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The Message
The phone rang. I rushed out of bed and into my office. Who the hell is calling me at 4:30 A.M., I thought. I picked it up and said hello.
A man’s voice said, “Hello, Richard”.
“Yeah, this is Rich. Who is this”?
“You don’t recognize my voice. I’m disappointed”. I was immediately annoyed.
“Great, fuckin’ proud of you. Who is this and why are you calling me so early in the goddamned morning”?
“You killed me”.
There was a conversation stopper.
“I killed you. Do you think I would remember that? You have the wrong number. Bye”.
I hung up and turned to go to the bedroom. The phone rang again.
“Yeah. Now what”.
“You killed me, you took my soul”.
“I heard you the first time. Apparently you can’t say the same”.
“Why did you do it”?
“Friend, I’m done with this. Go back to bed or have another drink, or whatever it is that you were doing. Goodbye”.
I left the phone off the hook. You know he was calling back.
I crawled into bed. Oh yeah, toasty warm. The problem was I couldn’t sleep. That creepy monotone voice was stuck in my head. ‘You killed me, you took my soul’. What an odd prank phone call. I would have been amused by the standard heavy breathing, and the throaty whisper, ‘I want you’. At least I could laugh at that. This was just plain weird.
The phone rang. I sat up. How in the fuck? I went into my office. The phone was off the hook. Just like I left it. And it was ringing! I shook my head, trying to decide if it was my imagination. It kept ringing. I picked up the handset.
“Hello”?
“That was rude”.
“What the …”
“Listen to your machine”. Click.
I actually said in my head, “fuck, now that was rude”.
Listen to your machine. What did that mean. The synapses just weren’t firing yet. Okay, when you listen to your machine, you…, oh, my answering machine”.
I keep my machine in the living room. I had more than half a mind to ignore everything, but two thoughts occurred to me. One, I was curious as all hell, and two, I bet if I didn’t listen to it inside of the next two minutes, that mother was going to call me again.
I could see the light blinking when I got downstairs and into the living room. I hit the play button.
A child’s voice started singing, “Can’t you stay, don’t you want to play, please give me half, not sure, take a look, it’s in the raft”. Beep. “Recorded today at 29 o’clock, and 61 minutes. You don’t have any more messages. Go back to bed”.
My head whipped back at the machine. “What”? There was no response. I hit the play button again.
“There are no new messages”.
I queued up the previous messages. My mom scolding me for not calling her, my father, the same. That was it. I queued it up again. The same. Now I’m frantically hitting buttons, like an idiot, trying to recover something I’m not even sure was there in the first place. If the machine could have cursed at me, it would have. I actually waited for it to do so.
I hit the Time button on it.
“4:52 A.M.”
I looked at my living room clock. Close enough. 29 o’clock and 61 minutes is not something you hear everyday. Or your machine telling you to go to bed. The only normal thing was that message and heck, I didn’t know what that meant.
The phone rang. I picked up. The monotone voice asking, “Did you get the message”?
“Yeah, I got it. One question. What the fuck does it mean”.
“You’re smart. Smart enough to take my life, my soul. You figure it out”.
Click.
Oh, that’s gotta stop.
I sat down on the couch and lit a cigarette. I was definitely awake. Like an idiot, I looked at my machine, waiting for it to tell me to make coffee.
Okay, can’t you stay, don’t you want to play? I had no idea what that could mean. Please give me half? Of what? Not sure, take a look, it’s in the raft? What raft? I don’t have a raft. Rafters? Laugh with a Chinese accent? It just didn’t make a goddamned bit of sense. I took a drag of my cigarette and watched the smoke swirl and move quickly to my right, towards the back dining room doors. That was odd since all the windows were closed. I got up and checked for a draft. Nothing. I took another drag. The smoke swirled again and made a beeline for the back doors. I went to them and looked outside. The backyard was quiet and dark. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I looked to the right, by the water, and saw an odd shape that didn’t belong there. I clicked the floods twice to keep them on and sure enough, there was something visible in the water. Opening the doors, I walked over to the shoreline. The shadows caused by the flood lights were long and dark as I crunched through the hard, cold grass. It was chilly, but my bare feet didn’t mind. My stomach turned when I saw a simple wooden raft in the water. There was a body on it, face down, naked, feet and hands dangling in the water. I could see the hair floating in the water. The skin was pale and water logged, all pruned up like you were in the pool too long. I leaned over the shoreline just for a moment to get a closer look. The body seemed to be that of a woman, slender, shapely and seemingly very dead. I leaned back and stepped away from the water.
All right, there’s a dead woman in a raft in my backyard. A man’s voice on the phone at 4:30 in the morning calls me and tells me I killed him. I get a weird message and my machine tells me to go to bed. I can leave out the latter stuff when I call the police. I turn my back and make my way back to the dining room doors. I stepped up to walk in and heard the water splash.
I turned to look and a pair of ducks had just landed in the water, swimming quickly to the shore. I get quite a bit of wild birds that feed in and around the lake. Seeing them swim made me smile for a moment, distracting me from the dead woman in my lake. I turned to go inside.
“Don’t you wanna play”?
My head slowly turned back to the water. She was standing, arms held out, beckoning to me. Water was cascading from her hair down her full breasts into the water. She was glistening in the bright light reflecting off of the water. I could see her clearly and she was gorgeous, not at all the pruned dead woman I had just seen. She took a step onto the shore, and began walking slowly towards me. I was stunned, frightened and mesmerized. Only for a moment. I flew into the dining room. At least I thought I did. It turns out I ran into my glass doors, hard. My face hit the glass bouncing me back down the steps. I looked back at my beautiful, dead woman, holding my nose. She was gone.
I was covered in blood. My nose was gushing and I was in a lot of pain. My eyes were watering as I tiptoed back towards the water, as if I was going to be stealthy like a ninja around a walking dead person who wanted to play. Oh yeah, I’ve seen plenty of horror movies. I know what you mean when you ask, ‘Do you want to play’? No, thank you very much though for your consideration, no, no, no, I definitely don’t want to play.
Peeking over the shoreline showed me that there was no raft. The only disturbance to the water were the lines made by my swimming ducks. They started quacking up a storm when I got to close. The pain in my face subsided as did the bleeding. I was out of my mind. I must be. What in the hell kind of psychological condition was this? Wait, how can you be crazy if you think you are? Crazy, that is. Hallucinatory? Hallucinations, flashbacks from my days of taking hits of mescaline, dropping acid, smoking dope, snorting coke. Twenty years later and that shit comes back to haunt me. Great, fucking great. What the hell else could this be? My hands were covered in blood. I kneeled down and rubbed them vigorously in the grass. I looked at them after a few seconds, thinking, ‘good enough’.
“Can’t you stay”?
I was motionless, my eyes trying to rotate horizontally around to the back of my head, without me turning my face, so I could make sure little-miss-dead-water-princess wasn’t really there.
A hand caressed my right cheek. I only remember cold, wet, clammy, dead, moldy, and fifteen thousand other disgusting words that ran through my head in a millisecond. I bolted for the dining room doors, mentally making a note to open doors first, go in second. There was slime running down my cheek. This was no hallucination.
I made the doors, opened them, got inside, turned and locked them. She was by the water looking down, like I was still there, her one hand reaching out as if touching something, the other holding her stomach. From a distance she actually looked sad. I had half a mind to go out and find out what the hell was going on. The other half said, “Are you out of your fucking mind”. The other half won. The phone rang.
“What”?, I almost screamed this into the phone.
“Please give me half”. The child’s voice was lilting.
“Half of what”?
Please give me half, please give me half, on and on. I could hear babies crying and other people screaming in the background. It sounded like a convention. I couldn’t stand the repetition of the child’s voice, the babies wailing and the people screaming in the background. I hung up, unnerved.
I noticed the time on the microwave. It said 5:01. Another five minutes of this and I was going to kill myself.
The phone rang again. I picked it up. I tried to stay calm.
“Yes”?
“Please do”. The monotone voice was back.
“Why are you doing this to me. I didn’t kill anyone. Please, please explain. I don’t understand. Please, just talk to me”.
“Please do”.
“Please do what”?
“Kill yourself”.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it. I could hear laughter and the click of him hanging up.
I placed the phone gently down on the kitchen counter. The enormity of the weirdness was too much. I was breaking down, tears welling, my body shaking.
“Can’t you stay”?
Her voice was magical. A song from the heights of heaven. I looked up. She was inside the dining room doors not five feet from me. She had a white shroud on that covered the majority of her body. The lights in the backyard created the most seductive silhouette imaginable. The lines and curves of her body were ridiculously feminine. In spite of my fear, I found myself responding. Another part of me also realized that this wasn’t going to end until I stood up to it. I stared at her eyes. She didn’t move. She simply stared back, waiting.
My voice was a bit shaky. “Yes, I can stay”. She didn’t look dead. In fact she looked very alive.
“Don’t you want to play”?
“Sure, I’d love to play”.
“Oh good. Please give me half”?
“Half of what”?
“Please give me half”.
“Tell me what you want. I swear, if I can give it to you, I will”.
She didn’t move the entire time. She simply stared at me with large, moist, brown eyes that looked to always be on the verge of tears. The phone rang. I picked it up and did not speak.
“Give it to her”.
“Give her what, goddammit”.
“Give her what she needs”.
“It’s the last fucking time I’m going to ask, what does she want”?
“Give it to her and you will know. Listen to the children”.
He hung up. Before I could make any sense of that one, I heard, “Please”. My arm went down with the phone still in it. I looked up at her. There were tears running down her face and she was holding her stomach. She was bleeding. Her cries were mingling with the sound of the babies wailing from somewhere far away. I moved towards her to help.
As I reached her, one of her hands grabbed me lightly, as if to hold herself up. I didn’t feel the death I felt before. I felt a living, breathing woman in distress There was blood everywhere, her shroud was drenched, her hands were dripping. Her tears were flowing as she whispered, “Please”, again. Her other hand grabbed at my shirt. Her arms went around my waist and her head came about my chest as she held on to me. I didn’t know what to do for her. She whispered again as she held on, “Please”, and I realized that the sound of the babies was coming from her, when she opened her mouth to speak. But there was more, the sound of people, women crying as if death were upon them. This was larger than me, I suddenly knew this. And any fear I may have had was forgotten.
“Tell me. Tell me what you need”.
One of her hands came around from my waist and slid up my stomach to my chest. I dropped the phone and touched her hand.
“What, what do you want”?
She was sniffling, and trembling. Her hand was vibrating slightly on my chest. She whispered something but the sound of the children and the women overcame her. She looked up at me and said ‘thank you’.
Her hand disappeared as I felt the slightest pressure in my chest. My vision blackened for a moment. When I could see again, I witnessed a sea of people above me with their hands beckoning below to large muscular men carrying children, babies away through a blackened doorway at the end of a large amphitheater. It looked like a dark, foreboding version of the Coliseum. Fires were burning on the floor of the large amphitheater, smoke swirling its way above to sometimes obscure my vision and the vision of those above. The children were fighting the men, who were indifferent to the flailing arms and legs, to the screaming below and from above. Some of the women above were throwing themselves down to the floor, disturbing the swirl of the smoke, their lives expiring upon impact. Every death caused the babies to increase the volume of their crying. As a man carrying a child crossed the threshold of the black doorway at the other end, the crying, the screams of the women would reach a new crescendo.
My heart was about to explode with the reality of that which I was cursed to witness. I fell to my knees pounding the dusted earth with my hands until they bled. Screams of my own drowned those of everyone about me.
“Make this stop, goddammit, what is wrong with everyone. This has to stop, please, please, stop it, please”.
The woman from my backyard stood over me. She reached down and lifted my head. She put my mouth to her bloodied body and made me drink her of her womb. With the first swallow, she screamed and fell heavily to the ground. Everyone quieted. The men stopped walking, the women stopped screaming and the children were silent in their stares at the two of us.
A man of enormous stature came through the ocean of bodies walking towards us. He walked quickly, with purpose, his feet stomping the ground, his hulking body leaning forward almost as if to run. He reached us and grabbed the hand of the woman, taking something out of it. With a graceful motion did he place it in his mouth, turn back to the mass of children and breathe a sinewy cloud of golden white. The men held the children up high over their heads. Fingers of the cloud snaked their way into the noses and mouths of each of them. A scream of unimaginable power blew in from the blackened door. I remember leaning forward into it to stop from being pushed backwards. My hands immediately came up to my ears to deaden the deafening roar.
The man who blew the cloud raised a large hand and a hundred angels glided into view from above to close the doors with a violent crash. As one did they turn and stand guard with drawn swords before the doors looking expectantly at the man. He turned to me and touched my chest. I looked down to see a gaping hole where none should be. The hole began to close as I watched. His hand kept tickling the edges until there were none to be found.
I looked up at him. He put his hand upon my head and I saw the meaning. A tear, one tear, flowed from each of his eyes. He leaned down so that I could kiss one. There was I blessed with the image of his Holiness burned forever within my heart and what remained of my soul. I felt his thanks and of those about us. All eyes were upon us as he picked up the woman and fed her the other tear, placing her standing upon the ground. She opened her eyes and looked at him. A cry of joy at her recognition and she leapt into his arms, tears of happiness streaming her face. After a moment, she let go and turned to me. Stepping near me, she grabbed both of my hands and brought them to her mouth, kissing them. She said, “Thank you”. With a kiss did I awake in my home, standing in my kitchen. The phone was on the floor where I dropped it. I shook my head trying to understand what had just happened. The phone rang.
“Hello”?
“Thank you”.
“You’re welcome. It’s the least I could do. I took what wasn’t mine. But you know, and all of you knew, I didn’t know any better. I was a baby, right”?
“Thank you for listening to the children, for not being afraid”.
“Who are you”?
“Richard, you should know the voice of your brother”.
“I don’t have a brother”.
“Yes. Yes you do. Goodbye, brother”.
“Goodbye”. He was gone. I put the phone down.
I remembered my Mom telling me about the only other child she birthed. My twin brother had died at birth. The doctors couldn’t explain it. He was fine and then there was no heartbeat. No breath. The doctors had expressed shock and dismay over the death. My mother was devastated. My father was angry. Mom and Dad had a difficult time of it over the next years. They eventually recovered. I was too young to know any better. I only had Mom and Dad to go by. They would talk about it with me when I was older.
Now, forty years later, I’ve finally talked with my brother. I realize I did something truly meaningful today; I could only begin to graze the surface of something so grave. But one other thing stayed with me more than the long term effects of my actions here. The first time I ever speak to my brother and all I could manage was to curse at him. Oh man, Mom was going to kill me.
***
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