Abducted Chapter Four: Group
From the novel I've been working on while I'm in school to keep working on my writing skills. Sorry it took so long to release more. I've been in a bit of a funk.
Chapter Four: Group
Mom texts: Jeffrey is so excited!
My whole body itches. My warts itch. But still, here’s my mom trying to find me a mate. Yes, I’ve accepted the date. Even texted the guy. Sent him a full frontal nude to let him know what he’s in for. Hell, you wouldn’t buy a car unseen would you? Even I’ll rock his cock if he wants me to, but you best bet I’m taking birth control I got off Wish. I’ll take two and a glass of Chambord, please. Even my horse face, ratty hair, and wart bespeckled knees don’t dissuade him. Jesus.
Some rat or beaver has nibbled on all my pumpkins, eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, and annuals, perennials, and cultivated growths. I tell mother and she says there’s always next year. But I can get pregnant any time of course.
Far off someone’s mic echoes. Pots and pans clink together, gum smacks in mouths, bags of chips ruffle, babies cry, children fight, and all manner of regular household noise comes cascading through my laptop speakers. Someone cuts a fart, and their icon box brightens hard with the noise and gradually dies. With moderator control I click off 30 or so microphones until there’s just Mallory. Isolated. Alone. Behind him are wood paneled walls. The kind used to cover black mold in old town houses and give trailers that homey look. Sipping a mug of tea that reads, “Believing is for suckers, I have proof. Just ask me,” Mallory’s discussing the minutes of last week’s meeting.
Jeffrey texts: I didn’t need all that, dear. Was just asking if you liked the Patriots.
In a rumbling bassoon, Mallory says, “from 8:45 until 9:36, sister Penelope Jenkins talked about the weather on Mount Washington’s summit. That it is known to be some of the worst in the world. Sister Penelope illegally made the summit at 12:45 AM on August the 8th 1967 whereupon she has a blank memory until the time of 2:45 AM. Later this missing time manifested in her dreams as the colloquially known, “pale room,” and, “the gray strangers,” and, “being molested.””
In the tub, microphone off, camera off, I’m tuning into my Wednesday night show. For about a year now I’ve attended the Sleep Paralysis Support Group that Bradford attended. Still wary of COVID-19 we’re all zooming in from home. Scalding hot water dilates my blood vessels. Veins full of gas station wine, I’m already a wreck. But still capable of answering simple questions and clicking buttons. Nothing’s interesting yet, not till the others get talking. True, I don’t belong, but it’s the only tenuous hold I have on Brad. That room in the big house we don’t go in anymore, it’s locked, entombed, guilded, barred, or otherwise inaccessible. An effigy to my favorite little man.
If you read the wiki, it tells you sleep paralysis is characterized by an abnormal sleep pattern in which the affected individual is aware but unable to move or speak. During SP, for several minutes at a time affected individuals report the inability to breathe, terror, hallucinations, and dark presences in the room such as aliens, succubae, shadows, cats, or wolves sitting on the individuals chest, or demons, or hatted figures.
Mallory drones, “From 9:36 until 9:51, brother Jamison Leeks reminded us that we are in complete control during the episode, just that we need to find that one limb or muscle to twitch that will break the paralysis.”
Most stories are photocopies of the others, but sometimes I’m surprised.
Like the time Betsy Stimpleton told us all she loves her SP episodes. Took the entire 3 hour meeting captivating us with her life story. The manifestation came as a polite young man with not straw-colored hair, but straw for hair and shimmering blue eyes. At first, he’d lay in bed with her, and talk to her, and feed her pennies. Later he told her previously unknown truths about her family, like that her mother attempted to abort her when she was still a fetus.
On camera, Betsy pulled down her shirt to reveal a gaping scar between her clavicle and ribs. “That’s where the hangar went in. Right where he said it’d be,” she says. Turning around, she pulled up her shirt in the back to show another hole of equal size, healed of course, and says, “that’s where it came out,” letting the collar snap back into place, she says, “my ma tried to yank me out like a fish, but she couldn’t cause I was meant to be here.”
And they all clap. I take a drink.
If you read the webMD it calls it hypnagogic sleep paralysis if it happens when you’re falling asleep. Predormital sleep paralysis if it happens when you’re waking up.
Betsy’s hypnagogic. In horrendous detail she’s told us her little scarecrow touched her with his cold fingers. Down there. He penetrated her with them. The repeated creepy fumbling’s throughout her teenage years were her introduction to her nether regions. To this day she still needs to put her fingers in a bowl of icy water to fully get off.
If you search the internet for child spirits you’ll find terms like Ogbanje, Changeling, Kumanthong, Abiku, and Kumari. These child spirits though malevolent, are considered easier to control than adult spirits and are thus sought after for good fortune and supernatural power. Betsy cries and tells us she thinks she’s a monster because though she’s aged and the boy hasn’t she still enjoys the encounters. Like as if she’s some kind of child spirit molester. Even she’s tried to tell him to go back to where he came from, but they seem inextricably tied for life.
Like a punishment, you see?
They tell her it’s okay. She’s okay. She’s not a bad person.
I drink.
For others, these apparitions cause the development of somniphobia, or the fear of sleep. Quite a few of our attendees begin their talk with, “Hi, I’m mister or missus what’s-their-face and I haven’t slept in six days.”
If you surf the internet long enough, you’ll find that the infamous hatted figure was Wes Craven’s original inspiration for Freddy Krueger. It’s true. Our favorite nightmare dwelling, campy, pizza faced, child murderer has been around longer than you can imagine. Skulking in the shadows and terrifying nocturnally emissed boys and recently bleeding girls for centuries. Dear old Wes just gave him a name and a face. Robert Englund breathed life into him.
I drink.
“From 10:15 until 10:35 brother Godfrey Weston expounded on his experience with whom he calls, “the mother.” Who in his paralysis berates him for being a professional puppeteer rather than something useful,” Mallory says.
Said “Mother,” strings him up from each limb like a puppeteer and parades his paralytic body around the room to a group of headhunters at large corporations like Amazon, and Microsoft.
Godfrey’d said, “my own mother would never say something like that. She loves my job.”
Parasomnias paired with somniphobias can lead to death. Sometimes attendees down gallons of coffee, abuse amphetamines, Ritalin, meth, or cocaine to stave off Freddy and his nightmare friends. Waifish and racoon-eyed, they elaborate on sudden narcolepsy while driving and almost hitting trees. Hallucinating yellow elephants while teaching 6th graders. Finding themselves in strange places without knowing how they got there.
“From 10:40 until 11:00PM, our oldest attendee Melissa Lufkin, 99 years old, said she fell asleep at the senior center and woke up in the Red Light District’s Paris Cinema watching gay porn. “Even I had my hand up my dress”,” Mallory repeats from her story.
I drink.
Call me a voyeur, call me a watcher, or faker, but I’m looking for a specific type of story. Some key words in a years long search for answers. While all this is an interesting if frightening dive into the strange and unknown, I’ve yet to hear the words I’m looking for. In fact, I might even be barking up the wrong tree. You see, Brad’s experiences had similar themes but it’s the ways in which his were different that give me pause. First, his episodes were during the day. Second, while he did report being unable to move, he was capable of breathing at first but inevitably it was like fighting against a low oxygen environment. Like a coffin.
Several universities performed experiments that involve increasing the CO2 gas concentrations in the blood. Said elevated CO2 induce fear, panic, and terror in otherwise sound participants and subjects. Third, he reported that there was no creature, feature, or otherwise haunting figure in the room. Just a voice, that while ominous, only induced fear when Bradford answered a certain set of questions falsely. Or what the voice considered false.
In Bradford’s waking dream, his cell looked much like the interior of a prison gas chamber. In this tiny bubble, Brad was interrogated through a tiny speaker on the door.
Or, “it was dark inside your mother, wasn’t it?”
Next to the microphone was a gauge that measured the CO2 and O2 concentrations in the chamber. Answering falsely, he’d be subjected to higher CO2, sometimes higher O2, and occasionally voice squealing additives like helium, and voice barreling sulfur hexafluoride. Any giggle, or indication that it was fun would induce suffocating levels of non-breathable gas.
“Fuck you,” he’d shout, sounding like Skeletor and in response the slow tightening of his chest ensued until his shock to wakefulness while driving or wherever.
My little man. Ever the defiant one. My favorite person.
I take a drink. I scratch my knees. I mute a few mics. Adjust some levels.
Shuffling through a leather bag, crinkling, clattering, Mallory takes out a single small wooden tile. On each tile is a number from 1 – 120. Supposedly random, this is how the next speaker is chosen. Somehow over the years, my number has only been chosen once. And on that night, I’d fooled them into believing my microphone didn’t work. Figures tonight he’d pull my number again.
He says, “number 78. Sister Tabitha if you’d be so kind as to share your experience with us?”
In the few years I’ve been doing this, you’d think I’d’ve made up a story by now. A script. Something cobbled together from other’s tales and things I’ve read online. But that’s cheap. Plus, once I tell the lie I have to remember every bit of it. How it affects my life and the life of those around me. It’s a bit like writing a book. Here’s the other thing; what if I create some manifestation, some monster, or lurker and others begin to dream it. I’m a drunk, a liar, a bad daughter, a bad sister, and a voyeur, but I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that. Would you?
Mallory says, “Please dear, we’ve been so aching to hear your experience.”
It’s 7:34 PM on a Thursday in October. I’m alone in the tub in my forest nestled cottage with the new Stephen King novel and I’m being singled out to share an experience I’ve never had. Left holes in my only work of art. I’m a 1/10th dilution of personhood to fear with a slow titration of alcohol like a saline drip.
Turning on my microphone, I say, “I…” and a light box ignites around my icon letting everyone know exactly where I am. The world really is closing around me like some hollow and dark spheroid cloud blanket getting smaller and smaller. All eyes on me. So many bloody bitten lips and stage frightened shivering knees out of nightmares I’d like to forget. This is the reason I wasn’t chosen to lead my father’s company. I can’t perform. Can’t rally masses. Don’t have a commanding tone or even a good singing voice.
Mallory says, “oh dear,” he pauses and averts his eyes. Lifts his arm to reveal he’s wearing a black and red cape that drapes around his shoulders and arms like a 17th century vampire. Even he’s wearing porcelain teeth to boot. Over several mics there’s hemming and hawing and gasping. Continuing muted through his cape, Mallory says, “sister Tabitha? Are you aware that your camera is on, and we can see you?”
I yip and drop the glass of wine into the water darkening it pale pink. You know that dream everyone says they have but they haven’t? The one where they’ve to give a speech in front of the whole school and they’re naked? I’m living it. Gods, I’ve been so preoccupied with open microphones and bad levels, I forgot to check my own shit. Unfreezing myself, with frantic wet fingers I’m gliding all over the keyboard and mouse pad to shut off the web cam.
I say, “I…shit! Shit!”
Reaching out to his master control, Mallory does some magic and turns off my camera from wherever he is in Wyoming or Alaska. Several still open mics let out groans and guffaws and moans. Several men and a few women frown. I know I’m pitiful but you don’t have to rub it in.
Mallory says, “I think under the circumstances sister Tabitha can be excused from sharing tonight. I do apologize, my lady.”
That’s when my laptop slips off the makeshift table and falls into the tub. Immersed, the LCD shorts, snaps and goes out.