Vanishing Act

The first night, when he came screaming out of the woods for help, they put him in cuffs. The tight metal drips with everything else on him. His hands were still covered in mud. By the time they reached the station, it had dried down enough to flake off when he moved his hands. His clothes and shoes were as wet as before and colder than when he dove in after her. The AC humming and his heart beating were all he remembered of the sounds in that space. He stayed the rest of the night in silence, shivering and afraid of what might get him in the night the police had no weapons to stop. A search was under way the next day into the night. He swore, he was sure, they found a body. Her body, so fragile, broken and rotting. He was certain they found her there in a state of decay beyond the time they shared. But she was alive when he last saw her. He thought she was. She walked on the water and on through that light they saw under the kudzu vines. He couldn't remember if she ever touched the water, but he searched for her there in the place she disappeared. In his mind, she was in two places; walking across into that unknown space of light, and vanishing beneath the dark water. Both felt as real as the other, but he remembered searching for her in the creek. He dug as deep as he could as the water dragged against him. He didn't remember how long he did that for. It felt like the hours had stretched across the land, and he and Time were drifting farther away from the logic of clocks. When he came running out of the woods, it was only eleven. He had left his house for a walk at ten thirty. He never intended to go into the woods. He was walking his dog and saw her go into the woods. He was drawn to her. She was familiar, but he couldn't place from where. He intended to ask her who she was. When he came back, he still didn't know nor did he have a dog. His parents made it clear to him he had never owned any pets. When he told the police that day about his missing dog and the girl, he was released as a suspect and sent for an involuntary hold to be evaluated. By the third night, there was no body. There was never a girl at all. He was told they found nothing, and had spent the night in jail because he was acting strangely. It was merely a temporary place until he could be sent somewhere more suitable for his issues. By the fourth night, he had never been in jail and his hold had been extended from seventy-two hours to a month. Thirty days turned to sixty. Sixty to ninety. After that, he lost count. His parents visited him at first, then he heard nothing from them. He was told, when he voiced his sadness about their absence, that he was an orphan and had been a ward of the state since he was six. He never had a foster family for long and reached adulthood without making any connections or being adopted by anyone. He didn't believe that, but when he thought about it, he could recall his parents dying in a car crash. But he was sure they didn't die either. Both seemed so true when he thought about it, he couldn't decide which was reality and which was a delusion. Both worlds existed within him. A month after that, he was informed his parents had been killed while on a couples camping trip by a serial killer. That too, seemed correct. The memory of the car crash became hazy, but every now and then, when he thought back to it out of the blue, it felt as real as the other two sets of memories. He hoped his medication would make it stop. With each new truth learned, he worked hard to replace what he thought was real and prayed for this to all end. Nothing changed. He wondered if these people around him were doing this to him, tricking him into believing false things were real for some nefarious purpose. But he wasn't interested in fighting anymore and the idea seemed like a waste of time. When he was informed of a new truth to believe, he simply swallowed it down. He was in that place for a long time. Surely, he was supposed to be there. Many of the other residents believed things that weren't real. The man who slept on the mat beside his in the hallway saw monsters from time to time. He had a family, from what he heard, but they didn't want to deal with him. This place was where everyone no one wanted to deal with or couldn't afford to empty their bank accounts for went, in a state run facility that was supposed to have been shuttered years ago. Private, public, everywhere was overcrowded anywhere someone needed to stay for long. The rooms were filled up and the hallways with makeshift beds. Some were unucky enough to have to sleep on the floor when too many people were staying. The mat he slept on looked like one he exercised on in elementary school PE, but this one had dark stains and tears, and lacked any of the bright colors those ones had. He tried to forget where he was. He sleptwalked through his daily activities and dreaded his dreaming time. She was always there when he closed his eyes. Sometimes she was there at the creek, walking on glowing water. Other nights, she led him through the woods to spiral stairways. At the top, some had doors or door frames. Others led to nothing. She would nudge him to open one with a door, but whenever he tried, the knob wouldn't turn. Every door was locked. She was always smiling in his dreams where she talked to him and he always felt like they were being watched by something big and out of sight. When she was silent, he found her beneath the water. Dead, dying, moving quiet. She would rot and fall apart in his hands, her heavy bones sink beneath the mud, and her eyes fall out of the sockets. Still, she moved. Her jaw, hanging on, would swing back and forth without words and her chest heaved up and down before the ribs fell in and dragged the rest of her down. She would be above him again then, walking on the water of light. He couldn't touch her. When he reached up for her, the warmth of the light from the kudzu and the moon burned his skin. Wherever the warmth touched, a burning pain surged through him and his own heart betrayed him as it pumped the strange poison through the rest of him. When he could bare the pain no more, he would see it then; the sky tearing open, splitting apart like fabric cut with a seam ripper. The threads of the sky above him slowly, delicately unraveling, slipped apart until both halves fell away from each other. Then, it poured in, dripping wet and burning hot. Bubbling from the darkness, the liquid light burst through and drowned everything in fire. When he woke from those dreams, he would be left paralyzed for a moment when he was greeted with the blinding white walls and ceiling of the facility. He would wait there quiet and frozen for a nurse to call him over for breakfast and his morning medication. He prayed today would be the day it finally worked, but the nightmares never went away. When his adopted parents arrived to take him home one day, he didn't question who they were even though he didn't recognize their faces and had no memories of ever meeting them. He was sixteen now. He was twenty-one when he first came. The next two years, he went to high school with people who said they were his friends and took his medication diligently. The dose grew higher as did the number of medications. No relief came. He didn't grow attached to anyone he met. After all, they might not be real. He might have new friends tomorrow, or a new family. One day, when he got off the bus from school, he didn't recognize the street he was on. He waited in that spot until a couple led him to his new home. These were a new set of parents, another foster family. He had a foster sister and brother at this home, but the sister quickly exited the picture. She lived on for a while as a wish and a regret of the mother who had always wanted a daughter but failed to get pregnant a second time due to health issues treated far too late. He avoided them all regardless. When he wasn't at school, he wandered the streets looking for a way back to where he started. He hoped to find that light again. The medication wasn't helping. If he could find that light, maybe he could make everything go back to how it was, or he could go to where that girl went. Luckily, he didn't have to go far to find the woods. Wherever he was, whether it was at school, at home, in a jail cell, or a psychiatric hospital, the woods were always in view and a short walk away. Finding the creek was the hard part. He could wander the woods for hours on end and not find it. When he did find it, the creek would have snaked its way off to somewhere else in the forest. He wanted to stay when he found it, but eleven would come and he would be outside the woods again. The trees wouldn't let him overstay his welcome. Or at least, that's how he remembered it. According to his ever changing string of doctors and nurses, none of that was real. Eventually, he did have living biological parents again. They were the same people he remembered, though their interests were different. They had been in a terrible car accident once, both hospitalized for a month before being released from the hospital. They had once camped somewhere a serial killer had killed a couple at, but he had attacked the campers most nearest to them. They never crossed paths with the man. He killed silently and brutally in the night and was never caught. When he thought on that, he remembered having a phase of becoming obsessed with learning about serial killers and what motivated them. They terrified and fascinated him, replacing his previous interest of the same dual emotional response, astronomy. The proof of these memories existed as books in his bedroom and a boxed up telescope in the garage he had packed with things he didn't want to discard or remember anymore. He was twenty-five when those parents returned. He had never been hospitalized, as far as they could remember, but he did take medication and see a professional monthly. His house returned one morning after a dream about the stairways with doors. He almost opened the door that night. The air was different that day. The sun never looked quite right after that. It was duller, dimmer and Time walked around him in an ever slowing pace. He stayed twenty-five for years, according to his own count, and the feeling of being watched by something large and out of sight lingered past his dreams' endings. The feeling grew worse after dark. He could feel something close and feel something akin to breath that was not breathing against the back of his neck. At random times, he would feel the burning from his dreams in his body. When this happened, he couldn't move whatever part of him ached. No doctor was able to find anything wrong with him. He was eventually told to not come back by a few of them. One morning, he was a pet owner again, but the dog was a different breed than the one he had before. He wanted to love the new pet, but he couldn't feel anything for anyone anymore. Bothering to become attached to anything brought him dread in the way the nightmares did. Afterall, at any moment, anything he loved could vanish or be replaced with something suspiciously similar yet not. The world itself began to seem unreal. He questioned if any of the people he saw really existed or if this was all a long dream he had yet to wake from. He often hoped for the latter. One day, the bright light of the sun would bring him back to the place where everything was right and that girl would disappear from his thoughts entirely. She was the only one he thought about for long. He never learned her name, nor could he place where he knew her from. He both believed and did not believe he had known her before. Which side he chose varied from moment to moment. When the days mostly went by peacefully, he told himself she was born from a psychotic break and all these confusing thoughts were simply an effect of that same break. One day, it would end. The other days, when the unseen thing was especially close against his neck, he had no doubts about his current existence having any truth to it. Sometimes he begged the thing that lurked unseen to take him or let him walk through the light. He wasn't sure why he believed it could show him the light, but it felt right in his mind. He would throw himself in rivers and creeks, in pools and streams, hoping one of them would drag him under while the other half of him walked above through to that other place too hot for him to touch. He was put in a hospital again for a while, then one morning he woke up back at home. His parents were dead again and the dog was gone. He tried hard to ground himself to something after that and live normally, but the scenery changed little by little as the sky grew dimmer. His current job, one he never recalled applying for, paid him well enough he didn't need to worry about much. He avoided the woods and tried to ignore the thing that followed. In his dreams, he refused to go up the stairs with the girl or get in the water. He captured every inconsistency and reformed it into a new reality. The world never felt quite real nor the people in it, but he would live with the idea they were and try to connect again. After all, he was likely still unwell and this would all stop one day. It had to stop. At thirty, which he came to be from several years of being twenty-five, the girl was there again at the forest's edge. She looked the same as before, not one day older than eighteen. This time, she smiled at him like she did in his dreams. He couldn't help but follow her back to the creek. She led him over to the light, holding his hand. The warmth burned him, but he didn't care. He was drawn to the light and her. They passed under the kudzu vines into the light. On the other side, he saw a pool in a dimly lit room. The walls were overgrown with kudzu. The long vines crawled into the dark water, fighting each other for dominance in the pool. They squirmed like worms in a can, wriggling and writhing against one another. Twisting and draining, the kudzu cast ripples across the surface like skipping stones. The pool began to glow with the warm light. She walked him over to the edge, his body slightly lifted off the ground. As he looked more closely at her, she didn't have a face. Or rather, her face had rotted away. The person in front of him was merely a skeleton. A careful mix of light and shadow created the illusion of a face and skin. As he watched her move, she had an unnatural bobbing to her gait. Faintly, along her wrists and ankles, at her waist and around her neck, he saw sinewy strings pulled at her from above. He looked up to see what she was connected to. There was no ceiling above them. There was quite a number of things there though, in that dark space, that he could barely make out with his eyes. He saw great darknesses encased in something. They were all around him, all touching against each other. In between that, in a tiny space, this room existed and just outside it in the space that removed was something too large for him to understand. The great big darknesses that touched were far larger than that thing, but he was nothing to it. It appeared to be as large as a blue whale. Orbs, clear and full of dim light, seemed to stare at him, but he wasn't sure they were really eyes. The body was transparent, but the organs were not. He watched things move rhythmicly inside it as it retracted an opening beneath the orbs. From what he assumed was the top of it, the kudzu-looking structures came. As he looked at them more, they were not kudzu at all. There were no real leaves. They merely looked similar enough for him to confuse them. Each leaf shape had its own opening and clung to the larger thing via tightly wound string-like appendages. All across the body, other strings extended out into the greater darknesses. He saw it move skeletons back and forth between the different touching spaces. His own body, he quickly realized, was bound by the same threads. He tried to release himself from them. The threads became tighter and dragged him toward the pool. The kudzu-like things moved excitedly, creating chaotic waves. The girl skeleton went limp and was moved into one of the connected giant, dark spaces. His eyes adjusted enough to realize the room was not real either. It was created of light and shadow the same way the girl's face had been. He could see through the floor and pool now. The opening he saw below the thing's eye-like orbs was not its only opening. The pool was another. He had assumed the smaller one was the mouth because he assumed its body was similar to animals he had seen before. But the pool and the little things clinging off the string existed in its actual mouth. He was dropped in. The kudzu-like things wrapped around him, cutting through his body as the larger being drank his blood and energy. He should've died long before he did. When half his body was down to nothing but bones, he was still alive watching his own consumption. In his final moments, he hoped and prayed to wake from a bad dream and be back in his old life before everything became strange. He was reassured so many times this wasn't real. He clung to that hope until his soul was all that remained and he saw his skeleton being hoisted above him into one of the dark spaces. A sucking sensation overcame what remained of him as his soul was pulled down into the large thing's belly. He saw strange shapes of light in the stomach, all of them calling out in agony. He could hear himself doing the same, but it didn't feel connected to him. Slowly, all the lights were pulled into a dark pit where they came out somewhere else. There, he existed, stretched and broken. He could still feel fear and cold, but hope had left him. His absence from many spaces was reported as a missing person's case. He was presumed to have committed suicide and the body simply not found yet. No body was ever found. But there was a girl who existed in some space who swore she saw that man vanish once down by the creek under the kudzu and moonlight. She didn't know his name though, so she couldn't report exactly who he was to anyone. All she knew was he felt familiar to her in some way. Eventually, that girl who had seen him disappear that night vanished from many spaces too and was soon forgotten about. There had been one space where neither vanished. The pair were happily married and lived with their two small dogs in a city apartment. As they appeared and vanished from other places in space and time, that space had remained stable. It was too far from the crevice the thing lived in, connected at a much farther spot in the greater space outside of everything. One night, when they were both thirty, the couple was watching a meteor shower from their balcony. The man spoke. "Did you know when I was a kid I was terrified of space?" "Really? Why?" She asked. "It's stupid, really." He laughed. "It's so big, anything could be out there. Haha, I was terrified of the bottom of the ocean too." She laughed with him. "Well, when you think about it long enough, those are really scary. I wouldn't want to go into space. The earth is plenty good enough for me." The man laughed again. He smiled and looked up at the shooting stars. "But you know, I was fascinated by it too. Who knows what's out there. It could be something creepy, but what if there's something beautiful out there too just out of sight?" "I don't know. I'd rather not think about that." She shrugged. "The stars are certainly beautiful from right here though." For a brief moment, the man saw a flash of a place he didn't know in his mind. A creek snaked its way through the middle of the woods. It felt tempting to linger on its origin. While he used to love astronomy, the rest of nature didn't interest him. He let the thought leave him. Main