Another Place

By Tina Shyver-Plank

After years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of The Man, Hope was left a fragile shadow of a woman, bone thin and locked in anxiety and depression. In order to survive, she had to shed the shackles of victimhood and patriarchy—without destroying herself.  With only a flimsy foothold in her real world of horrors, Hope constructs another existence. In Another Place, her mental realm, she coexists with her alter ego, Sarah St. Vincent, who equips her with the emotional tools to battle The Man. Yet as Hope becomes addicted to the catharsis of escape, her altered reality threatens to imprison her and trap her from her true existence. Only through self-discovery and personal evolution can she bring Sarah’s inner strength to the real world.  A dark and ambitious fiction debut, Another Place experiments with imagery, poetry, and realms of existence to explore the landscape of mental illness and the process of recovery and self-actualization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Oct 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634136181

Book preview

Closure

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Foremost, I want to thank my father for reading my book and giving me feedback and support. I love him very much. I want to thank my mother for always listening and caring. I love her very much. I want to acknowledge the support of a particular physician in my life, Dr. James Bernheisel, for his attention, time, and great advice. I thank my husband for his love, understanding, and patience with me. I thank Hempfield High School English teachers Harold Sachwald and Geoff Davis for both supporting and helping me to be a better writer. I thank Millersville University English Professor Dr. Stuart Foreman for making me the center of attention in class in a positive way and moving me forward as a writer. I want to thank my deceased best friend, John Shaub, for loving me and supporting me in life. Without these people, I would not have made it this far in life. I want to thank my departed Nanny for handing me the golden shoes in a dream and my departed Grammy for always smiling down on me and coming through to me during her moment of death. I also want to thank my dearly departed, never-met namesake (Grammy’s daughter) Christina for saving me from a brutal car accident, which would have changed my life forever and might have resulted in me not finishing my purpose in life. Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to everyone, especially Erin, Kate, and Ali, at Two Harbors Press for their supreme help and unsurpassed dedication to this project.

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A POEM PRELUDE

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Another Place

A beautiful pastel painting

As mystical as a dream

Lets memories touch the canvas

Of portrayals it could mean.

But no one sees the truth

Of silence behind the frame,

The colors on the canvas

Have been hiding all the pain.

Where the highlands meet the shore

With a gentle, quiet motion

There’s a place of loneliness

Beyond the calmest ocean.

No one hears the whispered plea

Or the voice against the tide,

Fear just overcomes my mind

No matter how I’ve tried.

Calling through the silence

With no sound to voice the pain

Seems hopeless in a way

When it’s here I might remain.

I’m lost in another place

That keeps me standing still

But have lasting faith in God

He’ll keep courage in my will.

Please someone sense the truth

And somehow hear my call;

I need someone to take me

From the picture on the wall.

Tina Shyver-Plank

The Stegmas Publishing Company, 1983

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I

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A Testament to Pain

Residual pain

Horrid

In its flow—

Scum at the bottom of a glass

Floating atop a shallow trace of water

Like the fuzzy fiend, memory.

Hope wanted to kill herself. Beads of sweat on her brow were in dicative of her intent to follow through quickly. A breathless compulsion fueled by an unseen force—that is, agony—imploded inside of her. Anxiety escalated inexorably. She tried in vain to contain the rogue, but to no avail.

Curling into a fetal position, she shut out the day in the darkness of her room. Hope’s long blond hair cascaded over her face, hiding the intensity of her green-eyed gaze. The heaviness in her chest could not be quelled by the false security of sleep, though depression coveted it with unyielding force. A fist churned inside her chest, reminding her how painful living could be. Fitfully awake and agonizingly aware, her eyes drifted toward an elusive picture on the wall. The scene, aglow only slightly by the close proximity of a candle, alighted a formerly unseen realm. Aquatic shades of blue traversed the canvas, netting her awareness just slightly enough to secure her fractured attention. This lucid, hypnotic refuge drew her in and brought, into the fore, a quintessential ocean view. Plumbing the depths of absolute stillness, she found Another Place. There, she was thrust into unanswerable dimensions, straddling the boundaries between life and death.

Just inside Another Place was the White Room, tucked away in the woods, where Hope could isolate herself. And I, Sarah St. Vincent, would be the voice to steer her back toward the surface, if only she would listen. But Hope would have to experience many more dimensions to Another Place to get through her perilous psychological journey.

Pensive, deep, and sensitive, Hope grappled with life along the jagged edge of raw reserve. Often depleted, her white nerves bled out. She boldly stood on a precipice, contemplating the void. Abject despair compelled her to write intensely to dispel these ancient wounds in lyrical verse:

Madness

Now, said I, the end.

Happiness is just pretend

And Death is mine forever—

Lover, life, and friend.

I tried, said I, "to postpone

The death wish that I own."

But darkness closing in, alone,

Shut out every light I’ve known.

Sounds of madness weep so soft

From my shadow’s mouth—the moans

Cut tears upon the eyes of shadow’s

Tilted head of stone.

The horror cloaked in coffin-stare—

A kind of steadfast glare

Stiff and still—paralyzed—

Stays frozen in the air.

No up . . . no down . . . just limbo

Upon the idle stair of fate,

Now said I, "The end . . .

No longer can it wait."

Stepping barefoot by the water’s edge, she resolutely stood in Another Place. She studied the scene, curling her toes gently into the warming sand. Perching herself wistfully and ever so delicately on tiptoe, she flowed downward, serenely watching the water. But even in Another Place, serenity could ebb toward the perilous, like a fragile fledgling’s fall from a lofty tree. Ocean waves licked playfully at her feet but could consume her just as quick. As the waves lapped lightly upon the shore, her gaze fell steadily across the ocean.

Her thoughts, gently blown aloft the sea, gloriously free fell. So daunting were these multifarious layers of reality. One could get forever lost in their torrents before ever realizing their sinister capacity. White ruffles on the sea could be a watery grave in an instant for unsuspecting souls.

A wall, one too high to scale, stood between Hope and the outside world. The scene was confounding—an innocent girl, a brutal world, no escape. It was Hope and the waves, the waves and the wall. She contemplated the waves, contemplated the wall. Soon her mind returned her forcibly outside the frame. Her eyes peeled open, her soul plummeting back into her body. Gasping, she sucked in a cold and painful breath. Life had reclaimed her. Her tired head flounced hard against the pillow. She surrendered, undulating slightly upward, to extreme waves of exhaustion.

Two worlds had merged; two lives had manifested precariously—a bifurcated existence interwoven with intricate, conflicting, and melding complexities arose unseen but nevertheless real. Hope could divide spiritually, just as a dreamer could watch and participate in a dream sequence simultaneously. Focused thought allowed her to traverse realms. But her earthly plane of existence was the one realm she could barely withstand.

Hope’s death psychology often submerged her between the elusive folds of life and death, relentlessly. These worlds merged closer than ever through a portal, the picture on the wall whose scene hid Another Place discreetly behind a serene curtain of blue.

Another Place was timeless, a parallel universe with its own path. Hope’s divided self lived out two lives, two conflicting personalities, one pragmatic and determined and the other psychologically paralyzed. No one could say how this really happened. Reality has many hidden components.

The Idiot Viewer, that torturous voice of nagging, inner contempt, wanted her to believe Another Place was a figment of her imagination. But even he was real. One could say it was spun from abuse, but Another Place was solid. An inner life had its bearings spiritually and physically in this domain as real as the earth. Somehow the two realms had to completely divide or Hope would die. Hope was as stubborn as she was weak, but I was the soul mate that would keep her alive, a twin soul of dedicated proportions.

In timeless space, anything could happen. Hope could get there, to this central depot, and emerge. Only Hope could pick them apart, figuratively and literally, as she tried to live up to her name on earth and in Another Place. But she would hole up in the White Room, a place I could only observe, and there she would freeze-frame.

As she surrendered to the vexing forces of the earth plane, her eyes fluttered closed, sleep finally encapsulating her. But as soon as she was cradled in sleep, the diabolical grip of vivid imagery befell her. She was not grateful for sleep. The floor quickly fell from dreamland. Sleep had merely summoned the henchmen of nightmares. Yet the dawning of the day was the building of the gallows, plank by plank. The world, to her, was an alien force of constant horrors.

The horror of darkness as a singularity came to life. From out of the darkness a legion of demons arose, bearing chalk-white faces and blood-red lips. Their jagged, pointed teeth, champing at the bit, shone bright white, as if to tear her apart. Each demon was cloaked in the darkness, with a body springing forth as many parts of the one; there were many emitting from the darkness like a horde of clones all in a row, threatening to devour her. Her eyes were now open, but she could still see them challenging her. She tried to stare them down, but they grew meaner, as they were unable to vault the invisible barrier God had bestowed between her and these unseemly creatures.

The instant onset of a migraine made her groan. She tried in vain to press out the steely pain with her fingertips. Colorful, wavy lines, juxtaposed upon an annoying, persistent blur, dominated her field of vision. She could not block out the terrifying display. Her stomach lurched with the toxic grip of nausea. The hand of sickness swept across her pallid cheeks.

She stared at the ceiling, pondering the horrors of inexplicable nightmares that often came with sleep and ignoring the heaviness behind her eyes. Each thought, progressively sadder, yielded to despair. Abandoning sleep, she tossed aside the covers and climbed slowly out of bed. The window shades had been drawn all day and would remain so. Slumping weakly at her desk, she switched on a low-lit lamp. Shielding her aching eyes, she cradled her forehead in one hand and poised a pen delicately in the other.

Starting to write, slowly at first, despite the haze, she flirted with the razed coattails of comfort. Though her hand shook slightly, her thoughts were steady. Images danced in her head and melodic verse forged a path, regardless of the depth and gravity of suffering. But here again, she remained steadfastly focused on the final hour.

A smile gently formed on her soft lips, fostering an ensuing sense of peace. But fatigue competed ardently with this positive result, curtailing just the right words to placate her ravaged mind. Lyrical verse penned to dispel the pervasive torment quickly gave way to a letter of explanation, a desperate and final goodbye. This radical slip continued. Verse was all but failing her now as she started to slip irreversibly into a depressive stupor. Feeling completely numb, she cut quickly to the chase. While engrossed in this action, she was partly at ease, foreseeing an end.

I cannot go on. . . . she wrote. I must go home to God. . . .

Her pen momentarily slipped from her delicate grasp. Congruent with relief was a penetrating awareness. She had tried to ignore the peculiar sensation sweeping over her, but to no avail. Bathed in that certain foreboding that portends intuitively and instantly something is wrong, she abandoned her work. Her pulse quickened. She now embraced the question of the moment, mechanically acknowledging a strange, unwanted presence gathering in the room. The energy polarized the atmosphere. To her horror, she played witness to the inexplicable while the alarming intensity of each moment exponentially increased.

In her parents’ immense, timeworn, creaky house erupted a heinous, panoramic sound of deep, disembodied laughter—having emerged from down the hallway, as though darkly winged. It settled markedly overhead and immediately cut out its own reality clearly, having come into the earth plane as though having entered through the space of a paper cutout.

The day, ironically having settled so sprightly around her, with sunshine in the middle of the afternoon, precluded such oddities. The sudden realization that nobody else was in the house, save her and this horrific voice, roused terror beyond measure. As the weirdness ensued, so did the corresponding denial. Irrevocably not imagination, the voice persisted. It was a maniacal anomaly that defied logic.

Springing to her feet defensively and whirling around, she confronted the invisible, but auditory, presence. To think that such a thing could happen floored her. She looked toward the ceiling, as the voice sounded almost inhuman in its depth and intensity. The distinct, deeply etched, and breathy voice echoed demonically overhead. So foreboding was this entity that it seemed to have carved out a dimension of its own—having expansiveness, a pulse. This can’t be happening, she said.

As if to contain her, or just maybe scare the life back into her, the laughter echoed ominously. She desperately tried to rationalize this event. She wanted to die, and it seemed as if some strange entity knew. The laughter was evil, as if to say: Kill yourself, little girl.

It had shaken her reality. In a split second she had reasoned that it just couldn’t be real, but she could not deny its startling reality, either. Not the remnant of a nightmare, it had ambushed her like a presumed sleeping tiger. And the anomaly had left as quickly as it had appeared. Her aloneness in the house, first welcome, now rendered itself as raw, unshakeable terror.

That she was unequivocally overcome with fear was an understatement. In the span of just a few moments, a sobering reality that life rarely addresses dramatically called into question the normal construct of things.

Despite her lasting nightmares that spoke of other musings, this time was different. Likewise, she had seen ghosts and had experienced other paranormal events, but this occurrence was undoubtedly on the underbelly of everything.

Her only way out of the house required passage near the laughter’s seeming point of origin. The voice appeared to have emerged from a room at the other end of the hallway, as though having traveled along a long, invisible string. This surreal event had left her dumbstruck, unable to transcend what she thought could have only been the creation of a silly, Hollywood horror flick.

Now released from the rubbery sensation of panic, she snatched up her notebook and dashed down the hallway past the room in question. Passing this room unfurled like a slow-motion endeavor, like an escape never made complete.

From the cradle onward, Hope could keenly sense the lower astral levels and now was no exception. It made her think she was evil or that the entities therein wanted to own her. Racing down the stairs, her feet barely touching the steps, she thrust the door open and faltered down the two remaining steps that descended from the bottom landing to the kitchen. I’m not evil, she said, springing wildly to her feet and scuttling feverishly toward the door. Evil forces are trying to fool me! she screamed. Fumbling frantically to grasp the doorknob, she fought against fear to gain control. Free at last, she leapt off the surround porch, never looking back and fleeing behind an abandoned outbuilding where the splinters of the sun-worn boards grazed her shirt as she slid to the ground. There was something bottled up in that house that could not touch her outside. Here, she wrote out her pain in a feverish attempt to preserve her only legacy to life. The suffocating reality of her being was not something she could verbalize; hence, she took refuge in the whispers of compelling, cryptic verse. A surge of adrenalin had momentarily restored her poetic nerves of steel.

Lonely Place

I feel like I’m surrounded

As I look around the room;

Mirrors, showing images,

Reflect impending doom.

Voices down the corridors

Remain unclear to me,

Trapped inside these walls

I know I can’t get free.

Down the halls of life

I see mirrors on more walls,

Soft dramatic tones prevail

Beyond a careful call.

My eyes begin to crystallize

Within these worlds unknown

As voices call and dissolve

Then leave me all alone.

I knock on soundproof walls

As time magnifies my fears:

One way in; no way out—

No one will ever hear!

Time seems nonexistent

In a lonely, empty place

Carving out the wounds

Halfway through the chase.

Reflections start to shatter—

Fear’s in a hateful reign—

It seizes quiet innocence

With forces quite insane.

In mirrors that surround me

Reflections bend from shape;

Weakening, they’re powerful

Enough to seal my fate.

Tension builds yet higher

With a breaking point soon near,

Seeming quite impossible

My heart holds back the fear.

Reflections shatter instantly—

Glass flies fiercely everywhere:

I stand silently filled with

The place that once was there.

You can see the innocence,

The fear, the raging pain,

But does it really matter

If I do or don’t complain?

Please take me from this place

That traps me in its land;

If you cannot help me,

Please tell me then, who can?

Hope tried to quell the intensity of her rapidly beating heart. Her pen shook hard against the paper. Beads of sweat fell on the parchment as her pen expelled the ink of ages. Nothing could stop the words; they came from places deep within, spurred on by the remote vestiges of a secret muse.

The charming, old house had rattled her reality. It had been renovated by her father and sat on the edge of Boston harbor. Now, she just wanted to escape it, as she documented its frightening existence in her notebook.

Days passed heavily and meanly. She tried to imagine herself in the future, years beyond the suffering. But the iron fist of anxiety constantly churned in her chest. The pain was vexing, unbearable. Panic arrested her, especially at night, dragging her into a vortex of nightmares that only broke the surface with silent, insufferable screams. She lived entombed in the clutches of terror but tried desperately to push onward,