The Places Alec Forgot

Chapter Six

The air is chillier than I suspected it would be. I felt warmer on the sidewalk, where my skin throbbed and the ground swayed. When I crossed the road, a thin coating of sweat began to bead on my bare skin. As soon as I set foot on Stanely Ave. though, things grew cold. I'm shivering, hands tucked up under my armpits so that they won't lose feeling. It's July, yes, but it feels like November. I feel naked here. 

The air is stale, and it smells of rot. It isn't nasty, however; it smells like fruits turning into soil. With each step I take, I move further into the shadows of Stanley Ave. and with each step I take, another layer of my very being is torn from me. Soon I will be only a nude soul, being watched by owls in the trees.

I hope they're owls.

It feels like a waste. I will always be afraid of this road. There is nothing on Stanely Avenue. My parents told me that. My teachers told me that. Jesse and Jamie - they were scared, too, I think. They never said it out loud, but each time we drove by the mouth of the street, and each time the signs reading its name were pointed out, they were hushed.

Something is on Stanley Avenue, and it's hungry.

I can feel it, but I can't see it. I think I'm going insane. The pills I took this morning, white and chalky, had tasted wrong, but they were supposed to stop this. Dr. Gold said I would get better, that the blood would stop, the headaches would stop, and the hallucinations would stop.

But now I feel its eyes on the back of my neck. Once again, I can taste its name, something human, something uncommon but normal. It still tastes of old meat. It's a name I should know. I think I should know it.

I remember now, something that escaped me for years. Stanley Ave. is bringing it back.

Someone was yelling its name. Not the road, but the thing that's watching me. I slowly begin to remember more and more of the scene that plays in the back of my mind the further down this place I walk. I recognize Mother's voice in the sound memory. I recognize my own nervous breathing, and I begin to echo it now. She's yelling, but the name she's yelling is muffled, and I can't make it out. I just know. I know it's its name. It's the name of the thing watching me.

I have to forget it. To distract myself, I rub my sore shoulder and take in my surroundings instead of dreaming of those in the past.

Somehow, I have again lost track of time and space. The end of Stanely Ave is much farther away than it was when I started to recall those sounds. I can't make out the street sign anymore, or any signs for that matter. It feels less like a road, and more like a path, some narrow causeway between the main road and the empty forest. While I remember new things, I can't remember which way I'm going. There was a little rhyme someone told me about our town when I was younger, but my memory fails me. Blue River sits in the center, and were the forests to the south or the east? Is the empty field north or west? 

I feel unwelcome here.

"Hello?"

It's cliche and stupid, whispering hello to the foggy wind in a public place. After years of criticizing those movies for their horrid inaccuracies of human nature, I now realize what morbid curiosity causes us to call out.

I don't want to be alone out here. I don't want to be vulnerable. Where are my walls, my armor, when I need them most? A sort of homesickness washes over me. It isn't a craving to go home, though. I don't want my bed or Mother or my sisters. There's a word for it, I think, but even that doesn't describe what I'm feeling.

It's just empty.

Of course, no one has answered my call to attention. No one has said hello back. I don't know what I expected.

Somehow, I keep walking, but it's all the same. Gnarled tree roots continue to tear up the old pavement here, and the long, black fingers of those trees continue to reach down towards me. They try to appear threatening, with their twisted, wooden faces, eyes just out of sight behind the thickening fog, but they don't scare me. It has never been the trees that scared me here.

I peer up through their branches, through the summer coat of leaves they carry. There is still a chill in the July air. It's not normal for this place, but maybe something devastating happened here, and the remnants of what it was left the ice in the air.

Mother told me about that once. It's the energy, she said to me. It gets left behind, and it can curse a place, curse a person. She once took me into her bedroom and sat me down, reminding me of the energy that leaves a chill. There was a chill in the room, I think, but I might be confusing it with the chill on my skin now.

She talked to me then with the same emptiness that I see before me. Come to think of it now, Mother is a lot like Stanley Ave: dark and empty, confusing and scary, but it tastes like home when I say its name.

I want to think of something other than Mother, other than home. I focus on the trees, their towering faces watching over me. If I think of them as that, not as looming beasts I need to fear, this place becomes much less threatening. I'll think of the owls not as judgemental but as curious onlookers. Yes, that's what I'll do.

Something creeps up over my mind, though. It isn't an owl or a twisted visage in the bark of an old oak tree. It's something nonhuman, some beast I need to fear. It is the eyes that watched me earlier before I was distracted by minor memories. My muscles seize, and I stop walking. 

Before me, Stanley Ave stretches on and on into the fog and darkness, and behind me, it does the same. There are no street lights here. While nothing threatens me, at least not physically or verbally, I feel a warning encroaching over my mind. I want to call out into the dark once more, but my voice is lost again to me.

Deep breaths, I remind myself. There is a breathing exercise I was taught in therapy. Breath in for 7 seconds, hold for 4 seconds and breathe out for 8 seconds. As I try it here, rooted to the ground like the plants around me, I only begin to feel dizzy. 

"This isn't real." My voice finally comes back to me, but I'm speaking to no one. God, I look like a psychopath out here, shaking in the mist and fog while I talk to myself.

I glance over my shoulder, and I see a light. It looks like a streetlamp, way at the end of Stanley Ave where there had not been one prior. The light is orange and old, casting a golden halo out around it. It's far away, but I'm closer to the end of the road, or the start of the road, that I initially thought I was.

I don't remember a street light being there when I walked down here. I only remember the street sign. My shoulder throbs again.

Breathe in for 7. Hold for 4. Breathe out for 8.

My heart skips and thumps in my chest, beating like a caged animal against my ribs. I clutch the fabric of my shirt. The light is wrong. It's out of place and it's wrong. It cuts into my clothes and my skin and my eyes. It wants to hurt me, I think. 

Something is standing under the streetlamp. A figure of shadow, it isn't looking at me. It's looking up at the light, at the golden halo it produces. Maybe they know that the lamp is wrong, too. Do they know that it wasn't there before?

They turn, a wider shadow than before, and now they're looking down the road. I don't think they can see me.

The light flickers. They don't move. I don't either.

I don't know if I should call out for them. If they're out there, they need to stay out there. Something is wrong with Stanley Ave. and I don't know what it is.

I hope they don't call out for me, either. We're watching each other, but neither of us has moved. 

Something is wrong with them. Something is wrong with this road. Something is wrong with the light.

Finally, I take a step back. As the sole of my shoe makes contact with the pavement, the streetlamp shuts off.

I hear footsteps, fast and heavy.

I turn around and run.