Black Out

Carl booked a doctor’s appointment six months after the Thing started to get out of hand.

“It feels like there’s something growing inside of me.”

It fell out of him like a confession, as he sat flush-faced beside the doctor’s desk, staring at the safe handwashing guidelines poster.

The doctor typed, only his fingers showing signs of response. He leaned close to the computer screen, glasses shocked with electric white glare. The acrylic tapping of keys beat loud.

The monotone voice asked, “When did you start feeling like this?”

When had he? What had he noticed first?

“Ah … sometime last year? But I just think it’s getting worse lately. It feels different?”

“What feels different?”

“This—I don’t know, I have this pain in my gut that keeps coming back. It makes me really faint and sweaty like I’ve got a fever. I can’t figure out what’s causing it.”

Tap-taptap-tap. Tap.

“Lie down please, if you don’t mind.”

Carl obeyed. He climbed onto the bench and shifted around on the sticky paper sheet, squinting under the blinding ceiling light.

The doctor stood beside him, gingerly probed his fingers into the softness of Carl’s stomach. He traced the bottom of his ribs, a line down to his belly button, spreading out to his hips. Poke, poke, poke.

Out came the stethoscope. A curt “Do you mind?” before he lifted Carl’s shirt and folded it back onto his chest. The cold metal disc planted onto soft white flab. A pregnant pause. Carl felt his pulse pound in his head.

The doctor sighed, pulled the plugs from his ears and told Carl to sit up.

“It could be a food allergy.”

Carl blinked.

“Start a log of what you eat each day and note when symptoms occur. Come back in a couple of weeks if you’re still having issues and we’ll investigate further.”

---

Carl, in his dark cave bathed in blue from the computer screen after-hours, scrolled through the forum page to find yesterday’s post. Three new replies to his thread.

[spo0kymulder93]:
This feels weird to post but hoping somebody can help. I think there’s something very wrong, but don’t know what to do. Started ages ago but it’s been bad for the last six months and getting worse. There’s this pain in my gut, feels like hands strangling me from the inside. Never felt anything like it before. Seems to flare up every couple of weeks but I don’t know why? I wouldn’t usually ask online but I saw a doctor the other day and he didn’t help. Maybe food allergy apparently. Anyway hopefully someone has some ideas, cheers.

[reded1313]:
time for exorcist?

[inyourwardr0be]:
I had something similar. Would get so hungry and eat non-stop for days then pain would start. My sister made me see some woo-woo natural doctor. Made me drink some weird anti-inflammatory dirt smoothies, it did actually help a bit.

[empty_chair]:
there’s no point fighting it.

Carl leaned closer to the screen. He typed back, fingers hesitating over the keys.

[spo0kymulder93]:
What do you mean?

He re-read the comments and felt the warning niggle of a yawning ache in his belly. He closed the browser and went to bed.

---

Carl tracked his diet diligently for three weeks. The note in his phone grew rapidly longer with logs about mealtimes, toilet trips, lists of ingredients, occurrences of nuts and soy and how many times he ate gluten and how his stomach sometimes hurt after he ate bananas—was that relevant? He ate as usual, but tiptoed around his routine with a new awareness, a blind dread.

The Thing woke up again on Thursday afternoon. Carl was reading the label on the back of a cereal box in the breakfast aisle when a TV-static tingling switched on in his lower back. The clock had started.

He rushed his groceries through self-serve and had broken into a cold sweat by the time he pulled into his driveway. The tingling warmed and sharpened upward, a tight grabbing in his guts when he climbed out of the car. He hurried inside, dumped the cold stuff in the fridge and started pulling his clothes off as he stumbled down the hallway.

Carl had taken to sitting on the floor of the shower when It Happened. He discovered that if he only ran the hot tap, the scalding of his skin would help the pain. Or, rather, he would have something else to focus on. The strange turning and writhing in his gut worked away like an engine, some mechanical kneading of his organs. Steam clouded the bathroom and absorbed the ceiling. He parboiled for ten minutes, then shut off the water and crawled from the recess, lobster red and woozy. He tugged his towel from the rail and draped it across his hot body, dragged himself into his bedroom. Packs of painkillers now lived on his bedside table. Carl dry swallowed a handful—paracetamol, ibuprofen, an antihistamine for good measure. He sprawled on his bed, tangled in his towel, still burnt red but beading in a cold sweat, and closed his eyes for five minutes, or until lunchtime the next day.

He woke up, groggy and leaden. At some point he’d pulled a pair of tracksuit pants on. Carl reached a clumsy hand out for his phone on the bedside table and felt around blindly—no success. He slowly sat upright, raised himself from bed. His stomach was hollow, a ravenous hunger brewing. His body stooped over, stiff and resistant to his steps into the hallway and to the bathroom. No phone on the bench. He shuffled to the kitchen, bleary eyed and squinting in the midday sun streaming through blinds he’d left open the previous day. An empty milk carton lay on it’s side on the kitchen bench, a congealed white puddle under it’s opening.

Carl rubbed his face and opened the fridge, trying to remember what he’d bought from the shops. It was totally empty aside from his phone, car keys and an opened pack of mincemeat, half missing and beginning to brown with oxidisation.

Carl sent an apologetic text message to work. Pulled open the forum page on the app and checked his thread.

[empty_chair]:
doctors won’t help you. you just have to accept it and give in. it’s strange at first but it can be okay.

---

Another three and a half weeks passed before Carl caved and booked another appointment. A different doctor, all being well a more useful one.

She was small and sprightly, leading him from the waiting room full of mothers and lethargic toddlers, tradesmen in slings and the elderly with walkers.

“What brings you in today?”

So, he explained, again. He tried to describe the strange change in his sleep patterns. He held his phone, dietary notes at the ready. She nodded while she typed rapidly.

“And can you describe the pain?”

He inhaled. A prick of anxiety caught in his stomach.

“It feels like there’s hands inside me squeezing and tugging things. I feel it in my stomach but in my back and my legs, too. I kept notes like the other doctor said, but I can’t find a pattern with any food.”

She nodded and frowned a little, finished up her typing and swivelled to face him on the desk chair. She flashed a smile at him that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“Well, the good news is, there’s definitely not any hands in there.” A pause—the smile didn’t waver. “Do you have a stressful job?”

“I, well…” Carl fiddled with the corner of his phone case. “I guess, sometimes, but—”

“Stress can have a big impact on things like digestion and sleep. What kind of things are you doing to unwind?”

Carl blinked. “I, uh … I’m not sure, I like … watching TV…?”

She nodded slowly, coaxing the words from him. Another silence fell on the room. She raised her eyebrows and took a deep breath.

“Okay, well. Why don’t you try being more active? Some gentle exercise, or maybe meditation? See if that has any effect on your symptoms and we’ll go from there. Mind over matter.”

---

Every other weekend Carl spent housebound, swaddled in an electric blanket and plugged in to his computer screen. His correspondence had continued.

[spo0kymulder93]:
Starting to feel really lost now. Two doctors, both useless. Told me to exercise and watch what I eat and manage my stress better? I’m not even stressed about anything aside from this thing that keeps happening??? Load of BS. Symptoms are getting worse, pain happening more often and for longer periods. Painkillers help a little but they just put me to sleep. Makes me really groggy and I do dumb shit and leave things in the wrong place around the house. Don’t know what to do from here.

He’d turned his notifications on—a gentle chime announced the rapid replies.

[empty_chair]:
they tell u it’s just in ur head? classic

[spo0kymulder93]:
How do you manage it?

[empty_chair]:
just listen to it, don’t fight it. its just how it is.

Sometimes Carl muted the notifications and closed the browser, lay in bed for a while and tried to read a book. His eyes scanned the same lines over again, again, again. He would put the book down and shuffle back to the desk to check the thread.

[empty_chair]:
don’t be scared of it, try to see it as a gift. This would kill a normal person

---

Another month bled away. Carl, from the depths of a bi-weekly fugue, was developing curious new habits. The pain would start as usual—the tingle in his back, stomach and legs—and he would dose up and hunker down in his room or on the couch, braced for the hours to come.

But something had changed. Hours of pain turned into some kind of hibernation. He would just wake up—usually in the same place, the same clothes. Not always.

He’d misplaced two toothbrushes, found the entire contents of the pantry arranged on the dining table according to colour, and had woken up one morning to find the garden rake and shovel leaning against the wall in his shower, dirt caked under his fingernails.

In the absence of any other explanation, he began to blame this on Other Carl. Other Carl was probably the result of taking too many painkillers too frequently. It was easier if Carl didn’t ask and didn’t try to explain this to another doctor. He just tidied up and put things back where they belonged.

Carl was worried about taking so much time away from work. They were very understanding and flexible when the issues began. But he felt that anxious twist in his stomach when he thought about explaining how, actually, things were a lot worse now, and he was losing days. He was becoming a little unreliable. The gaps in his memory were widening, and he quietly knew he wasn’t just sleeping when it happened.

And then, like a divine sign, Carl woke up one morning to a new message.

[empty_chair]:
for whenever ur ready – forum/black_out_

A knot of apprehension tightened. Leaning closer to the computer screen, Carl clicked on the link. The browser loaded slowly.

The forum appeared. The first post was a comment under a photo from inside someone’s walk in wardrobe. A white button up shirt hung in ragged strips, the contents of a toolkit were strewn across the carpeted floor underneath—screwdrivers, a utility knife and wirecutters.

[rileyknoxx9]:
One of many scenes after yesterday’s episode. Not sure what the tools are about—pretty sure he’s trying to tell me something but this is a bit cryptic. Better luck next time.

Carl scrolled. More photos loaded. Overturned back lawns, furniture lodged in trees, trees planted in washing machines, cartons and condiment bottles in the fridge refilled with detergent and chemicals. Something red smeared in a continuous line, head-height, across the wall down someone’s hallway.

Some posts were just comments.

[jarththedestroyer]:
I put my hand in the fucking deep fryer at work??? Woke up in emergency department, idk how I’m meant to explain this one to my family??

[bug_bug_bug]:
woke up on the OTHER side of the milk fridge at local supermarket after hours. Triggered the alarm trying to get out fml, I’m sick of this shit

[bowiesspandex8]:
Woke up in somebody else’s car, with somebody else’s bag and belongings, in a neighbourhood I don’t recognise. Checked maps, thank god phone was still alive. Two hours away from my house? Probably my best/worst yet.

Carl kept scrolling, faster and faster, a sick, clammy feeling beading on his skin.

His phone buzzed violently on the desk with an incoming call: Kevin (Work).

Carl stared and blinked. What was today? Saturday, the computer calendar said. Did he work yesterday? He wracked his brain, searching for a memory, for a conversation, for his lunch, for what shirt he wore, for—

The call timed out. Another singular buzz a moment later as the voice-to-text message loaded.

Kevin (Work):

Hi Carl, it’s Kevin. Look, I’m sorry to call you on a weekend but I feel it’s best we discuss what happened yesterday as soon as possible. I have a few concerns, mostly about your wellbeing after Mel’s actions yesterday. Please give me a call back when you can, just know we’re here to support you, we understand it was an accident. I also just wanted to let you know that Mel is in a stable condition and they decided not to airlift her last night. Talk soon.

Carl read and re-read the message, the words on the bright screen burning holes into his eyes. He waited for a memory to rise from the silt in his mind. He felt entirely vacant.

He looked back to the computer screen. A video from another user played on a loop—the middle of the night, black and white security camera footage from someone’s front door. A man exits the house wearing only his underwear, steps aimlessly around the garden for a few minutes, then disappears. The time stamp jumped to a few hours later and he reappears. Smeared in something dark and dragging something his size across the front lawn. The video cut off and started again.

Carl, breathless, opened his phone to Kevin’s message. His thumbs hovered over the screen. He typed, then deleted it, then tried again. He put the phone down and looked back to the computer screen, chewing his thumb nail.

There was a slow churning in his gut. There was only one obvious option.

Carl grabbed the mouse, clicked a few times, and started typing.

[spo0kymulder93]: I think I’ve done something bad.