From Dust to Ashes

“When did these visual occurrences start?”

The corners of the dingy office look like they haven’t been painted in a while. Dust covers once-white walls like ash; sadness covers gray carpet. I feel the grit in my throat.

“Since I moved in.” I shift creakily in my plush-steel chair. I hear him scribbling. I bet he uses that yellow notepad paper with red lines on the side that you tear off at the top. He’s writing a lot.

“So, these...disturbances began once you moved into your house?” He sniffs like he’s breathing in the melancholic dust.

“Yes…I mean, I hadn’t been sleeping very well for a few nights after we moved. It started with…noises…just…small sounds. They startled me at first, and it was fine. But I felt like I was being watched.”

He scribbles more now. I know it’s bad because he keeps writing. He catches me leaning toward his notepad, so I lean back and push my hair nonchalantly behind my ear.

“Is there any history of mental illness in your family?”

Motes of dust sparkle like glitter in the sunlight in front of the window, falling at my feet. My black nail polish is chipping already–on my thumbs particularly. It looks like there’s this one speck of glitter…

“Has anyone in your family ever experienced similar symptoms?”

I jolt my brain back up. His eyes are gray, not blue, like I thought.

“My mother had some problems with depression. But I can’t really think of anything beyond that.” I remember what she saw.

I look to the right, and my foot twitches. The legs of the clock slug through Irish bogs–each second of sound struggling louder and louder.

His gaze pierces mine directly now; he’s seen the whites of my eyes.

“How often do you experience these visual and auditory disturbances?” My chair creaks every time I lean to the side, and my back is starting to spasm.

I play with the upper cartilage piercing in my ear as I answer, “Not that often. I mean, it’s pretty much just at night when I try to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping much.” Mr. Jackson–was it Jackson? Johnson?--nods to himself as if he’s decided something important and briefly touches his silvery beard. It’s closely shaved and looks prickly.

“Is there a possibility that these hallucinations are the result of sleep deprivation?” That’s a good question, I think. It started with the blood.

The doorframe is weeping blood–garnet tears from the door casing and corners of the ceiling. Cracks split the plaster in fractals, expanding like tree roots in sped-up time. The corners of the room eerily darken as human-like shadows crawl up the corners. My heart grips my mind. This is not real. It is not there. It’s just my mind replying in kind. All the walls are weeping red plasma now, and the room vibrates with a strange energy. I’m not here. I grasp my sheets and pull, blinking slowly to wake up.

I blink again, and I’m back in the stale room. Mr. Johnson looks unperturbed, as if every one of his patients see blood seeping through their walls. The dusty light makes his hair look grayer, and I wonder if his patients’ stories take more of a toll than he lets on. He’s still writing–so many words, but so little to say.

My whitened knuckles clench the arms of my maudlin chair as my eyes dart nervously up at him, waiting.

“How long did this hallucination last?” he finally asks.

My leg jostles, “I can’t really tell. Sometimes it feels like a few moments; sometimes it feels like forever.”

“And this was the first one?” I reach for my ear piercing again to spin the hoop and stop myself.

“Yes.”

“You mentioned human-like shadows. Have you experienced any visions of people?”

I pause. It feels like I’ve been holding my breath underwater for too long. I don’t like where this is going.

“A hooded figure. Maybe once. Or twice.”

I look down and hear the scribble of permanent ink.

He doesn’t even look up when he asks, “Have they ever spoken?”

I exhale.

“Nothing is what you see,” says a gray hooded figure, surrounded in billowing artistic tendrils of black air. His hand is spindly; his voice ethereally deep.

He reaches pendulous fingers toward me--”If you could sleep, you will not forget me.”

I flounder out through humidified mist, “What do you mean?” I reach further, searching.

“Who are you?” I rise through the damp, swirling mist, one hand on my heart--grasping to the side. I bolt up, aware.

“What do you want?” I ask loudly, “You know who I am!”

My hand lays on the bed. A cold, pale, clammy hand rests on mine. The fingers are knobby sticks. My searching eyes see a black, loose sleeve and look up to a dark nothing.

“What do you want?” I now yell, looking all around me.

I spoke to air. Nothing responds. Nothing touches my hand. Nothing is by the bed. My loud voice filled a nothing-void; it ricochets in my bedroom, deafeningly loud. It feels like a bucket of freezing water tossed on me.

My eyes scan a dark space. The nightlight casts a pink light on Cassie’s peaceful, sleeping face. The only gray figures are those made by piled clothes.

I was talking, talking out loud with someone, something. What was I saying?

“What do you think the figure meant?”

“What?” I’m disoriented. He looks up, seemingly noting my confusion impassively.

He repeats himself, “What do you think the figure meant?”

The fabric on my chair is itchy; it’s scraping my skin. I chew the inside of my cheek, thinking back.

“Nothing is what you see.” That seems fairly obvious, perhaps. He wasn’t there. Nothing is ever there. “If you could sleep, you will not forget me.” That. I don’t understand that. If I don’t sleep, I’ll forget? If I sleep, I will remember?

“I don’t understand what he meant–not really. Does it matter?”

He harrumphs to himself in a tired sigh, almost as if my question feels as itchy as this chair.

“Visual and auditory disturbances often provide clues to the inner workings of the subconscious. Understanding why he was hooded and his message may help you understand why you conjured him.”

That’s the most he’s said in this entire session. He seems winded, like the explanation cost him more than I paid for this session.

I’m scraping the paint from my nails again. I’m paying him to explain. He needs to explain. I pull the trigger and shoot a question.

“So what would a fire mean? A fire that wasn’t there?”

There’s smoke, swirling in ashy clouds up to the ceiling. It’s dense. I can see the tendrils wafting and curling as my heart turns over. It smells like fire. I look over to Cassie, sleeping undisturbed. The smoke is thickening. I wave my hand through it, and it doesn’t disperse.

“Cassie!” She jerks and blinks, still half asleep. I roll off the bed with a hard thump, pulling the comforter off in panic.

“Cassie! Wake up, baby!” When I pat her face gently, her eyes snap open. “Fire! There’s a fire. We’ve got to go!” I’m practically pulling her off the bed as the smoke becomes unbreathable.

“Mommy!” she cries sleepily. “Fluffy! Fluffy cat!”

“We can’t baby. We’ve got to go.” Cassie starts crying as I pull her out of the room in my arms. The ash is following us as she cries, and my heart hurts. The smoke alarm is on now, siren shrill. I pull her into the hallway as she cries for Fluffy. Smoke drifts out from the bedroom. The flames are flickering as fast as my heartbeat.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Cassie is in my arms, her large eyes pink with tears.

It’s quiet. The hallway is dark. With halting breaths fueled by adrenaline, I pause and look around.

I’m sitting in the hallway with Cassie on my lap. The clouds of smoke are gone. The ancient smoke alarm has stopped screaming. I can’t smell the fire. The only sounds are my panicked breaths and Cassie. Cassie. She’s holding onto me around the neck, sobbing.

“Mommy, where is the fire?” I reach around and grasp her arms, holding her next to my face. My eyes are wet, and my heart skips a beat.

“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.” I’m crying now, too, as I rub her back and hold her to me. It wasn’t real. As I tuck her back in bed again, sing her a song, and wrap her blanky around her, I see a humanoid shadow in the corner. It’s hooded. I jerk my head towards it as she falls asleep, and it sharply darts away.

I won’t sleep. I can’t.

“I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep,” I say to dead silence. I rake my hand through my hair, frustrated with his beige indifference. How is this helping?

“Please, tell me what it all means,” I plead. He finally sets his pen down; the click reverberates with a hollowness. He sighs as he removes his glasses. He was wearing glasses? I’m not sure when they appeared. There’s a dull gold ring on his left hand. Who does he go home to?

“Perhaps, this hooded figure is a manifestation of your hidden guilt,” he said dryly. His blue–no gray–eyes are sharp, like his teeth. My leg twitches again as I scratch the dead skin from my fingernail beds.

“Guilt? What guilt?” My voice sounds shrill and thin. He rises from his chair. He seems much taller, thinner, grayer. How did I not notice he was so tall?

“For what you did.” His voice has changed, become deep and ancient. I cower into my chair, my fingers scraping the unyielding metal armrests.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My heart has chilled like the clammy sweat I feel gathering at the edges of my forehead. His face is lost in a heavy hood, draping across him like his gray lengthening fingers. Black shadows dart behind his back. I’m sleeping–I must be.

There is no Mr. Johnson now. I’m looking around the room for an escape, but the room is gone. I’m in an expansive black void with no dimension. Humid, hot air is choking me--choking me like smoky ash. As I try to sit up from my chair, I catch–the chair is chained to the nothingness, like me. He keeps approaching, growing as big as an old oak tree.

“The fire you set. Where is Cassie, Sarah?” His large voice sounds mocking now. It surrounds me like a painful embrace.

“I don’t–” I start. Where is Cassie? When did I last see Cassie?

“No, no no no,” I hear myself crying as my heart splits my chest open.

I feel the sneer in his voice when I remember him, “She’s dead. You killed her.”

No. No. I put my arms over my eyes–over my head–to block it out, block out the burning dark.

When I go to pull the cover over my face, I turn my head to my left for comfort. Cassie is there. She looks like her baby-self when she sleeps–her blue blanky wrapped around her. Before my widening eyes, the patterns in her blue blanket become diamond scales–the azure fuzzy fabric lengthening and smoothing into a long serpentine coil around her.

It slithers and twines, tightening in an ever-threatening manner as my bloodshot eyes are riveted to it. It’s going to kill her. I hang over the side of my bed, hands searching for my purse in a panic. I need…my fingers grasp the cigarette lighter in my purse. There.

I set it on fire. I watch it burn and hiss–it’s forked tongue surrendering to ash as it screams with a mouth.

I set her on fire. I set her on fire. I’m on fire. Hot pain fractures my head in bolts, bolts like lightning, and my throat tears with screams into blinding lights.

“Hold her down. I need haloperidol, now!” I feel a bite in my arm, and the light fades; the burn smothers into blackness. It’s not hot now, but cold.

Deep sleep blackness whispers, “If you could sleep, you will remember me.”