I'm Writing this to Warn You

Dear me.

In twenty years, three months and twelve days’ time. At around 8pm.

There’s something you should know.

Who am I? Really? Have you forgotten little twenty-seven-year-old you? Have you forgotten the way you used to comb your hair up all spiky and eighties-like, or those pink-and-silver shoes you were in love with. Or David Lancolm you were in love with last year, until you started seeing a whole other side to him and found yourself very much less in love.

But I digress, don’t I? I’m writing to you to warn you because I don’t think you’re going to remember this on your own. I’m pretty sure you’re going to whittle the memory down until it’s too small to attract your attention. You’re going to layer over it with booze, and then paint over a few coats time, or life, or daily routine, of simply wanting to forget. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret right now, former-you is about to go off and get shit-faced any minute now, and she has good reason to, because she wants to drown the memory of what she saw today, and she thinks she might succeed.

But before she does, she thinks she needs to warn you first.

So, listen up. This is how it happened:

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Just a harmless travelling carnival, right? Oh, I see your eyes rolling. This is such a massive cliché. And you know that I’m going to tell you how I walked right into the tent offering ‘fortunes-told-for-ten-dollars’. You’ve heard this one before?

Well, you’ve lived this one before too.

And you fucked it up. So listen close or you’ll just fuck it up all over again.

Anyways. In I went. And the tent was decked out the whole nine yards, with rugs and carpets all bunched up on the floor, and hanging beads, and crystals, and incense, and strange creatures preserved in oil inside jars on shelves that lined the back wall. Do you remember thinking: they’re all fake, she’d never get permission to have these pickled monstrosities in her tent like that, not this century? You did. And yet, you couldn’t take your eyes off them, because they seemed so authentic – a tiny mermaid; a miniature monkey with a twisted oversized head; a turtle with flippers that were like human hands. Clever, you thought at the time, and yet they chilled you. You felt as if the one with one giant, crystalline eye was stubbornly watching you, and that its eye would follow you out of the tent into the world.

She sat at the table, hair wrapped in scarves and peppered with wildflowers. She could have been any age from thirty to eighty. Her eyes were keen and predatory. She held out a smooth, ringed hand.  “Please, take a seat.”

I did. You did. We offered an awkward smile.

“You want to see the future?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Something in particular?”

“Not really. Just… you know… in general.”

“Are you sure?” she said, “you can’t unsee it.”

I laughed it off – “Enough glasses of whiskey and you can unsee anything.”

“Once you know it, I suppose, you can do what you will with it.”

“Fair enough.” I slapped ten dollars onto the table.

She took my hands with surprising force, making a claw-like grip with hers. And it really was as if something had come over her, a curtain falling, a portal opening. There was a feral quality to her eyes. And no crystal ball, or tea-leaves, no tarot or palm-tracing. There were just her eyes, mesmerising, intense. And I’m not kidding when I say they locked onto me like a pitbull’s jaws, and my sudden inability to look away became physical.

Her voice was soothing though. I heard it as if from a distance. And as if it came from all directions.

(You’re thinking: it was time to leave. Too weird. You should have got out of there.

Well, me is you. And you didn’t. Part of you couldn’t. And part of you told yourself you were just letting cheap tricks and parlour games get the better of you. And then again, part of you couldn’t.)

All the while she was saying calmly: “nobody only sees the future. We create it. We weave ourselves a future out of what we see. Out of what we love and fear. We make choices don’t we? And so, you can build this future, you can build it to your specifications. If you have the self control…”

“I’m not sure I-“

“Listen!”

But the future didn’t come to me in words. And it didn’t take any prisoners. It came like a freight train; I was dead centre on the tracks.

Three days away: I knew that because I had plans. Remember: the bake sale at Wilder Hall, because we promised Mum we’d help. Crystal clear. Mum’s scones on the table. Some fancy chocolates to the left. A sponge-roll with jam and cream to the right. Me, walking along, talking to Becky Greig, whom I haven’t seen in years, but whom I am absolutely certain right now I’m going to run into in three days’ time when I go to that sale.

(You: you probably know if that really happened. And by the end of this you’re probably going to know if I’m full of shit. And I really hope I am. I also think I’m not. And I think you’ll think it to).

But anyway: visions. Visions rolling in like waves, getting bigger and more ferocious as they crashed against me.

Eight weeks away: wasn’t that Christmas? All of us. Sitting around the table. Tugging those crackers. Passing plates and bowls across the table. But wait? Where’s Lyndon?

(Please tell me you and Lyndon are sitting around your blue-painted, orange-carpeted lounge, reading over this letter and laughing at the whole thing. Please tell me that.)

A funeral. Was it him? I could see a coffin. I could see a whole bunch of people all bobbing around, talking solemnly, neatly dressed. Familiar faces. But I couldn’t see Lyndon’s….

And I could see her, the fortune teller, that freakin’ witch, just beyond the rush of visions. “My brother…” I gasped at her.

“Only you decide what you see.”

“I wouldn’t choose this.”

“You have.”

I tried to pull back, but her fingers were like handcuffs. Steel teeth. “You have to see this through. Until the end.”

(You’re thinking: oh bullshit, I would have said Fuck you! and walked right out of there. And I would have picked up my ten bucks and stuffed it back into my pocket on the way out. Well, you didn’t. Your heart was pounding. You were hook, line and sinker right at that moment. And you just wanted to change what you were seeing, imagine it not-so…)

I wanted Lyndon there. I wanted this funeral to be a mistake. To be that of some distant friend and relative, elderly and barely known. To see him there amongst the crowd, one of those little cakes in hand, ridiculous in a suit and tie. I wanted… And there… a glimpse. Yes! And I focused on that glimpse. And I saw him. But it was only for a second and it was all wrong. A body. There on the floral carpet, crumpled and rotten. And even as I looked it got more rotten, erupting in maggots and mould, his jaw falling away from his face.

No-no-no – this is not it…

And then: years later. Walking through a park. A man. Handsome. My type. You’ll be please to hear that he approached us, started up some conversation or other, and it appeared as if one thing was getting prepared to lead to another. The two of us walking off together, a camaraderie between us that I think we both know was leading to sex –

(No, no vision of that. Focus, forty-seven-year-old me. This is going somewhere).

Visions snowballed. Picking up the pace. A decorated hall. A wedding. A wedding! He was there, and so was I. This man whose name I don’t yet know, but fucking gorgeous whoever he’s going to be. Me, in a white dress, in a long white dress that’s enlivened with pale, silvery beads, something princess-fancy like I never thought in a million years I’d actually wear. And flowers. And champagne. Music. Dancing.

And… something else.

I don’t know what I saw. Just a dark smudge. A little point of blur against an otherwise clear landscape.

A house. Small and cute. Carried over the threshold. And something. That small smudge, a little bit bigger. Following behind.

A tropical holiday. White-sand beaches. A shadow against the sand. A flicker between me and the sand.

The house. A dinner party. An argument in the small hours. A shadow that hung above his shoulders. A glimpse in the mirror – a corpse’s face. A rotten, putrid…

Lyndon….?

I really did try to pull back in earnest now. I was scared. But that gypsy witch had my hands trapped. And my eyes come to that. And her eyes: they were blood red, weren’t they? And her face was goth-pale. I would have started screaming at her, ‘let me go you evil bitch!’ if I wasn’t frozen, and if my voice wasn’t frozen right along with me.

A car. Driving away. Watching him leave. The scene didn’t show it but I knew it: driving away for good. And behind me… it had an almost human form, too quick and shadowy to make out much more than that, a faint glow of eyes.

Too much. I would pull away this time. I yanked at my hands, all my force in it, dug my armoured nails in for full effect. And I felt when her hold gave, and when I could scramble backwards. But the hand came after me. Not hers. Its. It reached past the image of me – a clawed and hairy and tangled monster of a hand – and out towards the actual me. I felt those claws, raking over my skin.

And I saw its face. There was a hideousness that lacks words. An act of being so broken and so misshapen, so bloody and damaged, and at the same time so aching with menace, so full of hate and crackling horror that no description is adequate. Evil given face and form. Drilling, obsidian eyes…

I stumbled free of the witch’s hands, tripping and rolling across her rugged-up floor. And I know what came tumbling after. It was bare shadow: just the slightest wisps of not-quite light, formless and indistinct. But with just enough form to be monstrous: dead-Lyndon mixed with were-wolf, mixed with wart-hog, and classical demon. For a vibrating second it hung over me, slavering and hungry, and then it dissipated, twitching out of any kind of shape and sliding out of the tent into the world.

The gypsy witch just looked wan and sad, standing there watching as if the whole process had had nothing to do with her. She didn’t say anything, even as I lurched forward, grabbed my ten dollars and made a run for it.

Now, Forty-seven, this is the part where you need to pay attention. Because I am going out very soon to get extravagantly drunk and try to pretend I didn’t see what I did. You’ll thank me for it later. But first, I need you to know. That shadow isn’t going to stay a shadow forever, it’ll start to take form, slowly, maybe too tiny to be discerned until, let’s say, you get married. But growing over the subsequent years, maybe feeding on your disharmony, on your eventual divorce. Until one day. One day in twenty years, three months and twelve days, you’ll hear something outside your scuffed, varnished door. And you’ll look through the peephole and see a shape. It’ll tear that door right off its hinges and come plunging into your blue-and-orange apartment, teeth gnashing, claws extended.

I’m writing this to warn you, Forty-seven.

Be ready for it.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work