CHORD
prologue
INSIDE AN ENDLESS VOID OF COLD BLACK, glitterflakes of glass twinkled with a shocking downpour of freezing, hard rain before a long fall into darkness.
The screaming skids of tires beating against uneasy asphalt fizzled apart into oily vapors of strained rubber that stung the senses.
The senses of the waking, unknown consciousness blinked like it had eyelids. But there were no eyes to this being. There was no body. But there is something… the consciousness thought.
The streaks of rains that whipped into the face of the unknowing consciousness became fluorescent trails like stars whizzing by at hyperspeed.
This is not a place in reality…
It was beyond that.
An arena of strife and death is here. I am in the middle of it. Those moments in between crisis and peace. All taking place in an instant but somehow stretching for eternity. Who am I?
A hand grabbed another from the everpresent darkness, the reaching hand firm and strong. It radiated with burning love and salty tears.
The dark void flipped over. It became full of passing pillars stenciled eldritch black, layered in chipped edges like tree bark.
The dull yellow light tunneled into a pinpoint. It was hot and cold at once, like dipping ones hand in the cool blue waters on some faraway Pacific island after baking in the sun.
The body of the consciousness smelled earth. Greasy metal. Blood. A toxin circled the body.
The once firm hand became slick and slipped into the darkness, relentlessly writhing about like a river trout. The senses faded. The void faded. The body and consciousness faded into the cold, rainy world of physical reality— while this pure part was left alone in the shrinking space of pain and impending doom.
CHAPTER ONE
October, 1998
THE TRICKLES THAT FELL from her forehead to her left eyelid caused the oddest sensation—that swirling mix of radiating warmth and shivering cold. In the back of her head, she could feel the reverb of loud noises that stretched around her racking head. Tires screeching, a scream, a dull rumble or two, and metal crumbling. In between those eerie echoes, she had been listening to the repeated pitter-patters of what sounded like pebbles bouncing across asphalt.
When she opened her eyes, a blast of cold stung to the center of her head. The blood rushing to her ears had finally escaped, a crunchy noise followed by her ears popping, leaving her naked to the silence between the pitter patters of fluids, mechanical clicks, and the biting breeze. Her vision centered while she twisted from her chest to her back, falling into the floor like a bag of barbells. The body pains hadn’t arrived yet. But she was definitely bleeding. Cold air started to seep into a raw part of her left forearm, looking down and seeing a dark spot in the dim light. Blood poured from her arm when she softly made a fist, sending rivers of warmth down to her elbow. It didn’t hurt at the moment, but it was going to be an ugly scar.
But not the only scar… Franchesca Maison thought to herself, holding her bloodied arm to her hairline and feeling a stinging, hot cut already bulging from the cold skin.
She winced when an icy finger glazed across the crusted, bloody surface. And then, without warning, her stomach dropped. That familiar body tic of hers, the flexing of her left hand into a fist felt different this time. She couldn’t feel her ring. She raised her shaking hand into the strip of light slicing through the darkness. Her ring was gone. She had placed it on the small dinner table. To clean it. That’s why she wasn’t in the passenger seat. But Ron! Ron was driving!
“Babe…?” she asked in more of a sharp gasp than actual speech.
She looked around the RV for him, looking past the crushed crates of fresh fruit and the dented, rumpled texture of the hollow floor. She felt fuzzy, as if she was hovering over the vehicle, the interior a mangled mess of vaguely recognizable furniture and trash. Every blob and shape in the darkness seemed to shift into new forms as her eyes glazed across the almost black canvas of the RV.
Something felt different.
It was only when she rolled onto the ceiling light, the plastic cracking and the bulbs busting into shards that she, and the entire vehicle had flipped upside down. She muttered some curses under her breath, a usually effortless task that now brought knife-sharp pains to her chest and heavy lungs. The only source of light came from the headlights shining onto the deep gray rock wall in front of the RV. Smoke or steam rolled in front of the yellow beams, dampening the interior in a foggy haze.
Franchesca went to stand when a sudden dull, loose twitch spread across her right kneecap and sent a lightning bolt through her spine. She cried out, arching her chest while the glass from the bulbs burrowed into her leather jacket, just poking at her back. She turned over, knees crunching into the little bits as she flopped onto her bottom. Her bloodied hand crushed a mushy orange and the juice instantly began to frost over.
The RV was basically a small house. Ron had spent the last two years and most of his savings to get the damn thing in perfect shape, scraping by with bi-monthly paychecks from the YMCA slick and selling tin cans found along the streets of Washington D.C. in Trinidad. What a shame. The now-missing kitchen countertop and fancy wine rack was her addition. Now, the roving RV was nothing more than a shredded tin can with the top of the line microwave, DVD player, and other RadioShack nick-nacks smashed to jagged ends and straightened metal springs. Nothing appeared unscathed from her view. The floor, or ceiling, was stained with juices and the growing puddle of some dripping blue liquid rushing from the hilt of the sink faucet above her. There was blood, too. Franchesca’s crunched nose caught the copper-rich whiffs that clung to the frigid air.
She called out for Ron again, her voice raspy and wavering. Through the smoke or steam that poured in the busted windshield, her eyes settled on a shadowy figure hanging upside down a good fifteen feet away.
“Ron…? Are- are you alive?” she asked meekishly, looking at the driver’s seat closely and spotting his dangling hand. She gasped again and started crawling toward him, that awful pain in her knee starting to burn like fire.
She shuffled forward, brushing away chunks of thick glass and tiny metal splinters. Within seconds, she was blasted with vertigo centered at the middle of her forehead. She fell into the crushed air conditioner below her; Franchesca couldn’t even scream this time, the bitter cold sucking away all the air in her lungs. When she breathed in again, she could taste the gasoline vapors and hints of the smashed fruit. She could even smell the heavy, metallic tinge of fresh blood. She dug her hands into the cheap, cardboard-esque ceiling tile and shredded off white fluffs that sunk deep into her fingernails, most of them cracked in some way. She pushed away the splintered wooden crate that was once full of fresh fruit from a vendor’s stand on the Maryland and West Virginia border.
She again pondered her survival upon reaching the driver’s seat, reaching out for Ron’s dangling hand. Her stomach flipped when they touched, his skin colder than the ceiling she crawled across. She felt his hand, noticing that there wasn’t a difference between the coldness of his engagement ring and his finger.
“Ron! Baby!”
There was no answer.
Please no, please no, please don’t be you!
For a brief moment, she found herself in a sloppy tumble headed towards insanity. Perhaps this person wasn’t Ron. Wasn’t there someone else with them? His parents? A college buddy? A hitchhiker, for God’s sake? She felt herself slipping off into a hideaway at the back of her mind, a hole so deep and dark that if she just kept digging—if she just kept her eyes away from his face—maybe Ron wouldn’t die.
But that won’t do… she told herself, narrowing her bloodied brow.
Franchesca found a sudden burst of energy and leapt up to her feet, hooking an arm over the armrest and grabbed him by the shoulder with her other bloody hand. His body was awkwardly slumped inside the so-called safety belt with his right shoulder definitely not where it was supposed to be, lodged up near his chin. A large streak of dried blood covered the right side of his puffy face, the side bathed with yellow light. She stopped shaking him after seeing his head wobble in a much looser fashion, the fear rising. She grabbed the cue ball gear shift above next to the steering wheel and pulled herself to her feet, bits of glass and a few pebbles patting her head.
“Hey! Ron, can you hear me?” she cried out, gingerly placing her hands on his face.
Tears were flowing before she realized. Her hands peeled off the caked blood and stuck to the side of the seat while she tried to determine if his neck had been broken. She shook the thought away, realizing that he needed to be level. With all the blood rushing to his head, he could bleed out.
Shit, she thought.
I don’t even known how long we’ve been here.
She felt along his waist for the seat belt, stretching her arm across his torso. Her cold fingers searched out for the lock button, her face so close to Ron’s chest that she could smell the blood soaked into his flannel. While her other hand was still gripping the gear shift above her, she could feel her jittering muscles and creaking plastic beginning to give out. Only then did she feel the bark scraping her cheek, turning toward the windshield’s space and seeing the large branch extending out into the spider-webbed glass.
She whimpered a plea to the heavens under her pained breath.
Her eyes followed the thick branch from the windshield to Ron’s sunken upper chest—the wooden spear appeared to vanish under his wool flannel shirt. She used her free hand to try and find the other end and tensed as her fingers followed the tout branch until meeting a wrinkled wall of Ron’s loose skin and stiffened yet smashed ribcage. She immediately tried to force it away from him, her arms buckled under the strain of the missile-like branch that needed a power tool to remove, and she relented, not wanting to propel the log straight through him. It was pointless—like trying to lift the RV itself.
“Come on, you… you piece of shit!” she screamed, only succeeding in breaking the windshield further. The candy-soft shards of glass crackled like ice on a frozen lake, shifting the branch in place and smoothing out the impact hole. It wasn’t moving. And neither was Ron.
“Please!” she pleaded, to whatever godly presence possibly rested in the frosty sky and universe above them. Her fingers trembled and began to buckle while her knuckles and wrists popped and cracked under the weight. She continued until her arms and ninth-grade tennis shoulder ached and pulsed fire. She swallowed the tears and gave up, snot and slobber falling from her face, her arm sliding past the branch onto Ron’s waist.
She ignored the acid bonfire in her stomach and was shocked to feel Ron’s obnoxiously large cell phone clipped to his belt at all times. She struggled to remove it from the plastic track and ended up ripping the back of the phone off, the battery plopping to the ground.
“No! No!”
She bent down, the glass stuck inside her jacket finally piercing through. Placing the rest of the RadioShack paperweight of a phone in her jacket pocket, she tried her best to ignore the bee-sting pinpricks and searched for the battery, now shrouded in darkness below her. She traced her uninjured foot across the floor in a blind arc—her boot plowed into more pummeled fruit, some intact Tupperware soup bowls, and Ron’s ashtray.
“Ugh! Come on! Where did you go, you little fucker?” she vented through gritted teeth.
While battery-searching, she heard strange noises that echoed through the shattered windshield from outside. First a single wooden crack, then some creaks and moans that proceeded the POW! of some-thing large slamming into the leaves near the RV. She stopped her search momentarily, her mind instantly projecting the image of a giant black bear seeking some late-night dinner. But she instantly shoved the thought to the back of her aching head—bears were mostly idiots and coward and no bear would be within a mile of the crash. Her foot continued to hover across the ceiling, bumping into anything that wasn’t nailed down. Just when her eyes become full of tears billowing at the surface, her boot scraped against the small rectangle.
She bent down, her face too numb to smile, quickly grasping for the edges of the battery like her hand was a claw machine’s metal prongs. The first two attempts were unsuccessful, her frozen fingertips missing the sides. Finally, she lowered herself to her knees, the right kneecap popping loudly and sending an almost welcome shock of pain to her cold nerves. She pushed the rising grunt down her throat and picked up the battery with two shaking hands and limped back over to Ron. She grabbed the phone from her jacket and placed the battery inside—a nice click letting her know she had done it right. She turned it over, holding the phone’s back with her right palm and waiting for it to come alive.
After an agonizing millisecond, where Franchesca could hear the steady drip of gas or water spilling from the front of the RV, the screen blazed a bright green that made her close her eyes. Waiting for the pixel by pixel animation of the “HELLO” title to fade away, she grabbed Ron’s arm again, being careful not to shake him. She put two fingers near his neck, struggling to locate a heartbeat through the heavy shirt. The collar was soaked with blood and prickly as a cactus with glass and small wood bits.
“Okay, okay. Nine. One. One.” she said to herself, noticing that her shivering had almost stopped completely.
Dan, her foster father in Chicago always warned her about what followed when the shivering stopped and you weren’t close to anything warm. It usually meant you were going into shock. And when she thought about it, while she wasn’t cold, she wasn’t warm either. In fact now, she couldn’t feel a damn thing besides a tingle in the back of her skull. By the time her mind returned to the scene, the phone had already beeped half a dozen times. Franchesca whipped the phone down from her ear and looked at the sickly green shining back at her.
“No service?” she asked in a whisper.
She glanced back at Ron, the faint green light making the blood trail down his face devoid of any color except black. His head was soaked. Or at least, it had been before the cold air dried it out, now patchy and in flakes on the skin. It was only then that she realized her breath was a stream of clouds billowing into the air. But Ron’s was not. There were no clouds at all.
She dropped the phone and placed a shaking hand in an awkward position, fluttering above his nostrils. In her racked and pained brain, she begged and pleaded for God to give her a breath. Anything left put her mind at ease.
She waited…
And waited…
For what felt like hours…
There was nothing…
Hot tears stung her cheeks, her face chapped and welted. Her hand remained at Ron’s bloodied nose until the muscles gave out, her arm falling to her side as she stared at her dead fiancé. It had finally hit her. She could feel it in the air. In her fingertips. Ever since she was a child, she knew when her pets and loved ones had passed. The tips of her fingers would become fuzzy-feeling, as if you could touch the static of some dead TV channel. The sickly feeling that one would normally feel with a stomachache radiated in her palms, triggering the weirdest form of nausea. She wanted to vomit, but felt her stomach lacked the ability to force something up. Her whole body felt bruised from the inside out. Her hand formed into a fist and the fresh scabs covering her knuckles burst open, a stream of blood flowing with every clench.
Her weak fist hit the passenger seat, the leather chilled into a hard surface that might as well have been a brick wall. A flurry of curses had broken out over the next minute, followed by repeated punching of the seat and stomping in a flash of red. The exhausting display of toddler temperamental behavior ended with the sharp pain in her right knee firing up to her spine and sending her to the ground. Her chest hit the overhead light and smashed it, the bulb’s metal frame making a quick clicking sound. Franchesca did a brief push-up to lift herself from the shattered mess, a spark lighting the interior of the overturned RV in a pale yet bright yellow.
With every click of the broken light, as Franchesca rose to her feet, she watched a shadow across the expanse of the RV rise with her. She was startled for a moment, believing it was her reflection until realizing that their bedroom mirror had long been smashed to bits, the bed completely gone in fact.
The shadow was just that, a pure black human shape with an outline that separated it from the rest of the RV. The yellow light fanned out like the spread on a radar dish display, enveloping the room and uncovering the shadow’s basic form before being swallowed by darkness again. There was no face or hair. No clothes even. It was just a body. Standing. No eyes but clearly staring right at Franchesca.
“Hello?” she asked, squinting and leaning her head forward.
She stood up finally, the shadow matching her every move.
“Can you- can you help us? Please?”
The figure leaned its head in, not making a sound. Franchesca backed up, grabbing onto Ron’s seat and gasping. The figure was absolutely silent, yet began to aggressively jolt its head up. The shoulders convulsed, the head shifting in a nodding fashion. When the yellow light returned, Franchesca could see that the shadow had many long fingers, twice as many as her. A bubbling sound escaped from the shadow, the yellow light flashing once again and highlighting a swirling hole of greasy, obsidian black where the mouth should have been. Two more holes appeared near the top of its head and it took a small step forward, leaving no sound.
She screamed what she could, a small squeak followed by a curdled cough. She gripped Ron’s icy hand and retreated behind the seat, the figure taking another step while outstretching a pure black arm. Her knee reminded her of the dull, airy feeling and she collapsed on top of the light, the shadow vanishing into the dark.
“Please!” Franchesca screeched, closing her eyes and trying to scoot away from the clicking light.
In the darkness, she saw twinkling wisps of light that vanished when she tried to focus in. The clicking continued and she could feel the shadow still watching her.
“Chess.”
Her heart skipped. It was Ron. No one else had ever used that nickname.
She opened her eyes, seeing Ron’s lifeless face, only half of a bloodshot eye open.
“Chess.” the male voice said again.
She watched its mouth remain still. Her bottom lip quivered with such force, she didn’t even realize she had bitten straight through it. She turned to the cabin and watched the clicking light reveal the shadow again. The figure’s arm and many fingers were fluttering to the right, where the wooden cracks turned into a hailstorm of falling objects raining down on the ground and the RV.
“Get down!” the voice that sounded like Ron hissed.
Just as she bent her head down, the cabin split in two, metal blasting apart and forcing her to close her eyes. The following second was a tornado of sound and shattered echoes. Before the chaos reached its loudest point, Franchesca felt the world go cold and dark.
CHAPTER two
IN THAT SPACE OF time when someone goes unconscious, what Franchesca referred to as a short nap in the dark, she had often dreamt up wild landscapes full of ever-changing pinwheels twinkling with neon color and warm rays like sunshine hitting her face. This blackout was not her first.
But this was the most intense.
By far.
Almost as soon as the cold black had whisked her away from the RV, she was thrust into a blinding white space that was ever-expanding, a barely present roar that rumbled like thunder pounding in her ears. Well, she would have said ears, but she didn’t have any.
She didn’t have a body at all. She scanned her supposed eyeballs down to where her feet would be, only finding the churning cloud-white void. She tried raising a nonexistent arm to her head, feeling the pull of muscle and fist clench reflex, but any arm would have gone straight through her line of sight. Franchesca couldn’t even speak. Not because it hurt or she no longer had the energy, it was simply because the entire space was thrumming with sounds that vibrated through whatever form she had taken.
am i dead ?
no, i can’t be dead. i’m thinking. i’m aware.
well, i’m a floating pile of nothing but i’m aware.
okay… then… what is this?
no…
no…
no…
the wreck.
Ron.
the shadow.
what the hell was that?
what was in its mouth?
did it even have a mouth?
seriously, what is happening?
The thrums continued, slowly melding into a melody of sorts, not resembling any kind of music she had heard; it was guttural, peaceful, and chaotic. Somehow all at the same time. The closest she could compare it to was the sound of her grandmother strumming chords before beginning a lullaby when she was a toddler. The image was smeared with glassy coating, Franchesca feeling the memory already slipping as fast as it appeared.
She felt sick to her stomach, having that childish feeling of looking at something you weren’t supposed to. She couldn’t see her face, only those opening chords of Five Little Monkeys.
coma?
it’s possible, I guess…
Ron. Ron.
dead.
gone.
Despite not having a body, Franchesca felt a jolt near her heart. Such much of a jolt that she screamed out. Suddenly, she forgot about the eerie space of nothingness around her and felt it deep within herself. It was as if her chest had caved in and a dark shape reached inside, squeezing her heart before ripping it from the stringy bits it had latched onto.
She saw Ron’s face, once again like a quickly fading dream, his eyes no different than the eyes of a doll. She screamed out, the chords growing in volume and turning the thunder into a screeching, piercing metallic explosion that didn’t stop. She could hear hissing around her along with quick snaps near her line of sight. She turned around, the sounds close to deafening.
And there it was.
The milky void had quickly twisted upon itself like a paper folded over, exposing a blinding kaleidoscope of every color Franchesca could imagine. Deeply bright neon blues, sun-shining yellows, and shifting green specks spun around each other without mixing, sliding through another like a syrupy liquid, although Franchesca couldn’t see the colors bleeding out to her location.
Stretched out into a foggy expanse were hundreds, if not thousands, of long spires that moved akin to a snake slithering its way through thick brush. The spires were textured like concrete, speckles of imperfections all over and the pockmarks emanating blue mists that shot up and evaporated into plumes like an old-fashioned steam engine. And out from the moving spires were wispy tendrils like ripped linen blowing in some unfelt breeze. They were as if a spider web had been carefully picked them apart, each silky line pulled out from its initial shape. And out from those tendrils were twinkling yellow or blue starlights, pulsing in rhythm with the chords of the space.
The scale was unreal. Franchesca couldn’t tell if they were a hundred feet thick or a hundred miles. There seemed to be no end as she turned around, the white expanse gone. An overwhelming warmth hit her face and when she reached out to feel it, she had an arm again. And legs. And a face.
She felt herself slip a smile through.
It was strange.
No pain. No bloody gashes no aches, not even a crust of gore. She was naked, in fact. Free of all the grisly wounds, but free of everything except herself.
oh shit.
i AM dead.
is this heaven?
doesn’t feel like hell.
what do you know about hell, Chess?
hallucination?
i mean, maybe.
because this is insane.
is this…?
is this IT?
At that moment, she knew what this was. It was an instinctual thought. This wasn’t Heaven or Hell. It radiated with an absence. It was in between that of existing and… not.
It felt so alive and chaotic until she looked off into the misty yet sharp vistas of mountainous objects and fractal shapes she couldn’t discern.
This was not a place she was meant to be.
Because…
I’m
not
dead…
TO BE CONTINUED . . .