Dark Matter Presents Haunted Reels: Stories from the Minds of Professional Filmmakers

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS DARK MATTER.

 

DARK MATTER PRESENTS: HAUNTED REELS is the newest anthology in our 'Dark Matter Presents' series. In April 2020, the world faced imminent lock-down, so a group of filmmakers started a virtual support group. Once a week, these diverse voices would assemble to do what they do best: tell each other stories. Campfire horror tales, emotional cosmic mysteries, and anything else that either made them take their minds off what was happening to the world, or help them understand it. HAUNTED REELS is the best of those stories.

 

Curated by film producer, David Lawson Jr., this collection features 29 brand-new stories written by some of the biggest and most creative names in film, TV, and video games, including C. Robert Cargill (Sinister, Dr. Strange, The Black Phone), Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson (Something in the Dirt, Moon Knight, Loki), and Janina Gavankar (The Morning Show, God of War: Ragnarök, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tales of the Jedi).

 

The book covers a wide range of genre fiction, from science fiction and horror, to alternate history and new weird, so there is sure to be something in here for every kind of reader and fan.

 

STORIES BY:

Jay Baruchel

The Gloom

 

Justin Benson

The World Often End

 

Lola Blanc

Yeast

 

Sarah Bolger

The Deception of Youth

 

C. Robert Cargill

It Stood Above Me

 

B. J. Colangelo

"Natalie Fears Recurrence" and Other Letters the Psychiatrist Recommended She Write

 

Michael Dunker

Detroit

 

Owen Egerton

Dead No Longer

 

Elise Finnerty & Estelle Girard-Parks

It Comes Back

 

Kyra Gardner

Strange to Me

 

Janina Gavankar & Russo Schelling

FuGaZi

 

Jordan Goldstein

Sprout

 

Brea Grant

Hologram Store

 

Gigi Saul Guerrero

This Is Not My Face

 

Gillie Klabin

Weavers

 

David Lawson Jr.

Towards the Light

 

Izzy Lee

The Beginning

 

Carl Lucas

Vox Canis

 

Malachi Moore

Desire Path

 

Aaron Moorhead

A Story with a Beginning and No End

 

Jared Moshe

The Man Who Saved the World

 

Wanjiru Njendu

Ilimu

 

Nick Peterson

Breathe

 

Brett Pierce & Drew Pierce

Muzzle

 

Cezil Reed

The Fiancée Comes to Visit

 

Gary Sherman

Spells

 

Graham Skipper

Grim

 

A. T. White

Midnight: A Series of Letters

 

Ariel Vida

Roll the Bones

 

Read more

Release date: July 25, 2023

Publisher: Dark Matter INK

Print pages: 418

Content advisory: Stories include foul language, disturbing imagery, and graphic depictions of sex and violence. Reader discretion is advised.

Sample

INTRODUCTION

C. Robert Cargill

Many years ago, my good friend Joe Lynch had his film Mayhem accepted into the SXSW Film Festival—a prestigious Austin-based multimedia festival, covering interactive (software), music, and movies. The film track is a huge launching point for independent genre and documentary films, but the popularity of the fest means hotel rooms across the city sell out months—sometimes a year—in advance. Joe was left with a film in a big festival, but no place to stay for its three showings. He reached out, and I let him crash at my place for a week in our guest room.

While there, between screenings, he and I spent most nights out on my porch, drinking beers and telling industry war stories. Our ups, our downs, our inspirations, and sometimes we got deeply personal. Joe called it “porch beers.” When he went back to LA. and people asked him about the experience, in addition to discussing the screenings, he told many of them, “If you get down to Austin, make sure to have porch beers with Cargill.”

A few months later, someone did just that. A friend reached out and said he was flying into Austin in a matter of hours and was told he needed to have “porch beers.” I had nothing pressing, so I picked him and a few of his crew members up from the airport, and we drank on the porch until dawn, once again swapping our war stories, commiserating, and just having a great time talking about work in a purely cathartic way.

He went back to LA and began telling friends: “If you get down to Austin, make sure to have porch beers with Cargill.”

And from then on, whenever they were in town, calls and texts came in from filmmakers wanting to have “porch beers.”

Within a few years, people began requesting to come over during the three major Austin film events of the year: SXSW, the screenwriter-centric Austin Film Festival, and the genre bacchanalia that is Fantastic Fest. By 2019, I was hosting over a dozen porch beers a year, with upwards of a dozen filmmakers a night sitting on the porch, swapping the stories they couldn’t tell at the festival—both terrible and triumphant—all under the auspice of one rule: what was said at porch beers stayed at porch beers. And that held. The stories told there always stayed there. First-time genre filmmakers mingled with A-listers—writers, directors, actors, producers, editors, composers. We were all filmmakers at porch beers, and we learned firsthand that we were not alone. Making movies is fucking hard. Sometimes really fucking hard. It can drain you, grind you down into dust, even sometimes traumatize you. But we’ve all been there, and the catharsis of talking with your peers about your trials and tribulations can be amazing. Fantastic Fest 2019 saw eight porch beers in a row, one for each night of the fest.

Then 2020 hit. SXSW was the very first major event to cancel. Then Chattanooga Film Festival, a favorite regional festival of many on the circuit, had to cancel their in-person portion. We were all stuck inside, our industry and careers left

entirely uncertain, as we all found ourselves inside of a horror movie.

Three filmmakers who had attended several porch beers in the past—Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, and David Lawson Jr.—reached out and asked if they could use the name “porch beers” for something they were planning. They’d grown stir crazy during lockdown, and one of the things they lamented missing the most was sitting around and drinking with other filmmakers. So they wondered: What if we did it digitally? I told them I didn’t have a trademark or anything on the name, but loved that they wanted to rekindle the experience, if even in a limited capacity.

And thus the Zoom-room version of porch beers was born. Every Thursday night, starting at 8:30 p.m. PST, the room opened, and filmmakers from all walks of life would filter in. Our youngest filmmaker was a twenty-one-year-old fresh out of film school; our oldest was in his mid-seventies and had directed films many of us had grown up on and been inspired by. Over the course of the pandemic, nearly a hundred filmmakers would join the room—some only once, others week in and week out, come rain or shine. Some nights would only host half a dozen for an intimate chat; other nights would see twenty different filmmakers hanging out at once, for hours at a time.

Some jokingly referred to it as “Thursday Night Therapy.” Others used it to navigate their current development nightmares, knowing full well someone in the room might have the answer to their woes, all still under that cone of silence. And over the course of three years, numerous deep, close friendships formed in that room. I have over two dozen truly amazing close friends that I hadn’t even met in person until years into our friendship.

In 2022, many of us got together for the first time at the Fantasia Film Festival, and then shortly thereafter had a thirty-filmmaker in-person porch beers, reviving the tradition at Fantastic Fest. Somewhere along the line, a discussion was had that we all wanted to do something together. This book is that something. What you hold in your hands is the physical manifestation of numerous filmmakers’ emotional survival of the global pandemic. There’s a lot we all lost during those years, but for the authors of this book, something wonderful was gained.

These are our nightmares. These are the echoes of the things we’ve all been through. Horror is catharsis; it is pure, unbridled empathy. This is the distillation of three years of discussing filmmaking, our lives, and what it means to make genre, particularly horror. And we hope you enjoy it.

“NATALIE FEARS RECURRENCE” AND OTHER LETTERS THE PSYCHIATRIST RECOMMENDED SHE WRITE

B. J. Colangelo

MARCH 12TH

I think Dr. Paslawski exclusively bathes in peppermint and tea tree oil. I’m going to dread our sessions because every time I enter her office, the smell of menthol slaps me across the face as if I’ve committed some blasphemous crime in the eyes of the invasive plant community. Tea tree oil is an antifungal, so she’s only telling on herself.

Why am I starting this way? Probably because I don’t want to do this. No, not probably. I really, really don’t want to fucking do this.

Okay. So. I’m Natalie. I’m twenty-six. Hi. Nice to meet you—whoever ends up reading this.

My girlfriend brought me here hoping they’d help me or whatever, and now I’m sitting at a desk covered in a layer of film from what feels like hastily applied disinfectant, and my nose is STILL recovering from the sting of cheap peppermint while I play “Dear Diary.”

“Natalie fears recurrence,” she said to me.

At least she doesn’t call it hallucinations.

Someone scratched a pointy looking heart at the top of this desk near the little dip where crayons sit. The linework looks too thick to have been a safety pin. It was probably a paper clip. But…who would need a paper clip? And who would have a casual paperclip at the ready in the middle of a therapy session?

Someone who needs therapy, clearly.

I shouldn’t talk shit about the mysterious paperclip carver. They could be very nice for all I know. Or they could be someone who skins cats alive with paper clips and squashes their flesh between their toes. But how did they get it in here? My tits are hanging past my belly button because underwire bras are on the ban list, next to shoelaces and spiral notebooks. A girl who thought aliens were sending her messages through her refrigerator magnets pulled hers out and slit her throat with it a few years back in the middle of the common area, and now my lower back has to suffer.

It’s a real crock, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe I’m just “projecting my own insecurities onto a perfect stranger.” Okay, but in all seriousness, I hate when people say that. Sometimes it just feels good to aimlessly judge someone without it having to be deeply interwoven with my own TrAuMa or whatever. Then again, I’m the asshole on my third 5150 hold in two years, so who the fuck am I to complain?

Okay. So.

Recurrence.

Everyone keeps saying that I’m here for my own safety, but there is no safety. I feel his presence humming through my veins like laying on the floor in front of an amplifier overwhelmed by interference. It just keeps getting louder. He’s out there. Waiting for just one millisecond of weakness, and then he’ll take me.

If it happens again, it will kill me.

And he’s coming.

I want to go home.

• • •

THINGS I PROMISE NOT TO TAKE FOR GRANTED WHEN I’M HOME AGAIN

• Underwire Bras
• • The Hitachi Magic Wand
  • Crunchwrap Supremes
  • When I Forget to Close the Curtains and the Sun Wakes Me Up
  • Bad Playlists for Long Drives
  • The Way Aria’s Hair Dye Stains Everything We Own Red
  • Showering Without Shoes
  • The Weird Smell of Aria’s Ears When She Doesn’t Clean Them
  • Glitter that Refuses to be Vacuumed
  • The Instant Warmth When Aria Nestles Into Me While She Sleeps and For a Moment, Time Stops and I Forget How to Breathe but I Know I’m Alive Because She’s Pressed Against Me…
  • Lint Rollers

  • • •

  She was still able to see me during intake. I stood there, nude, and she just stared at me through the wire mesh glass. She didn’t blink. Not even once. It was her only defense against the tears welling in her eyes. I don’t blame her for calling me in.

  He was starting to inch inside of me again.

  We keep the fan on at night to drown out the constant bickering of our neighbors and their screaming kids. I hadn’t shaved in a while so I thought I was just feeling the air current moving around my leg hair or something. Aria was fast asleep and she was wearing these fuzzy cashmere socks my mom gave for her birthday last winter, so I would have known if it was her playing a game of midnight footsie with me.

• It wasn’t.

  It was him.

  I looked down toward my feet, just past the rolling hill of my body enveloped in our dingy comforter, to see his jagged smile curling through the cracks around his mouth. The same smile he’s been giving me for seven years. I felt him steal the words from my throat when I tried to scream, “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!” so all I could muster was a squeak and a bemused “Help.”

  He ran through every single hair on my calf and stopped when he reached the scar on the back of my thigh. His touch felt like covering your skin with salt and pressing an ice cube against it—a touch so cold that it burns. I pressed my eyes closed so tightly that the remnants of mascara my cold cream couldn’t wash away seared into my tear ducts. My head began to shake something violent.

  I heard Aria choke and I panicked. The burning was gone. Somehow, he’d changed targets and he was after her. I knew it. He’d had his way with me and now he wanted the only thing in my life I’ve ever loved. I couldn’t let him. I turned over, the comforter flew off of my body and knocked over the half-empty glass of water on my nightstand. I jolted upright and braced myself for absolute carnage and saw that she was…

  Fine.

  She had choked a little on the spit pooling in her mouth. I looked back to my feet and he was gone. My heart was beating so loudly I was sure she could hear it, but between the fan and her snoring (she only snores when she sleeps on her back), she didn’t budge. She didn’t wake up. I sat there and listened to her breath slip through her teeth, to the sound of the fan and the way it jostled the leaves of the Lady Palm in the corner, to the spilled water dripping from the nightstand to floorboards.

  Thank fuck we don’t have carpeting.

  I don’t think Aria likes it when I talk about him. Then again, does anyone really like hearing about the people who have been inside your girlfriend before they met you? This would be so much easier if he was someone I let fuck me before I figured out I was gay, but how do you tell someone, “Hey, six years before we met, I was possessed by a demon who called himself Carcirath, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life in agonizing terror, waiting for him to take over my body once and for all?”

  Fuck.

  They are never letting me out of here.

  MARCH 13TH

  It’s 3 a.m. I usually don’t sleep the first night I’m admitted. Maybe an hour or so, but it’s not the best place for, you know, relaxation or whatever. The woman in the next room is coming down off something. My money’s on meth because it’s the easiest thing to get in this city. If you can’t buy it, there’s sure as shit enough tutorials online that teach how to make it. I didn’t think it was possible to hear someone sweat, but reality has a fun way of proving me wrong. She’s a mom. Her kids must miss her terribly.

  I like the night guard. His name’s Antwan, and he snuck me a blue Gatorade. He was here the last time I had to be admitted, so he knows I’m good for it. I told Aria on the drive up here that I like this place best because it’s connected to the hospital, which means we get food from the hospital kitchen. In the hierarchy of shitty food, I think it looks something like:

  • Regular Hospital
  • Public School Cafeteria
  • In-Flight Airline Meal
  • Prison
  • Psychiatric Hospital

  Tonight was an embarrassing attempt at mac & cheese. The noodles were mushy, the cheese was powder-based, and it 100% tasted like it was made by a white dude making minimum wage. Maybe this is the kind of opportunity offered to whomever comes in last place on Iron Chef. Or like, you know how there are Juilliard graduates who don’t turn out to be Viola Davis or Oscar Isaac and wind up as actors in mystery dinner theatre? Being the head chef at a psychiatric hospital seems like the culinary school equivalent.

  Aria took me to my favorite restaurant the night before I got here. It’s a small Vietnamese place connected to a Vietnamese grocery store, a hair salon, and a nail salon. A family immigrated to the area and bought an entire city block’s worth of storefronts. Walking between Wadsworth and 55th feels like stepping into another world. It’s as if someone plucked out a neighborhood from their hometown and dropped it next to the bus station.

  There’s a beautiful fish tank right at the entrance. Fish haven’t lived in the tank since the first Bush era, but that evening, we were greeted by a rainbow swirl of bubbling fins. I guess the granddaughter of the owner finally got her wish and

  refilled the tank.

  My go-to order is cinnamon beef stew and fried tofu triangles, with spicy peanut sauce as an appetizer. Basic, I know, but you’ve never had that spicy peanut sauce. If you could make out with God, His spit would taste like that spicy peanut sauce. Unless you’re allergic to peanuts—then it’s probably just caramel or something.

  Our waitress brought us our food, and Aria dove right into her samosas. I grabbed my tofu triangle, fresh from the fryer, and immediately dropped it. I stuck my fingers into my mouth out of instinct and when I ran my tongue across the pad of my thumb, I felt it.

  As if granules of salt between my fingerprints had met ice.

  Burning cold.

  I looked up, thumb still in mouth, and behind the fish tank, just to the right of Aria’s left shoulder, Carcirath was staring directly at me, his smile wider than the last time I had seen him. I stumbled out of my chair, unable to pull my thumb from my mouth, unable to unlock my jaw.

  “Baby, baby, what’s wrong?” she pleaded with me.

  But I couldn’t answer.

  I inched away, my eyes locked with his, and stopped only when the back of my thigh bumped into the table behind me, where an elderly woman was trying phở for the first time (my intrusion knocked her face into a spoonful of the hot broth).

  “Natalie. Answer me. Please.”

  I fell to the ground, my eyes never losing focus. He knew I could see him and he loved it.

  He slithered beneath the table that held the fish tank, and crawled closer. The carpet turned black, and the fabric disintegrated the moment his prolonged digits made contact. I watched as the fish began to turn belly-up one by one and float slowly to the top. I was overwhelmed with an unbearable stench of rot as every meal immediately spoiled and started to decompose. Carcirath is a harbinger of death, and he had an overdue debt to settle with me.

  Aria dove across the table, grabbed my shoulders, screamed “NATALIE!” and put her face in front of mine, forcing me to break eye contact with him.

  I snapped away and looked around. Everything was fine. The fish were swimming. The food was fresh. The carpet untouched. To everyone else, all I had done was caused a scene, knocked over an old woman, and embarrassed my girlfriend. He was there. I know he was.

  Artwan is coming for my crayon.

  I should probably try to sleep.

  MARCH 13TH (still)

  It’s a quarter till 2 p.m. now. I managed to get a few hours of sleep, but Artwan woke me up at the ass-crack of dawn for breakfast. If you’re not up by 7 a.m. for breakfast, you won’t get it. They like to get us out of our rooms early so they can lock the door behind us as soon as possible. That’s the thing no one ever talks about in psychiatric hospitals—there’s no real alone time. We’re all labeled as high-risk the moment we’re admitted, so I get it. I dozed off in the common area for a hot minute only to be rudely awakened by this girl who was smelling my hair. The shampoo here smells like a retirement home after they disinfect a room someone died in, so I don’t know what she was getting out of it.

  Our enthusiasm (or lack of) toward showering can influence whether or not they keep us longer than

  seventy-two hours. Swear to God. If you try to fight showering, you won’t get to go home. I’ve developed a habit of singing. I sing really well, actually. But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let these assholes appreciate my gifts for free. Nah, they’re getting my full nasal, deep vibrato, off-key Miss Hannigan finest. “Easy Streeeeeeeet!” I haven’t decided if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I’m completely unfazed by people watching me shower.

  I think I prefer it.

  Aria and I’s apartment has this big, vintage, claw-foot bath tub. It gets so damn cold in the winter that before it’s comfortable enough to take a bath, we have to dump in a pot of hot water big enough to boil a Thanksgiving turkey before ever turning on the faucet. Our hot water heater sucked shit trying to fight frozen Midwestern pipes, but we made due.

  When we got home from the Vietnamese place, Aria had set the whole bathroom up for me. She lit a few ghost flower candles (my favorite), prepped the warming of the tub, added some epsom salt, queued up a playlist of stuff like Massive Attack and Portishead, and atop the bathtub tray, laid out a glass of whiskey and a bath bomb in the shape of a heart.

  No one has ever shown me that kind of affection.

  She tried to walk away and leave me to it, but I reached out and grabbed her hand to pull her back to me. I twirled her back to face me and pressed my forehead against hers. Lifting her chin to meet her mouth to mine, I kissed her as I shimmied out of my pajama pants. They fell to my ankles, and I wrapped my arm around her waist, pulling her body against mine so she could feel that I was disrobing.

  “Stay with me?” I asked her.

  She skimmed her hands down to the hem of my tank top and lifted it over my head, pressing my flesh against her still clothed body in the process. Her lips burrowed between mine, the barbell of her labret guiding my jaw open as she whispered into my mouth.

  “Is that what you need?”

  I slid my hand across the small of her back and crept my hand up her spine. The clasp of her bra melted between my fingers, and the straps dropped down her shoulders and through the sleeves. I pulled the straps down her arm, pulling her wrist through the loops, and watched as her bra dropped from underneath her oversized KISS t-shirt on top of the pile of clothing strewn across the bathroom floor.

  Aria slinked into the bathtub and slowly descended into the water—her red hair bleeding dye and turning the clear water a subtle pink. She lifted her right eyebrow and pouted her lips at me. The siren wail of Beth Gibbons’ voice bounced off of our walls, and as Aria’s muscles relaxed from the warmth of the water, a moan escaped from deep inside as if her very being was calling me toward her. She loved me. Even after everything that had happened, she still desired me and deemed me worthy. I lifted my leg and stepped into the tub, my toe rolling the epsom salt across the bottom until I felt it. The frozen fire.

  I yanked my leg out of the tub, kicking over the bathtub tray and spilling whiskey onto the floor.

  “What the fuck, Natalie?”

  Aria stood in the tub, water flipping off of her skin and leaving little black specks all around the bathroom. Every water droplet immediately singed through wherever it landed, the blackness spreading and sprawling as if they were trying to grab hold of something. I watched the blackness twist toward my toes.

  “Natalie, answer me!”

  I snapped my head to look toward Aria only to see Carcirath standing behind her, his arms outstretched like the twisted limbs of a rotted tree, his darkness cloaking her in shadow. I dropped to the floor, my naked body curled into a fetal position, eyeballing the void worming toward me. Aria took a step out of the tub, and Carcirath followed in synchronicity.

  “DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME!” I shrieked.

  I laid on the floor and screamed myself hoarse. She kept her distance and stood in bewilderment, completely unaware of the horror that surrounded her. She couldn’t see him. She couldn’t fucking see him! I slammed my hand against the floor, cracking the tile beneath my palm. Crimson dripped down my fingers, and when my blood met the rot on the floor, it stopped crawling toward me.

  That’s when I blacked out.

  I woke up in the front seat of the car, my hand wrapped in gauze, Aria in the driver’s seat, eyes locked forward and staring straight down the road.

  “You need more than what I can give right now,” she muttered.

  My hand was throbbing, and my abdominal muscles stung. She told me that I couldn’t stop screaming about needing to protect myself. I had slammed my hand into the broken tile over and over again until I was gushing pools of blood onto the floor. Apparently, I rubbed it all over my body and screamed, “it’s the only way he can’t get inside of me again.”

  “Please, Aria, don’t let him take my body this time,” she repeated back to me.

  I asked if she saw him. She said no. I asked if the bathroom had been consumed by the void. She said no. I told her I didn’t believe her and I knew what I saw. She threw her phone at me, told me to unlock it, and still on display was a photo she had taken.

  No Carcirath. No rotted walls.

  Just spilled whiskey, a half-melted bath bomb, a broken tile, and me laying in the fetal position, covered in my own blood.

  Artwan said it’s time for group.

  MARCH 13TH (YES, AGAIN)

  Dinner tasted like resentment. Group was fine.

  Dr. Paslawski asked me to share my story, and I told her I didn’t need any more people in this world thinking I’ve got bats in the belfry. I don’t like talking about it because I know how fucking insane it sounds, but it’s real. Okay?

  I was possessed by Carcirath when I was twenty years old. Some wannabe exorcist my college roommate found online got him out of me, and then I moved to a new city and tried my best to start a new life. The thing people don’t know about demons is that they aren’t some supernatural entity that can only be flushed out by the “Glory of God” or whatever religious bullshit people have been peddling as a scare tactic. No. Demons are a part of us no matter what we believe. Most of us learn to live alongside them. Some of us are lucky enough to beat them. As for the rest? The demons take hold and they never let go.

  I think it’s because he knows I’m finally happy—that’s why he wants me now. And I see him. Everywhere. I watched him slip in while the orderly had me squat and cough. He knows I know, too. He’s been taunting me. I’ve seen

  that fucking smile peering around the halls, lingering above the TV in the common area, and making a home in the communal shower.

  But why? What did I do to attract this? Is it because of where I grew up? Genetics? Too much red meat? What is it? I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure it out. I know that if I can figure out what brought him to me in the first place, I can figure out how to avoid him.

  If he takes me again, he will shred me from the inside out. Carcirath comes not to inhabit, but to annihilate. He takes over his host and slowly destroys it, reveling in their pain and suffering and the misery that it inflicts on everyone who loves them. I know the catastrophe he brings because I’ve felt it, and I wouldn’t wish it upon even my worst enemies. But he just keeps coming back. And I’m scared, alright? I’m scared. I’M FUCKING SCARED.

  I’m scared of every molecule in my body feeling like a fiery tundra. I’m scared of my body withering away in front of me, unable to stop it. I’m scared of feeling my organs decompose while the rest of me is fighting to stay alive. I’m scared of going to sleep convinced that it’ll be the last time I ever shut my eyes. I’m scared of how much pain my dying will cause her. I’m scared that when I’m gone, she won’t feel any pain at all. I’m not afraid of recurrence. I’m afraid of dying.

  There is no comfort in knowing you’re going to die, just anticipation.

  MARCH 14TH

  The girl who smelled my hair yesterday is gone. Her body is still here, walking around and acting as if all is well and good, but she’s gone. Her name was Jeannie, I learned.

  She was walking the halls late last night, repeatedly proclaiming that something was under her skin and that it needed to be washed away—some real Lady MacBeth shit. Her pleas started off like a standard psychiatric freak-out, but her voice randomly turned deep and guttural, as if her voice was trapped in a tin bunker. There was no way any of us were going to get any sleep with her manic episode reverberating up and down the empty halls, so we all peeked our heads out of our rooms and tried to decipher what was going on between her incoherent ramblings and the hushed tone of the nurses on staff. Her feet tripped over one another, and she stumbled right in front of my door before stopping.

  “My blood is burning cold,” she screamed at me, compulsively rubbing her forearm raw.

  The orderlies did their best to de-escalate her. Kind words, prodding questions, anything to get her to stop rubbing her calloused hands against her soft flesh. Dead skin rolled off of her palms like sprinkles of decay and stuck to the sweat that glazed her arms.

  “He’s swimming in my veins!” she cried. “He’s here!”

  Her gaze never left mine. A nurse sedated her—probably Haloperidol—but even after the medication took hold, she kept talking. Her words were a tsunami, and I was going to drown.

  “Carcirath. Carcirath. Carcirath. CarciRATH. CARCIRATH! CARCIRATH!!!”

  You can pump someone with as many anti-hallucinogens as their body can handle, but if they’re

  not hallucinating, all you’re doing is shutting down any defense system they once had to fight what they’re seeing. Her muscles relaxed and she lost the ability to hold her head up on her own. She slumped to the floor, limbs loose like a marionette without a puppeteer, her box-dyed black hair covering her face like a shield. But her eyes still gazed up toward my window. Fetal position—it’s a position I’m all too familiar with.

  “Show’s over,” a nurse bellowed. “Get back to your beds!”

  The hallway echoed with the symphony of bare feet against linoleum flooring, hollow doors latching and locking, and a dozen or so bodies flopping onto vinyl covered mattresses. The nurse called for an orderly and mumbled something about leaving her there until they could bring a wheelchair to cart her back to her room. I crouched below the window in my room, eyes fixated on the torpid figure across from me. Her hair began to writhe across the floor, crawling toward my room and sliding through the crack under the door. I was entranced as her body edged closer and closer toward my room, her face dragging across the tile and collecting dust. I felt a shriek building from deep inside my throat, but when I tried to scream for help, all I could choke out was “Hi.”

  Her head SLAMMED into the door and her hair began to climb up the side toward the knob. Her hair couldn’t reach. It just flailed and slapped against the door, pulling her head into the wood frame over and over again. I backed away and pressed my back against the wall as I saw an orderly grab her off the ground and try to pick her up. ...