Chapter Text
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.dyqwq ohj i'jub
...
There were hands in your head.
Two of them, both larger than life, both infinitely intricate. Soft, delicate, they squeezed and gripped, pulled and stretched. Fingers that dug into the soft wrinkles of your brain, fingers digging into the division between the two hemispheres. Teasing them apart, treating them like the shell of a clam; made to pry, made to be broken. Cracked apart, a heedless schism, they dove within to reach the inside of you. Rolling, pushing, like kneading a firm ball of dough. They focused on reworking your mind, reshaping it, rewiring it.
They aimed to break down the thoughts of rebellion, of full-bodied curiousity. They sought to pop the bubbles of intrigue. They filled the dough of your mind with new yeast, of mirages of what you longed for; a confirmation of one world, of one location, of one true reality. Of a place that was easy to understand; hand crafted notions of uncomplicated reason, simple explanations for the unknown, the gentle reveal of an illusion made to be impossible to detect. To give you the opportunity to divulge in the fact that it hadn't been your fault, that you were merely an unwitting victim of unnatural circumstance.
It festered and grew, the injected yeast flourishing in the warmth of self-doubt. It bathed in the heat of your confusion, and in your soul-crushing ache for that fading sense of normalcy. The ball of dough engorged on the bitter cocktail of emotions, the fingers poking and prodding, warping and changing. They gifted you new perspectives, new beliefs, new thoughts to call your own.
You noticed them now. You could recognize the thoughts that weren't yours.
It didn't work. Not quite, not truly. For one cannot change the very fabric of the material they use. One cannot change what dough is made of, as the very foundation of flour and liquid were the building blocks that gave it the meaning of dough. Just as the the hands could not change the very core of your being. They could squeeze and strangle, they could tempt and lure. But the building blocks of you, your goals and soul, your dreams and patterns, they were all like the flour and liquid of dough. Once the a dough is made from them, they cannot be removed.
They can be influenced and hidden, but they themselves will never truly go away. Just as your very being cannot be replaced. Hidden, yes, from you or from the world. But never replaced; not without time, not without decision, not without reason. And without them, without whatever patterns of thought or experiences, soul or sense of existence. Without whatever made you you, you would no longer be you.
Or would you?
You hoped it would never reach that point, where that became a legitimate concern.
Could you still be considered yourself if you changed? How much change would be acceptable? Without the passage of time, without being swaddled in an ever-shifting world with no true control, what made you you? For change through time was natural, so what was change without? Would it still be you? For a ship is still the same ship no matter how many repairs it's gone through, gifted security in the knowledge of self through the very oceans it sailed and the crews that ran it.
Were you like a ship sailing on the waters of a universal semi-lucid consciousness, never aware enough to see what resided under the surface? Trading bits of mast, strips of sails with others that held impact on your life? Always changing, always adapting, somehow the same ship regardless of what you went through? Or, subscribing to a different train of thought, the self never existed in the first place.
You never really existed.
The you you called you existed in only the very microsecond in which you claimed it true. For that brief fraction of time, in that infinitesimal sliver, you existed. Beyond that point, it was still you, but it wasn't the same you as it was seconds, minutes, hours or days, weeks or years before or after. The self was ever changing, witnessed into being only in the moment it was seen. Else-wise it never actually was, and never would be. Simply a fabrication of thought, a name given to something that could never be quantified.
For what would you call an ever-changing substance? One that was solid one day, vaporous fumes the next? One day carried toxins, and another day a cure for illness? Would it not be considered different reactions, ultimately different in feature and make up? How could you ever be quantified if the you today and the you tomorrow would be different people? It only took a missing hour of sleep, a surprise gift or just talking to someone to change the emotional lens one experienced their life through.
Were you your body or did you reside within it? To others—to everyone that wasn't you—the former may be true. For humans, like many beings, are primarily visual creatures. It is the sense that is most relied on, though it is far from the only one. So, to others, when they thought of you, perhaps they thought of the visual representation of you that existed within the world rather than your brain, your mind, the core of who you actually were.
Or perhaps they thought of the sound of your voice, or the smell of your home. Things you've done, things you've been involved in. Things that are byproducts of your existence, but perhaps not the real substance of you. Even your opinions, the ones that you've voiced to others, weren't all you were. Opinions change, people learn. You changed, you've learned.
You didn't look like you did as a child; your body matured and so did your wisdom. You didn't wear the same clothes as you did when you were 8, nor when you were 14. If you dyed your hair now, how different would you really be? Would that make you someone new? If you changed your name—first or last or middle or any combination thereof—would that make you someone else?
Yet a tree was still a tree whether it was called a tree or a pine, an oak or named Jeffery. Just as a rose by any other name would still be a rose. It was just as sweet and still filled with petals and thorns. The physical world, the names and understanding, how much of it impacted what actually was? Did all things, living or not, breathing or not, human or not, face the same conundrum? Limited by evolution and the senses they had access to, trapped within a glass bubble of perspective? What was perspective other than how one experiences the world itself?
If a tree fell in a forest and nothing was there to hear it, would it still make noise?
You would still be you if you had a different name, wouldn't you? After all, no name is truly unique. With the hundreds of millions of humans on the planet—unforetold billions of billions of living beings that could have names regardless of what they were—any number of them could share your name. So what made your name yours? Millions of lives could be shoved into room upon room upon room, all with features like your own.
Maybe it would be just a name you would share, or maybe it would be more than that. It could be physical features, similar skin tones, hair types, eyes or ears, mouths or teeth. Similar builds, similar smiles, similar ways of hiding tears. It could be familiar ways of standing, of sitting, of waiting for a better future, or burying unspoken memories. It could be life stories with the same themes, or families like your own. Schools like the ones you had, or the same relationships with friends and peers. So what then made your personality unique, besides the fact you claimed it as your own?
So what then made you you?
If it wasn't your body, if it wasn't the physical form that made up only a fraction of the totality of you, what was it?
Could it be soul—or spirit or consciousness. Whichever name it was given. Did the name really matter when the concept it was applied to was so varied to begin with?—that made you you? Moulded by the very surroundings you were born into and that you were raised in, and the ones that you existed in now. Shaped by each interaction and each missed interaction, every one random in the grand scheme of the universe. Or lack of scheme, depending on through which lens life was seen through.
One thing was for certain. No one picked how their life would be before they lived them. Imagine the lives people would lead if they could?
...nothing like this would have happened if you had a choice.
...maybe you weren't the same you as the you that could have picked your life.
If a hundred souls were given the exact same life, same body and name, same friends and family and school and hobbies, how different would they be? How many similarities would live in the cavern of each of those souls? How many differences would roam in the gorge that separated their consciousnesses? How much would they be like you, or would they all be you? Different parts of you? Different people you could have once become? Different versions of you, all the real you in their own sense of the world?
Variations of the theme of you, or would they cease to exist the moment they serve no purpose in their hypothetical existence?
What actually made you you, if you couldn't even begin to define the truly unique aspects of what you were made of?
Were you simply a series of electrical pulses in the shape known as a brain? Bathed in blood and formed of grey-scaled matter? A seemingly endless stream of neurons within synapses, of rhythms and patterns, of signals and signs? Controller of a body that was home to billions of bacterias and minuscule organisms, a living universe unaware of the thriving microscopic biomes that it hosted? A master to a puppet made of biological matter?
Surely not?
You knew you were more than that, right?
So then, what made you you?
What then, made up the concept of you?
You felt the hands falter, both retreating as the dough of thoughts ballooned out of control. It writhed like a living beast, a manifestation of your natural disposition towards existence. Optimism turned to jaws, determination into the fangs that bit. Your strength to hold on, to not forget, to never forget became the claws that struck, the claws that would protect.
And eyes, your eyes—all of your eyes. The eyes that weren't yours, yet lived under your skin. The eyes that weren't yours, yet bubbled up within. The eyes that you saw in the mirror, the eyes that you saw in your reflection. They were inside you, they were festering, bulbous masses. Ready to burst free, ready to erupt through the pores of your very skin—glared towards the hands.
You could see double; the apartment around you and the world inside the realm of hands and thoughts. The walls you lived in clashed with walls you've only ever seen through a screen. Scarlet upon snow, the multi-coloured walls burned through the off-white of your own, white bleeding red. The ink dripped down the walls, leaking from the ceiling. It was a fine spray, spreading like black mold on top of it all.
The growth of rot, eternal.
The hands flickered between faint shadowy suggestions of themselves and solid sunflower yellow, between being made of the wisps of clouds and from pure sunshine. They were solid yet not, as too was your mind, trapped betwixt two worlds. Your mind was changed into a growling beast of rage and sorrow, snarling blind confusion. You could see the vague impression of a face distorted in distress. But you couldn't see the face, not with your eyes, not with your human eyes, not in any way that mattered.
You didn't have a face yourself, yet the only face you've ever had was your own.
The hands smashed into the dough, sharp and fearful. It popped the building pressure, shoving it down. It crushed your mind, shrinking it, starving it. You continued to fight a battle you didn't understand, you snapped and bit at the hands that failed to feed. They barely flinched, their desperation much stronger than your fury. It was a battle of wills, unwitting and painful. And you found yourself wishing, not for the first time, that you understood what was happening.
Dimly, somewhere in your choking mind, you finally understood one thing.
You knew you were sitting down, you could feel the wooden chain.
You knew what Wally meant now, that anyone needed a concept of self before existing as themself.
You knew that you had eaten, the clumps of sweet pancakes clung to your teeth.
It was so much easier leaving the formation of that concept to another outside of oneself. After all, who were you truly?
You knew whose hands they were, the were just as fleecy soft as you remembered.
You understood it now. Wally didn't understand himself.
There was the faint sound of a phone ringing.
He was afraid.
It was forced atrophy of the self. A necrotic wound encouraged to fester, not out of revenge or sadistic delight, but out of something far, far worse. Encouraged not for selfishness, but out of the delusion of selfless protection. It was a gift of self-negligence, a promise of indifferent obliviousness. For as long as you never thought of it, it would be like it never existed. Why struggle in the face of the impossible? Why hold onto something far greater than what could be understood?
Memories were forgotten for a reason after all. Whether it's because they were too painful, weren't important, or various distractions overpowered them, they ended up being forgotten. They can even fade through the passage of time alone, details dropping off as the months go by, faces turned blurry after the years pass. It was a natural process that let new memories form, that gave birth to new facets of the ever-changing nature of each person.
And it was the gift of self-inflicted entropy.
However if memories were always forgotten for a reason, what was the reason to forget these memories? Why weren't you supposed to remember? What weren't you supposed to remember? There had to be a reason, hadn't there? It was more than just an experiment, more than just freak coincidences, it wasn't some cosmic joke.
You weren't some guinea pig.
You weren't some joke.
Your body felt disconnected, your mind drifting ever further from conscious awareness. The walls you saw bled more red, the chair you sat in an abstract blob of mud. You couldn't remember where the windows on the wall had been. You could have sworn you saw pupils in the windows. It all felt fake, like a poorly constructed dream. The colours meant nothing, your position meant nothing, you weren't even sure you were real.
Everything felt wrong when the hands were elbows deep in your head, when you could feel those dreadful fingers cradling your brain with a sort of reverence that made you feel ill. Like your scalp had been peeled back, skull cracked open like a can, your very brain the contents sought after. A cranial container for the processing of all perception, tampered by metaphysical hands.
You wondered how many times he's done this.
Though the hands worked with the contents of your mind like putty, there was one thing they could never change. It was something less ambiguous than the identity of you—whether that be soul or mind, heart or body. A series of coincidences or a unique singularity that manifested as you—and something deeply ingrained in all sorts of living beings.
You wondered how many times it worked, how many times you mind had been successfully reshaped.
The hands couldn't stop your survival instincts.
The ability to overcome and adapt, the drive to continue being. The very survival instincts that kept ecosystems alive and fuelled the continuation of your very own species for millenniums. And the curiousity that came with it. The ambition to answer the call of the unknown, to solve the mystery of knowledge not yet gained. No matter how the hands pruned, what they did, what they cut off. None of it could touch the very core of what your species evolved with.
Whether through soul or not, whether through instinct or not. Whether it was buried under enforced disillusionment or secured behind walls made of unfaltering desperation. Even if it became a ghost—death of the self—haunting the concept of you, it never truly died. A phoenix reborn, a landscape of ashes and endless fire. It never broke down, it never crumpled under the weight of those palms.
You were safe from the attempt unintentional shattering of your consciousness.
But that didn't mean you were immune.
As you began gaining back your awareness, certain details of your surroundings remained fuzzy. They flickered, blurred at strange points. Like the door that wasn't a door, like the tile floor that was now shards and sand. Like the walls that were breathing, like the shadows that were moving. It was hard to see, like being tossed within an all-encompassing optical illusion.
But you had experience, now, with bearing witness to the impossible. You no longer flinched when you saw—or believed you saw. It was hard to tell, when everything was spinning, the ground lurching under the chair you sat upon—the kitchen cabinets quickly melt from strawberry red and cheerful blue to the same dull oak brown you recognized. As if they forgot what they were supposed to look like, as if your environment forgot what it was supposed to be.
You couldn't even look up now. Physically, your body was incapable of doing so. When you did, whether you craned your neck skywards or tried peering up without moving, you never saw a ceiling. Your eyes would flicker down, or the blurriness would turn to a flash of white. Even the tops of the walls were foggy, hidden behind a thick mist of luminous white and streaked with cracks of black.
There was a faint dripping sound, off-rhythm and chunky. It dripped, dripped, dripped, echoing in your ears. It came in waves. The louder it was the more you noticed the weak audio static, and when it was nearly silent the static was barely more than a brief flicker. You looked around, eyes squinted to peer through the random patches of blurred reality to see where it was coming from.
It was only dripping, so why did it make you ill with dread?
To your immediate right was a wall without any possible cause of the dripping. Ahead was the rest of the dinning table, really more of a glorified desk that could uncomfortably fit three people at the most, and another chair. Beyond that was a small gap and then your makeshift office, though all the electronics that should have been there were gone. The rest of your living space was to your left, which was basically all your living room and the wall-free hallway with doors to your bedroom, bathroom, and small storage closet.
In the living room itself there was your regular couch and side table, and on the wall across from that there was a pale rectangle. It once would have hosted a television, yet now was bare, making the space feel oddly emptier. Though you couldn't see much of the carpet or coffee table ahead of the couch, from what you could see there were no culprits for the dripping sound.
Why was that worse somehow?
The windows along the opposite wall to that on your right were still tall rectangles of pure snowy white. They were taller now, elongated. Yet the tops of them were still the same distance from the ceiling. It was the windows and windows alone that were stretched out. They hurt to look at too, far too bright and yet without light, hazy and glowing, dull and listless. Pearly monoliths shedding the scales of glass panes it was once was contained behind.
The walls around them had patterns growing like plants, of playful vines and poorly drawn flowers. A worsening infestation of paisley print. Only when you looked at them did they have colour, otherwise they were dun, more of a shiny sheen on an otherwise ancient wall. You would have checked if the pattern grew on the ceiling, but you were unable to do so.
You weren't able to look up, after all.
With a deep breath you pushed yourself up to look around the rest of the apartment. Though your steps were wobbly, you were able to walk without too much hassle. First you inspected your office again, checking under the table for any electrical cords. Unfortunately there was nothing. All your files, all your USBs, all the photos you saved and—the worse part by far—everything related to your camera was gone. Everything you used for your photography business stolen, as if it never existed. There was just a fine layer of dust coating everywhere it shouldn't.
You tried checking out the windows up close, but walking towards them was like pressing two magnets of the same side together. Reality itself refused your presence there as an aura pushed you back. The closer you trudged towards them the more it pushed and pushed, until your heels were digging into the ground and your teeth were gritted with effort. You could no longer move forwards, though not for the lack of trying. You couldn't even put your hands ahead of your body without a great force shoving them back.
The pillars were portals into colourless desolation that became taller the closer you got. They now stood nearly thrice your height, winding and twisting up on themselves, though still perfect rectangles. The walls beside them matched the growth, the objects against them warping to fit their new dimensions. The table and everything on it, the curtains and the pictures on the wall, they all went through the process.
Upon the table was a treasured object that hurt to look at. Stretched out and wrong, the simple painted wooden statue of a small dragon you had—burnt orange with an underside of cream, turquoise wings and a flaming tail—was now more akin to a snake, eyes forced to stretch wider and wider, pupils small and shaking. Thinner now than before due to only growing upwards, its arms were too narrow to stay attached, the wood breaking with a horrid shattering sound, the tips of the faux flame of its tail doing the same.
A picture on the wall, one with a closeup of a deer you found in the forest once, it too grew strange. The trees around it spiralled high, thick trunks now giant columns supporting the very emerald roof above, leaves looking more like a speckled marble ceiling of a grand hall with how distorted they were. The grasses around the deer matched the lengthening legs, far too long, stretched too thin. The body turned bulbous, huge and chunky compared to the ever narrowing neck, the head warping into a deer-inspired blob. The eyes though, they kept the same light, the same glow of life. They begged you to stop it as they stretched too, the reflections of the forest now tears in its eyes, the dark irises black voids.
You were spared.
Or were you? You felt weird.
You were left behind, an ant in the focused beam of magnified sunlight.
It hurt. It didn't usually hurt like this. What changed?
Abandoned in the face of the obscure, you felt ill. It started with the burning in your eyes that came from looking at the wrongness around you. And it was everywhere, an obvious wrong that you couldn't trick yourself into forgetting. The walls were stretched like pulled taffy, taller and taller until they were four times your height. And the light, it was sickly, it made your skin prickle and your stomach roll. It caused waves of nausea to eventually overwhelm your curiousity as the invisible force shoving you back finally won, finally forcing you to turn away from the not-windows or risk throwing up.
...safe to say, you were going to ignore the windows for now.
Or just... try not to think about them. If you didn't think about it it wouldn't matter after all! Denial is very much a healthy coping mechanism.
You sat down and leaned on the side of the couch still facing the windows, waiting for the nausea to fade. Until then, you only looked at the ground, specifically at the point where the wooden floors were covered by the large carpet of your living room. The carpet was fluffier than you remember. The strands of the soft fuzz was longer, half the length of your palm. You played with it, twisting the strands together. When you pressed down, it made a wet squishing noise, like something wet was stuck underneath. You lifted up the edge to reveal what it was, the experience with the not-windows not draining you of all your curiousity.
You immediately drop it and scramble up, leaping off the carpet as the nausea swelled. The bottom of the carpet was covered in an inky black substance. It was thick, stuck tight to the carpet's woven back, small tendril-like growths jutting out. Almost like roots, they had nestled themselves into the fine cracks between the boards of hardwood. And now they practically seemed to reach out now that they were uprooted, the section of the floor where it sat coated with a dark, glossy sheen.
Rushing over to the three doors left, you shook off your disgust. Maybe you just had a severely overlooked case of black mold here, or maybe it was some sort of harmless fungus. You hoped that was true, for how long had it been since you deep cleaned the place? Maybe the spores had always been here and you never noticed it, too caught up with cycling hyperfixations and the photography business. Yet... yet what sort of mold could move on its own? What sort of fungus would grow like it knew where to hide in plain-sight? And if it was here, surely there would be more elsewhere, right?
You knew what it was.
You wondered if Wally knew it was there?
You skipped the closet and stood in front of the bathroom door, arms crossed and fingers tapping. The bathroom door was sealed shut, the handle even worse than before. Instead of looking like the great hound Cerberus had used it as a chew toy, it was more akin to a ball of uneven spikes. Even the door—it was a door, right? You could have sworn this was where the door was supposed to be, but it didn't look like a door—was unnatural. The edges melted into the wall, the bottom gap solid.
The next place to check was your bedroom, and to your distress that door too was in a smiliar state. The handle though, it was different. Rather than spikes, it was just gone. The only sign that a door was once there was a rough square indent in the wall, a small gap in the baseboard, and a star-shaped metal plate. Pushing did nothing, and there was nothing you could grab to break down the wall. You bit your tongue turned left to see the final place to check; the kitchen.
Through narrowed eyes you saw him.
Wally was there, breathing gone, body still. He faced away from you, the sink running and a pile of drying dishes on the side. You approached wearily, the sound of rushing water thunderous, drowning out the dripping, drowning out whatever words Wally was muttering to himself. You weren't too sure how long the water was left on for, and you weren't entirely sure he knew either. As you came behind the counter, you could see the side of his face.
He wore the closest thing to a frown you've seen, his smile small, thin, mourning. His lips moved as he spoke, voice too low and unintelligible to make any sense. His eyes were unfocused, blankly staring at his hands under the water. They twisted and fidgeted, suds of soap cascading down the sides. His hands appeared a saturated orange from the moister, though there were still ink stains on his fingertips. On autopilot he continued to clean them. Each time his hands were free of suds he'd shake them off, grab more soap and start the cycle anew.
Looking around, half of the kitchen was pearly white, nearly glowing with how clean it was. Yet the floor had been decimated, most of the tiles completely torn up and shattered, leaving behind sands of porcelain. Dust of it covered the black of Wally's shoes, and danced up the sides of his technicolour pants in uneven streaks. Paired with the black fingerprints still covering the edge of his shirt's collar and the bottom part of his sleeves, he almost looked like he was falling apart.
Falling apart both mentally and physically, like a toy accidentally tossed out the open window of a car. Left to tumble to a stop alone, left to meander through an alien world not built for its survival. You felt equal parts pity and terror, because you knew that this wasn't all he was. What you were seeing in front of you, a puppet-human fusion the exact same height as yourself, was not all he was. He was completely unique, a being with no comparison in your world.
He was different, and he had powers that defied all rules of reality.
If he was like this, how bad was the thing you shouldn't remember?
And he was the one messing with your mind.
It was so nice to finally be able to think that without feeling pain.
Which means he knew what you weren't supposed to remember.
There had to be a reason, right? He wouldn't do this without reason, would he?
Which means he knows now that you didn't forget.
You knew he knew you didn't forget it this time.
"Wally? Are you alright?" You asked, leaning over the counter so he could hopefully see you out the corner of his eyes. He didn't respond, continuing to wash his hands with a lacklustre frenzy, like his energy was slowly draining yet he used all he had left just to do this. You waved your hand in his face, frowning when he still didn't react. Poking his shoulder did nothing, and neither did taking the soap away. The only thing you could do was turn off the tap.
Once his hands were free of suds you shut it off. He continued to rub his hands together, all four fingers interlocking and disconnecting as he did so. His sleeves were creased, wrinkled from once being shoved up his elbows. Now they hung by his wrists, shades darker and dripping from how wet they were. He reached out to where the soap had been to get more, mimicking the action of getting more without actually doing so before returning to wash his hands, eyes eerily blank.
You couldn't shake the feeling...
You stepped away, stomach rolling, a weight settling deep in your guts. You still couldn't look upwards, the ceiling still a sea of burning white, if you even managed to see it at all. The floor was a mess, the puddle by his feet coating most of the kitchen floor, mixing with the dust of broken tiles. The muddy mixture oozed into the material of your socks, thick and cold. Grimacing you padded away, deciding to search for more clues before bothering with him again.
Maybe he just needed time.
...that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
Your feet made a wet squelch each time you took a step, getting more uncomfortable as it began to dry. Looking down, you shrieked and tripped back. Around the edges of the carpet—the large carpet that covered most of your living room, the one you were trying not to think about—there was another puddle. This one wasn't made of anything you understood, instead it was made from exactly what you tried not to understand. With small tendrils that reached like hands, it pooled from under the rug.
This was a puddle of pure, inky oil. So dark that there were no reflections, so dark that there was no light. It ate at any that hit it, appearing 2D in the three dimensional surroundings like it was devouring reality itself. It spread through winding tendrils that filled the thin gaps between the planks of the wooden floor, branching out into webs before connecting into more of itself. You were paralyzed, watching in dread as it ever so slowly grew out closer from under the carpet, tendrils reaching, darkness spreading.
And placed innocently on the center of the coffee table in the middle of the carpet was your phone.
The same phone that once homed your paradoxical friend.
The very phone that was now a gateway to pure shadows.
It was impossibly dark, a sort of darkness that reacted like light. It made the air above it waver with shadows that couldn't be. It cast a ring of midnight haze on the table it sat upon. The screen seemed to flicker sporadically, the angle you could see it from making it too difficult to see what it was. Just the sight alone sent shivers up your spine, injecting ice into your veins. Your jaw was clenched tight, your arms close to your body, hands interlaced with each other. Your breathing was stilted, and the air tasted burnt.
You were right...
It was a challenge to even move your legs as the need to flee arose. You pictured moving them back, remembering all the times that you could move willingly just in the hopes of getting away from the bubbling spreading growth. Your lungs struggled too, and your heart felt heavier as your pulse slowed, muscles beginning to strain. But you couldn't look away as the phone unlit more, the shadows now like an orb above the phone, flickering into being, growing stronger, growing evermore present.
Had it not been overtaking your very home you would almost describe it as being beautiful, in a morbid way. Like watching a tragedy unfold, knowing the ending will be bittersweet at best yet still finding peace in the moments before it all went downhill. Like a time-lapsed video of a plant's life; buds turned to leaves, green turned brown, each one replaced over and over. A cycle of growth and decay, a reminder that the very nature of being alive gave you a bias towards more life. It also served as a reminder of the importance of decay.
...everything was wrong.
Decay was more than something to be feared. It was what gave the ground new chance to raise new plants, which lead to nourishment towards the entire ecosystem. It was what let things change, it was the catalyst that let life be life. For without decay, without death, would living ever be an option? Everything would be locked in one standstill reality, nothing new, nothing old, all the same.
Decay was what made time matter.
But decay was not what gave you meaning.
And it also reminded you of a story you read, long long ago. One of inescapable death, one of an inevitable ending. Written about the final moments of the universe, set in a future following the last moments of a scientist, it spoke of humanity's effort to survive. A machine built to exist longer than the planet itself, to collect information of nonexistence once everything once known and experienced no longer was. Hailed as the refuge of human conquest, it survived no longer than a fraction of a fraction of a second. And it was considered a success despite how brief a blip its existence truly was.
The puddle reminded you of the chaos that the end brought the people in that story that one day could be true.
It reminded you of how fragile the mere act of being really was.
And...
...it reminded you of fire.
Not just any fire.
It reminded you of the eyes that hid in lapping flames and searing sparks.
And of the eyes you saw in the mirror.
You managed only a few steps back before the phone rang. It was loud, too loud, so loud the walls shook with the sound, each shrill note a jackhammer against your eardrums. It was distorted, dipping deep at the ends with each start reaching higher than the last, blaring louder than the last. It felt like it lasted hours, time passing at a snail's pace while you stared on in shock, in disbelief.
After Wally barged into your life, had the phone ever rung without him being on the other side?
As the bubble of shadows above the phone solidified you felt your strength return. It was only enough to move away, feet dragging and leaving a trail of damp footsteps behind. Your goal was not just to escape, as your instincts screamed for you to do, but to also see Wally. You knew he was connected to what was happening, you just didn't know how.
Your voice was dry from what felt like misuse, "Wally?"
You saw the very moment he processed your voice. His head whipped towards the sound, movement paired with an audible snap. His eyes were far too large, twin moons of silky white and practically glowing as he stared at you. His pupils shrunk slowly, draining as more and more white poured through, illuminating the kitchen in a sickly light. Like tiny black boats in the rough silver waters, battered and beaten, his pupils shook, anxious and desperate.
The air turned cold, the smell of smoke fading as you both stared at one another. You shivered, clenching your chattering teeth. The tonal shift through you off-guard, and he still wasn't answering, half turned and hunched over, sweater oddly buttoned and sleeves hanging wet. The ink that once covered the tips of his fingers had spread, turning his fingers into a mix of mottled black-green and grey.
His body trembled with energy, like an arrow straddled in the drawstring of a bow, aimed and ready. You coughed, trying to break the moment, trying to snap him out of it. It didn't work, Wally unhearing. His eyes widened further, fully circular, his smile strangely neutral compared to his distressed state. Even his hair was off, strands falling around his face, the large pompadour more like a messy birds nest that lost its spiral shape.
"Maybe it's Rosie, you know how she gets when you don't answer her phone calls. She'll ring and ring 'till your phone runs out, just to tell you to call her back later!"
You tried humour to lighten the mood. Dry humour to be specific, this was no time for a dad-joke. Admittedly your attempt was quite poor, and it was obvious that Wally didn't find it funny at all, judging by how his body twisted to face yours, head cocked and pupils bouncing between you and the phone behind you. The only sign that he really noticed what you said was when he flinched, it was small, tiny even, and had you not been staring at him you wouldn't of noticed. It was delayed, like he was only partially hearing. Still, you could tell you said the wrong thing.
"Where did you hear that name?"
"She's my friend, don't you remember your friends' names?" You shrugged, playing it cool. There were far more important things to talk about now than friendships, but you'd humour him for now. It was the best chance at getting more information, even a sliver of context. The air was heavy with dread.
"Firstly, you shouldn't remember that.
His eyes twitched and he let out a huff, muttering to himself. He moved towards you, his steps nearly silent, his limbs moving oddly. Like a marionette breaking free from its strings, his arms snapped downwards and his shoulders slumped oddly. Though his voice remained monotone, you could hear tension hidden within. His next words were spoken more to himself than you, though you still heard him clearly.
"Of course, you don't really care about keeping yourself safe, do you Neighbour?"
"Why do you alwa-"
"Secondly, it can't be her. That would be impossible."
"No it wouldn't! She knows my number, we've talked many times before!" You cried, frustration boiling over as the strangeness of it all got to you. You felt increasingly vulnerable, knowing that there was black sinew spreading out behind you, that there was something coming from the phone, that the ceiling didn't want to be seen and the windows were less windows and more like obelisks. The fog above blurred lower, melting into the pale glow of his eyes and the not-quite-windows were flashing from a solar brightness to nothing at all.
"It's impossible because you phone was... tampered with. Only I could call or message you, though I did have a pleasant conversation with your friend 'Rosie'. I told her that you were sick, you know that sort of sickness people can't go near? With how loud your thoughts are I thought you already figured that out Friend!"
You felt like you were being examined, the gaze of many eyes focused directly on your back. It crawled up your spine, skeletal hands hovering over your shoulders, the discomfort coming in rolling waves. You psyched yourself up to look back, because you weren't going to be the first death in a horror movie.
Most importantly, you ignored the idea that maybe you already died. Maybe you were in a cycle of learning and learning and learning, and dying before you really got the answer.
Wally cut you off, closer than he had been moments before.
"Now whatever you do, you mustn't turn around, okay?"
Your mouth moved before you could think of speaking, "And why should I trust you?"
"Because."
"You and I both know that's no answer."
"Look, I'll explain later, okay Neighbour? But we really don't have the time for trading thoughts and theories right now. I know you understand that there's more at stake than just your pride, right Friend?"
You didn't offer a reply, and that was the end of that, it seemed. Wally stepped closer and closer until he was standing in front of you. His eyes were still off, dancing between your own and whatever was behind you, and the urge to turn around grew. Something was there, you had seen the forming orb, seen the ooze, seen the mind-bending non-euclidean geometry reshaping your very apartment. Was this what he didn't want you to see?
Was this what you weren't supposed to remember? Had this happen before? Did he try to make you forget so you could return back to an off apartment and off atmosphere, stuck in a hazy stalemate with the most stubborn person you've ever met? Return to numbing confusion, to questioning every thought you have, everything you could ever do? If he made you forget, would that be where you'd be right now?
If you hadn't fought it, would you be safe right now?
Still, you stood your ground. Though you hadn't outright said it before—or if you did you could't remember—you now felt like the question was a good one to have. Why should you trust Wally? What had he done to earn that trust? For trust was a finicky thing, hard to give and even harder to earn. And when thought about it, you weren't even sure if he trusted you.
When did you decide to trust him?
Did he make that choice for you?
You didn't trust him to wipe your memories properly, because you never knew he was behind it until now. You didn't trust him in your apartment, he basically invaded the space and claimed it as an extension of his own. You didn't trust him in your phone, he took it over and practically begged you for friendship. You didn't trust his words, because he always spoke in half-truths and honey-dipped statements.
But still... you trusted that what little he did tell you was true. You trusted that he wanted to help you, no matter how bizarre the situation was. You knew, deep down, that he was doing what he thought was good. He had so many opportunities to hurt you, and he didn't, not in any way that left scars, not in any way that left you gone. Though his method of protection was for more unusual than words could describe, he was still trying to protect you.
Then again, he was the one that introduced you to the oblivion now after you.
It was... complicated. But in this very moment you had two options. Trust his judgment about the thing behind you, or trust your instincts that begged to know what you were up against. Because he could be lying, because he was acting strange, because because because. There was no end to the questioning, no end to the curiousity. No end to the desire to know.
The phone rang once more, startling both of you. Wally was antsy, hands tapping erratically against his thighs as his eyes darted between you and the phone, his face draining of saturation. In that moment your curiousity won over any internal debate you had over trusting him. So you chose to look, because you were nothing if not just as stubborn as he was, if not moreso.
In the milliseconds it took for you to turn Wally had already lunged, throwing himself towards the phone with his arms stretched out. His hands were aimed towards the target, the sleeves of his cardigan rippling in the air. His shoes squeaked against the wooden floors, still wet. He paid no heed to the dark puddle, blindly leaping towards the sound of the ringing phone, the merciless chiming making it hard for you to process what was happening.
You were already dashing towards it even if your brain hadn't processed what you were looking at. You chose to go after the phone rather than throwing yourself at it in the hopes that Wally missed his target. The apartment around you flashed, white screaming in your face, darkness overwhelming it in brief stints. The flickering hurt to bare witness to, it was like running face-first into a star, an all-encompassing incinerator, burning your eyes, burning your skin.
It didn't stop you.
The sound of your feet hitting the ground was a heartbeat in its own right, rushed and frightened. The distance wasn't far, but it felt like the ground was stretching out, separating you from the phone, each normal step requiring twice that right now. Wally had jumped clear over the puddle but you had to clamber over the arm of the couch to avoid stepping in it, the urge to vomit returning when you briefly noticed all the finger-like growths reaching towards you from the oozing surface.
There was no time to think, wet socks oozing as they thumped against the coffee table, balance becoming your focus as you scooped down to grab the phone. Wally was quicker and before you could execute your plan he swiped it away. His grip wasn't right though, and despite aiming to snatch it it fell onto the ground, onto the island the carpet had become.
There was a pause, brief enough that you recognized that the shadowy orb hovering in the air wasn't leaving. And then the race was on, Wally scrambling from his fallen position to reach the target, limbs bending oddly as he did so. You dove towards, it, thoughtless abandon as you crashed into him, getting a fistful of royal blue cardigan rather the phone.
He scrambled up and held it above your head, chest heaving and eyes wide. His smile was broad, though you couldn't tell if it was from him panting, the adrenaline—did he even experience that? The rush? The energy? The everything happening all at once and being anything you needed in that moment?—or from being the victor. It didn't matter, grabbed his sleeve and pulled hard, intending to force him to drop it.
Why did you want the phone so badly? Moments before, weren't you afraid of it?
His arm didn't move. It didn't even budge.
You used both hands and pulled, but it was like trying to bend a metal pole. He stayed firm, even when your fingers sunk into a fine layer of fuzz that coated his skin, disappearing into the yellow fluff. He looked between you and the phone, ensuring that the screen never faced you even as you climbed into the coffee table to grab it that way.
He stopped you.
You forgot about the orb of shadows.
You felt it lick at the back of your neck as you were pulled away, the sensation of being watched nearly paralyzing. The darkness in the corner of your eyes, the puddle that was leaking up the wall, it had more than just fingers now. It was hands, it was arms, it was reaching tendrils upon tendrils, each slithering through the air towards you, towards the orb.
It was wrong, so wrong, an wrongness so obvious and distorted that you couldn't look at it. The carpet didn't save you from the image burned into your mind, seared in and left to scar, left as a reminder of what you shouldn't have remembered, what you shouldn't have tried to learn. A reminder that sometimes, curiousity was not worth it.
You saw the sight when you closed your eyes, of the arms outreached, the oozing black skin of crackling sinew bubbling and sizzling as eyes popped out from within. Coating the arms, coating the walls, some were as large as you were tall, some were no bigger than your pinky nail. The hands didn't stem from the tip of the arms, but rather from the inside of the pupils, climbing out with horrid screeching, like a cacophony of voices screaming in unison.
Though the eyes themselves had no reflection there was the mirror image of your face in the largest of the eyes, one located right where the TV had been, the one that was bigger than you. It took up most of the wall, the wall appearing to bulge upwards just to accommodate it, more tendrils waving around. It focused on you, your face trapped in its pupil, mirror of fate and misfortune.
You couldn't forget it, though you wish you could.
You wondered now, if because you kept fighting, if Wally wouldn't gift you the mercy of forgetting.
You couldn't scream, though you wanted to.
You wondered now, how many horrors he bore witness to, without the kindness of stolen memories.
Wally grabbed your hand, the four fingers wrapped tight around your palm as he tugged you with him. You focused on what you could feel, for your other senses were overwhelmed with the impact of the eyes. His skin was soft, almost like a living plush, the exterior fuzz dense enough to almost be smooth, at least on his palm and the pads of his fingers. His hand gave off no heat, though it also wasn't cold. His hand was a degree above room temperature, akin to your own.
You stumbled as he dragged you to the front door, miraculously not stepping in any of the inky oil. Though you weren't entirely sure, for your socks were still wet and the room was flickering yet more aggressively between burning white and starving shadows. The one thing you could make out, beside Wally himself was his hand grabbing the chewed up handle of the not-quite-door, the jagged edges digging into his hand, serrated blade into plush. He tore it open, the sound of shattering wood drowned out by the dripping and echoes of the screaming eyes.
It hit the wall with a slam, and as quickly as you ran towards the phone you both tumbled down the stairs into the small foyer on the main floor, crashing into the final door. It wasn't sealed shut at the bottom like the other, the wall hadn't grown over it like a healing scar, the handle wasn't mutilated beyond all hopes. It looked horrifically normal, picture perfect and slightly worn, not by entities nor from terror, but from the gentle hand of time.
He hesitated.
His hand hovered over the door handle, the door already unlocked. He crowded it so you couldn't reach it, not that you felt like doing so, stomach rolling and skin prickling, nausea simmering in your guts. The floor was crooked under your feet, the walls streaked different colours. At times you saw the tops of the walls leaking black, leaking that same dreadful oil. Then it would be replaced with burning bright light, white pouring in from an unknown source, forcing you to squint. After that it would briefly flicker to the stairway, dust and dull, no more special than a grain of sand from a desert.
The only thing remaining the same throughout it all was Wally, as if the rules of lighting known to your world didn't effect him, free from shadows and the aura of blinding light. Even the door, as normal and unassuming as it was, it still mirrored the intensity of the light around it, though not as extremely as the walls. It was limbo, standing here, torn between two realms.
One of a world you were born from and the other you spent eternity in. Caught betwixt the inner and outer realities that lives were created in, within the natural and unnatural, the plain and the extraordinary, lost safety and in safety to be lost. It was calming and terrifying, it was everything you couldn't stand. The unknown was more than just a theoretical concept you could ponder within the safety of your bedroom, thinking of all the possibilities of a world you dreamed of one day seeing.
It was there behind you.
And it was ahead of you,
And you found, even if one was currently after you, the unknown you hadn't met was still just as terrifying. For at least you understood—though you didn't, not really, not truly, not at all. And yet it felt like it, it felt familiar, like a building seen across from your school yard as a child, barely remembered yet had you gone back, you would notice the change—it, understood some of the rules that kept you safe.
Out there was the unknown, pure and unmet.
There was the possibility it would be normal.
And there was the possibility it would be anything but.
Wally grabbed the handle, his grip on your tightening as he began opening the door.
You closed your eyes with bated breath.
Between two unknowns...
How could anyone know which one was safe?
...
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