photographic evidence

I woke up feeling as though I had slept in a moving cement mixer. My head and body pounded relentlessly and every joint ached from deep within itself. My mouth was dry and my tongue felt like a dehydrated sponge. As I opened my eyes, the sunlight streaming in through the large picture window in the living room sliced through the narrow slits of my eyelids and pierced my cornea like a thousand tiny arrows.

Wait a minute, I thought. The living room window?  Why wasn’t I in my bedroom? At least in there the shades were perpetually drawn to ward away the penetrating rays of harsh morning light.

I blinked my eyes several hundred times to get them used to the light. After a moment, I could finally discern some shapes and even a few colors. What I saw was perplexing to say the least. The first thing I noticed was that this was not my apartment. At least that explained why I wasn’t in my own room.

I was lying on a burgundy leather couch, the large, overstuffed kind. Aside from the fact that my bare skin stuck to the leather, it was rather comfortable. I had a small black pillow and a blanket covering me, so I knew that my sleeping on the couch was intentional, though I couldn’t recall going to sleep here. The headache and sensitivity to light lead me to believe that I was suffering from a massive hangover, which the lack of memory seemed to confirm.

I sat up to get a better look at my surrounding and instantly regretted it. My head began swirling in and around itself in a very surrealistic, undulating manner. The sensation made me quite nauseous, and I very nearly threw up. Several deep breaths through my nose suppressed the urge, though.

When I felt that I could turn my head without making myself ill, I looked around the rest of the room. On either side of the couch on which I reclined there were two identical chairs upholstered in the same paisley pattern and adorned with hundreds of brass studs. Between the chairs and in front of the couch was a heavy, dark-stained, oak coffee table that was completely covered with empty beer and liquor bottles.

I was about to turn and examine the rest of the room behind me, when the corner of something yellow caught my eye from under an overturned bottle of Jack Daniels. I moved the bottle and withdrew what turned out to be a large manilaenvelope. The envelope was addressed to me, but not at my home address. I’m not sure why this information sent a chill down my spine. Maybe it was because I didn’t even know where I was, yet somehow the mail carrier did. The postage stamp was cancelled and the post mark showed that it had passed through the local post office two days ago. There was no return address.

I looked around surreptitiously, still unsure of where I was exactly, and therefore unsure of who could be around or could come in at any moment. If the address on the envelope was any indication, I was on the Other Side of town. I say Other Side with capital letters because it is the equivalent of the Other Side of the Tracks, but our town is sans railroad tracks. I tried to think if I even knew anyone who lived on the Other Side. I could not bring forth a single name.

I lifted the envelope off of the table and was surprised by the heft. It was not heavy, per se, but its size belied the weight it apparently contained. I lay the envelope across my knees and stared at it for a moment, struggling to recognize the handwriting. There was something vaguely familiar, yet somehow…immature…about the handwriting. All of the words were capitalized in block letters which, of course, makes recognition more difficult.

I turned the envelope over and tore open the flap carefully. Inside was a thick packet of papers. They were eight by ten photographs. The very first photo on the top of the pile was a picture of a very attractive blond woman getting into a black car. The next photo showed her driving away from the camera, her lisence plate centered in the picture and clearly visible.

As I continued to flip through the pictures they appeared to be telling a shutter-frame story of this mysterious blond woman. Through the photos, I watched as she drove to a hair salon, then went to a couple of clothing stores. There was even a six photo series of her shopping at a grocery store where she purchased some fruits and vegetables, a couple cases of beer, and four bottles of Jack Daniels.

Then I watched as, frame by frame, she drove to my apartment. She rang the buzzer then waited. She smoked a cigarette on my front stairs. A couple frames later, I emerged from the apartment and she kissed me on my cheek.

In the strange living room, with a stack of photos in my lap, my heart leaped. I could clearly see myself in those pictures meeting this mysterious woman, yet I had no memory of it. I racked my brain trying to recall even the faintest detail. Nothing. I went back to the pictures. Flipping through them faster and faster.

The blond and I got into her car. I drove. We went across town to the Other Side. I parked the car in the driveway of an old, Victorian style house. We got out of the car and walked up to the front of the house. We each carried a case of beer and the bags with the booze inside. The door opened and two girls, twins by the look of their identical, black haircuts and matching outfits, smiled and greeted us. They ushered us inside.

The next series of photos became blurry…out of focus…as if the photographer was moving the camera too much while trying to take as many pictures as possible. The pictures made my head spin. They looked the way my vision always did when I had had too much to drink.

I watched as me the girls walked through the halls of the house and joined a large group of people in the living room. Beers were passed out and the bottles of Jack began making the rounds of the room. The photos looked as if they were double exposed because I kept seeing dual images of each person, almost like a ghost image. The party began to take on a frenzied pace and people began to pair up with others. The weird part was that as people paired off, the ghost images seemed to gather at one side of the room and watch.

I was surprised to see that the next photo was black. It was followed by one showing the group of partiers suddenly looking surprised. Then another black photo. The next one showed a dark figure moving in among the partiers. Every other photo was black, as if the lights had been flickering on and off or, as if the lights had gone out completely and the image was only illuminated by the flashing of the camera’s strobe.

Garish streaks of red splashed across the scene like someone had sprayed paint across the crowd. Then I realized that the people in the pictures, as the dark figure streaked past them, had horrible gashes ripped in them and that the red that sprayed forth was there blood. My eyes bulged and one of my hands flew to my chest as I watched the picture of myself scream silently as a deep wound opened across my front. In the picture I collapsed to the couch. The same couch on which I now sat. I dropped the stack of photos at my feet and pulled up my shirt. I was relieved and a little shocked to see that I was unscathed.

Confused, I picked up the stack of photos and noticed that even though I lay apparently dead or dying on the couch in the photo, there was still a double exposed image of me, along with the others, huddled in the corner of the photo. The next several photos showed what appeared to be the same image repeated. The bodies of myself and my fellow partiers lying in growing pools of blood while ghost images sat still watching. The dark assassin was nowhere to be seen.

At first I thought those last few pictures were the same, but then I realized that with each successive photo, the images of the bodies grew fainter while the double images grew more substantial. When the bodies had faded all together, the ghost images began exiting the frame until only I was left. My ghost image then walked to the couch and lay down upon it. The blond walked in and handed me a black pillow and a blanket which I used to cover up.

Several photos showed me lying asleep on the couch. Then I noticed that the light from the window was growing steadily brighter. I stared at the photos, transfixed, as I saw myself sit up and squint in the bright light. In the pictures, I looked around the room then noticed something on the coffee table. I picked up the manila envelope, looked surreptitiously around, then opened it. I pulled out a stack of photos and began leafing through them. As I continued to leaf through photos in the picture, the figure of the blonde woman appeared in the photos behind me. In the photos, I looked up suddenly. In the room I looked up suddenly.

I turned and saw that the blond woman was standing behind the couch just as she had been in the photo. She spoke and the sound of her voice startled me.

“Something terrible has happened,” she said. “Come with me.”

She held her hand out to me. I rose from the couch and walked around to her and accepted her hand. She lead me into the kitchen. Seated around the table were all of the people I had seen in the pictures. They all appeared to be nursing identical headaches and they all looked to be about as confused I was. Many of them were sipping steaming mugs of coffee.

I could see that there were several doorways that lead into the kitchen. Each one of them lead to a living room identical to the one I had just been lead away from.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded, my voice sounding less forceful than I had intended.

“That’s what were all trying to figure out,” the blond said. “We each awoke in one of those rooms,” she gestured at the many doors, “to find that we had no idea where we were or how we had gotten there. We all found an envelope addressed in our own hand to ourselves. We’ve all seen the photos and none of us has an answer. You were the last to awaken.”

“Perhaps I can help,” said a new voice.

We all turned to see a woman standing in the doorway to room that was engulfed in shadow. The darkness seemed to drift like a black mist from the room and wrap around her like a living robe of shadow.

“I summoned you all here without your knowledge. I allowed you to become drunk on spirits so that your physical bodies would release your True Self. Then I wisked through your useless shells and killed the flesh vessels that were imprisoning you. Now that you have been freed, the real adventure can begin.”

I succumbed to my earlier urge and promptly threw up all over the kitchen floor.

~ by jaekido on August 25, 2008.