Little Slices of Death

I think that's what Edgar Allen Poe called sleep. The dark doorway of dreams. I'm getting less and less of it these days. I know why, you know why.

It's Isaac's fault. Why did he show me them? How did he show me them? I was blissfully unaware. Ignorance was bliss for me.

And now I can't find him. I've looked in the library each day, in the same room, but he's never there. He's gone.

Disappeared like a dream.

Headaches

I get these fucking headaches. They just...don't go away for a while. I hope it's not the doctor. He always scared me the most after the Slender Man.

Fuck. What am I going to do?

Nothing Known

Can't concentrate. Every time I walk down the street, I think I see them. Birds in the sky. Dog in a yard. Man with sunglasses.

I don't want to leave my apartment. I don't. But I have to. Have to go to work. Dont be afraid no fear please no fear

No Ledge

What do you do? When you know? When you know the world is a lie?

A Game

He was waiting outside my building today. Isaac. He had set up a checkerboard, red and black, on the steps leading up to my building. As I approached, he starting placing pieces on the board - but not checkers. Some were chess pieces - I saw a rook and a bishop - but there were some Legos and Monopoly pieces and even some from Candyland. It looked like a jigsaw board game made out of anything you could find.

I stopped at the steps and Isaac looked up at me. "Do you ever wonder where ideas come from?" he asked. "Or, perhaps, where they go? After you are done with them, after you have written them down, do they just stay there? Or do they go, perhaps, to some other place, a place filled with unused ideas, just waiting for something to think of them?"

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Now that's a question," Isaac said and turned back to the board. "I'm playing a game."

"With who?"

"You," he said. He waved at the board with one hand. "Go on, it's your move."

"I don't want to play," I said. "I just want you to leave me alone."

"You have to play," he said. "You were already playing before I got here, you just didn't know it."

"Please," I said. "Leave me alone. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know-"

"No, that won't do," he said. "You know more than you think."

I was tired. I closed my eyes and removed my glasses, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

"A game," he said, waving his hand in front of the board again. "A game of reality. Alternate reality, one might even say."

I looked at him, realization dawning. "An ARG?"

"Ah, finally," he said and smiled. "This is the game you play. The game we play together."

"You think this is part of the ARG? This...this is my life."

Isaac looked at me and laughed. "If you believe your life is not a game, you are in for quite a shock." He turned back to the game board. "Look at it. A random assortment of pieces, following no apparent rules except that which you set. And yet the idea of them came from somewhere. Someplace else. Perhaps the place where all ideas come from." He looked back at me. "And as the idea of them is real, so are they. Look." He pointed behind me and I turned around.

I saw. I saw them. I saw what I was avoiding. I saw them all.

I saw birds, hundreds of birds rising in the sky, lightning flickering between them as they rose.

I saw a dog, huge and jet black, red eyes and sharp fangs.

I saw an old man with a heavy coat, his eyes hidden, his face wrinkled, his arms holding a heavy book.

I saw shadows on the ground. I saw strange blurs out of the corner of my eyes. I saw a boy with skin like ice.

I saw a pool of water waiting. I saw open doorways leading to strange cities, which I realized was all one city.

I saw a dead man in a gas mask before a symbol of twin triangles. I saw a puppet who had taken control of her strings and the strings of those around her.

I saw a man with a bird's face and a wooden cane. I saw another man, deformed and sick, with a wicked smile and a waiting touch.

I saw the blink of an eye and the scuttle of mechanical legs and the silence of empty space.

I saw a beast kneeling on the ground, a beast with pale white skin and black eyes, a beast red in tooth and claw.

I saw a man standing tall, a man in a black suit, without a face but with arms outstretched.

I felt Isaac pull me back and I fell to the ground and everything I saw disappeared.

"What," I said. "What."

"You have seen the true nature of this world," Isaac said looking over me. "I am sorry. You know what kind of game you are playing now. I thought once you could stop playing, but now I am not so sure."

I couldn't move. I had seen them, the Fears we had made up. We had just made them all up. But they were real. We made it all up and it all came true anyway - the words floated back up into my mind.

I closed my eyes and tried taking deep breaths. "What can I do?" I asked, but when I opened my eyes, Isaac was nowhere to be seen.

I slowly got up from the ground and walked to my apartment, carefully looking behind me each step of the way.

Dog Days

There was a dog on my way home from work. It was a medium-sized dog - not huge, but not small. Black fur with streaks of gray. It had a piece of paper in its mouth.

When it dropped the paper on the ground, I saw that it was one of the fliers for Isaac's "Snapshot Simplicities" trap. On the page was written "You aren't really there. There isn't anybody but me here alone in the dark."

The dog looked at me and then scampered away.

Overpass

There's an overpass near by apartment. I have to walk across it in order to get to work. The fence between the sidewalk and a sudden drop down to the freeway is...not very high. A little below my waist, actually.

It's kind of scary sometimes. Especially since I'm afraid of heights. I have to keep looking straight ahead of me when I'm on the overpass and not look to the side. Sometimes I look and I'm kind of mesmerized.

Lately, I've been imagining what would happen if I fell over. Or jumped over. Why would I jump? I imagine a car careening out of control or a giant bird overhead that forces me to run and then jump and fall.

Down down down.

...

How could Isaac have possibly known what I was dreaming?

...what the fuck?

(between two mirrors)

You created me. Who created you?


You made them up but they have always existed. They existed because you made them up.


Who created me? I created you.


 -- Dalmas

(false awakenings)

wake up

you are dreaming


you are having a nightmare right now

you are sitting at a table in a cafe in a city devoid of people where the walls move like waves and the buildings shift and the streets breath and the windows watch you with avid interest to see just how you are going to die


you are walking up a staircase made of thirty-nine steps and at the top of the staircase is a door you can never open a room you can never enter a life you can never lead


you are having a nightmare right now


you are dreaming


wake up

-- Dalmas

(all that you see or seem)

You still don't get it. Maybe you never will, but I feel it is my duty to explain it to you yet again.


All is real. Everything. Everything you write, every thought you have, is real inside your head. Thus it is real outside your head. Thoughts are things. Put them down on paper and they come to life. They can affect the world. They can change the world. They can be changed by others.


Some ideas are different. Some ideas exist independently of everything. Independent of the world, of the universe, of space and time. Some ideas seek to creep inside people's minds and become real.


Are you listening? Are you sitting comfortably? 


You made it all up, but they were always there.


Truth and fiction are closer than you think.


 -- Dalmas

"He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality."

 -- Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

A Rondel About the Slender Man

I tried writing a poem to get rid of my writer's block. Don't think it worked.

It's that feeling in your stomach, that pit of dread,
  Seeing the man standing out in the rain,
  You know you will be next to be slain,
Because fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

There's a pounding ache inside your head,
  It feels like a sledgehammer in your brain.
You wish it were over, wish you were dead,
  You can't take it anymore, this great pain.

There is nothing you can do, nothing can be said,
  You cannot live under this strain.
  You've almost snapped, nearly insane.
It's that feeling in your stomach, that pit of dread,
Because fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

No Ideas

Do you know how frustrating it is to have writer's block? It digs at my mind. I'm staring at a blank screen and I want to write, my fingers are hovering above the keys aching to write, but I can't. I can't write anything. Whenever I start writing, it's always shit and I delete it and I can't write anything now. I can't.

Night Shift

Rereading Night Shift, Stephen King's first book of short stories. From the foreward:

"Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiousity of self-interest, trying to make a whole out of a hundred parts, like the blind men with their elephant. We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn it as adults. The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear - an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths."

Hitchcock Dreams

I woke up and that post was there. Did I write it in my sleep? Or did Isaac hack my account again? The latter probably. I wish he would leave me alone.

I remember another nightmare. I was on the beach watching the waves. My high school history teacher was there, Mr. Jackson. He was smoking a cigarette. I could see the smoke rising out of his mouth. He walked away and I followed him to a small stone cliff with steps carved into it. "Count the steps," he said. I counted them and said, "Thirty-nine."

Suddenly, he wasn't Mr. Jackson anymore. He was Isaac. "So many stone stairs," he said, "for which I sought. Now that I'm gone, it's all for naught." A bird landed on his shoulder and pecked at his ear. "Yesterday," he said, "upon that stair, I met a man without a care. He didn't care again today - and now I thought of something to say." He leaned in close and I could see the bird had pecked away part of his skull, leaving his brain open and bleeding. "Listen: we made it up and it all came from true anyway. That's the funny part." Smoke poured from his mouth and blood from his nose. "Smoke and mirrors, my friend, it's all smoke and mirrors." Blood dripped down his face and he smiled.

And then I woke up.

FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS RETURNS

STRANGER
one two three four there's a tall man at the door


PIPER
five six seven when you die you go to heaven


HAUNTER
eight nine ten see what lurks in the hearts of men


BOOKKEEPER
eleven twelve childhood ends on his bookshelf


SHRIEKER
thirteen fourteen hear the words so harsh and mean


RIMER
fifteen sixteen his laughter as cold as a machine


FINGERS
seventeen eighteen their beaks are sharp their eyes are keen


REAPER
nineteen twenty of bodies and lives he has plenty


EATER
twenty-one twenty-two don't trust the water so clear and blue


WORLDSCRAPER
twenty-three twenty-four look out don't open the door


WATCHER
twenty-five twenty-six inside in your eye it will affix


BUILDER
twenty-seven twenty-eight since its birth it must create


CARTOGRAPHERS
twenty-nine don't fool yourself they aren't benign


CARRIER
thirty thirty-one coughing hacking it's barely begun


DARK MATTER
thirty-two thirty-three when it shall come no one can see


WHISPERER
thirty-four thirty-five don't wake up if you want to survive


SPLINTER
thirty-six thirty-seven thirty-eight raise your arms stand up straight




for everything always returns

A Lack of Lecture

Isaac was there. He was waiting for me.

I need to start at the beginning. I decided to check out that "Snapshot Simplicities" class, because it looked so weird. I like seeing weird things - that's why I've seen almost every David Lynch movie.

So, Sunday at 4 p.m., I went to the public library. It's only open until 5 p.m. on weekends, so I figured the class must be very short. There was a sign next to a room that said "The 4:17 class," so I opened the door and walked inside.

And there he was. He had his back to me, but I could tell it was him. He was writing something on an old-fashioned blackboard. I was going to walk out, but he said, "Hello, there. I knew you would come."

"How?" I asked. "How did you know I would be here?"

"Because," he said and turned to me. "You are the narrator, after all. Of course you would be here." On the blackboard was written "PANTHEISTIC SOLIPSISM." "I'm sorry I had to deceive you. This is not a class, there will be no lecture here on mind or body. I merely wanted to meet you again. To see  you and tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"All things are real," he said and smiled. "Even if you made them up, they are real. Your monsters, your Fears, they are real. They exist."

I stood there and clenched my fists. This cryptic bullshit was really starting to get on my nerves. "Do they exist like I exist?" I asked.

"You do not exist," said Isaac. He turned back to the blackboard and flipped it upside down. On the opposite side of the blackboard was written in large block letters:


NOTHING EXISTS. ALL IS A DREAM. GOD - MAN - THE WORLD - THE SUN, THE MOON, THE WILDERNESS OF STARS - A DREAM, ALL A DREAM. THEY HAVE NO EXISTENCE. NOTHING EXISTS SAVE EMPTY SPACE - AND YOU!


I turned and ran from the room, from the library, and kept running until I was blocks away, my breath lost, sweat streaming down my cheeks.

Why is he doing this? Why?

A weird marketing campaign

So the graffiti must have been some sort of viral marketing, because I found a flyer taped to one of the telephone poles on my way to work (next to one looking for a lost dog named "Barguest") that read:

SNAPSHOT SIMPLICITIES

Learn About the World As Myth!

Explore the Endless Possibilities!

The Class That Asks The Unanswerable Question:

"I Know Where I Came From--

But Where Did All You Philosophical Zombies Come From?"

Sunday 4:17 PM

At Your Local Public Library

Should I go? It sounds like some sort of weird self-help meeting.

Jittery

Have you ever gotten just really jittery? Not, like, from nervousness, though there is enough to be nervous about, what with Isaac the hacker and stuff. But no, I just feel really jittery - maybe I had too much soda today.

Outside my apartment, someone had spray painted some graffiti, but it was weird. It read "SNAPSHOT SIMPLICITIES" and below it, they had carefully written "So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light." I know I've heard that phrase somewhere before, but I don't remember where.

Didn't find a keylogger on my system, so Isaac must have hacked it some other way.