Tales of Horror

Nobody Knows How to Get Back Home

Death is a place you can go in your sleep, if you know just where to look.

I wanted to look. I wanted to see it. So I went searching, in the dark places between the stars, in the liminal space inside my head that my conscious retreated to during sleep. I followed it, Theseus with his yarn.

At first, it was just a dream. A deep valley tucked in between the walls of gray stones mountains, a glistening pool of water so clear it looked like liquid silver in the sunlight. And beside it, a woman with long white hair. White the color of bones. White the color of bodies bloated in the sun. Her face was ageless, not young, not old, but her eyes spoke of millenia, of a time of silence, of a time before time. She raised those eyes to me as I approached, walking through a field of wild flowers. Scaling up the sides of the mountains were worn paths, leading off in all directions, but all disappearing over the peaks and crests of the mountains. Which one had I come from? I couldn't remember, but I'd figure it out.

"Hello," I said simply, and she cocked her head, a motion that read less as inquisitive and more as predatory.

"What is your name?" she asked, and her voice was like water over smooth white sand, like a knife dragging over rocks.

I thought about it for a moment. "I don't remember." I said. She nodded, as if this is what she expected.

"You have been too long already." She said. I frowned at her in confusion.

"Am I late?" I asked. Late for what? I couldn't remember. She sighed slowly, the sound like wind rattling through dead leaves.

"You are much too early, and far too late." She said. I had no idea what this meant, but she held out a hand for me, and I took it without thought. She lead me gently to the edge of the pool.

"Look into the pool." She said. I looked at her instead.

"What will I see?" I asked.

"You will see yourself, and all that you could have been."

I wasn't sure what she meant by that. To my left, pebbles skittered down one of the worn paths, a few tumbling into the water. I watched the water ripple, ripple, ripple, until only my reflection remained.

Except it was not my reflection. It was myself as a child, chubby fisted and rosy cheeked. I watched as I aged; a tween, a teenager. My sixteenth birthday party, where my uncle had smashed my face into the cake. The girl I bullied on the bus because she had frizzy hair and zero social skills. I watched her turn her face away from where I taunted her, and from this angle I could see the tears she furiously wiped away with a fist. The day I graduated high school.

The images began to speed and blur together; a pretty girl I danced with in a bar twirled by and faded into the crumpled hood of a car that merged into a stone bench in my mothers flower garden that flowed like a stream into holes punched in my bedroom wall, a girl crying on the floor.

I wanted to look away. I tried to, but I couldn't. It was as if I were a statue, frozen, forced to watch my life swirl away like bubbles down the drain. Images I had never seen zoomed past in the water; a child with my eyes and somebody elses curly hair, a woman in my bed, no, our bed, smiling at me over one bare shoulder. A lilac tree planted beside the kitchen window, blowing its sweet scent through the house.

This was the life I could have. This was the life I wanted. My potential.

I stumbled back, like falling from a trance, and only remained upright thanks to the steadying hand of the ageless woman.

"What was that?" I asked, and she smiled sadly.

"You." She said.

"That could be my life?" I asked. She did not respond. "I have to go home." I said, and started hurrying off.

I froze mid stride. Which direction had I come from? I scanned the multiple paths that lead over the peeks of the mountains, disappearing from sight.

"Which way?" I asked, turning to look at the woman. She sighed again.

"Nobody knows how to get back home." She said, and I felt something like dread rising in me.

"Where am I?" I asked. I thought I should feel my heart pounding in my chest, but I did not. The ball of yarn, the tether to my body, was gone.

"Nobody knows how to get back home." The woman repeated. "We all look, every day. The living and the dead."

I stared at her. I wanted to go home. I knew where it was, I just couldn't get there.

"I just wanted to look." I said. I didn't want to stay.

"Ah," said the woman, "that is the problem. Death is a place you can go in your sleep, if you know just where to look. The problem is remembering to look away."

I looked up at the sun that did not seem to move, to the mountain peaks that seemed impossibly far away. Behind me, the woman spoke again, but I did not hear her. I was already gone.

Alone in the valley, speaking to no one but herself, the woman continued. "

We all pretend to know where we are going when the truth is, nobody knows how to get back home."