The Haunted Park

Klaus committed suicide in the little park on the edge of town. But that was not enough for him to haunt the place.

You see, unbeknownst to Klaus, humans actually have no souls. Granted, Klaus was a sensitive young man. He read a lot of novels and books of poems, waxing over the pure and perfect heroines. He wrote poems of his own and he painted too. He was also in love with the count’s daughter.

All of these things are very human, and hint at a soul. So do religious visions, or simply religious devotion. But the reality is that, sadly, humans only imagine an immortal soul. The illusion is created by the elusive nature of their consciousness. Wires in a box. Electrical wires.

Luckily for Klaus (if haunting the park was something he actually wanted), there was an immortal creature present. Deep in the ground, below the park.

Millions of years ago, powerful and fantastic beings walked the earth. They were beautiful and they were immortal. One of those, let us call them Ancients, was incapacitated out there on the edge of town. Being immortal, it could never cease to be. But its senses, its very essence, were not even remotely similar to those of a human. So, it never made anything of humans and their endeavors. It just lay there.

When Klaus was dying, his brain put all energy into staying alive. But the organ was by then devoid of any means of defense, due to lack of oxygen. It had lost the control of the rest of the body. So it just screamed a primal scream. You remember, it was wires in a box, so the scream echoed through the electromagnetic spectrum.

The Ancient below the ground heard the scream with one of its organs and repeated it, but amplified. Then it kept repeating it mindlessly from time to time. Why? Who can guess the motivations of a creature so different from us? Perhaps it was like whistling a song one once knew.

The scream was a partial image of Klaus’ brain. As such, it was meaningless to the Ancient. However, the signal emitted by the Ancient organ was so strong, that other human brains could pick it up. And to some of them, it was sometimes meaningful.

Some of them picked up the emotion of powerless rage, or that of unrequited love. Some felt an eerie presence on the edge of their perception. Others still saw and heard a young man weeping. In the water. In the pond. In the little park. On the edge of town.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk