Ch 22 – The Thought Of What Would Be and What Was Reality

Everything was dark.

I could hear muffled sounds coming from the outside, no more no less. To whom those voices that spoke those various words belonged to was unclear. Although I could deduce Fred’s whenever I heard a man speak, considering he was the only man in the room. Honestly though I could care less about anything going on outside. I was secure here, on the inside. Safe. I was regressing back to the time before, when I had no name, no identity besides “baby.” The more I thought about the situation the more I believed I had found Heaven, inside the Grandmother Nurse. I would spend my remaining days here, enjoying the fruitful placenta all around me, taking nourishment from the Grandmother Nurse herself. My eyes were closing and I felt my body preparing to go into a deep slumber when the room shook like I was in San Francisco in 1906.

What the hell?

Suddenly a deep, guttural scream reverberated inside my fortress of solitude. I could both hear and feel the scream, followed by another and another. At the same time my ears began to pop due to the change in cabin pressure. A thin white dot appeared over my left shoulder, the source of said light originating down a scary dark path.

Ohhhh I didn’t like where this was going.

I felt my body slide forward, compelled by a force greater than I. I had no control over my surroundings and nothing to grip on to. The scream turned into screams plural, growing louder and more anguished with each breath. An intense fear gripped me deep within my scrotum; I did not want to go down that scary dark path. There was a monster out there, a monster sure to do me in. But what choice did I have? My body was being compelled forward and the screaming was now echoing inside my brain, imprinting upon my psyche the true horror of life. I half expected the face of the mighty Cthulhu to suddenly appear and scatter my soul across the eons of space and time. Survival wasn’t even a question at this point, for what good would my physical body be with a cracked mind and an empty spirit dwelling within?

Ohhhhh I was fucked. FUCKED.

The thin white dot that appeared over my left shoulder a couple of minutes ago was slowly growing, like the complete opposite of an eclipse. Even worse, the scary dark path was now growing illuminated in white light. A part of me still wished for the imagined horrors of that tunnel rather than the ghostly illumination pouring forth. My body continued to slide closer and closer, with my face leading the way. I tried to put out both arms and legs and anchor my limbs to something, anything. Except there was nothing to fasten on to, nothing to set anchor on and I was dragged like a puppy going to her first visit to the vet.

By this point, the screaming outside was joined by loud exhortations by the others in the room to continue doing whatever was being done. I tried to scream for her to stop, stop this bedeviling witchcraft and let me be in peace but my mouth was full of delicious placenta. Curses!

My face had reached the beginning of the dark scary path, now rather bright and filled with crudely drawn artwork. To my left was a picture of a brown man with a spear hunting what appeared to be buffalo. To my right was a picture of a man with a rather long beard holding the neck of what I could barely make out to be a duck in his hands. Despite the crude drawing, the man looked remarkably lifelike. In fact, he almost seemed to be winking at me…

WAIT

Bearded man…

Duck…

A flashback washed over my eyes and I was back inside my bedroom, holding a note that ended with,

“The moment you see the light…duck.”

The memory had no sooner vanished from my eyes when I heard a triumphant yell and the excited shrill cries of a woman. To this day the only words I could make out for sure were, “YES YES,” the rest were a jumbled jargon of ancient Danish words muttered in an incantation form. This was it, the moment of truth. The light suddenly dimmed and I felt a small hand feel for me. Instinctively I reached for a finger and felt my body pulled out of the dark and back into the light. Screams of triumph replaced screams of anguish as I took my first breath returning to this reality.

LIGHT

DUCK

Without thinking I contorted my body to the left, sliding out of the normal right hand of Fred and fell to the floor a cat hair away from a blade raining vengeance from above. The events transpired so quickly that the sword pierced the air where my now bizarrely fully-grown body had previously occupied and landed directly above the right knee of the Grandmother Nurse.

I hit the floor with a thud, the thick lower half of a leg following suit and I shall never forget the scream that came two seconds later. It’s funny, two seconds might not seem like a lot of time but in those two seconds I felt the air go still and could see everything in slow motion. From my view on the floor I saw Fred’s face transform from total victory to total panic. Because of the positioning of the Grandmother Nurse, when her right leg was torn asunder a spigot of blood came blasting forth as if from a fire hose. Fred’s mind went into complete shock from the thought of what would be and what was reality. All he could do was stand there with his mouth dangling open while the impact from the blood knocked him flat on his ass. Conveniently, the sword that was previously in his 747 of a left hand was now standing straight up on the ground next to him.

More screaming…

More panic…

Blood everywhere.

My mind commanded my legs to get up and run but my legs had atrophied in the brief time inside the Grandmother Nurse. My body might have grown to the size of a normal adult but the muscles were not yet used to supporting such a structure. As such, I remained there on the floor, covered by a severed leg and pints upon pints of blood. The thought of a return attack by Fred entered my mind and I feverishly twisted my neck around to see where he was and what he was doing. I stopped doing so the moment I heard the attractive nurse scream six words I deduced were directed at me,

“YOU KILLED HIM, YOU KILLED FRED!”

And then I slept.