"Caaaaayyy!" I say with a silly voice. 

She comes running, freshly potty trained and no longer diaper encumbered. She hops into my arms and hugs me tightly across my neck. I effortlessly pick her tiny body up and return the hug and we both close our eyes and in the darkness experience each others embrace of pure love and safety. I kiss her ear and whisper "happy birthday" into her ear. She doesn't let go, so we stand there for 30 seconds hugging tightly. My heart shutters and I realize how desperately I love her. How little most love I felt for insubstantial things in my life pales in comparison to what I am feeling in this intense moment where all the sights and sounds dim into oblivion and we forge this symbiotic connection. I know that my heart belongs to her and I feel inspired to be better. To be stronger and healthier, to live longer and no longer want to take foolish risks with myself. 

She lets go just long enough to back her face away and look at me with a smile. Then she reaches in and gives me a quick peck on the lips while eyeballing the Peppa Pig game.

I found out a few weeks back that Chuck was dead. He died in the hospital and no one thought it was a good idea to tell me. I found out from my brothers status update on facebook. I was broken hearted. Never had I felt so out of the loop of my family, out of the loop of life... Chuck, I had just seen him months ago, I took him fishing and while he was in bad shape and couldnt go far we were there, I was with him and I was just for the 1st time in forever, from a long absence of knowledge making an effort to reconnect with someone who helped forge me into me...

Chuck is dead and no one told me...

how could I be so hated? so despised? I didnt know of a funeral, of a wake... I deserved to know, I loved him, I loved him so much! And they didn't tell me, and to find out on facebook? The salt in my wound, how can I let it go? I accept that my family is broken, its always been and the only thing that has changed since I was young has been my perception, sharper and sharper with time to see the lies, the bullshit, to see how broken we all truly are...

and yet, this betrayal, this confusion...

I pushed it down. Deep inside, I always do... its my natural state.

Then one night at Bradfords in Stamford, my girlfriends work was having a happy hour party, I was obliged to go, ok fine. So I go...

A few drinks, another drink maudlin Billy appears, walls down, emotions on high octave. Cynthia, my girlfriends twin asks to use my Iphone, sure. Why not?

So I am showing her iOS5 the developers copy I have it installed, she says lets look at your photo roll, ok why not? We flip through the pictures, one by one, laughing, she sticks her finger into my side as if to tease me. "look at that one you look so stupid!" I laugh with her, she is happy, so I am happy... she flips to a picture of Chuck and I, I am 6 or 7, he is behind me, his handlebar moustache on prominent display, I am wearing my camo army hat, I am holding a large bluefish, this was the day Chuck and my father took me on thte My Joy, a charter fishing boat in the long Island sound, my smile was pure, I was so proud of the days catch. Chuck is smiling his half smile, his long hair covering most of his eyes, his strong hands made of steel hold the weight of the fish. 

Something is dripping on the Iphone screen... I notice I am crying... uncontrollably...

Cynthia looks at me in tortured bewilderment. 

"Billy are you ok?"

I cant speak my throat is choked with feelings and maybe phlegm.

I look at her from the corner of my blurry vision, her face is frozen in astonished and yet sour amusement.

I cant speak, I try, I say something but it comes out in vowels and mumbles, I point towards the mens room, and drunken I stumble from my seat, dropping my phone onto the table, leave these accursed feelings here I think if for a moment in a sea of moments.

I pull myself up on the bar/dining room divider and I fumble, a mess, a fumble mess of tears and anguish towards the restroom, Chuck is dead! hes DEAD! Forever gone, my connection is cut and I feel it, I feel it inside me its missing and every nerve, every fiber in my being that knew of him is screaming in agony. My uncle is dead! No more will he wile me with jokes, with 3 stooges reruns, with stories of Raymond E. Filmore while he jiggles his thick coke bottle glasses in hilarious mockery... every day I've known him forever altered in my memory, turtles, fishing poles, locusts, trout, abstract ideas I associate with Chuck flood me. I am in the handicap stall crying into my hands now. Nothing is going to spare me these feelings, nothing is going to take this away... and I wouldn't want it to... Chuck deserves my tears... I missed it all and the anger I feel for those who have let me down and kept me misinformed failed me, Chuck is dead! He is fucking dead! A flash of memory... Nelson Family Camping ground, going to breakfast, Chuck is singing werewolves in London, I can never listen to this song again with a straight face I know this without experiencing it... Chuck it dead! How can I bear this? How can I take this? I cant take this, its too much, my stoicism, my fragile wall of protection from feeling... broken in an instant. I cant hold it in, and now tears, snot, salt from my hands on the work day mix into a miserable concoction of pain, I hear someone knocking..."busy"... more knocking "BUSY ITS FUCKING BUSY! LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE YOU MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!" ANger replacing despair... I will fight this, I want to fight, I will hurt somebody, somebody will hurt as bad as I hurt... another sob... more knocking. "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT!" I pull toilet tissue and wipe my face clean... I feel better I let this out it was hurting me. I go to the sink and I wash my face. I know it is dark outside, no one can see me, but Cynthia would have told Sandra by now... time to lock it back inside, time to make them think its time to go home. I stick to the plan and leave the bathroom. I give the asshole knocker the look of death, and I think for a second he wants to say something but reads the fury in my eyes and looks away, we pass by and I brush my shoulder off him, through him, he knows not to press my buttons and he doesnt. I feel lethal. I sit down and collect my phone, Cynthia is gone. I finish my Stoli-O and soda... I pray someone fucks with me, because I want to smash this glass in someones face. After some time Sandra collects me and brings me home. I fall asleep without incident. This time. It is getting harder to hold things in, I feel as though this mask is going to slip... this buttoned lip stoicism is not faring me well... I know no other way.

Even now the visual memory of this will forever be etched into the fabric of my being. Not the moments before or after this incident can I recall or care to recall...

I turned the corner and the first thing I could see in the rectangular room was the silhouette of large ogre-some feet under white sheets protruding from the end of a clumsily hidden slab table. Those ridiculous large feet would never feel the bare earth between them again.

Then my eyes moved up the table, to his collapsed chest, which seemed much smaller than had been evident in life. And his face. Contorted in sadness and confusion. His final thoughts as his life ended. I wonder if in fear or grief, I could only pray to a god I've long lost belief in that it wasn't absolute terror. The thought of which shatters my heart into fragments. I wanted so much for him. I wanted so much for him to find peace and satisfaction. I wanted time to tell him how I really felt about him. Time forever lost to me now, and my punishment, my cowards reward is to choke on all that I can never tell him now when I know it matters the most. Time and experience is cruel. Its so cruel.

I approached him, with short weak steps, I swear it felt like my knees would give out before I could make it. So I sat on one of the chairs arranged for us. I let my mother, the Ricky, then Memere and aunt Liz go and say what they had to say and I stared at his face. In shame and loss and defeat. My incredulity slowly wore away to realization. And my chest heaved with great lament and heaviness... it felt like someone was squeezing me. I knew now the finality of it. It was my turn, I shuffled forward, each step feeling like the gravity of the earth would crush me beneath its weight. I couldn't look at his face. So I looked at his chin and his chest. Then the thought occurred to me that he had had an autopsy and that his chest had been sliced open and his ribs cracked and his organs removed and weighed. I began to feel nauseous so I forced myself to look at his face instead.

And there he was...

my baby brother.

dead.

Id never be ok beyond this point again.

Our invincible 3some (Me, ricky and colby) was now 33.3333333333% dead and could never be whole again...

His face was contorted in a nightshades grimace... it bothered me. What kind of a shit mortician would let him look this way? Later on everyone would tell me he looked peaceful, but I KNOW MY BROTHERS FACE better than anyone. I was the closest in proximity his entire life. I KNOW what his looks are, and I knew the look of terror on him when I saw it. It made me sick. I reached down to touch his hair, and it seemed like it took forever for my hand to get there.

I was fully expecting in that moment to feel warmth and heat. at first I could feel the prickle of his hair touching my fingers, then as my fingers settled onto his head I could feel cool lifeless indifferent cold. He was cold. Cold as the grave, cold as finality, cold as unending winter. That moment of realization broke me. All of my resolve, my strength melted away and I wept. From the boundaries of my soul I poured unending torrents of misery and sadness. My tears splattered across his forehead and began to dissolve away the makeup they had used to make him look more lifelike. I rest my face against his face and up against his unlistening ear I begged for his forgiveness. That He would forgive me for failing to help him. To forgive my failures as his guardian and letting him go so far astray. I told him that which I had never been able to, when it mattered the most which was that I was so proud to call him my brother that I loved him and I that I was a fool for not being more mature when we needed it most.

I told him I would never allow his children to go untended. I would step in and make sure they had all they needed. And that I would tell them of their fathers worth and keep his memory alive for them. 

I don't recall much of the rest of that day or really even the rest of that month. But I know now that I will never be ok. That, true adulthood is going on as less, less of what you were. Like someone who loses a limb, you just go on as less until there is nothing left.

If you have time to fix the things between you and someone you love, do it while you can. Because that window does close, and if you dont take it while you can, you will pay for it.

In the grip of her fevered madness the nightmare hallucinations took their toll. Raw unadulterated mania turned eyes, once of blue sapphire to the deepest unrepentant pits of tartarus. The pupils now seemed expanded beyond what ought to have been possible. In addition, the snarling feral mouth hung contorted and chewed by chipped pink canine teeth. The salty cracked lips split in various jagged tectonic slivers, the paleness of those lips only contrasted by the inner pinkish color of the sub-dermal roots, vaguely resembling an old iron coal lamp with soft incandescent beams of luminescence oozing between the cold rolled steel caging. Dried blood streaked down her chin, giving a ghoulish vampiric visage, of the deepest medieval peasant superstition. I knew then, in the locked stillness of the moment that the woman once so endeared to me was gone, lost in the bowers of fringe lunacy. 

      "There... is... no hope..."

It said, the words plopped from her fetid broken mouth, in a voice of such sullen batrachian depth, that it didn't seem right and proper to come from what was once such a sweet tiny woman of youthful embrace. The mere intonation at once making me doubt I had heard the words correctly, and then filling me with existential dread. This was not her voice. In that moment I feared, briefly for my own safety if not my sanity itself. The frame of the woman was still small, albeit now more gaunt and hauntingly contorted. But the small stature of the woman who once would hold my hand in enigmatic female empathy was now replaced by this small, stooped and sallow creature of deepest nightmare. The sight of her nearly caused me to crack, and let loose the sadness welling within me. 

"There is no hope... there IS no hope." 

It reiterated in that dark gallows like voice. This time quickening the pace and inflecting between words to distribute a feeling of pure maliciousness. Its head turned queerly like a dog struggling to understand human speech, it mouthed the words it had been saying for hours, I swear I could hear the lips crackling as they did so, then a frail tiny hand appeared from under its soiled robes and began to wipe away at that scabby broken precipice which answered for a mouth. 

I could feel myself now, reaching out to grip its shoulders, perhaps mere touch could bring it back from the oblivion of madness, only for her to jerk away in a half visible, jumping motion. Almost like watching a film with a maddeningly low frame rate, I thought that there was a disconnection between the motions I saw, and what I should have seen. It did not want to be touched, even if the act would enable some unthinkable miracle of reprieve and reconciliation. The sad, blistered and eviscerated gangle of flesh and mop like hair, refused such foolish milk of human connection. 

      "Marcia! let me help you"

I yelped from a position of insecurity and weakness betraying my robust size and strength. As the words left my mouth those black eyes, which reflected no light, set upon me, fixed, and locked. Half set upon me like a hunters bear trap which has sprung, and half rolling back into its skull. They punctured me, the look was like being stabbed repeatedly. I didnt not know if she was looking at me, or through me for the focus of those ebon spheres of hades seemed to pull me and perhaps the room into them. Like a black hole which light cannot escape from, undulated with tempestuous rage and feral animosity. They exuded unknown knowledge and demonic enmity half balanced by indifference. 

      "You're scaring me"

I said, casting aside all doubt that I was now inculcated in pure facile terror. Never before had my strength of will waned in such replete finality. 

It leaned its head back now, never breaking sight with the dark unpolished globes of inhuman eyes. Its head jerked quickly but never more than a degree or two, I could hear snapping and creaking in its neck as the brown mop of matted hair swayed and undulated like the soft caresses of a midnight beach on some devil island. Its mouth broken and sullen opened now, and I could see its breath escape, proof that it was not cold, but rather that her temperature was actually quite elevated and much hotter than the encompassing air around her. And then, starting from the bowels of hell itself a deep throated gurgle of a laugh began to corrupt my ears. Inhuman. Death like. Gurgling, almost not of this world. What I thought I knew of fear previously had dawned on me as a mistake, for I felt my body tremble from the fibers of my spinal column into the depths of my soul. What she did next will haunt the recesses of my nightmares for all time. She... slithered towards me, for that is the only word I can use to describe the reptilian, jerking motion, at once smooth, but also as jagged as the mountainous peaks of Erebor. 

Before I could mount a defensive gesture she was upon me. Her gnarled small white hands, formerly of frail alabaster now like iron talons gripped tufts of hair on either side of my skull sending bolts of hot white pain into my scalp. The pain, nearly making me feel as though she would yank the hair free of my head, was abated if momentarily when with demonic viper speed it jutted its head towards me and pulled my face towards it in a single motion, locking its lips around my mouth. I could feel it then, snaking its tongue between my lips against my firmly clenched teeth, exploring them with its tip in a sickening frenzy of lust giving way to nauseous insistence. The dry cracked lips were as rough hewn as sawed wood and the flakes of petrified skin jutted and slivered my own, I thought they felt like splinters. The tongue became more insistent now, pushing between my incisors both upper and lower. Somehow she managed to part them and its foul tongue found its way inside my mouth. The immediate shock sent my mind reeling, then the flavor of blood set in, her tongue was bleeding and between the neurosis of my despair I could also taste what could only be thought of as the acidic metallic taste of prescription medications so heavily pumped into this poor things 

veins. My stomach knotted, my knees buckled, I nearly vomited right then and there. 

I struggled against her preternatural strength, and managed to press my hands against her, one upon her chest the other her throat. In the moment of dark dread I realized my eyes had been squeezed tightly shut to protect the soft globes, I forced them open, and was greeted by a look which could only be described as pure malice and animal frenzy. I nearly fainted and quickly squeezed them shut again. I did not possess the strength to separate us, this tiny pale woman, set aside all rational thought and collapsed my power under the spell of her magnified insane strength. 

After a moment it loosened then disconnected from my face and let go of its grip upon my hair. Its hands slid downwards, and it smiled or perhaps it was a nightshades grimace, betraying all thought of the deed. Pink bubbles of blood and saliva glopped and slimed its way down her chin, one trail terminating in a long stream which stretched from her chin to my lips. 

      "Kiss me coward"

It bellowed from somewhere in the depths of its stomach. I was gagging and retching and spitting the pink foul fluid from my own mouth now. My hands set firmly against her chest now pushing, straining, desperate to regain distance and an illusion of safety. I begun to shake my head, tears welling in my eyes, choking still. Thats when I felt the next bolt of white hot pain. As those iron claws gripped my penis and testicles. I began to pull away now, and it followed me, still grimacing. My back was against the white steel door now. There was no escape, no hope. And in the moment of frozen terror, that mop jutted forward again, this time not to deliver a putrid medicated kiss, but to fasten its teeth upon my lips. Pain... agony... I pushed meekly against its chest, somewhere in the struggle sliding down and off to the side, she was on top of me now, biting, squeezing. I screamed in torment. Its teeth sinking into the skin of my lips rupturing the smooth flesh and filling the crevice between my teeth and gums with a pool of hot metal tasting blood. I began thrashing and twisting now, ultimately rolling on stop of her, but pulling my head away only hurt more so I began punching, clawing, choking her. Through the beating I could hear it giggling. Chuckling. It enjoyed this, it enjoyed the pain. Mine and hers. Strike after strike, one into its black eyes, one into its nose. The sheer magnitude of the force at once breaking the cartilage began to bleed profusely, mostly into a pool upon the ground but also into the fabric of its robe turning the dirty off white thing pink and then deep crimson as it became saturated in the beasts hemoglobin. 

As quickly as it had caught me, it relinquished its connection and crawled away nearest to the bed in the corner of the room. I sat there, back against the door staring in absolute incredulity as it began to fumble about its face, using its fingers to snap, crack, and realign its nose. The mere sound filling me with sickness, was grotesque in that fleshy, soft and wet resonance. I turned now and began pounding on the door, I stood and frantically looked through the small glass rectangle 

that offered view of the hallway beyond the closed door. I began to pound harder and scream maniacally 

"Open the door! Open the fucking door!" 

I could see shadows dancing outside in the hallway from a distance, I screamed louder. 

"Jesus christ... open the goddamn door!" 

I turned to look at her, Marcia, my once sweet friend. She was on her belly now, slowly crawling towards me, leaving a trail of blood and bile in her wake as her nose gushed and rained liquid and clots of unnamable substances. A smell of feces began to fill my lungs, and she smeared that behind her as well. 

      "I... need... you..."

It hissed, each word lower in tone than the last terminating in diabolical iciness upon the word "you". I pressed my back again to the door. Trapped. She only said my name now in a voice straight from the depths of hell. 

In the next moment, I do not know if my eyes deceived me, or if madness begun to slip into the cracks of my rational mind. But she lay there upon her belly, her eyes fixed upon me, those eyes, once of godly azure blue, then of ebon black, now seemed to glow with a pale luminescence. If this were real I could not say, but here it was. I stood now, transfixed like a moth to candle light. In this moment the other worldly glow of these faintly incandescent eyes seemed to stretch on and on, for all time. No, time ceased to exist in the path of these dim lights. I could not move, I am not sure if I was breathing, but I must have been for I did not feel like I was suffocating, quite the contrary I felt totally at peace here. The tendrils of madness were slipping into me, entangling me, all things of mortal importance fell to lesser magnitude. Maybe even I wanted to stay here, in the stillness, amidst those dim and dying ghost lights. I felt tears begin to flow down my cheeks, in that cursed moment I was crying, not with sadness, not with joy, but with reticent acceptance. 

      "take me"

I thought.

"Consume me" I thought, the very idea alien in origin, but inviting. 

I wanted this I think, I wanted to be devoured by it, embraced by it. 

"please take me" I am not sure if I thought it or said it, but it was there, I wanted to be one with it. To nourish this pale light. 

The lights came closer now, and in that moment all the world faded to darkness, and it was just the light and I. Like being stranded on a dark deserted highway in pitch black with great truck lights coming to me, 

growing, the power of this light, damning, inviting, loving, hating, all in one. They grew and as they grew the world peeled away from me, as they grew, and grew. 

"take me" I know I said it out loud this time. I felt the vibration in my chest as the air moved passed my vocal chords. I felt as though I was growing feint now, becoming translucent. There was only light now. Only light. There, somewhere between life and death, the light had me. Then motion... gravity. I was falling, falling backwards. The light was moving away from me. 

      "No..."

I said

      "noooo"

I repeated.

Then a loud smack. Followed by pressure, pain, anguish. On the back of my skull, pain. I could feel it now. The light faded away and darkness from my periphery grew, then the light was small and the world came back to me, faded into my vision from nothing to perfect clarity. I blinked my eyes frantically, i could see again. I was laying prostrate upon my back. I had fallen from one dimension back into this one. I lifted my head weakly, there stood a great metal door in front of me, with a small rectangular glass viewing portal. Great hands reached down to me now, beckoning me to regain my balance. I looked up and I saw a man. A tanned skin man with a mustache and sporadic unshorn facial hairs. He was lifting me now, to my feet. I gripped helplessly to him like a babe, new dropped from womb. He bore a badge upon his chest with the name Javier, his great beefy paws steadying me. I could hear him mumbling under his breath. 

      "mierda... mierda..."

Grave concern clouded the look of disgust upon his brow, my head hurt. At least I think it was my head. It was somewhere deeper though, deep inside my brain or psyche. My heart raced, I could feel it pulsating in my ears now. He shuffled me down the hall, one foot in front of the other, but slowly. 

      "you need to go."

He said in a thick Spanish dialect.

      "I cant go. I cant..."

"you need to go now." My strength, sapped and faded I could only relent to his demands. My soul was cracked, I was lost, what happened? Where am I? Where was the lights? 

"Go man, go" I strained to look over my shoulder, to the door. And In that small rectangular glass portal to hell I saw her. I saw her greasy mop of hair, and beyond that the empty cold globes of unreflective blackness and that crooked broken smile, waxing in totality to a grimace of malicious intent. 

CHAPTER 2: An Indifferent Cosmos

I sat there in the darkened room of my kitchen, lazily slumped backwards in my chair. There was not the faintest sound I could detect aside from the crystalline clinking of the ice-cubes within my cup now empty of the poisonous vodka I had been drinking with a fevered tempo. I swished the clear cubes about in the glass, all the while deep in morbid and morose thoughts of the madness not more than 7 days ago. Those eyes, Marcias eyes, unreflective and black, void of warmth like a great sharks eyes within the depths of lightless unfathomable depths. They were everywhere now. In all my thoughts all encompassing and all consuming I could think of little else. 

I lifted the nearly empty bottle of Grey Goose and refreshed my melting ice-cubes with the clear liquid. I rested my forehead in one hand while holding my cup with the other. I could hear the ice clinking again and I peeked over the top of my fingers and noticed that my hand was quivering quite tremulously. I rested the cup on the table but never relinquished my grip but if only to still the shaking. The clock on the wall was difficult to read in this darkness but Its small hands glowed with some chemical application that allowed me to discern that the time was nearly three o'clock in the morning. I had been sitting here drinking this vodka for nearly 2 hours now, a recusal from the sleepless tossing about in my bed before that. It was only six months ago that I began to notice the subtle changes in my friend Marcia which would conclude in her admittance to that madhouse of white halls, locked doors and the daily injections of drug and chemicals. 

She had started her career, having previously left working at the local bank for the lofty freedom of being a park ranger for the state. She felt the pay cut was worth the fresh air and the bubbling brooks of the Devils Hopyard and its small reservoir. 

"If I don't ever have to deal with a single human person again, and its just trees, rocks and deer, then that will suit me." She explained to me. 

"Aren't there bears in those woods? I read that there were bears, and maybe some ghosts too." 

She Laughed. 

"You and your stupid ghost stories. Look, I get to carry a pistol, drive an open topped truck and keep out of staters from throwing shit in the river, thats more good than I could ever do doling out money to people who treat me like utter shit." 

"Speaking of shit, I'm sure there will be plenty of that too." Her eyes narrowed for a moment, reflecting the luminescent lamp light sat upon the table in my back yard. They didn't look blue, they looked to be almost the same color as the fire. 

"Yes. I am sure there will be shit, nothing I haven't seen or smelled before." she quipped after inhaling deeply then releasing. 

"But you don't have to be such a fucking wet blanket all the time you know. Sure, I will make less money, sure there is some risk associated, but at least I wont utterly hate my life, isn't that a win?" 

Her hand slid forward and rested upon my own as a smile crawled its way across her ovular face. Her hair was pulled back tightly and set into a pony-tale giving her an almost girlish look that gave me pause to remember her as I saw her when we were mere teenagers. 

"sure, its a win... for the bear that gets to eat you" I said mockingly. 

"Kidding, I'm kidding, if this makes you happy then I support it, but why the hell in the Devils Hopyard? That place is creep city. You know about the family that went missing there right? I mean, its like the place just swallowed them up, they never found them." 

      "Mr. wet blanket again"

"People disappear all the time, they get lost, they make mistakes, they get killed. Its tragic, tragic... but it does happen. Maybe if I do this I can keep that sort of thing from happening again. I like to think I can do some real good. Plus, I will get to take Toby with me, you know how much he loves the woods and to run free. Working a corporate job now he the poor little shit is stuck in the house most of the day, this way I can take him with me. My couch will be so relieved, have you seen what that neurotic fucking dog does to my couch when I leave him home all day? It isn't pretty!" 

"True, that is one sorry couch." I joked. 

"Hey, why don't you come down to the Hopyard with me and I can show you around when I get settled? There are some pretty beautiful spots there when the sun is setting, and its very historical, You know how much you love historical stuff." 

"Yeah the colonials settled it, and the Pequots and Mohegan's before them. Although the Pequots called it Machimoodus which is supposed to mean "Evil spirit" or "evil music" or something like that." 

"Oh sure, I knew that. It's "dark sound" apparently the entire river valley sits on top of a schist fault. So the weird rumbling along the fault lines are just earthquakes that sound like thunder or roaring and groaning from a distance." 

Her smile was widely brimming now, she had noticed my intent listening and knew that she had captured my curiosity. 

"well... I would definitely like to see that then." I replied. 

I took a sip of the vodka, then another, then the entire cupful until the reduced ice-cubes slid down and batted my upper lip and rested against the whiskers upon it, melting into it. I wiped down the mustache with my palm and decided to try and go back to bed. When I stood the entire world felt like it was spinning about me. I could hardly tell if I was standing straight or leaning over feebly upon the chair. In my minds eye still 

seeing those darkened reptilian eyes, slowly gaining pale luminescence. I shook my head, and felt my way along the wall to my bedroom door. I stumbled into the room and flung myself upon my bed. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. Pure darkness now, I could hear the wind outside blowing against the window and perhaps some light rain fall. I turned my face towards where my window would have been in this blackness, and strained my eyes to peer through it, all the while fearful somehow that Marcia would appear from the darkness grimacing and moving with preternatural motion. I closed my eyes hard, and thought to myself that the world was cruel. It had taken everything from me now, my family, and now my only friend.I could feel the heat welling inside my eyelids and then the warm tears stream down my cheeks. There is nothing good in this world. I thought to myself, there is only my misery and torment. When next I look to the sky on a moonless night I will not see the auspicious beauty of the cosmos, I will see only the black indifferent void, and the reflection of my pain within it.

CHAPTER 3: More than I wanted to know 

Being that Marcia and I had lost our families over the years, we had become essentially family. We met for the first time when we were in middle school in Health Class. Even then her precocious and active mind was on full assault upon the world, breaking apart and analyzing all things, nothing was beyond the scope of her curiosity. Not even me. Dull, like a boring sack of potatoes, I always chose the least obvious spot in class. I didn't want to be put into the spotlight. It was too much for me, and I didn't like to be seen. Marcia picked up on this immediately, even then jabbing me jokingly, mockingly but not maliciously. Our teachers name was Mr. Stupacovich, he often loved to embarrass and humiliate socially retarded and inept persons such as myself. 

"Does the "pull out method" upon which a man removes his penis from a girls vagina before ejaculation a safe form of contraception? Anyone? Mr Stupacovich queried. He looked around the brightly lit portably built classroom and zeroed in upon me. 

"you, what do you think? Does the pull out method keep you safe from impregnating your girlfriend?" 

At once I could feel heat on the peripheral of my scalp begin to envelope me. A bead of sweat may have broken out on my forehead. I could sense the tension, the eyes, everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to speak. At once my throat felt dry and chaffed. I couldn't speak. I felt like such a fucking loser, I am blowing it, I look like a social retard. I AM a social retard. Why was he picking on me? 

"I uhh, um, I think that maybe... uhh, no, but its not.... I think..." 

Nothing formative would come, I didn't know what to say, on the spot I could only recognize that I was on the spot and failing. From the corners of my eyes I could see my fellow classmates covering their mouths and snickering, laughing. I even heard someone call me a weirdo, then a space case. I could feel nothing but heat, I became dizzy and overly self aware 

like huffing pure oxygen, I felt I could pass out, but the weight on my chest, the grinding, pulsating crushing constriction kept me anchored. 

"Of course its not an effective measure of birth control, there are active sperm cells in pre-ejaculate which is meant to act as a lubricant before ejaculation." 

Marcia, full of vigor, noticed my reticence and hopped to my rescue. She looked at me pityingly, and continued. 

" Even though it is less likely that a man could impregnate a woman with this method, it is still very possible for it to happen, and therefore proper precaution should be taken to avoid unwanted pregnancies." 

"Thats right, some people call it "seepage" Mr. Stupacovich claimed, and the best bet is to abstain from sex until you're mentally and emotionally prepared to deal with the consequences of it. 

As he trailed off I felt relief wash over me as my time in the spotlight had ended, once again proving that I was truly a loser. Not long after the class bell rang and the mob of confused, hormonal teenagers packed up their belongings and began to shuffle out. Feeling quite low about myself I was in no rush, for leaving first would indicate that I was in a hurry to run away, right? So I had to play it slowly, deftly. I packed my notebook, and my other assignments, as three quarters of the class had egressed I felt I would slip away unnoticed with the last remnants of the crowd. As I stood and turned, there she was, her feral long brown hair hanging in twisted but elegant tendrils around her face, those piercing blue bespectacled eyes fixed firmly upon me. 

** CHAPTER 4: I'll never be alright again.** 

I awoke the following morning. Still shrink wrapped in nausea and a vague sense of dissociation. I felt feint, part phantasmal, part corporeal. The acidic taste in my mouth betrayed the memory of what put it there, copious amounts of overpriced alcohol, in my little cup. The light streamed into my field of vision in its spectral brilliant manner. It reflected boldly through my eyes welling with tears due to their sensitivity to it, and I swear in the corners of those ocular pools of flooded salty refraction I could see the visible spectrum with an easing gradient into perfect clarity. There above me hung the pale ceiling, I was alone in my bed. I lifted my head with a certain sense of strain and difficulty only to find that as my cranious mass lifted from the pillow pain washed in from the sides of my ears with a hot ringing within them. Then this globule of pain reached forward into the front of my skull and squeezed my temporal lobes strongly and menacingly. I lowered it to the pillow again and some of the pain abated, but I could still feel the gushing pulse in the veins on either side of my head. 

Later, after my usual post awakening ablutions I prepared for the arduous nature of the days coming work. As a favor between mutual friends I agreed to remove the bulk content of Marcias earthly possessions and securely put them away within a retaining storage facility under lock, 

key, and surveillance until such a time that they might be reclaimed to their rightful inheritor. With no end in sight to the darkness which grips her poor soul, the previously mentioned mutual friend and landlord, Miss Babalas, thought it best to clear the lamenting place of personal effect for safe keeping, and for the purpose of a re-leasing of the property to a newer less encumbered tenant. 

With no little effort, the items were packed and sorted by use with labels firmly affixed to the boxes which were sealed with great abundances of tape and twine. I decided to take an additional pass through Marcias now empty, except for the boxes, a folded bed frame and a mattress against the wall, room. To be sure that I had done my due diligence and left no stragglers behind. I checked behind the mattress and a night stand, and within its drawer. Nothing. I checked inside the closet again, and felt along the top of the shelves in the darkness. Nothing on the first or second shelves. On the third shelf however I felt something odd, something hard and leather, it was a book. I slid it out from the shadow into the light and noticed that it was a small brown leather journal, of the Moleskine brand. I recognized the brand, although not this journal. She had told me one time, on a long Sunday evening in a Barnes and Nobel in the calendars and journals. 

"Moleskine" Fabricated in the legendary style of pocket notebooks by famed users such as Ernest Hemingway. " Marcia said. Her brown hair falling down into her face obscuring her eyes briefly before brushing it back. 

"You sound like a commercial" I said. "Yeah, well its a good notebook I am going to get it." 

The book was worn, its leather binding scratched and chipping at the corners. I had garnered great interest in this small tome, but constrained for time and additional obligations later this evening, thought to flip through briefly for points of interest. I opened it, and the smell of fabricated paper entered the room and filled it with mysterious ambiguity. The journal was nearly filled, line by line with the blocky text of my loving friends familiar handwriting. I opened to a random page halfway through. It was dated October 19th but year. It started with random musings, notes regarding he career, and a venting of frustration. She seemed to write in a stream of consciousness with no appropriate segues between one block paragraph or the other. Just her soul spilled out upon paper in ink. The final paragraph however, caught me unaware. I read it, each sentence more entangling than the last upon my thoughts, I gripped the sides of the book until my fingers became white and bloodless. What I read would haunt me until my dying breath. 

"He doesn't know, and he can never, ever know. The procedure will be completed tomorrow at 4PM. Doctor Goldberg, 112 Woman's Way Drive, Meriden. 860 992 4545. God forgive me for what I am going to do, but It cannot be. I Cant have this. This will destroy everything we built in our friendship. He will become possessive, and he will want more than I can ever give. I am not good enough, and I cannot pass on my sickness. God forgive me, he can never know, because he never would forgive me. " 

I closed the book quickly with a thump. I could feel the blood draining from my face. Suddenly in the abstract miasma of thoughts and consideration the month of October seemed strangely relevant to me. Several years ago, Marcia and I had been in one rain soaked evening at my home. Conversation turned heady as it had often in times passed, to discussion regarding legacies, fulfillment and matrimony. We had never aside from maybe some awkward fumbling in early youth attempted to explore what I had always thought was an undeniable physical attraction for one and other. We had spoken of safeguarding our friendship which we treasured more than a romantic tryst. But this evening, I had had much to drink and in a moment of rare and sincere vulnerability had mentioned that I had thought I would make a good father, and had often secretly dreamed of the prospect of fathering children with a good woman and beginning a family, something I had never had, but desperately desired. Marcia was adamant about never bearing children for fear of passing on her genetically inherited hyper-insulinism, which left her at birth nearly dead except for an emergency trip to Philadelphia to remove three quarters of her pancreas which, had they not would surely have killed her. In a moment of maudlin clarity I broke down in her arms, lamenting that I would never achieve my full human potential, and that fulfillment would never be achievable for me due to my inability to connect with women other than her. And in that still moment I let the secret escape that I still thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever met, and that that night the struggle to withhold that was very difficult. Maybe due to pity, alcohol induced lust, or sincere love she kissed me, and told me that it would happen if I wanted it to, I just had to be big enough to go get it. We made love shortly after. 

I turned the book in my hands and as it flipped over, a series of small colorful rectangles fell from the back of the book. Business cards. I stooped over to pick them up, and there laying on top of the pile was a card for Sarah Goldberg, MD. In association with planned parenthood, the abortion clinic in the next town.

Chapter 5: Retracing her steps 

I sat in stunned silence, uninterrupted, morose, and confused. The small book sat idle on the car seat next to me. In my hand, trembling like an autumn leaf was the small rectangular card. I read it to myself again and again, although the words didn't make sense, my eyes scanned them and I wasn't able to intake the data. What happened? Why wouldn't she tell me? Secrets, on top of secrets, on top of deception, the foul taste of it permeated my mouth until I felt the need to spit it out. How could I have been so blind? How could I miss the now obvious signs? The career change which took her further from our town, the longer hours, everything clicked together that she had been avoiding me for some time. I was too unnerved to drive my car, so I sat there waiting for the moving truck to load the boxes which would be then transported to a secured facility for safekeeping. I tucked the card into my breast pocket for additional attention at another time. But for now I had to know more, I took the journal into custody and began to thumb through it. I paused on one page, which was scribbled in frantic erratic penmanship, unlike the rest of the journal with its tidy small blocky lettering. It looked as though it was written in an intense state of emotionality. 

"In my mouth, it got in my mouth. I can't get the taste out of my mouth. Disgusting! I tried to make myself vomit but nothing would come out. My head hurts, the light hurts my eyes. In the Hopyard, it was in the Hopyard. I found it, there was an entrance under the Blasted Hearth, it's alive in there. It's always been alive in there." 

The words were legible but made no sense, without context I could not understand. The Hopyard is obviously where she is a park ranger, the Devil Hopyard, but what got into her mouth? What's alive? Where is the blasted hearth? I turned the page, only the next page was something else, mostly she wrote about feeling ill and needing to take time off of work to recover from a fever. So I turned to the next page, more writing on a lingering fever. 

None of this was making sense, I frantically flipped through the journal, she is a terrible writer. Everything is stream of consciousness, there is nothing spelled out, clearly this was only written for her eyes and never meant for those of a stranger let alone a lifelong friend. None of the pages are dated, I cannot make sense of the timeline. Then I flipped to one page, and there written in a single sentence, devoid of punctuation and syntax she wrote it "There is no hope" the very same words spoken to me in that things batrachian voice, the writing style was different, sloppy,  like a person just learning to write. Under the sentence, once uttered to me in ruinous maliciousness, was another shorter sentence, if only a few words, scribbled in nearly illegible script I could only make out the 1st few words "eat them..." then scribble, then "for lord" or at least that's what it looked like, it was so sloppily written that I could not say for certain. I gazed deep and long at the inky mess, filled with confusion and contemptuous awe, this was the start of her madness. A loud metallic clang broke my concentration, the large truck door of the movers rusted and well worn moving truck opening, the maw of hell to swallow dear Marcias personal properties. I rested the journal down to offer them entrance to the place, and to make sure they packed with care. 

Chapter 6: A Restless Night

Sleep did not come easily that night. When I thought it would and my eyes would begin to sag and grow heavy, I could see what looked like text in the dark. That sloppily scribbled scratch of malign intention. And I would consider it, and before the final curtain of unconsciousness drew I would snap awake in a frenzy of fright. Something was not quite right within me. All day I felt a tired decrepit malaise begin to envelope me. I could feel it in my muscles and within the structure of my bones. It felt like great pressure of gravity pulling me towards the earth. My stomach too, was unsettled. I took copious trips to the bathroom to relieve myself, but nothing seemed to abate the feeling of unease and disquiet. At first I took it for the erosion of my strength due to the unpleasantness of the daily work and the sadness welling within me for my lost friend, but now it seemed different, somatic, physical, not from a mental strain, although I am well aware of the mind body connection, but this is different. This was coming from someplace different and working its way into my mind, from my body. I took a Tylenol PM with the hope of a dreamless sleep, if only for the rest it could bring without the possibility of further nightmares. 

I awoke after a dreamless yet tentative sleep. As soon as my eyes opened to the darkness I could feel heaps of anguish emanating from some unknown space. In my ears there was a persistent, but deft ringing. I struggled to switch on a lamp beside my bed, only to find that it did not work. So I used my cell phone to illuminate the space. The phone said 4AM but it felt much later, I was haggard, more tired than when I had gone to sleep, and still my mind was shrink wrapped in worry and confusion. My stomach was full of knots, I felt an urge to retch, but remembered I had not eaten dinner. I rolled onto my side and the convulsions began. Violently I retched, again and again with nothing coming of it. I leaped meekly from my bed to go to the bathroom and shoved my head into the toilet hoping for relief. Again I retched, now in the position to which I was accustomed when sick for vomiting. Nothing again would come out except long strings of clear vicious saliva. Then a drop of black, almost ink splattered into the water of the bowl. As it spread out the color lessened in its ebon darkness and showed way to dark crimson but almost still black pitch. Another drop and another, I was vomiting and retching blood. Then one final convulsion and a stream of sticky hot blackness spewed from me, splattering the rim of the bowl in terminate blackness and deep unholy red. Something is wrong. Normally when I vomit during any average sickness I feel better, this time however with every retch, I felt more nauseous and more pressure. My ears were ringing loudly now, and perhaps in some immutable fashion growing in intensity I could swear I could hear laughing in a low sadistic growl of a voice. I lifted myself to look in the mirror of my vanity, I was gaunt, and pale. My eyes sallow and sunken. My night shirt was covered in the black bile like substance and my head felt as though it was going to explode. Tears were welling down my cheeks, I had acquired the same ghastly look Marcia had when last I saw her. I said to myself "there is no hope." In a small weak voice, half choked with bile and hoarseness, followed by uncontrollable sobbing in what was certainly not my own voice. I suddenly felt light headed, and I looked around the room frantically, the doorway which lead to darkness now seemed to be glowing faintly, the same spectrum of dim ghost light that I swear I saw that day in Marcias confined hell. Something was wrong. I reached for the door, which no longer seemed to lead to my kitchen but to some other multiverse of unending malevolence, I attempted to take a step towards it only to lose my balance and fall, hard, onto the tiled floor. I lay there, on my back looking through this portal, until I fainted into undetectable darkness. The first such fit I had ever had.