Chapter I: Hidden strings

A thin man is in aisle of a supermarket wearing a grey work shirt with no pockets, his long face has been unshaven for weeks, his cheekbones make his eyes look big and still. He focuses on the prices on that supermarket aisle next to home, difficult task when you left the reading glasses at home. This has always a problem of his, forgetful, a trait his partner is not fond about at any time she just deals with this because she loves him, he always wonders why she is still around and hasn’t she left.

As he looks to the end of the aisle she comes into sight, a beautiful blonde short woman, thin lips, hourglass figure with green eyes that could enter to heaven with a stare, he can´t avoid to stare at her, light of his life, she’s the reason he’s still here. Suddenly their glances meet but not for long, it all ends when she smiles and keeps shopping. If only he were less forgetful she wouldn’t get angry about his issues, irresponsible sometimes just due to carelessness.

This man starts to look at the end of the hall, the cans at the end start losing their colors, he remembers what he forgot, the most important part of their lives for the past seven months: “those damn pills” as he likes to call them. He knows what’s coming, he knows he can handle it until they get to the car with the shopping cart, he will have more time to enjoy with her after work, it’s been a long day and he misses her love, her smiles, all they have done is fighting and he misses those long kisses he knows he can get one but as long as she doesn´t notices, he is wrong.

The aisle is in black again, the cans are moving like distorted by the light that binds them together to his sight. The price tags start folding themselves and are caught on a black fire that feels cold; that’s how she notices she starts to shiver as soon as the hallucinations start, he is afraid of them and she knows. At the end of the hall all he sees are the grey fires of black and white that hide the darkness from him they show him what´s on the other side. A black figure this time, six-legged crawler starts staring at him from the other side of the aisle, he knows what’s going to happen, she isn´t there, she disappeared, he must not tremble for he knows she’s around, she must not know he forgot.

Meanwhile she is happy, thinks about their future and how things have improved, she loves him like the father of her children, “her sunshine” is what she uses in her head to name him when she thinks of him. She knows more than him, always one step ahead of his issues, she bought in secret the pills he thinks he forgot, she knows but she thinks the effect will last another hour, she is calm and happy, now. While she rejoices in her happiness and their future he battles the dread, that fucking thing with black steel teeth is still staring at him like an open menu, he is shaking the sweat, he thinks that after this one it will finally get him between it’s silver teeth but that is not as terrifying as they going after her, the whispers deafen his cries while the red eyes puncture his soul.

From the black teeth mouth and the spider legs came out a tongue, the jaws opened and it spoke with a voice that could crack souls open. He felt the can he held tremble as it said – “she isn´t here Malcom, she will leave one day forever and no one will save you from us neither that hag, her pills or the wraiths” – the voice had him shaken, he is looking for her again, nowhere in this hell to be found. The creature starts advancing slowly while chanting – “your flesh and bone belong to the cold and dark fires “ – this was it, the end of the line for him.

She starts wondering if she is really right about the remining hour and decides to look at Malcom to see if he is normal as he should, turns to the right and his Malcom is sweating and shaking looking at the infinity while he whispers – “dark fires cannot extinguish my warmth” – she was wrong again. As she drops the glass she held and ran to Malcom, she looked at him from below and she held him by the shoulders to notice if he was sweating and trembling, his man was lost to his mind and she hold her face and says “Malcom come to me, I’m here”. He heard his angel and came back to himself, the blackness ceased and she came un colors.

Her eyes watery and now she was the one shaking, - “Anna, are you hurt? Did it hurt you?” – he said. She hugged him to end up buried in his chest – “I have the pills, I have a bottle of water in my purse, get it and drink the pill now. You are having an episode, nothing you see can harm you, you are safe with me”. He reached for the bottle while she was still buried in his chest, she was crying but he is noticing yet, the pills went right in and she stopped the hug, gave him a kiss and went straight to the car.

As they arrived to the car she bursts into tears – “Malcom, I’m so sorry but the treatment isn’t working. I knew you had one left and took it, it was supposed to last another hour but I was wrong and I watched you get pale and whisper to those things like possessed by some evil. I’m sorry Malcom”. He wasn’t mad neither upset, he had a month without a hug from her and there they stood, he was smiling and said – “It´s alright honey, let’s get home, it’s no one’s fault. I’ll cook for you tonight and help you relax. We both are tense and need some food and fun”. She didn’t answer, after 5 minutes she stopped crying and with a kiss in the forehead she got into the car cleaning her makeup with a towel she had specially for it. As she fixes the rearview mirror she holds his hand – “I’ve heard of a number of cases like this in some research made by a private company, it’s always kept in secret but I can pull a few strings so we can know more about this”. The night was done for both of them, between wine and sex the images of the arachnid and its words had eased slowly in Malcom’s head, a sickness, a condition, a curse.

The past months were experimental, a notable change in his behavior due to the heavy chemical warfare waged on his body, medicated, lethargic in nature, the past months were absent of the episodes and Malcolm was near a full recovery to spend his life in treatment as a common man. This last treatment has been the lightest and most successful one so far, but as his mind rested in the hope of his loved one Anna’s mind was far from calm waters. Anna’s retrieval of this experimental information was found between the papers on the desk on a topic she never spoke about, her pride wouldn’t let her speak of her partner’s mental condition being a psychiatrist herself.

Nowadays a long night of sleep while Malcolm was away from town doing one of his conferences it’s a gratuitous form of space for Anna, all the numbers in his head look more like ancient scripts than actual science to her, therapists are one of a kind, a terrible job with a heavy burden on someone, burdens give birth to the sleek of relief and she was a sea of anxiety made with tea and cigarettes.

After what seems a heartbeat there she was in the car with her red hair in a pony tail, her glasses on the passenger´s seat, she was rubbing her eyes trying to wipe the tears and prove herself that the whole day was indeed a fragment of this reality, the unresponsive treatment, the strange company with a research division that nobody had heard about in the scientific community but by far the worst source of anxiety are the scratches on the bathroom door and more importantly on the upper back after last’s night with Malcolm, small incisions that can’t be made by a mad that holds your breasts and hips the whole night. She has been here for 10 minutes, she is holding the steering wheel like it was the last day of her life, tears of anxiety that disguise the fear, she knows there is just one cigarette left and that just won´t do this time, she needs a drink after all the bullshit of the past month.

Malcolm isn't hell on earth but he surely deals with reality like it was Chernobyl in the 87', a man with no family that barely talks of his past, little he says about his mother and never speaks of his father, you can feel hatred for the man when he hears his name. He’s a man of knowledge, not strength, disrespectful of self-imposed authority and a firm believer of logic, philosophy and morality. The treatment has deteriorated his attention span, a once bright mind of an engineer stopped working seven months ago after the first episode, lately focusing on writing books made by his own hands, stitched and covered in hide.

She has dealt with patients with hallucinations before, they have always been aggressive and violent in the episodes, they respond with fear and anger which makes Malcolm even stranger to his eyes. His episodes are mostly in a relaxed, almost catatonic state of mind where he just leaves reality for minutes and then strange things happen around him after a while; she is worried about the low probability attacks that made Malcolm dangerous to himself, he had an episode a month ago that ended up with stitches on his back made with his nails, he said some 6 legged monster was attacking him, the thing here it's not that Malcolm nails are a problem it’s that no human head can bite the lower back, this and the bite on the left ankle of Anna´s leg a month ago while she feel asleep in the shower a month ago, here felt last night wasn't pure psychology.

She decided to leave the car and go for that last cigarette, she fixed her hair and lighted the last one. She was out of herself by that moment, her hand shaking while holding the lighter and seemingly looking for a comfortable position to rest, constantly changing the grip on the body to seek comfort. As she got to the elevator she thought about those scratches on the shower's curtains, they were too thin to be nails and they have a metallic smell, the cuts in the curtains smell like blood. With every thought her breath got slower, she was getting the grip on the day, it’s just a share delusion given the 7 months of shit that were in the past. She gets to the office with the cigarette on her lips still, never left her, threw it on the ground and the foot silenced the red. The file has the drawings Malcolm has been using to "bring to life" the monsters, she told him it would make him sleep better and while he managed to deal with the hallucinations better, she wanted to see what was in those visions. The door locked and the shutters were closed, the hot coffee was added gin.

After minutes of research turned to days in her office she couldn’t notice the lack of patients and the mysterious calls that called on behalf of her clients to cancel appointments, the seal in the file that holds this experimental research on Malcolm’s condition stands out as much as the folder itself, a black folder with silver parallel lines that hold a symbol of what seems to be a mask for eyes and mouth, strange symbol that took rectangular figures to enclose the eyes as it were focusing the sight and silencing the mouth. She recognized the symbol as familiar, in the pages “lost” by Malcolm -as tearing a mad man’s drawing wasn’t desperate enough- it was just a sketch made quickly during one of his episodes, the symbol reassembled the drawing, just eyes and a covered mouth, the underlying noted said: “The lord hungers for realms to feast on”.

Anna stood from her chair, in a quiet desperation headed for the cabinet next to the window, she knows her struggle with alcohol won today, she took a glass of scotch and took the gin she had used in the coffee previously. The numbing effect of the gin gave her the embrace Malcom had forgotten on the past couple of months as she held open the file, the company was a distraction, the report was from a military unit as the ones she used to see at her dad’s desk on the family weekends but there is no proof, no trace, no mistake made by the organization. As she continued reading she started moving her legs in anxiety, every sentence pointed to the illness and symptoms that Malcolm showed since the first day; strange sounds that lead to strange marks in closed dark spaces, remarkable coherence in the hallucinations and the frequency of the episodes was the same she kept in his psychiatric record.

A knock on the door took her by surprise, the glass she held was forgotten and quickly thrown into the air as one of her hands hid the file beneath her seat and the other dried her face in an attempt to hide the gin’s touch to whoever was knocking at the most inappropriate time possible. She said it the words “Come in!” as a whisper and the door seemed to open in slow motion, no words were said, a coworker brought a newspaper and his sight was as scared as Anna’s muttering. He was on the newspapers, Malcolm had another episode but this time the Black file hiding under Anna’s tights held no answers as the final paragraph was just a sentence: “He will run and we will chase him, he will find him and the sacred machine’s wrath will descend from our might”; Malcom’s was on a picture on the newspaper, a man with 3 leather hide books painted in grey with purple and green glowing around them was on his knees as the street was flooded with six-legged spiders that died while the man was chanting.

The man couldn’t stop at handing the newspaper he went for the computer, she had to see the video. Anna was reading and suddenly - “Henry, I’m in no mood for being fucked with! What the hell is supposed to be this?” -  he answered “Anna, I don’t know how to tell you this, you aren’t going to believe anything unless I show you, it’s going viral as we speak, this is recorded where Malcolm is having his conference”. She turned slowly towards the monitor and Henry started the video.

The video was made from a cellphone but you could hear the screeching of the six-legged torments that spawned from the sewers as a thin man stood holding two books on one hand and one opened in the other as it where by an otherworldly force that kept them suspended as an aid to the immense size of the tomes began chanting in strange tongue, like a psalm it was repeated several times, with every sentence repeated the spiders just noticed the man’s intentions and their red eyes marched forward with increasing speed towards the man, he repeated the psalm once more but this time the sound of his voice came in company of two other ghostly voices who teared through the air pulling back the critters back. After the pull from the chant the spiders started eating each other, legs as sharp as needles and knives tore asunder the red eyes and the ending to the massacre was set by the third repetition of the chant. The creatures were pulled to the darkness by hands that desperately held the corpses with haste as they were driven with hunger. The man finally fell to the ground over the weight of the book he held, the camera gets closer and there was his face, Malcolm’s face, his eyes black with a purple iris as he took the books and ran away.