As Andrew got sicker, he’d point to perceived smudges on our bedroom window. Nothing discernible to him. Not at first. But the decline in my partner’s health brought with it a growing realization. “It’s a face,” he told me. “It’s someone’s face.”
I saw nothing.
I sat with Andrew through it all. Every sleepless night. Every shriek of terror as nightmares tore through him. Every sobbing declaration that he wasn’t ready. In the mornings, the smudged face would be there, ever clearer to him. He was terrified of it. Still, I saw nothing.
There was something unbelievable about the stuffing my grandmother made every Thanksgiving. It wasn’t just good – it was beyond amazing. Every morsel of meat and bread and vegetable was flavored to perfection. The meticulousness and love involved in the preparation process shone through with every bite. We’d eat until we were stuffed (pun intended) and still felt great afterward. Hell, we even felt invigorated, which was the last thing one would expect after Thanksgiving dinner.
Our family had been trying to get her to tell us the recipe for years. She wouldn’t even give us a hint.
I’m chef Geoffrey Zakarian’s personal espresso maker and latte-foam artist. Yes, that’s a real job. With benefits, in fact. Great health and dental.
One of the perks of my occupation, aside from hanging out with GZ and getting to eat many of my weekly meals at his outstanding restaurant, The Lamb’s Club, is the access I enjoy at The Food Network’s studios and associated properties.
GZ is a pretty big deal over there, which I’m sure you know if you’ve watched the network for more than a few hours. Aside from Chopped!, which is his best-known show, he’s building a new audience with the Saturday morning feature, The Kitchen. His personality fits so well with whatever he’s in, though, and it’s just great to be a part of it.
I’m totally fanboying right now. Sorry. I hope that doesn’t sound disrespectful in the face of what happened.
The overly-wide, grinning mouth is a horror cliche. It’s a trope, albeit a successful one, that’s wormed its way into scary stories from around the world. So ubiquitous is its inclusion that it’s taken on a legendary status; it feels like something that’s always been around to scare people. Right?
In 1844, one of the first serial killers in Connecticut began a rampage. Little was known about the killer, save for their signature technique of disfiguration. While the victims were alive, they amputated their cheeks. When the bodies were eventually found, their toothy, skeletal smiles became fodder for nightmares, rumors, and legends. The killer was never captured.
Starting in 2012, local Connecticut message boards and forums started to feature messages and questions about ghosts.
My therapist suggested I write this out. I guess reliving that night and putting my experiences on paper will help me get over the trauma.
A few years ago, I was in a motorcycle wreck. Broke my left tibia and fibula, shattered my right patella, got a greenstick fracture of my left femur, multiple fractures in my pelvis, breaks in almost all my ribs, and two broken collarbones. I was immobilized from the shoulders down by a heavy body cast. They told me I was lucky.
My wife, Violet, was supportive and nurturing. She never once complained about having to care for me. She cooked all my meals, kept me company, and emptied my bedpan without grimacing. About two weeks into my convalescence, Jenna called us, bawling, because her college roommate died. Vi had to leave immediately and be there for her. Vi’s sister, Kathy, was going to take care of me.
When I woke up the following morning, Vi was off to get Jenna. Kathy was there, cheerfully making breakfast and talking up a storm as she helped me with my more embarrassing biological needs. Like her sister, she never made me feel ashamed. She left around 11 that night and told me she’d be back at dawn.
My brother and cousins and I used to play a game whenever we had a sleepover. It was simple: we’d stay up and scare the living fuck out of each other. When we were at Erin and Kyle’s house, it was the scariest by far. Her house was haunted. That’s what everyone said. Even her parents knew it. “Don’t worry about Mr. Toombs,” they’d say. “He’s harmless.” Then they’d laugh and go back to what they were doing.
Mr. Toombs was the man who owned the house before Erin’s parents. He died all alone and no one realized he was gone until many months later. Even though the house got gutted and renovated before it went on the market, we had this feeling he’d died in the basement right near the furnace. The air there just felt thick and heavy – like old, sour breath.
We’d have our sleepovers a few times a month. Our parents all worked at the same factory. Whenever they had to take third shift, we’d either stay at home and Erin and Kyle would come to our house or Greg and I would go over to Erin and Kyle’s. I never minded all the moving around until Kyle said we had to play that game. I hated it.
Kyle was the oldest and could be mean if he wanted to. He wasn’t a bully; he usually knew when to back off and genuinely felt bad if he made one of us cry. But he still liked to get his way. And that meant we’d have to play the sleeping game.
The first time we played the sleeping game, we were at our house. The four of us were in our sleeping bags in the living room and Kyle started to tell a really terrifying story about a skinny alien that comes through the window and cuts you up in your bed. Greg, Erin, and I hated the story, but I could tell Erin was especially horrified. She was only six. I kept telling Kyle to take it easy on his sister, but he was relentless. To Erin’s credit, she didn’t cry, but I think that was the problem. He probably would’ve stopped if she had.
The game went like this: after the story, you weren’t allowed to get out of your sleeping bag. No matter how scared you were, you couldn’t get up to get water, you couldn’t go to the bathroom, and under no circumstances could you run upstairs to get comfort from the grownups. If you did, you’d have to get an indian burn from the rest of the group.
The night of the alien story, I couldn’t stop looking at the living room windows. Whenever a car went by and cast its light against the wall, I’d shiver and feel my balls drawing up into my body while goosebumps rose on the back of my neck. Stupid Greg and Kyle were asleep already. Erin, whose sleeping bag was next to mine, was crying to herself.
“I need to pee,” she whispered. “And I’m too scared to get up and I don’t want to get an indian burn when I get back.”
I looked at Greg and Kyle. They were both completely out. “Go ahead,” I whispered. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Erin gave me a tight-lipped smile and snuck out of her sleeping back and padded down the hallway. Right around when I’d assumed I would hear the bathroom door close, she screamed. It was a shrill, horror-filled explosion from her tiny lungs, and the three of us, now wide awake, vaulted from our sleeping bags in her direction. We got there a couple seconds before my parents were thundering down the steps. They flipped on the lights.
Erin was in the corner of the bathroom, sobbing. Her pajama pants were soaked. Mom picked her up and held her to her chest and asked what happened.
“The alien,” Erin whimpered, then pointed to the shower curtain. Dad opened it. Nothing was there.
“It was just a shadow, honey,” Dad told her. He glared at us. “Come with me, boys,” he ordered, and brought us back into the living room while Mom drew a bath for Erin.
After a long lecture from my father, we agreed to not tell any more scary stories. Erin eventually came back to her sleeping bag, and with Dad snoring on the couch, we all went to sleep.
The next night, of course, brought more stories. They were much tamer, though. Greg told a dumb one about a lady who gets pulled into a grave by a killer. I told an even worse one about some teenager whose baby brother’s head came off. Erin actually laughed at that one it was so bad. We got ready to go to sleep, still bound by the agreement that we couldn’t get up for any reason until it was morning.
At some point in the middle of the night, Greg shook me awake. “Hey, we caught Erin coming back from the bathroom.” She was already rubbing her arm in discomfort from the burn her brother had given her. Greg grabbed her other one and twisted, making Erin yelp. I took her arm and just squeezed it a little. I felt bad.
Months went by and we played the sleeping game every time we were together. Everyone got caught at least once trying to sneak out. Indian burns were had by all. Erin, though, got the most. It was obvious she wasn’t having any fun. To make matters worse, she looked exhausted on the mornings after we played. I brought it up to Kyle, and he thought about it for a minute, then said we’d do it once a month instead of every time. I didn’t argue.
We kept our little agreement to ourselves because we didn’t want Erin to think we were treating her like a baby. That night, we were sleeping at their house. They had a beautifully furnished basement with a big-screen TV, a ping-pong table, and all sorts of other fun stuff. We set up our sleeping bags and played video games until well after 10pm. My aunt came down and said to turn it all off and get to sleep, so we made like we were getting ready for bed, but when the lights went off, Kyle said it was time to play the sleeping game.
I groaned, but he shot me a look and mouthed “only one,” to me. At least he was holding up his end of the bargain. Like we always did, anyone who needed to get up to pee or get a drink beforehand was allowed to. I went, followed by Kyle, then Erin. We all came back.
In the glow of the flashlight Kyle liked to hold under his chin when he told his stories, Kyle started to talk about a ghost. The ghost. Mr. Toombs. Even Greg looked uncomfortable as he stared at the slatted wooden door which served as the barrier between the furnished and unfurnished cellar. The furnace was on the other side.
“Mr. Toombs waits until you’re asleep,” Kyle whispered, “and sucks your breath into his lungs. The longer you sleep, the more he takes away. And if you sleep for too long, you won’t have any air left to breathe and you’ll…be…dead.”
My eyes were wide with fear and Greg just stared at the ground. Kyle, too, looked like he’d successfully startled himself, especially when the furnace kicked on and we all jumped. Erin, surprisingly, had actually managed to go to sleep first, despite bawling her eyes out by the end of the story and making Kyle promise to give her his snack at lunch or else she’d tell on him. I snuck her one of the Lifesaver candies I’d stashed away to help her feel better. I guess it’d worked.
The rest of us tried to go to sleep. Kyle caught me getting up to pee and gave me a wicked indian burn, but since he caught me while he was on his way to the bathroom himself, I was able to reciprocate. Hard. He punched me in the arm and I swatted him in the balls. I won. We tiptoed back into the basement and got in our sleeping bags. It was the worst night’s sleep I’d ever had; each time the furnace kicked on, I knew I’d see Mr. Toombs floating above my sleeping bag ready to suck the life out of me.
Like always, my aunt came downstairs in the morning to wake us up for school. She started with gentle calls, then hollers, then shouts, then, since we always ignored her, she stomped down the stairs and threatened to haul us out of the sleeping bags.
“Let’s go!,” she ordered, “get dressed and go get your breakfast. Erin, if I have to ask you again I’m gonna flush your goldfish.”
Erin didn’t budge.
“I swear to God, Erin, Goldeen’s going down into the sewer with the Ninja Turtles in 3…2…1…”
Nothing. Concern flashed across my aunt’s face. Kyle, who’d been sleeping next to her, shook his sister. She didn’t respond. My aunt rushed across the room and pulled Erin to her. She hung limply out of the sleeping bag.
Everything went really fast for a while. The ambulance came while my aunt and uncle screamed and cried and Kyle, Greg, and I just sat there in stunned silence. My parents arrived soon after. They were also crying. We were all asked if we saw her drink any alcohol or take any medicine. None of us had. I knew Erin had been the last one to use the bathroom before bed, so I mentioned that. Someone went into the bathroom and returned with an empty bottle of sleeping pills that’d been in the medicine cabinet.
Through her tears, my aunt insisted that the bottle had been empty to begin with; that she’d been saving it so she could remember which kind had worked for her so she could get it again. But there was no other explanation at the time. Erin was dead.
There was a funeral. It was terribly sad. But I went on with my life. Everyone did. I learned years later that the toxicology reports had been negative and Erin’s death had been ruled an accidental asphyxiation. They blamed the sleeping bag, and my aunt and uncle sued for millions.
When Greg was moving out before his first year at college, I was asked to help load the van. I didn’t want to, but I helped anyway. Some of the heavier things were boxed up in the unfinished part of the cellar, by the furnace. I went down and tried not to think about poor Erin.
When I opened the door and entered the warm furnace room, I remembered that feeling I got the first time I’d been in there. An image of Mr. Toombs decaying next to the furnace flashed through my head. I shivered. But then I noticed the familiar, strange heaviness in the air. I noticed the smell. It was different from the sour odor that’d reminded me of the last breath trapped inside a corpse’s rotting lungs. This smell was sweet. It was cloying. Like the breath of someone who’d eaten a lime Lifesaver.
I’m one of the victims of the hypodermic needle assaults over the summer. Kara Yvette Bernard. It was the first time my name was ever in the newspaper. My name was among 51 other women; 66 total victims, 51 of whom allowed the media to name them. We did it in some spontaneous show of solidarity, as if we’d formed some kind of connection because of our victimization.
It wasn’t long before the physical damage of the assaults began to manifest. The media wouldn’t go into detail, but it was easy enough to find online. Mania. Hypersexuality. Skin deterioration. Not a single doctor could identify what our injections contained. Aside from the needle marks themselves, there wasn’t any sign that we’d been injected with anything at all. But as time went by and more of the women began to succumb to the effects, my terror and dread turned into confusion. After 3 months, I was the only one still alive.
My doctor suggested I was immune to whatever the injection had contained. I didn’t have any reason to doubt his suggestion, but there was still too much uncertainty to give me any relief. And now, almost half a year after the attack, I knew it was right to deny myself that relief. I started hearing voices.
I was on the couch eating my dinner. The television was on. At first, when I heard, “can you hear this?,” I thought it was the TV. Then the voice said, “Kara, can you hear this?”
You have to realize, after what happened over the summer, I’ve been terribly skittish. I panic at the drop of a hat and I’ve been on disability since the attack. When I heard someone say my name last night and it was so loud and clear that it was like someone else was in the room, I nearly passed out. But I knew no one was around. The place was empty aside from me – just like how it’s been for the last four months.
“Kara, please reply if you can hear us.”
I whispered that I could, and I heard talking in the background. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The next part, though, came through without any ambiguity.
“Drown yourself.”
I didn’t move. I knew it had to be the effect of the injection.
“Fill the bathtub and drown yourself.”
That was when I started to cry. The voice kept repeating the command. The tone was calm and seductive. Then, as I bawled and begged whatever it was to leave me alone, my body started to move on its own. I had no control over anything, not even my voice or my eyelids. My body stood, walked over to the bathroom, and began to fill the tub with water.
Internally, I was shrieking and sobbing and trying to plead with whoever was doing this to me to stop. All it did was repeat what it had been saying. “Fill the tub and drown yourself.”
When the tub was full, my body stepped into the warm water. Even though I tried to fight as hard as I could to break away and not be forced to do what they were telling me to do, I sank to my knees, sat cross-legged, then dropped facedown into the tub.
My body didn’t allow me to take a breath before I plunged in. While I panicked inside a body whose autonomy had been stolen, I readied myself for the moment my lungs would give out and I’d inhale, filling their entire capacity with bathwater. I imagined sucking in the water and reflexively coughing it out, only to refill my lungs again and again as I gasped until I was just a corpse to be found by the landlord.
The gasp never came. My panicked heartbeat thumped in my ears while I stared at the plastic bottom of the bathtub. There was no pressure in my chest. The only pain I felt was the cramping in my legs from being tucked underneath me.
“What does it feel like?”
I could talk again, but I still couldn’t move.
“Help me,” I gurgled, as bubbles floated by my wide eyes on their way to the surface. There was still no pain in my chest or any compulsion to inhale. It had to have been two minutes since I went under.
“What does it feel like? What does it feel like? What does it feel like?”
The question repeated over and over in my head. Eventually, I answered. “Like I can breathe underwater.”
The reply was instantaneous. “Are you actively breathing? Are you inhaling and exhaling water?”
I considered the questions and changed my answer. “It feels like I don’t have to breathe anymore.”
There was a silence inside my head that was broken only by the sounds of my heart beating and my stomach processing my dinner.
“You have eight days. We will come see you at the end of it. Please drink the bathwater periodically to stay hydrated and adjust the water temperature to avoid hypothermia.”
I noticed I could move my left hand, arm, and shoulder again. I reached out of the water and tried to pull my head up by my hair. It was as if I weighed 1000 pounds. When I tried to reach for the plug to empty the tub, my arm flopped lifelessly in the water. After a minute, I regained movement. I fumbled for the faucet and turned the water on and off.
For eight days, I remained underwater. My legs had gone numb. On the fourth or fifth day, I tried to run the water and overflow the bathtub with the hope a neighbor would notice and alert the landlord. I lost control of my hand for a while after that.
The water grew dirty as the days went on and I stopped drinking it. I lost control of my mouth and throat and was forced to consume a certain amount every day. On day eight, my chest began to burn. As soon as the feeling registered, I had control over my entire body again. I carefully extricated my stiff body from the tub.
I remained on my back, staring at the bathroom ceiling, for a while. The smell of the room prompted me to start moving and I showered the filth off myself while looking down at my severely water-damaged body. I dried myself carefully, noticing skin coming off as I did. I thought back to the online reports of the other injected women; how their skin sloughed off in bloody, sticky clumps. But mine wasn’t like that. There was no blood. Only raw, pink skin.
It took me a while to move into the kitchen where I grabbed a box of cereal and started shoveling handful after handful into my mouth. The skin on my lips split wide open with the first handful. Again, no blood.
“Kara, stop eating.”
I dropped the box of cereal. The voice was in my head again.
“You have three hours.”
And now all I can do is wait. Wait and type. My skin is starting to hurt and I’m worried I’ve gotten an infection from being in the dirty water for so long. I don’t know what’s going to happen in three hours. Part of me wants to call the police or run away. There’s another part, though, that’s overriding my desire for help. It’s grim curiosity. It’s the curiosity of someone who’s given up hope. Someone who’s lost control. I want to see why these people want to subject me to all this.
While I was face down in the tub, I sometimes heard talking in the background. The voices weren’t directed at me. It was almost as if someone had left a microphone on by accident. Words would come through every so often. “Respiration.” “Bonding.” “Slough.” There was one time, I think on the sixth day, I was able to hear part of a sentence. I’ve picked it apart in my head over and over, trying to figure out not only what it meant in general, but what it meant for me. I guess I’ll find out pretty soon.
There’s a nervous excitement in me that I feel is somehow wrong. Somehow suicidal. But still, like I said, the curiosity is overwhelming my desire for self-preservation. A little less than two hours to go. The perversity of my excitement is unsettling. This isn’t me, but I don’t think I care. All I care is that in a couple hours, I’ll learn what they meant by “…successful underwater, but it will be entirely different in the vacuum of space.”
