The Chasm: A new story based upon dreams of mine.
By ARMIV2 0 Comments
Prologue
I have been trying my best to navigate my way around this thing without disturbing it. I have been taking careful steps and quieting my breathing. I have been moving this stone into place for sometime now. It is immense in weight yet moving it hasn’t been so much of an issue. Nothing is when you’re working under severe pressure; under severe terror. But I don’t know what it is that I am afraid of. I see it in flashes of memory but I cannot tell what it is supposed to be. A figure of some sort? An edifice of some kind? The shape is massive and un-human. The memories show it responding to all that I do. Slightly. It stands across its stationary twin in some distant yet familiar pathway. They raise their crooked arms when I do something right. They turn their heads when I step too far down. Their eyes focus in when I do nothing. But with this final placement I finish the puzzle and am released from my prison.
How I got there I do not know. I remember clutter beforehand. I remember searching for something and being helpless. I remember spiders never before seen. I remember them stalking me amongst the mess as I searched for one in particular. I remember my left arm having been bitten and infected; dying as time raced against me. I remember seeing the long green tarantula responsible as it escaped from the room and into the maze of stone and thorn. I chased after it and…became lost…my hand was clean, but I was someone else when I tried to remember where I had been. I was dark, caped, shrouded and determined. Was I a hero or was I a thief? The questions left me as I left the maze. I left the dark skies and decaying scenery and entered into what I could only presume was a school of mine from childhood times. I walked out further and further to see the sunrise and old school trailers, then looked back to see where I had come from.
A silhouette and cloud were all that I could see behind me. I wondered if the thing that I had been so terrified of was even there or not. I came up to the last rows of trailers before the ambience of the quiet sleeping town around me died. Stillness. The air became thin with life and heavy with revelation at the same time. I turned to look behind me for no reason other than that I knew I had to. The silhouette changed. A tower shifted. It turned to look towards me, though I had not known it yet. It wore a long beak and a domed brim hat. It slowly left the mass of shadow as I could only stand and watch it. As I saw it calmly round the corner I then sought cover. Its frame was immense and cloaked in a long dark robe. It was in the appearance of a plague doctor for sometime before it knew where I was. I was lying down as close to the earth as possibly as one could when I felt that it had gotten me in its sights. Lying prone amongst the grass was pointless, though, as it picked up pace towards my direction. It must have been excited at the thought of my capture.
It undid the fastenings of its robe to reveal its immense slender frame. It had four arms that were all clawed through white gloves. The smallest pair of arms was curled up at the chest. It wore gaudy reduced apparel reminiscent of the clothes someone would have worn during the plague. And then, with what I may or may not have heard upon the distant breath of the rustling of some far-off leaves, a shrill shriek that stabbed my heart and soul filled my head as if I were trapped in a small room with it. It was everywhere and nowhere all at once, and at its signal the giant’s mask withered away to reveal a skull like that of an ibis or vulture riddled deeply and ornately. It was upon me when the sky had been darkening. The sunrise turned to sunset while the moon was nothing more than a cheap searchlight. The beast was going to crush me with its mighty foot before I gathered to my feet and ran towards a trailer.
I burst through the door after several desperate charges and made my way into what I could only see as a vast narrow corridor in an older building of sorts. Impulses lead me to open the first door on my right. It was a padded room faded yellow with time. The barred smeared window showed me the same false moon that I had just left. This was in the same time, but maybe not the same world? On the bed sat the evanescent image of someone that I believe I was supposed to know. He was gruff and dirty. He kept looking at me as if I didn’t belong there. If he had been a ghost, he wasn’t very frightening, but as the memory that I believe he was supposed to be, he was horrifying. Then, in a burst of cacophony, he rushed me and charged my head against the door. As my head slammed against it, images from times and places from everywhere and nowhere entered into my mind. Most of these weren’t mine, but I saw myself in a few of them. The influx became too much for me to handle. I swung my arms out and struck the memory and sent him and all else that he was trying to pour into me out and in a violent crash that ruined most of the room.
When I opened my eyes, the room was less aged and a middle-aged voice was yelling a name that I could only assume was mine. I opened the door to see a balding man in glasses look down sternly at me. He wanted to know about the mess inside, but clearly we saw two very different rooms. I walked past him and his pressed inquiries without as much as a tinge of repercussion on the back of my mind. The halls were busy with adolescents all going about their daily school related doings. I had begun to fall slowly into a state of comfort as this scene began to feel familiar to me. There was a feeling that all of this had happened somehow someway in another time or place and that it was a genuine memory. But then that comfort soon died as the memory began to reach my inner mind. This had happened before sometime at some place, and as it was here, something was missing. Feminine whispers began to fill the halls as I began to feel my soul being crushed. A name faded out by all the yelling rang upon my ears as I began to run desperately down the hall…looking…
People began to vanish. Some simply went away while others vanished as soon as I spoke to them. Pretty soon the only ones left were all girls of varying ages. As they faded, the light in the building was dying. A grey aura took the sun’s place as a soft sadness began to fall from the ceiling. Snow? Or was it ash? I had made my way to the end of the hall and into a small courtyard where a ruined fountain sat frozen. The last remaining females there stood around aimlessly, as if stuck in thought or time. One by one I approached them asking for the girl whom I did not know. They faded as they couldn’t answer me, all up to the last one. She wore a faded green sweater, but why that was noticeable I did not know. I grabbed her by the shoulders and asked her, heavy with desperation, my tired question. She looked at me. She looked at me and stared into my eyes with a look that I could only describe as a combination of terror and remorse; as if she knew something but either could not answer me or didn’t know how. She continued to stare as she began to disappear from my grip.
As she faded, the sun and its light returned to the building but lit up a different environment. The fountain was still ruined, but it was a different kind of ruined. There was an age set about the room, but yet it was clean. I heard a commotion coming from inside a hallway and decided to follow it. I ended up in a brightly lit room some three stories tall with a banner signifying a club or meeting of sorts. The room was pretty much empty save for the iron rafter system that made up the top two floors. Everything was barebones and done so in an old fashioned style. All over the stairs were people who seemed to come from all different kinds of walks of life and eras. The atmosphere was pretty warm and inviting, as they didn’t seem to mind me at all, though there were obvious whispers making mention to tension unfamiliar to me. This place relaxed me, as I felt that I could maybe get some answers here. But as I walked around looking for people to ask my questions to, I noticed that quite a few looked like people I had known. Friends, family, and a man who I could have sworn was my brother.
He seemed to have quite the crowd around him, whoever he was. I tried to talk to him but I could not be heard. I turned away to continue looking around when I saw fliers pinned to a board down at the end of hall at the top floor. The top most fliers and posters all seemed to be talking about a certain figure and something he had done. His absence was the cause of celebration, but in this room the whispers spoke otherwise. They all knew who he was, and soon I remembered too. The whispers cleared and I remembered a terrorist or rioter of some kind. As one or the other he either looked like a comic book hero or a tattered miscreant wearing layers and robes. I became angrier with the more I began to remember. I remember that he was responsible for what I was missing going missing, or at least he was involved. I remember his face, his name and infamy. I remembered how much I had hated him and that I was to be meeting him soon. The entire room’s chatter became filled with my revelation. They were waiting for his return. He was coming, and they were ready.
Rumbling built through the distance until it reached the doors to the room. In a burst the doors were replaced with smoke and two armored thugs. From between them emerged their leader, the man we were all waiting for, and the one I had sworn that I remembered hating with every fiber of my being. He was speaking, but all of my everything was drowned with the memory of me hating him so fiercely, that I just jumped towards him. I was screaming a name I did not know as I came crashing down towards him. Things began to fade and dissipate as the rush of our collision came into meeting with the rush of reality. Time pulled and stretched as I came down upon this unsuspecting yet knowing man. This was it; this was the end. As I came down, I began to realize. I began to wake…
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