Book 1: Black

Vexed Chapter 1: It began in black

TONY

January 13th, 2007

“It began in black. Lost. Dark. Without hope. It was cold and wet. Not raining, but the air was thick and damp and hard to breathe. At first I can’t see a thing, and then, slowly, I can start to make out shapes. My eyes adjusting to the dark.”

“Describe your surroundings to me,” he asked, slightly patronizing from beyond the blacks and shadow. I wish he’d just be patient. I was doing my absolute best.

“I’m in the woods,” I answered him, as soon as I realized where I was. “I guess it has to be winter. There are no leaves hanging from the branches,” I explained, peering up at the towering naked trees. “I’m at the bottom of a steep hill, and I begin to hike my way up. The loose soil makes it difficult to get traction.” After scaling half of the hill I nearly slid all the way back down, but caught myself just in time by clinging to a small sapling at the base of a giant old oak. The bark of the old oak was wet and slimy, with frosty moss covering its north side. There was a cold humidity that puffed with dense white vapor whenever I exhaled. The cold penetrated my flesh to the bone, and my teeth steadily chattered. It was miserable.

I didn’t want to experience it all over again. I wish he didn’t make me. It’s not like we’ll learn anything new. Nothing we haven’t already come across the hundred or so prior times we’ve tried it.

I pushed on through the loose soil and dragged myself to the top. “At the top of the hill, there’s a clearing and an old abandoned brick house,” I described as I walked through the thick overgrown brush towards the house that drew me in magnetically. It was uninviting to look at, broken and abandoned long ago, yet I knew my path laid within it.

“Have you gone into the house, yet?” he asked me. He knew that was supposed to happen next.

“No,” I replied as I shuffled over a large fallen tree and up the rickety old porch steps. The wooden rail nearly fell to rotted pieces in my hand as I grabbed at it for extra balance. The door to the house was off its hinges, and merely strewn across the entrance haphazardly. I grabbed it and lowered it to the ground quietly as the wind picked up, whipping around me violently.

“Are you inside, now?” he wondered after a few silent moments.

“Yes, I’m inside the foyer.”

“And how do you feel now?”

“I feel dread,” I said in a whisper, hoping the house didn’t hear me. My eyes scanned the large room, glossing over most of the usual details. Behind the once regal staircase with the fancy carved bannister was an old broken piano. It was tipped over onto three legs and sat in a corner in front of three tall ornate stained glass windows, which still maintained some panes of unshattered colored glass. A storm surge was brewing beyond, darkening the already gray skies. Thunder began to rumble and shook the uneasy floorboards beneath the area rug I stood upon. It was matted and frayed, like animals have been using it to keep warm in the long cold winter months.

“Why do you continue on if you fear what you might find?” he asked. His voice was urgent and perplexed. How could I not continue? How could I not keep going when she needed me to?

“Because I hear her voice,” I replied, just as the soft elegance of her call floated down to my waiting ears as if gliding on the air like a feather. The voice pleaded to me, beckoned me to hurry, but I couldn’t understand her. My insides began to burn, straining to hear her, to understand what she was trying to say to me, but nothing cohesive formed of her cry. Her voice was desperate. She needed me.

“Why is she there?” he challenged me, but I didn’t have all the answers. The urgency of his voice suggested the culmination of his inquisition. He expected me to have all the answers. Why would I be here if I had all the answers? Why would I relive this over and over again if I knew what it all meant?

“She needs my help!” I told him. I struggled to make out her words, following the whispers to a door cracked open behind the grand staircase. I opened it, and took a hasty step down onto the stairs that led to darkness. It was a great suffocating gloom, as voluminous as the thickest fog. It fed off my fear and stripped away all my courage, leaving me panting for air. I tried hard to slow my gasps, to quiet myself, hoping to get close enough to hear her. Before I realized it I had come to the landing at the very bottom of the dark hole, down into the basement. Lightning flashed through the windows set into the very top of the mortar walls, illuminating the dark room briefly before returning it to the swallowing darkness.

The floor was littered with rags and random spots of broken glass and trinkets. Another flash lit the room, showing me a long dark hallway ahead that made the hair on the back of my neck jolt up like pins. A shiver ran through me, a death rattle that fiercely sapped all my strength. I braced myself against the wall, struggling to get wind into my lungs and trying to avoid hyperventilating.

I began my path down the hallway into nothing, pushing forward step by step with my eyes fixated straight ahead.

“Do not go down that hallway, Tony,” he pleaded to me firmly. “It’s time to break this circle.” He was trying to help, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand where I was. He didn’t understand why I had to go. He didn’t understand why I had to do it for her.

I was never free to roam. This was a one way trip.

“I can’t…” I gasped as my entire body began to tremble. My knees buckled after each step, but I continued my way down the hallway that stretched further and further the more I pushed on. Every excruciating effort forward forced the hall to lengthen, changing my determination into pure frustration.

“You cannot change the outcome of the events that have led you here for help,” he lectured, “but you can change the outcome of this nightmare and begin to regain your life. Now all you have to do, is let go,” he forcefully demanded.

I would if I could. I would give anything to change what happened! Doesn’t he understand that? Doesn’t he understand why I have to be here? For her?

“I can’t…” I choked back to him as tears streamed down my face. “I have to help her.”

The storm outside had finally finished brewing and was now a beast. Cascading waves of lightning thrashed just outside the walls, shaking the house down to its foundation.

“Let go!”

“No.”

My eyes glittered in the flashes of furious light which burst through the small windows at the top of the brick wall on my left. With each strike the hallway became more illuminated than it was before, a steady glow lifting the shadows just enough until I could finally see her. There, at the very end of the hallway, behind a half closed door she waited for me. Her flowing red hair hung off her bare shoulder and her green eyes flared like beacons, tugging me closer. My heart beat twice as fast as the adrenaline ripped through my veins, demanding my paralyzing trembles to loosen.

I knew what was coming. I accepted my fate, and allowed the anger to take over.

“Tony! Let go, now!”

“Leave her alone!” I screamed. A figure appeared in the doorway behind her, grabbed her by the shoulder and drug her back inside, slamming the door shut with a loud crack that rivaled the booming thunder of the tempest.

“Is somebody else there?” he demanded. His voice was feverish, bordering on frantic. “Tony, is somebody else in the room with Jacinda?”

“Leave her alone!” I screamed again as I broke into a sprint, lunging towards the door. The hallway continued lengthen with every stride I took, looming off in the distance. It forced me to push harder, with adrenaline pumping through me like liquid fire, searing away through my skin. I ignored the pain while the lightning reached its peak ferocity, striking just inches outside the windows I raced past. My gut began to wrench, clenching under duress.

I dug deeper and deeper for extra energy, willing myself on until finally the doorway slid into reach, like stretched rubber finally snapping back into place. Without a second to react I crashed into the door. The jam splintered into thousands of pieces which scattered throughout the room. I collapsed hard onto my knees against the floor, with overexertion threatening to pull me under and doubled over onto my hands, sucking in hasty gulps of air.

The storm began to pass and left a stray roll of thunder in its wake, quickly deescalating from its former rage.

“Are you in the room now, Tony?” his voice asked calmly. “Is she there? Is there someone else?”

I rose to my feet with the help of the nearby wall and strained my eyes to see through the returning black of the nightly gloom. A stray angry flash from the storm struck once more and illuminated the rest of the room for me, holding its brightness just long enough to recall every inch by memory. There was a bed just a few feet away seemingly empty, its covers strewn about. A broken mirror hung from the far wall and a small wooden vanity faced the near corner. As the moments slowly faded by and the storm continued to amble along far away, small volleys of distant lightning lit the room softly.

There was something beneath the bed covers.

I pulled away the blanket and found a body. She was torn apart and lifeless. Her green eyes fixated on mine with pools of wet tears covering the small constellation of freckles on her cheeks. Blood dripped from the walls, seeping down onto the ground from the great splatters that had drenched them in crimson. The room was suddenly torn apart, with chains on the floor and broken pieces of plaster ripped away from the wall exposing the old wooden frame behind it. The stench of death caused me to gag and I stood there, numb like I had seen this atrocity a million times before.

“She’s here. The same as always.”

“Who kills her in your nightmare, Tony?”

There, across the opposite side of the bed rested a broken mirror against the wall. I stared at it and began to answer before the image properly became focused.

“I do.”

Within the reflective glass I stared at an image of myself. Unfamiliar to the man I saw in the mirror every morning, but definitely still me. My eyes were wild and feral and my face was misshapen, like a devilish beast. Blood dribbled from my mouth and chin, staining the entire front of my button up shirt, while my hands were clawed and dripped fresh gore. The image should have been enough to drive anyone mad. The least it should have done was draw me into hysterics, but something inside wouldn’t allow that to happen.

It was guilt.

I squeezed off a single tear. It gently fell over my cheek and fell harmlessly to the floor.

* * *

With a snap, my eyes involuntarily opened and the forthcoming rush of light sent my optic nerves into a painful frenzy. I sat upright quickly and took a few deep breaths while the sweat from my forehead began dripping down into my damp t-shirt.

Have you ever had one of those deep sleeps where you wake up and your mind needs a few seconds to reload all the basic information? Stuff like, who you are, and how you got there? That was how I felt at that very second. A man in basic need of a good, hard reboot.

My name’s Tony. Anthony Etereo. I am 28 years old, and I live in the city of Grace Point. I am generously five foot, ten inches tall with exceptional dark hair and eyes, and a fair amount of scruffy hair covering my face and chin, carefully fashioned. Years ago my uncle told me I needed to lean into the razor while shaving. This after seeing his pubescent nephew trying his mightiest to grow a goatee. I guess I decided to hang with it, and lo and behold I now am the proud owner of this masterpiece to facial fashion. I am not what you would call a classic male beauty. No, I am more the kind of guy that women pass over. Yet, I’ve got a personality like a jab from an old champ, if only I ever got close enough to use it. Well, if only I ever wanted to use it.

So went my mind’s reboot. As I said, just the basics.

“Quarter of? How long was I out, doc?” I groaned, quickly recovering from my momentary amnesia. The yawns and stretches were taking over my body faster than an infectious disease. There he was, sitting slightly behind me in a nice comfortable leather chair, exactly where he was when I laid down on the doctor’s couch a whole two hours ago. The room was dark with the shades drawn shut except for the one window he opened to let in some fresh air to help ease my recovery. That damn beam of light gave my irises a hard time adjusting from the contrasts in the room. Framed degrees and certificates line the wooden paneled walls behind the large wooden desk with the official tag that read “H. Hammond, Psy.D.” His perfectly arranged mahogany bookshelf was just a few steps behind it, and in the same proper order it had been since the first day I arrived for my very first appointment. Staring at that damn bookcase for as many hours I had, I memorized the pattern of colors from the spines of all the books.

Seeing a shrink had been an embarrassing step forward for me.

“I needed the extra time to get inside your mind,” Doctor Hammond explained as he jolted up from his chair and walked over to one of the drawn shades and pulled the dangling cord hanging from it. The silvery light from a bright overcast day spilled into the room, casting all the polished wooden surfaces into blinding white glares which further berated my eyes and gave my head a good throbbing as well.

The doc looked like your average Dr. Freud impersonator, fitted with the stereotypical beard and glasses. “I’ve never met someone who seems to gradually resist hypnotism. It took quite a while to get you under this time.” He said this with admiration, as if I was some kind of aberration or case study.

“Far be it for me to make your job any easier,” I quipped and smiled in amusement at my own wit to make up for the fact that the doc didn’t have the capacity for understanding humor. I had often wondered how this man had ever met and married the woman from the many photos he had framed on his desk. He was as humorless as a wet rag.

The vertebrae of my spine popped as I shifted my weight and swung my legs around off of the couch and onto the floor below me. Sitting upright felt good after the near motionless lying around on my back. After a hypnotic “nap” I always felt stiff and in need of a good stretch.

“Are your dreams always the same?” the Doctor asked me getting right down to business. He was holding his fancy leather bound notebook and reading through some of his notes from our session. His question seemed to forebear some kind of impending mystery or doom. Some kind of change in the status quo which seemed only to mount the tension I was feeling today. Something was off in my little world. A feeling that I couldn’t shake, no matter what device or form of trickery I tried to distract myself with.

“They’re not really dreams, they’re more like nightmares. The same nightmares I dream about every night. Night after night,” I told him in a slightly annoyed and repetitive way. Surely he remembered this after all the time we had spent together. “You’ve known this for practically an entire year.”

“They never differ? Not a single element? Exactly the same, every time?” the Doc asked with an excitable vibrance that left me feeling like the ass-end of a bad joke. This was new, and my body tensed at his elevated mood. There was definitely something coming and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it was, so I locked in and stared at my focal point. It was the only way to concentrate hard enough to block all the emotions and everything out.

The Doc’s massive mahogany bookcase sat against the wall opposite of me. It had more books than I ever dared to count, all in a very specific order that never changed. I would know, I memorized its complex pattern. Dark green and blue, even some red leather covers were mixed into the arrangement. One time the Doc and I spent an entire session on why I was so transfixed by his bookcase. This was before I decided to cooperate and work with him. Back then I could only manage to explain myself in short, one word phrases, mostly by choice. “Because” was all I would say. A primitive answer for something I found so inconsequential. Why did he care what I looked at? It was hard to stare into someone’s eyes and talk about the kind of stuff that we inevitably talked about. Eyes had a way of making me feel like I was being judged, like his soul was peering into mine and assessing value. I hated the way everyone’s eyes could make me feel like such a screw up. It didn’t matter if they were brown, blue, gray, hazel, or, God forbid, green, it felt like all eyes saw me as a disappointment. So I stared at his bookcase. Yes, it was a crutch, but I could care less. Whatever got me through these torture sessions.

“No. Never,” I responded to him after taking a moment to pretend like I was thinking about it.

“Today, when you reached the bottom of the stairs that lead into the hallway, I asked you to stop. To let it go. You refused as you have every time for the last few months.” Then he took a deep breath. “But today I tried something different. I angrily told you to let it go. My plan was to see what kind of response I get to different emotional stimulus I feed to you. It was just a spur of the moment decision,” the Doctor explained and tailed off into some other thought. Obviously, that was all news to me. I never remembered anything about our hypnotic sessions.

“So something changed? How come I don’t remember if something was different?” I asked, confused and a little bit annoyed. I came here every week and talked to him about all the different dreams I had, among other things, but this one had always been the same since the very beginning of our sessions, and as far back as I was ever willing to remember. Should I not remember that things were different this time? It was happening in my own mind, after all.

“Something did change. When I demanded you let it go, you screamed leave her alone. The hypnosis prevents you from remembering anything you experienced.” He said that last part in the same repetitive annoying tone I used on him earlier. It annoyed me further not only because I knew that, but that wasn’t at all what I was trying to ask him.

“Leave her alone?” I questioned. I could tell that the Doc’s loose attitude was shifting back to his more analytical tone.

“Leave her alone. You screamed it at the top of your lungs,” the Doctor said with almost a smirk on his face, perhaps he saw a chink in my impenetrable armor for the very first time. Breakthroughs had been few and far between and I was starting to notice his frustration which began to creep into our last few appointments.

“What does that mean?” I asked him, feeling a chilling sensation run down my back as I imagined myself screaming something in the middle of the quiet office. I was sure to receive a few strange awkward glances from his assistant when I left. Being a regular probably hadn’t inspired much confidence in her about the kind of person I was. I seemed to have developed a lot of that from those in my life who knew about me.

“I believe it could mean lots of things. Perhaps when I demanded you stop, your mind gave yourself a new reason to stay and fight? Perhaps it is your mind’s way of trying to relieve yourself of your guilt? Perhaps it unlocked a new piece of the puzzle? Tony, I could create an entire case-study based on you. You could be my life’s work. But that is not why I’m here. As your doctor, your psychologist, I am bound to help fix you, if at all possible. Your mind is warped and scarred. For some reason you not only blame yourself for her death, but you also in some way believe you committed the crime. A crime you were acquitted of because there was no logical or scientific proof that you did indeed commit murder. As a human being, you deserve to live your life in the pursuit of happiness. Not to dwell in misery and manic depression, no friends, never leaving your apartment except to go to work and run errands. You need to be free of your demons.”

I would have liked to have thanked him for saying everything I hoped he wouldn’t say. Even all these years later the words still stung, let alone the memories. Sarcasm didn’t work well with him, so I saved the whole hot steaming load of it I was about to crap all over the floor with. The last time I tried to make a little fun out of a tense situation he accused me of using my humor as a defense mechanism, and that it was a sure sign of my being a manic depressive.

There was nothing more depressing than being told you are depressed.

Clinically.

The best thing about the hypnotism was the fact that I could not remember any of it. I had done well all these years putting up the mental barricades and forcing myself into a new way of thinking. I had even been able to talk about my issues as if I was the mediator of a third party negotiating information. Yet, for an instant those words tumbled out of his lips and I felt strong again, like maybe I wasn’t at fault. Her smile graced my mind and stayed for a moment, before the defenses kicked in and forced it away into the dark places my mind would not go. As she faded, so did the Doc’s words and I slipped back into my waking coma. A living coma which had been my best defense against the pain.

“Tony? Have you been listening at all to me?” the Doc asked having noticed the drifted look across my face. “You seem much more distracted than usual. Is everything going well?”

“Sorry Doc. Time’s up,” I said looking down at my watch. I still had five minutes left since we were doing a double, and he knew that as well. I had just let the pain back in and I needed to escape so I could suffer it alone. It was a game we played but neither of us admitted to. It was easiest to just keep playing. “I have to get home, I’ve got a hot date with a TV dinner,” I quickly followed. I sprung to my feet and grabbed my coat and messenger bag from the floor where I had propped them up before starting our session. I moved quickly, hoping to avoid any further discussion before I could make my escape. As I approached the door I turned and gave a wry smile back to Doctor Hammond. The look on his face gave me all the answers I needed. He was letting me go having become all too familiar to my defensive quirks, and just nodded back with approval. Our next session was going to be a very harsh one, of that I was damn sure.

* * *

I made my way down the hall, passed the receptionist and the waiting patients, then out the glass doors of the suite and into the hallway. I could feel her probing eyes on me the entire time. On a better day I may have said goodbye to be polite, but today I just needed to be out and into the cool air. Around the corner I strode, my eyes glued to the ground beneath my feet while I pulled out my headphones and began to bombard my unsuspecting eardrums with the music that blasted out of my iPod. There was nothing to see walking these hallways. It was as sterile as most hospital hallways, with all the whites and neutral colors and the mass produced framed artwork hung on the walls. I turned another corner and looked up from my haunch to peer through the tiny windows on the doors into other suites. Inside I could see seminars and classes being taught, and waiting rooms filled with people who have their heads shoved into old copies of Time magazine while their kids played with the sticky germ infested toys that were bought to keep them occupied during the lengthy waits.

I couldn’t help but feel that this was what my life had become. Walking down a long hallway while the rest of the world moves on in their own little compartmentalized world with me separated away from it all.

I felt the ding of the elevator doors before I heard it open, which saved me from a lot of unnecessary thinking. My eyes looked on ahead to the sliding metallic doors just in time to see a man step through them and off the elevator. With just a glance I saw that he was an extremely tall man with a pale complexion, shoulder length light blonde hair that was slicked back with a tightly cropped beard. He wore all black clothing, from a long black trenchcoat to his black button up shirt and plain black pants. He could have been a doctor, or at least someone who made more money than I did, of that latter thought I was absolutely sure.

Chatty people often find the one person in a crowd who was trying their best to avoid talking at all costs. I had found that staring at the ground while walking was the best way to avoid unwanted conversation. Instinctively, my eyes went toward the floor to avoid any exchange of pleasantries one was expected to share when two strangers eyes met. Unfortunately, this tactic backfired and I ended up colliding with him rather abruptly across the shoulder, but not hard enough to change his course. I slid into the elevator and maneuvered to the back between two elderly women as the large man turned with an angry surprised look on his face. I gave an embarrassed smile and shrug, acknowledging the accident only because the man seemed angry. The doors swung closed before anything else could happen. Everyone seemed to have an attitude these days, even over accidents.

“Let it go, bro,” I said to myself. Now that was something I could let go of.

The elevator went down without stopping once on any of the other three floors below and opened into the lobby. I stepped out after waiting patiently behind the two old women as they chatted away about things I was thankful my iPod was drowning out, and continued on my way across the marble flooring and through the glass turn-style door, timing it perfectly so that the woman coming in would not get stuck in between as the door rotated. The cool air of early winter hit me lovingly in the face and made my eyes water with the slight sudden irritation. I let the cold wash over me, and I allowed myself to forget.