Immortal Part 7

Chapter Two

            I stared for a few minutes at the red brick wall, the spot that Emryl normally occupied while waiting for me. I usually took my time leaving class, hoping that Emryl would get bored of waiting for me and take off, but he never did. He was always there. But not now.

            The hairs on my neck stood on end. A chill ran up my spine and I realized I was feeling very afraid for Emryl. I tried to ignore it. I tried to tell myself that he was just being a jerk and that this was some kind of elaborate joke he had planned. That’s it, I told myself.

            But I couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding that had fallen upon me. I found myself glancing nervously behind me, afraid that I was being followed my some despicable creature that was beyond human. Of course, there was nothing behind me. This though, caused me to be nervous in a different way. Where was everybody? The streets, to me, seemed unnaturally quiet and deserted.

            I went right past my apartment and took the stairs, two at a time, up the additional four floors to where Emryl’s apartment was. I knocked impatiently on his door, calling his name, apologizing for my earlier rudeness. Periodically I would look at the time on my cell phone, decide I would give it five more minutes and then would repeat banging at his door.

            For almost forty five minutes I kept up my ridiculous attempt. I knew after a couple of minutes that Emryl wasn’t there. If he had been, he would have responded, even if it was to tell me to shut up. In fact, a couple of doors had opened during this time, the occupant would stick his or her head out, glare at me and then shut their door again. But I didn’t know what else to do. Where could he be? I tried to wrack my brain and recall if he had ever told me of extracurricular activities he was involved in, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything.

            Finally I pulled out a pen and tore a piece of paper out of one of the notebooks in my backpack. I scribbled a message for Emryl to call me as soon as he got home and then I folded the paper up and slipped it underneath the door.

            There was a small hope that perhaps I would run in to Emryl as a trudged down the steps, headed to my own little apartment, but I didn’t see anybody.  I was really starting to get worried now. If this was a joke on Emryl’s part, the funny had worn off. Not that I thought this whole situation was even remotely funny. It wasn’t.

            I fixed myself a sandwich and I sat down on the couch, thinking to distract myself, I would do some homework but then it occurred to me that I didn’t even know what the homework assignments were. I hadn’t paid attention. Fortunately, in the technologic society in which we find ourselves living in, I knew the homework assignments would be posted online. I finished my sandwich and grabbed my can of coke as I sat at my computer.

            Instead of bringing up the school’s webpage to find out what I needed to do for each of my classes, I found myself typing vampire, in my favorite search engine through the internet. I read a half dozen articles through Wikipedia about the subject. And Emryl was right, some of it was laughable, some of it was scary and some of it was very interesting. Although, admittedly, I was disturbed by all of it.

            It took me a long time to remember the name of the guy that Emryl had mentioned. The creator of the blog he had told me about. I wracked and wracked my brain trying to remember the last name of the guy. Zachary, I remembered but when I typed in Zachary there were over 72 million results. I even tried to type in Zachary and Vampires. The way Emryl talked, that was the main subject that the guy talked about in his blog, but nothing came up. Then it occurred to me that Emryl didn’t just talk about vampires, he talked about monsters. All kinds of monsters. So I tried to type Zachary and monsters but again, my friend “Google” wasn’t much help. Still over 9 million results and most of the first page I scanned through talked about music.

            I was just about to give up when I finally remembered the guy’s name. Zachary Payton and he was a professor at Ohio State. All of a sudden, all kinds of pertinent information popped up. I found the missing person posters that Emryl had talked about. And I even found his name on a federal website that listed missing people. There was an “in Memoriam” page on the Ohio State website. It showed pictures of him lecturing enthralled crowds. It even mentioned in the article his ‘interest’ of the supernatural and unexplained. Real ‘X-Files’ kind of stuff. He was pretty famous in Ohio for his research in paranormal phenomenon. He was known to drive all over the state to look into events that were reported.

            Finally I found his blog. It didn’t start out as a blog about monsters, or vampires or anything like that. Mostly he was just talking about the stuff he was researching on his own time. More extra terrestrial stuff. UFO sightings, and the like. In his earlier post, he kind of made the insinuations that people were mostly crazy and if it weren’t for his own interest in the unusual and strange he wouldn’t even bother. Mostly the people that called him were drunk hillbillies excited that somebody was willing to listen to their tall tales.

            But then his post started getting a little bit wilder. He had gotten a few calls about ghost and for a while he was in to that whole thing. The white noise and the EVP ghost voices. He even had a link to some of the ghosts he had recorded. I listened to a couple but it really was quite freaky and since I am a mere female and live on my own, I knew if I listened for too long my imagination would get the better of me and pretty soon I would be hearing voices whether they existed or not.

            After that is when his blog got really weird. He started talking about all kinds of spooky creatures that I thought were fiction and make believe. Zombies, for instance, aren’t the diseased, risen from the dead fiends from horror flicks like I thought. He briefly related the story of Wade Davis. He was an ethnobotonist that went to Haiti to investigate a guy named Clairvius Narcisse. The Narcisse dude, had been poisoned, buried alive and then he came back from the dead or something. The drug was produced by a witch doctor and Wade Davis basically claimed that Narcisse had been turned in to a zombie. Then for weeks Payton was on a Zombie kick and he put all kinds of documented zombie reports into his website. Then he moved on to werewolves and vampires and all kinds of other creatures of supernatural lore.

            Basically Payton was obsessed and every day he posted new stuff. The guy was obsessed and maybe he had gone off his rockers, but he was also very, very thorough.

            I was almost convinced of the existence of the things I had always thought were just scary stories and fantasy. He had dates, times, and lots and lots of details. Photographs of strange, peculiar looking objects, sketches and most disturbing to me… every time I doubted something I would look it up on the internet and his facts were always right on. After a while, I stopped bothering to look it up. I knew he had done his research and that if it was in his blog, it was accurate.

            That’s not to say I believed what I was reading. Just like Emryl had told me, the guy talked about how we live in a small, protected bubble where we go about our lives thinking that we know what life is about. We have our simple naïve lives and we think we understand what is important but we don’t have a clue. And just like Emryl had said, he talked about the wars being fought all the time by immortal beings over possession of the human soul. That’s what we have that they don’t.

            To say I jumped when there was a thump, thump, thump at my door, would be an understatement. I let out an involuntary yelp. My heart was suddenly beating hard and quick and I had to hold onto the edge of my desk to calm myself for a few minutes before I could get up.

            “Sydney Gerken!”

            I didn’t recognize the voice. I knew I was getting freaked out by everything that had happened during the day because suddenly I was very frightened. I had no reason to be. Anybody could be at my door. There was no reason to believe that whoever was knocking on my door was out to get me or something like that. Logically my mind told me this and you would think I would walk over and open the door like a sensible, human being.

            That’s not what I did. I tapped my pocket to make sure that my cell phone was in my pants and then I ran to my bathroom and slammed the door. I was breathing hard and I could still hear whoever was at the door pounding and calling my name. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and sat down in my bathtub, pulling the shower curtain closed. I stared balefully at my phone cursing myself for my stupidity.

            Again, I must mention, I hate horror movies and not because the movies scare me but because the people are always so stupid in them. I had fallen in to the same trap that many of the more thoughtless heroines of scary movies fall into. When a mass murderer is chasing you, that last thing you should do is put yourself into a situation where you could be trapped. Never run upstairs. That drives me crazy! Even worse than running upstairs though, is locking yourself in a bathroom. There is no escape.

            About the time I heard the sound of breaking wood is about the time I decided to dial 911. My hands were shaking pretty bad and it took me a few seconds to manage even pushing the button on the top of my phone. I had a touch screen phone and before I could use it I had to unlock it by scrolling down. Whether it was the sweat on my finger, or because I was literally shaking like crazy, I couldn’t be sure, but I struggled for a full minute with getting the damn phone unlocked before I could dial the magical numbers, 911.