Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (10 page)

“So, you probably don’t remember what
it’s like to not smoke.”

Reflexively, Jonah tried to
remember. But there was no memory there. Only fear. It frightened
him to even think about facing his life without the little
companions that were so much a part of his existence.

“No, I don’t,” Jonah said.
“And I’m not sure I want to.”

Tate smiled his challenge.
“Not even for a few days?”

Jonah thought about that.
It was somewhat less frightening.

“Give it one week, bro.
Then you’ll know what the world is like without cigarettes. If you
hate it, you can always go back.”

Again, Jonah considered it.
“A week, huh.”

Tate threw his hands to the
side. “We’ll call it an experiment.”

#

The day after Tate proposed
his experiment, Jonah called SSI and told them he wanted to take a
vacation sometime in the near future. The clients being scheduled a
month in advance, Jonah had to wait.

On a Thursday night, four
weeks after the experiment was proposed, Jonah walked out of his
office building with about forty reports to be called in. He
skipped dinner with Tate, and he skipped getting high. It was still
late Sunday when he finished calling the reports in, but he had the
next seven days off. Tired and fearful that he wouldn’t be able to
pull it off, Jonah went outside into the night and smoked one last
cigarette. The next day, the experiment began.

#

Jonah woke up early but
prolonged getting out of bed, slipping in and out of sleep a few
times. It was around 10AM when he finally got up. He usually took a
cup of coffee outside with him to have with his first cigarette.
This morning, he did the same thing but without the cigarette. In
his head, Jonah could feel himself going through the motions,
lighting up, sucking in, like it was natural, but it wasn’t very
hard to forgo smoking. Yet.

During the planning stages,
Tate had said, “Your OCD mind is like a trap. So if you want to let
go of something, you’ll have to let go of it completely.” That
meant no surrogates of smoking, such as the patch or nicotine gum,
which would probably just be something else for Jonah to hang onto.
He had to go cold turkey.

The first two hours were
more of the same. Against his will, his mind kept feeding Jonah the
motions of smoking, and with those motions, he could taste the
tobacco and got just a hint of what the relief would feel like.
Still, it wasn’t that hard. Then, shortly after noon, the memory
came out of nowhere. “You ruined my life!” his mother had screamed
at him. “I was young. I was supposed to be out with my friends, not
running away.”

Boom! He was supposed to
smoke. The inner turmoil would cease with the first breath of a
Camel.

“Spend some money,” Tate
had said. “Surround yourself with other pleasures. Then, when the
urge to smoke gets heavy, fulfill another urge to get your mind off
of it.”

Jonah got
out the bag of candy, a variety of miniature Hershey’s chocolate
bars. He took them to the couch. With trembling hands, he unwrapped
the first bar and stuck it in his mouth. He held it on his tongue,
letting it melt slowly. It didn’t make him forget about smoking,
but, as Tate had said, it took the edge off. But the effect of the
chocolates wore off, and they grew tasteless. Jonah got up to
satisfy another addiction. He brewed coffee. The first few sips
were mildly soothing. Then, the more he drank, the more he felt
like he would puke. It was as if his body had felt the oral
sensation and then started to be satisfied, then it said,
Oops, that’s caffeine, wrong stimulant. Here’s a
little nausea for trying to trick me.

That nausea stayed with him
as he did the only thing he felt capable of, staring at the
television, and the nausea wasn’t like the variety he was used to.
He didn’t feel like he was going to puke. No, puking would require
that his body was functioning, and more and more, that wasn’t the
case. His brain was nearly gone. He was watching the television but
not taking it in. Instead of seeing the picture in front of his
eyes, he saw the picture in his head: A cigarette burning, the red
tip eating away at the paper. And it wasn’t just a regular
cigarette in his head. No, it was a giant cigarette, as round as
his entire head. He’d open his mouth as wide as he could and suck
as hard as he could.

This was
like being sick, but with a major difference; Jonah knew what the
cure was, and he knew that cure would be perfectly effective and
immediate. In his imagination, he could sense the smoke entering
his body and making all of his symptoms dissolve. The smell of the
tobacco, the sensation of it entering his system. The cold sweats
going away. The nausea dissipating as the nicotine came in and
reclaimed his shaken nerves.
Everything’s
going to be all right. We left for a little while, but were back
now, to mend all that has been broken.

The questions: Why did he
want to quit? Was there something that was going to make this worth
it in the end? He doubted it. If he didn’t smoke again, would it
always feel this way? Yes, at this point, he felt pretty sure it
would.

Around four o’clock, Jonah
got off the couch. He’d thrown out his last pack the night before.
No matter. There was plenty of money to buy his relief. What had he
been thinking? He didn’t want to quit smoking. Fuck what Tate would
think when he failed. To hell with being able to get the reports
done between clients. He probably wouldn’t be able to concentrate
enough to do the reports anyway, unless he smoked.

By the time Jonah got out
to his car, he already felt some relief. Even if he hadn’t actually
smoked one yet, the commitment to smoking one in the near future
was something. He was able to concentrate enough to get his car to
the corner gas station. A little while later, he was walking to his
car, a pack of Camels now in his possession. He didn’t even wait to
get home. He tore the wrapper off and threw it on the lot. He
opened the foil wrap. He brought out a cigarette and put it in his
mouth. He pulled out his lighter.

He stopped. He did the
math. It being a little after 4PM now, he had made it over
seventeen hours since he last smoked. If he smoked now, he lost
those seventeen hours. Jonah took the cigarette from his mouth. He
stared at it for about a minute. He was indifferent to the cars
passing by, the people in the gas station, the cars at the pumps.
He didn’t care that there were undoubtedly some that were staring
at him, the strange man standing in the middle of the lot, looking
at something in his hand.

Finally, Jonah turned. He
picked up the wrapper he had thrown on the ground. He walked over
to a trashcan in front of the station. He couldn’t do it, not just
yet.

“It’s just an experiment,”
he said out loud. “If it doesn’t get better, I just start up
again.”

With that, knowing that he could smoke
again in the future, Jonah was able to throw the cigarettes
away.

#

From the gas station, Jonah
had returned home. It was nearly 8PM now, and he was on the couch.
The physical DTs were, for the most part, gone. He just felt a
slight icy feeling in his head. But now there was the psychological
to deal with. Jonah felt empty. For years, cigarettes had supplied
him with a constant source of desire and an anticipation of
quenching that desire. When things got really bad, there was always
lighting up to look forward to. When things that should have made
him feel good didn’t—like getting into the Ph.D. program at
USC—there was always the celebratory smoke to look forward to. That
sequence of desire, anticipation then satisfaction, was constant.
It recycled many times during the course of the day. Now that the
sequence was gone, Jonah didn’t know how to desire. He tried to
think about his future, his money piling up, the expensive
vacations he’d be able to buy, a nice car, a nice house, a cabin on
the lake with a dock. But all these things seemed bland, because he
wasn’t smoking while he had them.

One of the things he’d done
after Tate’s “satisfy urges” recommendation was rent pornography.
It turned out to be the first time he’d been impotent while doing
it on his own. The graphic images, the risqué situations, did
nothing for him. He could not desire the beautiful women. He could
not desire to be the men. He knew that would change after a smoke.
With nicotine in his system, his primal urges would wake up and so
would his penis. But for now, it was all just bland.

The worst part about
lacking desire was that he thought it might last forever. Would he
ever want again? Would anything ever feel good again? Without
craving, there was no fulfillment.

That night, Jonah drove up
to his office. There, he checked and made sure all the lights were
off. Even though the coffeepot had a timer that shut it off two
hours after it was turned on, Jonah checked it anyway, just in case
the timer had malfunctioned. He checked the phones, making sure he
got a dial tone. Then he checked the doors several times. Checking
the office when he hadn’t been there for a few days was a bit
extreme, even for Jonah, but he chalked the extra compulsions up to
the stress he was experiencing. At home, before he went to bed, he
checked some more.

#

Jonah had thought sleep
would be the easy time, a hiatus from the DTs. He was wrong. He
fell asleep fast, and the nightmares came. He was in pain and
suffocating, because his chest was caving in. There was something
wrong with his eyes. All he could see were the blurry images of
human forms around him. He wanted to ask for help, but he couldn’t
speak. He wanted to nudge one of them, just to get their attention,
so they would be able to see the state he was in and help him, but
he couldn’t move.

Jonah woke from this
nightmare, but there wasn’t relief. Awake, it was still hard to
breathe, as he still felt like his chest was caving in. His head
was icy and spinning. He was nauseated. And, once again, he could
feel that if he would just smoke one cigarette it would all go
away.

It got worse. There were
shadows in the room. They darted, one at a time, through the door,
and then disappeared into the wall. Jonah lay there, frozen in
fear, telling himself it was just a shift in the light coming in
from the outside, clouds crossing in front of the moon. Telling
himself this worked for a while, until he looked over and noticed
that the blinds on his bedroom window were shut.

With that, the shadows
stopped coming. He kept his eyes open and stared at the room beyond
his bed. Like that, he waited. Nothing, for the longest time. If he
wasn’t awake, then this was one hell of a realistic dream. Becoming
tired, he starting to blink. He told himself that he could go to
sleep and wake up in the light. The light would make things normal
again, and maybe the light would make the DTs go away, the craving
cease. He was just about to close his eyes for good, when the next
shadow came.

But this time it didn’t
dart through the room. It crept in. It came right up to the bed,
its form human. It stood there and looked down on him. He tried to
think of something to do, but fear wouldn’t let him think. He could
only be afraid. It was even harder to breathe now. His breath
finally ceased altogether. But that was fine. He’d suffocate until
he passed out. Then, maybe, the shadow at the foot of his bed would
be gone.

But that shadow did not go
away. Jonah did not suffocate fast enough. It went down and under
the covers. He felt the bed shift as the shadow moved up beside
him. He felt its coldness coming up his body, starting with his
legs, then up his stomach, his chest, his neck. Then it was
breathing its icy breath against his face. Jonah could not move
until he felt it stab his ribs. He jolted right out of bed and
landed on the floor.

Light. Light would make it
go away. Jonah crawled past his bed to the end of the room. He got
up on his knees and flipped the light switch. It was gone. There
was nothing in his room that wasn’t supposed to be there, and he
was fine. Nothing was with him, and he was fine.

He could breathe, and he
was breathing fast. There was still pain in his side. He looked
where he had felt the shadow jab him. There was an indention there,
surrounded by a quarter-sized area of red. The indention was about
the size of one of Jonah’s fingernails.

“I jabbed myself,” he
whispered. His own whisper scared him. It scared him because he
didn’t feel like he was alone. He needed to be quiet.

More light. He was next to
the bedroom door, and there was darkness in the hall. Jonah crawled
a few feet into the hall and switched on the light. When there was
still nothing out of place, he felt a little braver and got to his
feet. He took a couple of steps and switched on the bathroom light.
Something wasn’t right. But it had been fast, too fast, possibly
just his imagination. He did a quick scan. All was fine. But
something had been wrong.

Stop scaring yourself
more.

Jonah went toward the front
of the house. In the hallway was the door to his spare room. He
opened the door, then flicked on the light inside that room. He saw
only boxes and other things that he’d stored. He went into the
living room. There were no overhead lights there, but he switched
on the two standing lamps on either side of his couch and the one
situated above his computer desk. Nothing there to be frightened
of, he went to the adjacent dining area.