The Beings

A Story by Paige

A short story I wrote about the people who don't quite fit in, the missing people, the missing links. Great to read while playing a freaky plalist

There are beings in this world that don’t entirely fit. They go unnoticed, but when you see them, there’s something off. Maybe there’s a funny look in their eyes, their fingers are too long, or their smiles stretch out too far. Some with tattoos, but no scars, perfect skin.

You see them in a book store, or at a café. You ask your friend “did you see that guy?” They respond “Yeah, he had a really cool beard!” or “crazy outfit, right?” but that’s not what you meant. You meant the arm that bent the wrong way, or the deformed legs. Very rarely will you find a friend that will nod, watch them until they’re out of sight, and then pull their coat closed, as if the room was very cold all of a sudden.

That friend to me was Ezra Loveman. He moved to town with his adoptive parents when we were 14. We became good friends; he liked similar music as me, along with obscure bands and songs which I fell in love with. He never minded the rain, loved running, and played the piano so well it gave me chills.

As far as looks went we couldn’t be more different. We were both taller than average. Where I had muscle he was ultra-skinny. I had more color than he did. His eyes were the lightest grey I have ever seen, mine were hazel. His hair was dark brown, mine was sandy blonde. He always looked like he was sick, he had bags under his eyes all the time, and girls liked him quite a bit.

Looks aside, I have never gotten along with anyone in my life better than I get along with him. He moved to town right before my older sister went missing. He helped when I was sad, and kept my mind away from it when I was happy. He told me long ago that he was adopted because his parents abandoned him, in a car by the ocean. His adoptive parents found him, it was raining and he looked like he was dying. They brought him to the hospital. All that he had was a blanket with his name stitched into it along the edge. Nobody knew anything, there were no missing persons reports, the vehicle wasn’t registered with the state. No trace of his real family, which haunted him. He wanted to know, but there was no way to know. We both had something missing, maybe that’s why we bonded.

We lived in a suburb near Seattle, and he had been here for a few months when I started seeing the people. The first one I saw was at Wal-Mart. He looked like a college guy. Some sports team shirt on, athletic shorts, tennis shoes. It was sometime in the morning, he was buying beer and I bumped into him. He quickly apologized, in a high pitched voice that didn’t match him at all, and hurried away. That’s when I realized what else was so off about him, his spine stuck out from his back. Not like how someone bends over and you see the bumps, but the spine was raised off of his back, you could see every bone, and he was not a skinny guy at all. It wasn’t right, and it gave me the chills I got whenever Ezra played, but in a bad way.

I was with my family that first time, the next time I was with Ezra. It was a girl on a subway. She wore a pink dress, and had dreadlocks. She looked Hispanic, but deathly pale at the same time. She was standing a ways down from us looking to board. Every inch of he was covered in eerie tattoos. I turned to Ezra to see if he saw her too, because she was beautiful in a creepy way, but he was already looking at her. Then she turned and walked our way, heading towards a kiosk. Then we noticed more. First off, her eyes were cat like. Not in the cat eyed eyeliner way, but like she was half cat. Secondly, she had this weird coppery smell, almost blood like. Finally, there were her tattoos. All of faces, all crying. Literally crying, we saw the tears well up from the eyes on the faces and roll off her. Not right, not at all.

For a while we spoke often of the people. Texted each other whenever we saw one. We didn’t know if they were connected for sure, but we never saw any of the same ones twice. Nobody else noticed the weirdness. Just Ezra and I.

Then one day, when we were 16, we went on an early morning run in the woods away from town. We were three miles in when nature called so I went over to a tree off the trail while Ezra took a breather. I took care of business, but I kept getting chills. Everything was still, dead quiet. It wasn’t right. I finished up and when I looked up there was someone almost face to face with me peeking around the tree, just inches away from my face. A man with black eyes, greasy hair slicked into a pompadour, hollow cheeks, and a smile that stretched out too far, staring at me. He smelled like copper and blood, and he was grinning. I screamed and he grabbed my arm, but I couldn’t move, his hands were cold and had long fingernails that dug into my arm.

Ezra came running but stopped dead in his tracks when he saw who was grabbing me. The man stopped smiling, stared at him and cocked his head to the side, sort of like how dogs do sometimes, but he turned it too far to the side. Then the grin came back and he cackled, and spoke. “the lost boy lives!”

I’m a self-proclaimed ‘lover not a fighter’ but the way I punched that man felt like I had been a professional boxer my whole life. Instead of falling down or blacking out however, the man’s head twisted backwards, and he was still gripping my arm. He growled, and turned his head back around, slowly, making the noise you make when you pop you knuckles. He glared at me, let go of my arm, and slowly walked away, disappearing behind a tree.

Ezra looked like he was about to puke. I stumbled backwards, and sank down onto my knees. The chills were static all over my body. He slowly walked towards me, crouched down and put his hand onto my back. “We’re never going to talk about them ever again, okay?” I nodded.

Some more things from that event that made it even more terrifying. Such as the man’s voice. It sounded like it was shouting through a rain storm. You could hear rain in his voice. Another thing was the static, chilly feeling. It covered my body, it felt like it was inside me.

We upheld what he said. There were more and more we saw now. Or maybe we just noticed them. All we did was exchange glances, and try to hurry away. Ezra became really quiet and uncomfortable around them, even a bit paler, so did I. But we never spoke of them or ran in those woods anymore. Until I saw my sister.

A couple weeks later school was out and I was on a date with a girl I liked, named Lisbeth. It went great, she was pretty, funny, and relaxed. We went to a concert. Afterward, around midnight, we were walking to my car, and I was opening the car door for her. It was a warm night, summertime. It was beautiful for about half a second after that. I closed the door and turned around, only to be face to face with my sister, my sister who would be twenty one now, who had been missing for two years, but that wasn’t the girl who disappeared who was standing in front of me. She looked so much different, her hair was super long and still blonde, but it was half shaven. She had the coppery smell, her eyes were too large and round, and he neck too long. I froze.

She touched my face and her hands were deformed and ice cold. Then she spoke. “I’ve missed you.” her voice sounded like the man's in the forest. If his was rain, then hers was a downpour. She grinned; it was a bright, happy smile. Something was also wrong about it, there were two sets of teeth in her mouth, and her hand left my skin tingling. Then she gripped my neck. I broke free and ran to the other side of the car, jumped in, started it and peeled out of the lot, while she stood there, watching me drive away, looking hurt.

“Why are you so worked up, who was that?” Lisbeth asked

“Didn’t you see her? It wasn’t right.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t right that some random girl was touching my date.” She grumbled.

I shook my head, “Don’t worry, I’ll take you home. I want to be as far from her as I can get.”

She nodded, and as I dropped her off she held my face in her hands, and they were warm, like how hands should feel.

“Don’t do anything stupid.” was all she said. She kissed me on the cheek, got out of the car and watched me drive away. I wish I could have held that warmth a bit longer, but I had to leave.

I went to get Ezra. He worked at a music shop on the other side of town. They closed at ten, but at twelve thirty he was still there, playing a piano. I could hear it through the doors. He was so into the sad, mildly creepy song he was playing that he didn’t notice me until I was banging on the door. He jumped, and ran over to unlock it and let me in.

“What are you doing here? Aren’t you on your date?”

“Ezra, I saw my sister. She was one of them. She tried to kill me.”

“Alright, let’s get to your house then, right now.”

We got in my car and drove, I explained it to him, and he kept saying “this isn’t right, they know me, they want you, they want us, they got her, what are they? So on and so forth” until the car stopped. It wasn’t like how a normal car breaks down. It just stopped, like someone hit the brakes, and shut it off all in one moment. Ezra sat there as I struggled to start the car again. We were on the highway, the ocean wasn’t far away. Nothing in my car was working, I couldn’t even get the hood up, and it was a five year old car. I sat back in my seat, with no idea what to do.

I shot a glance into the rearview mirror, only to see a girl with orange hair, tall, bony shoulders, and no mouth in the backseat. I whipped around, screaming, and she was gone.

“What happened?!?” Ezra cried, as he twisted around trying to see.

I flung the car door opened and bolted away, only a short distance. Ezra caught up to me as I sank onto my hands and knees screaming, “There was another girl! She was in the mirror!”

I buried my face and my hands and started half sobbing half screaming while Ezra tried to calm me down.

Then, the smell was everywhere. Nothing moved. We were right by the woods again, but on the edge of a highway. No light, no moon, no stars, no wind, no sound. The tingling sensation seemed to be in the air, electric, and it was suddenly very cold. “We need to run.” Ezra mumbled. He grabbed my arm, and pulled me into the woods.

They were chasing us, I felt it. I saw shadows of people mixed in with the trees. We ran until we were parallel with the rocky coastline. Suddenly, my foot fell into a crevice in the rocks. I flew in slow motion to my stomach. The wind was knocked out of me, and it took a moment to think again. The pain in my ankle made everything sway around me.

I looked back at it. It was definitely broken, no doubt about it. Ezra turned back to me, took one look at my ankle and grimaced. He tried to lift me up but he couldn’t. We sat there for a moment, me with my leg stretched out in front of me, and he crouched next to me. We sat staring at each other, adrenaline pumping. He tried to pull me up onto my good leg, but I couldn’t do it.

“Are they still after us?” I asked him, panting.

He looked around. “I don’t see anybody.”

I lay down onto my back and looked out at the ocean. Mist was rolling in, and it started to rain, but you couldn’t hear it.

Then there was a disturbance on the water’s surface. Something was emerging, walking towards the shore, slowly rising out more and more. It was a woman with short, curly hair. She wore a white dress, and was very bony. A man was behind her, in a suit, with his head on backwards. He held onto the hand of a small girl with long fingers and neck.

I sat up again. Ezra stared at them, first in horror, and then as they grew closer his face changed as if he were trying to understand something. Then he stood up. They were twenty feet away. All dark hair, pale, skinny, but their eyes were white. All white. The woman held out her hand.

“Ezra?” I whispered, and he turned to me.

“It makes sense now.” He mumbled.

“Ezra?” All of a sudden they were right in front of him.

“Son? Come home please. We miss you,” said the man. His voice sounded like it was coming from an old radio.

“Please. Play the piano for us. We miss you, son.” spoke the woman in the same voice.

“Lost boy… I’m theirs…” he said, staring at the ground.

Suddenly someone knelt down next to me. I turned, looking at my sister.

Grinning she spoke “It’s okay brother. It’s not bad at all, really!”

I turned to yell at Ezra for help but my voice was gone. The wind picked up and I looked around. There were so many of them around us, all staring, including the man from the woods.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion and at the speed of light all at once. My sister wrapped her hands around my neck again, she was strangling me. The smell was so strong, and it was so cold. I managed to choke out a weak “Ezra” and he turned to me. He tried to run and help, but his family jumped on top of him, and suddenly all the other ones were crowding around us, I couldn’t see him anymore, I tried to scream, tried to fight, but then there was nothing.

I’m sitting on a park bench, by a pond. I don’t even notice the smell anymore. Ezra is next to me, playing with his little sister. His eyes are white, his neck long, paler than death. Other than that, he looks the same. I look at the ground. My ankles are deformed, and now my skin is just as pale as his. I can feel my teeth, all sharp, two sets of them. And then I look into the pond and see myself. My eyes are huge, like my sisters. I don’t know what I am, I don’t know how I came to be, but its night time, I’m with my best friend and I have my sister back. It’s finally right.