What Lies Behind The Veil?

What Lies Behind The Veil

I have been here before, this territory is familiar. I don't remember the last time that I even blinked. Things have been going as planned lately, but capriciousness is the norm.

I swallowed a half gram last night, and things went fine. Another half gram tonight shouldn't cause any problems, or so I thought. As the near instantaneous euphoria begins to accelerate into confusion I begin to realize that tonight will be one that I will only wish that I could forget.

I am aggrivated that I can not concentrate on the things that bring me so much pleasure. I used to be able to meditate on those things for several days at a time without rest. I can only recapture those rapturous moments in a too fleeting facsimile of the way things were.

I am living in the countryside about 40 miles east of Dallas. There is a rather large wooded area spanning perhaps a few thousand acres, and King's creek nearby. I have prowled these areas for years.

Things are beyond my control and I am making the final descent very quickly. I look to the rosary suspended from my ceiling fan for comfort. A voice from beyond tells me, "Pay close attention now."

The coyotes have began to yip and howl; the howls are as the voices of the damned screaming in torment, the yips are a mixture of curses and satanic laughter from unseen tormenters. I am drinking as I write this, the memory is as an open wound. I seek exorcism.

At times I have heard screams coming from the woods. They sound like a woman in a horror film, but these are much too authentic to my ears. Years ago there was a girl in the house with me at a very late hour and she heard them too. The girl told me that it was a bobcat, or even a cougar. She begged me to stay inside.

There is an abandoned house that is barely visible in the daylight hours. A couple of hundred yards to the left is an old cabin, obscured from sight by the trees. I worry that the sounds might be ghosts. It is much too frightening to question the activities of the neighbors. What bothers me the most is that no one but the girl will admit to ever having heard anything.

I am making a common mistake; I am listening to the radio. A voice, perhaps on a commmercial, says something about checking voice messages. Now I will have to check mine. There are several messages from one friend, and one from another. They are all vaugue, bizarre, and ambiguous. I suspect them all of having hidden meanings. I save them, and then the phone refuses to play them again for me. This is unexplainable, and I fear what could be behind it all.

My connection told me earlier, "Todd, don't go creapin' in the woods tonight,"but I am outside now. As I walk down the road there are four sharp raps against a pole. I believe that it is a signal of some kind. I refuse to acknowledge whatever it is, and go back inside quickly.

There are demons in the walls and the attic, and it takes all the self control that I have left to keep from going up there. Every light reflecting surface keeps me distracted with the kaliedescope images I see emanating from them.

An hour or two later it is still night and I am perhaps 50 miles away sitting in the parking lot of a conveinience store near an interstate. The employees there are kind to tolerate my presence. I have prayed for vision, and a reflection whose source I can not account for shows a cross in the display of my cell phone.

The girl has a third party to call me and tell me that she is trying to find me. I am amazed at her intuition. She wants to come and get me. She wants me to come and stay with her.

I begin to walk. I stop and rest for a while underneath a bridge because I know that no one will bother me there. It is mid-morning now and I am infuriated because I have lost the phone. How am I going to get back in touch with the girl? God, I have decided, doesn't want me to live with her again.

There is a restaraunt with a bar and beautiful young waitresses up ahead. I am in no condition to flirt, but alcohol is a chemical saviour when I feel this way. It is nearly closing time now, and I don't know where the time has gone. The police officers who woke me from my sleep on the counter didn't wonder at all.

Map Data - Terms of Use

Map

Coming Home To Roost

The conditions at the Lancaster, Desoto, Cedar Hill city jail are an abomination. I don't know why that I have been placed into the medical tank, but I know that no one here cares for it's human contents in the least. Dallas county jail gets a bad rap, this one is far worse.

Dirt and refuse of indeterminate origin are piled in every corner. I wonder just how long it took for all of this to accumulate. No one here is allowed to take a shower or so much as brush their teeth untile they have earned the "privilidge" with 3 days of confinement.

There is a man who had been addicted to pain pills trying to sleep nearby. As he raises himself from a fitful rest he askes a jailer to please bring him his methadone. He is going into withdrawls now, and he is covered in a cold sweat. The jailer assures him that he will get it for him. We find out later that the jailer's shift was over about 30 minutes after the desperate request was made. He never cared. The sick, arrested man is here because of a clerical error. He has never been to jail before. The pain pill addiction was the result of a work related injury years before. Here, he may as well be a murderer.

There is no toilet tissue in the cell, and after an hour of hitting the panic button on the wall someone finally asks us what the problem is. If there had been an actual medical emergency there would surely be a corpse in my tank now. The fact that the front of our cell is in view of the front desk doesn't seem to have helped at all. I believe that God puts me in these situations for some kind of reason. Man's inhumanity to his fellow man, I think, is greater in the death penalty state.

I realize that I live in a country that imprisons a greater percentage of it's population than any other in the world. My dreams of moving to Canada, or perhaps some Western European nation are revived.

I remember a friend once told me that the pen is mightier than the sword. Following that line of reasoning, the internet is as powerful as an atomic bomb.