was a small heap of silver glittering on the counter –a letter opener, a few butter and dessert knives from my mom’s wedding set, and this artsy ring she never wears that’s covered in metal points and lumps that could probably do some damage if worn while punching someone. I left them all where they sat.

I watched the light fade with a cold pit of anxiety in my stomach. The nap hadn’t really helped. If anything I felt more tired and disoriented than before. I wished I knew where my glasses were.

I was also ravenously hungry. My gurgling, pinched belly reminded me loudly that I hadn’t eaten anything since Saturday night. My mind went back to the note about dinner in the refrigerator.

I have this theory that every red blooded American male has that one woman in his life who cooks the best, cheesiest, meltiest, perfectly layered, bomb ass lasagna ever made. It’s like a law of nature. For me, that woman is my mother. She uses fresh herbs, sweet Italian sausage, slathers of rich red tomato sauce and handfuls of mozzarella that all bake down into a bubbling, toasted brown strata of perfection. It’s ridiculous. It’s the best thing on the planet.

When I opened the fridge and saw that’s what mom left me, it felt like the heavens had opened up just enough to allow a tiny ray of light to shine down on me and remind me that the sun still exists behind the clouds. I pulled the Tupperware container out and stuck it in the microwave. Tears prickled at my eyes as I watched the glowing digits count down. I miss my mother something fierce just then. I was grateful for inept plumbers and leaky pipes, glad that she was out of the range of fire, but all the same a part of me just wished she were here. Call me a mama’s boy if you want. My dad split when I was just a baby. My brother is gone. My mom and I are all the family we have, and we stick together like a couple of stubborn burrs.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

I pulled the steaming container out, grabbed a fork and a bottle of water, and sat down at the kitchen table, feeling very small and alone. It was not a sensation I enjoyed. I shook my head as if I could physically clear the fog from my mind. I dug into the lasagna, eager for a taste of something warm and familiar and comforting. I needed a touchstone to reorient myself by in this storm of madness. Something to remind me of home, and of safety.

I was so hungry that I was already three bites in before I realized that something was off.

The texture…….it was all wrong. My mom’s lasagna is the ideal balance of chewy, crisp and gooey. My teeth were tearing at gristle and lukewarm gelatinous flesh and sour grit and slimy softness that oozed when I bit into it. My molars crunched something that spurted foul-tasting liquid into the back of my throat. I retched, spitting the half-chewed mouthful back into the container.

I stared into the dish in horror.

What I had taken for a fat slice of my mother’s homemade lasagna was actually a squirming, interlocking mass of fat, glistening white maggots, hard black beetles, matted snarls of hair, and juicy tangles of red earth worms.

My stomach churned. I heard a rapping sound at the window out in the hall.

There it was again at the kitchen window. I flipped the light off, quick as a whistle. I glimpsed a tall black shape flickering by the glass outside. Something scratched and scraped at the exterior of the house.

There was a knock at the back door. The door knob rattled. I tried to shout for Caleb, but instead bent over and heaved the contents of my stomach all over the floor. The door swung open.

I slid to my knees as I saw the Dog Head Man through the burning of vomit-induced tears. He was a dark silhouette in the doorway, huge and solid, blocking out the light from the porch, so tall that the tips of his (ears? Horns?)nearly brushed the lintel. He made a small motion with his hand.

My glasses clattered onto the floor next me, narrowly missing a splatter of vomit. I put them on and reached up to flip the light switch back on.

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. When the light came on, the Dog Head Man turned from a nightmare giant towering over me into something somehow far more bizarre – a tall, masculine figure with the muscular build of a football player, dressed in threadbare Army issue camo pants, a hooded sweatshirt, and a t-shirt that proclaimed in bold font, YES I LIQUOR. His broad shoulders stretched almost the entire width of the door frame, and from those sprouted a black dog’s head with a mane of thick, coal dark fur. He was gazing at me with unsettling, mismatched eyes. One was the brilliant blue of a shepherd or a husky, the other the warm, sad brown of a hound. He looked, as far as someone with the face of a dog can look, like he was vaguely irritated. A shadow fell across me from the doorway into the hall at my back.

“Careful, Isaiah,” Caleb cautioned behind me. “He can’t get in unless you take your eyes off of him.”

“Look,” The Dog Head Man growled. He pointed past me.

“Don’t listen,” Caleb countered. “He’s trying to trick you. Don’t look away.”

My guts in knots, my mouth sour with stomach acid, I looked down and found myself holding my mother’s biggest silver-plated dessert knife with no idea how it got in my hand.

“Do it. Cut him. It’s the only way,” Caleb whispered urgently.

I gripped the knife tightly, mentally assessing the distance from me to the door, trying to gather the shreds of my common sense from where I had barfed them onto the floor. All I had to do was nick him. Just enough to draw blood, and then it wouldn’t matter how much stronger he was. I hoped, at least.

”LOOK!” The Dog Head Man barked. I jumped. The knife slipped out of my sweaty grasp and clattered onto the floor, spinning away behind me. I spun out of reflex, already bending to grab it.

“Zaya, NO!”

It was too late. I had seen him, and this time I was wearing my glasses.

The figure behind me wasn’t Caleb at all. It was as familiar as the pattern of freckles on my own hands. It was my brother.

Eli stood there, young and strong, his brown skin glowing with health, looking just like he did the last time I saw him alive. He reached out his hand to me, a silent plea in his eyes. I nearly took it. But as I watched, the firm skin turned saggy and thin, sinking over the bones of his face. It split and peeled like old wallpaper, showing the muscle and skull beneath. His eyes swelled, bulged, burst in a shower of viscous and maggots falling from the gaping sockets. He made a thick, meaty sound with his ruined mouth. Then he collapsed in a gush of blood and skin and bones and rot all over the floor, where the whole mess melted into the tile, leaving no trace.

I’m not ashamed to say it. I fainted right there on my mother’s kitchen floor in a puddle of my own sick. I bet you would have too. The last thing I saw before everything faded out was the dog’s head looming down towards me with an exasperated growl rumbling out of the back of its throat.

I phased in and out over the next week. When I wasn’t tripping balls and staring at the moving walls of Caleb’s den (yes, Dog Head Man turned out to be the real Caleb, congrats, you want an award?), I lay huddled in a miserable, feverish heap of blankets on the bench where I originally woke up. Often I was alone in the cave of roots, with nothing but the crackling fire and whatever was constantly cooking over it to remind me I wasn’t the last sentient being left on earth. Caleb left early every morning, before sunrise when the birds were just beginning to sing, and he didn’t return until well after midnight. Sometimes there would be a cooling bowl of clear broth sitting beside me. I drank it down greedily when my body allowed. Once in awhile I would wake in the night and see Caleb sitting at the workbench next to the hearth, his wide shoulders and pointed ears casting shadows across the packed earthen floor, working by the light of an old fashioned oil lantern and ignoring me for the most part. Maybe it was the psychedelic poison leaving my body, but each night his outline seemed a little less hulking, his ears a little smaller and lower down, and his fur a little less shaggy. He was filling these tiny bottle with….I don’t know. Stuff. Some of it was cool – tiny colored feathers, bits of stained glass, dried flowers. Some of it was strange – , glowing sand, glittering stones, small nuggets of silvery metal. Some of it was just weird – dead bugs, crumpled lottery tickets, cigarette butts with lipstick stains . Each bottle was filled with a random assortment, corked, and hung on the wall with literally thousands of other glittering glass vials. Being that he has the mouth formation and soft palate of a dog, Caleb is understandably a man of few words, but when I had finally sweated enough of the venom out to start asking questions, one of the only replies I did receive was loud and clear: do not touch the bottles.

Near as I can tell, the face changer’s poison functions similarly to her other abilities. It causes a high fever accompanied by intense hallucinations. Familiar things turn scary and strange while the poison shows you visions of people you love telling you to do terrible things, like stab the guy who is trying to help you. It was just my luck that without my glasses, I couldn’t tell exactly who it was that I was hallucinating. The human brain sees what it expects to see. Even more so under the influence of mind-altering substances. I saw Caleb, coming to save me, because that was what I wanted to see. I didn’t want to see my brother’s bloody corpse melting into the kitchen floor. I’ll never be rid of that image. But at least I’m here. I’m weak and exhausted from over a week of fighting off the poison flooding my body, but I’m alive. Today is the first day I’ve felt strong enough to get up. I’ve been sitting by the hearth where where the sun shines down through the roots, watching clouds skim past and finishing this update. The light is almost gone now. It's almost midnight, and Caleb will be back soon. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to get some answers.

After much pleading, he gave me back my phone before going out early this morning. It was under the condition that I agree to some ground rules regarding its use in his domain. No pictures, no tagging, no telling specific details that might lead to “civilians” discovering the “secret hideout” (yes, those were his words. His appearance grows more human by the day, and he seems to be having an easier time forming words along with it). The only new messages were my buddy wanting to play League and my mom, thanking me for doing a bang up job on cleaning the kitchen. I guess she didn’t even get home until yesterday. I texted back and told her I was staying with a friend for a gaming marathon. It’s not unheard of for me, so she wasn’t surprised.

I don’t know if you all are aware of how difficult it is to type out a 4,000 word update on a little tiny glowing screen when your eyes don’t seem to have fully committed to seeing normally after getting dosed with psychedelic demon poison. It was rough. Let me tell you. But I did it because I love you guys, and because Caleb seems almost amused at the idea that keeping an online account to document what’s going on could be useful. Let him scoff. I’m walking proof that you guys are a valuable resource. For better or worse, I wouldn’t be where I am right now if it weren’t for you.

Keep those eyeballs peeled.

You’ll be hearing from me soon.

Submitted May 01, 2015 at 09:59AM by solotopvladimir http://ift.tt/1GKMkxw nosleep