Here and There

Seth Wickers stared through the cracks of the toy box. Just as he tried to look away, glimpses of flesh appeared in the darkness inside.

It was her flesh, green and yellow from rot, amongst the clutter of toys.

The eight year old turned away from the box, away from the sight of her severed body parts, infested with maggots. He closed his eyes, counted all the way to ten, but he could still see her in the darkness behind his eyes.

She was dead, and it was him that found her right before he was brought to the station. He was sure she was following him now because he was in trouble, because he was not supposed to have seen her.

“Detective Hardy would like to ask you some questions. Think you’re up for that, Seth?” A lady in uniform gently asked as she stepped through the doorway.

He was still thinking about what all the horrors he was seeing, and before he could answer there was a fat man in a dress shirt that was too tight pushing his way past the lady aside. The man plopped down in front of him and unknowingly sat on top of the box containing the playthings and horrors.

“We’re good here Officer Jody” The man said as he clicked his pen and flipped open his pad. The lady cop stood in the doorway for a moment, looking as if she was about to speak. The detective told her to leave again,w looking away from Seth. There was a smile on the detective’s face, and the boy assumed that was meant for him, but the lowered tone was definitely directed at the cop.

She raised her eyebrows at Seth, but still slowly shut the door.

“Alright then.” The detective’s sausage-like thumb impatiently thumped the pen, “You already know me and I already know you, Seth Wickers, so let’s move on to more difficult things. I need you to tell me what happened today. Everything you did, saw, heard, and thought before we showed up.”

The young boy was awestruck by Hardy’s sudden commands. In the movies, there was a nice cop that made the suspect comfortable, and a mean cop that smashes his fists on the table while shouting ‘YOU DID IT AND WE KNOW IT’. Officer Jody was obviously the nice one, but she was not around long enough to make him comfortable. It was just the mean one, Detective Hardy, sitting in front of him now.

“Am I a suspect?” Seth calmly asked, trying to hide his trembling hands between his knees. For a second, his whole body shuddered with nervousness when he wondered if that was the right thing to ask.

Hardy slowly let out an aggravated sigh. He leaned his back fat against the wall and said, “No, you’re not a suspect. You’re a witness, there’s a big difference. All you have to do is tell me what you saw today, and then you can go home. Sound good?”

Seth nodded in agreement, even though the detective’s monotone voice just sounded like a muffled hum in the form of a question.

He glanced at the box right as the big man leaned back, allowing thin rays of light to slip through the wooden slits. Between the creepy face of a cymbal clapping monkey and the big rubber wheels of a monster truck, Seth saw her foggy gray eye.

She took his speech and mobility, forcing him to helplessly stare into the abysmal eternity behind her foggy eye. Her intensely emotional thoughts swarmed his mind like a horde of angry bees, causing him to only hear their continuously frantic buzz.

Seth, gaze still transfixed upon the dreadful eye, suddenly felt his lips part and jaw move. It was a surprise to hear his own words over the commotion in his head. He could hear himself calmly jabbering about what happened, instead of screaming that he was staring into death’s eye.

“I woke up when Dad left for work.” Seth said in a gentle voice. It sounded like him, but the words spoken were not coming from his current thoughts.

It did create a visual behind his eyes, and he watched a replay of his father walking to the door, grabbing the keys off the stuff-catching table, and kneeling to kiss him good-bye before tussling his hair and walking out.

The detective eagerly leaned forward, and fumbled around for a pen and paper. Once it was in hand and he had scribbled down what he heard so far, he nodded at the boy to go on.

“Mom was busy and told me to play outside. I went out out and a boy I’ve never met before rode past on his bike. He quickly turned around and asked me if I wanted to play catch. When I gleefully agreed, he told me he didn’t have a glove or ball.
“I have all sorts of sports stuff down in the basement, but I hate going down there. It’s haunted. The whole house is haunted, but the basement always has a bad feeling and sometimes there are scary sounds like people getting hurt.”

Detective Hardy attempted to ask questions, but they fell upon deaf ears. Seth rambled on.

“I found a football and ran back outside.

“It was fun at first, but he kept throwing it too high and getting in the back of my mom’s truck. The last toss landed amongst all the junk and I could not see it right away. I tossed a couple things, and got angry when I still couldn’t find it. The boy laughed hysterically at my frustration, which made me even more angry. I kicked my foot up and it caught the corner of the tarp and that’s when…that’s when I saw her.”

Seth blinked for the first time since he gained the anxious detective’s attention, and it ended his hallucination of her eye. 

The boy screamed so loud that Hardy jumped off the toy box and spilled the contents within the yellow file-folder. Pictures of the girl’s severed remains fluttered to the floor. The detective picked them up as quickly as he could, shouting for Officer Jody’s help between labored breaths, but Seth saw most of them.

The scattered images were a mixture of the girl’s severed limbs crudely stacked under the tarp he kicked up, and then neatly assembled on a steel table in the horrible shape of a young woman. He also saw other things he had never seen before, like his mother’s bloody clothes, tapes labeled with the full names of girls, and an array of torture devices and tools spread out across the entire garage floor.

Seth lost too much air and couldn’t scream any longer, so he just sobbed instead.

Right as he was about to turn away from the police photos, he saw the boy that was on the bike. It was a wide angle shot of the basement and the boy was in the space behind the stairs, poking his head out from the last few steps.

He suddenly understood why it felt so eerily normal downstairs; the ghost causing the horrid smells and scary sounds was outside.

Officer Jody flung the door off the hinges and swiftly scoped Seth up in her arms, diligently ignoring his continued sobs in her ear.

Seth was haunted by incident for years afterward, and then he finally exorcised his demons when took his life in his own hands.

The police were called to his childhood when the temporary caretaker could not find the spare key that was left behind by the home owner. During their safety check, they found Seth hanging from the rafters in his room in the attic area at the top of the stairs. His slumped bloated body was surrounded by graphic photographs of the gruesome crime scene from his childhood, a bunch of boxes containing files of statements and other information, and the video recording of the interview between him and Hardy.

Investigators would find out the young man had been institutionalized for seven years at Blair Mountain, a faculty well-known for treating their victims with a cocktail of brainwashing hypnosis and highly potent sedatives. Seth was released a few days prior, but it was a matter of good behavior and bed space. When his records were looked over, it was noted that his many doctors all wrote one thing in common; he was a mostly average young man of a mild manners, but suffered from a significant psychotic break when he found the girl’s mutilated body and that he was easily triggered into severe schizophrenic and obsessive episodes because of it.

Within Seth’s clenched fist was a piece of paper with his last thoughts typed on the face:

It’s been eleven years since I’ve been home, and I’m surprised to find it in the same condition it was in before my family split apart. The boy led me here by showing me visions of everything I would need to know, so I guess I’m more surprised that everything had been accurate.

Before it all started, he showed me an elderly man writing a note to the caretaker of his plants and placing a key on the paper before folding and putting it under the mat in the backyard. The note highlighted the dates he would be gone, and instructions to feed his plant-babies every other day. That makes me feel better because that means my body will be found soon.

Before the guards (dressed up like nurses) opened the door to my cell, he showed me a receptionist filing my release paperwork. The date of my realease was the same day the man of the house was leaving. I had another vision of bouncing in my bus seat on my way to my childhood home. I stepped onto the platform of the bus stop and prepared for a five mile walk, but then I was fast-forwarded until I was in the basement. I was pushing my back against the hefty wooden shelf underneath the stairs, slowly sliding it across the wall until it touched the other side.

Then I was suddenly looking at my mother’s back, she was feeling along the brick wall behind the shelf like she was looking for something. She planted her hands and pushed, opening a heavy metal door disguised on the outside to match the surrounding brick. The next thing I saw was her dragging a girl by the feet in the darkness of the room behind the shelf. Something deep in me knew she was the girl I would later find chopped into pieces.

I turned towards the stairs and saw the boy crouching on the top steps, silently sobbing, and then sprinting away.

I always thought he was another victim who lost their life at my mother’s hand, but then he showed himself alive. He was sitting cross legged on the concrete floor, sandwiched in the narrow space between two bunk beds. There was a circle with lines that connected at various angles scratched on top of the concrete beneath where he sat, and surrounding the circumference of the circle was a variety of items like a toothbrush, comb, and some cloth.

I know what a cell looks like given I spent half my life institutionalized. I noticed his grey jumpsuit had the words ‘Blair Mountain’ stitched on the left side of the chest, and that’s when I realized everything.

By the time the boy was done controlling my daydreams, I was walking down the street. The whole day had been such a chaotic mess of reality and visions mixing together that at first my mind was blank, but then I remembered that I figured everything out.

Or at least I thought I did at that point.

I thought the boy somehow had followed me my whole life. Maybe not always in the physical, but his presence was undeniable. Because he was locked up at Blair Mountain with me it makes sense that I was seeing, feeling, and hearing him every single moment of everyday while I lived there. I still didn’t know the reason why he haunted me from the astral realm or whatever it’s called, or who he was.

In my final moments I relived my trauma as I went through the case file, knowing in my gut the answers I needed were somewhere in the contents. I had a vague memory of watching my father carry it out to the shed and it was still in there amongst some dusty memorabilia. I remembered watching him place the key on top of the mantle above the kitchen sink, but I was still shocked that the current resident kept a locked shed instead of bashing the knob to get into it or just destroying the whole thing. Whatever the reason, I was glad to find the office supply box bulging with paperwork was still there.

On the typed copy of my statement, my father wrote a name and an arrow pointing at the sentence where I mentioned the boy. There was also a paperclip attached, but there was nothing slipped between it and the statement. I sifted through the box until I found what I didn’t know I was looking for; a photo of my father with his arms wrapped around my mother. She was gripping a two-seater stroller with two toddlers in matching blue jumpers squirming in their seats and causing a blur. The back of the photo labeled one of the baby boys as me and the other as, Samuel Wickers.

I spotted some admission paperwork into Blair Mountain under Samuel’s name, and I noticed we had the same birthday. I also noticed my mother and father signed only six years after we were born. There was handwritten testimony from both of my parents that stated my brother was possessed by malicious spirits that would enter their minds and the malicious phenomenon would only disappear if he was sent away.

At this point in my life, all the questions holding me back have been answered. I don’t believe in the soul or anything beyond our flesh, but I do believe in peace and tranquility. My mind and body have been damaged beyond healing after years of being a guinea pig for mental health treatments. I know I will never be at peace if I have to keep forcing myself to live, but I can leave behind something to bring others peace.

I pushed the shelf aside, but did not push open the hidden door. I have seen enough death in my lifetime and there is no doubt more on the other side of the brick wall. I didn’t see it as a vision, it just makes sense that my mother had no time to dispose of whatever horrors were rotting in the room.

The last thing my twin brother showed me himself again in the cell, and this time his eyes opened like he saw my presence there. Without saying a word he reached behind the lower bunk and pulled out a sheet tied like a noose.

He did me a kindness by not showing the rest.

Now, it’s my turn.