I hadn't worn a watch, but I figured it had to be close to last call. Tom wasn't outside either, but he'd have to come out of the club eventually, so I decided to wait. Then it struck me that he'd probably left without me. There I was, waiting for him to make sure he got home safely, and he’d probably gone on his merry way without giving me a thought. That would be typical Tom. And typical of how I’d let him walk all over me. How could a woman be so bright and so dense all at the same time?
There were groups of people standing in front of the club in various states of inebriation, drug intoxication, and passionate embrace, so I strolled further down the block and rested against the building, folding back into the shadows, still exploring the art of breathing and appreciating the solitude.
I mentally reviewed what I’d seen in the basement. Nothing fit with any of my therapeutic experience. In all my reading and research, I’d never run across anything that included fangs, levitation, and the kind of unearthly noises that were yowling out of that room.
What if there really are such things as vampires? What am I supposed to do with that? If there are vampires, then I might as well pull up stakes—so to speak—and go work in a fast food restaurant somewhere, because everything I thought was true, isn’t.
I dropped my head back against the cool of the old brick and closed my eyes. The moment I did that, a wave of dizziness swept over me and I braced myself against the wall, feeling as if the ground had actually moved. I held myself there, locking my knees to keep myself upright in the midst of the spinning, and opened my eyes. Everything was subtly different. I blinked a few times to clear my vision but couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong. Something had changed. The darkness was deeper, more textured. The air seemed thick, heavy, and scented with a sweet, coppery aroma. The smell got stronger until I could taste it in the back of my throat and I gagged.
“Come to me.”
I gasped. The voice was repulsive; it crawled on my skin with slimy fingers. I automatically jerked my head over, raising a shoulder to block the sound entering one ear.
What the hell was that? Im really losing it. I willed myself not to move.
“Come. Now.”
I couldn’t tell if I heard the voice with my physical ears or inside my mind, but it was unlike any I’d ever experienced before. It was as if the words attacked my eardrums. The sound split into dissonant octaves again and again, until it filled the entire vibrational spectrum, reminding me of those experiments by the government using audio frequencies to create madness.
But I also had the sense of feeling the voice kinaesthetically, of being able to locate places in my body where it was resonating, pulsing, invading. My bones and organs vibrated in time with a powerful rhythm outside of me, and the pressure increased as the sound waves echoed around and through me, becoming more painful as they escalated.
The voice tore at my ears, repeating the same message over and over. I covered them with my hands and screamed, “No!”
“I am here. Come to me and I will show you miracles. I will grant all your earthly desires.”
I felt myself moving away from the wall, pulled as if by a powerful magnet. My solar plexus tingled and ached, becoming hyper-sensitive, and I had the bizarre notion that an invisible something was attached to my midsection, physically compelling me. My head felt fuzzy, my mind disconnected. I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t resist. I walked away from the club into the darkness of the street beyond, the sense of dread and terror growing stronger with every wobbly step. Then everything went dark.
***
I woke up in a coffin.
That might seem unpleasant, unsanitary or maybe creepy to most people, but for me it was my worst nightmare.
This might be a good time to explain my greatest fear.
When I was young I saw an old movie called "Premature Burial," where—due to a strange illness that caused complete paralysis mimicking death—people were buried before they were dead. They were put in boxes, placed in holes in the ground and were very aware of the dirt being piled on top of their supposedly deceased selves. They couldn't communicate their aliveness to any of the grieving mourners, so they slowly suffocated. When the illness was finally discovered and the Unfortunate Buried Alive were dug up, it became clear that at some point in the process the paralysis had worn off and the bloody fingernails of the Unwillingly Interred were evidence of their vain attempts to escape. A hideous death, to my mind. I couldn't sleep for weeks after watching that movie.
A psychic later told me that I'd died in a previous life due to being buried alive or maybe drowned or perhaps suffocated with a pillow—just choose one of the air-restricted methods—and that was why the movie had affected me so profoundly. I can't verify the accuracy of my previous causes of death, but I do know that anything dealing with being unable to breathe thrusts me into spasms of terror.
As I said, I woke up in a coffin, but I didn't know that right away.
The first thing I noticed was a putrid smell. A unique stench consisting of backed-up sewer, rotted meat, blood, mold, mildew, and dead bodies. The smell was so horribly potent that it caused me to become aware of the second thing: it was very dark. The reason the smell triggered me to notice the darkness was because as soon as I got a good whiff of it, my stomach heaved. I tried to sit up, or roll over, because I didn't want to throw up on myself, and I was certain that vomit was in my immediate future.
My effort to sit up caused me to bang my head against an unexpected barrier, which led me to discover there was a ceiling directly above my body. I began to push against it and quickly deduced it was an immovable object—or at least a very heavy one.
Then I panicked.
The feeling of my hands pushing against the resisting material immediately triggered a cellular memory of the aforementioned movie, and I started to scream, which shifted my attention away from throwing up. This proved to be very helpful. Fear is a powerful motivator. Like the mothers who lift multi-ton vehicles off their children, imagining myself locked in a box for my ride onto the Entry Ramp to Eternity allowed me to become Hulk-like in my strength, and to force open what turned out to be the substantial lid of an old coffin.
I sat up, still screaming, the sound reverberating off the walls of the small, decrepit building I'd awakened in. A building that smelled extraordinarily bad.
Raising the lid on the coffin allowed me to see the sunlight filtering in through the broken front door. I couldn't tell how much time had passed, but it was obviously day. A chunk of my life was missing. I valiantly tried to reconstruct the chain of events that had brought me to this moment, and failed.
I stopped screaming—mostly because it hurt my throat— and let my eyes adjust to the dim light. Being able to see where I was made things worse. Instead of only suspecting I was up shit creek, I now had verification.
The building was an old, rundown mausoleum. Low spots in the cement floor were filled with stagnant, rancid water mixed with blood from several blatantly dead bodies. Even in the limited light, it was clear that no human in any state of aliveness could be the color of the remains scattered around that room. The place looked like a human slaughterhouse. Back in the corner were bones and pieces of rotting clothing, which gave evidence to the likelihood that whatever was going on here had been going on for a very long time.
Needless to say, I had to get out.
I assumed that whoever had killed all those people was probably coming back to get me. I didn't have time to think about why I was still alive—why the murderer had left me in the coffin instead of adding me to the collection on the floor. It occurred to me I was probably in shock, which explained the strange, fuzzy feeling in my head.
Since the lid of the coffin had only swung back on its hinge and was still standing straight up on one side, I couldn't brace myself by holding onto both edges to lift up. I grabbed onto the available surface and put my other hand down alongside my legs and felt my hand sink into clumps of dirt or sand. I pulled my knees up and heard a soft clattering sound as something knocked against the side of the coffin. I reached my hand in to find what had made the noise and closed my fingers around a long, stick-like thing. I brought it up into the light and found myself in possession of a human bone. I had been lying on top of whoever had been buried in that coffin.
Holy shit
My stomach lurched again. I rose to my feet as if pulled by ropes. Looking down, I could clearly see the remains of the original resident. I brushed off as much of the decomposed material as I could from the rear of my pants with shaking hands and apologized silently to the person I was scattering into the air.
The coffin I was now standing in was situated on a pedestal about three feet off the floor. The area close around it was filled with the dead bodies and pools of bloody water. I would have to jump, which under the best of circumstances called on grace I hadn't cultivated, and to jump while wearing four-inch heels would guarantee a painful outcome. But, if my choice was to wait in the coffin for the psychopath to return or take my chances with a sprained ankle, I'd choose the sprain anytime.
Not being adept in physical situations, it took me a moment to realize that I could crouch, sit on the open edge of the coffin and scoot down, finding a small space for the ball of my foot to land on one of the few dry spaces on the floor and then ease myself away from the pedestal.
That's what I did, all the while listening for any sound that would alert me to the return of the insane person who'd brought me there.
I walked on tiptoes through the carnage to the door, unable to avoid wading through puddles of slimy, bloody water, and finally reached the stairs leading up to the light. My stomach had been clinched so tightly I'd barely breathed since I got out of the coffin. I climbed up the stone steps and shoved the door, which swung open on rusty hinges, making that sound always present in horror movies. Then I stepped out into the sunshine and found myself in the middle of an old graveyard.
I heard sounds of traffic nearby and moved in that direction. I kept glancing behind me to see if it had been a trap; if someone—or something—was going to spring out at me from behind one of the huge gravestones and haul me back into the pit of hell, but I was alone.
I must have been quite a sight as I walked out of the ornate, cast iron gates of the graveyard and crossed the parking lot of McDonalds.
Chapter Thirteen
I had no idea where I was.
Another beautiful day in paradise had gotten all dressed up and started without me. The sun beamed almost directly overhead, making it about noon. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I spun in a slow circle, searching for the mountains to give me a sense of where I was. Denver is a consistent distance from various distinctive peaks and I always got my bearings by checking out my location in relation to the mountains, as well as the ever-present downtown skyscrapers.
Turns out I was within walking distance of Devereux's club. I never knew there was an old graveyard tucked away back behind fast food row. Well, you know what they say about learning something new every day.
High pitched giggles drew my squinty eyes down from the horizon and I found myself gazing at a clump of little girls, all holding dripping ice cream cones. As they surrounded me, one sticky-fingered angel said, "You're funny!" This caused another wave of gleeful laughter.
"I'm funny?"
That was apparently hilarious.
Another sweet cherub said, "What are you doing in the middle of the parking lot? Are you dancing? What's all that stuff on you?"
I looked down at myself and discovered I was covered in everything I'd found back in the death pit in the graveyard. Including dried blood, which was all over my hands.
Gasping, I immediately leaped to the most drastic conclusion: that the blood was mine. I inspected myself, searching for wounds or cuts, anything that would explain the stains, but I didn't find anything. And since I had no recollection of what'd transpired during the missing hours—and at that moment I wasn't up for exploring the disgusting possibilities—I gave myself permission to stuff the entire matter deep inside my psychological Do Not Enter zone.
A pretty little brown-eyed tyke ventured a couple of tentative steps in my direction, pointed and yelled, "You smell!"
That was definitely some kind of cosmic cue. Simultaneously, anxious mothers scurried forth from everywhere, retrieved their children and whisked them back to the play area.
"What did I tell you? Never talk to strangers!" one mother scolded, as she pulled her child away, tossing frightened glances back over her shoulder.
I raised my arm up to my nose and sniffed. Yuck. I did smell. In fact, I smelled worse than horrible. Just like that ghastly place. No wonder the moms had treated me as if I was a carrier of the black plague. And I could only imagine the visual I presented.
I fished in my pocket to see if the cash I'd put there the night before had survived my mysterious experience, and I pulled out a handful of bills and coins. Even though I could've walked to Devereux's club, the memories of the previous night left a bad taste in my mouth. I had no desire to make a return visit. All I wanted to do was go home, take off the toe-smashing boots and crawl into a hot bath.
I'd just spied a telephone booth and headed in that direction to call for a cab, when a police cruiser pulled into the parking lot and blocked my path. Either I really did appear suspicious enough to draw the attention of a passing cop car, or someone in the restaurant had called the police to deal with the crazy lady.
Two very young officers got out of the car and walked cautiously over to me. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I got.
"Are you Dr. Knight?"