The next time she visited me was embarrassing, but at least it was a visit.
As a child, did you ever dream of going to the bathroom, only to wake up and find that you'd wet the bed? I did it a couple of times when I was little, lying in the top bunk over my older brother. Boy was he pissed!
Well, that's what happened. But it wasn't a dream; it was her! She must have gotten up in the middle of the night, and I woke up peeing in my bed. It was the weirdest eliminatory experience I've ever had; I was pissing for her, and it felt like it was coming from someplace it wasn't.
When she went back to bed, we couldn't sleep. Something was bringing us pain, and I couldn't bear her hurt. She deserved only joy, and there was nothing I could do about it. And, with random rancor that too often typifies those things over which we have no control, this transmission lasted longer than any previous one.
But I didn't mind; it was time together. And perhaps she was reaching out to me for help. I would have died to keep her from hurting, and I hope somehow she knew that.
I felt tears splash down on my naked chest, but when I looked down, my skin was dry. I ached for her, and she was gone.
All I could do was worry about the woman I loved. I wanted nothing more than to block out all of her pain, to bring the boundless joy back into that beautiful, uncluttered, loving intelligence. I called in sick the next day, for even though I was no longer receiving, I was nauseated with her anguish.
Later that day it came in a brief flash of incredible anger, and was gone. It was a shock getting this unannounced flash of temper stabbing through me in the middle of my Weight Watchers whole wheat pizza like that. The strength and nastiness of the emotion was devastating; it was something of which I thought she was incapable. Something must have pushed her to the brink to ignite such horrible fury, and I wanted to destroy it for her.
By night, however, it appeared that all was well. I was watching a heart operation on PBS, when suddenly I broke into a gale of her melodious laughter. It was a joyous, cleansing experience for us, and I knew that she must have crossed that bridge over troubled water. I actually cried with the joy of relief that the gorilla on her back had been banished. God, I never wanted her to hurt like that again!
She was gone quickly, but I went to sleep happy. I probably dreamed about her.
A few days later I knew she was still happy. Her next transmission was uncluttered and clear. She must have been lying in a meadow somewhere beautiful. I could feel the prickling of the grass and took deep breaths of the cool, fresh air, scented with just the faintest touch of real carnations. We were completely at peace, and I happily wore her smile again. Now that my fear for her happiness was put to rest, I could go back to needing and wanting her again. If only we could meet, I thought, I'd give her anything she wanted: all the love and support she could stand, and then some. But I wouldn't smother her, I promised aloud.
Though I ached to be with her, I was sleeping better. I knew she was untroubled, and that made my life better as well. I knew that someday soon, somehow I would find her. That's all there was to it.
And then, several days went by without so much as a smell from her, and I worried anew. I would freak out on those occasions, certain I'd lost her, that I'd never hear from her again. Hurt and crestfallen, I never allowed the feelings to become anger or resentment. That was beneath me and the purity of my love. I would try to convince myself that I was lucky to have had as much of her as I did, that she had made my life better and more complete just by existing.
But that didn't cheer me. I missed her terribly.
Then came Saturday. I was lying on the couch watching the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad for the first time since I was about twelve. Trust me, it doesn't hold up. In fact, it lulled me into a sleep so deep it was as if somebody had flipped a switch and turned off the world.
Then came the rush, and I slept so soundly that nothing made any sense. My hands gripped something tightly, and I was completely confused. I was lashing out, poking, slashing. The blanket began to lift, and I felt like filth.
We were killing.
I felt the long, phallic blade in our hands hit flesh. It slowed at impact, then ripped through the living meat in sickening penetration. We hacked repeatedly through the squirming, helpless flesh, hitting bone with jarring abruptness, then tearing through. The vibrations of flesh being rent moved through my hands and into my body, settling in the acid pit of my stomach, and I shivered with the hideousness of it. I felt the warm, wet spray of blood like tears on my face, felt it run down my arm in pulsing hot rivers.
Then, the slashing stopped, and she was gone. The next emotions were my own. I felt indescribably dirty and savage, with a sense of degradation I had never known. I wore a bloody sheath of sickness and depravity I'm certain will never come off. If you haven't felt it, you can't know it… and I never did before this. I was red with shame and humiliation, sweating a foul stench of guilt. I retched repeatedly over the side of the couch until I went limp, my stomach empty. And then I couldn't stop the tears that splashed into the puddle.
That was months ago. I haven't heard from her since. This is the longest time by far between transmissions, and I'm resigned to the likelihood that there will be no more. She lied to me, cheated on me, used me. I want to hate her, flush her from my mind.
But I can't. Love chooses us. And I can't stop thinking about her. So I'm still waiting, just in case. I need someone to tell me how to feel.
AGAIN
Ramsey Campbell
Before long Bryant tired of the Wirral Way. He'd come to the nature trail because he'd exhausted the Liverpool parks, only to find that nature was too relentless for him. No doubt the trail would mean more to a botanist, but to Bryant it looked exactly like what it was: an overgrown railway divested of its line. Sometimes it led beneath bridges hollow as whistles, and then it seemed to trap him between the banks for miles. When it rose to ground level it was only to show him fields too lush for comfort, hedges, trees, green so unrelieved that its shades blurred into a single oppressive mass.
He wasn't sure what eventually made the miniature valley intolerable. Children went hooting like derailed trains across his path, huge dogs came snuffling out of the undergrowth to leap on him and smear his face, but the worst annoyances were the flies, brought out all at once by the late June day, the first hot day of the year. They blotched his vision like eyestrain, their incessant buzzing seemed to muffle all his senses. When he heard lorries somewhere above him he scrambled up the first break he could find in the brambles, without waiting for the next official exit from the trail.
By the time he realized that the path led nowhere in particular, he had already crossed three fields. It seemed best to go on, even though the sound he'd taken for lorries proved, now that he was in the open, to be distant tractors. He didn't think he could find his way back even if he wanted to. Surely he would reach a road eventually.
Once he'd trudged around several more fields he wasn't so sure. He felt sticky, hemmed in by buzzing and green — a fly in a fly-trap. There was nothing else beneath the unrelenting cloudless sky except a bungalow, three fields and a copse away to his left. Perhaps he could get a drink there while asking the way to the road.