An Oral History of Hell

specter vision radio you've felt it haven't you i felt that energy in the room shift a little bit that chill we were woken up by this howling that shadow and you would see this shadow just kind of creep out from around the corner of the dining room you're being watched six and a half foot tall and skinny came from behind me. Others have seen it, felt it, experienced it. And suddenly, there's these loud bang, bang, bang. And now they're ready to tell you everything. I saw an entity playing on a Ouija board and summoning a demon. Join us in darkness as we share first-hand encounters from beyond the veil. told by the very people who lived them. I felt a giant lick right across the right side of my face. Yeah, that was strange. This is Geist. All new episodes. Now channeling from Spectre Vision Radio. What is it about the supernatural that's captivated us for generations? Is it the mysterious allure of the unknown? The heart-pounding thrill of an unexplainable sighting? Or the creeping fear that a life-changing encounter could happen? to you. Sightings is the new series that puts you at the center of the world's strangest unexplained events. From Roswell to Amityville to Loch Ness and beyond, each episode combines a never-before-heard story of an infamous supernatural encounter with mind-bending investigations that will leave you questioning what's real and what's impossible. Enter the unexplained with Sightings, Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Watch out for the wind streams, Smith had told me before we headed in, and that was all it took to get me thinking again about killing myself. Wind streams are very common here. They sloop down between the rocks, invisible to the naked eye, looking like gasoline haze, making the objects beneath seem to shimmer. A man bigger than I can be blown sideways by a strong one. The surface of a wind stream feels almost warm to the touch, unlike anything else here. We'd been in the far mountains for three days. As expected, there was a large amount of bodies. Mercy killings, suicides, people who had drowned themselves in the shallow streams, jumped off rocks to break their necks. After the first ten hours of walking, we had come across an actual trail, which was where most of the bodies were centered. So people had tried then, at least, to enter the mountains At first, there had been only low foothills rising up from the plain The ground got somewhat mossy, and the plants became more plentiful There were more rocks, taller ones In life, I was in Scotland once, this reminded me of it A thin fog had been left over from the most recent grip, and through it I could see modest rises, shadowy peaks maybe fifty feet, a hundred feet high. The wind was getting stronger there. I had wrapped my arms around me as I walked. Shortly after I reached the bordering hills, I came across a tall formation of violently crooked stones surrounding a clearing In the clearing sat human beings, ten or fifteen of them, huddled on the ground They were eating ash and swallowing it down with the awful-tasting water from the nearest stream Some of these people looked up to acknowledge my presence, but no one spoke There was one man sitting on a long, flat stone who at least appeared fully sane He was not eating, only thinking He had no shirt on, and he was deathly pale, but built like a construction worker As I got closer to him, I noticed something very strange. His face had once been through a great trauma, apparently cut or even split down the center from forehead to neck. There was a thin, wandering scar there. This was Smith. He offered a leathery hand to me. I shook it. He'd asked me if I was hungry I'd asked him how long this group had been in the mountains He'd told me he wasn't with them That these vagabonds had been drifting along the outskirts Afraid to head into the higher elevations They had heard there were no grips further in Which of course meant nothing to eat Smith seemed to think it might be true I wanted him to tell me what he could about the mountains, though he admitted he hadn't seen enough to make a full report. I made the mistake of telling him I wanted to explore them, to see what there was to see. But I was lucky. He was not offended, just inquisitive. He was the first to tell me about the speaking stones, a phenomenon I had not encountered in my time here. Exactly how far in do you intend to go, friend? He asked me His voice sounded like oil poured across a bass drum It was another difficult question But after the suffocating hours I'd spent After the German girl, Anya, left me I found myself too tired to care about guarding myself There was something in the way Smith looked at me He seemed much older than forty in those eyes I sensed that he would know if I was lying So I said to him, all the way Neither one of us had ever known anyone who had done it, or even tried I asked Smith if he intended to move with this band of people When I swept my hand across them, they eyed me suspiciously It turned out that Smith was headed in as well. We sat there and we knew already that we would go together. He was physically strong, intelligent, and seemed knowledgeable. Later, I would ask him how long he had been on the plane, how long altogether. It wasn't important then. We ate some of the ash beside our feet and talked of many things. I told him, for instance, that I'd gathered the mountains could not be more than fifteen or twenty miles across, judging from a strict visual guess. You've done no such thing, he said, smiling. He had such a cool exterior anticipating me that I gave up. I told him simply that I wanted someone to come with me and that he would do. Again, he was amused that I was to be part of his expedition, and not the other way around. Not that he minded, he had no particular direction. Maybe, he ventured, we could trade baseball cards. Maybe we could even save each other from the lie. I wanted to move as fast as possible. He did too. After all, we didn't have much of a span here. There wouldn't be another grip for at least ten hours or so, so I suggested that we start right away. Smith couldn't embark on such an improvisatory track, though. He had given his word to a man in the camp, promised him a favor. The man, once a Russian submarine mechanic who had only one arm, had asked Smith to kill him if he requested it. And he'd said he might very well ask before they all moved on. Besides, it was Smith's opinion that you couldn't predict the grips in the mountains like you could on the plain. Everything was different here. Things had different patterns. When we got back to the clearing, everyone was gone. every single person gone without a sound as if so unsettled by us they had coordinated their escape so as not to attract attention thus we began our journey but not before I asked Smith blankly if he truly believed the fog of nervous rumors about the far mountains he had looked pointedly into my eyes If these are the far mountains, he said Watch out for the wind streams Yeah, I would keep that close in my mind Smith walked doggedly forward, winding between the sickly crags and outcroppings Beating down the weeds Even now I felt unnerved by the fact that darkness brought us no natural stopping point. You yearn to use the terms day and night here, but you can't. You yearn to say yesterday and tomorrow, but you can't. For all its unblinking soullessness, though, it's not the terrain that scares the new ones the most. Not the terrain that scared me at first. It's a constant for the most part The temperature is always cold, about the same The sky always a septic white, except for when the grips come You accept quite quickly that all directions are the same All points leading to some place none of us wants to go On some unspoken queue we rested, Smith and I Huddled against the rocks It seems, he said, that we're not going to be encountering any others It was true, I supposed, yet the thought brought me no particular apprehension Just he and I, then, for as long as it took Smith told me a story sitting there He said that a couple of days ago What had felt like a couple of days ago He had been walking behind two people, slowly gaining on them. In his vision, they had grown from dots to forms to humans. After a while, he noticed that there were actually three of them. The figure walking between them was no more than three feet tall. A child? I asked, disbelieving. No, Smith said It couldn't have been For there are no children here Impossible The closest I had come to knowing a child Was the girl, Anya Whom I had guided through her first grip Just before I came to the far mountains She had been nineteen years old Just nineteen She was born in a small town Just outside Bonn and her English was poor, but she had asked me question after question. One by one, I'd tried to answer them. I had to hurry. Bare minutes after I met her, the swirling eye of a distant grip could be spotted on the horizon, heading directly toward us. Now she was gone, like so many others. She'd informed me out of the blue, as we stood there afterward, beating the ash that had caked on our bodies, that she wanted to go off on her own. She had to mimic the concept with her hands, for the word alone was beyond her limited vocabulary. Perhaps my pale face, my despondency, had already alienated her. So I let her go, after telling her to be extremely careful, that this place was very strange, stranger than she could ever have understood. And she left me. If she had stayed, we might have become real lovers, she and I. No one can say any different. Anya. I saw a man do something odd once, Smith said to me now. He passed by me on his way toward a drift of ash that had settled a half mile away. He was very skinny, had a filthy beard. He sat down for a rest and pried one of the greasy roots from the ground, then rolled it up into a kind of cigarette. With two stones, he got a small fire going and he lit the thing. It was almost amusing. When he was done, he crab-walked over to me and offered me a puff. How did it taste? I asked. There was no taste, none whatsoever. I guess we all get along from moment to moment in our own way. I wasn't comfortable with him nearby, Smith added softly. Not fifty feet off on our right, there was an old woman lying face up, with a stone protruding from her chest. Her eyes were still open, so I moved on. What are you doing in the mountains, Smith? I asked him, unable to gaze for long at his awful split face. I thought you understood that by now, he said evenly. I want the perimeter. And I laughed. I actually laughed at Smith, something which I know now I would never do. It was such a childish statement, an insane belief. This place has no history. he said in a voice as lonely as I had ever heard. It has no history because no one lasts more than a couple of months, yet the concept of the perimeter survives. Everyone knows what we mean when we say it. It's dumb human faith, I replied, like God. I remember God, too, Smith said. The conviction in his voice was so great that for a short time afterwards I thought he might have been a priest. I think maybe you have the lie, I said to him. If you truly believed that, he said, you would have no choice but to go your own way. That wasn't necessarily true, I thought, but it would be better to die together. In one direction, I rationalized there was nothing. In the other, there was someone to talk to, and a kind of mystery, at least. Besides, I couldn't even be sure I'd be able to find my way back along the nebulous trail. I'd had no intention of keeping track of our progress. That's something that isn't done here. The locals do not look kindly on intimations of hope. So it was together that we would head ever deeper into the far mountains. Good. There were a lot of half-truths sputtered around our land, a lot of nonsense. But one was most certainly a fact. It gets awfully lonely in hell. I'm here, I told Smith because of a man named John Scarstone it's a common sickness here, I know to place blame, to deny, to swear vengeance but I'll say the words anyway they're a relief to me in the same way it's a relief to be deceived that our shadows on the ground here must be the creation of a hidden sun. It's the harmless, transient lies that block the worst ones out entirely. John and I roomed together in college nine years ago in a tiny cabin by a pond. He was a thin, pale student of astronomy when I met him, very quiet, and he spent a year putting up with my moods and complaints about life with fairly good humor. I didn't realize for a long time the extent of the pain he already suffered. At the end of my final autumn semester, everything crashed in at once. I was failing an anatomy class that I needed to pass to get into medical school. It was that simple, and as the situation grew worse and my family's expectations of me grew more crushing, I became more desperate. I more or less severed the rudimentary friendship John and I shared when I asked him to put me in contact with a student he knew who had a reputation for solving academic problems using the most underground of methods. I wish I could say it was the first time I had considered or followed an option like that. I remember riding back to the cabin after class a few days before finals and finding John alone in his room, staring out the window at Gunner's Pond at nothing. That's my first truly vivid memory of John, the way he looked so dead even then, with his father slouching toward his own terrible end in a hospital five miles away. It was on that day that John gave me the manila envelope containing the stolen answers to my upcoming anatomy exam and told me, in a haunted tone very unlike him, that he thought it would be best if we both found different roommates for the spring semester. I was halfway through the exam and sick with self-hatred when they came for me. The university sent an administrator down into the classroom. When I looked up and saw the man conferring with Dr. Lapp and then nodding in my direction, my entire body went numb. Following the man out into the hallway, it occurred to me right then that I had managed to destroy my life with one ill-conceived gamble. And I wondered if some part of my mind hadn't already glimpsed the awful future and was yearning to draw it forward in great leaps and plunges in order to bring it mercifully to a quicker end. But the man was not there for me. They were looking for John, and of course I knew the news would be terrible. John's sister, Joanne, had been killed in a car wreck as she was driving down to Richmond to visit their father. She'd gotten a flat tire on the interstate, and as she changed it, a truck came in too tight on the exit ramp and clipped her. She had been dragged a hundred feet I knew all the details because John told me of them Sitting on a wooden bench outside the intensive care unit where I found him alone He was slurring his speech toward the end Speaking from inside a world of pain so thick It had taken him a few seconds to even recognize me The accident had happened only four hours before He broke off in the middle of relating this travesty to me And the strangest, most horrifying thing happened The bizarre edges of a grin crept onto John's face And he said to me That's the last of the Scarsones, Nicky And then he began to scream To scream right there in the hallway a hideous rattling shriek that made me involuntarily reach a handout to stifle his mouth. I remember there was a brief struggle, and then John became very, very quiet indeed. He remained that way in our conversation with his father's doctor, who told John that after the old man's last attack, the word normal held a very different meaning. it was emphysema. He was listed in stable but critical condition, only a matter of time before he died. I stood there with John, his face like a pit of snakes, twisted and deformed, as he asked the doctor how long his father had. He needed to know, you see, if he should tell the man about what had just happened to his only daughter. There might have been a few months left. There was just no way for anyone to be sure. We spent an hour with his father, staring down at him as he lay comatose in a hospital he himself had helped to build. I would have given anything not to enter that room, but I forced myself to do it. I didn't dare leave John alone. No one else had come to the hospital I had called Samantha, John's girlfriend, but she was in Oregon John walked me out to the parking lot when I sensed I absolutely had to go We stood there for a while, the nighttime cold biting our bare hands under the depressing arc lights in the lot and at some point John looked right through me and said that if his father ever got out of there and they had him taken home he might suffocate him. That, he said, would solve the problem. At that point I was speaking to a skeleton a half-man reduced by tragedy to some walking computer whose function had become unclear even to itself. He was tucked deep within a mental lockbox, peering out And when I drove away from him, after getting him to make me a useless promise that he would rest and find someone more qualified than me to help him I thought that I would never see John Scarsone again That the darkness that had followed him to college had managed to scratch me, but draw no blood Even then I knew nothing of death But my education had begun in that hallway When I clamped my hand over John's mouth to keep him from screaming Or maybe it had touched me even earlier In that final year of classes When a biology professor of mine Chose to end a session of review slides By showing us something he thought most of us needed to see if we truly had ambitions about medical school. He had clicked to a slide of a black-and-white photograph of a young female nurse in Manchester, England. She was smiling, resting on the arm of a uniformed soldier. Fifteen minutes after that photo had been taken, the Germans ran an air raid. The professor clicked to the next slide. The woman had been torn apart, literally torn apart. The second photo showed her limbs strewn in the mud. Dr. Mueller had said to us, there is no chemical difference between the woman alive and the woman dead. If you can look at this atrocity, and yet somehow still see that young girl as she had once been so beautiful, then you can be a happy doctor. They might not teach you that anywhere else. I sat there in the lecture hall, hypnotized. I would never forget that lesson. Not ever. Smith silenced me there with a polite flattening of his outstretched palm. His head was tilted in an odd way, as if listening for something in the distance. I heard nothing but the way the ceaseless wind rearranged the dust that had settled on the rocks It's nothing, he said at great length I didn mean to interrupt you There a great deal more isn there Yes I said of course Do you really want to hear it Smith offered a sickly, crooked smile. I love a good adventure tale. Go on. I think of Smith now, and all the times he made me yearn to seize him by the throat and demand to know his own story. What were you, Smith? Were you a street pastor, a sheet metal worker, a lawyer who had done time in prison? Did you work with children? Or did the messily sewn fissure dividing your eyes result from the maniacal flailings of some junkie once tried to subdue while walking your beat? Go on, he would say, again and again and again. so I would say to him yes, there is more just two days after I saw John at the hospital I was walking across the quad during the busy noon rush on my way to apply for graduation it was a beautiful day people were everywhere, talking, excited out of my peripheral vision I was vaguely aware of someone striding quickly up to a girl who was maybe five or six steps behind me. An arm rose. There was a sound like a firecracker going off. I spun around, Smith, and I saw the girl's head rock back, and she went down. There was a sudden chorus of screaming. I threw myself on the ground. A stampede ensued. The gunman was tackled by three students, and he went down passively. All he had said to the girl was, you ruined my life. I heard him say that. Someone was weeping. I stayed on the ground for a long, long time. My eyes squeezed shut, terrified to get up, terrified to look. When I did, the girl was there, staring directly at me, her skin the color of our sky. They had to physically lift me from the grass. Someone shouted, Oh my God, he's been hit! But he was wrong. It wasn't my own blood. Three years passed. Three long years. One night, just before Christmas, I found myself parked outside a big house in the country, just 80 miles or so from where I had gone to college. I had been invited to a party and had spent the better part of a week debating with myself about whether I should go. It would be the first time I'd seen many of my old friends in what seemed like forever. Finally, I forced myself to go up and ring the bell. I was greeted by the sounds of a festive gathering and the face of my friend Walter. who was as shocked to see me as some of the others there were. For me, it was a nightmare. They were all so happy to have old Nicholas back, but I could only think of the mistake I'd already made in resurfacing. I'd spent most of the time since school in New York doing odd writing jobs at a newspaper partly owned by an alcoholic uncle of mine who had managed to both show me the ropes of the business and introduce me to the deranged allure of liquor, which, like himself, I had found to be a more forgiving companion than most people I knew. I was going to start working for a Richmond paper in the spring. I thought I might actually get through that night, but then I ran into an old girlfriend of mine in the kitchen who told me that John was there. She had no way of knowing that I hadn't written or spoken to John, not once, since I'd driven away from St. Jude's Hospital. By the time he'd returned to the cabin by the pond, I had cleared out for good. I asked her how he seemed, and she confided to me that she was already worried. Even though our host had never been able to get in touch with him to issue an invitation, John had shown up anyway and started drinking very quietly, keeping to himself, moving from one room to the next, not really talking to anyone. So, silly me, I went looking for him. There was a large den upstairs, and I weaved my way up to it, moving past some lazily stoned guests sitting on the stairs. There were nine or ten people in the den, sitting around talking. I hung around the entrance for a minute, looking in, trying to keep out of sight for now. I saw John in there. He was sitting deep in a chair with a scotch and soda resting on the arm beside him. The thick, bookish glasses had finally been replaced by contact lenses, and his hair was longer, but otherwise he looked the same as he did in college. He seemed to be listening intently to something. The conversation in the room had become focused on one particular couple, a man and woman I had never seen before. They were having a friendly debate about the ethics of organ transplants. Everyone Walter knew was studying medicine. The boyfriend had moved the topic on to euthanasia. It went on like that for a while, mostly just the two of them speaking with occasional, mostly impartial input from someone else. Then, from the corner of the room John Scarsone, my old roommate My friend Interrupted the woman as she spoke about the cruelty of an establishment that let so many people die alone John's voice was much softer than I remembered My father was in the hospice, he said to them And the room got even more quiet He had it, yes He suffered from emphysema A long, drawn-out case In the end, I was in charge of taking care of him They discharged him from the hospital And hospice was the only way he could realistically be taken care of There wasn't a whole lot of money floating around So I went off to work every day And he was cared for by a succession of nurses They told me that the time for hope was over And the time for acceptance had begun My father's death was slow, very slow And deeply strange, too Something was happening to his mind at the end He would answer questions in ways I couldn't make sense of And address people who weren't there When he could talk, he told me stories I knew he'd never experienced firsthand It became frightening Obviously, he was not in his right mind anymore So one day, an old war friend of his came to visit And when he left, he looked heartbreakingly sad He told me that my father believed himself to be someone else entirely Some part of his brain was so desperate to escape that wrecked body That he had absorbed the personality of one of the men in his platoon in Korea I've talked to psychiatrists, they said it couldn't be He never emerged from that state Those outbursts became very infrequent and at some point I just couldn't stand it anymore. I began to resurrect thoughts I'd had about killing him. Every day for weeks I thought about it. I knew it could be done, but I was scared. They left him with the same nurse every day now, a girl. She was only 19 and frightened of him and the ugly way he was dying. I was slowly working up the willpower to do it to kill him quietly to put him out of his unthinkable misery finally one night after work I went to a bar to get a lot of whiskey in me before I went home because this was going to be the night this was going to be the night I killed my father who had raised me on his own from the time I was nine years old The nurse wouldn't be there because I took care of him after 8 o'clock I didn't have the guts though It got to be 9, 10 And that meant he was going to be there alone I had to go home I drove to the house and went upstairs And I realized I didn't have what it took to kill him It was nothing as prosaic as a fear of God Or a dim glimmer of hope that he might pass away soon on his own I was chicken But when I checked on him He was dead It was over And I had been miraculously spared and then I saw that one of my father's pillows was missing he'd always had two, always I looked around for it and it just wasn't there, anywhere that was the pillow she'd used to smother him, I guess the nurse, the young girl this 19-year-old virginal girl had the strength to do what I never could. There was something in her so immense and so clear, I'll never understand it. I never saw her again. She didn't come back. There was no reason to. After the funeral, when my mind was at its weakest point, I found myself searching the entire house for that missing pillow. but it never turned up and here John raised his scotch and said simply that's my hospice story I left the doorway then in case there should be any more I got into my car and went home my hands shaking lightly on the wheel I went to bed early and very drunk but around one o'clock I realized I wouldn't be able to sleep that night I got up and went through the phone book I took a chance on a number I remembered only dimly It rang and rang and I was just about to hang up when John answered For a moment there was no trace of recognition in his voice, none at all But then it all seemed to come back to him He said he had seen me at the party We made some awkward small talk, and for some reason I found myself crying and trying to hide it in my voice. I think John's wavering, disembodied voice on the other end of the phone made me realize far too suddenly how much of a wreck the last three years of my life had been. When he asked me if I was a doctor now, I almost broke down. I had to tell them that they'd eventually found out about my cheating and had thrown me out of school. That my life had gone off track in the most shameful way I could imagine. A few more useless sentences passed between us. And then I asked him how Samantha was. A foolish question, as I had no reason to assume he and our class treasurer were still together. His answer was so chilling, so cold, that at first I thought I had not heard him correctly. She's dead, he told me. I couldn't respond at all for a few seconds. I don't remember exactly what I said. He only repeated the words. She's dead. She had died of a heart attack. a congenital deformity. I managed to ask him when it had happened. Three days ago, John said. And then he said goodbye and hung up the phone. He did not pick up when I phoned back twice, three times in rapid succession, uselessly. I got only a busy signal for my efforts. I drove as fast as I could to the house where John grew up, his father's house. All at once I was as sober as I have ever been. The miles whisked by me, but the journey seemed to go on endlessly. When I got there, I recognized John's old sob in the driveway, the same one he'd had in college. I got out of the car and ran up the stone walkway. There were no lights on inside the house, no sign of welcome. It was a little past two in the morning. I peered in the front window. There was just total darkness. The front door was open. I let myself in, and for some reason it did not even occur to me to call out John's name. I just walked forward, trying to keep my mind an absolute blank. I had never been as frightened in my life What did I know? What did I know then? I went through the foyer Down a shadowy hallway Past the dining room And there was John Lying on the kitchen floor His body doubled over as if folded neatly in half A serrated steak knife lay beside him blood from his opened veins had puddled around his wrist I knelt down beside him breathing hard John was just barely conscious he had just slashed the one wrist a deep jagged wound that was still bleeding as if he had timed my arrival to find him hovering on the verge of death I dragged him into a sitting position his head lolled on his shoulders and I found myself shouting cursing, cursing him for drawing me here and bequeathing me with this horror I grabbed a towel lying on the sink, yanking it toward me, loosing a stack of dishes that crashed on the floor, shattering I had to shove him into the front seat of the car I kept yelling at him, even then I swore I would kill him myself if he pulled through this he was mouthing one word over and over. It sounded like... Breathe. It was the sad command he had spoken to his father years before as the old man lay in his hospital bed with machines keeping him alive and me standing in the corner of the room. The worst moment was still to come. When I pulled up to the hospital, I remembered as a child to find the building boarded up and dark. In my delirium, I pounded my fist on the horn and began to scream for someone to help me. I was convinced I was too late. There was so much blood streaking the seats, the dashboard, even the windshield. It didn't seem possible John could still be alive. When they came for me, I was apparently standing on the sidewalk, weeping and hollering for someone to let me into that abandoned building. It must have been five minutes, even ten before help came. It must have been that long, because that is how I remember it. The hospital had not been closed, just moved two blocks away. I regained myself eventually, found enough composure to talk to the surgeon who dealt with John. The wound had not been as deep as it had first seemed And John was going to be all right They had to keep him, though, for psychiatric observation No more than an hour passed between the time I spoke to her And the time I got up the nerve to go into his room and see him But he wasn't there He was not there His clothes remained The clothes his blood had ruined Security looked everywhere for him We combed the hospital But John Scarstone was gone His room was on the second floor Leaving a ten to twelve foot drop to the ground below A drop he had apparently been desperate and deluded enough to risk There were reports, conversations, questions I arrived back at my house sometime past dawn Going directly to sleep When I woke up, I saw that my answering machine had registered a call during the night One that had come through a little before 5am But no message had been left The cassette tape had recorded only the sound of a single click as if the caller had hung up without speaking. Seven months later, I was in the newsroom reading the paper on my lunch break when I came across John's name. His body had been found in a public park two states over. It was listed a suicide, a gunshot wound to the temple. He was 27 years old when they reported him dead. I told myself it was over And founded hopes that every memory I'd had of that poor lost soul Would dissolve with enough time I felt no guilt I had done all I could do That's what I managed to tell myself And my withering life went on There are times when I think I'd like to compile an oral history of this place. Everyone I've met here has had something to tell me, or some demented theory about the folkways, the trends, the portents they see. I've found that you could mix grip ash with the water from the streams and manufacture a kind of paste that could mark on rock. and even when washed away, this bastardized ink left a faint but legible print for several hours. In the end, though, it was no more indelible than the name I had written in the dust when I first got here. Nicholas, etched with a long stray stick I carried for a time out of paranoid instinct. There must be a way to make things permanent, even if it means scraping stone against stone and burying the tablets in the ground for the nomads who will come after me. At the very least, someone could create a kind of calendar or clock. But Smith said no one would care, and he might have been right. Under our feet as we walked, there may have been a thousand such tablets and inventions I wouldn't create mine in anyone else's interest, though We had been in the mountains for about five days Moving slowly, deliberately, and then fearfully Because, true to rumor, there hadn't been a grip for a long time We drank from the foul-smelling streams and conserved our energy however we could. Two days later, Elsa disappeared. We'd found her sleeping in the weeds beside some speaking stones. I've leaned close to her peaceful, pretty face. And yes, the voices within the stones did sound like the carbonation of soda to an intruding ear. Elsa had told us she wanted nothing more than to lay there and let the stones soothe her. We, however, had convinced her to walk. She'd been a secretary in an architectural firm, barely out of college. She had appeared here in her work clothes A blouse and skirt that were now filthy to the point of tatters Like my own jeans and a brown sweater Like the white t-shirt Smith must have scavenged off a corpse sometime when I wasn't paying attention We all went to sleep after five or six hours of hiking cautiously around the highest of all the peaks we'd seen so far one which jutted out over us like a gargoyle's chin. There were occasional rock slides, and we weren't taking any chances. And when Smith and I awoke, she was gone. That simple. We split up for a bit, venturing no further than the dwindling range of our voices. She was nowhere to be found. Disappeared, Smith judged flatly. I didn't believe it. You know it happens, Smith said. You know it does. Why should it? Look what you're asking, he replied, and where you're asking it. He had a point. I couldn't count on two hands the number of people who had just plain vanished. But when the natural structure of human time is taken away, existence becomes a series of cinematic dissolves that cannot be tracked, and it seemed to me that many such disappearances took place during my own lapses of memory and consciousness. Fifteen minutes here and there slip by you, meaningless and unmissed. What was there one moment, if displaced, was rarely worth pursuing. I was too weak and hungry to go into the matter with Smith We looked down toward the shifting fog that had spread out below us In a direction I thought of privately as west Nothing could be seen down there We were closing in on something We both felt it Whatever it was didn't necessarily want to be seen I've seen some terrible things Smith told me as I lay with my eyes closed against a rock another rest, unscheduled but unavoidable in my first few hours here I saw a man completely petrified by the grip he had only one leg and his mouth was shaped in a howl that had filled in with ash The nationalities tend to congregate here, Nicholas Have you noticed? It's only natural There was a wandering group of Spaniards once All of them old Not one among them younger than 80 They were Christians Hard Christians And they wanted to organize a mass repentance And until then they would whip themselves like the penitents and the sin-eaters of the Middle Ages, saving all the rest of us. The good are here, just like the bad, you know. That's one of the first things I learned. That and our people's horror at the slightest conviction of faith. And the lie. You asked me about the one they call Pickman, he said, lulling me with a voice whose power as a sedative was stronger than even my mother's used to be. There's not much doubt about whether he's real. Some say he's been here fifty years, never aging. Some say he's here to watch over us, and some say he created this place and can't be killed. What I've heard most often, Nicholas, is that he's mapped this place out entirely. knows all its borders, where the stones are born. Maybe the perimeter goes through Pickman, man without a first or last name, but a hybrid of both. But there's no use fearing him. What can he do to us that hasn't already been done? What about your scar? I whispered to Smith, either in dream or in waking. will you keep lying to me? It's something I suffered here, he said. I know you think that couldn't be true but the truth isn't that important anyway now. We won't survive much longer without any ash. There was another longer dissolve and then he and I stumbled out of the far mountains and onto a plane unlike one we'd ever seen. For hours, as we lurched forward on our last legs it had been getting I swear increasingly warmer Here there was grass real brown grass like the kind that had grown near the train tracks behind my childhood home It struggled up to the ground in patches three feet wide The peaks fell away behind us. My heart beat excitedly against my wasted chest. We'd made it. There was such a thing as progress then. This was a different place. It had to be. Even Smith seemed stunned. About a mile later, we saw all the bodies. There must have been two thousand of them, spread out in no discernible pattern. Their heads were beaten in, their torsos were bruised, crushed, and they'd bled profusely. Small, bloodied rocks lay everywhere, streaked with brain matter. Tree branches from an unseen forest had been strung together with weeds to form crude bayonets. Men and women had been struck down together, no courtesies afforded in battle. It took Smith and I a while to determine from the angles of attack that there had been not two, but probably three sides to the war, each rushing in the direction of the other. It was an observation possible only by retreating for a wide view of the area At the flashpoint of the battle, the dead had fallen over each other with a density far greater than anywhere else It had been the scene of a massive, meaningless civil war Some lay virtually in each other's arms We wandered among them as if in a maze The smell was indescribable. This was it then. This is what we had come for. We wouldn't rest anywhere near that carnage, that atrocity. We went a little further, out of sight behind a thick, leaning tree, and collapsed. And if I had ever thought that Smith's hard heart might be immune to such afflictions, I knew then and there that I was wrong. The beginning of the end, I told Smith, came only a few days after my 29th birthday. In the beginning of November, I might have had a chance to defeat the depression that had been stalking me for some time. It had begun, I think, as a potentially curable illness, but the downward slope from that point towards something far deeper and more sinister felt unchallengeable. I was called into my editor's office one afternoon, and there was a scene. In my brief career at the newspaper, I had never felt comfortable in my work, or even competent. And eventually I simply slipped. I had been labeled by them. They'd called me a racist, and I wouldn't apologize under any circumstances. I was okay for about ten minutes, and then I lost control. My last official act at the paper was to seize the chair beside me and slam it against the base of my editor's desk He had never been so frightened of anyone in his life I could see it in his piggish eyes They called security on me, but I was already gone The next thing I remember was the funeral of my wife's only aunt They buried her in a large, tasteful cemetery in the suburbs, one I had driven past many times and always found sterile to the point of ugliness. The church service itself was quiet and respectful. The woman had been well-loved, and there were many tears. Halfway through some priest's lengthy sermon about altruism, I felt a panic attack coming on. My heart seized up in my chest and I got to my feet a bit too abruptly and left as many eyes followed me. My wife came out and found me on the big porch behind the rectory. I was drinking wine from a paper cup. She asked me what was wrong. I told her I refused to go back inside the church, that the entire ordeal of the funeral was making me sick. She was understandably confused, but her puzzlement only enraged me further. I swept my arm across the expanse of the graveyard and called it repulsive, an abomination. To me, this funeral, and all others throughout time, had become surreal testaments to nothing but the awful power of death. and I accused Kate of honoring it by sitting inside with her head bowed, listening to all the pathetic eulogies. None of this was for her aunt, I shouted. It was all for death, all of us dressed in black. It was all for the cancer that had killed the woman. It was ghoulish, and I alone refused to play at it, to become another mourner showing my misguided respect for the unnatural end of a human life. On that day, Kate became the first one to urge me to find psychiatric help, and her suggestion had more anger in it than love. I refused to defend myself, and instead only stared at all the tombstones, all the emblematic rows. I found that I couldn't take my eyes off them. I didn't hear Kate slip away, and when I finally snapped out of my strange reverie, a full hour had passed, and I walked four miles back to my house, never going to her aunt's gravesite for fear of what it would do to me. Kate had stood there unattended. At the end of the week, I received a letter in the mail. It was postmarked from the next town to the east, and it had no return address. Inside the envelope was a piece of motel stationery. I sat in my empty house, reading the letter again and again, staring at the signature beneath it. And then I went to find some scotch. The letter was from a man who wrote that I should not panic or dismiss the letter's single paragraph, or tell anyone I'd received it. He had just arrived in Virginia. He wanted to get together, and suggested a meeting at ten o'clock the next night at a quiet local bar close to my home. He wrote that it was finally time he came back and told someone about his life. It was from John Scarson. The second document I examined that night was the article from the Richmond Post-Herald, which had reported his passing years before. I had saved it against my natural impulses, stored it away inside the front cover of a novel I had been reading all those years before. The carefully detached column was already curling with age. I went to Stuky's on the 20th of November, and John showed up too, as promised. When he walked through the door, I had a horrible premonition that he had come to kill me, had harbored some twisted grudge against me for saving his life years before. But he smiled when he saw me. He had lost about 25 pounds, which he most certainly could not afford to. His hair was shorn brutally close around his head, and he carried a large duffel bag, which I came to learn contained virtually all of his earthly possessions. We didn't stay in the bar long. I felt the need to get out into the air, so I drove us up and down the interstate with the top down, the cold night wind whipping at our heads. The idea to live as a dead man had come to him almost immediately after his botched suicide attempt. He said it was the only thing left. He spoke of having made an enemy of death, of provoking it, and that had been his true mistake. In his logic, such a course could only lead to tragedy. So he said he had realized that it was better to embrace death, to let it know he was not afraid anymore, that he wanted to get as close as he possibly could. In his speech, he ascribed human characteristics to death, pity, anger, vengeance. I was mostly silent as we rode. We drank beer from a six-pack. John had never felt anything as liberating as the freedom afforded to the dead. Every step he took, with a fraudulent certificate testifying to his passing somewhere in official government files, he understood more. There were times when he'd actually felt invisible. like a spirit walking among the living, but existing on an entirely separate plane. But he said the years-long intoxication had worn off. He'd lost the connection somewhere along the line. One could not live in that false state forever. As we drove, someone cut us off beside an exit ramp, ripping past us at 80 miles per hour. John took careful note of it. He suggested that the population was filled with such risk-takers, that they knew full well the possible consequences of their actions, and that some hidden part of their subconscious actually yearned for a confrontation with the unthinkable. Death wish was the wrong term. John told me he hadn't found a better one yet. I thought it might be possible that all John wanted was to come back and start his life over again But it wasn't so He said he'd come back to get a hold on what he'd lost He needed a place to think things over And in his words, to break bread with death again He wanted to get far closer than he ever had before I didn't even remotely understand what was going through his mind But he had anticipated this and was not concerned He just needed my help He didn't know if he could manage this next step on his own I didn't ask any questions as to what that step might entail After about a hundred miles, I stopped hearing him altogether I dropped him off in front of his motel and I went back to the house where I spent the next couple of days in a shapeless stupor Kate was not coming back not until the drinking stopped I passed the time watching a great deal of TV trying not to think of John and what he might be doing my headaches were getting a little bit worse not terribly so, but noticeably And winter had come Not calendar winter But a desolate gray curtain that had arrived toward the end of November It snowed on Thanksgiving, which I slept through I rarely woke up before one or two o'clock One day I was in the supermarket Buying a lot of soup and pretzels and wine I lifted a steak from the meat freezer and turned to set it in the cart, and I saw that the cart was full of stakes, just like the one in my hand. I had buried everything else under a mountain of them. People were beginning to stare. I had no recollection of how those stakes had gotten in there. The past few minutes had merely disappeared. I left the cart where it was, and I walked out of the store. I moved slowly to my car and got inside. I found that I didn't have the energy to start the car or even fish my keys out of my pocket. And so I sat in the lot, time passing me by, watching the storefront, watching the people come and go. When it got to be about dusk, an inner voice told me I should try to leave before I started to look suspicious. I put blankets over myself and sat at the kitchen table before my soup, which I couldn't touch. What passed for life went on that way for a while. I was already counting down, somehow aware that the end was coming. I had even stopped thinking about the wreckage of my past. Soon after that, there was only static and fog In his cruddy motel room by the highway, John told me more of his story As he spoke, he unpacked and prepared the marijuana we would both smoke The whiskey we would drink He was always in motion, as if impatiently waiting for a mysterious guest to arrive. He had acquired an unsettling nervous energy in his speech and mannerisms. He seemed very uncomfortable whenever he was forced to sit for more than a moment. The stories he told me blended into one another. He rambled, paused for great lengths, mixed his tenses as if he weren't sure when anything he'd been through had truly occurred. He'd been in Africa for a few months in the later days, he said. There he had experimented with an obscure substance known as concombre zombie, The Haitian zombie poison, which had long been used to induce a deep narcoleptic state in kidnapped victims, which could last for days. It had cost him a lot of money, and a cab driver had severely beaten him when he could not pay for it on time. A beating which had so damaged a nerve in his left hand that two of his fingers were useless. The poison had worked to a point, but John claimed he'd had too many dreams while he was under the earth He was after total deprivation When they took him out, he understood that he had failed completely Zombie Savane, the villagers had called him, a man returned from the dead But they had no idea how big that gulf wheelie was John had been doing a lot of research in town the room was scattered with library books the main body of his research centered on trying to determine the slowest possible method of death he had considered AIDS since it was fairly easy to contract but he worried that there would be dementia and he wanted to slip into death with total knowledge even a sort of friendship, he said. He balked at the intense physical pain associated with cancer as well. Any illness which required the ingestion of painkillers would distort his perceptions. John was ready to start his final project any time. The research required for it, however, was exhaustive. He wanted a full year before he died for good. He figured that would give him plenty of time to draw the Reaper closer than anyone ever had. In John's mind, death had been stalking him, and his fiercely pursued goal involved some sort of cosmic swindle in which he would ultimately defeat it somehow. The terms of this defeat he kept to himself. It was not for me to know. I sat there in his motel room, and I wondered about all the books and what lay within them, the pages and pages of notes he had taken. Before I became completely high, a soundless, almost comatose high, I wondered most about the shovel propped up against John's dresser. I wondered and feared what that might be for. I went to the doctor one last time, a few days later than I was supposed to, and more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. He wanted to know if anything had changed since the last time I'd seen him. I didn't want to tell him the extent to which my brain had begun to torture me. I couldn't find the words for it. I had been in the park some time after the incident in the supermarket, and I saw a man sitting on the other side of a wishing fountain. He was very far away, but I could slowly make out the details of his face and clothing. And I realized that I was looking at the image of Jesus Christ. He had not looked back at me ever. And eventually he had gone away, leaving me to stare from my bench. but that hallucination was not the worst I broke down weeping in the doctor's office when I confessed what was truly haunting my soul for I had recently begun to see on the street and once beside the picture window which looked out of my unkempt back lawn a vivid apparition of someone else someone I had not seen in years a young woman I had only met twice. It was Samantha, John's old girlfriend from college who had fallen dead of a heart attack three years before. In the hallucinations, she was always turned half away from me. Holding a letter I could plainly see was written in my own hand. I believe it must have been a confession I could not summon in reality. Seeing her face across the room tore my heart apart. It confirmed that there was such a thing as hell on earth for people like me, a ghastly twilight existence in which consciousness itself became its own terror. My doctor became convinced that my headaches and my hallucinations Now pointed to a physical root for my suffering He said there were drugs that could help me But that I would have to wean myself off the alcohol If the drugs worked He thought that perhaps I could be made healthy again I didn't believe that for a second But I was beyond caring where anyone put me Or why Soon I was in a different bed A hospital bed for the first time in my life I found that I didn't miss drinking much There were pills that kept me stoned far better I received a package A stuffed manila envelope A little before my second weekend in the hospital I took it to the recreation room Where no one could watch me John's spiky handwriting was slurred across the envelope And a note was inside, paper-clipped to a bundle of documents He wrote that it was a good time for me to Take a look at some of the things he had collected He could sense that I was beginning to see what he was searching for He had sent me almost 250 pages of material Essays by terminal brain cancer patients their delusions and visions of truth. Clippings from obscure books. The Burning Ghost. The Serpent and the Rainbow. The unlocked door. Men who would not depart. Near-death experiences. Descriptions of absurdly violent death agonies in people who didn't even have the strength to drink a glass of water. Passages circled in green ink but unexplained. Photos of the Day of the Dead celebrations in Waxaca, Mexico. Children's drawings of the Reaper, not photocopies, but originals, done in black and gold crayon as a dangerously skinny man who looked ten years too old urged them on with promises of candy. I read it all there in the clinic as the fog thickened and the snow fell. No one asked me what I was doing. I hid the envelope under my bed When night came, there were more drugs Bouts of crazed giggling And fanged shadows Once out of the hospital, I went to the bank And withdrew most of my remaining money I forced down a hamburger at a fast food place And just after dark, I went into a gun shop I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for So I had to ask a lot of questions, maybe too many It wasn't as easy as I had thought it would be But I managed okay in the end I took the gun home, loaded it Then I waited a few hours, watching TV With the TV, I drank a third of a bottle of whiskey There was a strange moment when I could not find the number to John's motel. It was not listed in the phone book, and directory assistance could not help me either. It brought on a sudden break in my endless living coma, and I thought to myself, you can be rid of this. There is another way out. Simply not finding the number seemed almost enough to release me somehow. Then the haze swept back over me, and it was as if that thought had come from a different voice entirely. I had merely garbled my words so badly to the operator that he had been unable to understand me. I called back and forced myself to speak clearly. John answered his phone on the 10th or 11th ring. I told him I was out of the hospital. I was at home. He sounded excited. He said we needed to meet, that he'd had a breakthrough in his research, and that I had given it to him. Yes, we did need to meet, it was true. The place he proposed, though, was a most bizarre one. Mount Cavalry Cemetery. John urged me to recall what I had once tried to explain to my wife, and then later conveyed to him during our first night on the highway. Your theory about honoring death, he said over the phone. Your wife's aunt. I muttered something in assent. That gave me the idea, John told me. There's something we've got to try. I've already bought the equipment. But I told him that I only wanted to die. To die that very night. He seemed to not even hear me. his sister was buried in Mount Cavalry he said and he now insisted again and again that it was wrong of us to leave her there that something had to be done and he was ready I have the gun John I said and lifted it off the chair beside me as if to show it to him we can go tonight what are you talking about he asked obviously very confused and I thought there was a faint tinge of fear in his voice. This will be perfect, John I whispered the tears rolling down my face in a steady stream. We can go together, I said. I don't want to die alone. He could only respond with another demanding invitation to meet him now at Mount Cavalry. He wanted to see how the bastard would react to his plan. And I told John in a trembling voice that the only reaper I feared was him. That everything about him was death. That he had sucked the life right out of me. He hung up the phone without answering. I checked the gun, turned out all the lights in the house, and went out into the freezing dark. The ground beyond the killing field that Smith and I had discovered got only more scarred, and the sky got only colder. Soon there was no telling between the land before the far mountains and the land that lay on the other side The ailing grass and all other signs of growth had disappeared entirely within a day or so of leaving the battle scene behind I began in my physical and mental infirmity to lose track of any sense of time whatsoever. Smith and I didn't talk much now. Still, the urge to survive compelled me like some dumb animal. And when I suddenly couldn't find Smith, I panicked. I shouted and shouted, marked my position with a pile of stones, and walked in all directions. Who knows where I really went, what terrain I covered, before I finally found him. He was lying on the plane on his side, breathing unevenly. His eyes were sluggish. He had wandered off and fallen in exhaustion. He'd landed badly, and a stone had torn his palm open. His breath was full of decay. Enough for me, Nicholas, he said, the words leaking out of his mouth like blood. I was wrong. Get up, God damn you, I said through gritted teeth, seething with anger at his horrendous betrayal. There's a grip coming. Can't you hear it? He could. I'd already detected the first low whistle off in the distance minutes before. I have the lie, Smith whispered, his mouth pressing against the cold ground. I never thought I would. I thought I could go on forever. I thought I could grow old here. it's not the lie if you can survive I said grasping his shoulders I'll help you no I can't move you refuse to move I screamed into his time worn face get up it was no use he was just carrion now so I found myself helping another suicide This time, though, a grip was coming It appeared, as always, as a gentle discoloration on the horizon And quickly focused itself into a swirling, bruised eye By the time I had dragged Smith's heavy bulk to a standing position This one had already broken apart in giant sheets to become a blanket of low clouds The highest of these was maybe 40 feet off the ground The whistling rose briefly and then cut out altogether Like an air siren There were three or four seconds of utter silence as the clouds enveloped us And then we were in the grip, no way out Those seconds of silence, that's when you take your last breath for a while The sound when the whistling stopped was like an aerosol leak mixed with radio static, and it was loud, the sound of spray rising off a waterfall. The mist soaked through our clothes and the stinging began, like a thousand biting insects landing on our skin and trying to pry beneath the outer layer. An electric current was how it had felt to Anya, the girl from before whom I'd introduced to this land. Not so much pain as a sense of horrifying invasion. There would be no connection between the visuals of this grip and its actual severity. I had thought it looked like a short one because of the diameter of the eye, but that was faulty logic. Our visibility dropped to about ten percent in the course of thirty seconds. I could barely see Smith's legs. Close your eyes! I shouted in his ear, struggling with his weight, moving forward sluggishly. It was not going to be fast enough. The mist became ash within seconds. In a grip, the most important thing is to keep every joint working, to keep up a kind of shuddering dance so the ash can't harden your joints and stop you from moving altogether. I bent my elbows constantly, clenched and unclenched my fists, rolled my neck around on my shoulders. Smith could not do the same, and there was almost no way I could help him and still save myself. I let us both collapse to the ground so I could work on his limbs, feeling for them blindly. Though he had enough consciousness left to keep his eyes shut, Smith was making no effort to flex. The grip destroyed the weak and the elderly within minutes. those who didn't have the physical fluidity necessary to keep the ash from collecting in all the intersections of the body. A man of my size, if he kept relatively still, would become a statue in three or four minutes. The new ones who came here and faced the first one alone sometimes lay down on the ground to wait and see what happened, and they inevitably perished. it was going to happen to smith with my left eye i made the tiniest vision slit possible and looked down seeing only the top of his head his mouth was partly open and before i could close it for him he began to choke the mist scalding his throat it's not like a snowstorm where you can turn your head away from the wind. The mist is everywhere, hissing, chattering. The ash caked into my jeans as I beat madly at Smith's arms and legs in a frantic attempt to keep them in some sort of motion. Hunger had sensitized my skin to the point where the invisible buzzing insects in the air felt like miniature knives. The hissing of the mist made my ears throb. The grip encircled us like a carnivore. Smith's chin fell from my palm and thudded against his chest. But then his legs had shifted on their own, and when I felt for them again, they weren't there. I tried to look again, but the mist was too thick. I could not even see my own hand, which I could tell was already encased in a half inch of ash, like my chest and my hair. I yelled out for Smith. I could sense motion off to my right. I opened one eye all the way and hollered in pain as the mist stung my cornea. I saw Smith rising to his feet in one swift motion and moving away. Not just moving, running. I tried to follow, expecting to run into him. It was far too loud now to reestablish contact. The grip sealed my face in a mask and I tried to beat it off. It went on like that for 15 minutes, maybe even half an hour. and as I ran I slowly felt a calm come over me peace not a death panic by any means I decided with the clear and elemental reasoning of a child to give up right there and then my desperate fear was replaced by an immense relief the ash began to collect in every pore of my flesh I closed my eyes even tighter wanting it all to be black I had veered off my nonsensical course and had sensed the ground becoming muddy I took one last step to my left believing from experience that the marsh-like terrain meant there was a long shallow crevice in the earth beside me it was true and I found myself stepping right into the center of a wind stream that had sluiced down from the faraway mountains and was tracing the path of a thin, rancid creek. The wind stream blew me sideways. I tumbled down through it into the noxious water. My head brushed to the side of a rock and there was a dim, painless explosion in my brain. I had sustained a concussion. Still, though, the voice from the speaking stone came to me There was only one voice I was ever meant to hear Nicholas, John whispered to me Breathe, breathe The ash hardened on my body, completely comfortable Sheltering me from the cold water of the creek Soon I couldn't move my arms or my legs even if I had wanted to try John's voice within the speaking stone repeated his words again and again Then unforgiving hands were hauling me up from my resting place Hauling me forward and destroying my dream The living myth, the history keeper the man who had come to be known as Pickman built a fire for both of us and I waited for him to speak having myself nothing to offer Pickman looked to be in his forties nearly skeletal with soot black hair and sunken eyes he wore a brown sweatshirt and ancient khaki pants his feet were bare his toenails yellowed and thick. He watched me silently as I methodically removed the ash from my body, eating none of it, though I was starved. He would not tell me how he had found me, or why he had saved me from the grip. Smith was gone, that was all I knew. Yet Pickman and I were not alone. When he guided me back to his makeshift camp, there was someone already there, a silent soul whom Pickman introduced me to with chilling courtesy. It was a boy, a boy of no more than ten years. He only stared into the distance, unwilling or unable to speak, his dirty blonde hair ruffled by an occasional breeze. Pickman had found him and chosen to keep him for a while, amused by his find. I wanted to say something to the boy, but I could not in a million years think of any words of comfort. We sat cross-legged, the three of us, under the indifferent sky. How long have I been here? The man called Pickman said to me That's what you want to know I'll give you the same answer I would give anyone I simply don't know It's been a long time, that I'm certain of And I don't think I'll ever leave It took an immense effort But I was finally able to stop staring at both Pickman and his lonely ward, and let my teacher speak as I became enwrapped instead by the tiny fire at our feet, the only vestige of real color other than blood that anyone could know in this place. I'm needed here, it seems, Pickman went on. I'm the closest thing you have to a god, I suppose. I'm living proof of what passes for a future here. if I were to be killed or throw myself off a rock, what then? What would you people have to believe in then? There are things I can't explain to you. I do want to tell of them. I've seen much. But my knowledge is all that keeps me special. If I told everything I know, there would be no need for me. But what if I were to give you one question? He said. "'his eyes never leaving mine. "'Somewhere during his instruction "'he had moved closer to me, "'uncomfortably close, "'and the illusory swirl "'in which we had been sentenced to exist "'deceived me yet again, "'for Pickman's hair was now showing traces of grey "'where there had been none before, "'as if he were growing older by the moment. "'One question. Most likely you'd ask about the perimeter. My friend, there is no perimeter. It was invented, just as religions are, to nurture a diminishing sense of purpose, to give us strength in the face of nothingness. I've been here longer than anyone, so I should know. Searching is futile. You must understand that this is a place of judgment. our judgment is clear there is to be no exit these disappearances you wonder about they're only suicides the insane who wander off thinking they hear voices speaking of some reachable truth that man you were traveling with was just one more of them so ask me one question and then be on your way and so I thought for a moment and I asked him what comes after the far mountains he rose to his feet looked at me in pity there is an ocean he said and I never saw him again the answer broke my heart twice over the ordeal that lay ahead was unfathomable miles and miles of freezing plain ahead and who knew if Pickman told the truth if he was a ghost or just another madman who had stalked us through the mountains my determination to end my existence here was never stronger I would eat, I would sleep and then I would use what remained of my wits to become a dreamless corpse Already I was helpless against remembering The way I parked my car underneath an oak tree beside Mount Cavalry And climbed the short brick wall that marked the edge of the cemetery I placed the shotgun gently upon the wall And hoisted myself over it Once inside, sheltered from any eyes that might have seen me enter It became only a matter of finding the spot I was looking for it was past midnight it could not have been more than twenty degrees out but I felt no cold the trees around the cemetery rustled softly the eastern section was for veterans of foreign wars who had died in this small town each grave there was marked only by a white marble cross that rose up to the knees there was no funeral home nearby and the vast acreage, which sloped gently from east to west and sometimes served as a sledding hill for daring children, was untended after dark. I walked through the rows, through the darkness, gripping the gun tightly. From my vantage point I could see the entire graveyard spreading out before me. I wasn't sure where I was going, but for the first time in years my purpose was clear. I called John's name once, and no one answered. Halfway across the graveyard I stumbled and fell because I was so weak, having eaten nothing for two days. My right hand remained on the gun. It seemed vitally important that I not drop it. I knew John was here, you see. I had seen his car parked around the corner from my own. unknowingly I neared the place where Joanne Scarstone was buried the monument was a simple one I would have missed it but for the mound of dirt that had recently been unearthed beside it it was fifty feet away at any moment I thought John's silhouette would emerge into view perhaps with an outstretched hand The wind picked up, and then, strangely, it seemed to die around me completely. There was not even the sound of the leaves scuttling across the ground. What's happening, John? I thought, or maybe even spoke. Where are you? Something's changing. it was then that I looked up to see the reaper striding across Mount Cavalry a dark robed figure taller than I had ever dreamed gargantuan, a monolith as tall as a small tree and the reaper was carrying the body of John Scarsone toward the south cradling it, letting John's legs dangle and his head hang downward Death walked in great, purposeful strides, not looking back at me for a moment. I tried to follow him. John couldn't be dead. We were meant to go together, the only rational way out of this fetid life. But death was quicker than I, and he carried John's lifeless corpse away effortlessly, out of Mount Cavalry, his ancient robe flowing behind him, disappearing altogether between two tall oaks which protected a path leading to the most expensive vaults, opulent tombs gathered in a winter-killed field where the dead slept in demented victory. I ran then. I fell once beside John's sister's grave. His shovel lay there and a battery-powered light, a ring of keys, and several blankets. There was enough moonlight to see that John lay in that grave. His body crumpled atop a thin sheen of unspoiled dirt. He had fallen in, fallen in with one bad step in the dark. His left shoulder was cocked behind his neck at a bizarre angle, and his eyes were open and gaping. His neck must have been snapped. I could see his collarbone sticking through his skin. The wind started to curl again, the snow started to fall, and suddenly the grave was empty as my mind made one last grab for sanity, taking one last photograph of how things truly were. John was gone, not dead, but gone, and the grave was bare. His sister Joanne had been removed and secreted away. John's research would go on without me. I simply couldn't wait any longer. Every moment on the earth brought me new terrors. I didn't so much as call out my friend's name again. The chemicals in my brain were shutting me down for good tonight. They sent me a last series of signals that got me back to my car. That was where I shot myself, propping the butt of the shotgun on the floor beside the brake pedal. I took it in the mouth. The shot was like pulling a cord from a socket. There was no pain. I awoke on a plane colder than Mount Cavalry had ever been, even during the darkest sunsets of December. In hell, I found a great concave stone that rose above my head, and on this stone had been etched the beautiful image of a sleeping woman's face. Someone had carved the face with enormous effort, and so deeply that no wind could ever erode it. I can't remember the details of that face now, but I gazed at it for an hour, wondering who had made it and why. The last thing I found was a piece of paper, a real piece of white vellum, and I found this in my pocket when I sat down to die for a second time. the words on the paper were scrawled in black ink that could not possibly have been created from the fruitless plants of hell they had been written by Smith Nicholas he wrote I don't have time to explain all this now I'm afraid my way out of here might close just as quickly as it opened I can only tell you that there is a perimeter. You've got to believe me. I think you know I don't have the imagination to lie. The way out of here is nothing like we thought it would be. And you've got to keep searching. I suspect that's the most important thing. Let this letter be my sign to you that it's true. Use it to take down your oral history, maybe. Whatever you can. Once, as we went through the mountains, I slept beside a speaking stone. It had your voice, your voice telling me how you came to be here, the entire story told in a way you weren't able to, with every secret spoken truthfully. Our lives both ended badly, Nicholas. We were blind not to see that death really is vulnerable. but not if we let it control us. He's an enemy whose strength comes only from our frightened servitude. Natural, unnatural, good, evil, vengeful, or merciful. Every minute we spend arguing these distinctions, the indecipherable properties of mortality, is another minute we've lost. Your friend John was poison, and so was everyone who never let us forget for a moment that death was with us every day. Everyone here is poison too. Go on your own if you can. Don't let them kill you again. Goodbye. I kept that paper, breathed the cold in deep, and looked around me. I wasn't quite alone, I saw. Others were starting to emerge around me, the citizens of the land beyond the far mountains. They were no more and no less tattered, beaten, crazed, and broken-hearted than any others. In memory of Smith, and for no other reason, I went away from them, never looking back, one foot in front of the other toward the taunting mystery of hope. Now receiving frequency transmission. I think ideas come from everywhere. On one hand, I believe our subjective experiences present ideas to us through circumstance and everyday happenstance. Sometimes answers are provided to questions that we didn't even know to ask. I think ideas come from our heart that they are born out of our feelings I also think ideas float above us in the ether and that in extreme moments or instances of heightened sensitivity we are capable of accessing them from some sort of vast shared cosmic consciousness stream Sometimes I suspect ideas are passed down from unseen higher intelligences, downloaded like Philip K. Dick's gleaming pink light. But I also think some of the most fascinating and transformative ideas come from what Dick called the trash stratum, from lowbrow pop culture like comic books, paperbacks, monster movies, and the like. I think the universe is itself an idea. One that we shape together. Transmission complete. Stay tuned to Spector Vision Radio. Stay. Stay.