I was a reader for two years before I met Elliot Stoffel. A reader is just what it sounds like—I read to the elderly and the disabled several days a week. The pay was never great, but I enjoyed the work and there was no denying it would look good on my applications to graduate school.
There was a time that meeting an esteemed sociology professor like Stoffel would have been exciting. We actually used one of his books in an undergrad class I had junior year. But that man, whoever he had been, seemed long gone when I first met the shattered ruin he had become.
Stoffel was supposed to be in his early fifties, but this man looked past seventy at least. And while the professor's books and reputation in sociology circles made him out to be a very articulate and intelligent man, the pitiful figure before me vacillated between long bouts of drooling, dead-eyed silence and brief interludes of incoherent screaming and thrashing about at some new imagined horror.
The company I worked for would get brief medical condition summaries on prospective clients along with emergency contacts and known allergies. We were not allowed to give any care or aid under our contract, but depending on the client, some readers got “combat pay", meaning they were going into a home in a dangerous area or with a potentially combative client. Stoffel paid the extra money.
His file said he suffered from “non-specific delusional ideation, persecution complex and moderate catatonia”. Below this, someone had written in “hallucinations-paranoid schizo".
I knew what all that meant, but it didn't really prepare me for what he was like. Most of my time as a reader had been with sweet little old ladies or people who needed company as they recovered from a debilitating injury. Not a madman that rolled his eyes fearfully toward the corner of the room as I read to him, his lips trembling as he closed his eyes tight against something only he could see.
His primary caretaker was his younger sister, Hillary. She was a kind and pretty woman who, if not exactly friendly, was at least always pleasant and polite as she headed out the door, off to take advantage of the break I was giving her. It wasn't until I was there for over a month that I saw what a toll it all was taking on her.
I had gone into the kitchen to tell her I was leaving for the day—this was the first time she had stayed home when I came, but I hadn't glimpsed her after she initially let me in. When I stepped into the kitchen, I saw her sitting at the table, her lips thin and her eyes sunken. I found myself surprised at her expression to the point that, before I could reconsider, I'd asked her if anything was wrong.
She gave a small laugh and gestured toward where her brother lay in the other room. “Aside from that? Aside from him? No, everything else is just peachy.” She glanced up at me as she said the last, and her gaze softened slightly. “Sorry, I don't mean to take it out on you.”
I shook my head. “No need to apologize. I know handling all this is hard. Is there anyone else to help?”
She stared off wistfully. “No, our parents are dead and neither of us has married. When he came back from his trip on the medical transport plane, none of his professor buddies even bothered to show up or visit. Its like he's already dead to them. Bunch of jealous, selfish assholes.”
Talking to her, I felt like I was walking across an unfamiliar frozen lake. I wanted to go further out, but I had no way of knowing where the thin spots might be. After a moment of silent debate, my curiosity won out.
“What happened to him? Did he just have a breakdown?”
Hillary studied me for several seconds before gesturing to the chair across from her. “No one knows for sure. I know he had gone to stay with a primitive tribe in the Amazon rainforest. The Ugtatu I think is how you say it. He had been before, and though they generally didn't care for outsiders, over a few years they had grown to tolerate him well enough.”
She looked down at her folded hands and sighed. “Apparently he was much more coherent when he first reached civilization after his latest trip. He told a colleague there that he had gone through the first step of a “purification ritual" during his stay. The ritual was supposed to take three days in total, but after the first night he woke to learn that the tribe’s holy man had died in his sleep. After that, no one else would talk to him or even acknowledge his existence outside of making a sign to ward off evil.”
“After three days of trying to get back in their good graces, he had headed back out of the jungle. By this point he was already acting strange, and within another week he was much like you see him now.” She sniffled. “They don't really know what's wrong with him. I looked at his notes, but they were mainly gibberish as far as I could tell. The most I could make out was that during the first part of the ritual, the holy man had said a phrase in Elliot's right ear while holding something he calls a “whisper box" against his left. My brother said the box made a strange sound, and he seemed to think that the combination of that with the sounds of the words the holy man spoke somehow flipped a switch in his brain, making him see things. He was trying to find a way to reverse it when he slipped into a fit and then became more like what you see now. A shell of the man I knew.“
I didn't know how to respond. The story was interesting, but seemed very farfetched. Odds are, I thought, he had been slipping towards insanity for years, and when he finally had a break from reality, this hocus pocus was the form it took. After sitting through an awkward silence, I said I had to be going and let myself out.
It was a few days later, when I was back reading Stoffel “The Great Gatsby", that I noticed the small wooden box sitting on the table near him. I tried to focus on the Fitzgerald book, but my eyes kept being drawn back to the box. It wasn't overly ornate or special looking, but the wood had an odd luster and I found myself wondering if this could be the “whisper box" Hillary had told me about. Had he somehow brought it back with him?
I told myself to stop being stupid, but after another thirty minutes of trying and failing to get my mind off of it, I sat down the book. We were alone in the house, but I still looked around as I reached for the box. I had no intention of stealing it, but I did want to see what it was. See if it opened, what was inside.
If it made any odd noises.
There was no lid or way to open it, and giving it a light shake produced no rattle from inside. Still, it was much heavier than I'd expected, so I didn’t think it was a solid piece of wood. There was something else inside.
I gave Stoffel a cursory glance, but he was just staring off into space, a thin thread of spit stretching an impossible length between his pajama shirt and his lower lip. He wouldn't mind me messing with his box a bit more. So I stuck it to my ear.
The sound was immediate as soon as the box was close to my ear. It reminded me of the sound a rainstick makes, but much higher pitched. While the noise itself wasn't unpleasant, I found my vision beginning to swim. I went to pull the box away when a hand covered my own and pressed it back against my head even as I heard Hillary speaking into my other ear.
“Weasel. Dish. Firelight. Thimble. Amber. Jack. Chimney.”
By the time I was able to react and move my head, she'd already finished. And whatever she had done, I knew something was wrong.
I looked up at her, my eyes seeming to gain and lose focus moment to moment. “What…did you…did you do to me?”
She stepped back, almost as though she thought I might attack her, but I could barely stand. “Something that I hope will help my brother. I'm sorry, I really am. I wish there was another way, or that it had been that nasty nurse that Elliot first had once he got home instead of you. But I just figured out the words, you see. It's not just the sounds of the words you have to replicate. You have to understand the words too. Elliot, he understood the Ugtatu language. For you, I had to find English words with the same sounds. It really was a challenge.”
Now I considered attacking her after all. She had done something to me and now was patting herself on the back instead of answering me. “Did…you do the pur…purification thing on me?”
She cast her eyes down like a schoolgirl caught cheating. “I did. Or the first part, which is all I had, of course. Though I may have fibbed a bit on that part. According to Elliot's notes, the Ugtatu called it ‘Khazit chureharu me’. I think it means ‘The Purity of Joining’. That may be off though.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Bunch of superstitious nonsense, regardless of how effective the technique may be at…”
She stopped as her face lit up with a brilliant smile. I turned to see Elliott Stoffel reaching for me, his hands like iron as they closed around my neck. I tried to struggle, but everything was swimming. I felt like I was moving through the darkening waters of some deep, midnight sea, and as his grip tightened, I watched the world fall away.
When I awoke, I was at a bus stop ten miles away. I could see and move better, but I knew something was still wrong. I wasn’t sure what until I was a few minutes down the road on the northside bus.
Two of the people on the bus were monsters. I first noticed it when I glanced back and saw one bending down to get candy out of her purse. The second, who looked even more hideous, was a man sitting in the back with worms crawling in and out of his face.
It took all I had not to scream, and after getting off at the next stop, I walked the rest of the way home. Not that it was any better. I saw terrible shapes in the shadows of houses as I passed, and more than once I thought I saw glowing eyes from a nearby ditch or storm drain. That was two weeks ago, and I've barely left my apartment since. The last time was last Thursday, and it ended with me running from the grocery store after seeing red crystalline eggs hatching from a young woman's chest.
Not that my apartment is much better. As I write this, I can see the giant spider looking at me from the corner of the room. You would think I could control myself better, convince myself that none of it is real, but I can’t. It all seems realer than real, and certainly realer than reason or memory.
I try not to look directly at the spider. It's been around for the last couple of days, and I work to ignore it, but it likes to get places where I have to look. Where it can startle me with its presence.
I'm getting weak from not eating—half my food seems rotten or corrupted, but I know I have to keep my strength up. I don't want to appear too frail. This morning I think there were the start of webs across my face and chest when I woke up. I don’t want the spider thinking it is getting time to collect me and carry me down into some dark and terrible hole.
I wrote this to remind myself to not give in. To not be crazy. To find a way to fix whatever that bitch broke in my brain. I know it can be done, because just yesterday I read about how Elliot Stoffel had made a miraculous recovery and was going to return to teaching in the spring.
She has to fix me too.
But for now I need to get up. I lost track of the spider and then I realized he's moved to the wall behind me. He's waiting for something, but I don't understand what.
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Credits
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