Don't Let Me Keep You

Don't let me keep you. I'm sure you've got very important places to be; there are people waiting for you. Loved ones? Maybe not. Ones who care about you, surely, but they couldn't have cared very much. We wouldn't have met. Not if they had cared even a little more.

What was it that tipped you over the edge, I wonder? What brought you here? For now I wonder. Soon enough you'll tell me. Even if you never figure it out I will chisel the bits out of you in time; peeling back your regrets, phobias, and dreams like the soft and rotting layers of an unused onion. But this onion can bleed.

This onion can beg.

Was it some ephemeral dream of fame; maybe just recognition? Did you believe I could, might even want, to drip some of my shine onto your negligible existence? You have things I want, to be sure, but none you would willingly offer as collateral even for the materialization of unfettered fantasies. Some of these things are mine already. You have guessed at a few more on my list, but there remain an endless number you can't imagine; and I can't stop imagining. I won't.

Your friends told you about this place back when bogeymen were real and schoolyard hyperbole could pass amongst peers as gospel truth. They planted my seed without knowing I had gifted it to them, generations ago, feeding bits of fanciful daydreams into the uneducated minds of their ancestors. Even then I knew you; knew you would come. How much better we know each other now. How close we've become. How much closer can we be? I feel your dread where my heart should be, tugging like a fish on a line it couldn't fathom mere moments before.

Certainly I had other methods I could have used to bring you here. Backup plans stacked atop ruses, tumbling all around you like freshly disturbed stacks of books in a hoarder's home. I couldn't be too obvious; not all the time, anyway. You might have heard about the attic window that frosted shut and sometimes grew great icicles like fangs in the dry heat of summer. The changing number of windows on the front of the house. There were the dead dogs on the lawn. Those I'm sure you heard about.

The first few appeared weeks apart, always in the center of the uncut yard, forming bloody craters in the foot-high overgrowth born of keen superstitions that kept even the bravest would-be landscapers away. Each one was supine, legs spread outward and pinned with lawn darts, its belly split; mouth open as if laughing at the sky. They all appeared to have been well taken care of, loved. Right up until the end, that is. Bright collars with bone or heart shaped tags still clung to their sticky, blood-caked fur. Owners were never contacted. The tags would always show the animal's name as something innocuous like "Rex" or "Fido." The owner's names were where I had my fun.

I still giggle imagining sad and horrified people steeling themselves to call someone named "Colon Jackson" or "Puss Macruthers." They may have even had phones in their hands when they realized the engraved phone numbers were always too long, too short, or contained extra digits unfamiliar to any living scholars. It was juvenile, sure, but it kept people whispering about the house: my house. Those more rational traders of gossip would assert teenagers were responsible. Gross and silly names pointed to the immaturity of the pranksters, and that's just what I had hoped for. I couldn't risk scaring you off with something too explicitly impossible or terrifying. You have to believe me, I didn't want to scare you. Not then.

That's all done now. You're here with me. You'll never capture a photo of a glass dripping water up through the buttery light of my kitchen toward the fetid ceiling; scabbed over since last night's bleeding. There will be no reality television career for the amateur ghost hunter whose childhood town harbored a devil house. You will tell stories; but only to me, and only between screams. For now you might believe your failing body and slowing pulse are inching you closer to the punctuation of death. That looming period that marks a finite ending to your suffering. I assure you, your sentence is just beginning.

This isn't punishment, not really. If I still had a soul I might apologize, for you've done nothing wrong. Nothing you'd understand, anyway. No, my friend, this isn't retribution or rehabilitation. I don't aim to make you a better person. I'm going to make you something less and more than the great gods of your most ancient myths. I'm going to outshine the gargantuan terror of your species' most secret and tenacious fears.

Were this sport and I enjoyed a challenge the way you apes seem to, I might have slipped you a note. It could have been stitched into the wings of a dying butterfly or seared into the surface of a freshly opened pop-tart. You wouldn't have known what it meant, shivering there in your backyard, kitchen, bedroom. You couldn't have known like you do now. There are holes in the world that swallow you whole, chew up the memories of you, spit out strips of undigested consciousness like bones, and leave those who knew you struggling to remember you name.

You would have done well to stay away, heeded the warning I never gave: Don't let me keep you.