He no longer knew or cared what words appeared in front of him.
They were no longer his words, no longer a translation of the thoughts in his head. The words belonged to the Fingers. He had ceased to even feel as if he belonged to a normal, everyday life. Things like sleeping, eating, or even drinking water seemed like foggy rules from a hardly remembered high school class. They no longer were relative to him.
The Fingers though, and the hands and arms he could see trailing off of Them (and then the eyes he was using to see Them) were very much a part of his reality. He supposed the rest of him surely existed, the fact that he was sitting up must (surely it must) tell him that he had some form of leg below the waist, a waist, and some kind of torso. Otherwise sitting up would no longer be possible. And if he had lost a limb (or two) he’d have passed out from blood loss, right?
Although, now that he thought about it, he really wasn’t sure that he hadn’t lost consciousness. He no longer held onto a vague idea of time. He could have passed out, he wasn’t truly sure. He was in his writing study, and the only light source was a dim, outdated lamp sitting on the table beside him (and of course the soft, metallic glow of his notebook computer). There was one door, a dull brown rectangle taunting him. It was even ajar a slight amount. But it might have been a door sitting in another world as far as it concerned him. He could no more get up and exit the room than he could fly. This room that he had insisted on converting to a study, despite his wife’s protests that there were much better uses for it, had become his prison, and would ultimately become his grave.
As if They could know his very thoughts (and why not? They were, or at least had been, a part of his body at one point) the words appeared, letter-by-letter, on his screen.
“And with that, the door slowly swung shut, as if blown by a light breeze. The sound of the latch fitting into place sounded, to Him, like bones clicking together. It sent shivers down His spine.”
Even as the letters were appearing, b-o-n-e-s, s-h-i-v-e-r-s, he peripherally saw gooseflesh appear on his arm, followed moments later by the peculiar feeling that was a mixture of coldness and of warmth; that feeling which renders its feeler incapable of doing anything but cringe.
These Fingers were no longer his own.
Granted, They certainly were still attached to his body, the muscles and tendons still connected Them to him, and he figured that his heart must still be flooding Their very veins with blood, but somewhere along the branch of his arm, boundaries were drawn, control switched sides. They were no more under his control than were the tides in coastal France. Except the Fingers were alive.
The only things that seemed to still be under his control were his eyes. Should he so desire, he could look left, right, could see the clock in the top right corner (although its numbers no longer meant anything to him; he felt a faint tickle of what those numbers meant as far as the measure of time, but couldn’t quite put his mental finger on it). What he could not do, even with those two things that he still thought were his own, was tear his gaze off of the glowing rectangle of the computer. He was bound. He couldn’t look away, and so, feeling how a scrolling stock display must feel, he merely watched as the words that were out of his control fled across the screen.
He did not do so without trepidation. He did not care, it was true, but he was afraid, afraid that the tale being spun that was so intertwined in his own reality would become his reality, and then he would be in trouble. This fear wasn’t a heart-racing kind of fear; he was much past such intense emotions. He knew that he had no control of or effect on the words on the screen, and with indifference he was sure that medieval criminals felt on the march towards the gallows, he simply watched, read, with rapt attention and a mild form of apprehension.
This fear was not without it’s justifications, however. If it were merely a closing door, he would not have been too worried. He could ignore the feeling, the knowledge, that if he tried to stand up, nothing would happen, it would be like a there was a break in the spinal cord, that the neurological messengers were out for lunch, so sorry. He could equally ignore the fact that he’d been sitting here for hours and hours, the running word count at the bottom of his screen adding up like the grains in the bottom of an hourglass, one that’s been nailed to the table. Sure, he’d love to willingly get up and walk away with it all (and possibly never write another word again, if he could help it). The problem was that wasn’t sure he could. It was if They had strung roots into his consciousness.
The Fingers always got what they wanted.
Days (weeks? hours?) ago, just as all of this was starting to happen, he had started to get a feeling of unease. Something felt un-right. He no longer felt like the words he was writing were his own. It didn’t feel like he was penning some story that he’d envisioned, it was as if the story was envisioning itself. Could this be how writers usually feel when they finally are writing a good, real story? He wasn’t sure. He wondered if he should not just get up, go out side, do something else for a while. He had a strange feeling that if he were to try to leave, he would be somehow unable. He had no idea where this was coming from, certainly that inarticulate voice in the back of his head was wrong, surely they were his fingers and were not doing anything that he wasn’t having them do, right? He had gotten as far as lifting himself an inch or two off of the seat (fingers still clacking away) when They typed
“And, despite His potential, His blasphemous thinking had undone Him. He was powerless to resist this strange gift He’d been granted.”
His butt slammed back down into the chair, his jaw dropped open, his arms felt like a long unused hose being drained of it’s last few drops of life-giving water; it was then that he began to panic.
His Fingers were now undoubtedly out of his control. There was no denying that. He tried even moving his pinky finger from its position hovering above the enter key, and found that he could not. Sweat started to break out and bead on his brow, although he was still doing nothing but sitting in his computer chair, dumbfounded.
And so began his decent into that of a static, vegetative observer, bound in his own body, and slowly a convergence began. He began to be absorbed by the only thing he could still do: read. He simply sat, and watched his Fingers type their tale. And that began to weave in and out of his own reality more and more.
It was these weavings that began to elucidate the newfound power that he (his Fingers) had. It started with the door swinging shut, seemingly moved by the Fingers’ sentence in response to his own thoughts. Certainly, though, mere words on a glowing computer screen could not cause something to happen? he thought in a meager rationalization. And surely the goose bumps that he had felt were only caused by seeing the prediction that the door would close, a prediction which then came true (right?), rather than because the Fingers had said he’d get them. Surely. And that mess about losing control of his fingers, about not being ‘powerless’ was just mumbo-jumbo he was writing (he, he was writing it, not Them), caused perhaps by a lack of sleep? When was the last time he slept, anyhow? He couldn’t remember.
Breaking this thought process (which would be one of his last) was the chiming of the doorbell. He realized, as there was a minute but slightly perceptible pause in the tappita-tap-tapping coming from just below his field of vision, that he was scheduled to get a package delivered on Tuesday. But it couldn’t be Tuesday, he had sat down to the computer on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and that would mean he’d been sitting here for going-on 48 hours, give or take (he, again, had no way of knowing what time it was, the numbers in the top right of the screen being present but swimming in and out of recognition).
“Suddenly there was an intruder! A foul-up at this part of the plan could certainly make the lives of the small band of heroes, not quite a dozen of them still present, much more difficult. However, they were quick acting, and narrowly evaded being thwarted this late in the game. The intruder took one last breath, and exhaled as his heart beat its last.”
From some vague area to his right (he thought it might be where the front door was, but the memory was foggy, as if he were looking at it through a steamy post-hot-shower bathroom, and he couldn’t be sure; in fact, was this even still his house?) came a deep and sudden gasp, as if a person had just been drenched in cold water, and immediately following that, a dull thud. It sounded like a sack of potatoes being dropped on a wooden floor.
He started to get more scared.
“The heroes needed to ensure that there would be no more distractions or intrusions, and therefore decided to close off everything else from their lives, and fully devote themselves to the quest they were on.”
Suddenly everything in his visual field fell away. It didn’t ‘go black’, that would require a quick but existing fade from light to dark. These things simply disappeared. The only thing that was still there was the odd shape his computer made when there was nothing against there for it to rest against, a kind of slightly pinched rectangle. All that was there was his (Their?) hands, and the Fingers attached to them, keying in all the right combinations to craft the reality that went scrolling across the screen.
His eyes grew wide; his thoughts became more and more murky, until he no longer thought. He was a stand on which eyes were mounted, and from which fleshy appendages reached for a laptop. His conscious awareness fell away, and with every word that appeared on the screen, the story became more real.
“These travelers set out, again and hopefully for the last time, after finally having dispatched their mark. They had first come to Him slowly, gradually talking with Him, passing conversation, perhaps lending Him a thing or two, doing Him favors. Gradually they lead Him to believe that they were all pals, even that they were there to help Him.
More gradually still they began to work their powers. Soon, He would begin letting them work, thinking that He was really doing the work, that they were indentured servants of His. In reality He was merely facilitating their work on his eventual demise. They had Him ‘hook, line, and sinker,” as they say, and as each day grew dark they knew they were one step closer to their goal, for which they had traveled a very far distance. Far indeed.
Once they knew that they had Him, all pretense and facades fell away, and they seized control and bound Him. He began to protest, but at this point, the Ten Heroes had grown more powerful, and although they were much smaller than Him, they were able to subdue Him with ease. They did outnumber him, after all. He was soon powerless to resist, and only lay there on the ground with His stupid giant’s eyes peering at them dimly.
‘We’ve been with you for so long a time, what must seem like an entire life to an imbecile like you, and you never once thought that we were anything but your best of friends, did you?’ one spat. “How complacent, how foolishly arrogant of you! And they warned us that it would be difficult! We’ll go back to our homeland and be treated as princes for ending your vile, tyrannical life!’
Those dumb eyes just stared up at them, moving gradually to one side and then flicking back, as if He were reading something.
And so, with Him peering stupidly up at them, they set upon Him with what weapons they had, mainly swords, but the occasional axe or dagger. To the last He did not voice any complaint, remaining catatonic until the very end; their spell had been cast flawlessly. His last drop of blood trickled out onto the dry, dusty ground, and our Heroes went their way, pausing only to marvel at the Giant who was the source of so much legend in their kingdom, and who now looked like some stupid, fallen, fool of a giant in a fairy tale.”
Writer Found Dead
Alone, Police Say
Modern day murder mystery
unfolds here in Virginia
Yesterday afternoon, Police found the body of local writer dead in his Richmond home.
“The crazy thing about it was that the guy lives alone, and none of the doors or windows were unlocked,” Police Chief Frank Brendell said. “It didn’t look like a suicide, but there was no sign of breaking and entering either. It’s like a current version of a Sherlock Holmes locked-room murder.”
Mr. was found in his 2 bedroom house at 3:56 pm. “I saw his car was in the drive, but a package had been sittin on his doorstep all day, and that was nothing like him at all to just leave it setting out there for so long. I rang the doorbell a buncha times, but he never answered, and that was when I called the cops” neighbor Lawrence Overman says.
The package had been delivered the previous afternoon via mail.
“I knocked, but he never came to the door, so I Just left the package there on the stoop” says the mailman, who prefers not to be named.
The medical examiner states that the COD was a heart attack, most likely stress caused, but that his face, hands, neck, and other exposed skin were covered in many tiny lacerations, as if a small knife had been used to cut him multipl-
Continued on page A5
Just a note, the last line of the news article did cut right at the right-side margin, and it's only in it's transition to blog that it cut awkwardly in the middle of the line, which is not very much how an actual paper would do it.
ReplyDeleteI'm just glad it held on to it's thin, double-justified set that makes it look like a newspaper column.