#cold spots

[paranormal-playground-podcast]

The Haunting of the Pacific Electric Building in Los Angeles

The Pacific Electric Building in Los Angeles, a towering landmark steeped in history, stands as a silent witness to the city’s vibrant past. However, beyond its architectural grandeur and historical significance lies a darker side, a realm of eerie tales and unexplained phenomena that have earned it a reputation as one of the most haunted buildings in Los Angeles. Indeed, the Pacific Electric…

The Haunting of the Pacific Electric Building in Los Angeles

[pixiemage]

My dad: “Can you throw my food back in the microwave for another minute? I thought it was done but I’m still getting cold spots…”

Me: “Cold spots? Do you notice any uh…strange smells? Like sulfur or–”

My dad: “Oh my god–”

[in-tua-deep]

cold spots (part two)

(part one)

The second time Five sees a ghost (or rather, ghosts), he’s standing in the courtyard of his childhood home, picking himself off of the ground he’s been flung onto with a desperate sort of hope burning in his chest.

He looks up and can’t help the stillness that falls upon him, not when there are ghosts standing right in front of him. And he knows them to be ghosts, because he buried them with his own two hands.

(His hands had been scraped raw, bleeding sluggishly from a dozen different cuts. He’d been hauling rubble all day, gently placing each piece with care over the bodies of the people he knew to be his siblings.

His work is already half done for some of them, but even so he’s almost soft as he places each rock atop another one until he hardly knows which pile of rocks belongs to which person. But he does know. The knowledge engraved intro his very soul. 

This is where his siblings died.

This is where Five vows to live.)

It’s more difficult than Five thought it would be, seeing them alive again. Seeing them alive where in only eight days that fact could change. It’s stupid things that startle him as well. It’s the way they move in the corner of his eye, or how they change positions when he turns his back.

It feels unnatural. Wrong. He visited his siblings graves with frequency, and none had ever moved. Dolores always stayed where he knew she was, always very considerate of his feelings.

They talked back to him, which really shouldn’t be as odd as it was. But he’d spent years upon years sitting on ground caked in ash, speaking to people who would never speak back. He talked to them constantly, especially in the first few years. He’d bring things to their gravesite that reminded him of them, and he would gently set his offerings at the foot of their cairns and explain in a voice choked with tears that weren’t permitted to fall what he had brought and what adventures he had been on.

But now there were here, and there were two sides of Five at war with one another. They’re alive, whispered one part in quiet joy, overflowing and warm with the sharp edge of desperation. The part that had fought for so long, so hard, for this one chance to see them again with rosy cheeks and warmth under their skin. The part that refused to believe this wasn’t real, because to disbelieve would destroy them.

They’re dead, whispered the other half of him. Quietly, painfully, full of grief and mourning and knowing with an unshakeable sort of knowledge that Five buried his siblings. He had seen them cold and dead and lifeless, had pressed a hand against a death-cold cheek and choked on sobs because he hadn’t known better than to waste water yet. It isn’t easy to erase that experience.

He tells himself his grief is ridiculous, that the sharp stab of pain in his chest when he looks at his siblings is ridiculous. They’re alive and Five is going to save them and there’s no use for the tightness of his lungs and the stinging pain between his eyes.

(There’s no use grieving for the thirteen-year-old siblings that would always think that he’d abandoned them, no use grieving the siblings he knew instead of the strangers he finds before him. They’re the same people, he shouldn’t be as mournful as he is. They’re here, they’re alive, that has to be enough.

He thinks of Luther’s shoulders, standing straight and proud instead of hunching in on themselves. He thinks of Diego’s stutter and the way he looked at Mom like she hung the moon. He thinks of Allison’s mischief and collection of lip gloss. He thinks of Klaus without the number of shadows behind his eyes, grinning as he pocketed said lip gloss while holding a finger to his lips. He thinks of Ben, god, Ben. Small smiles as he hid his face behind the cover of a book as though that would protect him from the sibling drama. He thinks of Vanya who showed him glossy pages of far off lands from the pages of an encyclopedia in the middle of the night, vowing to go there one day with a sort of longing that ached.

Those are the siblings he missed, that he mourned. He doesn’t know these strangers with their strange problems, sharp smiles and sharper words. He feels his walls shoot up in response, his own smile looking more and more like a weapon. Every barb that passes his lips hurts in an inexplicable way, and that hurt just makes him want to lash out at these impostors all the more.

I don’t know these people, part of his whispers, confused and wounded. We shouldn’t care about them - we can start over. Fix the equations. Go back to our family. 

He stamps those thoughts out, when he catches them. 

They’re his siblings. His family. He’s supposed to love them unconditionally, supposed to love these strangers with familiar faces and unfamiliar ways. He just needs to get used to them, he convinces himself. It’s only fair.

It’s not like they’re the only ones who have changed, after all.)

Once upon a time, Five had carelessly asked Klaus if he could tell the difference between the living and the dead. Klaus had laughed, a sort of desperation in his eyes that Five, as a child, had ignored. He’d started speaking, but almost immediately had gone off on a tangent and babbled until Five went away, clearly not wanting to answer the question in the first place.

Five wonders if Klaus would answer him now.

(He’d listen this time, would cling to any knowledge on how to differentiate the dead between the living. He just wants to look at his family and not see their corpses, is that too much to ask?

If he bothered, Klaus would probably tell him that it was, haunted eyes of his own and a brother only he could see.)

Five stares at his sister as she twists her hands and tells him that time travel messes with the mind and thinks of a smiling man who stood in the shadow of a volcano and never saw the danger for what it was. The apocalypse looms ahead of them, and once again only Five recognizes what it is. He wonders if his life is doomed to repeat itself, if this is all some cosmic punishment for daring to dabble in the laws of time.

(He wonders if he’d told the smiling man with the belly laugh of the danger to come, he wonders if that man would have believed him. His siblings certainly don’t. He feels a little bit like Cassandra, his warnings falling upon deaf ears, helpless to stop what is to come because no one will listen.)

While his siblings gather in the kitchen, loudly debating their next meal, Five stands before a series of portraits of a family that he doesn’t really recognize. He looks at the paint on the canvasses, depicting his family growing up.

“I want to go home.” Five tells the portraits, voice quiet and full of shame and he is horrified by the tears welling up in his eyes. It’s easier to tell these people, these strangers. He doesn’t know the seventeen-year-olds in the portraits. He doesn’t see the ghosts that he buried.

Just like the graves, the cool eyes of people he never met do not respond - which is a relief in itself. Some semblance of balance restored to his world. A plea that had fallen from his lips too many times to count, met with the cold indifference of a lifeless world. It’s familiar. 

Everyone else would look at Five with pity in their eyes, assure him that he was home. Here he was, safe and sound inside the walls of the Umbrella Academy with the tattered remains of his family. By all accounts he should be jumping for joy, but he wasn’t.

Five saw ghosts for the second time in his siblings, in the graves that weren’t made and a world that didn’t end. He mourned the children that they weren’t and the end that never happened, a home that never existed and was never destroyed. 

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around, does it still make a sound?

If a boy goes to the future, and then undoes it, did it ever really happen?

Five is haunted, though he’d never admit it. He sees ghosts in the corners of his eyes and in the faces of his family. But that’s impossible.

Anyone would tell you that it’s only Klaus that sees ghosts.

[dicktripwire]

Independent Comic Wallpapers

[lobocomicsandtoys]

COLD SPOTS #3 (OF 5)

Written by Cullen Bunn Art by Mark Torres

The unquiet dead gather around a crumbling island mansion, drawn to a quiet young girl who is trapped within the dreary old house. The girl's father has come to bring her home, but a sinister family with dark and murderous plans stands in his way.

Available at Lobo Comics & Toys this coming Wednesday, 10/24/2018

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[stanthemothman]

If I'm lucky, my house will be so haunted that it will stay cold during the summer time.

[dicktripwire]

Independent Comic Wallpapers

[luxiferanox]

This would come in handy for hot-flashes, too.