The Cosmic Account

Whenever I see an object while I am out in the world, I often wonder about its story. It might be something as simple as a pen, a note written by a school kid, or even money. Random shoes that seem to appear from nowhere are the most common, but it could be anything. It’s also part of why I began a life as a urbexer. Exploring a deserted house or factory led me to hours of discovery. While exploring the clubhouse on an abandoned golf course, I found it held a large stack of tournament pins and a photo album filled with photos of people whom I would never know. However, I can make up a story for them that may or may not be close to their reality. A few weeks ago, one of my finds was an amazingly easy story. It was a scratch ticket that netted me $20,000 and a few months' leave of absence from work.

Most treasures can easily be identified, and their purpose worked out. Rarely though something will come along that stumps my imagination. I was in an old steel factory that had been closed for over a decade when I came across something unusual. It turned out to be a notebook. Now, you might think a notebook isn’t very strange, but there were two things that made it strange. First, it was laying on the floor in the middle of the factory with nothing at all near it. Second, it looked brand new.

It was black and expensive looking, like the ones writers and artists are prone to use. I leaned over to pick it up, the cover feeling cool to the touch, and my imagination started to form a picture of a young person writing poetry. Opening the cover, I saw it had never been used by anybody. The notebook went into my backpack and I finished exploring the building, but I found no further treasures.

When I arrived home, I took the notebook out again and wondered what I might use it for. I sat at the kitchen table thinking, but the faint sound of whistling became a distraction. I began to make dinner and pasta was on the menu. Look in my pantry and you would see a lot of packets of different pasta forms. This time it was spaghetti, however.

I sat down to eat and reaching for salt my hand jerked back in pain like there must have been a sharp edge on the shaker. I checked my finger but there was no evidence of a cut. The food tasted bland, so I added parmesan to the food, but it only took more flavor away. It seemed pointless to keep forcing myself to eat so I cleaned up. I was standing at the sink cleaning my dishes when I thought I spotted a flash of light in the back yard. Stepping to the door, I tried the knob, but it wouldn’t open. No matter how hard I turned the deadbolt. I watched the backyard through the window, but no more flashes came. I’d need to look at the lock in the morning.

I made tea, moved to the living room and settled on the couch to try to find something on the TV to occupy my mind. A nature show appeared when the screen lit up. There were two animals I could not name scrounging for food on a darkened landscape. The program gave me an eerie sense because of there being no narrative of what type of animals these were or what they were doing. I sipped my tea and instantly spit it out. The tea tasted rancid and very bitter. Changing channels, the scene shifted to a street view. Cars moved down the street and pedestrians walked past the camera. Again, there was no narrator, no sound but the faint sound of the traffic.

Somewhere in the house I could just barely hear people talking. Grabbing the broom from the kitchen, I disconnected the handle from the head and went upstairs to investigate. I called out, asking if anyone was there and thought I heard someone moving. I surveyed my bedroom but saw nothing. I was surprised by a voice behind me, and as I turned to confront who it was my head hit the door frame and I fell to the ground, my vision getting hazy. I don’t know just how long I lay there but more voices caught my attention. Bits and pieces of their conversation struck me with some clarity. ‘He’s not meant to be home’ ‘get rid of him.’ These were a couple of things I could make out.

I sat up to get my bearings and saw the black notebook on the floor in front of me. I gathered it up, stood and slowly went downstairs. The front door was now open, and I bolted through the opening, trying to escape whoever was in my house. The night air felt cool against my face and as I ran the world seemed to close on me. The direction I ran brought me to a conservation area and I plunged into the forest without slowing. The density of the forest increased; my clothes became entangled. The breeze rustling the leaves sounded like whispers to my ears. Those whispers trying to tempt me to surrender to their will. Struggling was useless to me. The more I twisted the tighter the trees held me in place, the whispers begging me to sleep. The adrenaline I felt while I had run subsided, and my consciousness began to fade. As my eyes finally closed an eerie visage smiled down at me and told me I would find peace now.

As I woke up, I felt the branches still hold me to the ground. The silence surrounding me was unnerving. Surely in the middle of the woods in the middle of the day there would have to be some sounds of nature. My eyes were adapting to the bright light and I realized I was no longer in the woods. What I noticed was blank, off-white walls and a door with no knob. In the corner of the ceiling was a camera pointed at the bed I lay in. Looking down at myself, I saw my hands had been tied down with restraints that I recognized from countless films. I knew now I was in a hospital of some sort and was restrained so I wouldn’t hurt myself. I heard a small chime, the door swung inward and a tall man wearing a doctor’s coat walked into the room.

“Hello Mr. Rutherford. I am Dr. Scott. How do you feel?”

“I, I think all right, I guess. Tired, confused and sore.”

“That isn’t irrational considering the weekend you’ve had. I’d like to have someone free you from your restraints and talk to you in my office about what you’ve been through. Do you feel you’re up for that?”

“Absolutely,” I responded, relieved. I had been thinking they might keep me in these restraints for a while and it had made me uncomfortable.

Someone did come and set me free of my bindings. I started to protest when they wanted to help me into a wheelchair but relented when I found I lacked the strength to sit up properly. The wheelchair was pushed out of the room and down a long hall, passing a desk where a few people chatted. Arriving at Dr. Scott’s office he thanked the attendant who helped me and smiled as his attention focused on me.

“I would like to start with a couple of questions,” he said. “Can I ask, do you drink alcohol or use drugs Mr. Rutherford? If so, did you partake before you went to the steel factory on Friday?”

His question bothered me at first, but I didn’t know why.

“I do drink beer. Usually one or two while I’m watching the hockey game, but I don’t do drugs. I had no beer before I went to the plant though. I like to keep a level head when I’m exploring because it can be hazardous enough without being impaired by alcohol.”

“Yes, well your blood tests confirm that. No traces of substance in your system.”

It suddenly struck me what bothered me about his question.

“Why did you raise the question like that? On Friday? How long have I been here?”

“You were brought in last night. What day do you believe it is?”

“If I’ve only stayed here overnight it must be Saturday. The visit to the steel mill was the same day as my attack.”

“Mr. Rutherford, can you tell me the sequence of events from the time you entered the steel plant?”

I ran through the entire day starting with entering the factory and ending up blacking out in the forest. I knew most of what I had experienced before I blacked out was not real, but the doctor’s expression said there was more to it than just hallucinations.

“I’m afraid I need to tell you that it is currently Tuesday morning. Even more difficult is that almost none of what you believed happened is accurate. You were found at the plant last night after spending three days there. The building will be developed into a new business, so the developers installed cameras a few weeks ago. They aren’t worried about theft as everything of value has been gone since the plant shut down. However, some unscrupulous people get a kick out of setting fires and they obviously want to avoid that. I want to show you some of the recordings they found when they reviewed the footage yesterday morning after they came in.”

There was a large screen hanging on his office wall. He tapped something into his computer on the desk, the screen came on and the picture he displayed was me climbing through a hole in the wall at the rear loading dock. I watched myself walking through the plant, things happening as I had remembered them. Until I found the black book. What I recall was finding the book, opening it and then continuing to explore. The footage showed something quite different. I sat for over half an hour staring at the open book, not moving. I saw myself then closing the book, getting up slowly and walking around the plant as if I was in a daze.

The rest of the footage jumped multiple times to show my various activities over the weekend I spent there, and much of it horrifyingly explained my hallucinations. The spaghetti I had made was really just me collecting worms to eat. The salt was a pile of finely smashed glass, the parmesan was insulation. What I thought was tea was actually dirty water that had gathered in an old barrel. The tv shows I watched turned out to be two rats eating the sandwich I had brought with me to eat. The attack was two urbexers, one of which hit me when I ran at them with a piece of rebar. The last piece of footage was the paramedics loading me on a stretcher and taking me out of the plant. My guess is that the escape from the house and running was the trip to the hospital in the ambulance. The trees grabbing me and not letting go was the restraints placed on me at the hospital.

I turned back to the doctor and saw he had the book in his hand.

“This was one of the constants throughout the whole weekend. You never once let go of this and you regularly opened it to stare at for minutes at a time.” He opened the cover. “You haven’t even written anything in....”

“Dr. Scott? Are you OK?”

I leaned over and saw that he was not. His eyes were vacant and no matter how loud I screamed he would not look away from the book. I think it claimed another victim.