Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (12 page)

“Did you do it that way all
week?”

“Every single time, with
every single client. Even when I had a no show, giving me a whole
hour which I could have been calling reports in, I just changed my
obsessing from fifteen minutes to an hour and fifteen
minutes.”

“Bro, you’re fucked,” Tate
said, laughing slightly.

Jonah heard Tate’s laugh
and knew Tate was bantering him. But it didn’t matter right now. He
was too caught up in kicking himself to care if Tate kicked him. “I
don’t feel like smoking at all,” Jonah said. “But it seems like the
obsessions have gotten twice as bad since I quit. Maybe the smoking
was providing some kind of self medication that made the obsessions
less intense.”

Tate laughed hard, then
spoke mockingly. “Yeah, bro. Nothing alleviates an anxiety disorder
like a stimulant.”

Again, Jonah didn’t care
about Tate’s teasing. He knew Tate was right. Nicotine was a
stimulant, and stimulants were anxiety provoking. But it didn’t
matter that he was wrong or that he sounded stupid right now. He
was just so pissed at himself.

“You’ve tried medication,
bro,” Tate said, his laughter trailing off in his voice.

Jonah oriented himself more
to Tate. He realized that Tate was not asking if he’d tried meds,
as much he was saying that he knew Jonah had tried meds. “For about
six months while I was in grad school,” Jonah said.

Tate nodded, then said,
“Failed miserably.”

“Yes. And I took them too.
Never missed a pill. But they did nothing for me.”

“And you were glad for
that,” Tate said, his voice now toned down quite a bit, confident,
but no longer mocking.

Jonah was confused. He was
confused about what was going on in his head. Tate’s assertion
seemed ridiculous. But at the same time, Jonah thought he could
remember a slight sense of relief he’d had when the pills
failed.

Tate said, “OCD is
biological, to an extent, sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Jonah agreed, knowing the
research.

“But, in your case, it’s
not,” Tate said. “You need your symptoms, bro. You’re scared to
death to get better.”

Jonah had thought of this
many times before. He’d had compulsions for longer than he could
remember, and they were like a security blanket for him.

Tate said, “You don’t want
to get better. Because if you’re better, you’ll stop checking. And
if you stop checking, something might sneak up on you. And then you
might lose.”

Once again, Jonah knew that
Tate had him pegged right. He waited to see what else Tate had for
him. The waitress came over and got Jonah’s drink order and handed
him a menu. After she left and Tate still hadn’t said anything,
Jonah said, “So?”

Tate shrugged and said
matter-of-factly, “You’re fucked, bro.”

Jonah sat there shocked for
a few seconds. He really didn’t think that Tate had anything that
would be of any help, but he was surprised Tate wasn’t
trying.

After a few seconds of
staring at his menu, the smile crept up on Tate’s face. Then he
gave the high-pitched laugh. “No, brother. I’m just messing with
you. Come by my place tomorrow after you stop working on your
reports.”

That Tate might have
something to help was totally beyond comprehension to Jonah. But
curiosity would still make him go.

#

“All right,” Tate said in
his relaxed tone. “Come back to the room.”

With that, Jonah opened his
eyes and began to orientate himself.

Jonah had walked over to
Tate’s place about 9PM, too tired to call in any more reports. Tate
had told him it best that he not tell Jonah the reasoning for what
they were doing, and that Jonah should just go with it for now.
Jonah agreed. Tate had him do a series of five-minute exercises.
Essentially, Jonah was to close his eyes and watch his own
thoughts. He still wasn’t sure what that meant.

They had done five
exercises so far. This time, after about a minute of orientation,
Jonah said, “It’s so hard. I try to just watch my thoughts, but I
get caught up in them. I get to thinking about something in my life
and then get really into it. Then I forget I’m doing the
exercise.”

“So you stop observing your thoughts
objectively and become entrenched in them.”

“Exactly. Then I get to
wondering how I’m doing and if I’m doing the exercise
right.”

“And you get so caught up
in trying to figure out how to do it right that you actually stop
just observing your thoughts and get inside them again.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s good,” Tate said in
a calm voice that served as a contrast to the way Jonah felt.
“You’re seeing how strong your mind is. You try to keep out of it
and just observe it, but your mind just sucks you in anyway. The
key word here is try. Now let’s do it again.”

Jonah’s head was spinning,
but he really wanted to get this right. So he closed his eyes, and
Tate started telling him how to do the next exercise. They went
through five more exercises, before Tate said, “All right, now
describe to me what’s going on.”

“I still can’t get it,” Jonah said in
a slow, frustrated voice.

“And you’re trying harder.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s the problem.”

Jonah shook his head, now even more
confused and frustrated.

Tate
said, “The harder you
try
to resist your mind pulling you in, the harder it
pulls. Your mind gives you the thought that you’re not doing it
right, and you respond by trying to figure out how to do it right.
And is trying to figure out something observing?”

“No, it’s not.”

“No. So, for right now,
stop trying to deal with the thoughts your mind gives you and just
watch them. Let’s begin.”

Again, Jonah did the
exercise, trying to watch what his mind gave him without
intervening. Afterward, already being asked to stop the exercise
and having been given time to orientate, Jonah said, “That was
better.”

“In what sense?”

Jonah tried to figure out
how to answer Tate’s question, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know how
it was better. He just knew it was, somehow.

Tate said, “You have a
sense now, brother. You feel like something is about to click in
your head, but it just won’t click as of yet.”

“Yeah.”

“Good. That means it’s time
to stop for tonight. I encourage you not to try to figure this out
for now. Just go with it. Go about your life as you normally would
until tomorrow night when we do this again.”

“But—”

“No arguments, bro. Arguing
this won’t get you anywhere right now. I’ll see you
tomorrow.”

Jonah stared at Tate for a
few seconds, frustrated that he had made progress and now Tate was
telling him it had to halt. But still, he was fascinated by what he
had just been through, which took the edge off the frustration. He
got up and nodded his goodbye.

Jonah was just getting
ready to enter his apartment when something smacked him on the
face. Stunned, but not injured, he looked to where he thought he
might have heard the object fall. There, on the ground, in the
light of one of the building’s lamps, was a large cricket. Jonah
was fairly familiar with bugs of its size. Having grown up in the
warm climate of South Carolina, he had seen hundreds of crickets
and other bugs like this and had even had other experiences of them
smacking into him. Usually, the bugs would hit you once, land, then
scurry or jump off in another direction. But this bug was lying on
its back motionlessly. Jonah nudged it gently with his foot. It
didn’t move.

#

So many
thoughts are in his head. None make sense.
For what I’ve done . . . I don’t know why it’s so bad. . . I
wonder if she’ll . . . I have forty-two on the schedule next week.
. . It doesn’t matter; I have to do . . .

It’s all just a jumbled
mess. What makes sense is that he’s in a car, moving down a road.
He passes a gas station, a block of houses, a church, no people. Up
ahead is a vista with some kind of tower. There is writing on the
tower, but its scrambled: tompmorowerirmeaytotn,woiklthahommae. He
comes to the end of the road and turns. He notices the road sign of
the street he’s turning onto. He sees it in a flash, not enough
time to read it before the noise wakes him.

#

At first, coming from the
dream and into reality, Jonah thought it was just his alarm clock
going off. Shortly after the high-pitched noise stopped, Jonah was
oriented enough to realize that he hadn’t even set his alarm clock.
He opened his eyes and sat up. His mind went to the night of
hallucinations he’d had when he was suffering from withdrawals. A
little frightened, Jonah told himself that he was never going to
have to go through that again. There would be no more withdrawals.
But what had made the noise? Had it just started in his dreaming
mind and faded as he came awake? Jonah knew better than to try to
just go back to sleep. His mind would never let him do that. If at
all possible, he had to confirm what the noise was.

Through the dark room, he
looked to the alarm clock on the dresser. The little red light that
showed when the alarm was on was not there. It was 3:14AM. Jonah
got out of bed to switch on the overhead light. Just on the other
side of the bed, he felt something crunch beneath his bare foot.
Disgusted, Jonah jumped the rest of the way across the room and
switched on the light. There, on the floor, in a broken circle,
were five large crickets. Four, including the one that he had
stepped on, were motionless. One struggled for a few seconds, its
legs sputtering weakly, then died right before his eyes.

Jonah went and got a broom and
dustpan.

#

Saturday went like Friday.
There were more of the five-minute meditative sessions, and Jonah
didn’t really feel like he was getting it.

“Give up the struggle,” was
about all Tate would say each time.

After about the tenth
session, Jonah said, “I don’t think I can do it tonight. I just got
too much on my mind.”

“Oh, tell me about it,”
Tate said, an eager look on his face.

Jonah kind of laughed. Even
after all the weirdness they’d been through, and the vulnerable
states Tate had seen him in, this seemed almost too strange to tell
another person. But he still wanted to let Tate in, because he
thought Tate might help him make sense of it.

“Do you ever have problems
with bugs getting into your place?”

Tate looked a little amused
by the question. “No. Why?”

After a little more
hesitation, Jonah told Tate about the crickets from the night
before. Tate listened, without saying anything, but the amused look
still on his face.

When Jonah was finished,
Tate laughed, then said, “Don’t worry too much about it, bro.
Meditation is powerful stuff. Your mind is going through major
changes, most of them out of your conscious awareness.”

“Yeah. I can buy that. But
how does that explain the crickets?”

“It’s simple, bro. The
first incident, where the cricket hit your face, was probably real
enough. It’s odd, but would you agree that it’s
possible?”

“Sure,” Jonah said, though he was
still very skeptical.

“And the other instance, with the
crickets on the floor, was probably just a dream.”

“No,” Jonah said. “There’s
no way. I was awake.”

“But you said you were just
waking up. And we’ve all had dreams where we thought we got out of
bed, only to wake up in bed a little later.”

“But this was so vivid. So
real like.”

“That’s not unusual, bro,”
Tate said confidently. “You’ve been watching your thoughts. That’s
not a practice most people engage in.”

Jonah believed that part.
Meditating, actually watching his thoughts come, was so different
from the usual practice of experiencing himself as actually being
his thoughts.

Tate said, “And with just a
little practice, you become better at doing this. And in ways,
especially subconscious ways, you become better at it almost
immediately. You start to actually pay more attention to your
dreams. And, initially, that makes them more memorable and
vivid.”

Jonah was not sure if what
Tate had just said made logical sense. But, by Tate’s amused look,
Jonah thought it would be very difficult to convince him otherwise.
He wished he hadn’t flushed the crickets. Then he could have at
least confirmed their reality to himself, if not to
Tate.

“All right, bro,” Tate
said. “That’s as far as we can go tonight. You need to just live
your life now. But I’ll tell you this. You’re going to start
noticing yourself engaging in meditation naturally. You’ll just be
going through your routines and notice that you actually reflect on
what you’re thinking. It will be powerful, but not nearly enough.
Next Thursday, after you’ve seen all your clients, we’ll work some
more.”