Glimmer

Glimmer by Shinigamiinochii

Prologue: Karin: The Human Brain

            My sister
once told me, a haunting is a feeding place for animals. No, you won’t find
this definition in any dictionary. Still, it sends a chill through my neck and
down my shoulder blades. It’s up there with ‘spiral into madness’ or ‘the dead
travel fast’. ‘Haunt: a feeding place for animals.’ Something so small and
simple, but it terrifies you each time you hear it. I suppose that when most
people think of ‘haunt’ they think of old movies like Poltergeist or the
Amityville Horror, even these have nothing to do with haunts. Spiritualists and
psychics claim that when a person dies, they leave an impression in the things
they have touched, like a finger print on a clean pane of glass. If you’re just
passing by it, that blemish, so small and unimportant in the giant world, but
if you stop, and focus on that pane of glass, for just a few seconds, that
fingerprint is so vivid, and so out of place, you wonder how you could have
missed it. But is such a thing possible? If you had asked me a year ago, I
would have not said so. Sure, my family goes to church every Sunday morning,
just like all the other families in this quaint little seaside town I claim as
my home. And sure, I bowed my head like everyone else. But, deep down inside,
did I believe in the ‘everlasting soul’? In a thing that no one could see,
touch, feel, or even describe elegantly? In a world filled with behaviorism,
nature vs. nurture, and genomes, things like good, evil, and the human soul
were mere possibilities that were out of place in my life. After an entire year
dealing with evil, good, and yes, even the soul, do I believe? No. I believe
even less than back then. What I do believe in is the mind. I’m sure you
remember Phinneus Gage, whose entire personality
changed, not through possession of the devil or a fall from grace, or even from
losing his soul. He became this way from a metal rod through his skull. As
humans, we only use 10% of our brains. Eidetics,
those few with photographic memories, still only use 11%. Science fiction
boasts that, if we could use all of our brains, we could become super humans,
having powers like clairvoyance, telepathy, and telekinesis. But I don’t
believe in that either. Would your brain grant you the doorway to godliness, or
would it turn into a cancerous sore, rotting in the cage of your skull? If you
use all of a computer’s capacity at all once, the computer would break down.
And aren’t our brains just complex computers? There’s a reason we don’t use anymore
of our brains. Haunt: a feeding place for animals. That still frightens me. If
there are no ghosts, haunts are products of our brains, straining at something
that is impossible to comprehend. Is that any less terrifying? If a haunt is
not a fingerprint, then it is a crack down that glass, threatening to shatter.
Or is it a wave, slowly carving away at a cliff? Haunt: a feeding place for
animals. For every fact there is a question that tears at it. Haunt: a feeding
place for animals. What animals?
Everything inside me grows cold. And I wonder what did my sister see? No, what
disease infected her brain? What illness haunted her? What animal was eating at
her? The last time I saw my older sister was in the autumn of 1995, exactly
three months ago.