#62: Miracles and Madness

05/05

FTP: So we were homeless together for about a week. That was an adventure all it's own. You never really notice the presence of God so much as when you have no idea where your next meal will come from. It seemed like no matter how desperate the situation seemed, a miracle would pave the way.

There was a weird experience where we ended up somewhere downtown in Lake Worth, a few major roadways over from where Ben had lived in the original timeline. We did a lot of travelling around the area during that time we were on the streets; it was honestly kind of liberating. We stopped at this gas station we had never been to before and the lady behind the counter rings up my green tea, looks at me, and says “Haven’t seen you around in a while. How you been?”

This was some older woman in her fifties with glasses on her face and missing teeth acting like I was a familiar dirty traveller. Maybe she was just trying to be polite and thought I looked familiar? Doubt it. Something was up and I think even she sensed it as we left in a hush.

Remember my friend Richee? He hasn't really been relevant to the story but I mentioned him in entry #42; he really helped us out. He loaned me a backpack for my stuff and gave us $20 for food without us even asking. Also he got us McDonalds. Whatever the heck is going on it is good to have one person you can rely on. That seems to be his role in this story- to bail me out of a bind.

Things seemed bad at night. We had no place to go, but something happened to help us out then as well. We had spent the night before in McDonalds, sleeping in the back while the night shift employees covered for us. Not wanting to stick around in one place too long, we moved along toward the beach to have some pleasure amidst our plight. It seemed like we were going to be wandering all night by the time the moon reached the top of the sky. Cops, discomfort, and wildlife drove us from refuge after refuge. It was a quiet one in the morning trip to the corner store where I saw someone familiar.

“Frankie?”

He looked up when I said his name. By his slack jaw and glazed eyes I guessed he was high off his gourd. Typical.

“Do I know you?”

“Yeah, we, uh…” I stumbled on my words. Casey didn't exist so we never had met. He didn't really know me at all.

“What he's trying to say,” Ali explained, “is that you used to hang out with some old friends of ours. I don't know if you remember us. I'm Ali.” She extended a hand.

I don't know if it was the confidence with which she said it or the fact that Frankie, like us, had been trapped in this hall of mirrors for a while. Maybe past Frankie that actually DID remember me had allowed him to let his guard down.

Somehow, Ali talked him into letting us spend the night at his aunt Teresa's as long as we didn't mind sharing the couch with her dog, Gracie. He even smoked us out. All these acts of kindness, from the motel manager whose four kids shared their pizza with us to the homeless man who taught us all about squatting in abandoned buildings in Greenacres, all of it seemed to come only when I had given up or resigned hope. It was the opposite of the Outer Layer, where negativity bred darkness. In fact, light only shone where darkness lurked in this reality, it seemed.

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Darek's presence in the background haunted me. All too often I felt a warmth as an impulse swept over me, one that led me down a different path that ended up at safety. I would sense a presence with ill intent glaring at us and grab Ali’s hand, or straighten out my posture on a whim. These were not my whims. These were his, trying to keep me alive. It was as if he had walked these streets a million years, as if every inclination of his attitude and coldness were bred to help me survive. All of a sudden looking a little nuts was a good thing. Being weird and unapproachable kept the bad influences at bay.

So all those miracles may have lit the way through the week, but Darek's the spark that starts the fire. I feel like seeing Frankie was no coincidence. I feel like that was a scripted encounter by the game master. I feel like Darek's been guiding me toward something for the longest time and, recalling these moments during early April, I can't help but feel that this is a consequence of me and Ali sharing the same space. Darek's and Kendra were doing this together.

03/27

I made my way forward using the glow of the moon off the lake as a guide. That white mist I had seen rising off it in the last visit to the Outer Layer gave it away as soon as I moved a few yards toward the clearing. However, unlike all the other times I had found the lake, Anna was nowhere to be found.

“Hello?” I called out. The night was so clear and the mist was so radiant in it's moonlit glow I could not possibly ignore the beauty of the scene before me. It took my breath away how the reeds at the edge of the water seemed to bow in reverence to the ambiguous source of the churning mist. The mist itself was thinking and wispy, capturing the moon's glow as the moon captured the sun's rays, magnifying it's beauty but not obscuring the vastness of the lake itself. In the past I had visited the lake, both in person and in flashes of memory, and it had been a modest thing, more like a pond that had swelled up after a heavy rainfall. At worst I could manage to make out the far end of it with a little squinting. Now the lake I saw stretched miles in all directions; trees peeked out over the horizon but I could not see the other shoreline.

I moved clockwise along the shore, alternating between staring out through the white mist and calling out for Anna as my eyes traced the shoreline. My pleading and seeking were met with silence as the moon drifted through the sky and I drifted along the side of the surface of water.

“Do I need to go into the lake again, is that it?” I asked no one in particular.  I stared out across the surface once more, contemplative. The mist swirled toward the center. It seemed as though shifting shadows moved over the surface within the obfuscation. I squinted my eyes, trying to catch a clearer look at the phenomenon in the distance. Were those...wings?

As I made the connection between the shape in the mist and Gwen, a violent force rocked across the water and the fog in the center transformed from a cloud to a living vortex of force. Great gusts of wind dragged all the oxygen in the atmosphere towards the anomaly. I dug my feet into the grass and stood my ground. A figure, more solid, shrouded in shadow but certainly sporting wings, flew upward into the sky from out of the vortex. All the pressure released with this expulsion. The gusts I felt dragging me toward the center of the lake suddenly became an atmospheric expanding force away from the lake. I lost my footing and fell on my butt.

Still, I kept my eyes trained as best as I could on the girl tumbling through the air. She did not fall with majesty and grace as one might expect from a winged celestial, but her unceremonious tumble called to mind a plummeting meteorite. I raced toward where it seemed she was heading, never breaking my eyes from her.

Maybe I should have watched the ground because I tripped on an exposed root and smashed my face into the dirt. I actually chuckled to myself a bit, lying there and considering how absurd it was. After all those times in the past, my mind had literally tripped me up. There was nothing to do but shake it off. I kept moving. I'd lost sight of Gwen now but I suspected she wouldn't be too far from the shoreline.

“M...Mat…” A strained voice drifted from the trees as i raced past. I paused and spun around. Gwen staggered into view, one hand clutching her chest, another propping her up against the trunk of a tree. I could tell she had been thrashed by the landing, dirt and damage etching along her body telling a brutal story. The blood seeping from the wound covered by her hand was far more curious and concerning.

“Gwen.” I looked at her sternly. “What is going on?”

“We don't have time!” She snapped. “Listen, the sickness is spreading! You can't stop it; I can't stop it! Don't fight this anymore! Just end it! Kill yourself and you can stop the cycle!”

“That… that's crazy talk.” I managed, but her sudden intensity caught me off guard. Honestly, the thought had crossed my mind before that death might be preferable to this occasional nightmarishness.

“If you die,” she continued, almost as if she hadn't heard me, “then you can't be used as a vector for the illness anymore. Everyone you come into contact with is a part of the monsters web and by continuing to exist you allow it to catch more flies. Please, it's the only way to contain this illness. We tried everything else and we failed.”

I pointed. “What happened to your chest…?”

She glanced down momentarily, a hesitance of omission that spoke louder than her actual response. “I must have been stabbed by something on the way down. That doesn't matter now, does it? This whole reality is crumbling apart. We are living in a perpetually doomed timeline. Every reset has a half-life shorter than the cycle before it. I've seen your thoughts in the darkness! I know you know it's true!”

She seemed wildly desperate to have her voice heard. I focused instead on the visual clues that revealed her deception. Kendra's aura of clarity still hung around me.

“That blood isn't fresh. This happened before you were thrown from the lake.”

She looked at me, the dim distraction of her twisted words finally halted.

“How did you hurt yourself?” I repeated firmly, slowly.

“Lucinda impaled her.” Anna said from behind me. “After she caught her trying to sabotage one of the towers.”

I turned to see my gentle Figment friend battered and bloody. Her hair was a wild mess of tangles and matted clumps. Splotches and scratches decorated her face and her clothes looked like they had been badly tattered through elemental exposure.

“Anna, are you-?”

“I'll be okay.” She said. Her voice felt like it was coming from a far away place, as if the Anna I had known had been locked away somewhere and a stranger occupied her body...

#61: Kendra

04/26/19

FTP: So I'm settling in here nicely. I've decided how to format things going forward. Up here I will recount the events between the dream and now as I write up chunks of the narrative set during my sleep. I think that will be most effective; it worked last time. This entry all concerns the 27th of March, this first part starting after the dreaming ended.

After waking up, Ali was immediately besieged by messages and calls from Rob. She's since blocked his number and I think entirely cut contact with him. Whatever excuse she used about him causing too much drama was nothing but a pretense. I was the one she always wanted by her side anyway.

I hung out with her all morning as we wandered Wellington and she begged her parents for help. Spoiler alert: no luck on that part. I had no idea how much worse things were going to get.

I seem to remember us hatching different ideas for how to proceed. Jae would take Ali in to train her with the job. Maybe I could try and get the same job? She shot it down,
saying Jae could only recommend one person and Ali had the IT knowledge to manage a computer job. I'd find something. I knew I'd find something. Until then Ali would vouch foe me and keep Jae okay with her sudden bonus roommate. Where did we go until Jae could pick us up? She said she couldn't make the trip until the next Saturday. Since Ali's parents had left her out on the streets, we had to give her some kind of shelter. It took a lot of convincing but I think we agreed on trying to talk to my parents.

When we got back my mom screamed at me. She told me to pack my shit and get out right then. Obviously, I didn't just calmly go about this business but my arguments were utterly futile. It was as if she were an NPC set on a track of ignorance to my plight.

“Fine. Fuck you, then!” I heard myself say, but now I wasn't speaking. I was just the spectator on the side observing. “You're full of shit and I'm done with you anyway!” I followed my body to my room, not sure what to expect as I opened the door.

I guess Ali and I left behind a stinking mess in my room, paraphernalia and alcohol containers. I didn't remember doing more with her than smoking a bowl and, well, what we did, but true to my mother's word(amidst a sea of put downs and passive aggressive disappointment), the room was a disaster area the likes of which Ben's party days would envy. Normally my instincts said blame it on Darek, especially in that moment as he puppeted my body,  but recent events reveal that reality itself is an unreliable narrator. I have no room to assume anything.

I didn't even resist the move after that. I just kind of grabbed a backpack of essentials and met Ali down the road from my former home. Her presence was a welcome light in a dark unknown around me.


03/27/19

The dream imposed itself upon reality immediately. I felt as though I had been traversing the thick miasmatic fog all day, as if my spiritual self had been here the whole time I was with Ali. I can't be sure how soon after sleeping I saw the figure in the distance. I might have noticed her as soon as I slept. It felt like hours, days elapsed before I spotted her.

“Alice?” I called out, half-delirious.

A small smile illuminated her features. I saw full, red lips, thick glasses, and a distinct cheek dimple framed by royal purple hair. Memory did not betray me this time.

“Kendra!” I raced to her and threw my arms around her. She returned the embrace with a whimsical ease to her posture that lessened the weight I had been dragging around for these past weeks.

“What are you still doing here, you silly boy?” She asked me with a knowing smirk.

“I'm… I… I don't know…” I said. That weight suddenly crushed heavier down on me.

“Every time you get swept up in the darkness you always need me to come save you.” She pressed a finger to my chest and poked me, sending a slight warmth spreading through my torso. “You never realize until it's too late that you can do it yourself.”

As her finger pressed into my chest, a light radiated out from me, around me, piercing the dark fog.

“You've been so close to putting it all together in every post I have read on your new blog.” Kendra mused. “But you've got false angels in your ears misdirecting your mental processes, so I'm just going to have to spell it out for you plainly.”

We began walking, her own body generating the same warm glow as mine. “This dark cloud is not a location; it's a portal to the underbelly of the mind. It leads to the deep recesses of the subconscious where Chameleon lives. All those doorways you've been seeing are parts of that dark labyrinth the dark cloud leads you to. But that's because you're not looking where you're going. You're letting yourself get turned around.”

With each step we took the darkness seemed to be eaten away by the light, and i saw that we were in fact in the same familiar woods that I had known from my last trip to the Outer Layer. It appeared to be night time, though the inability to see the sky or anything more than a few feet ahead prevented me from confirming that. We continued walking together.

“You were right about Gwen being linked to the cloud. But you need to know she lied when she said she represented your relationship with Alica. I know that for a fact. I've been here a long time, longer than I can clarify right now, and I've seen her birth and who she is. She isn't an external event you experienced. She's an answer to an age-old question. Was Alice one of the users or one of the used?”

I paused in stride and felt the warm glow shrivel slightly. Without breaking stride, Kendra clasped her hand around mine and propelled me forward. “See? You know exactly what I'm talking about. It's this question that put the first crack in your soul. That has been there as long as I've known you. You turned it over and over in your head, even without conscious awareness. What were Alice's true intentions? Why did she behave the way she did regarding you, and what did she see you as?”

“Gwen,” Kendra continues as we began to be able to make out farther and farther ahead, “is the scenario where Alice never existed. Gwen, the real one, Alice's sister, pitied you and wanted to manipulate you so she created the fake account, invented a sister, and played with your emotions. The whole story from the relationship to the cancer was a big lie.”

I could now see the reflected moonlight off of the tree leaves and a couple stars twinkling in a clear night sky. I dare not try to find the dark cloud. Searching for it might trigger a reaction.

“Anna, inversely, is your more realistic vision of Alice, a troubled girl just like you who used the internet to escape reality, who fell for you and agonized over the fact that the happiness you shared could not last, who may even have deceived you about her sickness but out of a desire to protect your image of her. She died as an angel in your world so she could watch over your spirit.”

“Fat lot of good it did…” I mumbled.

“It has made all the difference." Kendra assured me. “Her influence over you echoes across every fraction of this Outer Layer, from Anna to Zanark.” She smiled over her shoulder at me. “In a way, bot Gwen and Anna are your interpretations of who Alice could have been.”

“So…” I mumbled. “Was there ever really an Alice here?”

Kendra stopped walking unceremoniously. She gazed up at the luminous round moon, now fully visible, and carefully formed her answer. “To exist in the same form as you or I would have been a bastardization of what she was to you, Mat. No, she never walked among Anna and Gwen; all of Anna's memories were the result of Gwen's manipulation. But she is among us; her spirit lives with you. Everything she was and is lives in your memory.”

“Memory…” I whispered. The word lingered on my lips. How much memory had been taken from me over the years? How much of who I was did Darek and Chameleon and Zanark delete and fabricate and obscure? Despite all of that, Alice still remained a constant focus of my shattered soul, never wavering, never dimming, a beacon for me to follow through the darkness.

Kendra pointed forward, toward a thinning of trees which indicated a clearing ahead. “Go this way. The girl at the lake waits for you. I must attend to some other matters.” She smiled and kissed my cheek as she strode in the opposite direction. “It was good to be with you again. I've missed you this past two years.”

“So you do remember the missing time.” I said after a moment of contemplation, but Kendra was gone when I turned.

#60: Exodus

04/19/19 FTP: It's my… twenty third birthday? I can't really remember anymore. I think Ben's the one turning twenty three. I'm two years younger than him so I'm turning twenty. Or wasn't I twenty twenty-four in the original timeline? Should that count toward my age even here in this weird timespace? I don't know. For those of you who care (there are some things lying around online from 2016 that suggest people were following me), let me tell you what the last few weeks have been like for me: a brief brief homelessness that almost felt like a reprieve; quasi-comedic events that play as if somebody shoehorned a plot point into a bad script; Darek's sticky prints all over the damn place; and a frantic salvaging move into position for the endgame. I briefly touched upon the feelings in the last entries on the other blog, but the behaviors of people around me give me a strong sense of my role as a playing piece for Chameleon and Zanark. All the moves that have been made over the last couple weeks are all familiar, forced positions. It's deeply unsettling to consider that my life might just be a game for powers higher than even Darek. Anyway let me put to rest the concerns about my well-being. I'm safe with Ali at her cousin Jae's house. She picked us up about a week into my homelessness. I made a joke about “Jae-us ex machina” and Ali laughed for the first time in the whole week. It felt good. Anyway here I am. Now that my eyes are open to the nature of my reality, I see the invisible hands guiding the pieces around. Yet again, yet again I sense the haunting nearness to the climax of this chaos. Kendra's hand in this is the only assistance I have. She's probably helping Darek, but, as far as I'm concerned, her direction is far more than I've had otherwise. So in terms of reality and supporting myself, Ali talked Jae into letting me crash on the couch while I get my shit together. I'm gonna start looking for a job soon. I already know I'll get the one I had before. I'm not too worried about income. Honestly what does all of it matter when the fabric of reality is stitched together by frayed threads? Enough from the present though. Here's part one of the events. 03/27/19 What follow is the events that occurred on March 27th 2019 starting at 2:13 AM. I'm not going to censor any of it for the sake of illuminating every echo between this iteration of my life and those recorded on the Tumblr blog. I didn't actually realize it was Alice's birthday until after the fact. Ali texted me saying she was outside around two in the morning. It wasn't actually exactly 2:13 AM when I read the text; I had been too engrossed in watching Ben's latest YouTube video to realize she had messaged me until a couple minutes later when I checked my phone. As to the contents of that video, well, I guess Chameleon has had his claws in more than just me. Despite the anomalies recorded in the video, Ben maintains a stubborn unawareness that anything supernatural has occurred. However, he is beginning to grow frustrated with the lack of answers his narrow viewpoint is revealing. This could be a promising hastening of his personal path to awareness. He has to accept he has the same disease as all of us before he can confront any of the deeper truths. Anyway, I had to sneak Ali in through the back door. Our family cat, Lucky(that doesn't sound right; check back with other logs for the cat name), slipped out while the door was open so I got to spend an extra five minutes coaxing the little guy out of his hiding place under the bushes. We made our way up to my room and I just confessed everything to her, from my blog to the dreams to Ben's YouTube account. She took it all in with a remarkable complacency. When she was done thinking it all over, she looked deep into my eyes. “I believe you.” She finally said. Something inside me released all of my tension into the world with those words. In many ways I felt about Ali the same way I did about Mammoth; she seemed just a mask being worn by Kendra to separate from the dreaming self. That admission of belief felt like something genuine, coming from the girl I'd come to know beneath and beyond all this split-personality chaos. “You do?” I managed to ask. “Yeah.” She said. “I keep getting these… feelings, like deja vu. They're so intense and so vivid and, if you really have lived this whole thing before, maybe I have, too. Like you said, maybe being on the other side helped you...remember how to not forget like me and Ben.” She looked wistfully out the window into the night sky. “Besides…” she said. “You're my best friend. Why wouldn't I trust you when you come to me with something crazy?” I embraced her, held her close to me, as I let the relief of finally making a connection in this post-apocalyptic disjointed nightmare overtake me. It felt so good just knowing someone accepted me, someone understood, and I lost myself in the pleasure of the moment. Before I knew it I was kissing her. Before I knew it she was kissing me back. Our hands were all over each other. Flashes of the intimacy we shared back in entry #46(though I couldn't have told you whether it was entry #40 or entry #4 at the time) rippled against the surface of my mind. This dance was all too familiar. I honestly don't know what my logical train of thought was while taking her clothes off. I highly doubt one existed. My brain asserted that in order to ensure Kendra would be able to help me I needed to be as physically close to her as possible. When she pulled the condom from the back pocket of the pants draped over the side of my bed, I realized that this was the closest I could physically be to her. How physical proximity to the host impacted Kendra's ability to travel the spiritual barriers of my mental dreamscape really does not compute in hindsight. Maybe that wasn't the motivation at all. Maybe it was just an excuse. Maybe I wanted to have the feeling of intimacy that had long since drained from all my social interactions. I will give one more relevant piece of info before I do the cliche pan up to the moon and fade to black. As I was throwing her onto the bed, I noticed a MegaBlok on my bookshelf. It was not red. I considered briefly that the blue one must have been with her all along, that surely the influence of Zanark within the block would save me, before she kissed me again deeply and made every thought and theory melt into oblivion. The haze of uncertainty afterward was numbing. I lay awake next to her and stared up at the starlight. Was this real? Would I turn over to find a black doorway greeting me, beckoning me back to the asylum? For the first time answers didn't matter so much as just experiencing the moment for what it was. I didn't try to fall asleep for once; it just came naturally as the next breath.

#59: Decision

03/25/19 This has to stop. I keep thinking and trying to connect the dots of the various things I am seeing and experiencing. There's so much confusion and subversion mixed in with the actual clues. I feel like I'm lost in a labyrinthian maze of my own design, one which Darek would rather see me stuck in. Every blaring flashing hint in the world of how to escape will be ignored if Darek supplies seven red herrings to divert me. I don't know. Maybe it's not Darek. Maybe he's trying to help me. Maybe it's all a part of his Grand Master Plan to confuse me. I feel like somebody mentioned something like that once, either in this lifetime or a parallel one, that Darek was not out to get me. He simply saw from a wider perspective and acted in ways my mind could not fathom. Sounds like some deific bullshit when I remember it like that though. He's a part of my mind; he's a Figment of my imagination, not my God. Anyway, I am starting to think that this is a big misdirection of some kind, an obscuring fog over my brain… a dark cloud. Perhaps it is THE dark cloud, the one I have witnessed stalking the Outer Layer. Sure, that adds up. It's the best lead I have so I'm going to follow it. Let's say I am inside the dark cloud right now. Let's say the red MegaBlok, the same one that magnified Ben's anger and negativity, is some kind of… the best description would be a signal amplifier. It's making the dark clouds influence stronger in my mind. I know it's kind of a leap in logic but at this point we are dealing in conceptual forces so I don't know what logic even applies anymore. My gut tells me this is right. I can't get rid of the MegaBlok. I have tried and tried but it follows me through supernatural means. I even see it when I am inside the dreamscape. Honestly I think it's a container for the void I keep wandering through. It seems as though if I do not see the MegaBlok, I am inside the void world. Regardless of speculation, I cannot escape by getting rid of the red block. I've tried to destroy it, many different ways over the past weeks, but all that happens is it gains a new dent or a new scuff mark. The more radical attempts to destroy it end with it vanishing. Its protector, whoever keeps using my body to move it around, likely saves it from serious damage in this way. There's another link between this dark cloud and myself. That would be Gwen, a name that once belonged to someone I would have called family, a name that now belongs to a twisted manipulator. I think about the last encounter I had with her; I think about the allusions to her since then. I saw her in the initial dream of the dark place. There was also the reference to the false angel made in entry 57, which very well may have been all in my head. Just as well. This battle is being waged in my mind anyway. I have never been one to cling to reality even when I was under the delusion that my life was totally real and normal, barring some mental instabilities. No reason to start now. Since that time there have been, as I said, many weaving threads of dreamed lunacy intermingling with false awakening and reality-imitation. I've stopped differentiating so much. However, this particular moment felt more like… a memory. Gwen sat at the side of the lake with Anna; she was braiding Anna's hair. I'd seen it done up like this the last time I visited her, but in this dream Anna looked younger. Gwen did as well, though she still seemed just shy of a decade older than Anna. The skies were peaceful. It looked as if tragedy and darkness had never entered this forest. “Gwen?” Gwen responds with a noncommittal noise. “When is Mat coming to visit us again?” Anna asked. “He’s always with us, Anna. It's just like Alice said. The person that visits us is a manifestation of a dreaming soul. The thing that boy actually represents is this entire realm around us.” “Even the lake?” Anna asked. It was clear from her eyes that she was full of curiosity and wonder. She couldn't be older than ten in this state. Gwen responded with a soft chuckle. “Maybe not the lake. But the land the lake is on, sure.” She continued working on Anna’s hair in silence. “Gwen?” “Yes, Anna.” She clearly had been asked many things throughout this ordeal. “When is Alice coming back? When do I actually get to meet her?” “Anna, you've met Alice. Remember?” Gwen said. Those words sent a tingle through my body. She was just as good at lying back then. “She used to tell you bedtime stories when you were younger.” Anna shrugged. “Guess I forgot.” Did you know that if you suggest false memories to someone, studies show that they will be believed even if they're fabricated by our own minds? I am wondering if Alice was ever present with Anna or if Gwen just manipulated her memories the entire time. I wonder if Gwen manifested the dark cloud in my mind with her very nature and her subconscious will. I wonder a lot of things about Gwen, the manipulative liar. There's another individual mentioned in the last entry that needs to be considered in all this. This individual is the same one I saw the last time I saw Gwen. This individual is the one who seemed to scare Gwen away, whom the dark cloud was unwilling to approach. If I am trapped inside the dark cloud, perhaps seeking out Kendra's help could free me from its dark embrace. So yet again, here I am. I have a phone in my hands and I'm nervously starting at the screen for a response. Things are chaotic, wearing on my probably nonexistent mental health, and only Ali can help. The only logical way out I see, based on my esoteric knowledge, requires me to cross a line that I would never even contemplate under normal circumstances. Is that the truth Mathew? Do you know that for a fact? What really happened over those six months? I don't even know the truth anymore. I just know that I can not hope to save myself. Call this a sin-ridden hail mary moment; it doesn't make sense but nothing makes sense and I'm a madman who is writing notes to himself living a second life I never asked for that's just a mirror of the first. My phone vibrates in my hand. I look down at the message on the screen. Can't get away tonight. But I have to get some stuff from my dad's tomorrow. I'll tell Rob I am spending the night with him and come over to see you. I shouldn't have smiled at that. I'm literally asking her to betray her boyfriend. But I knew she would say yes. All I need to do is wait and hope things don't get too crazy.

#58: False Awakening

??/??/??

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.

#57: Haunting Tones of Dissociative Darkness

03/05/19

Everything is so surreal; today felt like living inside a dream.

It started as a dream. I recalled the reflected pools of blue gazing curiously at me from the thick miasma of smoke. The form was obscured but the telltale wingspan extending behind her gave Gwen away. Around me cloyed the unnerving stillness of eternity, neither in existence nor incorporeal, an anomalous vacuum I occupied inexplicably. As I watched in suspended fright, Gwen flapped her wings and billowing blankets of thick darkness fell over me, over and over I was buffeted by these suffocating gusts of smoke. One would assume her wings flapping would cause the air to move the smoke away; instead, it seemed as if each flap of her shadow angel's wings were generating more and more smoke. It surrounded me, consumed me, suffocated me.

To be honest I have always been afraid of drowning. The idea of being unable to breathe, to know that you can't hold out much longer, that you're being pushed to a place where your body will take a breath anyway and water will fill your lungs, it's frightening. It kind of feels like a forced suicide. If you can relate to this fear, amplify it by ten and you have an idea of what suffocating in that smoke felt like. It lasted forever. My body couldn't move; my mind couldn't hold out. I knew I would die if I inhaled it but it started seeping in anyway, through my nose, through my ears, eventually into my throat. Echoes of twisted, distorted laughter from Gwen followed me as I faded into the darkness, my body and soul and consciousness melted into the smoke.

Then I was awake, awakened as if I had been falling in my dream and suddenly jolted out of it. My heart raced. My hand clutched my chest. My eyes darted wildly, seeking the familiarity of my bedroom. Instead I was faced with a doorway. It was not THE doorway, but it stood suspended in that same null from before, a foreboding ebony shade. All around me was a vast expanse of nothing. Even though I did not want to to go through that door, every psychic sense in my soul told me that it was my only option. I moved forward.

I opened the door and passed through into the food court. Having been asleep at a decent hour(decent enough considering I had no money and no drugs to assist me), the wave of exhaustion that fell over me felt unreal. There was an emptiness inside of me akin to the vast null previously surrounding me. I inferred I had not eaten at all in a while. The expression “running on fumes” came to mind. Truly, I felt as if my ability to stand and move was rooted in some second wind. Was this really the food court? Or was i still dreaming? This felt real, but then that wasn't saying much considering reality felt like a dream lately.

In an ocean of delirium, I stumbled forwards. That's right. I remembered. I'm supposed to meet up with Ali today. Too late to back out. I was here, somehow, and there she was walking toward me.

“Hey, you!” She smiled. I tensed up.

“H-how are you?” I mumbled. She ran up and hugged me. It was almost too innocent. I felt Kendra burning behind her eyes.

“I'm okay.” She said. “Honestly it's just good to get out of the house. I've basically been doing nothing but playing games on the computer all week.”

“Have you been applying for jobs?” I asked casually.

“Umm, I have a few possibilities.” She mused. I could tell she was lying. “But nothing for certain .”

“Why don't you try something online?” We started walking through the mall. There was a big, open area ahead where the path split off into three directions. Aimless, I turned right and she followed.

“What do you mean?”

I took a deep breath. It was now or never. If I could just guide her along the path she had followed last time, I could probably get away with such innocuous inconsistencies as the fact that I probably had no idea what her cousin did for a living.

“Well your cousin Jae works for Google or something right?” I racked my brain for any specific details of how the job worked. “Doesn't she do like spreadsheet management or something from home? I was thinking that type of job could be good for you…”

I half-expected a confused reply or some searching gaze but her eyes lit up and danced around the colors of the various storefronts. We approached the child's play area, another open enclosure in front of J.C. Penney.

“That's crazy. I was actually talking to her just the other day! And you're right. That job does sound super interesting, just…” She hesitated. Here came the big turn-around. I should have known! She was going to follow the exact same pattern and isolate herself from me. Our friendship was about to collapse. I felt Darek at the corner of my mind ready to enact his version of the conversation at will. All the colors and shapes blurred together. I really didn't sleep last night. I must still be dreaming.

“I just… I'd have to move all the way up to Melbourne to do the training for that job. If I even got it.” She liked at me with that same leading curiosity as if Kendra were right there orchestrating all of this. A chill ran through me at how perfectly this was progressing.

“Well if you applied and got hired I'm sure she would let you move in with her.” I said.

“Rob doesn't want me to leave West Palm though.” She said, for the first time looking away from me entirely so I could not see her face. “His family's here, he said. So we can't go.”

“Ali.” I began, and Darek descended upon my awareness. The sensation of free falling returned; I heard the voices before I saw the scene. It was me and Ali, but… I didn't recognize the memory.

“Look, you're better off without him.” My voice declared. “He's manipulative towards you and you know it. You play this facade like you and he are so happy but you're with him to forget your past and he's using you for companionship. It's not healthy.”

“I know, but… what will I do?” Ali said. This version of her gave off a totally different vibe. She sat starting at the ground in the food court. Her hair was a mess and you could tell she had been picking at her pimples bad just by glancing at her. This was not the same upbeat and excited girl I had just been talking to.

Darek leaned in closer. His energy swirled with intensity and passion. “I don't know. Something will come up.” He reached out and placed his hand over hers. “We can figure it out together.”

This is from before, isn't it? I realized. This is from those six months I lost.

Slammed back into the moment, still hollow inside and drained of all energy, I saw this time Ali was putting her hand over mine.

“You look exhausted.” She said. “Are you sleeping okay?”

I wanted to say I still might be.

“Maybe it's time you put your happiness first for once.” I said. It wasn't really me talking. Even though I chose the words I know i didn't script them. “You're always thinking about everybody else before yourself, Ali. Perhaps it's time to change that and do what works for you.”

“Besides.” I smiled over at her. Despite the utter mental exhaustion, I still managed to radiate a reassuring warmth with that smile. “Honestly, I think you would be better off without him anyway.”

She smiled back and we continued walking. I didn't need to wait to find out how things would work out. I already knew because I had lived in the aftermath of them. Part of me felt dirty and manipulative, that part that still held fast to the delusion of normalcy I had maintained since first hearing Darek's voice.

Don’t lose hope. Zanark is more patient than Chameleon is wrathful. I can help you deal with the false angel.

“Huh?” I looked over hearing that but Ali didn't even seem to be paying attention to me. She was staring raptly into massage parlor storefront. I brushed the oddity aside and assumed I was hearing things.

We hung out for a bit longer. I kind of fell into autopilot. She prattled on about all sorts of drama between her and Rob and his family. I just tuned it out, mostly. There's no sense recounting irrelevant details on this blog. The entire rest of the day was a giant blur and I can't even remember falling asleep or anything besides vague impressions. The days are starting to blend together actively and I'm not sure if I could even tell you with any confidence how I got to and from the mall.

I just hope with all my heart that this wasn't a mistake.

#56: February Recap

02/22/19

It is so difficult to focus my thoughts.

Sensation rules my perceptions. When I try to focus on the information i gained from those entries i get overshadowed by the emotions that gripped me during my experiences. Fear, confusion, nostalgia, sorrow, and more bend my perceptions and force my rationality to take a back seat. In those moments I just sneak into my dad's liquor cabinet and drown out the trauma. He's not a big drinker so I've gotten away with it so far, but he will notice eventually. There's also the handfuls of change I steal from his room to come up with five dollars to get stoned every weekend. Yeah, they're going to start to notice.

So things are tense at home. Honestly, that's expected. Given the realization that I cannot fight the forces of fate, I am marked for death; I will lose my grace with my parents eventually. Is this perhaps how it happened last time? Did Darek take my body in those six months and do nothing? It's possible. It's probable.

There's something I have only just paid attention to as well. There is a red MegaBlok near me almost all the time. It just keeps popping up. Now that I have noticed it I cannot stop from spotting it all over the place. Sometimes it is in my backpack when I go out to chill with Ali. Sometimes it is on a counter or a shelf just out of the focus of my attention. I know it is the same block every time because it is damaged and melted slightly.

This is reminiscent of the blue MegaBlok Ben had in his videos. It also reminds me of the fact that Mark gave him a red MegaBlok which he had in his last video. It seemed to spike his anger whenever he looked at it. I don't know if this block is supposed to be a representation of something in the Outer Layer but it's continued presence in my life is unsettling. Is it the cause of this foggy mental state or the result of it? It's incredibly unsettling and not normal.

Speaking of Ben, he still refuses to have contact with me. He is going to some extremes, too. He's blocked my number and deletes any message Ali sends concerning my name. He shuts down any conversation about me and just won't give me room to speak my mind. So I have been considering this.

He uploaded a video to Facebook. Mark turned it into a YouTube release complete with footage of our conversation at the mall and throwbacks to the first time he uploaded a video defaming me.  It more or less reflects the conversation we had as depicted in the last entry. I am just a little surprised at how radically it affected him. He's jumped straight from being willing to hear me out to considering me a danger to him. The last time this happened, it took the death of his oldest-friend-slash-love-interest. Something about the conversation we had doesn't feel right. It was as if I could not properly articulate my thoughts; it kind of reflects how I've been feeling a lot since waking up, honestly. It seemed jumbled and messy, but it also is odd because it didn't seem like I misspoke so badly as to incite such hatred from Ben. He's always been a stubborn type, but this just seems extreme.

It seems as though, in my attempt to subvert the flow of events, I have instead accelerated them. That got me thinking: instead of trying to fight my destiny, why don't I just radically embrace it. I know that, after those six months of darkness, I ended up enemies with Ben while Ali had left her boyfriend and let me live with her. If Ben is already my enemy, wouldn't the next obvious step be…?

Yeah, the more I think about it the more confident I become. This is what I am supposed to do. Having recently been in Kendra's presence, I know she cares about me, she is on my side. If I even hint at the idea that we could be together, I bet she would drop Rob in an instant. It's a crazy sounding idea, I know. Every moral bone in my body says to just let it be. But the more and more I look at the evidence and the patterns the more I am convinced this is the right move.

If this was real life and my actions had lasting consequences on the world around me I would not do this. But something insane is going on and if I don't evolve my perceptions and inferences to keep pace I won't get anywhere. From the perspective of someone who has seen backstage, who has lived this out once before, who knows that these people are just actors on a set amusing Chameleon and Darek and Zanark, what do I even care if I'm a little bit of a homewrecker? I've noticed Ali's passive aggressive comments lately. The home I'm wrecking was broken already anyway.

So that's the plan going forward. I acknowledge it is insane but I can't stop things from happening. I already lost my job and my car and my grades and my friends. What's this on top of it? Let's just go all in and place a risky bet. The worst case scenario is that I get reset and I don't remember any of it anymore.

Or maybe I will find the end of this rabbit hole and be free at last.