This Strange Sight [Chapter 5]
Some skeletons don’t fit in closets.
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Chicago
Three years earlier
Jubilee squinted blearily against the excruciating morning light as she drove back to her apartment—or tried to—from the penthouse party that had just ended at six am. Beside her on the passenger seat, her purse sat stuffed to the brim with six hundred dollars in cash, a gem-studded bracelet, and three gold rings. Her sunglasses, however, were nowhere to be found.
Losing a pair of sunglasses was worth last night's haul, but the massive hangover she had now might not be. "I'm never drinking again," she groaned.
It was more of a sentiment than a promise, one she literally could not afford to keep. People didn't let their guard down unless she agreed to drink, too. Only then was she ever able to get close enough to steal from them. A girl had to do what she had to do to pay the bills.
Then again, maybe she hadn't had to take those last three shots.
A car honked and she grimaced, taking one hand off the steering wheel to clutch her head. Why did the city have to be so loud? Still gripping her head, she sped up, trying to discern the lines of traffic and stay straight. Today would not be a good day to get pulled over for a DUI. Not that any day was good for that. The sooner she got back to her apartment and slept off the alcohol, the better.
Hopefully her roommate Alyssa would still be asleep, and Jubilee could avoid her mother-henning. Alyssa had recently quit partying in favor of playing house with her new fiancé. Jubilee was happy for her friend—mostly. But would she be able to afford rent once Alyssa got married and moved out?
Jubilee shook herself back to the present. The traffic light turned yellow, fifty feet ahead. Or maybe it was a hundred feet. Being hungover didn't exactly help with her spatial calculations. Either way, it was too late to slow down now.
She charged into the intersection some seconds after the light turned red. A barrage of honking immediately assaulted her ears, startling her. She glanced right. Cars were in the intersection already...heading right for her.
Panicking, she jerked the steering wheel left, swerving wildly towards the center island. A steel traffic pole loomed before her. Hit the brakes! her brain screamed, but in a moment of fear and confusion, her foot accidentally slammed down on the gas pedal—hard.
The traffic pole rushed to meet her. Time slowed in the moments before impact as Jubilee watched powerlessly, her mind immobilized by dread. She was dimly aware of the sound of tires squealing, car horns blaring, and a siren starting up nearby. For a split second, one resounding thought drowned out her terror...Was this the same helplessness her mother, her father, and her little sister had felt, right before they died?
Now you can finally join them, a voice too calm to be her own whispered.
Then, everything sped back up. Her car crashed into the pole, its front end crumpling like tin foil. The whole world jolted and turned on its head. Jubilee's neck snapped forward, slamming her forehead into the steering wheel. An explosion of pain seared through her entire body, and then—
Black.
A cold, distant awareness of absolutely nothing.
She no longer felt pain. She couldn't even feel her body. Was she paralyzed? Jubilee tried to reach a hand up to check her neck but couldn't...because she no longer had hands.
Or a body.
I'm...dead.
Suddenly, she hurtled across a vast, cosmic space, streaks of light and color flying past her field of consciousness. The colors dimmed and darkened as they sped by, going out like flames as she shot past.
Where am I? What's happening?
Far ahead sprawled a dark, gaping chasm. It stretched across an endless expanse, emitting an infinite, immeasurable coldness that pierced her soul and snuffed out any remembrance of warmth. The stench of rot and decay wafted from its depths. It was coming right for her.
Panic crawled through Jubilee. What was that thing?
Then, the memories began.
She was six, crying as her mother screamed at her, her father sitting silently to the side.
She was thirteen and she'd learned to scream back, ignoring the distressed whimpers of her baby sister who watched tearfully from a playpen.
She was nineteen, sobbing at her family's grave, cold rain dripping down on her as she lay between their burial plots, a gravestone on either side of her head. She screamed at the sky, cursing the heavens for what had never been between her and her family—and now, what never could be. Then, curling herself into a fetal position on the wet soil, she whispered, "Just take me, too."
Wish granted.
The same voice from before pulled Jubilee back to the present where she was speeding through space and time. The voice was like a thought and yet vaguely audible, with a smoky timbre too dark and gleeful to have originated from her own mind. Was it coming from the blackness ahead?
Do you remember?
The replay of her life started up again.
She was at a drugstore months after the funeral, waiting for a prescription of antidepressants, running on empty mentally, physically, and emotionally. A mother and daughter were in the next aisle, arguing. Something inside Jubilee snapped, and her hand shot out to snatch several random items off the shelf in front of her, stuffing them into her bag.
The memory sped up, skipping forward.
She was back in her dorm, staring at the contents of her looting and wondering what she'd just done.
"Sweet color!" Alyssa bent to admire the makeup Jubilee had just shoplifted. "That's a good brand. Mind if I use some for the party I'm going to tonight?"
"Want to buy it?" Jubilee heard herself say. "It's brand new—because I stopped wearing makeup months ago."
Alyssa contemplated her roommate. "In that case, I'll buy all of it...if you let me put some on you and come with me to the party."
Jubilee hesitated. "I don't—"
"Come on, Jubilee. It'll help you get your mind off of...things."
The memory fast-forwarded again.
Jubilee stood amid a sea of college students, dolled up in a dress from Alyssa's closet, her frizzy hair flat-ironed and lips darkened to a deep red. The crowd laughed and danced around her, revolting her with their carefree revelry. Various frat boys thrust drinks her way, and she kept shaking her head no until one boy stumbled into her, heavily intoxicated. Grabbing onto her for balance, he gave her a bashful but not entirely apologetic grin. Jubilee was about to shake him off, too, when she spied a fat wallet peeking out from his pants pocket.
He's got enough cash and happiness to spare, she decided on impulse. And he'd be too drunk to remember her in the morning, which would serve him right. Looking up at him through heavily curled lashes—courtesy of Alyssa's artistry—she let him lead her onto the dance floor, where she put her arms around his waist, her fingertips brushing the top of his wallet.
Of course, you remember. The cruel voice cut sharply across Jubilee's memory as she fell through the nothingness. You remember all of it.
Her memories sped up, replaying through her consciousness at a ferocious rate.
She was in bed with stranger after stranger.
She was crawling out from under a tangle of limbs in the dead of night.
She was slipping wads of cash out of the wallet she'd found in a pair of pants lying forgotten on the carpet.
She was sitting on a bathroom floor staring ahead at nothing, hands by her sides, one of them loosely clasping her open pocket knife. The blade was stained red. A slow trickle of blood dripped from the shallow gashes marring her wrist to the cold tile beneath her, but she paid it no mind. All she could feel were the tears trickling down her cheeks.
Do you remember how you were never brave enough to cut deeper, the voice continued, Even though you knew you deserved it?
Then Jubilee was at her apartment, holding Alyssa in her arms as the other girl cried. "I—can't believe I—lost it," Alyssa hiccuped between sobs. "Brian spent...so much money—" Another sob. "On it."
"I'll help you look for it," Jubilee soothed. The weight of the diamond ring inside her pocket grew heavier with the lie. "You'll find it again, I promise." Tears rolled down her cheeks and she wept along with the other girl, not knowing if it was out of shame and empathy or if she'd just gotten that good at pretending.
Her memories fizzled to an end, replaced by a sudden, awful awareness of the black chasm drawing closer and closer. The faint, eerie sound of weeping echoed from its depths. Anguished screams blended in tune with the cries to produce a chorus of agony that doubled in on itself, reverberating through Jubilee's core.
The voices all sounded like her, and yet not like her at all. They shrieked in hatred of their fate and of themselves, in resentment of life and all its misspent moments, in fear of eternal pain from which there was no escape. They sobbed with the sorrow of irreversible, unerasable shame. The cacophony grew louder and louder, stifling Jubilee's soul, suffocating her with an incurable dread.
Before her, the darkness yawned wider, like a mouth waiting to swallow her up. The putrid smell of death on its lips became unbearable. Fear, like a sharp claw, sliced its way through Jubilee, along with a horrific realization.
I'm going to hell.
She tried to fight the tide of gravity sucking her towards this black hole. But there was no way to fight. No arms to flail. No feet to kick. No mouth with which to scream. There was only a sense of utter powerlessness as her soul was drawn towards its unavoidable—and, she knew, well-deserved—fate.
Please, she pleaded, though she didn't know to whom she was pleading. Please, no. No. Help me. Help me! Don't let me die...
Vaguely Jubilee was aware that she was already dead, yet somehow she knew that the destination she was shooting towards was a place of death beyond what she'd ever conceived. It would be a death continuous and unending, of not only the body but of the soul and spirit, a place so utterly void of life that she would never again see or even remember what life or light or joy was. And there, she would spend eternity reliving every moment on earth that had been killing her from the inside out.
Resignation filled her. Why not just accept that she'd had this coming all along?
The wisp of a final memory pushed its way into her mind.
Jubilee was fifteen, sulking in a pew, alone except for a toddler in her lap. The child's hair was thick like Jubilee's but short, pulled into pigtails that had come undone and poofed outwards. Her rosy cheeks dimpled as she bounced in Jubilee's arms, oblivious to the older girl's foul mood.
The image made Jubilee's heart wrench. Was this meant to make her feel even worse? To remind her of all the times she'd failed to cherish her sister?
The little girl hummed quietly to herself, and teenage Jubilee scowled at the tune. It was one she'd just heard during the insufferable service she'd been forced to sit through.
Her sister tugged on her sleeve. "Sing wit' me, Ju-Lee!"
Jubilee hesitated. Her sister looked so bright and expectant in that moment that suddenly, she couldn't bring herself to say no. "Okay, Jenny," she acquiesced, and began, "There's a truth that frees me, frees me..." Jenny clapped her hands and hummed along. "From the chains of all my sin."
The memory faded, but the song continued, echoing softly through Jubilee's mind as she fell through the darkness. There's a light that saves me, saves me...
Ahead the chasm loomed, its sobs pouring out to envelope her in a rising crescendo that nearly drowned out the melody.
From the darkness crowding in.
Sheer terror gripped Jubilee as the blackness raced to meet her, its sound and stench growing stronger and stronger. She could barely hear the song anymore.
If you will, then save me, save me...from the chains of all my sin.
If you will, then save me, save me...from the darkness crowding in.
Sudden desperation filled her, igniting a primal instinct to survive, along with something else—the deep sense of mourning which she had quashed for years. It was grief for the family she'd lost and the friends she'd wronged as well as for herself—for every precious moment of life she'd so recklessly thrown away and now could never have back.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry... If she'd still had a body with which to do so, she would've wept bitterly. I'm so sorry...for everything I've done.
Jubilee remembered her sister. She thought of the light that had always been in Jenny's eyes, even when their family had been at its most dysfunctional. Jubilee didn't know where that light came from, but now she desperately hoped that it could do what the song promised it would.
Please. She sent a final, desperate plea upward into the nothingness. I know don't deserve it, but—if you will, then please...
SAVE ME.
Author’s Note: Thank you so much for reading this sample of This Strange Sight! Since the full book’s release on Amazon on June 1, 2026, the remainder of the written serial was taken down to comply with Kindle Unlimited rules. You can continue the story in audio format here (pick up at timestamp 15:51 to finish hearing Chapter 5). Or just order the completed book here.