SAM GLOVER / TEN POSSESSED PEOPLE CAUGHT ON TAPE
01.
She is convinced beyond all doubt that she is in the possession of two spinal columns. They are close in proximity, but either one is vying for dominance. We hear this fact related in snatches of garbled whispers. Spine no. 1 is monochrome, a gradating scale from black around the coccyx through thoracic greys into white at the cervical peak. While spine no. 2 passes through a polychromatic sequence of rainbow hues. How they both occupy the narrow width of her torso is not explainable in strictly anatomical terms. Her adamant belief is that they are braided together, coiled, like plaited ropes. An alternative explanation is that one spine is in front of the other, separated by inches. That they might be placed side-by-side, parallel, is a possibility furiously denied by the double-spined women. That is a ludicrous idea, she says, her speech devolving into an indecipherable mumble of negations.
02.
He’s never existed not in knots. Pretzel-shaped man, twisted, arm between leg loops, hand behind back, every limb tangled. Appearance suggests that only his arms are crossed, sat with one leg over the other, but he assures us that he is even more tightly bound than he looks. At his centre, he says while gesturing suddenly toward his neck’s protuberant cartilage, there is a sphere of tangled elastic bands – about the same size as a golf-ball. His hands are embroidered together. He tells us breathlessly that he is his very own conjoined twin. But they are not monozygotic. They are conjoined but do not resemble each other in the slightest. And yet, he cannot recognize which of the two he is.
03.
This one has outgrown the need to walk upright. The corridors are their forest floor now. Foraging for truffles beneath the bracken like a boar. Dust-flecks waft through the air like fungal spores, and mushrooms take root in the eaves. As they crawl – sometimes flat against the carpet, sometimes on their hands and knees, but never more upright than that – their body gives off a damp rotten stench of deciduous foliage breaking down beneath winter stars. Watching how desperately they drag themselves along the carpet, expending so much energy in advancing so little, the qualified medical professional can only wonder what destination they have in mind, what location they are trying to reach. It is the door at the end of the corridor that has no number. Once there, they will stop and rest and dissolve bit by bit into the synthetic fibers of the carpet.
04.
Four boys, unattended at home, are worried about their friend. The four of them are all together in a room, what looks like a bedroom, one of their parents’ bedrooms presumably, given that a large double bed occupies a large part of the room. Their friend is in another part of the house, but his moans can be heard through the walls. Only it sounds more like a choir of moans. The unsettling sounds reverberating throughout the house are more numerous than one mouth could make: long drawn-out whining that is polyphonic in quality, but a polyphony that is out-of-joint and dissonant. The boys are unsure how to proceed, in clear fright. But eventually one leaves the bedroom in search of their friend and the others follow. Down a long corridor they see that a light is on in the bathroom, the door ajar, with an oblique slanted block of light falling upon the carpet. The moaning stops. The boys begin calling out their friend’s name, some clearly on the verge of tears. Silence. Upon entering the bathroom they find the eyes of their friend rolling in dizzying loops. He is spinning around on the floor in a brightly colored pool of pink shampoo, green cough medicine, blue mouthwash and orange vomit. He stops suddenly, looking up at his friends with a mixture of shame-exhaustion. Then he begins moaning again, only this time the four boys join him in unison.
05.
There had always been inkling in her mind that she wasn’t observable by others. Before solidifying as a fixed idea she had made a compromise with her intuition, speculating perhaps that only 25% percent of herself was unobservable by the various people around her at any one time, both those known and unknown to her. But that unobservable portion steadily increased to thirty percent, fifty percent, seventy-five, until the current predicament in which 100% of her being is unobservable by any one. Only the other night she had spent hours in the company of long-term friends that were totally unaware of her presence. Initially, this had not been an entirely unpleasant situation. It only became dire when she began realizing that she was not just unobservable, but that they – her friends – and everyone else – were well aware of that fact she couldn’t be observed, were aware of the fact they were totally unaware of her, and they were unaware of any way of observing her again. This knowledge precipitates a falling sensation, a diminishing awareness – two wet fingers applied to a candlewick – that darkened things further. Now she was not just unobservable by others, but unobservable by herself, who was now and perhaps always had been totally other.
06.
To all possible bystanders he has the look of someone plunged suddenly underwater, despite the fact he is confined to an office cubicle for most hours of the day, for most days of the week. Keeping afloat is a daily labor undermined by a continual sinking further and further. Soon enough he will touch the ocean floor. Another stack of papers are placed on the desk. Another salvo of emails litters the inbox. His thin wrists emerge like limp fronds of seaweed from the wide-mouthed shirt cuffs. His superiors are at a loss. They want him out of the office, or at least out of the way of the other workers who might be distracted or even influenced by his presence, but they do not want to dispense with his ability to work at a manic-productive rate. He seems to devour tasks as a means of remaining above water. The slightest water-cooler interval throws him into anxiety, aimlessness and disorder. For now, they say in the board room, this can be accommodated. But once his work-rate begins to waver, they will have no compunction about placing on his desk the papers that outline his redundancy package.
07.
They are an unfortunate people, those human beings haunted by lips. They only make up a tiny fragment of the population of which they are both a part and apart. But when taken in total, they form quite a sizeable percentage of the global population. Of course, the medical professional tells us, quite soberly, there are varying degrees of severity when it comes to this affliction. Additionally, being haunted by lips should not be confused with the more common cheilophobia – that is, a phobia of lips, for which there are a number of effective treatments. Being haunted by lips leaves the afflicted person in a state of acute distress that is only mitigated by the most austere social isolation, given that lips are the interface between so many human actions – speech, eating, intimacy. Certain patients have commented upon the parting of the lips as being the most distressing aspect. Totally sealed lips do not pose such a threat. But the quarantine of social isolation is not a total cure. The haunting does not just manifest in a revulsion felt for lips, but also a presiding obsession with lips that results in dreams, fantasies, hallucinations and ideations. In order to escape them, in the most extreme cases, patients have been known to undertake a complicated and dangerous operation in which they attempt to “castrate” themselves of their own lips – often with unsuccessful results.
08.
She was in a car-park full of stationary vehicles when she first realized that there was nobody, absolutely nobody, here on this earth except for herself. All around her, going in and out of the large supermarket, were shoppers pushing trolleys and carrying plastic carrier bags, but she could see through their deceitful attempts to act substantial. They were no more human than a shadow, or a cold gust of wind, or a dissipating vapor. They could only be seen because of her, they were only there because of her, and they would disappear forever were she to leave. Hastily, she furnished a number of explanations for their existence: they were emanations from her own brain, or they were past or future iterations of her self reincarnated in different forms, or they were placed here to torment her by some other presence in this world of which she is not aware. After much deliberation, she decided that the final explanation was the most likely. It would explain why they all seemed to be in on the joke together, a joke that came at her expense, and why they were all so secretive around her, why they laughed knowingly or else looked away embarrassedly when she approached. Having realized this, all she needed to do now was to find out and uncover the presence or force that was orchestrating all these ghosts. But the thought of uncovering such a conspiracy unsettled her deeply, even more than the unreality of the people around her, when she considered the consequences such a discovery would incur.
09.
They can sense that outside of them there are things desperate to get in, and inside of them there are things desperate to get out. There are toxic fruit growing ripe in the bowels, there are iridescent flies desperate to enter the nose; there are grandfather clocks ticking within the stomach, there are hostile words in search of the ear’s entry point; there are relics of traumatic experience deposited in the heart, there are radio-waves that contaminate certain muscle groups; there is linguistic mucous that needs to be spat out, there are catchy airborne melodies that lodge in the throat; there is silence accumulated in the bones that will soon make the skeleton mute, there are pathogenic theories in search of a new mouth-piece; there are new forms of destructive technology encased within the ribs, there are flowering shrubs eager to take root among the veins of the foot; there is a dice rolling around inside of the skull, there are purple petrol fumes that intend to perfume and fumigate the entirety of the torso; there are USB sticks lodged within the tail-bone that contain important information regarding family history, there is a set of canine teeth desperate to replace your own. All these things they sense, even if they cannot put it into words, but even this relatively comprehensive list is only the beginning of this world’s multitudinous external and internal threats.
10.
He is sitting at a desk. Nothing can be made out of his surroundings. Except for the very harsh cone of light that illuminates the man from above, emanating from an unseen source, he is surrounded by total darkness. There is no way then to establish the dimensions of the space that contains him. It could be a claustrophobic enclosure, or an expansive space that extent of which is without mapped limits. His eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses. On the desk there is an open notebook lined with exceptionally small handwriting, a stack of books to one side, a cup of dark liquid that steams continually, and a laptop the screen of which gives off a sad blue light that doesn’t illuminate any of the surrounding space but that tinges the pale skin of the man sat at the desk, the man seemingly attached to the desk. Despite the stillness and the emptiness of the nothingness that surrounds him on all sides, he is engaged in a frenzy of small actions that are continually arrested by interruptions and distractions that mean he never settles into any one for any length of time. He takes a sip of the hot drink, he writes a word in the notebook, he takes another sip, he writes another word, he scrolls down a page on the laptop, he takes a sip, writes a word, scrolls down a page, opens a book, reads a sentence, puts it back, writes a word, takes a sip, scrolls down the page, switches to another page, begins to watch a video on the laptop entitled “Ten Possessed People Caught on Tape,” switches to another page and begins to scroll, writes another word in the notebook, closes the notebook, picks up and opens a book, reads for a moment and then closes it shut, takes a sip of the drink, scrolls down a page and then switches to another, and then he closes the laptop, the blue tinge disappearing from skin, attempts to write a word, fails, reopening the laptop, he sits still for a moment and then takes off his dark sunglasses. The whites of his eyes are entirely discolored a shade of raw liquid pink by a minuscule latticework of expanded and ruptured blood vessels.
Sam Glover is a writer from London whose work has appeared before in Ligeia Magazine, Minor Literature[s] and ergot. He can also be found on instagram @abrupt.encounter