Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (13 page)

#

Earlier in the week, Tate
had hinted that he was bitter about having to give up their
Thursday night dinner at Denny’s. When Jonah had called him on it
by offering to go ahead with dinner and put meditation off until
Friday, Tate had laughed and said, “No, bro. I’m just fucking with
you.”

Tate was very relaxed when
Jonah came over Thursday night, and he didn’t say a thing about
Jonah being so late, although, Jonah thought, Tate would know that
he was late because of the usual OCD crap. Jonah surmised from
Tate’s calmness that Tate must have been meditating before Jonah
got there.

After they situated
themselves on the couch, Tate said, “So tell me about it,
brother.”

“Well, you were right,”
Jonah responded. I found myself paying more attention to my
thoughts. I actually watched myself obsessing.”

“And?” Tate asked, when
Jonah paused.

“And I tried to convince
myself that my thoughts were ridiculous. And I was actually able to
do that.”

“And that didn’t help.”

Jonah shook his head. “The
more I tried to convince myself not to obsess, the more anxious I
became.”

“So you lost that battle?”

Jonah sighed. Now that he
no longer smoked, he had more energy and he wasn’t near as ill
after a long day’s work. But now, considering this mess was
starting to make his head feel decimated. He nodded in response to
Tate’s question, hoping the conversation wouldn’t get too
complicated.

“So, although you were able to see
your obsessions as they occurred and were able to argue against
them, you still lost.”

“Yes,” Jonah said.

“You lost the battle in your
head.”

“Yes,” Jonah repeated, this time
louder.

“So, despite knowing what your mind
was doing, it still ruled you anyway, and you lost?”

Jonah didn’t respond this
time.

Tate waited a few seconds,
then said, “So, if you can’t win the battle in your head, maybe you
should consider fighting some place else.”

Jonah considered what Tate
had just said. After about a minute, he had no idea what it meant,
so he just shook his head.

“Remember,” Tate said. “I
told you to give up the struggle.”

Jonah nodded.

“The struggle in your head is the
struggle you have to give up.”

To Jonah, Tate sounded like
he was basically telling him it was hopeless, but that couldn’t be
right.

“You remember when you quit
smoking?” Tate asked.

Jonah smirked. “Yeah. How
could I forget that?”

“Did you do that in your
head?”

After a few seconds of considering the
question, then giving up, Jonah said, “I don’t know.”

“Were you able to convince
yourself that you didn’t want to smoke? I mean, when you really
wanted a cigarette, were you able to just make your mind stop
believing that?”

Jonah remembered the tricks
he had used when he was trying to fight the urge. They had taken
the edge off of the DTs for a little while. But, by and large, they
had failed and he had suffered. “Hell no!” Jonah said.

“So you lost the battle in your
head?”

Jonah, now starting to cue
into what Tate was getting at, said, “Yeah. I did lose the battle
in my head. But I still didn’t smoke.”

Tate smiled softly. “Give
up the struggle in your head, bro.”

It all seemed simple to
Jonah now. He could fight his mind with all he had, and it would
only get stronger. He couldn’t control his mind. But he could
control how he reacted to it.

“Thanks,” Jonah said. “I
know what to do.”

#

There is a thump, and it
comes from somewhere nearby. Then there is pain. First, it is a
single pain on his thigh, sharp, extreme. Then there is a similar
pain in his back. He struggles. Something hits the top of his head
very hard. Then there are multiple pains, and he realizes two
things: He is being overwhelmed. He is helpless.

He feels the flesh being
torn from his body. There is another thump, and it’s
over.

#

Jonah came to from the
horrible dream. The afterthought of the pain was still there. He
was afraid to go back to sleep, but, at the same time, he was very
tired. After about half an hour, he dozed off.

#

He is in his clinic, in the
interview room. On his desk is a woman spread out, and Jonah is on
top of her, giving her the measure. The room fades, like a poor
television reception, and his thoughts fade too, going into
something weird. All of the sudden he is different. He doesn’t do
exactly what he does. He isn’t who exactly who he is. The room is
changing too. It’s changing within the bad reception. But that
reception is growing clearer and so are his thoughts.

There is a thump, and the
reception is bad again. The process seems to start over. He is
Jonah, in his clinic, having sex with some woman. It fades into the
bad reception and starts to become something else.

There is a thump. This
time, when he goes back to his clinic, he realizes that this is all
not real, because the thump was from outside, and Jonah wakes
up.

#

The feeling Jonah was left
with was mainly fascination. He was a little afraid, because he
didn’t know what had made the noise and woke him up, but that fear
was overwhelmed by his memory of the sense from the dream, what it
felt like to be changing into someone or something else. After a
few minutes, he slept again.

#

There are many thoughts in
his head. They are jumbled. But there is a sense that they may
become clear. Just a sense.

He’s back in the car. The
gas station. The block of houses. The church. Then the vista with
the tower. tompmorowerirmeaytotn,woiklthahommae, is written on that
tower. But then the letters start jumping around, and some of the
letters begin to fall away.

There is a thump. The
letters stop scrambling and then fade all together. Jonah turns
onto the next road. He notices the street sign. Main Street it
says. But that disappears. Jonah is pulling into the parking lot of
his clinic, and that begins to change, first fading into the bad
reception, then it begins to become clearer.

There is the thump and a
slight crack. Jonah wakes up. For the rest of the night, he has no
dreams that he can remember.

#

When Jonah got up that
morning, he had coffee and a bagel. He then got his files out and
prepared to call them in. That was when his mind started in on him.
The first obsession was his office. His mind kept telling him that
he should take a few minutes to ride up there and make sure
everything was okay. Steph, like he, was there Monday through
Thursday. So he would have been the last one out this week. His
mind gave him the usual images: the lights, the coffeepot, the
locks, the phones. But this time he didn’t take time to try to
remember every step he had taken last night, didn’t bother with
mentally retracing his steps in a futile attempt to see if he’d
taken care of all these things.

After a few minutes of
screaming at him, Jonah’s mind offered a compromise. He could just
call his office. Then, when the answering machine picked up, he
would at least know the building hadn’t burned down. But Jonah
would not take the compromise. He was fairly certain this was going
to have to be like when he quit smoking. No weaning himself off of
his compulsions. He had to go cold turkey.

Letting go of the
compulsive behaviors wasn’t as physically bad as giving up the
smokes. Jonah didn’t feel like he couldn’t breathe or feel
disconnected from himself. Giving up on compulsions was more
mental. It made it hard to concentrate with his mind protesting so
much. Initially, doing the reports, Jonah made a lot of mistakes,
and these were real mistakes, not the imagined mistakes his mind
had always warded against.

Eventually, his mind gave
up on the office obsession and went on to something else. This
time, it was the rewind function of the teledictation service.
Hitting the five on his phone’s keypad would allow him to listen to
the last ten seconds of what he had just read in. Hitting the six
would take him back a minute. Jonah was able to resist the urge to
use the rewind keys, but he found himself slowing down to
compensate for not allowing himself the review privilege. Thinking
this cheating and, in a way, another form of obsessing, Jonah sped
up. The actual mistakes increased, but that was fine. In the past
he had not gone forward until positive that he had not made a
mistake. Now, on this day, he only went backward if he were sure
that he had made a mistake. The new way was faster. But, of course,
it aggravated the hell out of his obsessive mind, and it screamed
all the louder at him.

Around three in the
afternoon, Jonah had several reports finished. He didn’t know the
exact number, but he refused to go back and count, having to know
the exact number being one of his obsessions. There was a function
on the teledication system that would allow him to go back and
listen to one of his reports after he had finished it. His mind
begged him to do this. When he refused, it bargained, telling him
that he didn’t have to listen to the whole report, so long as he
fast-forwarded to the parts where he thought mistakes were most
costly, like the patient’s social security number or the diagnosis.
On top of this, the office obsession had started up again. But
still, he was resisting, not giving in to his obsessive mind’s
demands. But the fight did take a toll on him. He was
exhausted.

Jonah, feeling too weary to
do even one more report, decided to take a nap. He had been doing
his reports in the living room, with the files spread out in front
of him on the coffee table. He got up from the sofa and naturally
went to the door to check the locks.

No
, he thought, backing away from the
door like it was lined with disease. Going to bed, even just to
take a little nap, had always involved a regular obsessive routine.
Everything that could be turned off had to be off, all that could
be shut had to be shut, and his car had to be checked. Jonah did
none of these. He even forwent his usual cup of water that he kept
beside the bed just in case he got thirsty. His mind screamed at
him for a little while, before he fell asleep.

#

It was strange to wake up
and feel wide-awake immediately. Even stranger was the realization
in his head. Jonah knew, somehow, that the realization, with its
message too logical for a dream state, had been what pushed him
into consciousness. He got off the bed and pulled up the blinds of
his bedroom window. What he saw there confirmed what he thought.
Last night, there had been thumping sounds in his dreams. But it
had sounded like they were coming from somewhere else, somewhere
outside of where his experience was, somewhere that was outside of
the dream and in reality.

There were several little
smears in the dust of his bedroom window, some of them overlapping,
and there was one single crack, about eight inches long.

For a little while, Jonah
wondered what could have been hitting his window the night before.
Then Jonah got up to go work on his reports.

#

Around 5PM, Saturday, Jonah
sat on his couch in a state of amazement and invigoration. For
years he had smoked, and now that was gone. For years he had
obsessed and reacted to his obsessions with compulsions. But, as
Saturday had gone by with him refusing to give in to the
obsessions, they had faded away.

That was when Jonah found a
new obsession. But he was glad to give into this one. This
obsession was speed. Without the usual obsessions there to distract
him, he had begun to read each report in faster. At first, it was
about four reports an hour, then he got it up to five and finally
peaked out at six. Now he was done. He had the rest of tonight, and
then all of tomorrow to do whatever the hell he wanted. Yes, speed
was addicting, and Jonah was obsessive compulsive no more. He
couldn’t wait to see what the future held.

That night, he and Tate got
high. The mood was very relaxed. Neither one of them discussed
Jonah’s progress. Jonah thought it was because they both knew the
real test was about to come. But what Jonah didn’t know, at that
point, was that he had no idea what the biggest test of all was
going to be.

#

On Sunday, Jonah was a
little confused. He had suddenly found himself with free time and
had no idea what to do with it. He finally settled into a book and
was fine. Monday proved incredible. The obsessions had completely
ceased. It was like by not responding to them, he had made them
give up, and suddenly, without them, he felt capable of anything.
He met Monday’s clients with calmness foreign to him, but so
enchanting that he quickly incorporated it. His client’s seemed to
react to his calmness in kind. The interviews were a snap, none
lasting the full hour, most barely passing thirty minutes. Then, as
soon as each client walked out of his office, he was on the phone,
calling the report in. He actually found himself wanting more. He
didn’t need, as in something he would obsess over, but he wanted
more of a challenge, to see just how much he could do
now.