02/19/17

FTP: This is one that I could have posted right after #42 if I wanted. I chose to not post it because, revisiting it after months of my recovery, it sounded completely insane. Then I remembered I lost six months of time and had tense relations with my subconscious. It was already crazy. Even still, this is something I don’t remember writing or experiencing. Darek could have made this all himself to throw me off the trail or to confuse me even further.

It’s all I have to go on for the past six months. I guess I got through the doorway. And when I did, it left a vacancy on my side that Darek happily filled. Additionally, if I accept the premise that this is an honest recollection I no longer recall, it has some valuable answers. Part of me wants to go back there… but looking at the consequences, part of me does not.

Assuming this entry is my own words, it begs the question of when I wrote it, of how I wrote it. It’s not impossible that Darek granted me the chance to write then erased the memories. What else during those six months did I forget experiencing? Do other logs exist somewhere recounting the time I lost? It seems no matter how many answers I find, I know less and less the more I dig…



(No date given)

I first became lucid by accident, actually, in a dream of a memory from the third grade. I was shuffling off the bus after school behind a kid named Justin who was a year ahead of me. As we passed by another kid in his year, Greg, the latter made some smart remark about the former. In a blur of motion Justin spun intent on decking Greg, but I was standing too close and took the blow straight to the face.

My nose felt numb and tingly. It seemed to be runny but when I put my fingers to my face they came back dripping red. It was about then that my perspective shifted to a third person overhead view. I remembered the words as Darek uttered them.

Just let go. Let me in.

This was one of the first times I had heard Darek’s voice whispering in the back of my head to just let my emotions go freely, to give himself a little hold over me. I didn’t have to cry. It didn’t really hurt that bad. But I let it go and I let him in and I did anyway. I made myself look like a victim, look weak, when that little nagging voice in my subconscious knew it was not weak. It was a little foothold on its way to full control.

As I watched myself burst into tears, I looked out the window to my childhood home. I gave the building an initial cursory glance; even knowing this was only a dream, it all appeared natural to my disconnected eyes. Then I did a double take. The front door to the house had been a flimsy, dirty, white contraption that clung loosely to the frame. Here I saw the doorway, the same innate pressure pounding behind it. It’s solid finished wood set it apart from the rest of the house.

My heart rate went up and everything but the doorway fell out of focus. The raucous jeering of the school kids became a distant buzz, distorted to near-demonic proportions. The walls of my old house fell away; the very earth fell away, leaving only that void of ethereal mist and that doorway. This was my only chance. I had to make a break for it.

As I ran in that place, threads of colorful light danced around me. Any moment I was certain one of them would errupt into an explosion and consume me, or jump out and pull me away, or call out my name and freeze me in my tracks. The closer I drew to the doorway, the stronger that certainty became. I cheered myself on despite my growing paranoia. As soon as it was close enough to make out the little details(cracks in the wood that had been repaired, scuff marks to show its age), I put on an extra burst of speed.

In the moment my hand made contact with the knob, my fears became absolute certainties. Darek would stop me right this second, was in fact right behind me with a cocky expression and ready to grab me by the throat. That moment never came though. It took me a minute to register that. What was the blinding white light I was seeing? Finally it clicked. I had opened the door successfully. This was my first glimpse at what lay beyond.

As the buzzing faded from my ears, the light receded as well, revealing a vast, rolling field with a tree line on the horizon. I turned three hundred and sixty degrees to take in the entirety of my surroundings. The doorway stood behind me, alone, surrounded by grass and sky. On the horizon opposite the trees, the consistency of the earth shifted from lush grass to what appeared to be sand. This didn’t feel like a dream anymore. Even while lucid, my dreams always had a bit of a hazy feeling about them that persistently reminded me of their illusory quality. When my vision adjusted beyond the doorway, it felt exactly like I was wide awake. This was distinctly different from dreaming.

Something about the forest called to me, invoking memories of walks through forest paths taken in my troubled youth. As I crossed the field, a gentle breeze blew across it, lifting my hair from my face. A calm serenity fell across me. Something about being here felt right, as if I belonged in this realm.

I stepped across the border between the two environments and a wave of zen fell over me. The sunlight filtered through the tree tops. Birds chirped in the distance. There was a strong sense of life emanating from this place that I could not explain. Should not this world within a dream feel vague and hollow? Wasn’t this a creation of my mind?

Going deeper into the forest, moving branches from my way and skirting between tree trunks, I seemed to follow a preset path absentmindedly. I walked like I knew exactly where I was going. I was certain that I had been here before and Darek had merely stolen my memory of it. The pervasive feeling of familiarity had no other explanation.

“So this is the Outer Layer…” I mumbled to myself. I brushed my hand against one of the many tree trunks around me. It felt rough and sturdy and real. As a slight shudder broke out through me, a stronger breeze followed; it seemed to be summoned by my body’s involuntary action. Looking ahead, I could make out a small clearing. Something told me this was the destination my subconscious sought.

When I stepped through the shrubbery into the clearing, the nagging familiarity of this place finally made sense. It was something from entry 15, a vague reference of the Outer Layer that made no sense to me at the time. I had been here before, quite often in fact, and every time Darek stole the memories away to keep me out.

The clearing was perfectly encircled by the forest. Clouds had briefly covered the sun, blanketing it in shadow. There, in the center of the circle, stood a stone statue, undamaged by time. It depicted a woman in a robe, her face solemn, hands clasped in prayer, head slightly bowed. I approached it slowly, a strange anxiety building inside me. Above, the clouds parted to cast sunlight on the statue; its shadow stretched out over me. I crept closer to it. At the base words were engraved on a plaque.

“In loving memory of a fallen angel.” I read, my voice breaking with emotions. Tears welled in my eyes. The clouds returned to hide the sun.

This was Alice’s shrine.

I fell to my knees before the memorial. My arm extended to brush the writing. As my hand crept closer, I heard church bells ringing in the back of my head. The sound seemed to vibrate through the ground. Visions danced through my head: a sorrowfully smiling figure standing at a distance in the woods; a girl with angel wings plummeting from the sky; a young woman with tears running down her face, knelt on the ground by a lake’s edge.

“Welcome back, Mathew.”

My hand jerked away from the statue. I spun around and stood up to face the one who had addressed me. She stood at the edge of the clearing, her hand resting on one of the tree trunks. Her hair was the deep blue of spring water, her eyes the lighter shade of the sky. She was clad in a dress of earthy green, lined with snow white. On her back, neatly folded against her, I could make out a pair of wings like that of an angel’s. I could already recognize her as one of the three figures from the strange visions. Numbness rolled through me. Could it be…?

“I’m sure you must be confused.” She began making her way towards me. “I can see the questions behind your eyes.”

“Are you… Alice?”

She smiled knowingly and nodded. “You’ve forgotten again.”

“Where am I?” I spluttered. “Is this real?” My heart was racing and the sun was beating down on the scene. A thousand things were running through my head in that moment. I wanted to believe. I really wanted to, but I also did not know where I was besides somewhere in my mind, or where Darek was and what he was planning. Besides that, there was an undefinable tingling in the world around me of which I had slowly become aware. It had been there since touching the statue, probably when she first appeared. The sun was so hot and bright all of a sudden. I felt a little dizzy.

“Your consciousness has been living and dreaming inside… a chamber, in a manner of speaking.” She told me. “In a sense this place is as real as the one you came from. Maybe even more real, at least to you.”

“I… don’t really follow…” I said, trying too hard not to think too hard.

“It’s your soul, a place you created to escape that other, cursed place. And I am the personification of Alice, the ghost of her that lives on inside your head. I’m the part of her she left you.”

“And… and I’ve been here before?” I whispered, gears turning in my head and entries popping up one by one. Darek had said investigation would open doors and invite in things I didn’t want. If everything he was worried about came down to this place, this manifested realm, could there be any darkness in it so great I would not brave it to be with Alice again? “Why would Darek take this from me?”

Alice looked up to the sky, like she was expecting something. “It is never a simple answer when it comes to him. In his head, he had his reasons. He thinks in a greater magnitude than any other I know when it comes to his actions. He is very…”

“…complicated.” I finished. The strange feeling in me had grown to be impossible to ignore. Maybe it had nothing to do with Alice. Maybe it was something else, something approaching.

“We have to go. Now!”

Alice’s eyes locked onto mine for a moment before she darted off into the forest. Of course I was right. A shadow slowly spread itself across my vision, prompting me to look behind me.

A dark, billowing cloud of smoke crept across the sky from the distance. All the other clouds had been swallowed by it. It spread across the sky like oil, blotting the sun out and threatening to engulf me. All that tension in my body seemed to explode. The whole world lost its color. I didn’t even have time to consciously register my body turning and running. That dark cloud was sentient; somehow I was certain of this, and I was convinced it was coming after me.

Suddenly the forest was not so serene. Running and darting through a wood characterized by shades of grey left a foreboding fear festering in my chest. The trees seemed to shift and twist within my vision, inducing a claustrophobic panic that only worsened as the fauna thickened around me. I had seen Alice’s shadowy form in the distance at first, but now she was nowhere to be found. She might have been mere feet from me but I could not see even that far ahead.

It definitely wasn’t just in my head. The trees were moving. Twisted, leafless limbs dropped down into my field of view like gnarled hands. As I tried to duck between them, the hands snatched at me viciously. One caught me roughly around my shin. I cried out in terror, shaking my leg free. In response, the trees in the immediate vicinity seemed to turn to face me. Though I freed myself, I could not stay standing. As I scrambled to regain my footing, I caught a glimpse of the horror behind me. The dark cloud had descended like a grim fog upon the forest, rolling along between the trees with great ease.

Now I was jumping and ducking between tree limbs all vying for my capture. Overhead, leaves were withering and turning to ash as they drifted to the ground. I didn’t even make it ten feet before a root snaked up and snared my ankle. I tumbled face-first into the dirt and foliage. The leaves lining the forest floor crumbled to dust on impact. Dark tendrils of smoky blackness snuck along the ground to surround me. Unable to free myself despite desperately struggling against the imprisoning root, a black fog fell around me as ashes rained from the sky. I had been caught.

An emptiness fell over me like a blanket. I wasn’t calm or at peace like earlier. I was numb. The feeling could best be described as a coldness snaking through my veins. I shut my eyes and held my breath to avoid taking in any of the smoke that had engulfed me.

Time passed. The apathy I had become faded into the background, not quite gone but not imposing on my psyche. I opened my eyes to something unexpected.

I was no longer on the floor of the forest. The place I was in was comparable to that ethereal mist that I had run across to reach the doorway, except all the color had been completely taken from it. I appeared to be on a solid surface invisible to my eyes. All that surrounded me were tendrils of smoke in various shades of grey. With no other choice, I started walking.

I didn’t walk for all that long. Despite it, I felt time flowing around me at an exponential rate. I experienced days of torturous monotony in what must have been the span of moments. Surely it hasn’t been that long. I didn’t have a phone to check and wouldn’t trust one to tell time properly here, but the fatigue that set itself through my body reflected intense lengths of time. By the time I finally fell back in exhaustion, an intense disorientation had clouded my senses.

How many weeks had passed? How many months? I will never be able to quantify the time I spent wandering that surreal landscape, devoid of stimuli, just myself trapped with my increasingly maddening thoughts. I started to lose pieces of myself there. Before I got out I started to feel like I had never lived a real life, never been anywhere except this void of apathy and monotony.

I did escape, though. It started when I spied that doorway again, still but a tiny speck in the distance. I felt compelled to approach it. After eons of unchanging grey ether, anything was a welcome distraction to me. I can’t grasp the specifics of what ran through my mind as that doorway slowly grew larger. I think I probably went insane in that span of time. I can remember general impressions; the things I was thinking were running like blood from a wound, splattered onto my mind with violent lunacy.

Going through that doorway lifted the crimson haze that had temporarily blotted my sanity, but it did not invite release from my prisonic spirit world. I found myself occupying a space with a single source of light, a television set displaying static. It illuminated a wooden chair with a figure sitting in it. I stepped forward tentatively, calling out over the television’s hum.

“Hello?”

The figure turned in its seat to face me. I gasped when I recognized the face. It was Ben, but the hair was much longer than when I’d last seen him. Something was off about his eyes, too. The way he stared at me felt hollow. Ben was always hard to read, but I’d never looked into his eyes and seen nothing before. Alarm bells were going off in my head. This wasn’t Ben. This person wasn’t safe.

So I turned and ran back through the doorway. Instead of returning me to my familiar ethereal eternity, I was running down a twisting, winding corridor lined with framed images. I recognized all of them as things Chameleon had hidden in my entries. As I raced down that passage, insane roaring laughter echoed out all around me. I threw my hands to my ears to try and maintain my focus. I needed to get the hell out of this dark twisted place!

Images started repeating on the walls. Cracks formed in the pictures and they started crashing to the ground in front of me. Desperate, terrified, I cried out for help hoping my mind would answer me. Instead, the floor started to collapse from beneath me. All I could do was scream as I fell forever, down into oblivion, not even the monochrome ether to keep me company. I was surrounded by nothing in all directions. Eventually even the corridor above me vanished from view entirely.

I didn’t fall as long as I walked, but time stretched on until my body started to acclimate to the constant downward motion. When my voice grew hoarse from the screams, I accepted my new fate in silence.

It started as a pinprick of white light below me. Then, slowly, second by second, it grew, until I realized I was plummeting towards it at terminal velocity and it engulfed my vision. For one blissful moment I thought I had finally died. Then feeling slowly returned to my body and I felt the coarse forest floor against my face. I was back. After what must have been months I was back.

Slowly, sorely, I got to my feet. The forest had changed. Where once mighty trees had obscured my view of the sky, withered deal limbs now gave a clear view of the surroundings. The grass had died as well. Where once new life had bustled now rested the chilly glaze of winter.

I rose shakily, the horrors I had just experienced fading like a dream. The sensations still lingered strongly. I had just lived lifetimes and experienced horrors that were not easy to shake off. What the hell had I just been through? The strangest thing was that even though I remembered feeling so empty inside, now that I was back I felt like I was missing something. Somewhere in my raving thoughts near the end of my long walk, I had come to some conclusions that had given me some sort of higher understanding. I couldn’t remember anymore what had triggered this, but I was certain I had solved the puzzle of my life and forgotten. This left a small piece of me yearning to return despite the costs.

I had no wish to suffer that dystopian fate again, though. I cast a wary eye to the overcast skies and walked through my new world. This forest had definitely reacted to my fear before. It made sense, given this was inside my head. My perceptions affected the environment directly. As confirmation, the sun peeked out behind the heavy clouds to cast twisted shadows across the woods.

There was no snow on the ground but there was a chill in the air. This frigid coldness likely stemmed from the change in my mental demeanor. At first I had been filled with the wonders of new discovery. Now I was dulled from the torture I had received inside that dark cloud.

Something caught my eye through the trees that juxtaposed the wintry woods. It was another clearing, much larger than the first, and a perfect circumference of lush green summer grass marked it plain as day for me. Curiously, I meandered towards it.

The clearing contained a small lake. I had seen this lake before. It was the same one I had been dreaming about the night before I entered the doorway. I’d seen it other times in my dreams, too. It seemed to be a recurring constant and solidified my certainty that I was meant to find this place.

At the lake’s edge, a figure knelt. I recognized her as well, though I couldn’t quite place where from. She seemed unaware of me entirely as I stepped into the green circle. Her face was entirely obscured, but her sky-blue hair cascaded down her shoulders visibly. She was clad in tattered articles with an earthy red shade to them. Her feet were bare but not very dirty.

“Um…” I paused awkwardly, unsure of how to get her attention. However I had no need to.

“Mat…” it sounded like she was crying.”I’m sorry… I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” I asked hesitantly.

“You came here looking for Alice, right? You always do. But you won’t find her here. I’m so sorry, Mat. Alice is dead.”

Dead? I stared at this girl in stunned silence. She lifted her head upright and turned to face me, knees still on the ground, eyes misty and watery and green. She looked like she might be sixteen. Her face was covered in little freckles. She kept talking to fill the silence.

“I’m sorry. Every time you vanish for a long time and come back you always forget and I have to tell you again. I can’t hide it from you; you’ll eventually find out either way. I just hate to see the hurt it causes you over and over every time and I’m just so sorry.”

“But… Alice… I saw her in the forest. There must be some mistake.”

“No.” Her expression darkened and her words took on a bitter sharpness. “That is not Alice. She’s an imposter, a pretender.”

“Then who-”

“It’s her sister, Mat. It’s Gwen.” The girl explained, pleading up at me to make her stop telling me these things but continuing to speak anyway. “She wanted to be Alice to make you happy. She wanted me to help her convince you, too, but I can’t do that to you. It’s false, false happiness, and you deserve the truth. I tried to warn you that she was a fraud but I guess you really didn’t remember either of us so-”

“Okay, okay.” I cut her off. “So, then, if that wasn’t Alice but Gwen, and she sent that message in the capitalization errors claimimg to be Alice, then you sent the other message… but who are you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Her cheeks flushed bright pink. “My name is Anna. I’m… sort of… Alice’s daughter, I guess…”

“Her what?”

“Not literally, I mean. Just…” She hiccuped softly. “When you were younger and you came here, she was like a parent to me. We were sort of like a makeshift family, you know?”

I nodded, my heart yearning to remember the days she spoke of but my mind unable to conjure anything. “So… what is this place?” I asked her.

“It is where all of us Figments live.” She explained. “The way Alice explained it, we are born as extensions of your heart, to help you. This lake is my home. I’ve been here since you created me, but the Outer Layer is not just my home. All your friends’ Figments live in this realm where your souls intersect. Except for Darek, that is. He comes from… somewhere else.”

I recalled my meeting with the Ben-like figure inside the dark cloud. “And… that cloud thing… is it also part of this world?”

“The dark cloud exists in the Outer Layer as a manifestation of the disease that afflicts you all. It’s a mark of chaos in your created safe place.” Fresh tears came to Anna’s eyes and she blinked them away. “It only appeared after Alice left. I’m so sorry. It must have terrified you, and-”

I put my hand reassuringly on Anna’s shoulder. She looked up into my eyes with a guilty glimmer of sorrow. “If you knew Alice, if you thought of yourself as her daughter…” I said carefully. “Then you have a piece of her with you. Maybe it was you I’ve wanted to find all along. So stop apologizing to me please? It isn’t your fault she’s gone.”

“You don’t understand,” Anna whispered, breaking eye contact. “Alice… I… she…” suddenly the scene around me started to fade, becoming translucent. “What’s happening?” I asked urgently.

“I think you’re being called back to the other plane.” She said. “I hope you can find your way back soon. I hope you finally remember.”

I wanted to thank her, but the world around me faded like a shimmering ghost, leaving only darkness behind. At first I feared I had fallen back into that cloud’s little torture realm, but I quickly figured out that the black was from the inside of my eyelids. I opened my heavy lids to the real world once more.