Move Right Through
Written by Rebecca Carlyle
Aisha couldn’t remember how she got here. All she knew was the inky night sky, clouds blotting out light from the stars, and the all too present silence. She patted the ground around her with outstretched palms, searching for her glasses on damp dirt stirring a moist, earthen scent that filled her nostrils. The absence of them pressing down her nose was stark and worrisome. Although Aisha wasn’t blind without them, everything would be a little fuzzy around the edges. With eyes squinted she took in her surroundings, still patting the wet soil to no avail. A big sigh slowly pulled itself from her chest once she had successfully felt her within-reach radius and hadn't yet bumped into them. She would need to buy another pair of glasses. Again.
It was too quiet here and that put her on edge. The roadway couldn’t be near since she didn’t hear any vehicles passing by. She also hadn’t felt any grass or gravel when she had been feeling around for her opticals, so Merrim Lake or Twin Pine Park were out. Where else would be this far away from the road?
A sense of dread began to pool deep in her core, spreading quickly through her body, leaving goose-pricked flesh in its wake. She prayed she was wrong. She let the dread drag her from a seated position to standing. With breath coming in unsteady gasps she took a step forward, squinting into the expansive darkness. She was able to pick out lumps sticking up from the ground every couple of feet in every direction. Some seemed to be rounded, some appeared to have sharp edges, and some had statuesque shapes towering above her short stature. Her right hand reached up instinctively to push glasses back up her nose. Aisha muttered to herself to stop being stupid and strained her eyes harder to see more details. There were trees lining the far left and right, but nowhere in between. Bushes and ivy crawled over each slab in the ground and wove themselves along the pathways in between. She knew without a doubt where she was. The old ranching cemetery.
Now for the real question: how did she get here?
A breeze rattled banyan tree limbs and blew her curly hair away from her face. The air was brisk and startlingly cold on her bare arms. As Aisha folded her arms across her chest to keep her torso warm another realization hit her. Her jacket was nowhere to be found, which is where her keys and phone would’ve been. All of her must-have belongings were seemingly missing. Unsure if she was headed in the right direction Aisha took a few steps forward, hoping that the main wrought iron gate was straight ahead. She needed to get home. But mostly she needed to get out of here. Caution and worry and the loss of her glasses made her progress forward painstakingly slow. Aisha’s feet slid ahead, scared to lift them up and trip over something she couldn’t see, like the vines and ivy that grew over everything.
The clouds were shifting noticeably, beams of moonlight shooting through and highlighting tombstones for just a moment before falling dark again. She felt as if she were underwater with the filtered light, the audible silence, and the inability to move quickly. Try as she might, Aisha couldn’t help but step on a few graves. Her stomach flipped over for disrespecting the dead in this way, but she couldn’t see where their edges lay, not with her eyesight in this fuzzy state.
Another breeze swept by, pushing the clouds in front of the moon to the side. Relief flooded through her as light descended on the landscape, but it quickly fled her system and was replaced with fear. Her internal sense of direction had led her in the wrong direction. Directly before her was a mausoleum instead of the gate away from this place. She had been trudging in the wrong direction this entire time. Dismay began to seep its way through her extremities, freezing the blood in her veins. Aisha turned toward where she had been sitting earlier when she came to and squinted to make out the details in the shadows. She couldn’t recall there being a mausoleum in the old ranching cemetery, but then again, she wasn’t 100% certain that's where she was.
A low-hanging mist weaved its way through the tombstones, sending tendrils forward and inching its way closer to her. It rose into the air, swirling in on itself and creating humanlike shapes above each gravesite. They swayed as one, these ethereal beings gliding just above the ground. A glow outlined each figure, pulsing within them as if it were their life source; bum-bum… bum-bum…
She rubbed her eyes—this couldn’t be real. Yet when she opened her eyes again, there they were. Without any facial features, they seemed to track her, pulling her closer without ever reaching out an arm or hand. She took a step back, letting the fear get the better of her. Her breath came in uneasy spurts, bursting from her chest and gulping in the night air by the mouthful.
Then they were upon her. The first hovered in place directly before her for a moment. Aisha could see right through the milky film of it, the translucent form wavering under her gaze. As if of its own accord, her hand reached out to touch it. She wanted to feel its texture, expecting it to be soft like a cloud and barely there at all. That’s all it took for the apparition to move forward and consume her with its entire being. When it collided into her, Aisha was whisked away from her own body, spiraling through the ether to another time and place.
She felt frail and tired. She was in a bed with a patchwork quilt tucked into all her crevices. She raised a hand and noticed it was old, wrinkled with unpainted nails. What the hell was happening? She was alone in the room. It was barely furnished with just a chest of drawers across from the foot of the bed and a rocking chair in the corner. An afghan was tossed haphazardly over the back of the chair, the yellow yarn the only spot of color in the room. Exhaustion coerced a heavy sigh from her lips, her eyelids drooping lazily and coming to rest. The last thing she felt before being ripped back to the present was loneliness.
Aisha coughed into her manicured hands, sputtering for air. She looked around for the thing that had just passed through her, but it was gone, evaporated into the night. A shiver rolled through her entire body in a giant, convulsive wave, leaving her a frigid, hollowed-out shell. The misty forms writhed in place, all but two. One was in front, with another slightly behind it, both moving forward—the first slide its form onto hers—
Aisha hurtled through space again as she was pulled from herself, and tossed into what she thought was another's last moment. This time she wasn’t alone. Instead, she was filled with dread and sorrow. The room was a bright starched white and smelled of disinfectant and death. She was tightly tucked into an old, thin, slightly raised mattress and hooked up to a machine that beeped every few seconds, monitoring her shallow breathing. The bed was surrounded by loved ones, oppressively so. She would not be going peacefully, not with heaving sobs weighing down the air in the room. She felt her esophagus begin to close up and her chest tighten with lungs that refused to fill.
The room with the family dropped away and she was torn through the ether and into another body, but this body wasn’t old and dying. This felt young and vivacious, pulsing with nervous energy. She was cowering in the dark, curled up on the floor; crawling away from a closed door rimmed with light. Her chest rose and fell in quick, panicked spurts, fear coursing through her veins—thudding deep in her bones.
From the other side, footsteps clambered by as terror leaped into her mouth, a strangled sound that couldn’t come out. They passed by and faded away. She released a lung full of air that she had been holding. The door ripped from its hinges and the closet flooded with light. A man's silhouette towered over her, a kitchen knife held at his side, dripping with red. The scream she had been repressing clawed up her throat right as she was torn back into herself once more.
Aisha stood in the graveyard, shaking and wailing. She didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to see how many of these she would have to go through before she’d arrive at the fenceline. There had to be another way out of the graveyard, a way around where she didn’t have to see and feel these people's final moments. She swiveled her head and blurry vision from one side of the yard to the other, squinting to make out the walkways and fence line. If there were any breaks in the fence, they weren’t visible. Unsure of which direction to go, panic settled in. Another misty, featureless figure was almost upon her now. Her feet began to move, scrambling underneath herself before her brain could catch up with them, but she wasn’t quick enough to outmaneuver the ghost.
This one moved through her almost too fast to register. A sense of foreboding flooded her senses, swept her from where she stood, hurtling her up two marble steps and into a wall. Panic and confusion prickled her cold flesh, a shiver rippling up through her spine. Flashes of sharp steel and the steady drip of warm blood hovered in her gaze. A jolt of pain seared into her stomach, ripping another painful shriek from her frame. The back of her skull smacked the wall behind her, and everything vanished; she was herself once more.
With her own senses returned, Aisha scrambled and tried to get away from the shifting films. Instinct told her to go inside the building she found herself outside of. The glass door was tall and heavier than it appeared. Her hands searched for a handle or knob before pushing with her full weight in order to budge the door enough to slip inside and away from the ectoplasmic beings that chased her. She hoped they couldn’t pass through the walls and doors like they pass through her, that she was safe in this building.
Cold oozed from the walls, roiling through the room in the wind, twisting and turning and expelling its musty air on her. She moved to the middle of the room and let her eyes rove about it, exploring all the nooks and crannies. Aisha couldn’t see much of the ceiling or if there were lights anywhere, not with her subpar vision. She reached out a hand and let it drag across the wall, letting it guide her through the room. The wall seemed to have boxes etched in it, her fingers lingering on what she assumed were name plaques. A horrific realization entered her mind: she was in a mausoleum. As if summoned by the idea of them, wisps of white began to seep into the air, escaping through cracks of their forever homes and rising to greet her.
The first of this group made her old and frail; like her bones were about to splinter into a million pieces within her skin. She fell down a flight of stairs, tripping over her nonslip, orthopedic sneaker-clad feet. She felt a rib crack and give way, a knee pop in the wrong direction, a gash on her shoulder, and finally, her head smacking the wooden floor. She lay there, the minutes ticking by and no one coming to help her, her vision coming and going in time with her fading pulse.
She came to on the floor of the mausoleum, relieved that her own strong bones were holding her up, still poised by the door. She tried the handle and pushed, then pulled. It wouldn’t budge, it remained steadfast and immovable. Immobilized by terror, Aisha was locked inside with a room full of spirits. Her chin wobbled with her emotions and she looked up just in time to see two mists coming for her. They both reached her at the same time, fighting for their own stories to be heard.
Her head pounded and she was startled by the sensation of someone’s hands squeezing around her neck —
She was in a luxurious bed with fluffy comforters pulled about her and pillows propped behind her head—
She was trying to fight back, clawing at her attacker’s face—
Beside her on the bedside table was an empty pill bottle and her stomach roiled with putrid heat—
She felt her knees giving way as her strength began to fade, her throat rasping for air, high-pitched ringing deep in the depths of her ears. Her fingernails cut slashes across his face, red filling her vision—
Her heart rate was slowing, she could tell. She was cold, pulling the sheets and blankets tighter about herself. Her mind bounced from one thing to the next, unable to focus itself. Her chest tightened, and she gasped her last breath—
Aisha was sitting on the floor when the two mists left her exhausted body. They had fought hard to show her their individual deaths. With her energy drained from the exertion of being pulled back and forth between the two, she couldn’t move. Her limbs wouldn’t obey the command to stand up and get out. She stayed on the ground and waited for the next wave to hit.
