Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #012

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #012 – “The Atrium – Chapter 01 – Tim”

Starting from here, I plan to release some of my upcoming book bi-weekly as part of the Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday series here at SBS.  I don’t expect it to make sense…at least, not at the moment…but that’s okay.  Putting it out here publicly is intended to be motivation to keep me writing it, and that’s all the purpose any of it needs to serve.  Hopefully, if I get lucky, you’ll enjoy it in the process…that’s the best case scenario.  At the moment, I’d predict that things will likely change with the order I put these things out in…and what reads as “chapters” now, might end up becoming pure prologue, if it even ends up making the final cut for the whole story at all.  Regardless, if you find yourself being one of the few that wanna follow along and see where this goes, I can at least promise you that reading what is posted up here at the homepage will provide you with extra insight, details, and ideas that probably won’t even end up being in the book…so perhaps, by reading these postings at the start of each month, you might very well know more about what I’m writing than the publisher will by the time things are all finished. 

I truly hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading.

– Jer @ SBS

The Atrium – Chapter 01 – Tim

September 19^th, 1983.

There was no possible way that Tim Martins could have been aware of the fact he only had another twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds left to live.

How could he have known?

It was late, somewhere past midnight when his beat up ancient Chrysler decided to call it quits in the middle of what seemed like the darkest stretch of road just before Hope in British Columbia, Canada.  In the daytime, you could see trees and mountains for miles alongside the #1 freeway, making the drive towards the city almost dreamlike it was so breathtakingly beautiful.  At night, the whole scene adopted a much more menacing tone.  Each tree looked malevolently twisted.  The moon would hide between the branches if you were lucky enough to even see it between the clouds.  The heavy torrents of rain that never seemed to end.  The lack of anyone else out on the road at this time of night.  Everything felt all too dangerous and like it was hiding something that could harm you at a moment’s notice.  A bear.  A coyote.  A crazed madman lurking in the forest with an axe.  You just never know, and Tim didn’t really want to find out as he began to run down the side of the freeway through the cursed dark and pissing rain.  He could probably make it to the outskirts of Hope in about twelve or fifteen minutes if he hustled.

No matter how quickly he moved, he was going to be completely soaked by the time he got into town.  British Columbia has always been a stunning paradise of environmental splendor, but it’s also a known rainforest and tonight it seemed hell-bent on earning its stripes.  Pouring down on Tim so hard it was like someone was following him with a garden hose turned all the way to the max, the feeling was well beyond a mere refresh – it left him downright miserable.  Thinking about how he’d likely have to pay some random mechanic in Hope too much money to come out and tow his vehicle to town, only to tell him days later after assessing the problem that the poor light blue Chrysler was dead on arrival, was flooding his brain with financial burdens.  If his car was toast, he’d need a new one.  If he needed a new car, that meant working a substantial degree of overtime.  If he was working all the time, he wouldn’t get to see his kids as much.  It’d be a cycle of work, work, work, sleep, work again, and it would feel like he was trapped day in & day out.  Only it wouldn’t be like that at all – Tim now only had about twenty minutes left to live.  He scurried fast through the rain, drenched to the point where he was as dark as everything else was around him, walking fast but not quite running.  He was in no hurry to receive a bunch of bad news.  He’d get to the Chevron gas station and they’d tell him he’d probably have to wait until the morning when the one tow truck driver in town finally got into work.  He’d have to get a hotel for the night.  He’d probably have to wait another five hours at least before his car was even pulled into Hope.  The list of nightmares in the sequence of necessary events seemed to go on and on in his head as the rain continued to soak him from the outside in.  Finally seeing a bit of a glow up ahead of him where the illuminated Chevron signed beamed out its hopeful light in effort to snag gas guzzlers as they passed by, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Tim pushed himself hard to run as quickly as he could to reach his destination, so that he could start the rest of his journey back to the wife and child he left waiting with the car in the middle of night.  He wondered briefly about their safety as he turned down the street towards the gas station.  The lights seemed so intensely bright against the black of the sky.

As he skidded on the backs of his heels into the station, he looked for the side window where there would be an attendant trying to stay awake until the morning light and the end of another shift.  Finally reaching some cover from the rain overhead underneath the safety of the station, Tim attempted to wipe the rain from his eyes with the back of his rain-soaked sleeves, which seemed to make his vision even more blurry than it was before.  Still, he could make out the frame of a person sitting adjacent to the window and made his way towards it.  Realizing he was probably going to need to buy something, whether it was gas or a miracle, he reached down to his front pocket and patted himself down.  Nothing.  Panicked, he put his freezing hands inside his flooded jacket pockets and found nothing there either.  Somewhere along his damned marathon run down the highway, his wallet must have broken free from the confines of whichever pocket he’d had it in and was now laying on the ground, hiding to be found.  While this clearly presented another massive problem for his next few minutes ahead at the gas station, he couldn’t help but chuckle to himself, feeling that nights like these were far too consistent in their madness.  One thing after the other on top of something else that was shitty – it seemed never-ending.

Only it did have an ending.  A very finite one.  In approximately twelve-to-thirteen minute’s time, thanks to his full sprint through the rain getting him to his fate quicker than he estimated, Tim would be dead.

He pulled on the main door to find it locked.  As he got closer to the service station window, he could see the nighttime attendant sitting on a chair behind the register with his head leaning forward into his chest like he was sleeping, or at the very least fully paused in deep thought.  Hell, had it been a better situation and not an emergency, Tim might have even taken pity on the tired worker and simply moved along to the next town ahead instead of wake him up, but he really had no choice.  Rapping his knuckles on the window, the worker inside hardly stirred at all, sitting on a stool that faced away from where Tim was standing on the other side.  He flinched a little from the sound of the tapping, which was somewhat comforting; otherwise Tim might have had to consider he might possibly be deceased, slumped over in his chair like a gangster had shot him.  Clearing his throat as he tapped on the glass again, Tim said “I’m sorry to wake you buddy, but I’m in a bit of a pickle over here and I need some help if you can spare it.”  The man on the inside of the window still didn’t move much, but enough for Tim to know he was making a little bit of progress in the pursuit of waking him up.  “My car broke down about a couple kilometers back; my wife and kid are still with it.  I’m here to get us some help, but I’m not really all that sure even of what I should do.  I probably need to call a tow truck or something, so if you happen to have a phone and a phonebook that I could borrow for a minute, that’d be mighty appreciated right now.”  Tim was basically shouting through the window by the end, still tapping his fingers lightly on the glass so as not to startle the man behind the glass too much once he finally woke up.  “Jesus,” Tim muttered to himself, not knowing he was less than ten minutes away from his own upcoming death but still feeling rushed to get a response from the attendant.  The rain continued to beat down harder, pummeling the station’s roof.  Maybe it was just as loud on the inside, he thought, and practically punched the glass in front of him to resolve the situation once & for all.  “Buddy, I need some help man – please, you gotta wake up.”

The light on the outside of the station seemed to fill the sky, but on the inside it seemed like it was dimly lit to the point where it would practically induce sleep in a late-night employee.  Tim tried to take a closer look at him in effort to properly assess the situation and figure out who it was that really needed the help between them.  The man began to stir slightly in his chair, mumbling “whaddya want” at Tim without actually turning around.  From behind the glass and the glare on the window, through his rain-soaked eyes, it looked like the edges of the man’s face were fraying but tucked into place, almost as if he was wearing some kind of flesh-colored mask.  Maybe he’d just come back from vacation somewhere tropical, Tim thought to himself.  Maybe he was exhausted from the flight home and excess sunshine.

“I just need a phonebook and to use your phone for a minute if you don’t mind.  Car broke down.  My wife and kid are still in it.  Honestly, I’m not really sure what the right thing to do actually is, but I figured coming here wouldn’t hurt.  If you know of a good tow-truck place or mechanic that can help, I’d be real grateful right about now bud.  Anything you can do for me?”  It felt like Tim was pleading to the window.

If only he’d known how much it actually would hurt him to come to this particular station on this night, he’d certainly have gone to any other.  The end of Tim’s life was hovering in the wind, less than five minutes away in the future ahead, and despite his best intentions, he’d never get the help he was looking for.  The man behind the glass still didn’t turn around, but pointed to the phone beside him on the countertop.  “That’s what you want?” he asked.  He sounded nearly metallic in the way that he said it, and what made the moment even stranger was that Tim could have sworn he could taste metal in the air.  “You can borrow the phone.  I’ll need it back of course, but you can borrow it for a moment or two.”

“Yeah,” said Tim.  “I mean, of course I’m not going to keep it.  I just need to call a tow-truck and that’s it, I’ll be on my way.  Sorry man, I’m really not trying to cause you any trouble, I just need a lil’ help is all.”

“I understand,” said the man behind the glass, who started to turn around slowly in the chair like he’d only learned how to rotate his body a minute earlier.  As he turned towards the glass, Tim gasped at what he saw as he got his first good look at the attendant.  It wasn’t something as innocent as a sunburn – it looked like the skin on the man’s face was attached by the finest of threads and was barely clinging on to the skull underneath, all loose and dangling.  Every instinct and impulse he had was telling him to scream and to run, but the sheer shock of looking at such a horrifically disfigured individual put Tim on his best behavior instead.  It was impossible for him to know what he was looking at, or how bad it was.

He grabbed the phone, moved it closer to the window and opened the metal tray that led to the outside, sliding the drawer outward towards Tim, eerily never taking his eyes off of him from in behind the loosely piled flesh that was covering his face.  This muted light must be playing tricks on my mind, Tim thought to himself.  “I’ll need a phonebook too if you have one sir.”  Less than two minutes away from his death, Tim felt like he was the monster for judging the appearance of the man behind the glass.

The attendant opened a drawer behind the counter, fished out a thick yellow-paged book, and threw it into the drawer so hard that it practically bounced out of the open end where Tim was standing.  As it threatened to sail over the edge of the drawer, he snagged it by the corner so that it wouldn’t fall to the ground, and held it up to the man behind the glass to show him he got it.  “Thank you,” said Tim, more politely than he probably would have if he had known he was going to die in less than sixty seconds.

A boney hand grabbed the phone receiver and put it in the drawer, sliding it over to Tim from the inside.  As Tim reached down to take it from the attendant, he looked through the window at his face once more, and saw it smiling back at him in the most awkward, inhuman type of way he thought he’d ever seen.  It was like the dangling skin had briefly lined up to the outline of the face just enough to seem like it belonged there, and clung just tight enough to begin to stretch at the corners to indicate some kind of happiness, creepy as it was.  There was more there behind the smile though, Tim thought.  There’s a curiosity.  An inquisitiveness.  It’s like he’s studying me.  In that same instant that he had those thoughts and he went to take the phone from the attendant’s extended hand in the drawer, the man reached out and grabbed Tim’s wrist with his other free hand.  The immediate pressure of his grip made Tim yelp out loud, and the sheer speed of the surprising act was instantly frightening.  The face behind the glass tilted slightly and almost innocently, just like a dog’s would when looking towards their owner to attempt to understand what’s being communicated.  Tim dropped the phone and reached out with his free hand to try and pry himself loose from the attendant’s iron grip.  “What are you doing?  Let me fucking go!” he yelled.  The face staring back at him simply looked back at him, examining the pain as it was increasing.

Tim felt his other hand gripped by the attendant, and screamed out into the night as both of his wrists were snapped in the drawer simultaneously.  As excruciating as the pain was and as loud as he yelled, it was almost as if he could see the sound of his voice drowned out by the rain pounding down around the gas station.  “What the fuck!?!” he screamed at the attendant.  “LET ME FUCKING GO!”  Tim’s own voice was so high pitched in his screaming that he barely recognized the sound.  The employee’s powerful grip never relented, and only seemed to increase in pressure more with each punishing second that passed.

And then the pulling started.

“What are you doing?” Tim yelled.  “Let me go.  Let me go.  LET ME GO!”  He sounded maniacal.  He thought about his wife and child left alone in the car miles back on highway one as his elbows began to disappear into the drawer and Tim’s face started to smush into the window above it.  The pulling continued.  The pain was unbearable.  The attendant had a foot on the wall at the bottom of the glass below the drawer, and kept applying more pressure to Tim’s outstretched arms, bringing more of him physically into the store, inch by inch.  “Pleasssseeeee,” he said with his lips on the window.  “Stop.”

There wasn’t enough space for Tim’s full body to go through the drawer, but that didn’t stop the attendant from doing it anyway.  He pulled at his arms with what seemed like superhuman strength, looking like he was legitimately attempting to get as much of Tim into the store through the metal trough as possible.  His arms broke in multiple places.  His neck contorted like a bobblehead doll as it smashed into the window over and over again as the attendant pulled at Tim’s meat.  The skin began to separate from the his shoulders up, and the torso of his body lurched into the drawer, leaving the head behind as the blood began to splash left and right as Tim’s final voyage through the windowed wall was finishing up.  Like forcing the square peg through the round hole with no regard for the shape or respect for physics, Tim was pulled through the smallest of spaces, shaving off his skin, limbs, and bones as he was wedged through the drawer.  The attendant pulled him all the way through until he was no longer recognizable.  Dropping his lifeless, headless corpse to the floor below where he was sitting earlier, the attendant returned to his chair above it.  It was now strangely peaceful as the storm continued to howl.