#58: False Awakening

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Remember those Slenderman references in the first couple entries? Yeah, I can see where they came from. Shadows stretch to excessive heights out of the corner of my eye in mundane moments. Suddenly a sleepy Saturday at home turns into a struggle to suppress sheer panic. I have literally seen beings standing across the room from time to time. Once it was Kendra, the one from the Outer Layer, her head replaced by a cosmic cloud straight out of a drug trip. She was motionless. I stared for maybe ten minutes before my eyes couldn't focus anymore and she shifted out of reality with the blurring of my vision.

Another time it was Mammoth, or rather ADDICT. His skin was blue and rotting in places. The dark rings under his eyes implied that he had not rested in death. He was soaked, and he chased me through the golf course in the neighborhood one dark night. I had been wandering by when I spotted him. Unlike Kendra, he moved. He was wading through the canal.

Mammoths voice echoed behind me as I sprinted from the approaching terror- “YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TALKED YOU FUCKING KIKE” -and the absurdity of it almost made me laugh. But the way ADDICT ran at me, lopsided and lumbering like a drunk beast, poured adrenaline into my heart and pushed me forward.

After escaping into my house, I saw that there was a puddle of water in front of my doorstep when I poked my head out later that night. Was it also an illusion? Or did I actually get stalked by the ghost of Mammoth? I chose not to dwell on it.

And when I dream, I always find myself in that null place, the chaos of the days thoughts echo back at me in the endless void. It's like the opposite of the lake, where I felt enclosed in an open space. I walk and walk in my dreams, free to flee from my mind in any direction. Yet nothing ever changes. I am trapped in the same place and it's like I haven't moved at all.

Sometimes there are doorways in my dreams. Black doors made of hateful things. They pop up when I'm not looking and they lead me into false escapes. I remember one where I walked through the door and, next thing I remembered, I was waking up in my bed in the morning. The only issue was, when I got dressed and turned to leave the room, I was not staring at my door. The door was black and daunting, this thick wood emanating an odor faintly reminiscent of blood. I staggered back into the corner and stared, shell shocked.

“Am I still dreaming?” I asked the door. It gave no response. I suppose that in and of itself implied something. My mind flashed to that other door standing in the middle of the street. Nobody was around; the world was silent. Frightened by the prospect of opening the door staring down at me across the room, even more frightened by the possibility that this was not a dream, driven by curiosity to know the truth, I reached for the handle.

With a grandiose gust of wind, a stairway endless to the eyes, suspended in a sick purple miasma, entered my gaze. Lining the ascending slope were the same door I had just opened, copied and pasted ad infinitum. Uneasy, I began climbing the staircase.

The purple miasma was no more than a single shifting backdrop, instilling subtle nausea along with intense vertigo. My eyes scanned the doors, the steps, anything else to try and distract from the overwhelming dizziness brought on by the shifting background. It was all in vain; the haunting ethereal swill remained ever-visible in my peripheral vision. I rushed through a doorway just to escape the spinning vision. Looking at it, I felt like I was getting drunk uncomfortably fast.

Beyond the arbitrary entryway I found myself in the Outer Layer, but...not exactly. It appeared as I remembered it, an open wood with a beaten footpath, but the ground was covered in earwax-colored moss that seemed to blanket everything visible to my eyes.

“No, no, no…” I muttered as I traversed the sickly-looking forest. “Please, I just want to wake up.” I felt nauseous two times over now. My entire body was rejecting the reality around it by rebelling against the contents of my stomach. Clutching my gut I gingerly proceeded through the malformed forest path.

A mysterious anomaly arose in the distance. At first I had thought a thick blanket had fallen over the skies a ways away. As I drew nearer to it I came to understand that this was not a cloud or a fog or anything tangible. It was nothing less. The null grew in the sky ahead as if it were encompassing the entire off-brand Outer Layer. The sky was just a shoddy paint job to cover up the void that surrounded reality just out of sight. I could not believe what I was seeing. I moved forward with a third kind of sickness inside me.

I came in time to a familiar clearing that was actually not so familiar. By then the sky and the void seemed to be engaged in a beam struggle which the sky was slowly losing; through the darkness and discolored foliage of the forest I could even make out slivers where neither dark nor light appeared to exist. It was like seeing beyond the veil of life and death in a peripheral sense that left me deeply unsettled.

This clearing was home to Alice's shrine. Rather, it used to be home to Alice's shrine. All that remained was a pedestal covered in rust and that odd moss; the statue atop it lay in pieces streaked with inky black cracks. Some pieces had found rest on the ground and been quickly overtaken by the pestilent moss. I could still make out a chunk that had been from her face. The eye stared at me from a distorted angle that amplified my unease.

“Only the dead walk here… keep walking… dead walking…” The echo of a rambling voice reached me through the trees. The voice felt familiar, as if heard in a dream elsewhere. The person ranting did not look familiar at all. A tall, skinny, disheveled man emerged from the treeline. His eyes were bloodshot and haunted. His face was gaunt and bony. His clothes were rags hanging loosely from pale, scarred flesh. The hair was a wild mat of knots and twigs. I stared as he approached me.

“Who. Are. You. Who are you who are you?” He asked. Suddenly it clicked.

“Jake?”

He shook his head violently as if offended by the prospect. “Jake. Is gone. Luther is gone Jake is gone. Only me now. Only the shell. Only the dead-walker “

“Wait, so what about Madrik?” I asked. And I noticed something else curious. Behind this twisted form of Jake, this hollow dead-walker, his footprints burned black into the earwax-tinted grass.

“Master.” Jake said simply and he continued walking. Not wanting to give up my chance at information, I followed him.

“Master send me, master saved me and gave me my mission. I get to walk, walk, walk forever.” Each footfall left a black imprint. I knelt down and observed the phenomenon. The surface of the footprint was a flat shadow, but it did not seem to be immobile; ash-like particles of the same shadowy consistency drifted upwards in a nonexistent breeze.

“My mission my job my task. Master send me. I walk. I walk I bring the gift.” Jake had started to move out of the clearing. I took a final glance at the off footprints and headed after him. They seemed to be expanding over time, seeping into the ground around them.

“Ja-” I caught myself before I called him Jake again. “Uh, dead-walker. So, what exactly is your mission?”

“Spread. Spread the gift.” I stared into his cold dead eyes for even a hint of recognition.

“The gift from your master? But what is it?”

He stopped. He stood still for thirty seconds or so. He turned and he reached out his hand to me. A flash of an event from the other entries, of a hand firmly around my throat, caused me to recoil. The hollowed version of Jake flinched but did not retract his hand. He curled his fingers inward and pointed behind me. I turned and I couldn't understand.

In retrospect it was obvious what was happening, what the gift was.  And it was never Madriks gift; it was Chameleon's. Alice's clearing was half-erased already. At the border between it and the frightful chasm of null, I watched those same black ashes abscond into disintegration. It was obvious in hindsight; most things are in this place. The gift was destruction. Jake was walking through alternate versions of the Outer Layer and erasing them with his very steps.

As if the universe were unzipping along the serrated border of those footfalls, a tear in the fabric traveled along the ground where Jake walked. It went too fast. It was upon me before I could react, screaming, cowering, fully expecting to become undone by the cosmic anomaly, I braced for the unavoidable freight train of nonexistence to impact me.

My eyes opened in a hazy blanket of fog. The translucent mist coupling with the void beyond sight produced a space defying comprehension. It seemed like I was being smothered by emptiness, as if the thing that denoted emptiness had filled an unfillable space and now closed me in.

“Hello?” I called out. “Please, I just want out of here. I just want to wake up already.”

Had I ever even been awake? I wonder that now as I'm writing this. Was any of it even real? Had this whole experience been false awakening after false awakening, a maddening Cirque de Soleil of stitched together experiences think fastened by my consciousness?

In response to the echo of my plea another doorway appeared, this one the inviting colors of the door to the Outer Layer. It was a chance. I took it.

Just like that i was back home. I was in my kitchen. There was a sandwich made from all my preferred ingredients that I (presumably) had prepared. This wasn't the first time I had stepped out of madness into reality; I just kind of went with the flow. Checking the time I saw it was two in the afternoon. A sandwich sounded nice to my tired belly. My entire being down to the core was exhausted.

From lunch I went about some usual business. I avoided lying down in bed for fear of falling back into another twisted dream. Eventually I sat at the computer and began typing this entry up.

Kendra knows where the red block hides you. To sever the ties to your plane you must clip the wings of the caged bird pestering you.

I stared, unable to comprehend. These words materialized on the screen, typed as if another person were interacting with my personal computer from afar. My mind jumped to the hackers Ben was so convinced were tormenting him back in the last version of reality. But I knew that I couldn't make sense of what was happening. I didn't want to deal with it. I grabbed my phone from beside me, shot out a quick tweet, and made for the door to head outside for some air.

That never really happened. As proof, I checked and my tweet about the odd phrase never appeared in the feed. Could Darek have removed it after I posted it? Maybe. And I didn't see the doorway I went through to leave my house. Perhaps it wasn't really that black nightmare door I had seen in the dream time and again. I will never be able to confirm or deny it definitively. It was like something out of TribeTwelve. I thought I was free from the nightmare realm, then I open my front door and come face to face with an endless expanse of nothingness yet again. I swear I even heard maniacal laughter in the distance.

So I kept wandering. I wandered until I saw another door and I went through it. It led to a passage full of doors and I just walked it wearily. It was getting old. Panic had long since passed over me. Only exhaustion remained. Not a physical type, though I was ready to curl up and just stop moving. I was morally exhausted, spiritually spent, mentally bankrupt. I didn't want to decipher the difference anymore. I just wanted to be free of this madness.

Since that time I haven't really slept. I just pass from door to door and live in whatever room I end up in. Sometimes I fall asleep. Sometimes I wake up thinking I wasn't dreaming. I don't know how long it has been. Days become meaningless. I'm just really starting to lose my grip on what is real and what is just a dream. I am starting to wonder if it's all been one giant dream to begin with.

I see the door now, as I type this. Better get up and love on to the next room.