(C)1991 John Tynes
[This feature debuted in TUO1, but due to an oversight The Annotated TUO1 didn’t include it. Ah well – I think I’ll let sleeping dogs lie and leave it as one more buried treasure for those who happen upon a copy of the first issue. Anyway, here’s the second one. “Message” is possibly the most idiosyncratic item in the magazine, reflecting my tastes in fiction and writing moreso than the rest of each issue. Each “Message” is a brief creative work dealing with communication and enlightenment, and the dark costs of knowledge – textbook Lovecraftian themes.]
Every night from eleven o’clock to three a.m. my next door neighbor shines a light up out of his house. It’s an invisible light, no one can see it but I know it’s there. He doesn’t know that I know, and I’m not about to let him find out.
Today while my neighbor was at work I snuck into his backyard. He leaves his bedroom window slightly open for ventilation, even when he isn’t there. It’s not a good idea, because people can get in your house and you won’t know it. I went to a seminar once that the local police gave and they talked all about people getting into your house and the things they might do there. I didn’t do any of those things, though, I just wanted to see what he was doing.
The inside of my neighbor’s house was kind of dingy. There was a smell like the trash bin behind the chicken restaurant down the street. He had a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink. I looked in his refrigerator and he had tons of food. Meat from the deli, cool whip, real butter, tobasco sauce… I never saw so much food in one guy’s place before in my life.
But that wasn’t why I was here. His house is only one floor, but I knew there was an attic because you can see a couple of little dormer window-things up there. So I poked around and in the ceiling of one of the closets there was a trapdoor. He had nailed a make-shift ladder into the wall so that you could get up there pretty easily. I climbed up and opened the trapdoor, and then went on in.
The attic was empty, just floor and dust. The sloping roof meant that there wasn’t room to stand, so I just had to kind of crouch while I looked.
In one corner of the attic I saw a bundle, wrapped in a sheet or something. I sort of crab-walked over to it and unfolded the cloth. Inside was a metal cylinder with lots of strange markings on it. I couldn’t figure out how to get it open. I figure he had to use some sort of psychic brain-wave device to make it work. I tried real hard for fifteen minutes, just stared at it and thought “open” over and over, but it didn’t work.
Then I heard a noise downstairs, and I realized that my neighbor must have come back for something. I tried to remember if I had left anything to show that I was here. I think I left the closet door open, but I’m not sure.
That was four hours ago. I can still hear him down there, making noise every so often so that I know he’s there. I think he’s going to come up here when it gets dark and do something to me. So I’ve taken the cloth and I’m writing this down, and I’m going to tie this to my key chain and throw it out through one of the ventilation ducts if my arm will reach.
I hope somebody finds this and calls the police, even though I did get in here against the law. And I know that I haven’t been out of the hospital for long but I’m not imagining this, I swear, even when I was on the medication I didn’t do things like this, so if you read this help me. I finally realized that he wasn’t beaming the light into space, he was beaming it into my head so that I wouldn’t think straight and would come over here. Please, let me out.
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