Interminable Hour

Light and darkness.

Color and void.

A silent symphony of twisting, reverberating nothingness, echoing in ears I no longer possessed. 

And then, all at once, the world came crashing back in, my vision narrowed to fit natural eyes, and I hit the floor of my quiet bedroom for the second time in an hour, painfully cracking my knees and yelping. I'd turned out the light before I left, so once again I fumbled in darkness, disoriented. This time, however, I'd done one thing differently.

In my white-knuckled grip was the leather book, tingling weirdly. I silently cheered myself for somehow keeping a grip on the stupid thing, despite the momentary loss of any bodily sensation. I wondered what would happen if I'd let go of it in that... in-between place. If it was a place. 

I dropped my book on my desk and pulled my light cord, illuminating my cluttered room. I'd rarely made my bed, and today was no exception. My laundry pile, recent savior of my face, lay across the floor next to my stupid hamper, which had one of those narrow cloth slots on top instead of a wide opening, and therefore was hard to toss dirty clothes into. Books were everywhere, in teetering piles, sorted according to how often I reread them. I say "sorted" as though it was intentional.

I'm not a materialistic person by any means, and I would argue that the state of a person's items is no reflection on the person himself. Nevertheless, looking at my disheveled living space, I felt embarrassed. This was the state of my life. This was the way I chose to live. I chose the easiest possible thing at every turn.

Maybe that's why the book drew me in this way. As confusing and frightening as it was to tumble through nothingness, one of my first thoughts was, "Wow! I could get home really fast now!" I never considered the implications.

I looked at my clock. 7:09 PM. Still almost three hours until Beck got out of her job at the grocery store, hopefully to explain just what the hell the deal was with this book. What to do? Three hours was a long, long time to sit around and think, when I'd been zipping around with a magic book all night.

Well, there it was. The elephant in the room. I'd tried not to look at it this way yet, but in a nonsensical way it made the most sense. Weird symbols? Freaky incantations? Mystical voodoo fireworks and instantaneous travel, to my own home of all places? Nothing I knew could account for it, but when I laid it all out, realized just exactly what I'd been doing...

Okay. So it was a magic book, I decided. I felt an awkward chill, looking at it lying innocently on my desk. What other insanities lurked in those pages? For a long, long time, I sat on my bed and stared at the book, wondering. Silver glyphs gleamed at me, reflecting the yellowish light of my lamp in a way that made it seem mysterious, arcane, special. I thought I could smell the ancient leather. After a while, I looked at the clock.

7:12 PM.

F**k it.

I sat down at my desk, brushing aside papers and empty bags, and opened the book to the first page. I expected scribbles and scratches, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw the shining, clear English text printed neatly in the center of the front page:

This Text Belongs To:

Tyler Maloney McAllister

What? I'd definitely looked at the first page of the book before, and I hadn't noticed any English, let alone my own name. When had this happened? And how? 

I chalked it up to "magic", that helpfully obscure cure-all for mystery, and turned the page. Now-familiar scribbles dominated the page, devoid of meaning, and I was about to turn to the next page when something caught my eyes. A particular sequence of glyphs seemed... important. It was that same unnerving certainty I'd felt when I first saw yayo ayamia, or whatever the hell it was. (You have no idea how hard it is to transcribe those words. Don't be irritated if I don't even bother.) I looked again, focusing, waiting... and there it was. A whisper in my mind, accompanied by the desperate, animal desire to say the words out loud...

Before I could stop myself, out it came: "Mo Kalya Bhaara a Indriya!" The words reverberated, echoing in my brain, burning. 

Immediately, a whine filled the air, like a shrill whistle at the edge of hearing, becoming louder and louder over a space of seconds. I'd just decided it wasn't my imagination when there was a flash of bright light from the open pages of my book, a rushing sound- then a searing pain from the back of my right hand. I say the "back" in hindsight, but at the time it burned as though my entire forearm was in flames. 

I was probably shouting - okay, screaming- but I couldn't be sure. The light poured over me, tormenting my eyes, shining so bright I could see the bones of my hand when I looked to see if it was even still there. The pain continued to spread, raking up my arm until I was paralyzed from the shoulder down, and then it spread some more.

I hated that book so profoundly in that moment, but I hated myself even more. As the creeping agony crossed my chest, ripping the breath from my lungs, striking my heart like a bolt of lightning, I knew with pristine clarity that I'd done this to myself. I'd fucked around with something I shouldn't have, once again, and now I'd finally wound up killing myself. Great.

I thought I was on the floor, probably. I kept rolling into things, bumping my head over and over against my sparse furniture, but I didn't care. The burning was climbing my neck, and I knew I was screwed. A concussion could only help.

My entire spine was ablaze, and I think I arched my back painfully, and then the line of fire reached my brain and the world ceased to exist. There was only pain and suffering and endless blackness shot through with the flashes of synapses burning, and the awful, awful understanding that this was my own damn fault. Endless regret...

...and after a thousand years of horror, the brilliant agony faded. So slow. Too slow. But away it went, draining away like an acid bath, tendrils of flame dragging along my veins as though reluctant to leave me. At last, I collapsed like someone had cut my strings and lay on my floor, panting. Strangely enough, in the absence of horrific full-body pain, I felt a relative pleasure. The floor felt nice. So did my shoes. My hair, slick with sweat, felt cool and soft on my forehead. 

For a moment I relaxed, appreciating the cool, refreshing air in my lungs. Already the pain was becoming a memory, falling away into the archives, never to be fully recalled. I can't say I missed it. 

I looked up at my clock and immediately sobbed. 7:16 PM. 

"This has to stop..." I moaned, reeling. I was mentally exhausted beyond anything I'd ever experienced. I didn't just want to sleep, I wanted to f*****g die. There was not enough rest, I thought, for me to ever feel human again. The pain had gone, but I'd still endured it, and I felt soul-sick with the effort. 

And I was so hungry I thought I could eat my desk. Did I have any food? Did I have the energy to lift it up and put it in my mouth? I thought of trying to open a can of soup and nearly cried.

And then a knock at the door. Incredible. I'd completely forgotten about my landlady in the heat of the moment. Knock, knock, rapid and rough, showing no sign of stopping.

"Trick! Open this door!"

"Murrgf." Speaking was hard. Didn't seem worth it.

"Damn you, boy, open this door right now or I am calling 911!"

"Goddamnit," I muttered, and committed to standing. I tried to raise my voice. "I'm... I'm okay, miss Dean. Don't worry about me." I managed to struggle to my knees. I thought I weighed about six hundred pounds. 

"Open the door, Trick!" She kept knocking. I guess she hadn't heard me. I finally planted one foot underneath myself, pulled myself up by the corner of my desk, and staggered to my feet. As carefully as possible, fighting a wave of dizziness, I limped to the door and pulled it open. My hawkish landlady, an old Irishwoman like most people in the neighborhood, stared at me with a wide-eyed expression of shock.

"Saints alive, child, you look like you've been beaten! Who's in there with you?"

"Nobody, ma'am." Go away.

"I heard you screaming awfully. And someone was thumping around."

"I burned myself making dinner. Kind of... kind of danced around a little. You know how it is. Hurts." Just leave me alone. Please.

She tried to look over my shoulder, suspicious in that old-lady way. I'm no linebacker, but I'm still bigger than an old woman with osteoporosis. I managed to block her sight of my room, not wanting her to see the gleaming book lying on my desk. She scowled. "If you're in some kind of trouble, you'd best clear out. I don't need that coming down on my house."

"I'm not in any trouble, ma'am. Just burned my hand."

"Let me see, then." F**k. Crafty old shrew.

I held out my hand, hoping her eyesight was worse than her hearing, and both of us gasped. The back of my right hand gleamed, seemingly tattooed with the same reflective ink as my book was written in. A strange symbol like the ones in the book shone, two inches wide, centered on my hand where the pain had first struck. And my landlady was staring directly at this bizarre display with an expression of horror on her face.

"Um." I started to explain, realizing I hadn't made up an explanation yet, but she cut me off.

"Boy, you're dealing in un-Christian things. You ought to know not to mark up your body this way. 'Tis an offense against the Almighty and you'd know it if you knew your Book." She looked positively scandalized.

"Um."

"You know the Jews, they won't even bury a body in one of their graveyards if it's marked up that way. The Jews, they know how to listen to the Book. Nice people. You ought to know better."

Nodding at subtly racist comments was just part of living around the elderly. I smiled. "Yes, ma'am."

"Small wonder you were hollering so. Marking yourself up. 'Tis a shame and a sin. Where you young people find the ideas for such foolishness..." she tapered off, muttering, then seemed to notice me again. "Well. I don't need you howling and carrying on. Let's have this be the last time, aye?"

"Yes ma'am." Please, please go away.

She shot one more suspicious old-lady gaze at me, trying to look through me to my den of blasphemy, then turned on her heel and headed down the stairs. I let out a sigh of relief and shut my door, frowning at my hand. Whatever this silver substance was, it was reflective to the point of being mirror-like, and it wasn't rubbing off. Great. I had chrome skin now, on top of everything else. 

I looked over at my clock and bit back a scream. 7:23 PM.

"That does it."

I took my cell phone out of my pocket and typed up a quick message, one-handed, while I looked around for my ratty pair of fingerless gloves, a relic from my skateboarding phase. As I pulled on the black, thin yarn gloves, I hit SEND and headed to the door.

To: BECK

7:24 PM

coming to the store. take a break or something. need answers NOW.

Author's Note

Some of my more astute readers may have noticed I'm using Sanskrit for my "magic words". In a final draft, these will be something a little more creative. Consider the Sanskrit a placeholder.

Reviews

[UponATyme]

You really built up the drama in this chapter. The flow was nice, the language even better, I found myself reading faster to get through it and see what was happening. I like that you didn't have him make a quick recovery as soon as someone knocked on the door. More realistic. Awesome!