Requiem of Mind

If ever there was a time that I knew my doubts about the good left in humanity had fallen on deaf ears, I'd it was the barn that cemented this fixation. After experiencing the dismal and frightening display of horror that occurred within that rotting structure, I was forced to confront these concerns on my own.

How does one go on living life after seeing the things that I have seen? Have I seen them at all? Or is the reality we live in, some sort of playground of consciousness. The sandbox of our lives and our sanity are both delicate structures of wet sand. We all think us-the individual-are too strong to let that delicate structure fall. We believe we are too grounded to be led astray by pseudoscience and faith. But what is a belief in a universe as calculated as our own? Facts in our reality are mere gossip and hearsay when compared to mathematical standards like gravity and formulae of the physical. Like twisted messages passing through too many mouths, our perception too, becomes warped.

So yes, the barn is where it started, and perhaps also, where my delusions in faith had ended. I see now, that what psychologists have deemed as hallucinations and episodes of mania are the only truth in reality. Cryptic though they may be, these haunting vistas and reverberations guide me through the dark more now than ever.

It was an August night when I got the call. A solid lead on a seemingly dead end case; finally something to go on, I thought as I set the telephone down. A short ride out of Chicago and I was there. That damned barn. It burned straight out of Hades and scorched its mark upon my psyche. I'll never forget what I saw there.

"Welcome to the Jackson Farm," a rusted signpost read upon entry of the property. Its letters were worn and tarnished, foreboding all who might brave entry into the damning enclave.

The rain had begun to pelt my Model-T Ford. A shame to treat a brand new automobile the way I was, but being my first case after coming back from the war, I was desperate for results. My eyes struggled to keep a straight path on the old dirt road where the Jackson house awaited. The smoke from my cigarette clouded the inside of the car, perhaps trying to save what sanity I had brought back from the trenches in France.

Under the silver moon, the fields had fallen to an unsettling shade of amber green. They were allowed to grow out, pasteurizing fields with nary a beast to graze. It was always the simple things that swell that feeling of discomfort in the pit of my stomach. The kind of feeling that made anxiety seem like a welcome friend. Things like the mailbox being turned inward, away from the main road, or pieces of patio furniture, resting on the front lawn instead of on the stoop where they belong. Though every instinct in my body was imploring me to cut my loses and turn back, I pressed onward until I reached the home. Its weathered siding and ragged shingles truly set it apart as a home for something sinister indeed. Knowing what I know now, I would have never climbed the stairs to the front door. Like the face of a hang man, standing poised and ready to pass judgment on me, it waited for my final words as someone with his humanity still intact: I knocked.

The rain had begun to let up by the time I heard footsteps on the other side. First lightly, then harder, they were getting closer, but they were certainly in no hurry. I sometimes wonder if that is what lured me into the false sense of security. The relaxed pace of her, an unassuming elderly woman just shy of a century.

She greeted me with a peculiar smile, saying, "come in, please, come in," even before I had time to introduce myself and offer a sign of kinship with a shake of my hand. She looked neat and tidy. Her teeth were as white as ivory piano keys, though her voice did not sound as tender. It was quite rasp, surely she might have been an abuser of tobacco in her time. Though as harsh as it was, her smile made the tension melt away.

She led me to the kitchen without hesitation. "You must be Mrs. Jackson," I said as politely as the time of night permitted. "Thank you for taking my call at such a late hour."

"Are you the one I spoke with on the phone?" she said, kind as ever, putting the kettle on and pulling out a chair for me to sit at the dinner table. I nodded and she sat in the chair across from me. "You must be Alex then."

"Von Faust."

"Ah!" she chimed, her face lit up with a bigger smile then before. "German with no accent?" she asked.

"Only German for a year, until my parents brought me here," I tried to keep the conversation as light as I could light for as long as possible. My subconscious kept stalling me. I couldn't bring myself to ask the old woman the questions that needed asking. Images conjured themselves in my mind's eye. They were faces, the faces of each missing man, woman, and child related to this case; at least thirty eight of them, and I'd say there were more if I was a betting man. These faces were warning me to stay away from the old house, don't go in the barn! They screamed a silent scream only a schizophrenic would hear.

The old woman went on about the happenings around the nearby town. She talked about the town of Pocket, just down the road. She talked about how most of her family had moved away and left her alone to tend to the farm.

"Is that why the fields out front are left alone?" I was starting to get there. The questions I needed to ask, but there wasn't a force in the solar system could compel my lips to move in such a way. Not yet.

"Oh yes, dear. Most of the barn animals had to be sent away to feed the soldiers overseas I'm afraid."

I finished my tea and looked to the ground. Hesitation was radiating from every pore in my skin, yet I couldn't understand why. That horrible barn, it was tempting me as if Pandora herself was waiting within its moldy walls. Before I could finish, the old woman offered her hand out to me without saying a word. Not really sure what to expect next, I took it.

"You look nervous for such a confident young man," she said with a kind smile and softness in her eyes. She turned my palm face up and began to inspect it.

"I'm sorry. There are lots people who want to know where their loved ones are. Everyone seems to be reporting them as being seen last in Pocket before they disappear."

She didn't say anything. She tightened her grip on my palm and looked deeply at its lines and ridges. Her fingers pressed into my skin. The pressure became so immense that it cut off circulation to the tips of my fingers and the pain started to crawl up my arm. Out of gut reaction, I tried to wrench my hand away, but it did not escape her grasp. She looked so weak and nonthreatening, yet this display of supernatural strength sent panic racing through my veins. Why didn't I call the police? Why didn't I bring some way to defend myself? I should have known it would have been dangerous in this house of horrors when Mrs. Jackson had been seen burying bodies underneath her emerald pastures. I thought if I kept the conversation light, and didn't say that she was suspected of murder, I could have gotten the information I needed. Yanking and pulling as hard as I could, sweat beaded on my brow, cold sweat. The old woman did not react; she just continued to stare into nothingness.
"I can read your future if you like."

Her voice, now soft and gentle, put my anxieties to rest. Her caring eyes disarmed me. I went numb and nodded. Her grip loosened as she rested my palm down on the kitchen table; a twisted yellow-green pallet of suburbia that nauseated the senses. The kitchen wallpaper, also the same sickly color of yellow, spun around the two of us as she focused on my palm. Her fingers traced the lines and she began to mutter to herself. I was hypnotized by her, lulled into a daze I knew I should have escaped, and yet I did nothing in attempt.

She hummed, just a whispers volume at first, but then the diaphragm of my undoing opened up, and the noise bellowed from her, rattling the kitchen pots and pans. She closed her eyes, those disarming and sincere eyes, blocked now by lids darkened with too little sleep, or none at all. This went on for as long as time could be perceived, if such a thing really does exist. The old woman rocked back and forth and back and forth, then side to side. And then she screamed.

Foreboding, a banshee in her own right, let go of my hand and launched her disjointed frame away from the kitchen table. She screamed until I thought my ears would run red of blood and bleed my body dry. Falling from my chair, I clutched my ears and closed my eyes. Blocking as much of the encounter out as I possibly could, but her harrowing screams still penetrated my skull and unleashed their terrible message unto my psyche.

"Demise! Demise! Undone! You are undone! We are all damned!" she screeched the words again and again until they ran together into a mess of syllables. She did this till she ran out of breath and until there was nothing left. I cautiously opened my eyes, every logical sense within me wished I hadn't, yet I did it regardless, and saw the old woman sitting on the kitchen floor. Her eyes were blank, milky white, like the horrible things she had seen in my palm had burned the very sight from her ocular blessing.

Her lips still moved in a strange way that I hadn't seen in my years. Was she even saying words? I couldn't tell in all certainty. On my hands and knees, I inched my way closer to hear her. The words then became apparent: "How can it be stopped. How can it be stopped..." ever repeating. She was chanting it, not as a question, but a statement of truth in a world where truth had no light of meaning. Eventually, she rose from the floor and walked to the back door, feet shuffling little by little, still chanting, "How can it be stopped..."

Against all logical thought, I followed her. She opened the door and walked down the steps. Cold night air came upon us as the barn came into fruition. The rain stopped, it too was afraid of the barn.
Its avatar in reality was even more horrid then my imagination could describe. A feeling of death pulled on my spine, trying to stop me from following the old woman, but onward I went. We reached its harrowing walls where the old woman was about to clasp its iron handles when I pulled her back.
"Don't go in there," I said. My voice was cold, strong, but surely panic was in my thoughts. I didn't know why. Neither men of science nor men of the cloth could explain why, but I knew opening that barn would only serve to birth fault lines in the chasms of sanity. She looked back at me and she too was afraid. I saw it in her glossy, reflective eyes.

"I need to know," she uttered almost instantly, her voice quivering. "How can it be stopped? The higher order ones are coming. I knew it, I saw it, and I thought I could stop them, but they are still coming."

I had heard enough of this old woman's ramblings. I was taking her back for police interrogations. Let the corrupt blue suits sweat her for a bit, then she'll talk some sense. Not now, not there, anywhere by that barn. It tried to draw me into its maw, and show me the horrors that of which men only dream of. I yanked on her arm, but she protested.

"I must ask!" she continued to ramble. "I must know, they can tell me, they can save us. How can it be stopped?" The woman summoned inhuman strength and shoved me backward.

Having fallen to the ground, the barn towered over me. Its weather vane, twisted and malformed by many nights past, reached up at the violet sky like a claw reaching for perdition.

"Who are they!" I shouted to the old woman, trying to send my voice over the howling wind.

She did not answer. Her small frame turned toward the wooden demon and leaned on its hinged maw. The doors opened with a tormenting screech and I was left on the ground, groveling for all it had bestowed upon my consciousness.

Vision, hallucination, dream, night terror. All were things I have seen in this life that I call my own. I've seen men missing limbs and I've seen men piercing the viscera of other men in uniform with rusty knives and insane eyes. I've felt the warm blood of others spill onto my skin and then fall cool in the trenches of war. But I have not seen atrocities like I have seen in the barn on that night. There was something different. I've seen entrails with my very eyes yet I have not seen them strung to the rafters of a demons house of blood, dangling the lifeless bodies of women and children. I've seen skin stretched and bludgeoned from wounds of battle, yet the barn has shown me for the first time, skin spread out like wallpaper and tongues nailed to the dirt floor like carpet.

The old woman ran into this tomb as if it was her salvation. Something she saw had driven her to this place. She wept, begging the dismembered and disemboweled lexicon of humanity. "Please tell me! Why won't you tell me? How can they be stopped! How can they be stopped..."

She fell to her knees and crawled around in circles through the bloodied innards and foul stench. I looked on, awe struck by the ghastly display. Faces, formerly seen through black and white photographs, tacked to the walls of my office in the city, now tacked to the walls of the ninth circle. One by one I recognized the people that countless clients hired me to find. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, and people of all other varieties were within these walls.

My mind was adrift in a sea of subconscious. There was no logic, no way to comprehend, and no way to digest the deplorable acts that must have taken place within its walls. My body operated without the mind, strictly on instinct and self preservation. My body ran away.