Aberrations Read online

  ...but as I slowly walked down the hallway to the men's bathroom at the opposite end of the building, I stepped on a piece of paper. I picked it up and stared closely at it, squinting. It was an announcement that had been on the wall. Peering ahead, I could see that there was paper and refuse strewn about the hallway floor ahead. Bulletin boards had been torn off of the walls... and one of the rectangular ceiling lights twenty feet ahead had been ripped down, and now hung dangerously low, blinking sporadically.

  What the hell was going on? Had there been a riot or something during the night? At the very far end of the hallway, maybe a hundred feet away, I could see a disheveled shape leaning against the wall. It was right outside my destination, the men's bathroom... but I couldn't tell what it was, even as it seemed to lazily float or stagger around, not seeming to notice me. It had to be a person, right? But what was it doing in the distance just randomly moving around like that?

  Feeling horribly vulnerable but unwilling to go back and wake up my girlfriend because I was scared, I inched forward. I ducked low under the hanging light. Its sporadic humming set me on a nervous edge... and still, I approached the figure at the end of the hall. It hadn't yet acknowledged me in any way, continuing to gently walk or bump repeatedly into one of the walls. What the hell was going on here?

  I then had a genius idea. Instead of approaching whoever it was that was acting so oddly, I quietly ducked into a stairwell, and decided to use the men's bathroom on the second floor. I felt incredulous when my squinting eyes and searching hand found the second-floor door out of the stairwell had been ripped off of its hinges and was lying on its side in the doorway. It was then that I felt that something dangerous might actually be going on.

  I peeked into the second floor hallway to find it equally in disarray. Half of the lights up here were simply out, shrouding most of the floor in dim morning gloom. I could hear someone murmuring in the distance, around the corner of the hall. My heart pumped with adrenaline as I ran for the bathroom and quietly closed the door behind me. I gazed around the tiled white walls in a panic, but saw nothing. My hands shook, but I used the water from the sink to put on my contacts, and finally relaxed.

  Now that I could see, I felt silly at my fear. The relief was short-lived, however, as I stepped out of the bathroom and found that the hallway really had been trashed. I made my way back down the stairs, bumping right into a police officer. After a few questions, he shook his head and explained that I didn't want to go 'out there.'

  A student had apparently had some sort of mental breakdown, trashed the building, and committed suicide... and, if I hadn't gone upstairs, I would have blithely walked right up to his body, hanging there in the hallway. The shock hit me hard... the officer said that he had died in the night, but then... admittedly it was bleary-eyed and from down the hall... how had I seen the body moving?

  ****

  The Unseen Hands

  Greeted by blurry darkness, I slid halfway out of a long dream world I was not unhappy to leave behind. As I lay there on my side while my awareness returned, the insistent hand pressed against my bare shoulder blade again. I froze at the realization that my girlfriend hadn't stayed the night - behind me could only have been rumpled sheets and empty space.

  My thoughts immediately jumped to the possibility of sleep paralysis, something I'd never experienced, but my subtly tested toes proved that this was all too real. The hand shook me gently again, and I felt the delicate fingers squeeze my shoulder. I could feel now a sense of lazy interest in that grip, not malice or fear... but the hand was oriented as if the other was sitting hunched on the bed behind me, not lying down. I could feel no weight or tilt in the mattress underneath me.

  The hand moved and shook my arm, growing more insistent. Still, I maintained my charade of slumber... and another hand joined the first, shaking me by the shoulder and arm. My heart pounded as I imagined what horror might be trying to get my attention... and then I felt the hands shift, as if the other had turned and looked behind us.

  Suddenly, the grip of those fingers tightened, and the intensity of their shaking turned from lazy interest to one of marked fear. I knew then that I had to act, to do something, but... before I could, a third hand of the same size and feel joined the others by shaking my forearm. I leapt up and out of the bed in abject terror, scanning the bed and the room.

  My pounding heart reverberated in my ears, but I saw nothing unusual at first glance. After a few moments of fading adrenaline, I felt a slight breeze - the window next to my bed was open behind the blinds. Confused, I climbed up on my bed and slid it shut. This window had been behind me, where the other would have looked before it grew fearful. Not one to resist the unknown, I pushed up a blind and peered between.

  My eyes first jumped to the white of a passing police car on the street outside, but then to movement to my left - I saw the shocking gray tufts of hair of two disheveled and withered old men, dressed in torn and horrid rags, as they leapt over a fence into the next yard.

  ****

  The Hungry Lights

  I can't stand the new LED Christmas lights that debuted a few years ago. I'm the only one among my friends that holds this opinion, and it's a bone of contention during holiday time... but I can't bring myself to tell them why certain previously-unseen colors of light fill me with uncontrollable dread.

  I had almost forgotten the incidents... a few more years, and they might have been lost in the fog of childhood forever. When I first saw that unreal color in the new lights, my memories sparked, and I remembered everything.

  My room was on the back of the first floor of our house, then. We lived fairly far out from the city, and our back yard was old Florida swamp - filled with age-old twisted trees and thick underbrush. My childhood was not altogether happy, but I got through the bad times by lying in bed at night and watching the swamp from my window. Something about its quiet immensity always made me calm... and that sentiment is probably why I reacted to the first incident with only curiosity.

  I wasn't sure what I was seeing the first night. While the vast darkness between the trees roiled with storm, I began seeing movement that was not part of the rain and wind. It was barely detectable at first, and I had to look away and see it out of the corners of my vision. As it grew closer, I began to realize I was seeing light of some kind - a strange color and cast that seemed somehow impossible to me. Even then, I couldn't describe it until I got my first clear look at it - the next night, as the hurricane grew to dangerous strength.

  I remember that moment vividly. I peered from between my curtains in my dark room, observing from what I felt was a safe hiding spot from the storm. I had been observing the phenomenon for almost an hour... but only felt fear when I finally saw it clearly.

  A hundred feet deep in the undergrowth, through the wind and rain, a point moved above the ground. It smoldered with a strange sort of un-purple that seemed to pull in and crush light rather than radiate it. It moved laterally deeper into the swamp, seeming to bob slightly maybe ten feet off of the ground. As it moved off and disappeared, I realized that my curious game had become all too real. Still, I couldn't resist peeking out my window again the next night, which I now know in retrospect was the worst night of Hurricane Andrew. The storm was fierce, and battered the trees mercilessly. Our house creaked and groaned constantly with the force of the wind. Engrossed in my investigation, I hardly noticed.

  This time, I had binoculars. When I saw the un-purple radiating darkness again, I watched it closely. It seemed to be less a point and more a half-circle of some kind... I stared intently at it until it suddenly stopped, something I had never seen it do... and the half-circle moved and became a full circle. Confused, I dropped my binoculars, and they clattered to the floor. It was then that I saw a second light near the first, a deep bright blue point that made my vision feel strange in a different way than the purple darklight.

  It was then that I realized what I was looking at. Ten feet off of the ground, among the storm-b
attered trees, I was seeing an impossible pair of eyes... and they were looking right at my hiding spot. The mismatched points of light began to bob and grow in size and seeming malevolence... approaching my curtained window.

  It was then that I was scooped up from behind, screaming, and carried out of the house by my father. Stinging rain and lashing wind blasted us painfully as he ran us to the car, and then drove our family to a storm shelter.

  I was never able to get the straight story out of my father about why he suddenly chose to change his stubborn opinion about staying home despite the storm, or why he chose to evacuate us to safety at that moment. What I did remember, before the new colors in LED lights jogged my nightmarish memories, was that we returned two days later, after the hurricane had passed... to find the back of our house seemingly imploded, its contents inexplicably thrown about hundreds of feet in the opposite direction of the damage, and my room completely gone.

  My father decided to use the insurance money from the 'storm damage' to move us cross-country, and I have never been back.

  ****

  The Television

  After we moved into our new house around fifteen years ago, I used to fall asleep listening to the comforting sounds of the television downstairs. I figured my parents watched it long past my bedtime. They had no idea I could hear them, and I never mentioned it to them.

  I would listen to the muted voices as they switched between different tones of conversation, though I was never able to make out the words. These conversations were below the threshold of hearing, but the random noise in my ears definitely carried the markers of human voices. The more I listened, the more they gained definition, but they were always ethereal and impossible to decipher.

  I imagined it was often some sort of news program, as the conversations didn't seem very emotional and they talked for hours on end in the same monotone - but, every so often, my parents must have watched a scary movie, because sometimes the voices were terrified, angry, or even screaming.

  In fact, I soon began to suspect they were watching the same scary movie over and over again through the years... as I would hear the same 'sound bites', the most recognizable being a twenty-second conversation between two men and a woman that grew into a heated argument and ended with the woman screaming in terror - before being cut off abruptly. This movie had that sound bite play multiple times before I would fall asleep, and I often wondered if I was hearing it right. What could the plot of this movie possibly be, to have the same argument and screaming so many times?

  Finally, when I was older and had experienced years of this ongoing sleepy confusion, I suddenly awoke and decided that this night I would confront my parents about exactly what the hell it was they were watching. I had heard the same muted argument and barely-heard screaming get cut off only moments ago, so I knew it was that movie.

  In a righteous indignation, I opened my door to head downstairs and confront them - and then froze. The hallway was black. The house was silent. The living room was empty... and the television was off.

  Completely in shock, my thoughts raced as I tried to make sense of the last several years' sleepy experiences. I lay back down in bed, burning with adrenaline, and shivered as the barely audible voices resumed.

  ****

  An Impossible Window

  My grandmother's house was a long, narrow structure typical of an ancient Pittsburgh suburb. It was one room wide throughout, and set among a row of other such houses on a very steep hill. It was robust, but my immigrant grandparents made a home of it. My father grew up there, and my brother and I were taken to visit three or four times a year.

  I spent the nights of many family gatherings in a room that felt like a cave. Far at the back of the second floor, it was a perfect hideout once the adults let me escape from dinner. There were old books there, of the kind that can't be found anymore. I read them by the orange glow that filtered in through the blinds of the sole window at the back of the room. It was the muted and soft glow of a streetlight. I often fell asleep to the ethereal sound of passing cars in the night.

  As the years passed, I grew older, and books were replaced by video games that I brought from home. My brother joined me, and we took refuge in our cave to escape the younger children and boring adults. We would play in there for hours on a black and white television, once the pride and joy of my grandfather's possessions. Still, that window lent a soft glow to the room that let us turn off the main light and fool the adults into thinking we were asleep while we stayed up and gamed.

  We returned there about two years ago to pack the place up and handle the estate. My father was there, his eyes tired. He saw half a century of memories in every room. I can't imagine what he felt. He told us all about the adventures he and his six siblings had had growing up there. He took us to our room at the very back of the second floor, through a long narrow hallway and past all of the other rooms. It was his room that we always took refuge in. He had always secretly enjoyed the fact that my brother and I liked the room, too.

  "You know, in all the years we've been coming here, I've never looked out that window," I told him.

  "Well, it's our last chance," he replied. "Take a look."

  My father walked over to that window and adjusted the blinds. They opened to reveal the Pittsburgh cityscape as it was just starting to glow in the early evening twilight - a beautiful view from high on our hill.

  "I grew up with this view," my father mused. "So many younger versions of me looked out this window..."

  I joined him at the glass, eyeing the streetlight that had lit so many of my younger adventures. I remembered the view in detail, having peered out many times. My brother, who had somehow never managed to look out the window, immediately looked confused.

  "What are we looking at?" he asked, peering over our shoulders.

  We looked at him as if he was crazy for a moment.

  "This is the back of the house," he explained. "What is that light doing there?"

  My father and I looked back out at the same time. I traced the street below, noting parked cars, other houses, and a hill that ran down into distant cityscape. My father shook his head, and ran out of the room. We followed him to the front of the house, where a sole window showed us the exact same scene - except it wasn't. The cars were different. The houses were the same but... different in small ways. The cityscape in the distance twinkled with slightly different patterns. I'd grown up with that back window, taken it for granted...

  My father started swearing, and rushed to the back of the house again. We entered the room to find his face pressed against the glass. He peered about wildly, then seemed to fixate on something.

  "Dad?!" he shouted. "Dad!"

  We ran up to look, and I saw a hand waving up at the window from the street below. As I leaned higher to try to see more, the hand dropped. I caught a glimpse of an old-fashioned hat as its owner approached the house.

  "Jesus Christ!" my dad shouted. "Dad, wait!"

  He pulled at the window, which seemed to have been painted shut long ago. We helped him, pushing at it, but it refused to budge. In desperation, he wrapped something around his arm and smashed the window. It shattered outward with a crash and the delicate sound of falling glass...

  And we peered out onto the backyard and driveway. Broken glass littered the ivy below. My mother was out there, packing things in the van. She looked up at us, surprised.

  My father just shook his head, his eyes brimming. The room was dim. The comforting orange glow had vanished.

  Though we asked many times, he never spoke of that window again.

  *****

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