Lindsey Chalmers: Home At Last

Coercive controller Lindsey Chalmers finally finds a place where he belongs.

Written for the 30 Days of Fright writing challenge, Day 25

Lindsey remembered the first great shock. The look of pure loathing in her bright blue eyes as she flung the pot of boiling pasta right in his face. The pain came too quickly for him to scream, even when the stabbing began. The cutting that followed was the next great shock. He felt his right arm come away first. The pain ebbed with his consciousness. He was aware of the left one's removal as a fact. He was too far away to really feel it then. Lindsey felt himself falling at first, then drifting into a deep, sleepy darkness; cool and calm. This wasn't so bad.

Left leg. Right leg. Head. It was over at last.

***

Drifting in a dream that had no shape or form, Lindsey let himself flow, floating freely in the velvet darkness. He was dimly aware of other… beings? He could not call them people. He could not call them. He had neither the will nor the way.

After a while, he began to adjust to this new state. Memories beckoned. Home. The order he had established there. Life. But they were gone now, torn from him in a moment of the violent chaos he had always worked so hard to keep at bay. While his memories haunted and hurt him, they anchored him. Lindsey struggled to reconcile his desire to go home with his newfound fear of what awaited him there. “Home” would be forever tainted by the last real experience he'd had; his own wife assaulting him. No. He wanted A home, not that one.

Will required effort. It demanded the exertion of those parts thst were, at present, in pieces. He couldn't quite think, but he could desire. He allowed that one idea to take root and grow until he was able to assert some kind of control over himself. He sought his body—or what remained of it.

He was bumping jerkily over something. Small bits of gravel? As his awareness grew, he felt that visceral loathing that had sent him to this place. Mary was shoving him into the back of a truck. Two men received him.

They jabbered in a language he didn't recognise, but somehow he knew they were frightened. He had seen that kind of fear turn to loathing in Mary's eyes before she murdered him. He fled.

The Drifting Dark, as he called it, welcomed Lindsey back like an old friend.

It felt almost like ingratitude. Like infidelity. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate the Drifting Dark, he just wanted a place to rest. To be. He sought his bones again, fixating on them till he had found them again.

The weight was overwhelming, as if a giant had sat on him, squashing him flat. No. Not fair. This was no soft blanket of earth to soothe him, this was a prison. He stretched himself, forcing his way upwards until he felt space around him.

A room, bare. Empty. Waiting.

He drifted upwards. More empty space. This would do.

***

The first family to move in soon moved out.

“Pippa,” said her team leader, “what did they say? We're not running a hotel service here. They have to take what they can get.”

“I don't understand it, Ti,” she replied. “‘It feels wrong. We don't feel welcome.’”

“Welcomed by whom?” Tiassalé asked, skepticism raising her eyebrow.

“They haven't said,” Pippa replied.

“This is very strange,” said Tiassalé.

***

Who were these people? Middle-eastern, perhaps. There was nothing about them that Lindsey liked. There was no order to the way they lived and he couldn't understand a word they said. Could that little boy see him?

That was moot; whatever he had done, they had packed haphazardly and left.

The next lot were worse. Always having people over. Holding noisy parties. So disorganised! The old lady could see him. Soon enough, she and her family were gone.

Another family. If he'd had lungs, Lindsey would have sighed. They were religious. Regimented. Plymouth Bretheren, perhaps. Religiosity aside, they had potential. They were certainly orderly. Precise. Why could Mary not see the benefit of such a way of life? They kept the house immaculate. The garden was neat. Yes, these were his people. He could live with them.

Did they really have to wake up at five o'clock every day? Their prayers droned on and on. Now they were singing. A bit of variation would be nice. While Lindsey approved of their neatness and order, he found the Uptons too austere for his liking. They took little interest in the outside world and kept so much to themselves, he found it stifling. They would have to go.

Focusing all of his thought on his disapproval, he forced himself into being. The deep, forbidding coldness and sense of unease that this engendered usually sent them packing.

“Them” being the Uptons, they saw it as a spiritual battle, and fought back with prayer and Bible verses that stung him in ways that sent him back to his base in the foundation.

There had to be a way to assert himself. He tried manifesting; first as a glimpse caught in the corner of the eye, then hovering in the children's bedrooms. That resulted in an all-night prayer meeting. The only peace he had was when they were asleep, but that was by no means guaranteed. In any case, a barrier had been erected around the inside of the house, so now he had only the foundation and the garden.

He willed himself back to his former home, but new people had moved in. Mary was gone. She hadn't just killed him, she had totally abandoned him. With nothing to anchor him there, he went back to Birmingham. There was no rest for him there. No place to settle. To belong.

Despair carried him on swift wings to the Drifting Dark. Carried by its current, he finally arrived at a place lit by fire. He could see the faint forms of other spirits, their features blurred by despondency. Entropy moved them forward and drew them closer together. With no senses to process the sights, sounds, or smells around him, Lindsey had to rely on mere memories of what such an environment should look, feel, and smell like. None of it was pleasant. He tried to turn, but there was no way back. The others drifted forwards with him, in front of, and behind him. Some had simply given up. Others struggled, trying to turn back, but were pulled forward ever more swiftly as if they were caught in a riptide. The more quickly they moved, the more they tried to get away. The more they fought, the faster they moved.

Lindsey allowed himself to drift towards the edge, away from the chaos in the middle of the moving throng. He was trying—and failing—to make sense of where he was.

There were cracks in the rocky walls; nooks and crannies that other spirits lurked in, watchful and waiting. Every time he approached one, it vanished. There was no way to communicate with anyone. To ask questions—or to get answers. Even the cracks disappeared when he drew too near to them.

The firelight grew brighter.

Dark shapes appeared among the spirits, urging them onwards towards a great cavern that opened out into a dark, but wide open space.

Lindsey noticed that, the more closely the spirits were gathered together, the brighter his surroundings became. The current—or whatever it was—that drew them together in the middle of the cavern, appeared to be the inevitability of their being there. What he had taken to be flames and firelight was their struggle to escape it. Their obsession with escape was the fuel; the flames were their frustration. And the dark shapes were feeding on their desperation. A distant memory came to mind; a quote: Hell is other people.

It certainly was.

This story is part of a series:

Lindsey Chalmers, Redux | Lindsey Chalmers, Reborn | Lindsey Chalmers: Remains