The Fall

The clock on the dashboard read 1:37am, and three typical teenage boys were out for a Taco Bell run after a late concert at Massey Hall. They had just seen Buckethead, that crazy guitar player who was supposedly raised by chickens and wore a KFC fried chicken bucket on his head (hence the name, “Buckethead”). They were pumped, because each of them, by pure stroke of luck, had gotten their ticket stubs signed by the man himself. Buckethead was throwing after-show backstage passes into the front of the crowd, and for whatever fateful reason three stuck together; they caught them, pulled them apart, and nearly passed out with rapture. Along with the signed ticket stubs they were given free CDs, t-shirts, and free all-inclusive passes to the next show of their choice at Massey Hall. All in all, it had been a good night.
The three teenagers, Egan, Keary, and Camlin were heading southwest on QEW, when Camlin, sitting in the driver’s seat, gently began to press the brake pedal down and turn the car to the right, onto the side of the road. Egan began to look around, wondering why they were stopping. Keary said nothing nor showed any curiosity as they slowed to a halt on the side of the deserted highway.
They were roughly a mile from the exit that would take them to Taco Bell.
“Hey, Cam, why’d we stop?” Egan asked. “Do we have a flat tire or something? Run out of gas?”
“No, nothing’s wrong.” He pointed to the gas gauge, which read three-fourths full, as Egan saw en route to looking up at Camlin’s face. “I just need to make a quick phone call. You know how I am about driving and talking on my cell.”
He flashed Egan a quick smile before pulling the car door handle and slipping out into the early morning air. A flash of slightly chilled wind swirled throughout the cab, carrying a slight aroma of red and gold leaves and wood smoke before the door slammed shut behind Camlin.
Egan watched as Camlin crossed through the headlights to the other side of the car and wandered up a ways. The glow from the headlights combined with the eerie fog rolling in made him seem somewhat transparent, almost ghostlike. A shiver went up Egan’s spine, and he turned away from Camlin’s spectral sight as he dialed number on his cell phone. He leaned in toward Keary in the front seat.
“Hey Keary, did you like that one opening band, oh, what was their name... Swingline, like the stapler, right?” Keary nodded his confirmation. “I dunno, man, that band was... I don’t even know what to think of them. Like, the guitar was pretty fricken amazing, and they had some kickass tunes, but others were just, not good, you know?” Egan shook his head. “I might have to download some of their tunes and really listen to them, minus all the crowd noise and crazy shit they were doing onstage.”
Keary undid his seatbelt and twisted in his seat to better face Egan. “Yeah, I don’t know, I never really liked them much from the beginning. They seemed a little to poppy, too mainstream to me.” He shrugged a little with one shoulder.
Egan sat back in his seat. “Yeah, I thought so too for a couple of their songs. I think when we get back from Taco Bell, I’ll hit up the torrent websites so that I can download their album while—”
“DAMMIT! Ah, fucking DAMMIT!”
Egan and Keary turned their heads out the windshield. Camlin was yelling into his phone, but not as loud as the exclamation that had cut Egan off midsentence.
“What’s that all about, I wonder?” Egan said.
Keary only shrugged. He was the picture of indifference, but as Egan looked closer, Keary had a strange look in his eyes, like he was feeling whatever rage Camlin was venting to the poor soul on the other end of the connection.
“Well, I hope he’s done with whoever he was yelling at; I’m starving.”
*Zzzzzzzttt!*
Keary frowned over at Egan before he reached into his pants pocket, pulling out his own cell phone. His face was cast in an eerie glow from the display, changing like a TV screen as he navigated the screens to his text message inbox.
“Did he just send you a text message from outside the car?” asked Egan.
Keary grunted, not giving Egan a clear answer. As Egan watched him read the tiny screen, Keary’s face paled slightly. He looked over at Egan in the back seat. He looked afraid, but at the same time Egan could tell he had expected whatever it was he had read in the text message.
Egan suddenly felt very afraid for his life, though he couldn’t understand why.
“What is it, what’s wrong?”
Keary only stared at him in answer. The car once again filled with the smell of fall as Camlin opened the car door and slid into his place behind the wheel. Keary looked away.
“Alright, now that that’s settled, let’s get off this deserted highway and get us some tacos, how ‘bout it?” Camlin smiled over at Keary, and then turned back to Egan. His smile looked forced; he didn’t know how he knew that, either, but he did. He looked back at Keary and gave him a look, almost like he was saying “Chill the fuck out.”
“Hey, guys, I don’t feel so hungry anymore,” Egan said. “I think all the heat and jumping around made my stomach a bit queasy. Can you just drop me off at home, since it’s on the way?”
“Man, no way!” Camlin threw his right arm over the back of his seat to turn around. “Me and Keary are starving, and I’m driving, so you go where I go. Besides, we’d have to get off the highway early to drop you back off in the neighborhood, then get back on, go to the Bell, then go all the way back to the neighborhood again. You want me to charge you for the inconvenience you caused me in gas money? It’s getting expensive to drive, you know.”
Egan didn’t buy it. He had dropped him off just like that countless times. What was going on, why was Camlin so insistent that he stay in the car with them?
“Listen, Cam I really don’t feel well. I want to go home and sleep. You’ve brought me home before, why can’t you just do it one more time?”
“It’s too expensive to go back and forth like that.”
“That’s not why and we both know it”
Camlin stared back at Egan with a look he didn’t recall ever seeing on his face. It was mix of anger, amusement, and immense sadness. It frightened him to the bone.
“Alright,” Camlin sighed. “Listen, Egan, I can’t take you home.”
And so it comes out. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you. I told Them I wouldn’t tell you why, just bring you with us”
“Wait, who’s ‘them’? ‘Us’? You mean, you mean you and Keary?”
“I told you, I can’t tell you who They are. And yes, me and Keary.”
“I don’t understand; what do they want with me?”
“No more questions.” As he spoke, his eyes began to fade from blue to black, making it look like his iris was dilated from an eye doctor visit; to Egan’s horror, it spread beyond his iris and into the whites of his eyes until they were completely black. He looked demonic. Keary glanced back and he saw that his eyes had undergone the same transformation. It was an alarming sight.
Camlin turned back around in his seat and started the car, revving the engine a couple times before easing it off the shoulder and back onto the highway.
In a panic, Egan turned to the door closest to him and tried to open it, and found it was locked. He tried flicking the lock to release it, but the door did not give. He unbuckled and slid to the other door, and found the same result. He knew Camlin didn’t have the child safety locks on; his car didn’t have any. Frantic, he kept trying to open the door, hoping there would be a fluke in whatever was holding it closed and it would open. He didn’t care that the car was moving; he had a strange feeling that it would be better to jump out of the moving car in comparison to whatever he was speeding towards.
“Please, Egan,” Keary pleaded to him, black eyes looking at him through the void between the headrest and the seat. “Please, just come with us quietly. I swear, it’ll be better for you if you do. They don’t like it when people are brought in struggling, fighting Them.”
Egan paused in his frantic attempts to escape to look into his eyes. “You don’t want to do this, I can tell you don’t. Why? Why are you in on this?”
Keary didn’t answer. He turned back, pausing to glare at Camlin, before staring out into the night, a night as black and lifeless as their eyes.
Egan’s focus returned to the doors. As he did, he thought he saw the window flicker. He paused, watching the window, but all he could see was pitch black. As he went to grab the door handle again, the window flickered again, like a TV screen. Egan watched as the window faded into a static screen, mute of the white noise that would normally be present on any such channel. Abruptly it flicked to a different screen as if controlled by a remote control. Egan saw a dark, barren room, holding nothing but a small cot and a pot in the corner. There was no window.
The screen began to move in toward the cot. Curious, and a little anxious at the same time, he peered closer. He saw there was a figure sprawled out on the cot, unmoving. The screen rose up and over the figure smoothly, going up the length of the body. The clothes the figure, he now identified as male, wore were tattered, ripped, and stained. Through some of the rips Egan could see deep, painful-looking cuts and bruises. He wore no shoes.
The screen rose up to the man’s face. What Egan saw made Egan recoil in horror.
It was himself.
The face was a canvas of bruises and cuts, both fresh and old-looking. The only reason he knew it to be him was that he saw his own face in the mirror every day, and had for as long as he could remember.
Terrified that it this was to be his fate at the end of the car ride, he scrambled to open up the door. He pulled the handle and put all his weight and as much pressure as he could on it. Suddenly, it gave, and he fell out the door. He closed his eyes at the expected impact with speeding pavement. But he never hit. Impact never came. He opened his eyes and saw he was falling into the scene he had just left in the window. He was falling toward the man on the cot, falling toward himself. He looked back up to the open car door, now seemingly miles away. He looked back again, and slammed into his immobile body. Not on top of it, he was surprised to find, but into it. He gasped, opened his eyes, and felt the pain of the wounds he had seen a moment before burn through him, causing him to gasp again. Egan tried to move, but the effort set his joints afire, and he lay back down. He wanted to get up and get out of this place, this cell, but he couldn’t move; he feared the pain.
He felt trapped in this nightmare of events. Just an hour ago he was on his way home from one of the most awesome concerts of his life, and now he was trapped in a windowless room, beaten, it felt, within an inch of his life. Everything he had ever wanted, or had hoped to one day want, was lost. He felt a scream welling up inside him, and at first he resisted, not wanting to alert anyone who might be nearby, but eventually he let it go, knowing that at this point, it didn’t matter what happened now. He let it consume him, letting it rip through his body. It echoed a million times of the walls of his dark little cell, echoed back to him until he couldn’t tell if he was still screaming. Time stretched, faded, and slurred into nothingness.

 

Egan was still screaming as he woke, sitting up as his scream echoed off the walls and faded. They faded much faster than he expected of a stone cell, more characteristic of a sheetrock room. As his eyes adjusted to his surroundings, he noticed he was no longer in a cell. Egan could see posters of Nirvana, Fair to Midland, MuteMath, The Audition, and many more of his favorite bands on the walls, stripped with light from the closed blinds. He saw it was 1:37pm, the day after the concert. He was home.
He was almost too giddy with relief to contain himself. It had been a dream. Just a silly, stupid, if not scary, dream. And he had slept right through lunch time. He was starving, so he threw the covers off himself and swung his legs out onto the floor. As he stood, his joints burned as if they were on fire. Must be the lingering effects of the mosh pit, he reasoned.
He stretched, arching his back like a cat, and crossed the soft carpet to his private bathroom to wash up a little. Hot water streamed from the faucet, steaming up the bottom of the mirror on the wall. Egan pulled the washcloth off the towel rack behind him, wet it, and lathered it with soap. It unexpectedly stung his face. Water was too hot, he guessed.
After he rinsed the water and soap off his face, he looked up, preparing to look into the mirror as he wiped the water from his face with a dry towel. He was smiling as the towel came away and he looked into his reflection as he had done countless times before.
The smile faded when Egan saw what was reflected in the mirror.
Like an abstract painting, his face was a myriad of blues, blacks, reds, and yellows. Here and there, as if the artist had become frustrated with his work, angry red slashes crossed each other on his cheeks, mouth, and eyebrows.
Egan looked down at his arms and saw wounds similar to those on his face. He also noticed, to his utter horror, that he was wearing the same clothes as he was in the windowless cell. The fluorescent lights of his bathroom revealed what he did not see in the darkness of the dungeon; the stains were dark, dried blood.
His eyes returned to the mirror to study more his face. As he did so, he saw something else that wasn’t there before he began to inspect his arms.
There were faces to each side of and behind his shoulders.
The faces had black eyes.
His nose began to bleed and dripped into the sink, crimson against the white porcelain.