Chapter 14: Practitioner (5)

Someone screamed.  Later, I realized it was me.

Let me correct that.

I fucking screamed.

A… A thing.

It was female.  I could tell that much.

A wispy bipedal humanoid thing that looked like the wrinkled husk of an insect cocoon banged its fists onto the window again. It had these upturned eyes.  Not a pair, but eyes. A whole three of them converged onto where its nose should be.  Stringy hair fell in clumps around what was supposed to be a face.  Sacks of skin hung loose.

Then it opened its mouth and screeched, banging its fist onto the RV.  No sound escaped its throat and the windows didn’t quite rattle.

Its mouth was just a gaping hole.  No lips.  No chin.  Multiple gaping holes, layered in on each other like some dentist's worst nightmare, lined with serrated teeth like a lamprey.

Then it caught me looking.

And its eyes furrowed, narrowing.

It was smiling.  At me.

I stood frozen.  Unsure of what to do.

Then it ducked, disappearing out of sight.

And that scared me more than anything else it could have done.

Without knowing, I’d been backpedaling.  I bumped up against the desk and lurched forward, turning furiously as my heart began to race again.  A panic-ridden second of pure terror that overwhelmed my teenager brain into nothing more than a lizard’s pea-brain full of instinct to just escape.

But facing the desk was another window.  I’d forgotten.

And sitting outside this window in the snowy weather was a bird.

A small owl-like bird that was perched on the sill.  Staring at me with yellow eyes.

It flapped its wings, trying to fly.  But it failed.  It hooted, which sounded muffled through the cold glass.  It tried to flap its wings in vain again.  Something was wrong though, like it was hurt.

Without thinking, I walked forward and put my hand on the window; ready to lift it up and let the poor creature inside.

An instinctive gesture that came about because my brain had been filled with distilled horror the moment before and my thinking faculties had been decimated.

A mistake.

The moment I put my hand on the latch, the fucking owl transformed.

Perhaps it’s unfair to say it transformed because it was never an owl at all.

It was a hand.

The creature stood up and its jaws slammed against the surface of the glass, banging into it.  There was no impact but the jump scare was enough to send me hurtling myself back towards the couch.  The owl dissolved into a mess of feathered fingers.  Long, multi-jointed spider-like limbs that curled and stuttered as a broken wooden puppet would.

I only saw its face for a moment.

Angled yellow eyes.  Mouth with –no, a jaw.  Jaw with fangs.  Skin that was the color of darkness.

Not even humanoid.  

Something else entirely.

I was shaking.

A click-clack behind me.

The female creature was back and it tapped the window glass with its fingernails.  Long and yellowed.  It smiled upon seeing me and wagged its finger in a come hither gesture.  But wrong.  No emotions, no thought.  Just an empty shell, trying to imitate something it saw others do.  Like a praying mantis, imitating the dance of other insects.  

Mindless.  Predatory.

Cold.

When I didn’t respond, it dipped out of sight.

I remained standing.  Frozen.  Eyes so wide that my face hurt.

After a moment my body moved on its own.  I lunged forward and grabbed the blinds, closing it shut over the windows.  I did the same for every other window in the whole place.  Snap and shut.  Snap and shut.  Then when I was done, I picked up the gravity knife and flicked it open.  Again, I stood still.  Ears careening for the slightest of sounds.  

A scrape.  A tap.  Anything.

Sweat waterfalled down my face and dripped off my chin, creating wet spots on the floor.

“F-fuck.”  I finally stuttered out.  My hand was shaking and I couldn’t get it under control.

That pretty much summed up my thoughts.

I could see them.

I could See.

The tension in my body reached a crescendo and was determined to stay that way.  My mind was all too happy to let it.  I caught a reflection of myself in the mirror.  My chest was drenched in sweat, dyeing my hoodie a darker shade of gray.  Eyes too wide and frantic, sunken from hours of running on adrenaline without rest, My stubble of a excuse for a beard was starting to darken my chins.  

Then in the reflection of the mirror, I caught movement next to me.

I freaked the fuck out.

“Yegh!”  

I swung the gravity knife without direction, just in the general proximity of what I thought I saw had been.  But the knife cut nothing but air, leaving me bereft of breath, energy and panic-induced instincts.  I leaned against the wall, holding the knife in one hand and the other twitching –my fingers shaking without me wanting them too.  For about the next thirty seconds, I stood like that.  Taut like a whipcord of iron, ready to explode at the slightest stimuli.

Oh god.

Oh my fucking god.

Slowly, the fright subsided.

Leaving me alone with the ability to think.

Being scared doesn’t start with panic.  Jump scares are just that; jump scares.

True horror comes from rational thought.  It is the aftermath of the bump in the night that wakes us up.  Lying there, in the dark, imagining what the source could be; what the darkness hides… being afraid comes from understanding and understanding that what just happened was wrong.  That I was right to be scared.  

My back slid down the wall, my body shaking in little tiny jerks.  Something squeaky escaped my mouth; a hiccup.  It was accompanied by the laughter of someone whose brain didn’t know how to react; in reply to happenstances outside the scope of my immediate capability to absorb.

We humans are logical creatures.  I think.  Atleast, I like to think so.  There’s a book about how humans are irrationally rational creatures.  The point is, even if we don’t act like it, we act on what we believe makes sense.  These beliefs give us reason.  A foundation of behavior which drives our every action.

And the last five minutes had just shattered that belief.

I started laughing.  Not in reply to the absence of logic.  But because the puzzle pieces started to fit.  The longer I sat there, letting my thoughts roam free, the more everything started to make sense.

Emyrith.  The Valentines.  The Ryus.  The homeless bird.

Jesus fucking Christ.  They weren’t crazy.

Fairies were real.

Little fairies with wings and tutus and–

I took a shudder that barely qualified as an intake of breath, feeling the cold-air send an icepick into the folds of my brain.

Refreshing.  Startling.  But it worked.

It calmed me, stopping the imminent hysteria.  Stopping the onslaught of thoughts that would lead me nowhere.  Nowhere good at least.

I couldn’t afford to let myself think too much.  The imaginary aspects of what if and what could happen were overwhelming.  I needed something to do.  Something to keep my mind busy.  Hands busy.  A direction.

The book.

Understanding is good and bad.  Just because you understand something doesn’t mean you grow less afraid of it.  Sometimes, the more you understand something, the more you realize how scared you should be.  Not being afraid of lions doesn’t make the claws less deadly.  Doesn’t make being powerless any less real.  If anything, understanding the true dangers makes you more aware of how scared you should be.

But understanding them, their habits, habitat and behavior; that could help you survive.

I learned early on that surviving and being afraid are too different things.  Just because you’re afraid doesn’t mean you are helpless.  Far from it.

For centuries, humans have overcome difficulties.  By understanding aerodynamics, we created giant metal tubes that fly through the sky.  Understanding the biology of bear, lions and tigers –had to stop my brain from running on tangents– helps us tame them.  Capture them.  Keep them from overtaking us as the alpha species.  So to speak.

And according to evidence presented to me so far, Mages haven’t gone extinct.  Yet.

That was a good sign.

I scrabbled across the floor on my hands and knees, still suffering from the quiet cloud of fear that occupied the upper recesses of my heart.  I didn’t dare poke my head above waist-level.  The last thing I wanted was to get a peek at a pair of eyes trying to catch a look at me between the slivers of curtain and window.

I shuddered.

Finding the book and the remains of my half-eaten sandwich on the coffee table, I began to read.  I rapidly flipped through the pages.