Invocation's Wake

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. “Yeah, right. It is just my mind playing tricks on me, attempting to scare me back into the compliance of my secret lifestyle.”

The night is cold, the moon full, the air thick. He knows very well the significance of this evening, and the irony of his choice to walk this path is not lost on him. Not when he considers his motives for needing a break from the stifling environment of his childhood home.

“Is it the wind or is she laughing at me?” He ponders. Unfortunately, this bout of personal admonishment is not out of his norm, but being perfectly candid with his avoidance issues, he decides to see for himself and musters up the courage to approach the empty shack.

Would you believe the haunted stories they tell of its origins? That it was once a Church’s secret hiding hole for conversion therapy failures. Where the Nun, who would later come to be known as Sister Slaughter, performed unspeakable acts of torture on the castoffs in her care. He has been gay his whole life. It wasn’t a choice. He was born this way! So to think of someone seeing anyone as less than human based on one organ's predilection…

“This is why I haven’t had the courage to tell my very devout parents that their one and only son, Tristen Jeb Tomous, prefers the company of his sex to that of the woman they keep trying to set him up with from their church and bridge club.” He says to himself. “I grin and bear it. I take the incessant jabs at my perpetual bachelorhood, the passive-aggressive commentary that my mother won't live long enough to know her own grandchildren, etc. I’ve had long enough to grow a thick skin, but Christopher? We’ve been together for the last five years and my parents still think we’re “roommates.” I love him. Is that so wrong?”

He comes to stand before the backdoor of this decrepit den of horrors and contemplates a God who would condemn a soul for choosing to love out loud. “Is there no logic in religion or no religion in logic? One thing is for sure, there is no logic in me tonight.”

He thinks every time he comes to visit his parents it will be different and he will have the courage to tell them who he is, but it never happens that way.

“It’s that damn picture! I get tongue-tied seeing Ewan Mcgregor’s likeness on the mantle, the one they refer to as Jesus. Is Obi-Wan judging me?” There are crucifixes everywhere, angle figurines, and apocalyptic art of people suffering and being tortured for their presumed sins.“You can’t turn a corner in my childhood home without getting a shame complex! Why is that so hard for him to understand? Why can’t we just let it be? It’s not like I am outright denying him!”

Then it happens again. The visions. His mind’s twisted interpretations of what Sister Slaughter did to those poor men and women when brainwashing them didn’t work. When they were brought to this degenerate shack and forced to deny themselves, their love, and nature. Buy one righteous soul and get a murder charge half off, due to the corruption of local authorities who want their community “cleansed”.

“Christopher would have been brought here. Would have suffered and inevitably been killed. Part of me admires his pride, but the other gets enraged. Mad that these fools wouldn’t just play the game and keep the peace. What is so wrong with wanting to live bad enough that you are willing to compromise?”

As though one of his mother's sainted tapestries just walked over his grave, he shutters with the shame of his response to these violent acts of hate. He resents the victims because he resents the fear. Yet it seems easier to quiet what has been repressed for so long rather than try to change what has been the hierarchy.

Tristen took this walk to try to clear his head, yet subconsciously ended up here, of all places, on the anniversary of the day they claim Sister Slaughter just up and disappeared, never to be heard from again. “Am I trying to prove Christopher wrong by scaring myself into believing my choices have been based on sound logic and not the fear of what could happen to me should the wrong people find out who I really am?...

“Why did he have to give me that ultimatum?”

…

“Jesus,” Tristen swears as he puts his shoulder behind his effort to open the warped back door. It screams with every second of caked-in agony, worn with time upon its hinges. Finally, he manages to make an opening big enough for him to at least squeeze through.

“I guess some things aren’t over-exaggerated.” He says glaring back at his enemy, the door. He brushes off the rust and cobwebs incurred with his entrance, then takes a look around.

He shakes a disapproving head at the utter decay of the place. “Should have been condemned years ago.” However, he is surprised that there is nothing about his surroundings that giveaway its history. Maybe he was expecting to walk into Ed Gein’s living room and is now let down by the fact that it is just an unremarkable cabin. As underwhelming and shocking as that.

“What am I doing here?” He turns to leave, but instead comes face to face with a mirror, so coated in dust that the only thing that gives it away is the finger-etched words - as if in answer to his thoughts - that read: “Same as all the rest.”

Slowly, Tristen approaches the antiqued reflective. He wants to believe this is just a coincidence, but when he brushes at the dust, the letters don’t obscure. The mirror doesn’t clear. It isn’t dust that disrupts its appearance. It has been burned. Touched with such intense heat that it now haunts the bubbling shadowed decay of its own memory.

“What could have caused this… here? And why these words?” Despite sensible reasoning, Tristen looks over his shoulder for an explanation. It is no good. There are no openings large enough to have caused an Archimedes lens effect. “Then what?”

Turning back Tristen practically collides with a new presence. One whose physical form he recoils from so violently that it sends him slamming to the floor in sheer terror.

“Tristen!”

“Please no, please no!” Tristen cries while trying to protect himself from whatever this apparition's intentions are. It is no use, his wrists are restrained and he is forced to look his fate in the eye.

“Tristen?”

It is Christopher, looking rightfully freaked out by this reaction. Tristen, utterly mortified, tries to regain some form of composer or other, by pushing Christopher away, like he came to scare him on purpose.

“What are you doing here?” Tristen asks as he gets to his feet.

“Came to see what all the fuss and lore was about, besides, you left me alone with your parents.”

Together they exchange a look of exasperated understanding, and an unspoken truce is struck.

“What has you so spoked?” Christopher asks.

“Science.” Tristen is still looking around the room for an explanation. Christopher just watches him, amused and slightly perplexed by the gravity of his partner’s countenance.

“Now you sound like a republican.”

Tristen shakes off the jab. Christopher is the much more easygoing of the two, but oh so steady. Like the human embodiment of a pillar, but in a soft, subtle kind of way. It feels like he could contemplate him for hours, even after five years.

“What are you even doing here?” Like a low hiss in his ears, Tristen feels this voice deep in his bones.

“What? Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Christopher asks, a little more on guard since Tristen truly seems freaked out.

“I want… to go, I -” Tristen stops short of breath as he turns and comes face to face with himself in a perfectly normal - albeit dusty - mirror.

Tristen is manic. He looks from his reflection to Christopher and back, until, all at once, it ruptures! With unseen force, the mirror bursts forth, shattering into a thousand jagged edges across the room.

Out of instinct, Tristen covers his head and crouches, a human ball of a man. Then, just as suddenly as chaos sprung, all is still and quiet.

“What the hell…” Tristen says as he cautiously uncoils himself, only to find Christopher lying on the floor hands to his throat.

Tristen rushes to his lover’s side. Blood spills out of him from where a piece of glass must have hit an artery. “I’ll get an ambulance, it’ll be okay. I’ll get help!” Tristen turns to rush for aid but is stopped by the stained raw claw of a breaking heart.

Christopher no longer holds the slit at his throat, there’s no point, his eyes so full of tears and betrayal. Disbelief mares his features as his trembling lip moves to form what few words he has left in him. “You saved yourself…” He says, “You always would.”

Reality slams Tristen to the floor under the weight of this shameful realization. It was always about him. His safety and comfort. His avoidance and what he perceived as “inconvenient”. Was it fear he was attempting to outrun, or himself?

The shame of a thousand years. The brainwashing of a thousand faiths. He had backed himself into a prison time had created, but individuals enforced. It was the idea of their judgment, God’s judgment, that he allowed to rule his life and his convictions.

This was society’s conversion therapy, the mass manipulation of those throughout history whose fate gave them the noise necessary to become scripture. So universal yet so subliminal it was entrusted to the people to carry on, as he had carried it on, personally. Torturing himself with the idea of a reality he birthed into existence. His greatest fear… losing Christopher.

Why wasn’t their love enough to live by? Why did he bow to the loud bullying fervor of an ever-shrinking majority that only knows how to exist through fear and hate-mongering? Why had he allowed himself to emulate it, to embody the idea of how he should be in order to be deemed acceptable… lovable… worthy? When this man, who now lays dying before him, proved that he was and could be so much more, and who asked nothing from him but love?

He had wondered before if it was that there is no logic in religion or no religion in logic, but now he could see all too clearly and too late, that when it comes to the conventional methodology of anything, there is only Man in religion and logic, but no faith.

“You saved yourself… “ Tristen said, repeating these last words for the acknowledged impact they had that now left him winded and numb. “So you could live… but really so you could die… as one of them… as those deemed good, but…”

All his life he had worked to prove that he was good, that he was normal and his particular inclination towards his own sex did not make him any less. To prove in the eyes of the world he was more…

“Not really…” Tristen’s eyes move to the proof of his corruption, but Christopher is no longer there… it is only him, his reflection.

The mirror is once more intact, but this time it is also clear.

Yes, he can see himself clearly, perhaps for the first time in his entire life. The physical embodiment of everything he was trying to outrun. In avoiding the harm, the hate, and the evil of a world against him, he became it. Took it on. Lost himself.

We are a planet made up of varying perspectives. Worlds divided, but together a false whole. We are not meant to exist the same, no pact is. When we try to make pieces of ourselves fit with things that do not, we break.

Perhaps the realization has not hit Tristen yet, as he stares transfixed into the mirror, that Christopher had in fact ever been there. For it is not relief he feels, but the sinking ache that his once polished perception had twisted itself into a stranger.

Gnarled and warped he saw himself slowly become the image of a lucid void of sharp mangled features and oozing swampy flesh done up in the outline of a Habit - how fitting and ironic this should be the garb of this “ghosts” contained evil - now succumbed to the abyss of the darkness that abounds within its reflective walls. Made whole and yet empty for it had seen itself for what it truly was, and because of this understanding, could no longer be.

“I am not a killer. Not flesh and blood.

I am neither figment or physical.

I am as real as you people pretend to be. I am your fear. Your lies. Your insecurities.

I am your maker and destroyer.

The slow penetrating death inflicted upon oneself with dull knives.

I am the Sister Slaughter you’ll soon come to recognize.

The accumulated hate of a world viewed through your eyes,

What you want to be true because you cannot face the fact that they are not the only ones to blame or demoralize, but rather to thank.

For their opposition has been your only means of surviving what you will not face.

The secret in the void, if you’d you only look.

They are your rules, I am but the book.

The trappings, the stranger, the faceless dark you cannot contain.

I am the evil you have given a name.

The accumulation of all that remains, when we lie to ourselves about what it takes, to live and let live, waiting for the right time,

But it will never come,

Elusive, it taunts.

We are the damned… the real ghosts that haunt us.