The Flashback.

“Of course. Why would I think that it wouldn’t happen here?” Mark said sarcastically to himself.

“Geeze.” He shook his head. “I’m such a freak.”

Mark stood atop the Punchbowl Memorial Cemetary's marble staircase. The giant statue of the robed woman holding an olive branch behind him dwarfed his five and half foot stature. In fact, the whole memorial was huge compared to his average size. This only added to the dominating sensation which the ornate, Greco-marble design blasted at its admirers from its towering columns.

Mark stood there with his back to the memorial, looking down the staircase to the rolling hill of grave markers and past to the valley behind it. The ocean breeze whipped his hair as he peered past the hills down toward Diamond Head Crater that lay on the coast of the Honolulu area. The gray, bustling metropolis of Honolulu shifted back and forth below the rigid and dusty brown crater creating a sharp contrast against the paradise blue of the Pacific Ocean.

But Mark had just refocused on all of this. A second before this horizon had looked completely different. It had looked desolate and abandoned. The hills of headstones were completely grown over. The city was broken and motionless and as for Diamond Head…well, that beautiful crater was charred and collapsed. A giant hole that looked to be half a mile wide disfigured its once majestic western ridge.

But that wasn’t real. Mark scratched his forehead in frustration. These quick visions had become more frequent over the last six months and it was getting down right ridiculous.

How long had he been standing there, spacing out while dozens of tourists passed by staring at him? Who knew. Sometimes these things were split second, sometimes they were a few minutes long. Either way he felt stupid and he hated that.

Mark sighed as he began the long walk down the marble staircase. “Why did I even come up here?” He thought, “I should have known this would happen. So much for escaping for the day, this thing wont even let me have a day off.”
He plopped down each step, letting go of his frustration a little at a time as each foot hit the marble. He knew that soon enough this vision would be added to his collection in his journal and soon after that, forgotten until it actually made sense. If that ever even happened.

“Have a nice day,” said the memorial security guard rather unenthusiastically. “Thanks,” replied Mark with the same enthusiasm as he passed the gate to the parking lot. “What? No big vision insight into that guy?” Mark thought sarcastically as he grabbed for his car door. “Why is it that I can’t even decide the things that I want to see? If I have to be a freak, can’t I at least be in control of my own mind? Look at me, I’m talking to myself in my own head. That is classic psychosis. Sheesh.”
Mark shut the door and put his head on the steering wheel. He remembered back to high school to the first time he saw something.

It was Clifford High, 2002. He was a scrawny sophomore in wood shop. He remembered standing there in the middle of the shop with a plank in his hand when all of the sudden the room swirled into darkness and he saw the table saw stand out amongst the black. As he approached the saw it hissed and came to life but was spinning too fast. Within a second the whole table shook uncontrollably as the blade increased in speed, jarring from the right to the left until finally it broke loose from the table and flew across the blackness, shattering into a hundred pieces. Mark looked back at the table that had finally come to rest, mangled and bleeding from the uncontrollable blade.

Just then he heard a loud SMACK directly behind him. He jumped and spun around brandishing his plank only to see his classmates rolling and laughing hysterically on the floor. “Your eyes were HUGE, man!” Laughed one of the boys. “Did you see how high he jumped?!” Yelled another. “You were like, way out of it, dude! Who daydreams standing up?” They all busted out in another round of laughter as Mark lowered his plank and walked out of the main shop.

He couldn’t shake the image of that saw for the rest of the day. “It was just so random,” he told his best friend, Paul, at lunch, “I wasn’t even thinking about the saw when I walked in there and then, BAM. It happened. I don’t even know how long I was standing there.”

Paul busted out laughing. “ I could just see you there, holding a piece of wood, completely gone to the world!” Another round of laughter.

“Yeah, yeah. Funny stuff.” Mark said tiredly as he rubbed his forehead. “It just doesn’t feel too funny to me.”

“That’s what happens when you take drugs, dude.” Paul said trying to hold back his laugh, “you end up dreaming crazy things...” He paused. “...While standing up, holding a piece of wood.” Paul almost fell out of his chair laughing. “You gotta get me whatever you are smoking, bro!” Paul held his stomach as he laughed.

Mark put his hand over his face and sighed. “My friends are retarded.” He thought and quietly got up from the lunch table as the laughter continued.

It was in that instance that he realized he couldn’t share this event with anyone else. Why should they believe him even if he did? It was pointless. “Just forget it and move on, you have a very active imagination, thats all. You are perfectly normal.” Mark thought as he threw his lunch away.

But he couldn’t forget it. The more he thought about it, the more real it seemed. It was as if he could even see it from different angles. The sounds, the lighting, the whole thing was eerily tangible in his mind. He continued to try to shake it off each time the memory came up.

“I am officially going insane.” He thought. It had been a week since the event and he was in wood shop again, dreading to have to enter into the shop. Once again the vision of the spinning saw flashed through his mind, but this time it was even louder than before.

Mark paused at the door. “I don’t even care anymore.” He said out loud and turned to walk away. Just then he heard shouting from inside the door.

Mark peered in through the slatted window. Mr. Harper, the woodshop teacher was screaming at one of the students. Every obscenity imaginable came flying out of the burly man’s mouth. Mark could see four other students frozen in silence as they watched Mr. Harper verbally unload on the trembling freshman. Mr. Harper moved closer to the terrified student, continuing to raise his voice. As the freshman looked down to the floor, Mr. Harper grabbed him, threw him to the ground and began to beat him mercilessly. Mark watched in horror as the burly teacher thrust his huge fists into the boy over and over again.

Screams went out from the shop. Two seniors jumped on the back of the enraged teacher, pulling his arms back from the bloodied student. Mr. Harper threw them off his back and whipped around to face the two seniors. His eyes were blood red and his face was flushed with anger. He reached over and grabbed a hammer off of the table and began to hack at the closest senior’s back.

The door flew open and knocked Mark back against the brick wall as the rest of the terrified students bolted out of the room. Mark fell to the side and limped after the other students as they dashed for safety.

Mark remembered the sirens and the sight of the ambulances and police cars as the school went into lock-down. Two students went to the emergency room that day. One returned alive.

No one really knew why Mr. Harper had gone insane. No one could ask him. He had died that afternoon after police had fired upon him in a violent struggle to arrest him. The local news explained it as a mental break down relating to his incredibly busy life, recent divorce and settlement and a secret addiction to energy supplements. The news caster had even said “some believe he was just spinning too fast.”

Mark raised his head from the steering wheel and looked out towards the memorial. If only that was the one time his vision had made some sense or come true. But it wasn’t. Dozens of others in his journal at home had dates, newspaper clippings and pictures attached to each one. Articles and pictures that revealed the journal entry’s truth.

The scarier thing about these visions was that he already knew they were true, before they actually happened. Something in each vision was almost more real, more right, than the rest of the world around him. “If this is what being insane means,” Mark thought, “then I really need to start listening to insane people more often.”

Mark focused again on the memorial and stopped breathing for a second. His mind flashed back to the mangled crater, the demolished city and the neglected memorial. “Dear God,” he thought, “what did that one mean then?”

He breathed in again. “I need to focus, this is getting out of control.” He started his car and headed down the hill toward the valley below. The beach lay just beyond the bustling city and Mark knew that within 20 minutes he could be walking on that warm white sand again. He needed a good, focused walk along the shore.


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So tell me

What happens next?

Tom's Story

Tom woke up in a panic.

As he sat up in his bed he frantically looked around the room.

It was just a dream, calm down.

He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and popped his neck a bit. That was some deep sleep for a nap, he thought as he threw his legs over the edge of the bed.

He looked towards his bedroom door and listened. No sound of the roommate. He looked at his phone: 4:30pm. He’d only been asleep for an hour, but he felt as stiff as if he’d been asleep for a month.

Tom opened the bedroom door and listened again. Still no sound of his roommate. Tom figured he must have left to go get some dinner.

Tom’s roommate Mitch generally would have planted himself in front of the TV by now. Mitch’s personal schedule was as predictable as commercial breaks; 4:00 get off from work, 4:15 sit down in front of the TV for the next 4 hours until he became hungry enough to get up and get food. So for it to be 4:30 and no sound of ESPN heard in the house was out of the ordinary to say the least.

Tom stretched as he walked into the quiet living room. He looked around the room for signs of Mitch. There was plenty of Mitch's “leftovers”, but nothing recent. Although the air had a pungent smell of spoiling food, there was nothing like an empty plate or half filled soda can to indicate Mitch's recent presence.

Tom opened the front door and looked out into the front yard. It looked forlorn and abused; the grass hadn’t been mowed in a couple of weeks and it looked as if weeding had never been even contemplated. The shaggy foliage ended where the edge of Jacob’s street began and the collage of uncontrolled vegetation gave stark contrast to the dark blacktop of the recently paved road.

Jacob’s street was the typical neighborhood road with the exception that it ran right up against the back of the city's hospital. This would have had little effect on the neighborhood traffic had the city not decided to connect it to the local bypass two years ago. Now this small neighborhood had become a regular route for many on their way to and from the hospital and the hum of traffic filled the void of the once peacefully silent neighborhood. This hadn’t been an issue for Tom or Mitch though, with the exception of the blaring ambulances that would pass by nightly. But after a year, Tom had learned how to tune it out. As for Mitch, nothing could pull him out of his own little world whenever a game was involved.

Tom stood on his porch, barefoot as he looked up and down Jacob’s street. Its quiet out here too, he thought. The low, dull sound of traffic from the bypass was strangely absent, making the neighborhood feel empty.

Tom walked out onto the grass to get a better look down the street. Nothing. No cars, no people, no sound.

Tom scratched his head as he muttered to himself, "Maybe something is happening at the lake?"

Crystal Lake was just half a mile from the hospital and was a constant center of community events, celebrations and gatherings. Tom couldn’t remember hearing of anything special happening today, but that wasn’t abnormal. He generally was the last one to know about those kind of community events anyways.

Tom looked down at his bare feet, then turned and looked toward the hospital.

"I guess I’ll just walk down the street real quick and maybe I’ll hear something happening over at the lake," he thought.

Tom gingerly walked down the paved street. He looked up at the sky, enjoying the mild temperature of the early evening. It was gray today. Not unusually gray, just the “overcast-about to rain” kind of gray. As he stared upwards, is mind raced. Tom's imagination started creating wild connections to the lack of people and the gray sky, allowing every fantastic story and movie to become reasonable and real in those few moments.

Tom smiled and shook his head as he neared the hospital. His imagination could really take off, that was for sure.

He reached the last house on the street and stopped.

Silence.

Tom's pulse accelerated as he thought aloud, "This is starting to get strange. Where is everybody?"

There was no answer. In fact, there was no sound at all except the wind and a few birds in the distance.

He stood there silent, stretching his ear for any sound aside from his racing heart when something caught his attention.

A smell.

Something was burning.

Tom looked around, peering above the treetops and houses for signs of smoke. He couldn’t see anything that pointed to a fire so he jogged back to the house and grabbed his shoes.


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So tell me....

What happens Next?