Part 8 /
I’ve mostly stuck to recounting stories from by past, as I wanted to get everything out in the open in the hopes that enough eyes would be able to help answer the questions I’ve never been able to. I’ve related current events as they pertained to the past events, most noticeably when discussing Scott Thomas Erskine, as a means to make sure once the story caught up with the present there wouldn’t be a need to recount all the crazy shit that’s happening currently.
All that being said, this entry is going to act as an interlude of sorts, as I’m only going to touch on the past a bit in order to explain what has kept me so busy these past couple of weeks – besides being sick, of course - and how that information directly correlates with Texas. They say that everything is bigger in Texas, and Ed was no exception, as he became a much bigger pain in my ass when he decided to come around. Though his visits weren’t as prevalent, he grew more violent, more conniving, and more monstrous in Texas. Maybe it was the humidity; I know I wasn’t a fan for the first couple of years, and I had central air I could escape into. If nothing else, Ed kept his promise about never coming inside my house. I can’t imagine he slept comfortably.
This surge in violent behavior is another one of the reasons I had a hard time ever letting go of the notion that he was an evil monster. We stayed in a hotel for our first few weeks in Texas – this was covered by my father’s housing allowance – while the owners of the house we were moving into finished clearing out and getting the house ready for us. My father snored like a bear (and still does), so nobody thought it was strange that I looked over-tired for the first few days in Texas because we were all sleeping on two beds in the same hotel room. It wasn’t his snoring, nervousness, or anything related to the move or close quarters that kept me awake, but Ed.
Seeing his face in the window of the house where Mark Crawford, the allegedly murderous mayor, was disturbing in many ways, but the one that kept me up at night was the thought that Ed had murdered the man at that house to ensure that he could stay close to me. It doesn’t make much sense now, but back then it explained everything - the mayor’s flimsy excuse, why Ed was gone so much before the big move, and even why he had agreed to not stepping in my house in the first place. Ed had killed a man, or at least played a part in the man dying, as a means of securing his own home, and nothing could convince me otherwise back then. But it wasn’t the fear of Ed or the dread in knowing that I hadn’t escaped him that kept me awake. I was used to that shit.
What kept me up at night was the thought that a man had died because of me; because Ed wanted…or needed…to stay close to me. It was a guilt that came to the front of my thoughts every time I saw Ed’s face peering out at me over the next 5 years. He didn’t visit often, but that grinning face and the long fingered wave that accompanied it were constants. Even when the house was finally bought, and the new owner turned the barren property into a small farm, covering it with flowers, fruits, vegetables, and goats - even when I knew that it was no longer Ed’s house – I still looked at that window every single time I walked by, always expecting to see him there. Every so often, he still would be.
Another reason it has been so hard for me to feel sympathy for Ed, or to view him as a protector of any sort, stems from how vicious and…fucking evil he got in Texas. I had always worried that he would kill me one day, but it wasn’t until Texas that the idea seemed to finally occur to him, and a couple of times he nearly succeeded.
Since learning about Erskine, I’ve been trying to either validate or cast aside the remnants of doubt about Ed, and memories of Texas have always kept me from fully committing to the latter. My biggest issue has been the constant, nagging question of why he would escalate so severely, so suddenly, because my family moved to Texas. If he was some kind of angel on my shoulder, how the hell am I supposed to overlook the woods, the highway, or the truck bed? Most of all, how could I believe that what happened in the half-finished house that Bill’s father had dedicated his adult life to building – the house where a group of us hung out, played pool, and generally acted like insufferable twits by pretending we were older then we were – or what was found buried in the back yard years after that friendship had disintegrated? When I get those stories fleshed out in the coming entries, I think it will be clear why I have spent far too many nights wondering why, if Ed was such a good guy, he had been so fucking evil in Texas?
Since Ed’s last visited, I’ve been sleeping on the couch in the living room and letting all of the dogs sleep down stairs in the hopes that Ed would return and answer that question for me. My wife hasn’t been overly happy about my wild goose chase for answers about a monster she’s only read about in these entries, but as she wants her calm and content husband back, she has let me do my thing. Honestly, the couch has been killing my back, and I was going giving him until the New Year before I scrapped the idea entirely, but he finally showed up last night. It was a brief visit, but one where he offered more answers then he ever has before.
Well, I only actually got one answer from him – at least only one answer that is new and explanatory and an utter mind fuck, as the other answers he gave me were little more than confirmations of things I was already pretty sure of - but the potential for further brain copulating answers was the real value of the visit. That potential is currently zipped airtight in a large freezer bag in my refrigerator, and has turned the once white dish cloth Ed used to collect it a dark, inhuman shade of red.
Yes. Ed gave me his blood.
But this entry isn’t about his blood and the potential answers it might hold. It’s about the other, more concrete answer – given without words or hesitation – that was finally able to convince me that Ed, for all of his unorthodox methods of protecting me and teaching me lessons, has never truly intended me any lasting harm.
Though I can sum that answer up in 6 words - and at the end of this entry, I will do just that - doing so would be a disservice to those who have been patient and supportive of me while I tell the story of my childhood monster and seek the truth of what that monster is. If you cannot wait, skip to the end and those 6 words will be waiting for you, as will the rest of this entry when you are done. I must stress that this entry is more of an interlude, and that the story isn’t over. I still fully intend to answer the question that I have required myself to type each time I submit a new piece of this large, life-spanning, fucking confusing puzzle: Is Ed real, or am I crazy?
If you would rather find the answer out as I did, I promise that those 6 words will be waiting after you read about what happened to me last night.
Ed woke me last night in the most effective way that he could that didn’t involve actual physical contact: he turned off the fan that was pointed at me, and the ensuing silence woke me with a startled suddenness as soon as the fan blades stopped turning. As a side note, this is exactly how I wake up every single time the power goes out in the middle of the night, and it is the reason I think of the phrase deafening silence differently than many others do.
The silence was startling, but seeing Ed was not. It was, probably for the first time in my life, a relief. He must have been holding his breath, because his hitching wheeze returned as soon as I sat up and came face to face with him standing next to the fan. He was somewhat skinny again, and the outlines of his teeth were just starting to be visible on his cheeks, but I had seen him in worse condition before, so I thought nothing of it. Though my entire reason for sleeping on the uncomfortable sectional was to talk to him, there was a long silence while I figured out exactly what I was going to say to him. I had spent so long being angry with Ed…hating Ed…that I didn’t quite know how to talk to Ed.
After a silence, both awkward and necessary, I asked “Was it hard to get in?”
He laughed quietly and shook his head no. After that, whatever damn that held the deluge of words back crumbled, and for the first time I had an adult conversation – or what passed for one when one of the participants can only speak in sentence tapestries stitched together with borrowed words – with Ed the Head-eater.
“I know you didn’t kill the boys in the salt fields. The man who almost hit me the day you screwed up my bike chain did.” He didn’t react. “Did you know? Is that why you tried to break my bike that day?” Ed shook yes, and I offered my own unsurprised nod in return. “But how did you know that was going to happen? Did you over hear him planning or something?” He shook no. “Did you read his mind then?” He raised the bald spot where an eyebrow should have been and shook his head no again. “Then how? I understand what you tried to do to protect me, but how did you know you had to protect me at all?”
Ed opened his mouth halfway, and he looked to concentrate very hard for a few minutes before three words, all of them spoken with a different voice, escaped with a slight stutter. “He…was…waiting.”
“Waiting? At the stop sign?” After a pause, I added, “For me?” He nodded yes, and understanding began to fill in some of the puzzle pieces from that day. “That’s why I was able to fix the chain and keep racing, because you didn’t’ have much time to sabotage it between seeing him and us starting the race. That’s why he almost got me anyway…” I trailed off, filled with cold fright even though I knew that Erskine would never hurt anybody again, lost in thoughts about what could have happened if there was no Ed at all. “Thank you,” I said at last. The fucker looked smug.
“What about the mayor? Was that your loophole to stay close to me?” He shook his head no with more fervor. “No need to get riled up. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did. He was a bad dude.” He grunted, shaking his head again as if to emphasize his innocence. I held my hands up and smiled. “Ok, I believe you.” My smile faltered as I recalled my painful memories of Ed in Texas. “But you were bad down there, Ed. You were worse than evil. Fuck, you almost killed me down there. Multiple fucking times!”
He shook no again, more frantic than before, and opened his mouth again to add a mimicked “No!” to further his point. I had to shush him. The dogs were downstairs, but they would still start barking if they heard anything strange, and the last thing I wanted was Ed disappearing before I got the answers…and everything else…I needed from him. I reached over and clicked the fan back on to the low setting to help cover any conversation noise.
“Ok, you don’t want to talk about it.” He let out an exasperated sigh, but said nothing else. “What about your breath? It changes, but when you came back in October, it smelled like it did when I first met you. Some people keep saying that maybe you aren’t eating well, and maybe it’s a diet thing…”
He cut me off. “No.” This time he didn’t sound agitated, and he added, “To…remember.”
It was my turn to laugh at him. “There is no way, until the day I die, that I will be able to forget you, Ed.”
“Not…me.”
“Not you? Then what?”
“The…dead. Remember…the…dead.”
I still don’t understand what he meant by that, and I may even have to read over my own entries again to see if I can figure it out, but I wasn’t going to dwell on it while he was here so I moved on.
“And what about the toys? I motioned around the living room, pointing out the two large bookcases on either side of my fireplace, both of them filled to the brim with collectible toys from various fandoms. “I’ve grown my collection again, as you can see, and I think it’s because I have a subconscious desire to keep sacrifices around just in case you ever come back.” He shifted, as if uncomfortable, and but didn’t look at the toys. “You can have one, if you want. Just tell me why…”
He cut me off again with a more familiar phrase. “Please, don’t.”
“Come on, you can at least tell me that much,” I pressed him. “You took almost every toy from me that I loved as a kid. I’m not mad about it anymore, but you can at least tell me why you needed them so badly. It couldn’t just be to chew on them.” I remembered the kittens that the Cat Man had showed off and shuddered. “There were plenty of things for you to chew on besides plastic playthings. Was it some sort of lesson?”
“No.” He looked to be growing more and more uncomfortable.
“I know you weren’t donating them to Toys for Tots, so unless you were saving them for that shit you pulled when the trailer got moved to Texas, please… just tell me what you wanted them for.”
He moved his head around – not shaking it no this time, but as if he was looking for something – and then stared straight into my eyes and said, “Not…for…me.”
I realized there were some answers I may not have wanted to hear after all, so I changed the subject again by pulling a new white dishcloth from beneath my pillow. Ed looked on with some curiosity while I tossed the cloth back and forth in my hands, unsure as to how to ask the one question I had really wanted to ask all night. I settled on “Do you remember the night of the camera fire?”
He growled deep, and the words “Fuck you, Special Ed,” echoed within that growl.
“Yes, that night. I’m sorry about that.”
He waved his hand in a move on motion, so I did.
“I wanted more than just to film and expose you that night. I was angry and I wanted the truth. That knife you somehow got hold of? That was supposed to be the last step, if nothing else worked. That was how I was going to get the truth.”
“Blood,” he whispered.
“Yes, blood.” I stopped tossing the cloth. “I don’t want to expose you anymore. I’m not mad, and I don’t hate you. But…I still want the truth, even if I’m the only one who knows it. If that means not writing about it like I’ve written about everything else, fine. If you can explain to me what the hell you are with whatever vocabulary you’ve collected even better. Otherwise, I talked to a friend of mine who works in a lab, and I think I wasn’t so far off when I was a kid.” I tentatively held the cloth out to him. “I don’t want to take anything from you if you don’t want to give it…”
He stopped me by reaching out and resting his hand atop the cloth, and my own hand that held it, for a long while. Though I couldn’t quite make it out in the low light, I could see his face contorting with curiosity and concerns and whatever other thoughts monsters had when humans asked them for sacrificial bodily fluid.
“You…sure?”
“I am.” He looked around once more, looking almost paranoid, and gently took the cloth from my hand. “It doesn’t have to be blood, she told me,” I quickly added. “Saliva can work if there is enough of it…and you’ve always had plenty of that to spare.”
He shook his head no one last time as he turned the fan off again with his free hand. “Must…be…blood,” he said, his mouth open wide, and before I knew what was happening, he lowered those sharp teeth to his forearm and bit down. He held the cloth to the wound, hissing in pain, as dark red spread over the bright white of the cloth like a slow motion magic trick. I had expected a small cut, and had even kept a Band-Aid on the table near the couch in the off chance that he agreed and it was necessary, but the blood flowed heavy and the cloth would soon be unable to hold more of the precious fluid.
I ran to the kitchen as quietly as I could, stubbing my toe with my own inward hiss of pain as I went, to grab a large freezer bag for the cloth. I also grabbed the half-used roll of paper towels next to the sink. When I returned, I opened the bag and held it out, and Ed put the cloth inside of it. Blood immediately began to form a small pond in the bottom of the bag as I squeezed the air from it and zipped it closed. I handed the paper towels to Ed, hoping they would keep the living room from looking like a murder had happened while I found a better way to stop the bleeding, but I saw that it was unnecessary. The holes in his arm where his teeth had bitten down were already covered with thick, dark scabs.
I set the paper towels down and made to thank him, but a sound near one of the book cases interrupted me. I looked towards them in the dark and saw motion, though I could make out no shape. Ed didn’t turn, nor did he looked surprised – only woozy and anxious – though his wheezing did seem to grow in volume, almost like he had grown a second pair of lungs.
“Blood…for…blood,” he whispered as something like worried sadness filled those large, dark eyes of his.
I didn’t have time to question the statement, as my own nose started to heavily bleed as soon as he finished it. I ripped a paper towel from the roll and held it to my nose before any could spill on the couch. The taste of rusted pennies filled my mouth, and the force with which I pinched my nose to try and stop the bleeding caused my eyes to water with thick, salty tears. The tears gave me kaleidoscope vision, and for a few moments the real Ed was joined by a number of ghost doppelgangers, floating next to and around him in the dark just a few feet away.
As the tears and the blood began to try up, these doppelganger heads of Ed’s started to disappear one by one until only two remained. I grabbed a fresh paper towel to clean my eyes as the heavy chorus of Ed’s wheezing swelled around me, and when I opened them – my vision clear again, at last – I saw the answer.
It was the explanation for his surge of violent behavior in Texas, and for why that first toy – the large ALF doll - was the only one he destroyed without some sort of allowance. It explained the noise by the book case, the sudden volume of his breathing, and how strangely anxious he had been acting.
It was the answer to many of the questions that I had yet to ask, some I had never thought to, and one had had flat refused to answer only minutes before.
The answer – the truth - was only 6 words long, and it was so goddam obvious once I knew what it was.
That truth, which filled me not with comfort or solace, but with hot terror and cold dread, is this:
There are fucking two of them.
Submitted December 24, 2016 at 09:16PM by hEaDeater http://ift.tt/2idtgl3 nosleep
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