Story Time #1, by Adam Lehrer
The Counter-Agency stresses the need to remember life altering and mind expanding experiences. In this story, a fever stricken eight-year-old Adam is visited by an indescribable entity
As a boy, I was prone to strep throat. Once a year, I fell dreadfully ill with that wretched disease. Brutal, flu-like symptoms. Frighteningly high fever. Painful sore throat. The works. My pediatrician recommended hacking my tonsils out — they’re essentially useless organs dangling in the back of the throat collecting bacteria and festering disease — and I was scheduled for that very operation. Nevertheless, my mother — a somewhat over-protective and high anxiety woman with a profoundly loving soul — couldn’t compartmentalize the terror of her oldest son having an organ severed out of the back of his mouth, and called it off. She assumed my body would eventually develop an immunity to the disease, and she was right. The problem was that immunity didn’t develop until past puberty, leaving me with years of strep throat ahead.
During one particular bad case of that disease when I was eight-year-old, the doctor prescribed me to Bactrim to clear the infection. I was already diagnosed as being allergic to Penicillin, so Bactrim was assumedly an antibiotic that I could take without running the risk of death. A day day after I started the Bactrim, however, my symptoms were exasperated by at least 100 percent, and it became clear that my antibiotic allergies weren’t solely limited to Penicillin and its derivatives. My fever was at 104 degrees, but I couldn’t stop shivering. Aches and pains coursed throughout my body. Worst of all? The cold sores that typically line the throat and tonsils during a case of the strep quadrupled, running all the way down to my lungs and all the way out to the outer perimeter of my lips. I looked like a fucking monster. Totally bed-ridden, I began to lose touch with reality. My thoughts were disconnected, looking at the reality of my parents and my siblings and my house and my room as if it were a fiction playing out on a TV screen. I don’t know how long I was laying there, but at some point it was dark. Though I drifted in and out of consciousness, something startled me, and a chill breezed past me. The hair on my arms rose and goosebumps lined the flesh.
Suddenly, my awareness was totally dialed in, as if I’d just taken a toke of methamphetamine – everything was crystal clear. My eyes were peeled open, and I saw the first one. A shadowy figure, hard to make out at first. But it didn’t look quite human. Then, he turned around and stared at me. Oh my god, his face! A grey and wrinkled visage, mound of flesh hanging from his cheeks. A great tousle of hair unkempt and concealing parts of his mouth but, still – I could see his eyes. They were fire red. Finally, he smiled at me. This was no friendly smile. Pure terror! He walked towards me on my bed, but I was paralyzed with the sickness, totally vulnerable to whatever he had in store for me. And that’s when I realized: he didn’t come alone. Unknown numbers of wretched horrors beyond our world entered my room in a march behind him, all of them smiling and rejoicing in horror and depravity. Monsters, unnatural colors, horrific forms that I struggle to give language or description to. All I know is that I’d never been so fucking terrified in my life.
The veil had been lifted. The borders between our world and theirs had completely disintegrated, and I was at their mercy. I know that RD Laing said that the schizoid “refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two ways; a disruption in his relation of the world, and a disruption in his relation with the self,” and I would love to write this horror off as a temporary psychosis I experienced during a fever dream. But, I’ve never been able to convince myself of this. It was all too fucking real.
The demons, or the beings, or the entities, or the forms, or whatever we want to call them, finally circled around my bed on all three sides, and took each other hand in hand or claw in claw or whatever their fucking extremities were or looked like locked together. Still smiling, they started chanting in unison, as if attempting to commune with an entity even more otherworldly, powerful, and evil than they. I don’t remember screaming. I don’t remember so much as moving. I couldn’t move, I just watched with my eyes peeled open and attempted to rationalize the wretched images around me. And finally, my mother and father were above me and consoling me. Once I felt their embrace, the entities vanished without a trace.
The next morning, I began to heal. The medication had been discontinued the previous day. Bringing me juice and soup, my mother asked what I was screaming about. I didn’t even know that I had been screaming during the ordeal. I told her that I couldn’t remember. I never uttered a word of what I witnessed, until now. My mother wrote it off as a sickness induced night terror and never spoke about it again. I, however, have never been able to purge myself of that ghastly memory nor the image of those hideous beings and their intentions for me. The memory is triggered at the most inopportune of times. During intense exercise, for instance, or during psychedelic experiences. I wish I could know what that chanting was. I wish I could wretch some meaning from that phantasmagoric encounter. I don’t know what I believe, exactly, about god or hell or demons. Or if I believe at all. But I do feel that this world is not all there is, and that what lie beyond this world and the universe might not be the utopia that God-fearing men pray that it is.
Illustration by Adam Lehrer
Fascinating, Adam. Your memory of this experience is very vivid, compared to other reports of "shadow men", bedroom entities, etc. This is definitely one of the rabbit-holes I find myself tumbling through on a regular basis.
Fantastic stuff here.