This Was A Bad Idea

chapter 31 - strawberry flavored battery acid

Orion

December 12, 2010

3 months later.

I breathe in a lungful of cold air, trying to calm the fear thrumming in my chest. My hands straighten the hem of my dark blue sweater, going through all my old, practiced movements. The patterns soothe me, all my idle motions to try and distract me from the pounding of my thoughts. Old reminders from the week spent looking for Sam.

I didn't think I would make it.

I remember it all, the memories crisp and clear like oil in water. Blooming to the surface of my mind each time I stop to think about it too much.

My vision flashing dark. Elliot's voice going blurry. His hand curled around the base of my skull, a sob shaking loose from his throat. The look in his eyes, fear shredding through the hope in his eyes. I had slipped away slowly at first, like a wisp of smoke. How despite the agony in my legs, I felt so cold when I finally blinked out like a light.

I woke up in the ambulance when they were transporting me. I thought I was dead. The air had taken on an unreal quality, an oily haze surrounding the blurry faces that bent above me. The bright slam of the fluorescents and the high pitched scream of the sirens only brought me further into the dim edges of consciousness. I kept expecting to slip back under but I never did. I was awake the whole time as they accessed the burns on my legs, as they tried to make sense of where charred flesh blended into living tissue. They peeled me apart, shreds of skin commingling with my thrashing limbs.

What happened? What did you do?

A question that tore at me like hands, tumbling from openmouthed faces as I tried to piece together what had happened. First to my parents. Then in a statement ordered by a police officer. Later, in a frenzied text message written for my friends.

My plan. The one where I tucked a thin strip of fabric under my shoelace, intending to create the illusion that I was burning to death. I didn't expect it to actually work, what with having soaked my pants with water to try and dull the effect of the flames. I just wanted to create an illusion of false smoke.

The tunnel needed fire in order to break apart. I'd seen it in the lost memories that laced my brain like acid. They filtered through in bits and pieces, fragments of a puzzle that I'd never see fully completed. A hidden party with locks strung up on a length of fence. An old cult that drugged and sacrificed its members in an attempt to reach eternal salvation.

Both involved fire. The charring of bodies, the screams of people left to die. The teenagers found crumpled outside the tunnel after Sam's disappearance, lured in by whatever sinister force the cultists had conjured in their wake. A dark force had cursed the tunnel in a way, condemning all who ventured down into its harrowing depths.

So I staged a fake sacrifice, intending to only singe my clothes. But the flames consumed me instead. They tore past bone and flesh, corroding nerve endings and leaving me scoured like a rotten fruit.

Stoneridge held its harrowing secrets, old lore from a forgotten tunnel meant to never reach the orderliness of suburbia that lay above. The names and faces of those rotting skeletons may have been long forgotten, but what they intended to do scarred time itself.

I still remember it all.

I force myself to swallow the memories like bile.

They keep coming back in strange places. Catching me off guard like a gnarled hand that curled around my lungs. All the tiny little reminders strewn throughout the monotony of what I thought was normalcy. The small flames inside carved pumpkins left to decorate doorsteps during Halloween. A sudden hand landing on my arm. Changing the bandages on my legs and revealing the ragged burn scars that still catch me off guard to this day. The colorful wax candles lining people's windows once another cold Pennsylvania winter started to close in.