A Diary of Veils (special preview)

Looking at that image, it felt like I was a child again, sitting on the beach. I was looking at something so much bigger than myself, a void that was endless and unknown. I grew terrified of that image the same way I was of the ocean. It wasn’t something, it was alive to me. It was a creature, a monster, and it was inside the people I knew, the people I was trying to help.

That first night when I got home, all I could do was cry, and I couldn’t even tell my wife what was the matter. I couldn’t tell her because I did not want to make her worry, I couldn’t tell her because my job made me sign a nondisclosure agreement. I just cried, terrified for what was happening in the world and what it meant.

I had loved sci-fi stories in my youth, and they always made me wish for something more exciting to happen. You want aliens to come to earth, you want molemen to come up from the earth’s crust. You want something more to come into your life and make it exciting. But when it happens, when it’s really reality, all you want to do is get rid of it. You want life to go back to normal, you want comfort, you want easy. But change is rarely comfortable or easy, especially when life is on the line. There are no superheroes to come save the day, either, who will fight your battles for you. Instead you have humans who err and have bias. You have people like me on the frontlines of a war they never saw coming. There were people unprepared for what was happening, watching innocent people take grenades and bullets. Only thing was, it was these very same people holding those grenades and bullets, with their scalpels and saws as they continued to open bodies to study these Veils one on one. 

They dropped like flies before our curiosity was sated. Fifty people died before we realized it would never work. Fifty.

After that, things at work became much more tense. It felt like there was a chokehold on everyone. Then came the first exploratory surgery. I sat in the theatre, watching with a crowd of others as they opened up the first subject. Things were hopeful, even if they couldn’t remove this membrane, they could at least get samples and see what they were working with. There was no fear for the patient. 

As soon as the skull was open, though, the machines began to scream and the body on the table started to thrash and twitch. It felt like hours watching the doctors panic while the machines screamed their horrible prophecy. The monotone beep came like the scream of a banshee. The patient was dead thirty seconds after the skull was opened. 

Thirty seconds felt like hours, and after that, it felt like the air had been taken from the world. Everyone stood in stunned silence. What was there to say? What could possibly be done? They tried to take samples, but eventually the sheet was pulled over the subject and the theatre was emptied out. 

I can recall the dread that had settled upon me in those moments. It appeared like they didn’t even care. Someone was dead, someone they set out to save and help. Yet they just watched them die on that table. If anything they seemed angry. Irritated since they could not get the samples they needed, or see the thing that alluding them. 

They killed someone and they were angry they died.

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It’s hard to pinpoint when the Veils first started to advance onto earth. For all we know, they’d been around for centuries, we just had no way of detecting them. Even now, I can’t help but wonder if we would have ever figured it out. The Veils are part of life now, they’re all around us.

When my father was young, he had gone on a family vacation to the beach. He says he has a hard time recalling all that happened, but he eventually got swept under a current and pulled far away from shore. He drowned and he went missing for hours. He eventually reappeared on shore, alive and well if not a little terrified. His parents immediately took him to the hospital where nothing wrong was found at all. They noticed he started acting differently once they got home, but after all, he was a growing boy, boys change. Nothing much was thought about it. 

But he had gone missing for hours and there was evidence from the doctors he had ingested a lot of water and even breathed it in. What happened in those hours? Where did he go? What did he see? For the longest time, it was ignored. It was normal for growing kids to go through phases and change, it was normal for some memories to fade away and be forgotten. It wasn’t questioned at all, and my father never considered anything else could possibly be wrong. 

That was until people started undergoing tests to see if they were a Veil or not. These involuntary tests were given to everybody; man, woman, child, it didn’t matter. This was even before they came to realize that the Veils came from deep within the ocean. Everyone was tested, and if you were discovered to be a Veil, well, you were sequestered away, taken from family, friends and home.

My father’s test revealed he was a Veil, and that was when our lives changed forever. 

It’s hard to look back on my youth sometimes. I see reflections of memories that were good and wonderful. But at the same time, I see paintings like tragedies all around me. I see dark strokes under the eyes of my father, and the soft pastel tears in my mother’s eyes. The magic mirror that is this diary is helping me to understand these paintings. 

My memory is not the usual photo gallery or clipshow that some people describe. In my mind, it is like a long corridor of a museum. On either side there are paintings that are still and unmoving, but have the texture and feelings I can recall. Thick brush strokes and globs of paint remind me of the tension in my throat. Pastels and watercolors flow through me with the serene moments of my life. Giant torn pages ripped apart and pieced back together on the canvas so that the words are jumbled into a new story, make me realize how scattered my life had been. My father was always hiding, but at the same time, I know he was searching for himself. He feared he was never who he really was, that he wasn’t him at all. He was a stranger in his own body, a stranger to his family. He felt like a liar to us.