My grandpa, Harry Morris, started saying more weird stuff than usual after my mother and her favorite sister, Aunt Rebecca, his favorite daughters, died. My grandpa had started to become increasingly senile at times a few years ago and decided to go to a special home before things got to a point where he wouldn't be able to take care of himself, but it accelerated, and fast. My mom and Aunt Rebecca had passed away from their injuries after getting hit by a driver while walking across a street. No one ever saw the driver.
At first I dismissed it as part of sun-downing, a common feature of Alzheimer's disease where the person becomes less stable at night time. He was perfectly normal most of the day. But unlike normal Alzheimer's episodes, they were rare, brief, and strange. One night, we were at a family dinner at the Stationhouse, a steakhouse in Palm Beach, Florida made from the first railway station in the area. It's pretty good, especially for my relatives who are too white to enjoy the explosions of flavor in Caribbean cooking. Ostensibly it was to grieve, but in reality, it was common to meet together socially after any potentially legally difficult situation, and settling two inheritances certainly counted.
We had rented the entire restaurant for the evening, despite the fact that we could have been humbler with a quarter of the space, or more opulent with a more expensive restaurant, considering the amount of money Ted had alone. Uncle Ted loved to remind everyone that we're true Palm Beachers though, some of the last of our breed and rightfully prosperous because of our connection and heritage with the land. The wood frame building with its antique decor and unexciting menu was just perfect for him.
"Good evening, everyone. Before anyone orders, it's all on me, so go crazy. We have the appetizers coming out in just a moment. Now, if everyone will please pay attention to me, there are a couple of important dates I would like to mention prior to the reunion..."
"No! It was an accident!" My grandfather suddenly shouted from right the actual fuck next to me. The entire room turned to stare and one waiter couldn't hold back a smug grin. There had been a few episodes since my mom and aunt died where Grandpa had done this, and I suppose it wasn't a huge surprise to Ted, who had planned the event.
My family made me sit with him because I'm a junkie and they probably hoped that if one of us had a problem the other would handle it. My grandpa, Joe had just started to lose his memory. I waved to my Uncle Ted, and I was as grateful to get away from another one of his pompous speeches as I ushered my frail, birdlike Grandpa out of the nice building while he repeated himself angrily. Ted made sure to give me an approving smile from his podium before I left. An equally ancient old woman brushed by us on her way to the bar when the normally passive old man grabbed my shoulder and began speaking desperately.
"It was an accident! Just an accident. No one should have to pay so much for an accident."
He said it with incredible conviction. He was shaking and looked incredibly upset. He searched the room, as if looking for something. My uncle Ted raised an eyebrow to me. Gramps began to point to a spot outside on the tracks while almost shouting.
Grandpa, once known as Harry Guilford Morris, wept as we walked to the train tracks. I rubbed his back as he made his way to a point just in front of the crossing.
"Grampa, do you wanna talk about it?"
"Goddamnit! No!" He reached out as if to grab something and swiped at the air.
I gave up and just helped him walk instead.
Fuck it, I said, sometimes I wanna do shit no one else in the family likes too, and in the end we're both probably going to shit our pants. Why should I judge him? It wasn't like I wanted to go back to the dinner anyways. He kept saying "No", and random outrages until we got to the tracks. Suddenly he turned and grabbed me.
"We have to help them!" He shouted in my face. Except it wasn't the him I was used to anymore. It was a young man, who looked kind of like my dad. I didn't really have time to think about it, there were two girls screaming on the train tracks and a train was rocketing towards them.
"Come on! Grab 'em!" He turned and ran towards two girls laying near the tracks. I could barely hear them over the oncoming train at that point, but one of them was screaming. As I ran towards them it became clear that one of them, a cute brunette, had her long hair tangled on a piece of metal on the tracks.
"I"m sorry!" Screamed the blonde trying to pull helplessly at the other's hair. They both had bruises and it looked like they had been fighting. I remembered that I had a mall ninja knife and finally had a good use for it. Harry Morris, formerly known as Grandpa, reached the girl and kept her hair taught as I used the massive Matrix-esque knife to cut her loose. We all shot back from the tracks just in time, the girls just barely rolling away.
As the train wooshed by we all took a deep breath. Only then did I realize that the train was a beautiful streamliner, and although it looked pitted and rusted it was still way too fresh for a style from the 1920s. As if my younger, suddenly ripped grandpa weren't proof enough, everything was different. The neighborhood looked rural, not the middle of an endless suburb. The girls, in their late teens or early twenties, had wrecked beehive hairdoos and were dressed in shockingly conservative dresses for a day that was as hot as balls. My head began to reel, it felt like I was about to start tripping, but the trip never came.
The girls looked at each other nervously, then stared at me as if I had grown a fifth head as the train continued to roar by. It occurred to me that if this was actually happening, the whacky dagger and slightly multicolored hair may have been a bit alienating. I was suddenly glad that I had made the effort to dress as a normal human being and not wear anything that would immediately reveal me to be a junkie. Still, the slightly multicolored hair that looked fine in a nice restaurant in modern times probably made me look like a weirdo. After the train finished, the brunette coughed and extended her hand to be assisted by my grandpa while the other, very reluctantly raised hers for the same to me and then shot up in a hurry. The girls kept their eyes nervously glued to me while speaking to my Grandpa.
"Thanks...thank you so much!"
"We were fighting and we fell...I didn't mean to!" The pretty blonde shot out in her defense."
"It's alright, let's just get a soda..." Said the other, eyeing me nervously and getting up quickly without turning her back to me. "Well, thank you...both...so very much."
"We gotta go!" Popped the blonde before the both dusted themselves off and got away from my creepy ass. The only other person around was an old woman, staggering towards us with her mouth open in shock. The ginger badass that would eventually become my grandpa clapped me on the back.
"We oughta go too, you know." His "Florida cracker" accent was even more distinct than I had ever heard it in his old age. It sounded like "Weeyawdagodo, yanno".
He had a smug smirk on his face as he gently grabbed my arm and walked away from the tracks. As we walked towards the spot where we had traveled from, I noticed something off behind the station house, which now had a man in a drab blue uniform outside. Behind him it looked like a tall man dressed entirely in black was walking towards us. His walk was funny, almost limp, but quick. Diseases back then must have been fucking terrible.
"What is that?"
I pointed at the thing, which seemed to be relatively far in the distance, but he simply gave me a quizzical expression, shrugged and kept walking.
"Some tall nig...uhm...ahhh...black person, I suppose?"
As we got closer it was plain to see that it was too tall to be a man, but not by much. It was clearly moving, and seemed to be largely, if not entirely, in black.
"Whaddya think?"
"Well I don't remember him at all..."
He shot me a confused expression.
"Well, strange, that much is certain. Alright, well, let's get back." His pronunciation of the word 'certain' was the same as the word 'sudden'.
He grabbed my hand and stepped forward. Somewhere in the blink of an eye, the scene changed again. I don't know how to describe it except to say that it was like one world faded and became translucent while the other gained strength. The modern world felt a little funny, almost wrong, for a while afterwards. The smell of rot somehow filled the air, and nothing felt quite right at all. It was night, modern cars were driving by. I could still feel the sweat on my brow and the strain of my muscles, I had to repeatedly tell myself that the experience with the two girls was actually real.
The hand on my arm went from one that was reassuring to one that needed help. My grandpa stumbled, not from losing his step but from the incredible myriad pains that struck him regularly from inside. He had a lot of gastrointestinal problems years ago, and the solutions weren't perfect.
"Grandpa, I hope you're feeling alright? “
He looked over at me with the same smug expression he had a moment ago.
"I’m fine, fine. Not quite sure what that was though! Saw one earlier, but wasn't sure what to do with it. Seems like this made quite an impact though. I still faintly remember not having a knife on me and watching that poor girl scream, covered in blood, but the memory is different now. The old memory is like something I watched on TV. I remember saving their lives as clear as day, and I remember you being there to help. Not sure it was a bad thing, whatever it was. Reckon we might not wanna tell anyone about it though. I doubt that would get a good reaction."
He patted me on the back. I remembered that I was a junkie and he a baffled senior. We started walking back to the restaurant.
"Can you Let me know if you see another one?" I asked. His smile dropped.
"Little hard to predict, I didn't even know it was real, but if I can I'll let you know. Can't wait to do that again!"
That wasn't good. If he wandered off on his own, he might get into trouble when he came back. There was a lot to be worried about here and I had to seriously consider something at this point.
"How about that thing past the station house? What was that?"
He gave me a deeply troubled, baffled look.
"That tall fella?"
"That thing, it was past the station house, was it a person in costume or something?"
"Well, I still don't recall that fella at all, frankly. I remember seeing him with you, but I don't think I saw whoever it was later.
I knew damn well it wasn't a person, and the sheer amount of weird shit we were fucking with was beginning to worry me. But he was still staring at me, confused and frightened, and I realized that his mental state was returning to what it was normally. I patted him on the back.
"It was exciting, and that girl probably ended up living a full and rich life. You should be proud of yourself, that was not a bad thing just because we can't explain it. But, we should get back."
He smiled and nodded and we reached the restaurant. As we sat down again my uncle nodded approvingly and we got straight to eating. We had apparently missed any point at which I could have interjected anything anyways. My uncle looked deeply pleased as gramps and I sat at the table at our original spots. After a brief meal and some dessert (all of which, it was implied, I should be massively grateful for), I was unceremoniously asked if I could take gramps home.
He smiled absentmindedly as we walked to my badly pitted 91 Cadillac Fleetwood, which was once his car, and I drove him back to the shitty nursing home center my family had ditched him in. I spent a lot of the time thinking about how this might fuck with some laws of physics or something. No one was at the gate or the front desk when we arrived, which wasn't unusual, according to him. A confused old woman was hobbling about in the lobby in the dark, neither avoiding us nor seeking us out. It hurt my soul to see that.
When we got to his room, he had tears in his eyes. I wanted to ask him more about what had happened, but I knew he wasn't going to be able to handle the conversation.
"Thanks for helping me tonight. That was a terrible memory. Terrible. I was hoping, if you weren't too busy, maybe you could help me out with something else? Not another little adventure, I was just hoping someone could help me with some things in the apartment they gave me." His eyes had a glazed, but hopeful look to them.
"Of course, grampa, of course. I'll see you tomorrow. I'll be by at around 11 or so." I said before hugging him. "I love you, have some sweet dreams."
He smiled with tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.
"You too."
I went back to my shitty apartment and spent a few hours pointlessly trying to search Google for references to stories involving alzheimers and time travel, but no luck. Not sure what I expected.
The next day I helped him put up a painting, but I mainly just kept him company. I showed him how to use his cellphone and he sent me his first text message. We would text every now and then over the next few days. I also used him as an excuse to get out of a family meeting, which was convenient. I tried not to think about the adventure, knowing I wasn't going to find answers. One morning when I woke up with the horrible and inexplicable impression that I had seen that tall creep again, and the smell of rot filled my room.
About a week after our adventure he sent me a text saying "S.O.S.". I called him and we arranged for me to pick him up the next day.
The next day I woke up feeling great. I began to tear my place apart, hoping to find things that might be useful during a time travel expedition. I tried to imagine what threats might exist in the past, but couldn't really think of anything. I decided on bringing a can of body spray and a lighter, a classic for otherwise unarmed junkies, before setting out to get a Publix sub for my grandpa and some Tassot de Kabrit and diri ak djon djon (Haitian style marinated and fried Goat and black mushroom rice), with a massive side of red hot pikliz. I bought a new conservative looking shirt that I thought might look alright in the past. By then it was almost 10:30 and time to go see Grandpa again.
The nursing home wasn't much better in the daylight, and a single exhausted looking but beautiful Hispanic girl manned the front desk.
"Hi, visiting?" She asked with a thick Cuban accent.
"Yes, I'm taking my grandpa for a day trip." She nodded, disinterested, and gave me a single page that had some information and required a signature. After I signed it she placed it in a yellow organizing bin, entirely alone, and went back to watching Madelaine Petsch threaten someone on her tablet. As I walked down the hall, doors opened every now and then for elderly to check and see who it was. I couldn't bear the disappointed looks they had when they saw it wasn't one of their loved ones.
When I got to his room, he was dressed as if he were getting ready for church. He hobbled over to me to give me a big hug and a pat on the back.
"So, this thing, huh?" He asked me with a mischievous grin.
"Has this ever happened before? Or anything like it?" He shrugged happily.
"Yeah, once at the park, but I avoided it at the time. I hadn’t actually used one until that night, I wasn’t feeling quite right in addition to the events. that I'm aware of, although it's possible I may have slipped to some other time while getting wasted once in a while. The 70s were a hell of a decade." We both chuckled at that.
"I saw something that reminded me of a spot that might work. If it does, then there is a way to stop something else. Do you know the Hotel Biba?"
I nodded. It's a famous hotel in Palm Beach that was built in the 1920s and somehow continued to house the richesque and swanky.
"Well, maybe we won't actually have to go inside, but I'd like to see something, if that's possible."
"Alrighty, well let's see what happens." I smiled and stood up. I somehow still doubted the entire thing and was expecting to show up to see nothing more than a confused concierge. Or maybe I was just using whatever was left of doubt to avoid mind numbing terror. We ate the lunch I had brought, with grandpa even sampling my kabrit and seemingly enjoying it before ripping into his Boar's Head Italian again. As we left, we saw a despondent looking fat man waited at the end of his hall in a terrycloth robe.
"That's Jerry, he lost his mind years ago."
I nodded to gramps, but offered him my leftovers anyways, which he happily took and ate with gusto, except the pikliz, which was too spicy and strange tasting.
As we fired down I-95 in the Cadillac, I had to remind myself that the time and place we had arrived to outside of the steakhouse was as real as anything else I had experienced. This thought slowly began to cultivate weight until it had formed a lead pit in my stomach. I had to wonder why there wasn’t some kind of rift in the fabric of space time or whatever. If we had already changed history, why hadn’t something in time gotten obliterated?
The area around the Hotel Biba is a mix of extreme poverty and extreme wealth that might seem odd outside of Florida. It's distinctive mix of Moorish and Art Deco architecture, pervasive in both the hilariously rich and hilariously poor parts of the neighborhood, still manages to keep an air of both grandeur and subtle charm, like a billionaire who genuinely prefers jeans and a t-shirt. I pulled into the tropically painted strip mall across the street and got out to help my gramps over. The area surrounding it was crammed with buildings and businesses and was bustling during the middle of the day.
"That's it. Right over there." He had a grim tone as he pointed to a spot across from the hotel under a tree, where a classic Volvo P1800 was parked. It stood out, being powerfully vivid in comparison to the rest of the world. The sight of it was stunning.
"It looks like we may be in luck..." He said hopefully, hobbling towards the spot a little faster. It was a moment or two before I realized that I was seeing it too, and that the Volvo was most certainly not from our time at all. There was something about it that stood out, making it more vivid than everything else around it, almost as if I expected the paint to start moving.
"Right here, I remember you, I remember you..." Gramps began mumbling as he reached out for the door. As I stepped forward with him to make sure he didn't lose his balance I realized that the light in the world had somehow left, suddenly and quietly, in a way that a I barely noticed. Everything, even the air, was more vivid, richer than it had been a moment ago.
Before I was able to take another step, I realized that the world was now dark and cool because it was night time, and the street was lined with so many palm trees where buildings had been that it looked like a forest. The hotel, which in the modern world is still visited by the relatively wealthy and those hoping to join them, had a classy jetsetters jazz beat.
And in the old world, Harry Morris knew how to haul ass. My reverie was broken by a flash of red hair as the man who would become my grandpa shot past me. I heard a woman scream in the direction he was running. I turned and saw a man, so drunk he was barely able to stand, towering over a beautiful woman with red hair and a black and white checkered dress who had a bloodied nose.
“Will? Will Blatty? Hey, what are you doing, you piece of shit?”
The man spun around with an embarrassed and angry look on his face. In comparison to the ginger hulk rapidly gaining on him he didn’t seem so tough. He couldn’t have been more than 5’6 and looked like he had more gin blossoms than pushups in the past few years.
"Fuck you, Harry, you stayaoudda" was about as much as the drunk man could get out before my grandpa slammed into his torso, knocking him to the ground as the woman got up and ran like hell to her Volvo. I watched her get in, start it up and leave as my Grandpa straddled the man and began beating the stupid out of him, pounding him in the skull with the same movement over and over and over, as if it was no different than putting nails in wood.
"You worthless muthafucka!" Harry Morris screamed at the top of his lungs as he pounded the limp piece of flesh that had once been a human being. I ran over to grab him, not wanting him to exchange one mistake for another.
"Dude! Fucking dude! Grandpa! Come on!" I shouted as I tried to pull, but he managed to get a few more shots in. I had never imagined my grandpa as an angry person, growing up there simply wasn’t any way to picture such a thing. A man who was dressed as like a bellhop in turquoise and purple, ran over to help the man who had the tar beaten out of him.
"Will? Will Blatty? Oh for fuck's sake, what happened?" The man asked, in an accent that sounded like an old timey radio announcer trying to do a Spanish impersonation. Will Blatty was a big name in Palm Beach, several schools had buildings named after him and the mayor had made a big deal at his funeral.
"I told her it would be good for her career if she went home with him. He was going to hurt her. Bad. She never would have healed right."
"So you decide that he gets the same?" The Spanish man asked, pointing to Bill's jaw, which was hanging slightly wrong. Bill's eyes were open but it was obvious he was unconscious. A dark pool was growing below his head.
"I went too far. I know that. But you have to trust me, this man needed it. He absolutely did. That would have been horrible for that woman" He wiped the blood off of his fist as the Hispanic man stood up to face him, frowning, but seemingly nodding in agreement.
"I...I had a bad feeling about him tonight. He drank too much every time, but tonight...ok, cops get here soon, we say it went to blows but it was him that started...he doesn’t remember anyways, I think."
Something about the man was deeply familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it. "Maybe you guys wait here for them, so it doesn't look too funny."
My grandpa gave me a concerned look, but I shrugged. I doubted that they had the ability to check and see if my social was fake and didn't want to get "hauled in". I took seats on the ground. I tried to focus on the area around me instead of worrying. In my time it was at the dead center of the city, but I saw only palm filled wilderness in the distance where slums would stretch in forty years. My grandpa sat next to me, smiling just slightly.
I noticed movement coming towards us from a mile or two away. But it wasn't the cops. At first, I only noticed the distortion in the dark, a silhouette moving gracefully, like a ribbon being blown in the wind it raced between the palms and skirted up the sidewalk.
"Um, are you seeing that?" I nudged the red-haired beast in the ribs. He looked over in that direction, but the thing was gone. He turned to me with a puzzled look right as a patrol car pulled up from the other direction. The officer stepped out of the car and walked up to Bill, who was regaining consciousness, but only enough to moan.
"Oh this, this is going to be interesting. “The square jawed man said. My grandpa nodded sternly to the officer who shrugged at him with a smile. "Alrighty, you're gonna need to get up Bill. If you need to go to the hospital, that's fine, but I gotta say, no one is gonna act surprised that someone finally did it to you." Relief spread through me rapidly. I had forgotten how casual "a little beating" could be taken in these days.
As he turned to come speak to my grandpa, I saw it again, snaking out from between two trees and gliding effortlessly down the sidewalk. Except this time, it was much clearer, it was like a person, but liquid in places. I saw its legs slosh forward step by step, as the area that would have been a torso twisted impossibly to face us. My grandpa's jaw dropped like a rock in water. I couldn't see the area that would have corresponded to its face, it was moving around too rapidly. It was about half a mile away and if it weren't for the consistent way that it gained on our location, I would have thought that it was just flitting about.
"So, uhh, what do we do from here?" My grandpa asked, now suddenly slightly nervous.
"Ah, you know. Probably gonna want to take down some statements. The Blatty family always had more lawyers than virtues. " My grandpa nodded, but didn't take his eyes of the thing that was making its way towards us.
"Don't worry, I'm not about to have a second go at the man." My grandpa nodded to the two men, including the helpful Spanish man, who seemed to be patiently waiting on the officer to speak to them about what he saw, while the liquid thing in the distance began to move its legs more quickly. He gave me a nervous look and pointed behind me discretely, where a beaten to hell Jeep that happened to have a Salt Life sticker and whacky rims that probably would have garnered a hate crime in Gramps day was sitting, looking slightly less than real.
The thing picked up speed, and as a wind blew past it, I could smell the sickly-sweet smell of carrion. As the thing ran under a streetlight it became clear why: the person running towards us looked as if he had been in more than one car accident. Whoever it was utterly pulverized. The blood and gore seemed to assemble itself to a degree to compose half of a black, shattered face. I couldn't get a better look before attempting to run. As the officer went over to talk to the men, my grandpa nodded to me and made a break for it, running to the jeep like a madman. In the second it took me to join him, one of the men pointed out our escape to the officer who then began shouting for us to stop. The thing fired past him running towards us, but he didn't seem to notice.
"Come on!" Her shouted to me. As my run turned into a mad sprint, I saw the horror in my grandpa's eyes and felt something snag the cloth on the back of my flannel shirt and knew the fucking thing was right behind me. As I reached him, he shot one hand out to me while keeping the other on the hood of the jeep.
I reached and grabbed it right as something ice cold slashed through my clothes and cut the skin of my back. My legs gave out and I felt the concrete slam into my face, but it was a relief. The concrete was burning hot and the world was overwhelmingly bright. When I got up there was nothing there. Nothing that we could see at least. I couldn't bring myself to turn my back on the area though, I knew it was still there. Staring at us. I could just feel it.
"Holy shit" my grandpa said before doubling over. "Holy shit" He repeated softly as he threw up. "What was that fucking thing?" He managed to gasp before sitting on the ground. A young black guy with a tank top and huge muscles came running up to us.
"Is he alright?" The young man asked. His voice sounded like a funny recording for a second. Everything still felt a bit off.
"Yeah" My grandpa answered. The young man smiled a brilliant smile at us before offering Grandpa a bottle of ice-cold water from his jeep, which my grandpa happily accepted. But still, nothing felt right. Every time the wind blew, I got a whiff of that decay. After a few moments he got back up and managed to get to my car, waving gratefully to the young man as he went back to what was clearly a date with a tall statuesque redhead. I took a deep breath.
"What the fuck was that thing?" I asked him in as calm a tone as I possibly could.
"I...I don't know. I certainly don't remember it. Not at all. Ever." My mind tried to summarize the thing over and over, not being fully capable of digesting what I had just seen. I could tell his mind was doing the same.
"Do you think that thing is still here? I mean, maybe not how we can see it, but still here?" I asked him, but I knew the answer. He looked at me with pure fear in his eyes.
"What about Mr. Blatty?" I asked, but I already knew the answer. He had faded utterly from my memory. I only weakly recalled the drunken incident at my birthday as a kid. Instead, I remembered Ignacio Gonzalez, the Spanish guy who would eventually become my grandpa's business partner. I remember him from every single one of my birthdays, and I remember my first kiss with his niece Jessica. God, she was pretty. I don't recall doing some of stupid shit I had the impression I had done previously. Maybe having different friends helped me reign it in a bit. Still, plenty of stupid shit though.
I started up the car and we drove back to the retirement home. I was hoping to go out to dinner or something but he shook his head when I suggested hitting up Howley's, his favorite spot, but he told me he was still full from the sub.
"Well, can you think of a reason to do that again?" I asked as we got out at the retirement home.
"God no. We shouldn't mess around with that fucking thing. I don't know what the hell it could have been. I just don't know." He shook his head, distressed. I nodded and walked him to his home. There was no one at the front desk this time, but Jerry was at the end of the hallway again, weeping powerfully. Grandpa stared at the floor and seemed to refuse to make eye contact with the man as he reached his room.
"Alright, so you're not going to do that again, but if anything happens, or if you see that fucking thing out here in this time, you have to call me as quickly as you can." He shot me a look of ample confusion and I remembered that he couldn't use a cellphone anymore because of his arthritis and eye sight. I left my tablet with him after hooking it to his retirement home's wifi and showed him how to use Google Voice with it, giving my cellphone a couple of quick calls. Then I showed him how to use Netflix.
"Maybe I'll watch a movie with that Brie Larson, she's a real looker!" He exclaimed happily.
"I'm sure they probably have a few with her, she's really popular." We hugged for a long time, until he began to weep.
"That man, that horrible fucking man. I can’t believe myself. I told that woman it would be good for her career if she went home with him. I lived a long time with that. Bill made sure I was comfortable, but I was never really comfortable with it. But part of me still remembers what he did to that woman, or what he would have done. She barely lived."
"It didn't happen this time. Thanks to you. She's probably fine."
He smiled and nodded.
"She is! We even went on a few dates before I met your nana! I even remember that officer, asking me why I ran away, but I only went six feet. Funny enough, I didn't seem to recall why I had done that back then, beating Mr. Batty or running to that lightpost where we saw the Jeep instead." He shook his head in amazement. "I sure wish that one asshole would leave us alone, would be awful nice to explore, maybe learn about. Seems likely why we never heard about this before with anyone else though, I'll bet he's Johnny on the spot for some people."
That thought bothered me. What if, so far, we had only gotten lucky? We didn’t have any idea why it was after us so it was hard to tell what it would do. We also didn’t know if it had any way of reaching us in our time. Also, why did our time seem so off? I knew it wasn't near us at the moment, but I could still feel the thing, somewhere. It was a nagging sensation in the back of my mind. I went home and smoked myself retarded.
The next couple of days ambled about with little occurring. It bothered me how pale and weak this time still felt. I talked to gramps a couple of times and told him how to recharge the tablet. Things seemed to be doing well and life meandered something close to normal again. Eventually I got a call from Todd DeMott, our slimy as hell executor for my mom and Aunt Rebecca’s will. Apparently, he needed to speak with me in person. I drove down to his beautiful office overlooking the water, where he kept me waiting for almost an hour. Eventually I was ushered into his office where the fat red headed man happily told me that the family had agreed to place me under a form of conservationship and that any money I received would likely be for treatment programs, metered out of course by my uncle Ted, who was sadly unable to attend the meeting.
He made every attempt to persuade me that it was entirely my money and always would be, but that this was just to make sure that my I didn’t have a borderline episode and lose my shit at some point. He pointed out that it could be invested at no cost to me, but I knew the reality. I was always going to be in conservationship.
I stared at the overpaid piece of shit for at least a minute or two before walking out without a word. I just stared. The rest of the afternoon was mush. I told my grandpa, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had been placed under similar measures a long time ago. Without any relatives to back me up, I was utterly fucked. Any of the money that was supposed to go to me, including from my Grandpa, was going to be diverted to my asshole cousins. I couldn't afford an attorney. The piece of paper was signed by every sane adult member of my family. There were multiple hard realities facing me at that moment. That my family barely considered me a person, that I was going to have my inheritance taken from me, that I was going to die destitute while some little schmuck used the money that was supposed to go to me for the latest bland Lexus.
I refused to sign anything, not that it mattered, something that Todd was happy to remind me in some professional jargon. As I walked out in a huff to avoid saying or doing anything that would validate their description of me as insane, I went down a list of people that might be able to help me. I understood now why those rat bastards had kept such a close eye on my psychiatrist and therapists’ visits. Their signatures where at the bottom of the page that indicated they thought it was a potential risk, but not the ones stating it was an imminent one. Just enough to justify it.
The only person I could talk to about it was my grandpa. The only thing he could do was angrily stamp his feet in the tiny room they had confined him in. He swore, he turned red in the face, he felt all the anger I was too tired to feel myself. But it was clear from the very room we were standing in that there was nothing that he could do about this. He had suffered the same fate years ago at the hands of his own son. Suddenly the memory of the family meetings, of my own mother wringing her hands over what she had been told was a "cruel necessity".
"You have to go." My grandpa put his hand on my shoulder. "We both do now. You know that. If you don't give him that, he will come after you. At least get what you can out of the situation and please, do it gently. I know, with your mother gone, there isn't much reason for you to be polite. But for my sake, please. Don't make this difficult on everyone. We both have to face this. It won’t be easy."
"OK" Was what came out of my mouth, but my brain couldn't really digest it. Those may have been the most difficult two syllables of my entire life. The emotional commitment of seeing these people and pretending to not want to murder them was purely staggering. But I pushed through it, nodded and went back to the details of the party.
"It's going to be at the Bryant Park, right near the Gulfstream Hotel, and there will be an open bar." Bryant Park was a beautiful lagoon side park surrounded by old art deco and unique Floridian Flagler architecture homes. He only gawked at me in response.
The Gulfstream Hotel was picked especially for him, or at least to make it appear as if Ted gave a shit about him. I knew it had been his favorite drinking hole decades ago and that it might be a genuinely good time for him, so I just couldn't let my mind drift to the idea of bringing a gun instead of some weed. The Gulfstream was one of the first hotels in the area and had recently been renovated into a hilariously expensive condo. We sat in silence for a pretty long time. He seemed even more horrified than I did.
We agreed to go see a movie or something, which I began to genuinely look forward to. Maybe we would see another time portal and I could go back and kill my uncle before he grew into a greedy piece of shit. The fantasy of picking an infant Ted up and throwing him at a wall, or drowning a 11-year-old Ted by pushing him face first into a toilet had become regular fantasies that I did not tell my mental health practitioners about.
The unofficial annual pseudo-reunion was planned to be right around the corner, though. Another meeting for Ted to use to ensure that he still had control over the family. Enough time for me to digest my helplessness and choose a path of behavior that would suit him. He wanted me to show up, smile and accept my fate, so that he would sleep at night without worrying about some pesky lawsuit or family struggle. He had sent me several texts, all of them unanswered, hinting at a much better "arrangement" as long as I "did well".
Worse yet, the smell of rot had become a frequent issue, and more than once I could have sworn I had seen some kind of strange disturbance moving towards me.
Story Continued in Comments.
Submitted August 25, 2019 at 10:52PM by IEscapedFromALab https://ift.tt/2ZnspTu
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