thz
ward
HOME  ABOUT  FICTION  POETRY  ART  SUBMIT  NEWS  MORBID  ZINES  ODDITIES  BEWARE  CONTACT  PLAGUE  FRIGHTS  WILL.HAYNES  BOOKS  FILMS  TIPS
Jeff Parsons

The May Featured Story is by Jeff Parsons

Please feel free to email Jeff at: jeff_95630@yahoo.com

Jeff Parsons

A SLICE IN TIME
by Jeff Parsons

Robert Watson thought, How do I feel?

It was a common enough question. But when asked by a staff psychiatrist at a mental health facility, it contained an uncertain depth of hidden meaning that required a carefully staged reply.

The doctor sat opposite to him, staring at him, never blinking, and patiently waiting as if time had no meaning. The wall clock’s hands never clicked, ticked or moved; stuck at 11:55.

Robert’s cracked leather chair groaned as he fidgeted. At least ten other old musty comfy chairs filled the therapy room, haphazardly arranged. His eyes darted about, searching for insight, inspiration, answers, anything but the truth. 

The windows, all of the windows, were painted over—for the millionth time, he wondered, Why the hell did they do that? Considering the lack of decent lighting within the building, it was a profoundly stupid idea. The dim fluorescents hanging above were a dull egg-white color, strangely caught in half-spark, never twitching, buzzing, or flickering, casting a ghastly pallor down onto the doctor’s face.

The bald, bespectacled doctor seemed to be immune to the building’s sweltering heat as he awaited Robert’s reply…not a drop of sweat on him. Robert sweated profusely.

The doctor spoke. “Shall I repeat the question?”

“Uhhh…no. How do I feel?” Robert felt distracted, spacing out the words to gain more time. Oh, what the hell, just say it. “I’m afraid. Not of, uh, what I saw. I’m afraid the hallucinations will return.”

“You’ve only had one hallucination. And it hasn’t recurred, correct?”

“Yeah, thanks to your help.”

“You’ve rationalized that it wasn’t real. But something’s still bothering you about it. Let’s revisit what happened, shall we?”

Robert sighed. He was tired and exasperated. He didn’t like sharing his emotions. Over and over and over. The doctor always probed, an indelicate intrusion into his life, as if memories and emotions were something physical that could be surgically extracted, disassembled, categorized and reconstructed.

And so he was hesitant as always, not wanting to mention certain things that would provoke other intrusive questions. “Uh…um,” he stuttered, “we were strolling about downtown North Conway, my brother Alex and I. We had just taken several hits from a doobie, and…”

He watched as the doctor scribbled in his notepad, then resumed talking. “Well, we were totally stoned. We just had a slice of pizza and were walking back to his car when we saw…”

“What did you see?”

Robert frowned, then continued, “People…that is, everyone else…they stopped moving, stopped breathing…like they were frozen in time and everything else was too. The wind wasn’t blowing anymore, falling leaves were suspended in midair and the clouds didn’t move across the night sky. After that, I don’t remember anything.”

He hated this. He didn’t want to remember what it felt like to be crazy. Maybe that was why he could only remember so much, and not too much.

“Why do you think it wasn’t real?” the doctor queried.

“It couldn’t be. I must’ve been trippin’. I’ll never do drugs again, that’s for sure.” Robert snickered on the inside because all the patients received medication at meal times.

“Very good. We’ll keep working on this. See you at group.”

The doctor softly closed his notepad, stood up and left the room. Robert followed soon thereafter.

He had some ‘unstructured free time’ to himself until the group session. He remembered the term from long ago, when as a teenager, he had spent some crisis intervention time in a psych ward.

Shuffling down the long corridor, he passed by many patient rooms, wondering why almost all of them were unused. The activity room was also empty—everyone must’ve been taking a nap. That was understandable. He often felt tired himself. Lost in foggy thought, he ambled back to the therapy room and sat down to wait for the group session to start.

Soon enough, the other seven patients shuffled into the room and sat down. They were all young men with scruffy hair and unkempt beards. Their emotions were moderated by drugs: antianxiety, antidepressant and sedatives to smooth over the mental edges of their lives—nightmares were common.

Robert half-listened as a patient, Thomas, asked where the new guy was. No one knew. The new guy had freaked out in group last night, babbling something about aliens among us. UFO nut.

There was a scattered chorus of nervous giggles when his friend Bongo asked if anyone knew the doctor’s name…no one did.
The chatter died as the doctor entered the room and sat down facing the semicircle of patients. His eyes swept across the group as he said, “Who would like to begin?”

The doctor’s dreadful words washed over the uneasy group.

Robert was reluctant to talk. He suspected why he was an amnesiac; that opening up certain mental doors could be dangerous, especially if you stumbled upon some awful hidden truths. It was a horrible feeling to question one’s own reality.

“We can only get better if we share our experiences and learn from them…” the doctor prompted.

Someone gave a low rueful chuckle. It was Jake, seated to Robert’s left. Jake usually kept to himself.

The doctor directed his attention onto Jake.

“You don’t believe that sharing is healthy?” The doctor asked, his voice monotone and measured, as always.

“What should I share? That I’m freakin’ insane? Hmm?” Jake scowled, obviously perturbed.

“Your fellow group members can help validate your feelings,” the doctor said.

Most of the group nodded their heads.

Jake struggled, agitated, as he expressed himself, “I have dreams.”

Robert felt a moment of shock creep up on him. He had dreams too. The drugs took the ragged scary edge off them, but he often woke up, panicked, sweaty, shouting.

No, no, no, he thought, but Jake went on.

Jake practically spat his words out as if they were poison. “There are dark shadows, I don’t know what they are, and they make noises, a deep grunting, like…like how an ape would talk if it could.”

For Robert, the room’s hot air became even more stagnant, damp and smelly. New beads of sweat crawled down his skin.

“It’s like…I’m the only one awake in the world and I shouldn’t be. The shadows notice me and they…” Jake shook his head. “It was so real, ya know. I don’t know what to believe anymore.” He put his hands over his eyes and started sobbing.

Murmurs of support came from the group.

The doctor spoke, “Thank you for sharing with us. I’m sure we can all relate to your experience.”

Uh, hell YES.

“Would anyone else like to share?”

No one responded to the doctor’s query.

The doctor continued. “Our brain tries to make sense of everything around us. It organizes patterns into familiar shapes that we can attach meaning to. Sometimes, we are deceived by what we think we see and we have delusions that can impair our judgment. Very good. Dinner awaits in the cafeteria.”

Visiting the cafeteria was the only time they were allowed to leave the second floor.

Robert hated the hallway—he was afraid of the dark. Or, more accurately, maybe what could be lurking within it. He had no idea what other rooms were down here, or, even where the staff stayed: that is, the doctor and the chef.

His spirits picked up considerably when he entered the cafeteria. The room held many metal folding tables and plastic chairs and it was far too spacious and accommodating for the needs of only eight patients.

He grabbed a tray, plate and utensils, all of them flimsy plastic with no sharp edges. Shuffling down the short line, dinner was slopped onto his plate.

The doctor handed him a plastic cup of water and dropped a pill onto his tray. The pill, a strong sedative, was administered to knock the patients out at night. Robert thought it was odd that pills were never dispensed in a small paper cup. He thought that was standard operating procedure in all medical facilities, but not this one.

His friends Bongo and Reefer caught his attention, waving him over to a distant corner table, far away from everyone else.

He joined them and started to eat his meal.

After the doctor left the cafeteria, Bongo said, “Reefer and I, we think we’re being watched. Studied.”

“Why? We’re nothing special.” Robert asked.

Reefer replied, “They want to understand how we think.”

“The doctor…” Robert said, between mouthfuls of food, “he wants to understand what we’re going through so he can help us.”

“Dude, we’re not being paranoid,” Reefer lowered his voice. “Doesn’t it bother you that none of us remember how we got here and that we’ve never seen anyone come or go? It’s always just us here, man.”

Bongo said, “And remember when the doctor asked what’s-his-name, Edgar, why he felt sad about not remembering what had happened to his daughter?”

“Yeah, but Edgar, he’s delusional.” Robert stated.

“Don’t you get it?” Reefer stopped eating. “The doctor, it’s like he can’t even begin to relate to our emotions and that other freak, the chef, is even worse. And how come there’s only eight of us staying here? This building is huge. It was built to hold at least a hundred patients.”

Bongo answered. “Maybe it’s like Jake said, we shouldn’t be here. We’re a mystery. They don’t know what to do with us.”

“The government wouldn’t do that—study us.” Robert said.

“I’m not talking about the government. Something else is going on here.” Bongo stopped talking as he watched the doctor reenter the cafeteria.

“Well,” Robert pointed out, “Brenda was released. She’s no longer here.”

Reefer said, “Who knows.”

Right then, Robert made a momentous decision.

Normally, he would’ve downed his sedative with a slug of water. Instead, he went through the motions, appearing to swallow the pill, but palming it in his left hand.

After dinner, they returned to their bedrooms to go to sleep.

None of the lights worked in the bedrooms, so, when he closed his bedroom door, he had to stumble through the darkness using the hallway light seeping through the door cracks.

He dropped the pill into the room’s toilet and flushed it down.

He wondered if he was doing the right thing. Not only was he opening himself up to nightmares, he was turning his back on what the doctor was trying to do for him. But he needed to find out what was going on.

After everyone was asleep, he’d go for a walk and explore the building.

Slipping into bed, he tried to stay awake, but failed soon enough.

The dream returned.

The entire world was frozen in a stark abomination of reality, a surreal pause that held everything transfixed, with two exceptions: Robert and his brother Alex. But there were other things…

Alex pointed to shadows flitting about on the other side of the street. The shadows were in the vague shape of stunted creatures, and menacing in nature; they seemed to phase in and out of space and time. They’d move, vanish and reappear elsewhere as they picked up frozen people and casually tossed them onto a large pile.

His eyes refused to focus correctly on the shadows. The depth and outline that defined their shapes would slip away just as his eyes attempted to pull the separate parts together.

Alex sprinted across the street towards the shadows. Robert yelled at him to stop…

Alex slammed into a shadow that had appeared out of nowhere. It was as if Alex had hit a brick wall. He crumpled to the ground and lay still.

The shadows hovered over his brother, seemingly curious. They began to coalesce into horrific creatures…

Robert screamed and woke up. Breathing heavily, sweating, grasping at his bed sheets, he looked around his dark room to reassure himself that he was awake. The nightmare started to fade.

As helpless as he felt now, he noticed that at least his thoughts were clearer because the cumulative effect of the drug was wearing off.

He got out of bed. The air was brick-oven toasty as usual, but the chilling sweat rolling down his body gave him a brief tickle of respite from the heat.

Easing open his bedroom door, he listened to the snores rumbling from the other bedrooms.

The way out of the facility would be on the first floor, where the staff was staying, most likely. He’d need to be careful. Especially since nighttime was also when patients appeared and disappeared.

He stepped out into the hallway and walked to the elevator along the ancient wear marks in the grimy linoleum.

At the elevator he hesitated, at the moment of finality; what he did from here on could change his life.

He took the elevator down to the lobby. The lobby was illuminated with the constant half-shadows of fluorescents.

Walking closer to the thick metal entrance doors, he noticed that they had small electronic connections on the door frames. They were probably buzzer-locked. Might set off an alarm…oh, what the hell…

He pushed on the door. It wouldn’t budge.

There had to be other ways out. Most of the facility was unused, so maybe they forgot to lock everything up.

The wear marks on the floor continued as he walked to the cafeteria. They reminded him of the trails that ants would leave between their lair and a food source.

In the cafeteria, the lights were on, as usual, but no one was in there.

In the long hallway, it was pitch black on his right, but…hmm, to his left, as his eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness, he saw two doors outlined with a pale light.

That was promising. And scary… he hated the darkness.

With uneasy trepidation, he walked toward the first door, which was adjacent to the cafeteria. He pushed it open.

The room was a large kitchen with many commercial-grade cooking equipment and tools. The far end of the room was hidden underneath a floor-to-ceiling pile of large empty food cans. Feeble light suffused from a dirty skylight.

Letting the door swing shut, he continued onward.

He passed several doors on his left, but those were dark and led into the center of the building, not towards the outside of the building, where there could be an exit door.

He pushed open another glow-lighted door on his right.

Beyond the door, there was a huge open-space gymnasium, lit from far above by two pale skylights. The gymnasium was used as a storage room, for what he couldn’t see exactly, but the indistinct shapes occupied most of the floor at the far end of the court, just beyond the reach of the revealing light.

He walked closer to the shapes, squinting into those shadows. What he finally saw made him flinch back in sudden alarm.

No… no … no!

It was just like his dream.

Those shapes; they were people! Arranged haphazardly, standing with different postures, maybe the last position they experienced before they became frozen, paralyzed, placed in stasis, or whatever it was…

It was real. All real!

He forced himself to creep through the haunting forest of statues towards one of the doors on the outside wall. There were more people, in sitting, reclining or other awkward positions, stacked high, against the far wall, like cords of firewood.

Who did this?

What if Bongo and Reefer were right? What if they were being held captive, subjected to bizarre experiments and studied by some mysterious intelligence, by something not human?

He stopped walking.

A young woman was posed in still-life before him.

It was Brenda. She was a patient, a goth rebel, who had been violent in a group session—she had been terrified. She had disappeared that night.

He had missed her…

She was now an exhibit in this grim collection of unfortunate souls. A tear forming, Robert caressed her face. Her skin was warm, soft and pliant. There was nothing he could do for her.

Why is she here? His next thought chilled him to the core: Why am I here?

He felt an overwhelming need to leave this room, this building, this…nightmare.

With a running leap, he slammed his body against the nearest outside exit door. The door moved slightly. He leaned hard into it and it broke free of whatever had been gumming it up, snapping open with a harsh screech.

Outside, the night sky was overcast with low unmoving clouds.

He had expected a wash of cool air to refresh him when he left the building, but, instead, it was even hotter outside. Worse yet, he began to feel queasy from the eye-stinging bite of foul air pollution.

This place wasn’t anything like North Conway. Where was he?

Staggered about the rocky terrain surrounding the building, there were virtually endless piles of vehicles, appliances, and essentially anything metallic, stripped apart and scavenged. Each colossal mountain was at least a hundred feet high, undoubtedly the collective result of lifetimes of work, yet he couldn’t see any signs of rusting on the metals, a tell-tale sign of time’s passage.

All around, there were no trees, no grass, no insects, and no topsoil. It seemed there was nothing organic, or even once organic, for even the rubber tires had been stripped off certain older vehicles as well as other once-living parts, such as leather from seats.

In the near-distance, just beyond this hellish scene, he saw a sickly blue-green light sputtering upon the dense cloud cover.

He was afraid but he had made a pact with himself to learn the truth. He moved towards the lighted area, stepping along a winding path that snaked through the wasteland.

On all sides, he saw that huge foundation stones had also been cast aside within the chaotic tangle of debris. Other more common non-organic items appeared as well, and in more frequent, larger quantities. It was like the basic building blocks of his entire world had been ripped apart, polluted and cast aside, forgotten and useless.

The thick cloying industrial stench grew worse as he walked towards source of the nauseating light, soon to reveal itself, just around one more mountain.

When he saw what caused the light, he was stunned.

Against the gloomy landscape, a densely-packed web of spindly towers waved high into the air, disappearing within the murky atmosphere above, their sinuous interwoven lengths discharging tiny sparks that sprinkled downward like a crackling rain shower.

The writhing towers sprouted like tentacles from glowing structures, not buildings as he knew them, but pulsating blobs, clusters of huge oblong monstrosities from whence the striking brightness radiated strongest. Roiling gases billowed forth from the structures and blackened the skies above, despite the unnatural illumination.

Every vestige of his sanity was assaulted by this other-worldly view.

And he saw movement outlined against the structure’s light. Fleeting shadows at first… then…

He saw the creatures that spawned his nightmares. Except, this time, they were clear, distinct and undeniably real.

He had no idea what they really were, but, to him, their appearance came straight out of pages of folklore. They looked like hobgoblins. Huge heads, wiry arms and legs, powerful hands and crude features. Their naked, misshapen bodies were bald and hairy, in no particular consistency of location, and some of them had odd tools in their hands as they…

Oh my God…

They were assembling their structures, slowly, carefully, methodically; crafting their odd creations using plants, trees, animals…and people! People frozen in time, plastered, melded and assimilated as raw material grafted into their constructions that hummed with repugnant life-force energies.

The hobgoblins worked with life the way an artist worked with clay: arranging, kneading and sculpting, cutting away useless parts as needed. It was as if they didn’t realize that the organic material they used might have been sentient. Or they didn’t care.

Suddenly, it occurred to him that they must’ve been working for a long time on the sweeping vista of enormous structures. And that everything he once knew was long gone, maybe along with all of mankind.

It was as if the natural world was frozen in time, except for him and a few others, and the hobgoblins as well as their structures. Maybe the hobgoblins weren’t even a part of this world, or even this universe; maybe they were from another dimension, subject to different laws of reality, allowing them to manipulate time and space anywhere throughout this universe.

He felt so hopelessly lost.

“Robert,” a voice said, close behind him. It was the doctor.

Robert looked at the doctor. He was offering his hand.

“There’s nothing for you out here,” the doctor said.

What is all this?

He turned to look back at the odd structures.

The hobgoblins had stopped working. They were staring at him, standing completely still, as if they didn’t want to startle him, but were intensely curious.

Then, one of them changed its appearance, transforming while it loped to him, becoming taller and wider as it changed into a middle-aged man in a blue mechanics jumpsuit.

It stopped several feet in front of him, its face devoid of expression, but looking so human. Its mouth moved and deep, clicking grunts issued forth. Its eyes then flickered towards the doctor behind him.

“Robert, you’ve had a relapse,” the doctor said. “I can help you. Come back inside the building.”

He felt the doctor’s hand upon his shoulder. He went numb all over, collapsing in slow motion towards the ground.

“Come into the gymnasium…” The doctor’s voice grew distant.

Robert faded away into unconscious oblivion.

Jeff Parsons originally hails from the east coast, but has called Northern California his home for many years now. He lives with his wife and family and is a proud recipient of their love and support.

Jeff is a professional engineer. He has a long history of technical writing, which oddly enough, often reads like fiction. He was inspired to write by two wonderful teachers: William Forstchen and Gary Braver.

Jeff got his first break with SNM Horror Magazine’s online stories. SNM recently published his debut book titled Algorithm of Nightmares. He was previously featured in the SNM Bonded by Blood IV and V anthologies.

He is also published in The Horror Zine, Dark Gothic Resurrected Magazine and the Northern California Publishers and Authors anthology titled Golden Prose & Poetry.

book