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Charlie was a normal kid.
He went to elementary school like any other seven-year-old, he wasn’t the smartest, but that was okay. His mom was nice, she packed a lunch for him every day before he went on the bus. They moved to San Fransisco when he was eight. It was…challenging getting used to a new school. He made friends quickly enough, easily skipping over the awkward stages of being the ‘new kid.’
Charlie was a normal kid.
So what if the concept of death didn’t scare him when Mary brought it up after one of the other kids crushed a beetle. He still comforted her as she cried about it, and he helped her bury the thing (Mary had named it Beet, like the food). Maybe he just learned about death earlier than the other kids and had more time to accept it. But he didn’t remember his mom ever sitting him down and talking about it.
Charlie was a normal kid.
And normal kids have normal fears. It wasn’t dumb of him to hate going to the top of the jungle gym at school or crying whenever he and his mom flew on a plane across the country to visit family. Whenever he looked at the ground from high up it was all spinny and weird. It made his head hurt. He didn’t like it. Not liking heights was as normal as fears get.
Charlie was a normal kid.
So when he saw a group of three other people while waiting in the checkout line at the supermarket he shouldn’t have stared as long as he did. His mom told him that staring was rude, but there was something about the empty bottle, the backpack, and the candle that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from. It was silly, he had never met these people before and it wasn’t like they stood out at all. The green backpack glanced his way and did a quick double-take, he (how did Charlie know he was a he?) then tugged on the candle’s arm and she followed his gaze. The soda bottle noticed the odd behavior of the two and looked over as well. All three looked away when they noticed Charlie was staring back at them.
Charlie was a normal kid.
And nightmares were normal. His mom said that anyone could have nightmares, even adults, so he knew that they were just things that happened.
He had this one reoccurring nightmare. It was this place that was just a long span of grass that stretched on for miles and miles. There were other people there with him, but whenever he woke up he could never remember what they looked like. The dream often flip-flopped about, sometimes it was like he was watching from his own body, and sometimes it was like he was watching from an outside perspective.
He sat in the grass for a bit, playing around with it as the other people talked, probably about boring adult things. Then these wooden pillars always appeared. It was always in a different way. One night they sprouted out of the ground like trees, one of the pillars appeared under him and shot him into space. Another night they just popped into existence, not caring who or what they’d run into when they began existing. Other times they would fall from the sky, as if someone had dropped them.
He always ended up dream-hurt by the dream-pillars.
And he must’ve just been hurt, because he heard other people talk about their dreams and they always woke up when they died.
Every time he had that dream, there had always been someone in the dream trying to stop the pillars from hurting him.
He never could remember their face.
Then the dream continued on as normal. It must’ve skipped over some parts -- like dreams often do -- because he and the other people were suddenly standing on top of the wooden pillars. Except he kept falling off. It felt like those ice levels in the video games he plays. He just couldn’t stay sitting on the pillars, and every time he fell off he was just back sitting on them again, like a checkpoint.
Then at some point, he went back to sitting back down in the grass as if he had never been on top of the pillars in the first place. But the pillars were still there and he could still see the other people on top of them.
From there the dream devolved. He couldn’t remember much but three people fell and bounced when they hit the ground, as if they were on a trampoline. He always woke up after that to his mom calling him down for breakfast.
Charlie was a normal kid.
When he was a bit older he was given a phone for his birthday. Looking back on it, it wasn’t special. It didn’t have a data plan, and it was an old model. But he liked it. He got to play games and watch videos online. His favorites were these two objects who tried to solve cold cases. Their jokes were funny and who cares if he got nightmares sometimes after watching them before bed? There was this one video, a new upload, about the disappearance of five objects from all over the country.
Apparently, they had gone missing all around the same time, on the same day. Then all of them reappeared over the course of a year. Their names hadn’t been said in the video, for the sake of confidentiality, but nobody knows how -- or even why -- the five of them disappeared in the first place. Some suspected kidnapping. Others were more skeptical, as one of the victims disappeared in her room while having a conversation with her friend and there were no signs of a struggle. For a while, it was thought that one of the victims jumped off the golden gate bridge, as his bike was found abandoned on it. The case was left unsolved until the victims began showing up sporadically, the first two reappeared weeks apart, but then it took full months for the third to reappear, and not as long, but still a while, for the fourth and fifth to return.
Something about the case stood out to Charlie, but he didn’t know why.
It just felt as if something was amiss.
Or rather, someone was missing.