Table of Contents
JDatE
JDatE Forums
|
It's my own fault, everything that happened later. My first mistake was I didn't tell anybody about what I saw that morning, not at first. And by "anybody" I mean my one friend, John, and my girlfriend Amy. Amy would just get worried, I figured, and she had enough on her mind with college and all. John, he would go online and tell all his internet friends about it. David saw a ghost again! WoooooooOOO! I hate that shit. I hate talking about it, any of it. The type of people who want to listen aren't worth telling the story to. Not you, of course, but the nutjobs, the ones who are just so ready to believe. How do they know I'm not crazy? It pisses me off. The only ones worse are the people who do think I'm crazy. Arrogant bastards, they piss me off even more. Get me talking about this and I wind up pissing in every direction. Set me in the yard and use me as a lawn sprinkler. So I took what I saw that morning and stuffed it into the glove compartment of my mind, along with all of the unpaid parking tickets and most of my memories of high school. Still, it made for long nights in that empty little house, laying in bed and staring into the shadows. Like a little kid, studying the closet for monsters. You shouldn't still be doing that shit at age 25. You shouldn't still be working at a video store at that age, either, I guess, or signing petitions with the name Thong Bonerstorm. Anyway, my point is that by the time the Shadow People entered my life again a few weeks later, I had almost forgotten about the incident. Almost. What happened was I was visiting Amy, who - as I think I mentioned - was away at college. The school is a little more than two hours from here. (You'll notice, by the way, that I'm intentionally leaving out any city names along with any other clues that would help you pinpoint where all this happened. The last time we went public with this stuff, kids started showing up here, driving past the house and snapping pictures with little digital cameras to post on their blogs and leaving empty beer cans on my lawn. Needless to say, the names aren't real, either.) Where was I? Oh yeah, I was visiting Amy and we had to go to their on-campus clinic late at night because she threw out her back after she "accidentally" had a "fall" from the "top bunk of her bed" while we were "porking." It's an amusing story that she has asked me not to tell. Anyway, I was in their waiting room and flipping through some kind of newsletter for their medical school. Like a slap in the face I see: Experiment Glimpses the 'Shadow Man' Inside There was a black and white photo of two guys who looked like professors and a girl who looked like she was really hot. I skipped to the end of the article and saw an e-mail address for the guy in charge, Dr. Welsh. I dug a scrap of paper from my pocket, a receipt from a trip to the drug store that morning for Cheetos and condoms and two bottles of Mountain Dew Code Red. On the back I jotted down the e-mail address and snapped the magazine closed before Amy could come back and start a conversation about it. That next day I drove back home, rushed in the door and turned on my television to watch Ultimate Fighting. I had completely forgotten about the whole experiment thing. 
A week later, though, I went through those pants as I was about to throw them in the wash and the scrap of paper fell out. I sat down and fired off an e-mail to the guy, told him I saw a shadow person in my bathroom while it was taking a shower and wanted to know if I could get ahold of the guy in the experiment to tell him he wasn't crazy. They weren't keen on that idea, confidentiality I guess. They wanted to talk to me instead. They convinced me to meet with them, partly by offering me money but mostly because I am a retard. They wanted to hook my brain up to the machine with the electrodes, like the guy in the experiment. I agreed, in what has to be one of the all-time most monstrously stupid decisions in human history. I couldn't help it. Somehow the idea of gathering together smart people, in a well-lit lab, talking about all this... I don't know. I don't know what I was expecting. I guess I pictured them making this shadow thing appear and somehow we all see it, not just me, and then this whole thing would become someone else's problem. Also, they promised me money. So I ducked out of town that Saturday and drove back to the college, telling John I was visiting Amy and telling Amy I was visiting John, hoping I didn't somehow run into her on campus. Yes, I was lying to the people closest to me. I did it according to this equation: l = E x ∞ Which can be translated as "One small lie saves an infinite amount of explanation." I use it all the time. I've used it on you already. I had been picturing a big well-lit lab with huge computers lining the walls with those reel-to-reel things on them. It turned out to be a crappy little office on campus with broken air conditioning. I was sweating the whole time (this was in late August). I got there at nine in the morning and they greeted me and shook my hand and thanked me for coming. I filled out a stack of release forms a half inch thick. Then, the questions started. It was excruciating. Hours passed. They asked me question after question after question, about my mom and how she was in and out of institutions, about how I never knew my dad, about whether I had headaches and what kind of food I ate. The main guy was a huge man with a black goatee with silver streaks in it. He was Dr. Welsh, it turned out. There was the Psychologist, Dr. Pratt, who asked me to call him Fred. There was a girl there helping out, Kelly, who I remembered from the photo in the newsletter. She had a tiny ring in her nose and black hair and an adorable, round face. She oozed sweetness and kept giggling and touching my arm when we talked. What a stupid bastard I was, not to see it coming. Questions and questions and questions. All the way through lunch time. They even did the thing with the ink blots, like in the movies, showing me ten pieces of white cardboard with blobs on them, the guy sitting behind me and tapping on his laptop so fast I think he was trying to take down everything I said. All I could hear was that clattering of the keys and it made me a nervous wreck. Was that part of the test? ____________________________ Dr. Fred: Just take your time. You can turn the cards around if it helps you. They kept sending me out to this waiting room while they went and huddled in the office and probably talked about how crazy I was. Then, finally, they took me to a different building near the clinic me and Amy had been to on my last visit. The facility was mostly empty on a Saturday. They took me down a hall, me and the huge Dr. Welsh and Fred the friendly psychologist and Kelly the button-cute assistant in the tight T-shirt. The four of us piled into the little room with the machine and all the wires. Only three of us would come out.  
Pic from Abandoned Photography Page 4 -> Go to Table of Contents |
