My Unique Talent

by John Nyman

Throughout my whole life I had been a pretty laid-back guy. Coasted through school, took a quick college degree, the works; that was me. It was no problem though; I made my way through life as well as anyone else. I was trying to make it as a magician, and occasionally I would get invited to work at children’s parties and the like; I usually read minds. It was a strange talent, I’ll admit, but I had quite a knack for it. Sometimes, I was given brief flashes into another person’s mind, a perfect view of their thoughts in one moment; all I needed to put on a good show and impress a few kids.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make a living off of my charisma and my unique talent alone, so I took odd jobs where I found the time. My most recent stint was at a graveyard, actually. It was a day job though, so I had no worries, just helping to prepare the gravesites was what I did. All in all, it was simple, honest, and well-paying work, but I never could have predicted what it did to me in the end.

About a week into the job I was out in the graveyard on a hot, sunny day. The yard was a surprisingly peaceful place to work, with nobody around except for a few families or individuals paying their respects to the dearly departed; it was the perfect environment for me to get my work done in. After a reasonable period of labour I decided to take a short break, and grabbed a piece of cloth to wipe the sweat off my forehead. In doing so I closed my eyes, enjoying the cool relief. Suddenly though, the bright red spots blurring my closed eyelids disappeared to become a mat black, and I felt a shiver run through me. It was a cold shiver, a chill that rang with the bite of a cold dormant winter, and, alarmed, I opened my eyes immediately, quickly bringing the cloth away from my face. I was stunned, but the shock wore off after a few more minutes of rest, and I continued my work.

My work continued normally as the sun moved through the sky, however, later in the day, as I took a short break, I felt the chill again. This time it was longer, and more painful, digging into the skin on my arms and legs like frostbite, while my eyes remained helplessly affixed to the deep blackness of my inner eyelids, unable to open during the duration of my blink. As they squirmed to open up, I felt goose bumps rise up from my arms and legs against the cold chill, yet, when my eyes finally did open, they were staring across the field into the bright setting sun, and my limbs were lined only in the sweat of my sweltering skin.

After work I asked my boss about the strange occurrences, feeling just a little bit ashamed of being afraid of such things. I tried my best to explain the sudden chills, but somehow the descriptions just didn’t come out right; there was something so much more shocking to them than could be described. Regardless, my boss, a short, aging man who had likely heard his share of ghost stories, was sympathetic. “Son,” he said, “It’s only natural to be at least a little off edge when you start out here, just focus on your work and the chills will go away.” He was confident, yet I was not. As I left the yard at the end of the day, I realized I had neglected to tell him about my “unique talent,” and, when considering it, a horrifying thought that I could barely comprehend flashed across my mind.

At first it appeared as though my boss’s assumptions had been right. For a few days after I spoke with him I was not bothered by the strange chills. However, this bliss soon ended abruptly. Four days after the day I had spoken to my boss, I began to feel more of the chills in the early afternoon, near the beginning of my shift. They were as the others had been; brief feelings of utter coldness and fear, with my eyes locked shut, unable to determine the cause of the sudden temperature change until the blink would finally end. The feeling was more than a simple drop in temperature though; it was a tight grip, and a horrifying sense of helplessness, imprisonment.

By about midway through my shift, after the chills engulfed me several times, they had begun to put me on edge. I began to consider them more, and fear them, holding my eyes open while I worked to avoid them. However, as I attempted to further evade the horrifying moments, their frequency increased throughout the day, striking further discomfort into my floundering mind. Near the end of the afternoon while I was working, and trying particularly hard to not close my eyelids, a flurry of dust blew into my eyes, causing me to close them abruptly. Suddenly, I was again transported into the view that carried the cold grip. I felt it surrounding me, biting every part of my helpless body. Further, it carried with it a cold ooze, a moving slime that embraced me fully, irritating me as it squirmed slowly over and around my leathery skin. With an indescribable passion I desired to jerk my muscles in unison and destroy the intruding force, yet, as my eyes remained staring bleakly into the close blackness, I couldn’t move my limbs to destroy the slime. As I struggled I eventually realized that my eyes had opened, having cast out the dust that irritated them, and I found myself back under the afternoon sun. Alarmed, I quickly finished work and went home.

That night, as I slept alone in my apartment, I was taken to the world of dreams I so often found myself in at night. In my bed I shuffled around with my various unrecalled thoughts, until at one point I halted my movement. I was lying on my back staring straight upwards, with my hands pressed stiffly to my sides and my legs stuck stiffly flat on the mattress. In my dreams I again felt the terrifying coldness grip my lifeless limbs. In my conscious I flailed and floundered against the horrible chill, yet as much as my mind desired it my muscles would not move at all. My eyes remained closed throughout the ordeal, unable to see the force that slowly crept over me, engulfing me, and irritating my dead skin to the verge of insanity. I was pressed on all sides, encased in the cold cage of the crypt, buried lifeless underground. I was Carl Williams, three years dead and buried at the graveyard, void of all life except for the one immaterial spark of conscious that still held enough power to be explored by my unique talent.

I jumped up in my bed, screaming, then blinked, and found myself again within the corpse’s lifeless mind, struggling against the horror of the grave. When my eyelids shot open again I was back in my bedroom. Consumed with fear and the insanity brought on by my visions, I irrationally decided that there was only one thing I could do. I quickly put on a jacket and shoes and left my apartment, running frantically down the sidewalks towards the graveyard. I was consumed in fear, finding myself trapped underground with every blink, and ran with the force and iron will of a madman towards my grim destination.

Upon reaching the graveyard, cold and desolate under the full moon, I ran down the rows of gravestones searching out the name of my blinks’ captor. I found the name; Carl Williams, posted solemnly on one of the headstones, and upon blinking found myself again inside the forgotten body that rotted under the monument. Engulfed with insanity as powerful as the cold touch of death that gripped Carl, I grabbed a shovel and began to dig with the full strength of my will. I toiled under the midnight moon for hours of the night, phasing in and out between the horrible prison of the grave and the surreal conscious of an insane grave robber. Finally, I reached the coffin, and lifted it with all of my strength out of the cold ground, feeling my dead body jerk with every moment I closed my feeble eyes.

Striving to complete my work, I struck the coffin many times to open it, and in my moments of darkness, I could feel through my dead nerves the tomb shaking around me, longing for the forgotten touch of the outside world. Finally, the coffin broke open with an incredible crash, and upon seeing the gruesome face of the cadaver before me, I fell backwards as though pushed by a great wind, my eyes writhing shut. Again shifting to the world of the corpse, I sensed, at long last, the cool summer wind blowing through my wrinkled skin, carrying away the stale filth and slime that had gripped me during my three year stay in the crypt. The fresh air stroked me with an inconceivable pleasure, renewing the biological matter in my skin and embracing me with the strength of its natural origins. Slowly, I opened my eyelids, and looked up through the hole in the dank coffin at the bright moon in the night sky, illuminating the clouds that shifted overhead. I was free, free from the constant grip of the grave, and, satisfied at last and clear of mind, I dashed quickly back to my apartment, never to return again to the graveyard.