Mistaken Migraine (Part II)

Standing there in my bathroom, the shock had now completely taken over my body. I wasn’t sure what to make of this tiny device lying on a blood-soaked bathroom tissue. I stared down in horror, mouth still agape, trying to piece things together. Nothing made sense in that moment. I quickly sat down on the covered toilet seat, as my legs grew weaker. Slowly touching my hand up to my right ear and then gazing back down at the bloody tissue with the foreign object, trying to understand how this thing could have come from my ear. What was it? How did it get there? How long had this thing been there?

Dark in color, appearing to be caked and crusted with old blood was how I could best describe the intruder. There was a piece of it that was shinier than the rest, and it was small and flat. I’m not even sure how this would fit in my ear canal? The closest thing I could parallel in a description would be a small sim card, without the gold chips. Confusion in this moment was great.

Instantly, I thought back to lying on my bathroom floor and the apartment door being open. My mind started reeling and my heart racing. A million thoughts came flooding in, building up scenarios like a child builds with blocks. I suddenly couldn’t breathe. With my chest heaving heavily, I set the tissue down on the bathroom counter and instinctively went to my front door. I’m not sure why but I felt the need to check all of the locks, I suddenly no longer felt safe. Once ensuring everything was still locked, I begin staring out of the peep-hole, watching for… I don’t know what. I stood there for minutes, thinking something or someone might pass my door that would spark some idea of what was going on. No one passed. There was nothing.

I turned back around to face my apartment, absentmindedly peering down the hallway toward my bathroom again. Head still buzzing, there were so many questions that I had bouncing around my brain. It hurt to think and more than that, I was afraid. I swallowed hard and decided that I would dissect this odd instrument and figure out what it could possibly be. As I entered my bathroom, the light still on, a heavier panic washed over me. It was gone! The tissue was still wadded up on the counter, full of blood that had now absorbed into the fibers, but the device was gone. There was no way. I dropped to the floor and begin feeling around in the rug, maybe I knocked it over. I looked under the sink cabinet and around the toilet. I searched the entire room and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing! I’d never felt so sick to my stomach before.

My head started to pound and so did my heart. I was feeling so alone in this situation and now, there was nothing to even investigate because there was no physical evidence. I touched my hand to my ear, it was dry. No more blood seeping out, but there was some crusted around the entrance of the canal. I know I am not crazy. I know this happened. I don’t know what exactly happened, but I know something did! I kept trying to reassure myself, but it was getting harder by the second. After searching the bathroom one more time, I tossed the bloody tissue, flushed out my ear with warm water and found myself a spot on my couch to curl up in, trying to forget any of this had occurred.

***

The sound stole my breath away and shrewdly woke me from my sleep. I sat up in a wretched pain with tears quickly welling in my eyes. I felt as if something had burrowed into my head and I could feel an immense pressure coming from my temples; my inner ears were wincing. It was unbearable and that awful, screeching sound had returned with a vengeance. It was as if someone had hooked it up to an amp and I could no longer think straight. I couldn’t stop crying as I held my head in my hands. I was terrified and being tortured and I had no idea what was going on.

I timidly reached up to touch my ear again and as I did I could feel a warm liquid welling inside and leaking out, dripping down the side of my face. I reached for the lamp on my end table and switched it on. Gently brushing my ears, I pulled my fingers away to see that once again there was blood, this time from both sides. I had no idea what to do at this point, so I was fumbling around the room, trying to gain balance and search for my phone. Before I was able to find it, I felt this agonizing ripping feeling coming from my right ear. Cringing, I felt inside, as I gave up looking for my phone and headed to the bathroom to see what I could observe. As I looked in the mirror, trying to angle myself just right to get a glimpse of inside my ear, I felt something protrude from within.

Sticking the tip of my index finger inside my ear, met with my thumb, I slowly and carefully pulled at a hard piece of something. I continued to pull, feeling the pressure subtly relieve itself the more I got whatever this was outside of my ear. Finally getting the entire thing out, I packed my ear softly with a knob of cotton and sat down on the cover of my toilet again. Staring blank faced into the same mechanism that I’d seen just earlier that day. Though, this one was different. This one had something scrawled into it in tiny print.

POETOUGVRMN

RPRYFSOENET

I sat there with my eye sight slightly unfocused from the text, trying to let my eyes zone out a bit to see if anything jumped out at me. I did this often when I was looking at word search puzzles and it usually worked. Since it wasn’t doing me any good this time and my head was still pounding, I just sat there and stared at it for a bit. There were no numbers, no indication of what this might mean. It took me a good thirty minutes for my mind to settle down long enough to even think of Google. When I did, I started with Codes, which was only met by games, software, and computer type coding. Then it hit me to try Decoding, but that still didn’t bring anything that was of help. I finally typed in Code and cipher which brought up cryptography. Bingo! This was what I needed. I clicked on a few articles and a Wiki page trying to see if anything jumped out at me matching what I was staring at. It was so hard to tell.

It was probably another thirty minutes of very skimmed reading and still a sorely pounding head before I found an article that mentioned Transposition Cipher. This seemed to be the only code I could find that made even an ounce of sense in regard to what I was looking at. I started trying to apply different methods of this code to the words listed, hastily scrawling out different breakdowns. It was after about 7 minutes of toying with the letters that it jumped out at me. And then I froze. My breath became very stale and sporadic, my eyes begin to bulge, still wet from before. The fear pulsated throughout my entire body as I sat with my eyes darting back and forth between my handwriting and this device. What I had cracked read:

Property of US Government.