The Ghost Whisperer

Part One - Chapter Six

The next morning, Anthony felt sick to his stomach.

That sickening feeling had somehow spread to his head, and he groaned loudly while trying to get out of bed. His efforts proved to be in vain because he lacked the energy in the moment and ended up rolling off the side of the mattress and falling onto the floor with a thud.

He didn’t want to sleep. He also didn’t want to get up. Somehow, however, he forced himself up without his intention to, and soon he was sitting on the edge of his bed. His head was spinning out of control. Nausea washed over him like nothing else before. it felt like he was getting hit by a ton of bricks all over his body. He had never been this sick in his life.

Wanting to go throw up, he stood up suddenly and moved his feet at the pace of sprinting while at the same time stumbling as he made his way to the bathroom. He leaned one hand against the wall to steady himself from falling, and he lifted his other hand to his head to try and ease the vertigo.

When he got into the bathroom, he collapsed to his knees in front of the toilet, gripping onto the white porcelain bowl with his hands as he leaned his face forward into it and began to vomit.

During this, he remembered an instance from his past that’s similar to the present moment. One time when he was little, he had caught the flu and couldn’t eat anything without puking. He had been given buttered toast for every meal for nearly a week, as it was the only food he could ingest without it lurching back up thirty minutes later, and his mother told him to eat slowly. He didn’t listen. Plus, he carefully and quietly snuck into kitchen in the middle of the night to get a snack since he missed the taste of sugar, but it never ended well. Once he felt the nasty bile surging up his esophagus, he ran straight to the nearest toilet and let it all out. It woke up his parents, but only his mother appeared at the bathroom doorway. She knelt down to him and started rubbing his back while smiling. She stayed by his side until he was finished, but she didn’t lecture him even knowing he had disobeyed her warnings. Instead, she kept grinning and began cooing him a sweet soft lullaby as she carried his small body back to bed.

What he’d kill for that sweet moment of comfort right now.

He soon finished letting out what needed to get out of him, but as he opened his eyes, what he saw in the toilet bowl made his eyes sting and the stench was unbearable. Lumps of the steaks he had eaten previously floated in a murky mess of dark red, brown, and black liquid that he at first couldn’t believe came from inside of him. Apparently not agreeing with him, much of the residue still stuck to his mouth and chin. As he wiped it off with the sleeve of his shirt, that’s when the voice started up again.

“…I’m sorry…I’m sorry…I’m sorry…I’m sorry…I’m sorry…”

It was coming from the contents within the toilet bowl.

Was he going crazy?! As Anthony peered closer into it, the little clumps of meat began to stir around on their own. All the while, the voice of his mother got louder and was ringing in his head.

All of a sudden, the meat chunks started to bind together and swirl upward, until they took the shape of something he couldn’t decern at first. But as the small meaty mass continued to move and holes began to form, they took the appearance of what may just be a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth, which kept lip-syncing the words that he heard from his mother’s voice in his head. Yet it wasn’t just in his head, and he soon realized that he was now looking at his mother’s face in the toilet bowl. Though made of half-digested pieces of meat, he could still make out and recognize the facial features he knew belonged to only her.

Startled, Anthony pushed himself away from the toilet, and somehow the force was enough to send him stumbling backwards until the back of his head hit the wall behind him. He thought he was merely hallucinating in the beginning, but the fear and tension he felt in this moment was all too real. Letting it consume him, he sat there on the floor, his whole body shaking, yet at the same time completely paralyzed.

He stared in horror as he could have sworn the contents from within the toilet were rising upward, enough for him to see even though he was sitting on the other side of the bathroom. They rose higher and higher, and all the while, they grew in mass, as if the little bits of meat were multiplying. Taking new shape and form from just a face to the entire upper half of his mother’s body.

Anthony’s jaw dropped.

“…Sorry…so sorry…so sorry…so sorry…!”

The meaty arms, while wriggly and limp, reached out towards the boy as he looked on in absolute terror. They never got the chance to touch him, though. With a sudden burst of adrenaline, Anthony swatted them away with the toilet plunger he had managed to grab from his side as he also got back onto his feet, not caring about the intense dizziness he was feeling. He headed for the door on his right, exited the bathroom, and then ran down the hallway back to his bedroom. Slamming the door shut behind him, he stumbled back onto his bed and closed his eyes to try and simmer down his migraine. The alone things he could still hear at this point were his own heartbeat pounding inside his chest and his mother’s words inside his head.

Only several moments later did everything fall silent for Anthony.

He woke up again, and this time it was already past nightfall. He heard a sturdy hand knocking on his bedroom door before his father entered under his own accord.

“Hey, Anthony. Sorry, but do you know where the plunger from the bathroom is?” the man asked in a whisper as he approached his son’s bedside.

Anthony was still laying on his side, and he soon felt that he was leaning on something wet and uncomfortable. He then realized two things. First, he had puked again at some point in his sleep for there was more vomit around his mouth and on his bed sheets near his pillow. Second, he was still gripping the plunger in his hand and was prepared to use it as a weapon if he had to defend himself again from that meat monster replica of his mother from the toilet.

The boy shifted his body, flipped over onto his back, and then sat up. His father was already ready with clean towels in hand to wipe away the residue from his face, and he did it with a smile.

“How are you feeling tonight, champ?” he asked to show concern for his son’s health.

Through the gargles of bile still in his throat, Anthony managed to say, “Oh, yeah. I mean, well, not as good as I should be, but I—”

Then his stomach felt ready to lurch again and he couldn’t finish his sentence.

“I noticed that you threw up quite a bit in the bathroom,” his father cut him off once he got the chance, “I’m going to have the take the plunger back since it all won’t go down.”

Anthony felt embarrassed by that.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll leave this bucket for you at your bedside if you have to keep at it. Also, you missed meals today, so I made you a plate of toast. Be sure to eat it slowly now.”

‘Almost brings back memories…’ Anthony thought as he watched his father set the plate and a glass of water on his nightstand.

“Well, it’s late, so I better let you rest. Goodnight, son.”

After the man left the room, Anthony grabbed the plate and rested it on his lap to eat his toast, and then he noticed something that shouldn’t be there. If this was a dinner of only toast, then why were there multiple and extremely thin slices of red meat wedged in between? Knowing that he eats his toast in two or more slices at a time, he would’ve eaten them blindly if he hadn’t noticed it first.

‘Oh God!’ Anthony thought. ‘Is this the same meat from those steaks?! Why would Dad give me something knowing that it’ll make me throw up?!’

And why did his vomit of the steak briefly transform into his mother earlier?!

All these questions he didn’t have any answers to.

He didn’t want to believe it, but there was only one way to find out for sure.

Anthony couldn’t wait any longer. He had to know, once and for all, about what happened to his mother. But he needed help in doing so, and he knew of only one—or rather, two unlikely girls—who could and would aide him.