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It Takes Slow Sips

by Michael Wehunt

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Forty minutes to drive eleven miles, and the daylight was souring over the trees behind the apartments. He had left in the dark and just made it home before the dark. For a moment he sat in his car and watched a white dog being walked in the park across the street, its fur almost shining. People were wearing coats now, but it was only September. It had gotten cold two weeks before his favorite season, the one with her name.

He had been standing all day. His feet ached through the foyer and up the stairs to 312. A long envelope the color of butter lay on the carpet, wedged a few inches under his door. COLIN was written in black marker ink that had seeped out in tendrils before it dried, causing the letters to blur. The pale red words PINE ARCH RESEARCH had been stamped within a beveled rectangle in one corner.

Neither name had an address, as though the envelope had been hand delivered. He picked it up and something shifted from one end of the package to the other with a hoarse whisper.

The light inside the apartment was like stagnant water through the blinds. His laptop and phone waited on the kitchen island, and a dryness spread through his mouth. He hadn’t seen her face since before the sun rose. He couldn’t get used to missing her, but leaving these devices behind was the only way he could keep a job. The job was the only thing stopping him from moving back to her early. Before the fall. Her name.

He said her name twice as though greeting the phone and then the computer. Autumn, her hair a yellow darkened to brown like a turning leaf, waves crashing against her neck. Colin liked to picture her in the tiny pottery studio she had set up in the house she rented, streaks of gray drying on her arms, dabs of gray in the hair she kept having to tuck behind her ears. Barely five feet of her on a stool, spinning clay through her delicate small hands. When she paused and looked up into the distance, through her walls, what hung there in her thoughts?

While his soup heated in the microwave, he tore a side off the envelope to postpone the comfort of looking at her. Two halves of a CD slid out onto the counter, each a wedge of iridescent mirror. He turned them over and saw WA Y written on one half in perhaps the same black marker from the envelope, TCH OU on the other. The disc had been snapped neatly into two useless pieces.

He couldn’t make sense of the letters. He opened the microwave to end the piercing tone that wasn’t loud but always dug into his head. When he pushed the CD halves together, WA Y TCH OU stretched in a line that was almost perfectly straight above the center hole. Careful lettering. WAY. TOUCH? It clicked and he saw WATCH YOU. The disc had been broken on purpose. Otherwise the Y and the OU would have been written below the rest.

Colin wondered what the point of the package was. He’d never heard of Pine Arch Research, and the person he had hired online wouldn’t have traveled up here to deliver a package in person. But even as the thought rose, it fell away. Autumn was all that mattered.

He checked his phone and saw an email notification on his screen from mid-morning. He tapped to open her full message and smiled into the phone light washing up onto his face. A man was following me last night. Outside my window and scratching at the door. You promised in court. Leave me alone! He turned on a lamp and the kitchen light and sat down to eat the soup.

He typed out with his thumbs: Are you okay?? You should maybe call the police. I told you I have this job in Durham until October. Why would you think that was me? It was just one bad mistake. I thought I’d left something at your house but wanted to know if you were up before I knocked, remember? Please be safe. I care about you.

The soup was too hot, it couldn’t cover the taste in his throat of days without sleep. He closed his eyes tight and felt the burning under the lids. He listened to the warm song of his blood pushing through him, cresting in his ears. Sometimes when his eyes were pressed shut this hard, the sound of his blood was almost the sound of mountains shifting far away.

He counted the number of times he had typed you, each one an intimate touch. He deleted I care about you. The words ached as they disappeared, but he had to build to it. He needed her to realize some things on her own. He sent the text and closed his eyes again.

What was she doing in this moment, as the sun bled away? He pictured her out for a walk, in a light jacket because it was a little warmer down in Atlanta, his message vibrating against her thigh. She stopped and a man with a dog curved around her, the dog’s tongue hanging out of its mouth like one of the cozy socks she’d had in her dresser drawer. She slipped her phone out of her pocket and read his words. What did her face look like? Did it light up? Did lines crease her forehead? He would need to know before he was near her again.

He checked his social media accounts, but they’d been dormant for three months. It was as though Colin had died and no one had noticed yet. These profiles only existed now as doors for Autumn to open, to walk back through into his life.

She had changed her Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter passwords weeks ago, but he didn’t think she had figured out he had them because he could still get into her email. He had been careful ever since he found the list in her desk the only night he ever spent with her.

He handled this last password like a delicate glass structure that could collapse in his lungs at any moment. Even his breathing changed when he was in her account.

There was nothing today that caught in his throat or twisted cords in his gut. No cute messages from Cory, and she had lost interest in Brandon in July. She was working on herself, just like he was.

He logged out and opened his own email. There were message replies from the forum where his friends lived. They thought his strategy was solid. They reminded him that “celibate” didn’t need to apply to him anymore, so why should “involuntary”? There was a time when you took what you deserved.

He saw a money transfer request from username par000600606, the message went out with some females, went home alone, and a video clip of Autumn, sleeping, filmed through a gap between her curtains. It was ten minutes long, and at the end, the scene changed to a few seconds of a different house, a dark figure stretching up the wall toward a window, before cutting off.

Colin watched the clip again as he ate the cooling soup, even though it was grainy and the angle didn’t show much, then sent the second half of the payment and asked par000600606 if he was available to follow Autumn the day after tomorrow. He needed more. He needed it to elevate. He needed her to need him when he returned.

He felt he could sleep now, but he sifted through her social media photos. There were only two new ones, and no men in them. One had the caption, Still scared of the dating scene but ***selflove is my hashtag. He tapped the heart on a select few images.

She had blocked Colin everywhere not long after their one date, the day after she caught him fastening his pants at her window. He hadn’t been careful enough. But he could still see her because the profile swooning over her pictures was a woman he had made up. An older woman who sold pottery online just like Autumn did. This woman was safe, she had watched from a casual distance at first and only last weekend started messaging her, praising her work and promising to order some pieces.

It takes slow sips to not waste a good thing, he thought his father had told him that once. But he was still there when the night was gone, looking at her face. He memorized it all over again, and the first pink light pushed at the blinds.

---

Colin came home and the sun was still hanging above the trees, clawing at the sky as it fell. Its blood caught in the low clouds. He was tired again, his senses were dulled by patience. For the first time since moving here and leaving his access to Autumn at home every day, his work performance was suffering.

The manager had asked if there was something wrong after he got another order wrong, and Colin had looked into the perfect sunlight through the café windows and come close to saying the restraining order was choking him at this distance. He shouldn’t have moved this far away from her, four hundred miles was playing it too safe.

There was another envelope outside the door of 312, the same weight sliding across as he picked it up. He placed it on the counter as soon as he walked into the apartment. He had missed her so much today. It was difficult to remember the way she smelled. He went straight for the phone.

The home screen was empty, just the washed-out background image of Autumn asleep on that delicate, awful April night. Her windowpanes had been poorly cleaned. He was still bothered by the streaks getting in the way of a good view of her. But it was still her face.

The stamped PINE ARCH RESEARCH was smeared this time on the yellow envelope. His name seemed to have been written with less care, with fewer tendrils of ink soaking into the paper fibers because the marker had slashed the letters instead of dragging them.

The disc inside was whole, it slid out onto his palm with a corrupted image of his face staring up at him on one side and the words WATCH YOU on the other in a nearly perfect line.

He thought of the “par” initials in the username he had paid to follow her. Maybe they stood for Pine Arch Research. Maybe this was more footage of her. His laptop was just old enough to have a disc drive, and it dragged the DVD in with a sound like wasps caught in a jar. A video player appeared and he filled the screen with it.

It wasn’t her face. It was his face. It was the dark of 312 and he was in bed, a camera was hovering over him. He lay in half-shadow and seconds sifted into minutes in the bottom right corner of the screen. There was no sound, he could almost hear the blankness in the speakers where the ambient noise should have been, or the breathing of the person with the camera.

After eight minutes he began to smile in the video. It was slow, only the corners of his mouth creeping up into a curve, as though he had been dreaming her face. Eleven minutes and his eyes opened on the screen. He couldn’t tell if they saw anything.

Colin watched his body shudder, gentle like an old memory coming back. The camera stayed hanging over him, the person holding it must have been near his feet. Thirteen minutes and a dark smudge leaked out of his smile, into the darkness of the bedroom.

He thought it was blood, but too thick and deliberate in its movement as it lifted from his chin. The smudge grew. It stretched across the bed, up toward the camera, and swallowed the lens in its mouth.

And he stepped away from the laptop, because the smudge seemed to peel away from its screen, out of the video and into the kitchen. Like wet smoke, like a flaw in a photograph of this moment. It seemed to rise above the computer, but he hadn’t turned any lights on yet. He wasn’t sure.

Something landed on the back of his neck, it pushed into his hair at the nape, but it was gone before he swiped his hand across the skin. His eyes crawled around the room, up into the corners and across the walls, along the carpeted floor. He flipped on the kitchen light and brushed his fingers behind his head again.

He looked back at the laptop screen. He was still sleeping there, the smile gone from the corners of his mouth, and there was something dead about his face, until static filled the scene like a swarm of digital moths and the clip cut off.

A group of moths was called an eclipse. He thought about this as he switched on a lamp and sat on the sofa in its pool of light. The video and the thing that seemed to lift out of it. The feel of a heavy moth on his neck. The walls were still empty. He wondered what would happen if he replayed the clip.

He opened his phone and was about to go online to see what Autumn had been doing today. Only she could calm him. But there was a sudden feeling at the back of his neck, as though the flesh was lifting away from the bone, and something pushed through the fold of skin. A pinch, the feel of suction, a numbness that ebbed through him.

Colin thought he jumped up from the sofa. He thought he screamed. But he was still seated, and he reached back and touched his neck. His fingertips came away stippled with a greasy black dust, a bead of blood clinging to his thumb. It was becoming hard to concentrate. A tired cloud seemed to spend minutes drifting over him.

He fought it because he needed to see her face. He typed her name into Facebook, but she didn’t come up. He switched to a different fake account to be sure. The same thing happened on Twitter and Instagram. Had she locked down her privacy, was she taking a social break?

He went to her online pottery store, her Etsy shop, but the URLs wouldn’t load. Other profiles appeared normally, people he had known before he met her. Other websites were functioning. She was even gone from LinkedIn. He noticed he was shaking. The back of his neck throbbed like the beginning of an itch.

Autumn’s email account was still there, and his throat unlocked. He was able to swallow. But the inbox stopped two nights ago, with an unread message that hadn’t been there when he checked yesterday. He hadn’t deleted any of her emails. He was always careful now.

The subject line read WA H TCH IM, and he tapped on it.

The message was from pinedemon@z.z. Nothing in the body of the email, only blank space his finger had to drag up the screen to reach the bottom. Everything in her trash and spam folders was at least two days old.

He felt an awful drop in his stomach. He switched to his own email account. The message from par000600606 was still in the inbox, but the tiny video player was no longer embedded inside it. He should have downloaded the clip when he had the chance, grainy as it had been. He hadn’t seen her face since before the sun rose, and now it was dark again.

But he didn’t need to go online. He had his phone, the hundreds of images downloaded from her profiles over these last silent months. He opened the photo app, but it was a clean white sheet he swiped at in a panic, until he started seeing worthless pictures from before her. Above them, each of her photos was an empty square, the brightness shining up at him, too much light and too new, like spring or summer.

He stood and stared somewhere near the microwave for a long time. The cloud of fatigue settled into his pores. His phone fell asleep and he woke it up.

The background image was still there, but it was different now. With the screen held close, Colin saw that it had been altered somehow. Her window was dirtier and he couldn’t see her face at all, it could have been anyone.

He looked up Pine Arch Research on Google and could only find a video of an indistinct figure outside a house at night, reaching a long impossible arm or movie prop toward a window. It was the house he had glimpsed at the end of the clip of Autumn sleeping, from the man he had paid to follow her. A different woman was pursued through trees, a different man tried to find her.

He didn’t know what this could mean. It was from years ago. It felt like someone else’s story. He watched the video until he was sure Autumn’s face wasn’t going to be in it.

The one thing he couldn’t do was call her. She had changed her number before getting the protective order against him. If he called the new one, she would guess that he knew her email password. But he caved within minutes and it rang twice before a humming static filled the line. He redialed and the crackling started as soon he pressed the call button.

Where was she right now? Was she in trouble? He wanted to feel her heart slamming under his fingers. He wanted to calm her heart. He would have to quit his job and go back home early.

The night stretched ahead of him without her face, like a sickness. His eyes burned. His eyes ached. He tried to eat a can of soup and fell asleep on the sofa while waiting for it to cool.

---

The café windows poured light at him for hours. At lunchtime he felt something grip the back of his neck again, just under the collar. It pierced the skin. He reached his hand into his shirt, pulled it out to find a trace of black dust caught in his palm, a rill of blood in the seam between two fingers.

The manager came in to help with the rush and said Colin didn’t look well. The café filled with chatter like a swarm of voices. An eclipse of one great voice murmuring.

In the restroom Colin looked in the mirror. He avoided his face when he could. It reminded him that Autumn had probably only taken him home the night they met because she’d had too much to drink. He had kept buying her shots, the kind of door that opened maybe once in a life.

He was used to the sunken flesh under his eyes, bruises from looking at her face all night instead of sleeping. It was difficult to remember waking up next to her that one morning, the way the light had come in between the curtains to swirl in the shadows like cream. Her smell mixed with his, and the quiet beatitude of the world.

He turned to check his neck in the mirror and saw something clinging to his back, in the corner of his eye. A shapeless dark thing. It shifted, it crawled to the other side of him. It was gone as he twisted in a circle and scraped at his back.

After the second mistake, the manager sent him home and told him to clean his fingernails. The drive was fast before rush hour. There was no envelope at the door of 312.

He called her and there was only the void of distorted rings at the other end of the line. Her face was still gone from the internet. There was such a profound tiredness, soaked in his muscles and his bones. The course of his blood had slowed in his head when he squeezed his eyes closed. He couldn’t hear mountains out on the horizon.

He moved toward the laptop but then moved away from it.

The pinch came under the collar of his shirt again, the flesh pulling out and punctured by a tube or a blunt needle. The wet sensation of sucking, and small hands moving across his shoulders.

He tore his shirt off and the shirt beneath it. But there was nothing in the bathroom mirror. He tightened the blinds and sat down. The phone lay empty of everything beside him on the sofa.

---

Colin woke in the bedroom. He didn’t remember coming in here, getting under the covers. A face was looking through the window at him, two eyes in the space between open blind slats.

For a moment he thought it was Autumn. He let the moment stretch into a floating island of moments. He didn’t remind himself he lived on the third floor.

The eyes seemed too much like her eyes in certain pictures, when she was trying to look serious. He couldn’t take it. He slipped out of the bed because he was too weak to stand. He had to crawl to the window and pull himself up with his hands on the sill.

The eyes were gone. When he spread the two slats farther apart, there was only the ghost of his own eyes in the glass. He thought he could see a trail of dark grime smeared along the wall and around the corner of the building.

The door of the apartment creaked open. It clicked shut. He waited in the quiet, watching his eyes watch him in the windowpane, until something came into the room and climbed up onto his back. He felt the pinch again, the dig in his neck.

He cried out in a high voice that was only breath and scrabbled a hand behind him. For a second he had it. It writhed out of his fingers and he felt the small weight of it sliding down toward his waist. Colin said her name, he put all of himself into it as he managed to get to his feet.

The laptop was still open on the kitchen counter. He woke it up but the video player was gone. The DVD wouldn’t eject and there were beads of black paste around the mouth of the drive. He rubbed a finger down the screen and drew a line in the dark film coating it.

He opened a browser and searched for her, as though telling himself there was something wrong with his phone and not the reality of her. He would see her face in a few seconds.

But she was nowhere. He logged in as the woman potter and checked the Instagram messages, and only what he had written was there. Her replies were empty spaces beside empty circles. Search engines were no use, all he found were endless tributes to the season and empty, ugly Autumns with the same last name.

For a minute that felt like the last five months without her, Colin couldn’t find his phone. He was weeping now. He remembered sitting on the sofa, and there it was, slipped down between two cushions. Her name was gone from his contact list now, her texts had faded from the messaging app. He struggled to remember her number, he could almost feel it leaking from his heart.

It rang six times before silence picked up, the distant sound of wind like a place outside of existence. He made a gap in the living room blinds and saw the trees in the park shivering. A man was crossing the street with the sleek white dog.

He felt a breath across his ear. He felt the nape of his neck bunch up. The tube slid into his skin. A wire of pain straightened down his back, numbness pulsing out in strands. He tried to go still as a warbling voice said his name in almost a whisper. What would it do if he let it, he wondered, if he didn’t move. If he just stood watching the white dog in this loveless city.

It took a slow sip of him. His bones were like syrup, like the black paste beneath his fingernails, and he was folding down onto the floor. The voice spoke to him in crackles and gasps. He thought he heard it say Autumn was safe now, without him. She could sleep well again.

He thought he heard her name over and over again, an eclipse of names. Soon it was only wet noise instead of the perfect sound he had held onto for so long.

---

There was something he had not seen. He had forgotten what it was, that it was a beautiful face, that it had turned itself away from him. He had forgotten the face was hers. He had forgotten what name he had called when he needed a reason to go on.

There was only a remote impression of her still in his blood when he closed his eyes against the slanting blare of sunlight through the café windows. Leaves skirled past outside in a breeze, in the overture of fall.

Each day it took more of him. It drank the fact and the idea of her from him.

It let him watch the white dog on the leash in the park when he got home from work. It let him stand at the window with the blinds parted. It let him sleep through the night. The trees were starting to turn. But it took the color from even these things.

Colin carried two plates over to the small table closest to the door. He set them down and one of the women raised her face with a faraway smile. She didn’t quite look at him, her eyes seemed to graze the line of his shoulders as though trying to crawl over onto his back to look there. Her hair fell in waves some would have called dirty blond but he called the color of the leaves starting to cover the world.

And for an instant—but the instant was gone.

He asked if they needed anything else. She shook her head and turned to the taller woman across from her. Their voices built their own secret murmur.

Back at the café bar he glanced into the antique mirror as he took a clean mug from the shelf. He saw a face rise up behind his shoulder. It was his own face but smaller, small enough to belong to a shape that could cling to his back. There was something dead about its eyes.

Its mouth opened, and a black growth pushed out over the tongue. He watched his face lower itself behind his head. He felt the pinch, and the tube going in.

---

Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 898 for December 22th, 2023.

It Takes Slow Sips, by Michael Wehunt

Narrated by Jonathan Danz; hosted by Scott Campbell audio by Chelsea Davis

***

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Scott, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have It Takes Slow Sips, by Michael Wehunt. This story first appeared in the anthology/collection … Lost Contact and was reprinted in the 2023 collection The Inconsolables.

Author bio:
Michael Wehunt is a semi-reclusive creature living in the trees of Atlanta with his partner and their dog. Together, they hold the horrors at bay. He is the author of the collections Greener Pastures and The Inconsolables, and his debut novel, The October Film Haunt, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. His work has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, shortlisted for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ Crawford Award, and published in Spain, where it garnered nominations for the Premio Ignotus and Premio Amaltea, winning the latter. Find him in the digital woods at www.michaelwehunt.com. https://www.twitter.com/michaelwehunt

https://www.instagram.com/odandelo/

 

Narrator bio:
Jonathan Danz is a writer in the Blue Ridge of Virginia. He lives with his wife, child, and cat, all of whom are artists in their own right. He attended Viable Paradise, narrates for various science fiction, fantasy and horror podcasts, and co-hosted the now dormant Creative DoubleShot podcast along with his wife, Ginger Danz. He likes reading, riding bikes, drinking beer and messing with old typewriters.His socials can be found at @jonathandanz on Bluesky.

And now we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true.

***

[You can record the two pieces together, just leave a generous gap here]

ENDCAP

Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of It Takes Slow Sips by Michael Wehunt? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as the bad guy. Seeing that we have screwed up or done wrong is healthy, but with healthy things, its not fun. Most of the time, we can cloak ourselves in excuses and justification and in some cases delusion. Our ego can erect defences so thick and powerful, very little can penetrate them. Colin’s defences are certainly robust. He’s the nice guy, he will be patient and wait until Autumn ses he’s the one for her. He just wants to be with the woman he loves so much. He’s just such a hopeless romantic. Of course, he brushes aside the red flags of being on incel forums and has a restraining order placed on him. For him, these alarms are overpowered by the love song he has in his heart.

Of course, Colin’s true self is a stalker, a malignant parasite who won’t let go.. He drains her like a leech, even without being there. He inserted himself into Autumn’s life and still does without her even realising it. She has to erect her own defences with constant monitoring of her environment and her interactions. The constant vigilance against his presense becomes her new normal, but it doesn’t make it any less exhausting. So she finds a way for reciprocate all the trauma he has given her in service of his love.

That’s what makes the monster so interesting. It’s a reflection of Colin’s true self. It has literally inserted itself into Colin’s life. It’s his constant companion, always there with him, joined with him body and soul and never leaving him. Ever. He’ll never be alone again. All kit needs is a little nibble, little bites, slow sips here and there. He doesn’t need those memories of Autumn anyway when he has himself as company.

Now onto the subject of subscribing and support, PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re now formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly donation on Patreon will go farther than you would believe. Subscribers give us way more than just money, they give us stability, reliability, and dependability. Monthly donations give PseudoPod a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you don’t want breaches in our walls.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, and we understand, times are tight – then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media seems the least awful this week. By the way, we now have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.org. And if you like merch, Escape Artists also has a Voidmerch store with a huge range of fabulous hoodies, t-shirts and other goodies. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet. Check it out!

 

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

 

And finally, PseudoPod knows that…. You are you. Now, isn’t that pleasant?

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.