Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

the noise. He felt a breeze against the back of his neck. His window,
which had been closed and locked, was now thrown wide open, letting in
the frigid winter air. He could find no explanation for the loss of time, or
for the open window, then, and, what is more, he never did find out what
happened that night.
Alexi lay in bed, wheezing and coughing. Crumpled tissues were
scattered about his room.
He dialed up Ken’s number. His mother answered and told him that
Ken was out with his friend Jay. Alexi hung up the phone quickly and
closed his eyes. A feeling of panic was setting in. He could identify it,
could pick apart every single isolated psychological phenomena, but it
did no good. The desperation and irrational anger just continued to build.
He experienced his emotions from the outside, and was incapable of
interacting with them on their own level.
He dialed Samantha’s number a minute later. It rang a number of
times before he got an answer.
“Hey…” she said, out of breath. He figured she had run up the stairs
to get the phone.
“I’m not doing so well,” Alexi said. It was all he could do to keep
from pouring out an endless stream of complaints. Not that he hadn’t
been more and more prone to do just that lately. Still, he could watch this
degeneration with complete passivity, from up on his mountain. It
seemed that there was an ever-widening gap between his body and the
center of his consciousness. The machine is getting annoyed. “When I
wake up… I generally throw up… The headaches have been getting so
bad that I can’t think. Throbbing, every day, for almost a month now.
Can’t do anything. I’m starting to worry…that it’s not a virus… Every
second I think of you, and feel something terrible growing in the pit of
my stomach.” He paused, took a deep breath. “What’ve you been up to?”
“Nothing much.” She hesitated. “I’ve been hanging around Jay and
Ken a lot.”
“Right…Jay.” He felt a sudden flush of heat on his cheeks and neck.
“Do you want to come over? I really shouldn’t go out, but I could use the
company.”
“I don’t know,” she said, after an even longer pause. “I just don’t see
how I can help you. You need it more and more these days, like you
can’t exist on your own or something.”
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