To Hell and Back for You

Chapter 8: Intruders

I made it back home at five-thirty that evening after stopping by the store and picking up a cheap pay-as-you-go phone. It was a bit smaller than my previous device, but an even bigger piece of shit. Its web capabilities were terrible and I doubted the actual satellite service was very reliable either.

Fortunately, that wasn't the reason I bought it. I only got it on the off chance that I would need to make a call. Not family or friends since I had none. It was just for emergency and for work, so I didn't really care how much it sucked. I wasn't entirely certain why I had left my other phone with that girl either.

I suppose mostly I just didn't feel like bothering with getting her to return it. However, there was a part of me that felt that she had liked the phone. I could be wrong, but it was the sense I got and I kind of wanted to be nice to them. I didn't think the teens were bad kids or anything, alhough they were definitely on the road to some serious trouble if they didn't get a reality check.

Laying in bed, I set alarms for my work days on the new phone before placing it on the nightstand beside me and rolling over to stare at the ceiling. This had been the most eventful day I had had in months, possibly longer, and coupled with my depression, had made me extremely tired.

Regardless, Something was keeping me from going to sleep. I was on my back, on top of the blankets that I'd thrown on the bed that morning rather than take the time to neatly fold them and straighten my pillow. I wanted to lift myself and crawl underneath, but my mind felt like it was in overdrive.

Thoughts of those kids and their reasons for treating me as they had, what had driven me to go to Daytonsville at all, and what I was doing with life in general circled in my head along with visions of Lloyd McGraff sacrificing random citizens, being beaten to death, and then coming back to further terrorize his hometown through people's dreams.

Then I thought about Ames. Damn, she'd been through a lot herself. It saddened me to see her alone, tied to that forgotten city, with apparently most people viewing her as batshit insane; just as I had thought myself insane. Through her, I had seen proof to the contrary and it had shattered me. I longed to speak with her again, to learn more, yet I was stuck in an existential crisis.

I turned my head to the side to look at my arm. I had agitated the fresh cuts by clutching them too tightly in an attempt to hide them even though they had already been seen. In a few places, the scabs had been pulled away, causing them to bleed again. Now there was dry blood in wavy lines and in spots between the cuts. Suicide was never far from my mind, and yet I wasn't strong enough to actually do it.

It wasn't that pain bothered me. I had unfortunately grown a liking for it. I wasn't afraid of hurt; I was afraid of death. As much as I wanted to be rid of this bullshit pathetic life of mine, I had no conviction of what the afterlife held great enough to keep me from worrying.

Moreover, with the new evidence of the supernatural, I felt I didn't deserve it until I had righted what I'd done to fail Tyler. Then again, perhaps the only way to find him was to be free of this body. My brain instantly began contemplating this option. I could only do so much as a human, right? So what I were to release my spirit, fully release it, not just astral travel?

That presented another possible obstacle: not being strong or aware enough witbout my physical being to carry out my mission. What if atheists were right and it was all nothingness afterward? If we were our minds and whatever else was simply different forms of energy being converted into different uses.

Or what if the religious were correct and our next lives were equally predetermined? In any case, I realized that the here and now was all I could be certain of. At least I could comprehend who I was in this life and how it worked, its rules. Besides, even if dying were necessary to fix this shit, it wasn't like I was going to magically summon the power to end myself.