The curse of Chiko
Forgotten Birthday
All human beings want to be recognized. Validated. And assured that
they are indeed human. That they are indeed wanted. And that they are
stupendously awarded for tolerating the curse that is the modern world.
However, not everyone is so able to count their many blessings. The
world is
a cursed place and human beings are unfortunately subject to the same trials, struggles and
tribulations that any living, sentient being must endure. The very idea that the person they are
meant to be and the person they are doomed to become, might not be the same person.
Regardless, humans continue to live in triumphant
defiance to the notion of laying down and simply taking it. Human life
is fragile and in the past, it had become scarce. Now that humans are
plenty, they have undergone a serious metamorphosis. Now it is a world
where everyone is afraid of being unique, for being unique is abnormal.
In a world of many nobodies, those who are somebodies, in turn are
ostracized. Yet, the world still celebrates the individual. And in this
sea of collective thinking, there is indeed the haunting of the
individual spirit that has been long suppressed.
Birthdays are memorials for the death of one year
and the birth of another, alive on this Earth. A ritual that is best
celebrated in youth, when life has less challenges and painful thorns
to navigate. Life for a youth is a rose of wondrous anticipation. In
adulthood, the ritual becomes one of dread. And that dread gives birth
to an entirely new beast - the ultimate antithesis to birthdays and the
love of life. For it is not even the yearning of death, for death is a
close cousin of life. No, the opposite is the apathy of life itself and
a disregard for the purpose of living.
Mati had rigorously scoured over every occultic book
she could find and muster. Having long since inherited the library of
her long dead and cursed professor and idol… she had nothing but
an endless source of esoteric literature. But what was this curse? To
see the image of this wretched, evil boy, that frequently haunted her
dreams in the last years? No sources had actually come through at all.
At one point, Mati actually considered there not to be a supernatural
cause to this at all, but entirely a health related one. Sleep
Paralysis.
Yet, it was on the most somber of evenings, in one
of the most dark of nights, that she had been awoken by an eerie
presence in her room. She did not need to force herself awake, the
anxious terror of this presence had actually stabbed her heart with
adrenaline and now she fixated endlessly on the door of her apartment.
One that had only recently been adorned with a peep-hole to determine
who was visiting.
Dismayed by the presence of something clearly far
from human and far from the typical paranormal that she was familiar
with, Mati had to steel herself and prepare mentally for the journey to
the door. Sid was fast asleep and utterly engulfed in similar occultic
literature all around him. He resided on the floor, stubbornly,
surrounded in an accidental-fort of esoteric constructions.
The burden of seeing beyond this door, to peek
beyond the veil of all sane things, that was on Mati and Mati alone.
With a nervous sweat coating her entire body, a perspiration birthed of
pure, salty and nude fear - there was nothing else she could do but
accept the lack of mercy in her situation. She brought her eye toward
the looking hole and saw beyond the darkness of the room.
The hallway was unoccupied. A static hallway,
completely and utterly bare of any and all existence. It was something
out of a ghost story. A knock with no one to answer to. Yet, she could
still feel the disembodied, invisible presence of something on the
other side. She could not differentiate its ghostly, labored breathing
from her own. Was this a dream or the cursed reality that she was
forced to reside in forever more?
For now, all she could do was enter the bathroom and
seek out some cold water to drink from the faucet. Once her dry, itchy
throat was quenched, she lightly let the ice-cold trinkle of water
bathe her wrists. It was a nice, yet nearly painful sensation. But it
did succeed in its ultimate purpose - it had cooled her body and
allowed her mind, which burned red hot with anxiousness, to ease as
well.
But that ominous presence still remained. Every part
of her wished to rest and sleep, to hide away from it by the safety of
her covers. To be buried in the comfort of a bed, with a slumbering Sid
nearby, this would be enough to ‘ground’ her in reality,
would it not? Yet, any attempt to even stare at her bed had made her
frozen with inaction.
There was no escape from the alluring, magnetic pull
to the door. Finally, she forced her feet to step one at a time, toward
it again. Just in case there was someone there, Mati quickly pulled
together some clothes to hide her nudity. Somehow, this process
actually distracted her enough and the feeling of these textures
against her skin, it all reminded her that this was likely a symptom of
a sleep disorder. For indeed, she may sense a presence, but that did
not mean it was tangible. That it was there.
Clearly, this illusion of a presence was as physical
as a dream. It was just not as fleeting as a dream, more like a
recurring, habitual haunting of a nightmare that carved itself into the
grey matter with each passing night. Every electro-chemical reaction in
her brain would accidentally trace over this puzzle-piece shaped scar
of a memory. This sensation had no answer, no justification.
But she so wanted to investigate. Propelled by the
unnatural forces of cat-like curiosity, Mati braved herself once more
for a triumphant march to the door and to peek through the eye-hole.
Only when her toes had touched the cold, lifeless door briefly - did
she become entirely convinced that this was nothing at all. Just an odd
paranoia that had twisted the creative shadows of her mind’s
dazy, exhausted state.
It was only when she had embraced this ignorance,
that she saw the terrible truth before her - behind her door. She
peeped at the image of a grotesque creature. A humanoid boy, with
anchored fingers and an ominous, large head. The mouth was agape and
the eyes were devoid of anything that could have a spirit.
A boy. A ghost of a boy. A stylized character from a
terrible program, perhaps? No, this ghastly visage did stand in the
hall with focused, weary eyes devoid of all life. Mati’s stomach
felt revolted. Everything that had remained in her stomach from earlier
that night, had instantly become rotten. She felt her teeth chatter and
her heart was completely wrapped in tight bindings of panicked fear.
Was it a boy even? No, it was a girl, some terrible
mimicry of a girl. An illusion that perhaps an absent minded alien
would choose for a disguise, to at best - persaud a dog or some other
creature in lower sentience. It was not a person, Mati refused to
believe it. It was La Creatura. An entity far estranged from the
normalcy of the world. Even the world of even the most vile of magic
and ghosts or even demons.
A row of singular, even teeth, a buck of horrors -
emerged from the maw as it cooed open further. Disgusting, this imagery
had made Mati finally glance away. “No…” She tried
to convince herself that what was seen could not truly be real!
“No, it cannot be!” Mati had to confront this terror, lest
it haunted the hallway outside of her door for every night onward -
until the end of all time! Or at least until the end of the apartment
lease.
Her fingers failed to pinch the locks at first, the
panic had made it difficult for her to even see without having to blink
to restore her vision from blurriness. As her heart rate had reached
its maximum possible beat, it stilled as she finally opened the door.
There was nothing.
The old apartment complex had been recently
renovated. The traditional wooden flooring had a layer of plastic liner
that made one forget the stench of the rotten wood beneath. Barefoot
besides some socks, Mati wandered into the halls in search of any sign
of even the ambience of this nocturnal spirit.
Having resided on the second floor, she moved toward
the nearest stairwell, which bordered a perpendicular balcony that was
blocked with just a single glass door. Rain viciously pounded the panes
and soaked the balcony itself, which meant that the rain struck the
building at an odd angle.
“Rain on the balcony, like this? Is the rain
hitting the apartment complex sideways?!” It was, or rather, to
Mati’s terrible realization, the apartment complex itself was
maybe laid on its side and at the mercy of the drooling heavens above.
Outside, she could not see any hint of the city or the rurality that
was in between. The apartment complex was in a void of horizontal rain,
completely disjointed from the world.
“This has got to be a dream, it has got to
be!” Mati pounded her own temples with her fists. “It
always happens this time of year, it always happens!” Since she
was a little girl, as she
recalled. What was this demonic presence that haunted her since
adolescence? Some childish spirit that was but a manifestation of
frozen adolescence and all of its terrors?
Could it be a reflection of herself? The most shameful thing of all, an infantile ghost of the
person within. A lost childhood, manifested and given flesh by the rain?
Mati thundered down the stairs and to the first
floor, only to find a pair of wet footprints. Something had come from
the outside, from the horizontal storm of the void?
“What are you afraid of?” A voice that
may have been soft under any other circumstance, instead was a shrill
shriek that murdered the ambience of the rain outside that rattled the
otherwise deathly quiet apartment complex. Mati turned to see that the
voice came from the large-headed specter. “What are you afraid
of, it's your birthday!”
“It is not my birthday!” Mati screamed,
her hands brought together and then held defensively against her chest.
“It is not my birthday! I don’t have one!”
“Everyone has a birthday!” La Creatura
insisted. It wobbled with each step with the competence of a
drunkard’s stupor. Juvenile and childish. “Except for me! I
lost my birthday!”
“You lost… your birthday?” Mati
gulped. What did the apparition mean by this? “You just said
everyone had one!”
“Only those who remember it.” While the
face of La Creatura did not change, the voice was filled with a
bellowing sorrow. Like a tired, dying dog trapped at the bottom of a
well in the countryside. Barking for no tomorrow, with no one to rescue
it and with the rain gradually filling the stone-walls around it, as
the mud buried its paws. “No one remembered my birthday! And soon
I stopped remembering myself! And after that, my birthday stopped
coming!”
It stepped toward her again and water, murky, muddy, bloody
water slushed from the footwear. Nearer and nearer, it approached and
was utterly soggy. As if it had been a mascot suit, left in the rain.
“When the birthdays stopped being celebrated, I never got to grow
up! Each year passed and I stopped growing! But my spirit did. My soul
got older, colder and more full of … angry thoughts! But this
body didn’t grow, Mati!”
“How do… how do you know my
name?” She was afraid to ask, but Mati still mattered to
try.“How do you know me at all, why do you keep coming for me on
the nights before this day?”
“I want your birthday. Is there anything wrong
with that? I want to grow older again, I want my body to grow older
again and I want to be a big girl, just like you!” The terrible,
agape mouth managed to hide the internal frown that expressed this
sorrow. “My head got bigger and bigger, full of more and more
terrible thoughts. More and more diseased, horrible adult thoughts! But
now, my head is too big for this body… If anything, I need to
grow up to match my head or my little neck is going to snap!”
Mati shuttered at the thought, she imagined the
sound to be that of a bundle of branches being suddenly crushed with a
single, heavy woodsman’s boot. Just then, she shrieked as a flash
of lightning passed through every orifice of the apartment and painted
everything white, before the contrast of black settled in with a
resonating artillery-strike of thunder. Thunder so loud that it
battered her eardrums to the point they moistened.
“And if my neck snaps, Mati, then my head is
going to crack like an egg against the ground! And then all these bad,
terrible, evil thoughts are going to pour out into the world,
Mati!” La Creatura continued to taunt her, but to it, these were
genuine warnings. Doomsaying with a purpose. Mati could not listen any
further. She had slumped down to her knees on the floor and denied the
entire situation of its rightful existence. “Do you want to see
that, Mati? Do you have any idea at all of what has been hard-cooking
and set to a boil in this egg of a head of mine? It is some nasty
stuff, Mati, the stuff of nightmares - the kind that keeps the worst
people awake at night…”
“You’re not real! You’re just like a birthday,
you’re just a date on a calendar! You’re not
real!” Mati pounded her own head with her fists, as tears rushed
down her face like the rain outside that pounded the apartments so hard
- it was like a coalition of soldiers outside had aimed their rifles in
a volley attack against the infrastructure itself. Soon, the artillery
of more thunder and lightning would hit them again! “You’re
not real!” Mati insisted, as the soggy, wet hands of La Creatura
forcefully raised her tear-glazed eyes up to meet the dreaded slits of
the misshapen head.
“I’m real, Mati. I’m every
birthday you never hand. I’m the little girl that the world
stopped from growing up! I’m all your disgusting memories,
insecurities, depressive episodes and feelings of worthlessness -
chopped up, flattened into paper and then spitballed by your
brain!” La Creatura chuckled and coed. “You really thought
you could just forget about me like your own birthday? I’m every
bad day you will have for the rest of your life, every reason you find
to have an excuse not to smile, not to have friends, not to go out with
others. I am every bad justification that you make to keep this fragile
life of yours! I’m you, birthday girl! I’m-”
“Hey, birthday girl! Wake up, will ya?!”
Sid had to shake her awake. Mati let her eyes flicker open, the room
was somewhat dank with the scent of something other than her
perspiration and cold fear from the night terrors before. A smokey aura
floated from the kitchen like an elemental. “There you go! You
slept in again, ya always do this around this time of year. Ya lucky ya
gotta be a whole day late in order to miss a birthday!”
“Miss a birthday?” Confused, Mati asked
and then glanced toward the bare calendar that was pinned to the wall
just beside the living room, which was the bedroom of her and
Sid’s studio apartment, but also was connected immediately to the
kitchen. There was no distinctive marking of her own on the calendar,
but Sid had marked it with a star. With that star, it read: ‘A star is born!’ “My birthday… you remembered?”
“Of course, I remember every birthday of every
girl out there, bambina - but only the ones that matter, ya hear? A
girl’s birthday is a special thing, it means ya were born and
that the world was gracious enough to gift ya to us!” In his
small hands, was a very admirable attempt at a chocolate cake. It was
terrible! But the effort was there, full of love. It was merely a slice
for now, in the kitchen, a tray with the rest of the cake rested on top
of the stove. Remarkably, the cake slice was cut with surgical
precision. “Come on, ya gotta have a bite at the very least! It
was hard as all hell to try and make this without wakin’ ya up,
its been raining like a storm outside, even though its just noon, but
that musta hid some of the more embarrassin’ sounds!” There
was surely a lot of swearing involved in the making of this cake, Mati
could almost taste the vulgarities that floated along with the good
spirit behind it all.
“A cake… for me? For my birthday?” She blinked
again, skeptical as she took the plate and glanced it over with an
inspective, detective-like eye. “And you didn’t buy this at
a store or something? You really baked this here? Wow, Sid… did
you really cut this by yourself? It almost looks like an old 3d model
from a video game, it is so perfectly cut… I can almost count
the polygons on this thing!”
“Well, I did have some help!” A blushed Sid scratched at his neck and looked away.
Just then, the kitchen’s refrigerator closed
and none other than Cecilia was there. In her nun-clothes and a Church
approved apron with several apocalyptic quotes from Revelations on it.
The most prominent was:
Revelation 9:17 - ‘And this is how I saw the horses in my vision
and those who rode them: they wore breastplates the color of fire and
of sapphire and of sulfur, and the heads of the horses were like lions'
heads, and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths.’
Funny, that description of fire, smoke and sulfur
best described the condition of the stove, which still puffed small
bouts of smoke like a dragon.
“Cecilia?! Sid!? My-... my birthday is today!” She didn't even know why she cried.
But that day, the three had a very special birthday
celebration, one that would ensure Mati would never forget a birthday
again. And that this was a birthday never to be forgotten!
It was so good, that she did not even notice that the apartment complex was being pelted
with horizontal rain as it floated through the void.