Skerryvore: The Lost Channel
Skerryvore:
The Lost Channel
A Novel of Stark Raving Horror
Written by
Sean Terrence Best
A recurring nightmare is, by its very disturbing nature, always the same; and for Sybil it unfailingly begins in the smothering claustrophobia of a tightly cramped space. The location is a construction site at night. In choking terror, Sybil finds herself at the bottom of a deep cylindrical hole which has been drilled into the hard earth by an enormous auger for the insertion of a huge precast steel-reinforced concrete piling. The diameter of the hole is such that Sybil cannot fully extend her arms. She tilts her head back and shouts up for help, but the noise of heavy equipment totally drowns out her voice. Gravel and bits of sandy debris are falling down the dark shaft into her face. Sybil gets something in her eye. She lowers her head in stinging pain.
Then everything is suddenly quiet. Her eye stops hurting. She cautiously looks around seeing nothing but total darkness. In the distance, a dull blue light materializes out of the utter gloom. There’s a voice. It’s the voice of a man. She thinks she recognizes the voice from her past, but isn’t sure. The voice asks her a question.
“Have you ever listened to the ticktock of a wind up clock?”
Sybil nods her head “Yes.”
“Then you know that the second hand ticks out sixty beats per minute.”
She nods.
“Do you know the human at rest heart rate?”
Sybil motions “No” with her head.
“Sixty beats per minute.”
She does not respond.
“Do you know what the tempo is for Stars and Stripes Forever? It’s a march composed by John Philips Sousa. Do you know it?”
She does not respond.
“The tempo is 120 beats per minute which is exactly twice the aforementioned human pulse when at rest, which also means that by using a ticktock clock or a human heart as a metronome, one can hum the melody of Stars and Stripes Forever in perfect time. It is this way for all marches - military, Fourth of July Parade, etc. The old Roman standard for a funeral march is sixty beats per minute - exactly the same as the at rest human pulse. Earth time is based on the rotation of the planet which means that the second hand of a clock is based on Earth’s rotation on its axis. How can the human heart rest rate exactly match the number of seconds in a minute, and what does it have to do with combat or civic pride or death? How is it that the menstrual cycle of the human female corresponds with the lunar cycle of Earth’s moon? Do you not find it unsettling that such fundamental biological patterns match up so precisely with celestial phenomena? How can this possibly happen in random nature? How can the human heart and the human reproductive cycle be so accurately coordinated with the rotation of a planet on its axis and the lunar phases of its moon? Why is there only one moon and why does that moon have a human face on it as viewed with the naked eye from Earth?”
It is at this point in the recurrent bad dream that Sybil sees the scrawny pale-skinned man with oily dark hair. His complexion is sallow; a pitiful corpse-like pallor. His cheeks are sunken into deep dark pits and marred with ugly blue-gray blotches. His eyes are sunken into shadowed gray-blue hollows. Sybil can only see him from the waist up. He is wearing a slightly soiled bone-white T-shirt. He is standing in a drab kitchen. The walls are a barren egg-shell white stained with the grime of many years. The scrawny man’s age is unknown to Sybil. She would place him in his forties, but sickly as he is she finds him difficult to judge.
He is alone. Sybil doesn’t understand where she is or how she is seeing him. He doesn’t seem to know she is watching. She is quiet. He is quiet. Everything is stone cold silence. He’s gazing blankly down at generic-label chicken noodle soup as it slowly bubbles like yellow greasy goo in a small sauce pot on the coil burner of a bland dirty off-white stove top. On a bald counter beside the stove, a hand-crank can opener lies next to an empty can. Upon the stove there is also a plain white teakettle. The teakettle is dented; the ghostly white enamel is scratched. Sybil can see steam escaping as the water in the kettle boils but she cannot hear the shrill noise of the whistle. All is dead silence.
A plain white teacup sits on a plain white saucer. They look to be from an old set. They are smudged and cracked from years of repeated use. The white string from a white teabag is drooping down the side of the cup. For a moment she sees a closeup of the tea kettle whence she watches as the steaming water pours from the spout filling the empty white cup. The teabag floats, then slowly sinks and the hot clear water begins to turn amber from the steeping tea leaves.
Sybil experiences missing time. An empty soup bowl with a bit of cold soup in the bottom now sits on a small round table in the center of the cramped dismal kitchen. There’s a spoon in the bowl. The spoon is covered with greasy residue from the soup. The teacup is nearby. The teacup is empty except for the stain of tea.
Then she sees a plain bathroom with faded sad blue paint. The walls are barren; no framed paintings, no adornments or decoration of any kind. In some spots the insipid paint is flaking off the walls. She hears a commode flush, then shower water is running. The shower water is spraying on one shoulder of the pale-skinned sickly-looking fellow. He is standing sideways in the shower so that the water is not landing on his front or his back, but spraying down on his left shoulder and arm.
The shower is a very tight space. The sides and ceiling of the shower are covered in lackluster puke-green tile. There’s a bit of mold growing here and there. The scrawny guy with the deathly pallor and sallow skin is staring blankly at the back of the bland dismal shower. He’s just standing there. He’s not moving. He’s not saying anything. He’s silent. He stares in empty abstraction at the depressing back wall of the close shower space. Sybil can see steam rising from the hot shower water, but she cannot hear a single sound.
Next, the sickly fellow is standing in front of a mirror. The shower is turned off but now Sybil can hear water dripping, like a leaky faucet. The irritating noise echoes hollowly off the bare walls of the small bathroom. Drip, drip, drip, drip - it’s driving her crazy. His hair is still wet. He just stands there mindlessly looking at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Then he’s in a hallway standing right outside a door. The door has the number ‘13’ on it in tarnished brass numerals. A male and a female walk briskly by. They are dressed in heavy coats and woolen hats. They are speaking quietly to each other in a language she can’t understand; it sounds like French or maybe Russian. The couple in no way acknowledge the presence of the scrawny sickly guy. He stands there gazing straight ahead until they pass.
Next, he’s standing just outside a tall mundane building. There are a few stone steps leading up to the double glass doors of the bulky structure which somehow seems forbidding. There’s snow on the steps and on the sidewalk where the sickly fellow is standing. He is himself dressed in a heavy overcoat and a woolen hat. There’s almost no one else on the sidewalk. The sky overhead is cold and gray. A nondescript car rolls by on the street. Sybil can’t determine the year, the make, the model, or even the color of the car. She can hear the engine rumbling and she can hear the tires hissing along the damp street. She sees the tires of the car as they slosh through a clumpy pile of snow near the curb. The snow is dark brown and dirty looking - a muddy icy slush. The sickly fellow is just standing there, staring blankly across the street.
Then he’s at a public park. It must be a public park because there are gray tenement buildings looming in the background. Only a few trees in the park and they are all stark masses of barren twisted branches. Ice and snow - Sybil sees ice and snow. At first she thinks the sickly guy is all alone at the park, but then she sees a small pond which is frozen over solid. A little child bundled in heavy clothing and a blood-red scarf is clumsily skating alone on the ice in the middle of the pond. The child falls down and begins screaming bloody murder. Two adults skate over to the child. They pick the child up off the ice and skate to the far side of the pond. Sybil loses sight of them in the snow flurries which have begun falling. The flurries are falling heavier - a snow storm, a blizzard.
Then the sickly guy is standing in line inside what resembles a government office. Maybe it’s a post office or maybe it’s some place where people wire money to each other. There’s only one other person in line. Someone is walking out the door. Sybil can hear the wind of the blizzard howling. The door closes and the howl softens to a muffled roar.
There’s a heavy square of green-tinted glass in the wall at which the person in front of the sickly guy is waiting. A speaker in the middle of the glass permits the voice of the person behind the glass to be heard. The person in front of the sickly guy says something in that odd language to the person behind the glass. The person behind the glass puts something in a drawer and pushes. A hatch under the glass partition opens and a drawer slides out. The person in front of the sickly guy takes whatever is in the drawer, turns, and walks out into the snowstorm. The drawer closes.
The sickly guy is all alone in the small empty waiting room. Walls of old cheap wood paneling issue a stale odor of hopelessness. A few blank forms are stacked in an open box on a narrow dingy Formica counter along one wall. A worn ragged pen is lying beside the box of blank forms. There are no chairs. Opposite the dingy Formica counter, a section of the wall paneling opens. It is a concealed door. A tall stern-faced man in a HAZMAT suit walks from the darkened room behind the concealed door, gives Sybil an angry look, then exits the building disappearing into the cold obscurity of the tempestuous iron-gray blizzard. It will be night soon. The the concealed door in the paneling of the wall closes but before it does Sybil catches a glimpse of an unconscious woman lying on a medical examining table under a surgical lamp. Gray-skinned creatures with oblate craniums and large dark almond-shaped eyes appear to be doing something to the helpless woman.
The sickly guy is staring at the person behind the glass partition, but he doesn’t move forward to talk through the speaker. Then Sybil gets a good look at the person behind the glass. The familiar voice from the past calls her name. She wakes up. It’s exactly thirteen minutes after midnight. Sybil can never remember who she saw behind the heavy green-tinted glass.
The Lost Channel
A Novel of Stark Raving Horror
Written by
Sean Terrence Best
A recurring nightmare is, by its very disturbing nature, always the same; and for Sybil it unfailingly begins in the smothering claustrophobia of a tightly cramped space. The location is a construction site at night. In choking terror, Sybil finds herself at the bottom of a deep cylindrical hole which has been drilled into the hard earth by an enormous auger for the insertion of a huge precast steel-reinforced concrete piling. The diameter of the hole is such that Sybil cannot fully extend her arms. She tilts her head back and shouts up for help, but the noise of heavy equipment totally drowns out her voice. Gravel and bits of sandy debris are falling down the dark shaft into her face. Sybil gets something in her eye. She lowers her head in stinging pain.
Then everything is suddenly quiet. Her eye stops hurting. She cautiously looks around seeing nothing but total darkness. In the distance, a dull blue light materializes out of the utter gloom. There’s a voice. It’s the voice of a man. She thinks she recognizes the voice from her past, but isn’t sure. The voice asks her a question.
“Have you ever listened to the ticktock of a wind up clock?”
Sybil nods her head “Yes.”
“Then you know that the second hand ticks out sixty beats per minute.”
She nods.
“Do you know the human at rest heart rate?”
Sybil motions “No” with her head.
“Sixty beats per minute.”
She does not respond.
“Do you know what the tempo is for Stars and Stripes Forever? It’s a march composed by John Philips Sousa. Do you know it?”
She does not respond.
“The tempo is 120 beats per minute which is exactly twice the aforementioned human pulse when at rest, which also means that by using a ticktock clock or a human heart as a metronome, one can hum the melody of Stars and Stripes Forever in perfect time. It is this way for all marches - military, Fourth of July Parade, etc. The old Roman standard for a funeral march is sixty beats per minute - exactly the same as the at rest human pulse. Earth time is based on the rotation of the planet which means that the second hand of a clock is based on Earth’s rotation on its axis. How can the human heart rest rate exactly match the number of seconds in a minute, and what does it have to do with combat or civic pride or death? How is it that the menstrual cycle of the human female corresponds with the lunar cycle of Earth’s moon? Do you not find it unsettling that such fundamental biological patterns match up so precisely with celestial phenomena? How can this possibly happen in random nature? How can the human heart and the human reproductive cycle be so accurately coordinated with the rotation of a planet on its axis and the lunar phases of its moon? Why is there only one moon and why does that moon have a human face on it as viewed with the naked eye from Earth?”
It is at this point in the recurrent bad dream that Sybil sees the scrawny pale-skinned man with oily dark hair. His complexion is sallow; a pitiful corpse-like pallor. His cheeks are sunken into deep dark pits and marred with ugly blue-gray blotches. His eyes are sunken into shadowed gray-blue hollows. Sybil can only see him from the waist up. He is wearing a slightly soiled bone-white T-shirt. He is standing in a drab kitchen. The walls are a barren egg-shell white stained with the grime of many years. The scrawny man’s age is unknown to Sybil. She would place him in his forties, but sickly as he is she finds him difficult to judge.
He is alone. Sybil doesn’t understand where she is or how she is seeing him. He doesn’t seem to know she is watching. She is quiet. He is quiet. Everything is stone cold silence. He’s gazing blankly down at generic-label chicken noodle soup as it slowly bubbles like yellow greasy goo in a small sauce pot on the coil burner of a bland dirty off-white stove top. On a bald counter beside the stove, a hand-crank can opener lies next to an empty can. Upon the stove there is also a plain white teakettle. The teakettle is dented; the ghostly white enamel is scratched. Sybil can see steam escaping as the water in the kettle boils but she cannot hear the shrill noise of the whistle. All is dead silence.
A plain white teacup sits on a plain white saucer. They look to be from an old set. They are smudged and cracked from years of repeated use. The white string from a white teabag is drooping down the side of the cup. For a moment she sees a closeup of the tea kettle whence she watches as the steaming water pours from the spout filling the empty white cup. The teabag floats, then slowly sinks and the hot clear water begins to turn amber from the steeping tea leaves.
Sybil experiences missing time. An empty soup bowl with a bit of cold soup in the bottom now sits on a small round table in the center of the cramped dismal kitchen. There’s a spoon in the bowl. The spoon is covered with greasy residue from the soup. The teacup is nearby. The teacup is empty except for the stain of tea.
Then she sees a plain bathroom with faded sad blue paint. The walls are barren; no framed paintings, no adornments or decoration of any kind. In some spots the insipid paint is flaking off the walls. She hears a commode flush, then shower water is running. The shower water is spraying on one shoulder of the pale-skinned sickly-looking fellow. He is standing sideways in the shower so that the water is not landing on his front or his back, but spraying down on his left shoulder and arm.
The shower is a very tight space. The sides and ceiling of the shower are covered in lackluster puke-green tile. There’s a bit of mold growing here and there. The scrawny guy with the deathly pallor and sallow skin is staring blankly at the back of the bland dismal shower. He’s just standing there. He’s not moving. He’s not saying anything. He’s silent. He stares in empty abstraction at the depressing back wall of the close shower space. Sybil can see steam rising from the hot shower water, but she cannot hear a single sound.
Next, the sickly fellow is standing in front of a mirror. The shower is turned off but now Sybil can hear water dripping, like a leaky faucet. The irritating noise echoes hollowly off the bare walls of the small bathroom. Drip, drip, drip, drip - it’s driving her crazy. His hair is still wet. He just stands there mindlessly looking at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Then he’s in a hallway standing right outside a door. The door has the number ‘13’ on it in tarnished brass numerals. A male and a female walk briskly by. They are dressed in heavy coats and woolen hats. They are speaking quietly to each other in a language she can’t understand; it sounds like French or maybe Russian. The couple in no way acknowledge the presence of the scrawny sickly guy. He stands there gazing straight ahead until they pass.
Next, he’s standing just outside a tall mundane building. There are a few stone steps leading up to the double glass doors of the bulky structure which somehow seems forbidding. There’s snow on the steps and on the sidewalk where the sickly fellow is standing. He is himself dressed in a heavy overcoat and a woolen hat. There’s almost no one else on the sidewalk. The sky overhead is cold and gray. A nondescript car rolls by on the street. Sybil can’t determine the year, the make, the model, or even the color of the car. She can hear the engine rumbling and she can hear the tires hissing along the damp street. She sees the tires of the car as they slosh through a clumpy pile of snow near the curb. The snow is dark brown and dirty looking - a muddy icy slush. The sickly fellow is just standing there, staring blankly across the street.
Then he’s at a public park. It must be a public park because there are gray tenement buildings looming in the background. Only a few trees in the park and they are all stark masses of barren twisted branches. Ice and snow - Sybil sees ice and snow. At first she thinks the sickly guy is all alone at the park, but then she sees a small pond which is frozen over solid. A little child bundled in heavy clothing and a blood-red scarf is clumsily skating alone on the ice in the middle of the pond. The child falls down and begins screaming bloody murder. Two adults skate over to the child. They pick the child up off the ice and skate to the far side of the pond. Sybil loses sight of them in the snow flurries which have begun falling. The flurries are falling heavier - a snow storm, a blizzard.
Then the sickly guy is standing in line inside what resembles a government office. Maybe it’s a post office or maybe it’s some place where people wire money to each other. There’s only one other person in line. Someone is walking out the door. Sybil can hear the wind of the blizzard howling. The door closes and the howl softens to a muffled roar.
There’s a heavy square of green-tinted glass in the wall at which the person in front of the sickly guy is waiting. A speaker in the middle of the glass permits the voice of the person behind the glass to be heard. The person in front of the sickly guy says something in that odd language to the person behind the glass. The person behind the glass puts something in a drawer and pushes. A hatch under the glass partition opens and a drawer slides out. The person in front of the sickly guy takes whatever is in the drawer, turns, and walks out into the snowstorm. The drawer closes.
The sickly guy is all alone in the small empty waiting room. Walls of old cheap wood paneling issue a stale odor of hopelessness. A few blank forms are stacked in an open box on a narrow dingy Formica counter along one wall. A worn ragged pen is lying beside the box of blank forms. There are no chairs. Opposite the dingy Formica counter, a section of the wall paneling opens. It is a concealed door. A tall stern-faced man in a HAZMAT suit walks from the darkened room behind the concealed door, gives Sybil an angry look, then exits the building disappearing into the cold obscurity of the tempestuous iron-gray blizzard. It will be night soon. The the concealed door in the paneling of the wall closes but before it does Sybil catches a glimpse of an unconscious woman lying on a medical examining table under a surgical lamp. Gray-skinned creatures with oblate craniums and large dark almond-shaped eyes appear to be doing something to the helpless woman.
The sickly guy is staring at the person behind the glass partition, but he doesn’t move forward to talk through the speaker. Then Sybil gets a good look at the person behind the glass. The familiar voice from the past calls her name. She wakes up. It’s exactly thirteen minutes after midnight. Sybil can never remember who she saw behind the heavy green-tinted glass.
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