A Heart for a Soul, Version 1
A short horror story. A heart transplant to remember.
Peter woke up groggy after his six-hour heart transplant with a breathing tube in his throat. Though his eyelids felt heavy and a dull pain in his chest pounded, he sensed a paper-thin feeling that he was not alone.
It felt like someone was in the room with him. No that wasn’t it. It felt more like someone was in his body with him. But exhausted and not yet fully awake, his eyelids drooped and soon he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Recovering from the transplant surgery took months. Over the course of the recovery, that sliver of a feeling he experienced after surgery grew ever steadily. Many days he ignored it, just happy that his thirty-year-old self was getting another chance at life.
But little by little, the mental squatter gained strength.
On a morning walk, as his heart rate climbed a bit, a startling memory simply popped into his head.
As he looked out of a car windshield, a shadow of a movement behind him caught his attention. He turned his head and stared into a woman’s face outside the car. The woman had the barrel of a pistol pointed straight at his face. With no hesitation, she pulled the trigger and shot him in the head.
He stopped walking, stunned. He had no prior memory of this. Zero.
That was not me. That was not my memory.
Not for the first time, he wondered about his anonymous heart donor.
Who was this guy?
Throughout the rest of that day, the memory randomly played in his mind like a mini-movie. A movie that only showed the last scene.
His donor was a murder victim, that seemed clear.
And the feeling of not being alone grew ever stronger.
The next morning when he woke, he was already up, dressed, and leaving the house. Peter tried to raise his arm, stop his legs from walking, wiggle his finger, nod his head. His body responded to absolutely none of his instructions. And yet his body moved. And walked. And got dressed???
He got in the car and drove….to where?
He was not in control of his body. He was aware of another presence. A stronger presence than himself. The donor soul. The one he had been sensing. The donor had established roots.
He had become a passenger in his own life. Peter felt like he was seated in the back seat of his own mind, watching out the car window as someone else drove wherever he desired.
His body drove to a big box store and used Peter’s money to pay for a hunting knife. And, of all things, a pink bandana.
Through the virtually impenetrable veil separating the donor’s soul from himself, Peter could feel a sense of revenge with the invisible fibers left of his soul. Anger and a will for vengeance seeped through.
The donor drove Peter’s body toward downtown. Peter could only see through his body’s eyes, which he no longer controlled, so he had to look wherever the donor pointed Peter’s head. Peter saw only what the donor saw.
After driving a while, the donor pulled the car into a parking deck of a large building.
The lot appeared to have several floors and he drove through each one slowly and deliberately, looking for something. Peter’s eyes kept darting back to the clock on the car’s dashboard. As the donor eased the car through the huge parking deck, Peter saw through his eyes that he was looking at each and every parked car. The car wound its way to ever higher floors. Finally, on the seventh floor of the deck, the donor stopped the car abruptly and stared at a gray sedan for several seconds.
Seemingly satisfied, he backed Peter’s car into an empty parking spot down the row from the sedan. He turned the car off and adjusted Peter’s body so that he had a good view of the sedan.
And the wait began.
Peter’s eyes closed for a while so Peter lost his internal bearings. It was like he was stuck floating in the middle of a pitch-black room. Just floating in the dark, not touching anything.
Peter used the time to try to regain some control over his body. He focused on moving a single finger. Since his eyes were closed and he couldn’t feel his physical self, it was difficult to determine if he succeeded or failed.
He tried again, focusing harder this time. His eyes opened like shades rising in a window, staring right at his index finger. The donor and Peter watched it wiggling. Just a bit, but wiggling nonetheless.
Peter saw his other hand reach over and grab the quivering finger and hold it still. That was enough to break Peter’s focus.
The donor reached both hands up in front of Peter’s eyes and opened them wide then closed them into a balled fist, over and over. Then he spoke.
“This is my body now.”
He closed his eyes and Peter plunged into darkness again. Floating and powerless.
After some time, Peter’s eyes opened again, and people were filing out toward their parked cars to head home. Most of the cars between Peter’s car and the sedan were already gone. In fact, as the donor turned Peter’s head around to scan the deck, most of the cars had cleared out.
After his last burst of focus and the resulting finger wiggle, Peter sensed his presence fading. He seemed to lose the fight for his body before he even understood that a fight was happening. Now his soul was slowly being rejected by his own body.
Suddenly, through the windows of his eyes, Peter saw a woman in heels heading straight for the sedan. A gray haze tinted his sense of vision now, the color growing fainter.
Peter’s body slowly exited the car. When he looked down Peter saw him grab the knife in his hand. When he saw his hand again the knife was gone. Peter had no doubt he still had it on him.
The donor sauntered toward the sedan, blocking her exit.
When the woman noticed him she stopped short.
“It’s me, you fucking bitch,” Peter heard his voice say.
“Excuse me?” she shot back. “Do I know you?”
Peter’s hand tossed her the pink bandana.
It landed at her feet and she stared at it. She looked up from the bandana and stared at him.
“It’s me, Emily. Your loving husband. You were a bad girl. Honor and obey your husband. Those were the rules.”
“Mister, I don’t know you,” she replied, with less bravado now.
Peter saw confusion in her expression.
“You know me, baby. I bought you a pink bandana just like that on our second date. You wore it around your neck the rest of the night.”
Sheer terror in her face now. Despair in her eyes. A stranger’s face, but she believed.
“You are dead,” she mewled, her voice shaking.
“No, Emily,” the donor replied smugly. “I was dead.”
In the bottom of his hazy window view, Peter noticed the knife. Emily must have seen it as well because she tried to run, high heels and all. Peter’s arm easily knocked her down. Peter assumed it was not the first time.
The donor in Peter’s body towered over his fallen wife.
Peter felt utterly helpless to do anything but watch this horror movie unfold, neutered of any ability to save her. In desperation, with a final, sustained burst of focused concentration, what remained of Peter’s soul urged his body to walk.
Just stroll, legs. You remember me right? Ignore that fucking psycho.
His legs awkwardly responded and stumbled past the woman.
Peter heard his own voice cry out in utter surprise.
“What the shit?”
Peter’s arms reached angrily for the woman but the momentum of his legs moving pushed him into a jog, and then his body was sprinting.
Like a mental, high-speed wrestling match, Peter sensed the donor regaining some power over his legs. But only ten more feet to go.
Three more strides and they were there. The open railing of the parking deck. Seven stories up. Peter’s body slammed into the rail at full speed.
Peter heard his voice scream, “NO. NO. NO.”
Peter’s body and its two souls flipped over the side and tumbled into mid-air.
In the split second it took to reach the ground, Peter’s soul broke free of his body for good, and his freefall stopped short as the donor’s new body crashed to the earth.
On his rise upwards, Peter’s soul sensed Emily sitting up on the parking deck floor, crying. They seemed like tears of relief.
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