The Inner Torment of Thomas Creek

I remember about a month after my wife died something very strange happened. Sometimes I wish I could forget all that happened, but deep down I know that whatever happened changed my life for the good.

I had a problem. Lacunar Fugue, the doctor called it, or something like that. Often I would go on bizarre tangents; writing and speaking voluminous nonsense. When these grand mal torrents of madness passed I would be left with no memory of their occurrence. The only reason I knew I even suffered from it was my wife’s testimony and the hundreds of scribbled pages of absurd poetry I wrote during the attacks.

One night I awoke from what I assumed was one of my episodes to find my wife hanging from a few feet of cruel rope. She left a note saying she was sorry and she hoped one day I’d understand. Out of nowhere in a few short hours my happiness was shattered into a million unrecognizable pieces.

Everything I saw reminded me of her. As I walked through my house I expected to turn a corner and see her alive and well. Sometimes as I lay sleeping I could feel her breath on my nape. She was everywhere and yet was absent, and so I ran.

I stuffed an old blue duffel bag full of clothes and drove off in no particular direction. Eventually I came to a nice little hotel and checked in for the night.

I sat in a lounge cum dining hall with my sketchbook open on the table. With a few short strokes of my pencil I had formed a cardinal on the paper. It was a robust bird and although there was no color it had the essence of crimson.

Below my sketchbook was one of my most recent products of madness. I moved my sketch book aside and read the bizarre scrawl for the millionth time.

"Waters frost over in a murderous winter. It is the death of solace. They are trapped in a shell of human making but ignorance blissfully engulfs one. Twins of a perished Gemini are reunited after a long absence until the waking time. Kill the frost; save the world," it read like some sort of psychedelic rock ballad.

My episodes would come on without warning. Often I would be doing something and next thing I knew I’d be on the floor as if I was waking up.

I suddenly felt overcome with exhaustion. My mind flooded with desires to drift to the land of nod. I felt my head fall to the table and the world disappeared.

It seemed like a billion years had passed when I finally woke. There was no one around. My first thought was that everyone had retired to their rooms. The dining hall was dark and totally empty. I was lying on the floor; the tables and chairs were gone. Paper was peeling from the walls and the whole place reeked off death. I stepped into the lobby to see a similar sight. The check-in desk was empty; no papers, no computer, not even a business card tray. I looked to the sliding automatic door and saw that all of the windows had been covered with plywood and the door was bolted by a massive wood beam.

I must have slammed myself into that barricade and pulled at it a million times. I knew I was trapped. I walked down the lobby to the first hall and looked straight down it. At the end where there should have been a window was a plywood covering. Same went for the other hall.

I slowly trudged down the hall. Every so many steps I hazarded a call of hello. I didn’t hear any answers. I reached my door to find it slightly ajar. I heard a quickly muffled giggle and called out to nothing. I walked in to see the window yet again blocked. I heard something move from behind the bed and out jumped a short fat man. He looked ready to kill and lunged at me with a fist raised. Suddenly he stopped and grabbed my shoulder.

“You’re not Frost,” he said dumbfounded.

He pushed me behind him and closed the door. I saw another man, tall and gangly, lying behind the bed. He was laughing hysterically. The fat man ran over to him and pulled him to his feet.

“Shut up,” the fat man told him in a hushed fatherly scold, “You want to get us killed, you idiot?”

I sat on the floor and tried to analyze the situation.

“Who are you guys?” I asked them.

The fat man replied while the other just sat with a smile on his face, “I’m Peter River. This guy’s called Hauser.”

The other man, Hauser wore a full jump suit with his name printed on the breast. He suddenly took offense at the sound of his name, contorting his face in an ugly childish snarl.

“My name is Thomas Creek,” he said pushing at the fat man, Peter.

If things were weird before then they became downright crazy at this point.

“My name’s Thomas Creek,” I said with what must have been the most mystified expression anyone ever saw.

“I guess I really don’t know,” Peter said, “But his suit says ’Hauser’ and the guy‘s autistic or something.”

“But I am Thomas Creek,” Hauser said giggling.

Hauser picked up a red crayon that was lying on the floor and began coloring a cardinal that was etched on the wall. It was my cardinal, the one I drew.

“What is going on here?” I said almost whispering.

Peter sat down on the bed and smacked his thighs, “I have no idea, Creek. I just woke up here, oh I don’t know, maybe three days ago. The place is all barricaded. We’re all trapped inside.”

“Who else is here?” I asked.

Hauser had now picked up a yellow crayon and was coloring the cardinal’s beak.

“Well,” Peter said, “When I showed up, there was Retard here and some other guy named Tommy.”

“I miss Tommy,” Hauser said, not looking up from his work, “Tommy was nice. Tommy was funny.”

“Where’s this Tommy guy?” I asked.

I was beginning to like Peter less and less. Something about his arrogance, maybe the way he treated this Hauser guy, just rubbed me the wrong way. For some reason though he was vaguely familiar.

“There’s another guy here,” Peter said, “He calls himself Mr. Frost.”

Hauser fell to the ground, covered his head, and started to cry at the sound of the name. It was a miserable pathetic noise; almost like the last wail of dog before painful death.

Peter lowered his voice, “This guy Frost is some kind of psycho. Tommy said that when he woke up here, about two weeks ago, Frost was here, along with Hauser and apparently five other people. Frost just prowls the hotel, attacking anyone he sees-”

“What do you mean?” I stammered.

“This Frost guy just wanders the halls with his big cane and attacks you if he sees you. We try to hide out in the rooms to get away from him but occasionally he hunts us down. Tommy said that the five other people who were here before him had been killed by Frost before I showed up. Now Tommy’s gone.”

We all grew quiet, even Hauser shut his bawling mouth. I took the moment to process everything. I had been in the hotel dining hall when I fell asleep. I awoke groggy sometime later to find the whole placed closed up tighter than a drum like some dilapidated condemned building. I found two other people, trapped just like me. One was a semi-jerk named Peter River. The other was an autistic and, from the look of his drawing on the wall, some sort of savant. The tag on his clothes said Hauser but he claimed to be Thomas Creek: my name. Somewhere in the twisting bowels of the hotel there was some sort of killer. He was wandering the dim corridors of the prison this lodging had become. Something told me he was coming. Something told me he had been waiting for me to show up.

“So Creek,” Peter finally broke the silence, “Did you just fall asleep and wind up here?”

He gave me no time to answer, “Me and my wife and kid were staying here on our way to Toledo. I went to bed two nights ago and here I am. I promised my little girl I’d take her to the Toys ‘r’ Us in town in the morning. Now I’m here and we’re all going to die. Frost is coming soon.”

Peter wept. I didn’t know what to think. The air was filled with desperation. I had walked into a last stand. These two men had done all they could and now they, and probably me, were going to perish at the hands of a mysterious sadist.

Outside I heard a faint voice slowly growing closer. Hauser ran behind me and hid like a soldier behind a wall.

Whatever was coming was singing a terribly lilting melody. Any other time the sound would have been comforting. It had a mother-like tone and for one moment I thought that if it was the terrible Mr. Frost then maybe he wasn’t so bad.

For a few moments things went silent again but no one dared breathe a sigh. A few loud raps sounded at the door.

“Hello Mr. River,” the man behind the door said. Although he couldn’t be seen, I could tell just by the man’s voice that he was smiling, maybe even chuckling.

“This is Mr. Frost, Mr. River. May I come in?” then the door knob turned and at that moment realized the horrifying fact of the matter, that the door had no lock.

It opened and before us stood a man in a black suit with coat tails. He wore a Styrofoam wolf mask and a tall top hat. In his hands he held a heavy cane.

Mr. Frost saw me and said, “Oh! Mr. Creek has arrived! How would you like to come and see your wife, Mary?”

I bolted to my feet in mad rage. He knew my name and my wife’s name and he dared mock me. Like everything that had happened so far, it was impossible. I lunged at him but was pushed back when Peter came between us. Mr. Frost decked Peter with a quick swing of his cane. Peter fell to the ground, soiling the carpet with blood.

Frost, the stranger in black who wore a kid’s wolf mask, ran down the corridor and I followed. Secretly I hoped he really would lead me to Mary. Maybe I had died in the hotel and this was Hell. Maybe Frost was Satan and he was now leading me to my apparently equally hell-bound wife. A million other ideas ran through my head.

Frost turned corner after corner until I finally lost him. The hotel seemed to stretch forever and I began to wonder if it was real. Maybe it was all a horrible nightmare. After wandering the halls for hours, I came to an open door and entered. Sitting there on the tattered bed sheets was Mary, alive and well.

“It can’t be,” I muttered, tears streaming down my face, “Mary?”

“Yes Thomas,” she said, “Come here. I don’t have much time. I need you to listen very carefully.”

I sat down speechless before her. I prayed this was real and not a dream. I touched her face to find she wasn’t incorporeal.

“Thomas,” she said, “There was something about your problem I kept secret from you and your doctor. You were violent during your episodes. I thought they would take you away if they knew and since you didn‘t remember anything I thought we could get away with it.”

I felt angry and sad at the same time. Nothing prepared me for what came next.

“The night I,” she paused, “passed away, you had ran off during one of your tangents. When you returned you held a note and a Polaroid photo. I watched you stumble to the coach and pass out, then looked at the photo and note. And the note just said ‘Look what I’ve done’.”

She broke into tears. I tried to hold her but she pushed me away. She moved behind me and whispered into my ear between sobs.

“Waters frost over in a murderous winter. It is the death of solace. They are trapped in a shell of human making but ignorance blissfully engulfs one. Twins of a perished Gemini are reunited after a long absence until the waking time. Kill the frost; save the world,” she said, “Thomas, confront Mr. Frost. Unmask him. You are here because the darkness and hate that is him has become a part of you. Soon you will understand, and when Mr. Frost is gone, you will wake up and everything will be fine.”

Then she was just gone. I tried to piece together what she had said. Maybe this all really was a dream, but since when did a person have to literally fight to wake up?

I heard Mr. Frost cackling at the door.

“So you know what’s at stake Mr. Creek,” he said.

I stood up and readied myself, “No,” I said, “But I’m hoping it’s about to make sense.”

I ran at him screaming a bloody war cry that would make Thor blush. His cane swung at me. I ducked to the ground in a nimble dodge and pounded my fist into his gut. He jumped backwards and I stood back just in time for him to slam me into the wall. He pushed his cane down on my windpipe long-ways and I felt the life get crushed out of me. I felt as if I was about to blackout when I grabbed at his mask, tearing it off. Beneath it was my face. Mr. Frost was me. I gouged my thumbs into Frost’s eyes and kept pushing in until he let up and my hands became engulfed in a bloody pool of spent flesh.

In the pocket of his coat I found a note in my handwriting saying ’Look at what I’ve done’. Attached to it was a photo of what looked like a dead vagrant. This Mr. Frost had been some evil alternate personality inside of me. My wife, out of guilt, had killed herself thinking that if only I would’ve known the true nature of my attacks then maybe this could have been prevented.

I woke up in the hotel dining hall. Everything was fine and back to normal. Was it a dream? Were the people in that fantasy part of me? Or was it something else? I don’t know. All I know is that it cured me of my horrors and gave me a new solace unlike any I have ever known.