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micahrodney · 2 years

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Thread; Chapter 8 - The Strings Which Make Us Dance

This is a commission piece for Matthew Caveat Zealot.

---

Neil was, once again, lying in his bed in his dorm room. He was rather tired of being dumped off here whenever the universe was done with him. Immediate disorientation set in. Where was established, but when was the big question.

Fortunately, his alarm clock offered him a glimpse of the time, 9 AM. Scrambling off the side of his bed he noticed his wall calendar, assuming it was up-to-date, read Sunday.

The concerning thing was that a week seemed to have passed since his misadventure at the Levant Residence.

"Rem, if you're there, we need to talk," Neil said.

Rem was silent.

The knocking resumed and once again came the once melodic and now mildly alarming voice of Erica.

The old flame had burnt out a few weeks prior. But to Neil – who was presently a hostage to the whim of time – it felt as though it had only been a handful of days. The wounds were still fresh, and he could not imagine what she wanted.

He took a quick look at himself. A tiny bit of peach fuzz on his face, and he was only wearing plaid boxers. A fine state he was in. Reaching towards the nearest clean-ish t-shirt, Neil made a mental note to keep up with his laundry. He slipped the neon blue gym shirt over himself, saw that there was a very noticeable pasta stain on it, and shrugged.

Well, it's not like I'm trying to impress her anymore.

He opened the door and saw her. At once he wished he had taken a moment to find a clean shirt. She was as beautiful as the day she shattered his heart.

Perfect blonde hair, trimmed fashionably to her neck. She wore what could only be described as high society attire, a white blouse and black skirt that went down to her knees, with a pearl necklace and matching alexandrite earrings.

"Oh, sorry, I thought you were already awake," Erica said, scanning him with the tiniest hint of disapproval. "Would you like to take a moment to get dressed?"

"Depends on how long the conversation will be," Neil answered flatly.

There were a number of things he wanted to say right now. All of them felt childish and petty compared to the fate of the universe and considering he had just made a very powerful enemy of at least one person, he wasn't feeling terribly charitable. He hated her and he loved her. He wanted to invite her into his apartment and make love to her until the next time Rem dragged him out of reality, and he wanted to instruct her on where precisely she could stick her goddamn pearls.

This wasn't his Erica. This was some… socialite who happened to share her face and name.

This was the kind of girl his father wanted him to fall for. That was the thought that hurt the most. The realization that this phantom of his old flame was… not better, but definitely more socially acceptable.

Erica pressed herself against the door frame as if attempting to prevent Neil from slamming the door on her. A smart move as he was fighting the urge even as they spoke.

"I just… I don't know, I've been rethinking some things in my life and I think I might have been a bit," Erica made a rhythmic hand-waving gesture as though she were fumbling to cast a spell. "Hasty?"

"Ending our relationship was you being 'hasty'?" Neil clarified, putting his hand on the door and moving closer to block the entrance to his room.

"I understand that's not a great answer," Erica replied, backing away slightly. "Look, I've been having a tough time adjusting to college and my mom's new friends. You know how overbearing she can be. She has me canvasing for some church thing she's involved with."

"Your mom always seemed to like me," Neil noted, softening slightly.

"Uh-huh. What were her words exactly?" Erica tilted her head upwards in mock straining. "Ah yes, she told me that you were fine, and I quote, 'for a high school boyfriend'."

"And that's why you dumped me?" Neil asked.

Erica bristled slightly and folded her arms. "Not just that. There were other reasons. We don't need to rehash them, I hope."

"You did a pretty damn thorough job listing all of my failings at our last meeting," Neil scoffed.

"I don't have time for this."

Erica put her hand on the door as Neil made to close it. The two were now inches apart in the negative space between his dormitory and the hallway.

"I messed up, okay?" Erica spat out. "I was letting all of the stress get to me and I didn't give you a fair chance. Is that what you want?"

"What I wanted was to know why. Now I do.

I'm not good enough for you," Neil retorted.

"Oh, Neil, come on," Erica sighed in frustration. "That's exceptionally childish, even for you."

"It's been, what, three weeks since we broke up and you've decided now, out of the blue, that I'm worth sticking around as long as I fix myself for you?" Neil asked.

"Yes, there are things I think you need to work on," Erica replied, bluntly. He couldn't even fault her; she was technically right about that.

"But I also have things I need to work on too. I don't want to lose you over a fight."

Neil let go of the door and dropped his arms to his sides. "Do you love me?"

Erica seemed lost in thought for a moment. This was a sentiment she had difficulty expressing lately. He had noticed a turn in her. She was right, he had some faults he needed to work on. But the confirmation that his failure had led to their relationship ending was torture. Almost as bad as knowing his stubbornness might ruin his chance at reconciliation.

"I don't know," Erica expressed, settling on honesty. "I'm not sure I really know what that is. What I do know is that I care about you, and I want to be with you and maybe we can figure that out together."

Neil wasn't sure how to answer that. It was so damned reasonable. He had been entertaining the possibility that this was some nightmarish extension of the Crossroads. Something Levant had cooked up to distract him. Or that perhaps he had been deposited in some alternate timeline. Levant had made the suggestion that Neil could visit another world where Erica "worshipped" him. But this was not that.

She was different.

She had grown up. The more he thought on it, the more he realized that Erica's tastes had been changing ever since they left high school. The sudden change had been Neil no longer fitting into her life. Erica was right, he had things he needed to work on. But was changing who he was healthy? Was it fair to him? Or her for that matter?

"I need time to think, Erica," Neil replied.

Erica sighed. "I guess that's fair. I took a few weeks myself."

She chuckled softly, an awkward attempt at levity that made her seem more like the old Erica than any of her words. It was patient, understanding, and deeply human; reasonability in the face of one's childish and impatient desires for a speedy resolution.

"I have your number," Neil nodded, moving the door slightly.

Erica took the hint and backed into the hallway. "I'll be waiting."

--- When Neil finally decided he was ready to face the day, he had half-expected Erica to be still waiting right outside his door, hoping for an answer. This foolishness was not rewarded with her presence, and he felt silly even thinking about it. A shower and clean clothes definitely made him feel better, but a proper meal would go a long way. His usual haunt seemed the best choice. Besides, he was hoping Angie could help him recover some of his lost time.

He had tried to call Damien several times, but the usually attentive friend was not picking up the phone. He tried the house phone as well, but the answering machine was full; his father was a very popular man.

And a megalomaniac bent on universal destruction.

Ah, there it was. How was he supposed to have that conversation? He supposed he would have to try and bring it up at some point. But would Levant let him get that close? Was that the reason Damien was not answering the phone? There were too many questions, few answers, and the only reliable source of information that he had access to was Angie.

He arrived at half-past noon, a bit late in the day for breakfast food even if your sleep schedule was that of a lay-about college student. The blond boy behind the counter was unfamiliar to him and the "Trainee" name badge he wore was not encouraging.

"Uh, is Angie in?"

Neil asked.

"Sorry, no I think she had to leave early. Wasn't feeling so good. Can I get you something?" The boy replied.

He couldn't have been more than seventeen, and probably younger by the look of him. Perhaps a high school kid looking to save up for college.

Neil greatly missed when those were the height of his pressing concerns.

"Uh, just coffee I guess, room for cream. And uh, do you have any muffins left?"

"Apple walnut is all I have left. We're on lunch right now."

Neil sighed, glanced at the lunch menu – he'd never had an opportunity to thoroughly inspect it before – and decided stale familiarity was better than fresh and unproven.

"Yeah, I'll take it," he grunted, perhaps a bit more rudely than he meant. The kid would live.

"Coming right up, sir."

Sir. Yeah, that's great. I'm a "sir" now. A sir who has nobody. Not even the damned voice in my head, Neil fumed silently, taking a seat in an open booth and staring out the window.

The muffin was stale but palatable. The coffee was flat but stimulating. The physical effects of the food were noted and then set aside, without so much as a drop of dopamine to reward him. He was hardly a loner, but he generally enjoyed his solitude. He enjoyed having time to himself; moments to clear his head. Especially after mom…

Neil rubbed his forehead and considered his options. He was lonely, miserable, and watching what were meant to be the best years of his life slipping away a few days at a time.

Powerless.

That was the primary source of his ennui. Nothing he had wanted that day had come to pass. None of his friends were available, he had no answers, he wasn't entirely certain he was even in his own timeline, and the nagging question of what to do with Erica lingered.

Levant had said that he was powerful. That he had potential he had barely begun to tap.

"Well doctor," Neil mumbled to himself, draining the last few dregs out of his coffee cup before crumpling the styrofoam in his hand. "There. That's all the power I have. I'm not fucking special. Hell, I don't even know what I am anymore, but it's not powerful."

"Oh! Neil," came an all-too-familiar voice.

Neil turned to see her standing in the doorway to The Junction. She had changed in the past few hours and was now in far more familiar attire. Light jeans, her Vans, and a t-shirt with the album art for Pink Floyd's "The Wall". She still had on her pearl earrings, but this was far more familiar to the girl he knew. Maybe she had been out for a job interview or something.

"Erica," Neil nodded curtly.

"Come on, pull up a booth."

What the hell, Neil thought, embracing the chaotic wind that had swept through his life. I'll ride the current for a while.

"Oh, are you su-"

"You want to get back together," Neil stated. "I say we start with lunch and see where the day takes us."

"That's… incredibly forward of you," Erica noted, but taking a seat nonetheless. "I take it you had a good think back at your dorm?"

"No," Neil answered honestly. "I stopped thinking." ---

Before he knew what was happening, Erica was dragging Neil by his shirt collar through the door of her dormitory. It was considerably cleaner, and she had the privilege of having a room all to herself.

There was a second bed, but it was unoccupied. Neil vaguely remembered her mentioning that her roommate had transferred earlier in the semester when she moved. This was somewhere during his afternoon that had since been blotted out by an overpowering fog of lust.

He could vaguely make out the surroundings, stereo, TV, mid-range personal computer, and walls absolutely covered floor to ceiling in posters that would make his sister seem utterly out-of-touch with the music scene. Pink Floyd, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, KISS, she had a taste for classic rock. But interspersed, almost as gap-fillers, were alternative choices such as Green Day, Ace of Base, and some new band called Goldfinger.

That poster featured a woman with ebony hair and bright red lipstick wearing a cheesy retro-style astronaut suit, and the band's name in electric yellow font with red outline. "Here In Your Bedroom", the name of their single, was both present on the lime green album art as well as playing on the stereo when Erica pinned Neil down on her queen-sized mattress and started removing his shirt. By the time John Feldmann belted out his last refrain, they were both bare, limbs entangled and, as the song suggested, minds turned off. ---

Neil must have passed out. Because he woke in Hell.

There was a loud claxon sound piercing his skull and echoing through the vast chamber he found himself in.

Specifically, he and around fifty other people were tightly packed in a cage designed to hold maybe ten, writhing together as a mass of flesh as they tried to attain their freedom. The steel of the bars was rusted and blackened from heat.

They were underground, wherever they were, with a great chasm right beside their cage that sunk down several hundred feet into a void, from which a hideous green glow emanated.

Above them was a looming and fathomless high ceiling of the void, encased by the rock walls that surrounded it. The walls were oddly slick, with fresh-running streams of fluid which Neil recognized from their stench alone to be blood and offal.

There was an explosion of sound to his left as a great burly jailer wearing a black hood and nothing else cracked a leather whip against the cage bars. Neil was pressed against this frame with no protection and the next strike hit its mark, stinging his cheek and causing blood to pool just under his right eye.

The din was unbearable, with screaming, crying, and howling rising in chorus with the sound of that terrible alarm.

Home, Neil thought.

It was all he could think as his body protested the horrid conditions. The heat, the pain, the crushing sensation of his organs being pulverized. Home.

I want to go home.

Another crack hit the person beside him, an elderly woman who, rather than reacting to the pain, simply let out a sigh. The pain was familiar to her. It probably didn't even sting at this point. And he knew looking into her eyes, that would be his fate. He would be in this cage for the rest of eternity until his body was as broken and useless as hers. His torment would be unending, his life meaningless and his worthless carcass good for nothing more than target practice for the monster on the other side of these bars.

Oh yes. Levant had seen a Hell alright. And Neil was here.

The whip came towards Neil's face once more, and in desperation, he reached his hands through the narrow gap in the bars and caught the head of the whip. Neil felt a strange pulling sensation from within, one that coursed through him like a sudden rush of blood to an open wound.

As he held the striking end, the leather softened to insular black rubber, and the toughness a millimeter beneath it revealed the innards to be made of wound metal. His tormenter seemed unable to move; unable to let go.

Neil had no idea how he was doing it, but it washim enacting the change. He had just wanted to get out somehow. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see his friends again, to be in bed with Erica, to just be a regular college student once more. But above all else, as the whip came close to his face, one thought rose to the front of his anguished, panicked and exhausted mind.

I want to kill that son of a bitch.

And now what was once the handle of the whip morphed into bare exposed wire, whose end frayed, with each separate spindly coil wrapping themselves around the jailer like snakes.

They bound his whole body leaving harsh red marks in his skin, tightly lashing about him, cutting off blood flow, and around his neck cutting off his airway. The black hood fell off of his tormentor, and Neil saw the face.

He was a man, bald with deep gash wounds in every exposed bit of skin. Burn marks and gashes revealed the true nature of the formerly irredeemable torturer. He was just another prisoner here. Neil felt pity and in the last moment, he tried to amend his desire.

Not dead. Not dead, don't kill him.

And, as though he had uttered a word of command, the wires around his neck loosened, and he remained bound, but alive, on the rocky floor of the prison. The way was clear, at least for now. Bolstered by his unexpected success, Neil decided to push his luck. With the same free hand that once held the end of the whip, he now managed to wrap a few fingers around the rusty bars of the cage.

Disappear.

Nothing happened. The bars were as they had ever been. He almost gave up hope, until he took a desperate moment to consider what had happened. The whip hadn't vanished, it had been transmogrified.

Okay… melt.

At once the metal became scalding to the touch, and there was a cry from the people gathered within the cage. Just a quick startled gasp, however, as in the very next second, the cage cooled and solidified as a puddle beneath them and in some cases, draped over them in thin, parallel lines. They fell out, all over the ground before them. A few had taken a tumble over the edge of the cliff but were clinging to it, upper bodies holding on for dear life.

Some fled at once, without bothering to stay with the group. Some helped the others regain their footing, others still tended to injuries.

As for Neil, he took a moment to thoroughly inspect the nightmare he had fallen into. The path before the cage split off into two directions and down opposite corridors into unknown chambers. The platform he was on stood at the top of a great stone pillar. With the cage removed, the chamber he was in was about thirty feet in diameter at its widest point. He figured he had better pick a direction and start running when his plans were interrupted.

"Neil Ryder Brown," came a voice echoing through the blackness, temporarily replacing the claxon. It spoke in a bland but booming officious monotone. "Age twenty. Occupation:

Disappointment. Crime: Meddling with the multiverse, and now a prison break. Sentence: Eternal Damnation."

There was a sound of marching footsteps, and down each of his two options came a squad of hooded men wearing blackened steel armor over grey weave that looked almost like Kevlar. There were twelve in total, each of them carrying a forked pikestaff made from the same material as the cage. Suddenly, in front of Neil, there was a dramatic but oddly fake-looking puff of smoke that rose in a grandiose plume, before dissipating to reveal Anders Levant.

"Is this more to your liking?" He grinned.

He was wearing tacky red pajamas, and a dollar store set of plushy red devil horns. The crimson cape and plastic tail really completed the effect he was going for. Once again, the man was toying with Neil.

"You spared this one.

How kind of you," Levant grunted, pointing down at the bound torturer. "Ever the hero."

With a wave of his hand, the bound man slid along the floor just past Neil and over the edge of the cliff.

The bound soul didn't even scream on his way down.

"What the hell is this?!" Neil demanded.

"Call it basic training," Levant replied, playing with his tail and spinning it like a whip.

"Desperation yields quick results.

You've done this a time or two before without realizing it, but I think you're starting to understand what you're capable of."

"Thanks for the lesson," Neil replied, feeling his insides quiver and his heart sink. He shook repressed fear. If they were about to battle, he was going to lose.

"Clearly it was insufficient. If you don't nut up and start defending yourself, you're going to die out here," Levant explained. "Go ahead, be a hero. Save all of them, if you can."

The guards, in unison, raised their tridents, pointed them straight at Neil, and began to slowly advance. He backed up the few feet he had, but eventually, his left heel found nothing beneath him. If anything, Neil was even more frantic and disoriented than he was in the cage.

There was nothing here. Was touch a mandatory component of his powers or not?

Was there anything he could get hold of?

What if this was all just an illusion?

Should he just dive over the cliffs and be done with it?

Give me something, damn it.

The puddle of cooled metal rose between him and the guards, resolidifying and then expanding to create a wall slightly higher than Neil's head.

"Not a bad start," Levant whispered in his ear.

With a start, Neil turned to his right. Levant had ditched the fake-looking costume and was now in a blood-red three-piece suit with a black tie and patent-leather shoes.

"The fuck," Neil gasped in exasperation.

"Do you think they know we're in here?" Levant asked, mockingly.

In a moment the business end of a trident pierced through the wall, stopping inches from Neil's eyes.

The rusty black metal was now positively oozing with fresh blood.

"What's the matter, don't wanna kill me yourself?" Neil asked.

"I am," Levant replied, matter-of-factly. "You don't think those guards out there are real people, do you?"

"Oh," Neil nodded, with sudden realization.

Okay, let's see if this works.

The trident retracted from the wall, leaving three evenly spaced holes to peek through. Soon more came, chipping away at Neil's dubious protection in a rapid but rhythmic flurry of strikes. The Binder took his chance, placing a free hand on the wall in front of him. He had meant to try pushing the wall back to knock them off the other side of the cliff, but at the last moment, one of the great spiked tips gouged straight through his palm. He lost control and, in his anger, his energy and thoughts were redirected.

Burn them all.

Once more the metal was white-hot, even scalding Neil again. He pushed forward and it became a raging field of fire that swept across the entire platform. When the bright flame cleared, all that was left was thirteen charred skeletons, six to a side, and a smaller one right in front of him.

Neil dropped to his knees, the spike of the trident still embedded in his palm. He tugged the pike out and the wound began to bleed for just a moment before his palm began to mend itself.

"You can do without the stigmata, kid," Levant smirked. "You already think you're some grand savior. But one who clearly understands so little about the power you possess."

"Next time I'll burn you," Neil growled furiously. He was enraged, still in agony from the pain despite the wound being healed, and ready to end it all here.

"Yeah, I suspect you will," Levant chuckled. "And you'll probably get me in the end. But then as chaotic and unrefined as your power is, you'll do an awful lot of collateral damage."

He walked over to the small skeleton in the middle, pointing a solemn finger down to a spot just beyond its outstretched hand. With a small pop, a blackened plush figure rematerialized; a small teddy bear.

"Poor thing. She came back to get her toy. Such loyalty children have to their imaginary friends. Like you and Rem, I suppose," Levant noted.

"What are you…"

But Neil knew what Levant was getting at. This was one of his fellow prisoners. A girl, maybe seven years old. And Neil had killed her.

"I have a daughter about that age. Little Talia, you met her," Levant went on, as casually as if he was discussing the weather. "Has this little toy Dino, you know that purple dinosaur from the Flintstones?

She carries him everywhere. I've had to replace him a few times, but to her, it's the same one she got when she was… four or five, I can't remember exactly."

"You're making that up.

She's not real," Neil said, though his mind was filled with doubt.

"I assure you my daughter is real. I wasn't there when she was born, mind you, but I-" Levant paused in mock revelation.

"Oh, you mean this little one."

He started as if seeing her for the first time. "Poor thing is all bones!"

With malice glee, he kicked her skull off the edge of the cliff.

"Stop it, you bastard!" Neil shouted taking a few steps forward. The remaining bones suddenly grew ten-fold into great spikes, surrounding Levant in a cage of marrow.

Levant looked at him through the gap in the rib bones and gave him an extended, melodramatic eye roll.

He snapped and in an instant was outside the cage, standing directly in front of Neil.

"You might have killed me if you thought about it hard enough. But you don't have the stomach for it. This is one little girl you killed by accident. Think about all of the Threads that depend on you and the timelines that your mistakes will end. If you can't handle one accidental death, then you are grossly underprepared for the task that the Somni have for you."

"I didn't mean to kill her," Neil shouted, defensively.

"So what, Neil?!" Levant shouted, dropping his air of superiority so suddenly that Neil fell back. His hands found no purchase but fortunately, most of his lower body was still on the rock.

"Do you think that will matter to the kid's parents?" Levant went on. "Do you think you can just magic away your mistakes with good intentions?

Do you think you get to look at the universe and go 'I'm sorry I ruined everything, don't blame me, I'm just a kid!'"

"Then what about you?!" Neil shouted, incensed. He felt the urge to strike out at Levant. Maybe he could kill him. Maybe.

But what would happen if he did?

Who would he hurt next time?

"I told you," Levant said, calming down. If ever he spoke true to Neil, it was clearly in this moment. "I'm not interested in destroying this universe. I rather like it. I want to save it. But I'll be damned if I let the madness continue."

"So what? You set yourself up as some kind of God?" Neil asked.

"Hey, better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, am I right?" Levant smirked. "Sure, some self-righteous types like you will call me an oppressor, but in reality, I'm liberating the universe from the mad whims of both extremes. But there will be people like you, and like your grandfather, who think it's better to kill the 'bad guy' no matter how many kids they sacrifice to do it."

"My grandfather?" Neil asked.

"Ask your old man," Levant smiled. "Now, let me leave you with a little something to remember me by."

Intense, searing pain pierced through Neil's neck and upwards towards his brain. His face was on fire and the veins on his face turned from bright blue to pitch black. He couldn't think. He couldn't form words. Neil Brown was going to die then and there, and there was nothing he could do to save himself.

"You need to get with the picture, Neil," Levant said darkly. "I promise you, if you keep fucking with me, you will wish you were still in my Hell."

Neil screamed and screamed.

And when he opened his eyes, he saw Erica once more.

#writing #commissionwriting #cosmichorror #thread matthewcaveatzealot commission

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micahrodney · 2 years

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Rebranding

The grand re-branding effort begins today. It may change as things develop but we're moving forward with it for now, starting with my Youtube Channel. Formerly "FearAddict" - my old horror pen-name - this channel is full of narrations of mine, including some original work. The channel will now be used for a wider variety of my content. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXP6KqwWIrU1YfCoVhrhDCQ

#youtube #narration #audiobook #reading

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micahrodney · 2 years

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Do you follow me on Patreon? You can always get free public updates on my work, such as the Final Fantasy VIII Unofficial Novelization. I just posted a "SeeD Progress Diary", so go ahead and give it a listen! https://www.patreon.com/posts/seed-progress-01-60893346

#ff8 #fanfiction #progress #update #reading

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micahrodney · 2 years

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SeeD: The Beginning - Free eBook Download! https://www.patreon.com/posts/31433934 Hey guys! For those of you not in the know, I am writing an FFVIII Novelization. A few years ago M.J. Gallagher and I teamed up to write a preview novella SeeD: The Beginning for KupoCon. The 180-page book features the artwork of Kayley Henderson (with cover design by Alex Maine and Fiveonthe). You can download the PDF, ePub or MOBI formatted books for free from the link provided!

#finalfantasy #finalfantasy8 #ffviii #ff8 #novelization #writing #ao3fic #kupocon

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micahrodney · 2 years

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https://www.patreon.com/posts/60593650 Here is a free teaser of KnightCast, my monthly podcast that I post for my Patreon Knights! If it sounds like the kind of thing you'd be interested in, or if you want the other benefits of supporting me at the Knight level, definitely consider signing up. That said, you can always enjoy all the free content on Patreon and my other platforms!

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micahrodney · 2 years

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Thread; Chapter 7 - Here There Be Dragons

This was a commission for Matthew Caveat Zealot. Feeling his senses slowly return to him, Neil’s body was in a horrible state of damage control. His head was throbbing, his stomach churning and all sensory input was at once exasperating and unfulfilling. Lifting himself up to a standing position out of sheer survival instinct, he found himself standing in a field of green grass and wildflowers. Beautiful natural blossoms grew under the protective cover of a valley nestled between majestic mountains. Neil was under the shady bough of a great oak tree, shielding him from the warm midday sun. A gentle breeze lifted flower petals high into the air, floating purposefully towards the towering spires of a nearby castle.

Neil barely had time to take in his new reality when recognized his attire; a purple gambeson topped with an elegant black cloak. His shaggy hair was kept corralled under the wide brim of a pointy wizard’s hat. Laying at his feet was the quarterstaff that he had picked out. And it wasn’t much of a drop, considering he had shrunk about two feet.

He was, for all intents and purposes, no longer Neil Brown. He was Frobozz the Magnificent, the gnomish wizard he had created earlier that evening at Mr. Levant’s place.

“Uh, Rem. A little help?”

You have cleared one layer of the Crossroad, but now it seems things have changed slightly. I cannot explain why but there is another presence in the Crossroad with you. And he is altering the reality.

“He’s trying to stop me?”

More or less.

Neil shuddered at the thought. Contending with phantoms and the manifestations of his own fears was one thing. To be dealing with another human presence; another intelligence with malevolent intent…

“It’s Levant isn’t it?”

We cannot be sure. Whoever has the power to do this must have the power of a Binder. Be careful, Neil.

“No kidding,” Neil replied, before noticing something. “You called me Neil.”

That is your name. You have previously expressed a desire for a bit more… familiarity.

“The Tin Man has a heart after all,” Neil chuckled. “I knew you’d warm up to me sooner or later.”

Names are trivial, as are these pointless interactions. Please stay focused.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Neil began hiking in the direction of the castle town, up a gently sloping hill beside a lazy babbling river. As he crested the hill, he found a dirt road leading off to the western mountains and curving north into the keep. At the bend, a trio were arguing whom Neil recognized by configuration and reputation more than sight.

Marcus, the human fighter, was animatedly expressing his concerns to an unconcerned half-elf Rogue, Quem. Elwin, for their part, was casually playing a stringed melody as if providing background music for their debate.

“And even if the king isn’t working for the Overlord, he might be under his influence. I didn’t trust a word out of that fat oaf’s mouth,” Marcus cursed, spitting on the ground to emphasize his distaste. His mane of ebony hair was nearly as vibrant as the shiny plate mail that he wore. Even the steel of his longsword and tower shield were polished to a mirror shine.

“Right, but it’s as good a lead as any. And the coin is good. I say we just get the job over and done with and then go back to collect the reward. And if there are any complications then so what? We’ve been in worse scrapes,” Quem suggested, gently placing a lock of his dark brown hair behind one of his pointed ears. Six well-used daggers were neatly arranged in hilts on the belt of his leather armor.

“Lads. We’ve got ourselves an eavesdropper,” Elwin called gaily, red hair settling over his eyes as he stood up. He was not much taller than Neil – or rather, Frobozz – and wore a Lincoln green tunic and brown slops. His bare feet were hairy, and his nimble hands idly strummed a mahogany lute.

“Who goes there?” Marcus called, raising his sword in the direction of the perceived threat.

“Oh, put that away, you lout,” Quem sighed, walking casually towards the gnome. “You have business in Voxland? Or are you just a lost traveler? Don’t tell me you’re a merchant, now.”

Neil stammered for a moment and wasn’t sure what to say. These were his friends from the campaign, but that didn’t mean they were his allies. With the dubious exception of an insulting phone call, he had yet to meet any entity within the Crossroads that was friendly. And if there was somebody else in control of the world, then they surely wished him ill.

Unfortunately, Neil did not have time to decide what to do before the blare of a rough horn echoed through the valley from the east. A raiding party of kobolds charged at the unsuspecting quartet, spear and axe in hand as they scrambled over one another for the chance to strike. There were about five of them in total, horrible slouching lizards with rat-like proportions. Long faces ending in scaly snouts, weapons held in long-fingered hands, a hideous creature but not terribly strong.

And that’s why they fight in packs. Neil remembered Damian observing from before.

“We’ll chat in a minute,” Elwin shrugged. “Just kindly don’t hurl a fireball at our backs, if you please.”

“Frobozz,” Neil sputtered, deciding on the spot he should just play the game as intended. “Frobozz the wizard, at your service.”

“Well then, wizard, let’s see what you can do about this lot,” Quem replied, unsheathing a few daggers and twirling them idly in his hands.

Naturally agile, Quem was able to hurl one of his daggers at the leader, landing a piercing low directly in the creature’s heart. It was a lucky shot to be sure, but effective. Elwin, not much of a fighter himself, snuck behind Marcus and played a rapturous ballad on his lute, invigorating the muscle-bound warrior. As the charging kobolds reached him, he deflected an axe with his shield and brought his longsword down across one of the foul beasts, cutting him down where he stood.

Neil was still trying to parse together exactly how he was supposed to help. Saying you are going to cast a spell is one thing at a table with a collection of dice in your hands. Actually casting it, however, is altogether different. Shrugging and just deciding to stick with his father’s evergreen advice of “fake it until you make it” he thrust his staff towards a kobold purposefully.

A brilliant beam of bluish-white burst forth from the tip of his staff, splitting into three separate beams the further out it went. The magic missile spell, bread and butter of the budding spellcaster, pierced through the torsos of two of the remaining kobolds, and the third burnt the tail of the last one, who quickly saw the way the winds were turning in this encounter and began to flee.

“Nice work, wizard. Right then, let’s finish that one off,” Quem said, readying another dagger.

“He’s retreating! We don’t stick our blades in the back. At least most of us don’t,” Marcus insisted.

“We’re debating this now? He’ll go warn his friends about us,” Quem groaned.

“Um,” Neil decided it was as good a time as any to get his bearings. “Excuse me, but what’s this you all were saying about the Overlord?”

Marcus turned with a shocked expression, but Quem’s was a shrewder and more suspicious glance. Ever the first to enter a conversation, the rogue offered a guarded reply.

“Yeah,” Quem muttered, running a finger along his lower lip. “Big bad evil guy around these parts. What do you know about him?”

“Only, I think I have an idea of who he really is. And I was hoping you might have an idea where to find him,” Neil explained, bumbling his way through a conversation well over his head. Upon watching Quem’s face turn from doubtful to hostile, he offered a further explanation. “I’m sorry, I can’t really explain how I know what I know. But with your help, I think we can put an end to him.”

“Ah, splendid!” Elwin called, with a theatrical strum of his lute. “A fellowship forged, a grand quest undertaken. Fine verses for the latest ballad!”

“Right!” Marcus nodded. “You want to slay the Overlord, and that’s good enough for me!”

Quem shifted uncomfortably on the spot, before grunting. “Oh, alright then. But no funny business.”

It was peculiar how similar the scene was to Neil’s first ever session. In a sense, he was reading more from a script than acting out in a manner that seemed natural to him. Moreover, the stilted acceptance of him despite earlier suspicion, made as little sense in the Crossroads as it did at the table. But considering each scenario was equally made-up, Neil suspected that this was unavoidable.

It had to be Levant. This seemed the only sensible answer. And he was present for a brief period during their game. The real question, which he had yet to figure out, was why? What was in this for Anders Levant? Did it have anything to do with his family?

As the party traveled through the fantasy wilderness, occasionally slaying a kobold or goblin along the way, Neil’s mind was wrapped up in thought. The real game here, the long con, was this Kosmaro entity. Rem had indicated that there are those who might be inclined to aid him. Was Levant one of them?

They stopped to rest for the night in the shade of an enchanted copse. Brilliant evergreen trees surrounded a crystal clear pond, which gave an unobstructed view of the night sky. Dazzling starlight was obscured slightly by the presence of a full moon which bathed the clearing in soothing white light. Marcus was the first to fall asleep, drawing the short stick and being granted the last watch. Quem insisted on staying up to guard the party first, but soon he fell asleep as well. Elwin, who was on the first watch, was idly strumming his lute in a soothing melody. The soporific effect was overwhelming, as though the tune was specifically enchanted to aid in sleep.

As Neil lay in his bedroll, watching the halfling play silhouetted by the moonlight, he began to ask Rem a few questions.

“So… time doesn’t work the same here as on my world does it?” He whispered as quietly as he could.

No. Until you leave the Crossroads time is utterly meaningless. Some Crossroads might have you spend months or even years within them, but the effect of time will not be felt on you, Rem answered dutifully.

“Months? Years?”

It is uncommon but possible. Most perceive the events as a number of hours. I suspect the longer timeframe here is the doing of the new master, who is doubtless playing the part of the Overlord in this little fantasy.

“He’s toying with me. Levant wants me to drag this out. Wants me to give up.”

It is possible, but we still do not have confirmation he is controlling-

“Please, Rem. You honestly believe he isn’t the one doing this? We already know he is the epicenter of this thing, right? He’s like, ground zero.”

That only means he causes the intersection of time and potentially its destruction. It does not imply a will. However, if you must know, we share your suspicion.

“Good. So then-“

But you must never act on an assumption until you have confirmed your evidence. That way leads to recklessness and madness.

“No faith in human intuition, huh?”

Faith is also a concept we are unfamiliar with.

“Rem, you’re a delight as always. Good night, I guess.”

Good night, such as it is.

The morning came almost at once. While Neil certainly recalled falling asleep, it was a dreamless rest and seemed to vanish within an instant. Marcus was rousing him with a rough shake to his shoulder, his muscular form absolute towering over him.

“Arise, my new friend. We’re nearly at the Overlord’s Keep,” Marcus said, tapping the scabbard of his sword encouragingly.

“Yes,” Elwin added, letting out a yawn as he stretched his arms. “Frightfully dull swamp just over this hill and then that bloody tower. Not much call for a humble minstrel like me.”

“Don’t go running off, Elwin. We still need your magicks,” Quem said. He gestured to Neil. “I doubt that one has your healing touch.”

“Fear not, I’ll not abandon my friend to the bog. But I may need somebody to carry me if the water gets too deep. Our new friend too, no doubt,” Elwin smirked.

“Speak for yourself,” Neil laughed, waving his staff on the ground beneath him. With a flourish and a flash of yellow light, Neil now hovered a few feet in the air. He could now see eye-to-eye with Marcus.

“Neat trick,” Quem nodded, approvingly. “Don’t suppose we can all get one.”

“Afraid it takes all my concentration to use it on me,” Neil said. “I can hold your hand if you like.”

Elwin chuckled appreciatively and picked up his lute. “Well, you’re not boring that’s for sure.”

The party set out to the north through the desolate bogs that choked the Overlord’s kingdom. Despite the densely packed willow trees and thick mist hanging over the wetlands, they were still able to make out the sight of the tower whenever they reached a clearing. The stonework was black as pitch and the sort of brutalist nightmare that only ever seems to exist in high fantasy.

It had been exactly what Neil pictured in his head when Angie had described it earlier. Twin spires that looked like horns, and two great windows with glowing red light. It gave the whole thing the appearance of a massive demon overlooking the swamp. The whole effect reminded Neil of the description of Barad-dûr from Return of the King. He half expected to see Sauron’s eye watching them from afar, but apparently the person who wrote the adventure module didn’t want to risk a lawsuit from the Tolkien estate.

Neil’s mind returned to the task at hand the closer they got to the keep. Elwin had been managing to keep himself mostly above water with some clever hopping between logs and high ground. Neil, of course, was perfectly dry thanks to his spell. Marcus and Quem, on the other hand, were not enjoying themselves very much.

After fighting off a few pesky swamp creatures, the path eventually led them to a solid dry path laid in cracked stone and lit by ominously flickering braziers. The main gate led straight before them into the dungeon where the Overlord lie in wait.

“Adventure is over, it seems,” Marcus sighed, turning to Neil.

“What do you mean?” Neil asked. “We just got to the dungeon. We still have-“

And that’s when it occurred to Neil that their adventure stopped short because of Neil’s actions in the real world. It was about that time in their own grand quest that the incident with the pizza man happened, and their subsequent visit to the hospital. The only problem was, what was Neil meant to do now?

“We can go no further. But I think you should,” Quem suggested.

“Oh yes, he’ll want to speak with you directly,” Elwin nodded approvingly.

“Right, right. The Overlord wants a word with you about your role in this, Binder.”

Marcus’s words hit with the weight of a hammer. Of course, they had all been puppets. But the sudden change in demeanor and context was like having the fourth wall shattered in real-time.

“And what does the Overlord want with me?” Neil asked.

“Ask him yourself. He’s just inside,” Elwin smiled as he plucked a few strings on his lute.

The sound was chaotic and discordant. The once lovely melodies were now breaking down like a record unraveling itself on an overly sharp needle.

“Do you want to go home?” Marcus asked. “So do we.”

“We all want to go home,” Quem added. “But only you can now.”

“If you speak to the Overlord then maybe,” Elwin chimed in, still destroying the silence with his hideous music. “You can go home.”

Neil didn’t know what else to do. Turning his back on the shades of his former friends, he walked towards the gates of the keep, feeling himself growing taller as he did so. By the time he reached the gates at the far end of the walkway, he was no longer the diminutive Frobozz, but Neil Brown once again. There he stood in jeans and a t-shirt, in all his mediocrity.

He touched the handle of the gates and felt himself whisked away in a puff of smoke.

When he rematerialized, he stood at the top of the tower. Elwin’s shrill music had ceased, and a torrent of rain battered the swamps outside. Lightning crashed every so often to add a bit of light to the relatively dark tower keep. The only manmade light was a glowing red sphere, behind which sat an ordinary-looking man in a business suit.

Anders Levant.

“What do you think, kiddo? Not quite the evil Overlord you expected, eh?” Anders chuckled, emanating only fatherly warmth despite his surroundings. “I need to work on my costume a bit. A little too Lex Luthor. What do you kids like these days? Uh, Darth Vader perhaps?”

Neil wasn’t playing along anymore. Not with him.

“Why did you bring me here, and what do you want?” He asked flatly.

Levant’s chuckle turned into a full-throated laugh. “Damn. You really are fearless, aren’t you? Good, good, down to business then. I respect a man who knows the value of time. First a proper introduction, I think. I’m Doctor Anders Levant. That’s Ph.D., not M.D. And whether you know it or not I’ve been aware of you for some time. For instance, I know this is your second visit to a Crossroad, though your first occasion was something of an accident.”

“How could you-“

“Kid, please, let me finish. I got a lot to explain, and we are running very short on time. Suffice it to say, I know. And you are not the first nor, I suspect, will you be the last Binder I have to deal with. But for what it’s worth you’re the first human one I’ve come across. You must be really special. Now, I’m gonna make you a deal that I have not extended to anybody else and I want you to appreciate that fact.”

Levant’s jovial expression darkened for a moment. The sphere in his hand shifted its hue from a crimson glow to pulsing neon green.

“Because, boy, if I wanted you gone, I would have wiped you out of the cosmos. Easy as blinking.”

The green hue faded and Levant returned to his usual salesman demeanor. He stood up and walked around the keep, clapping his hands together and lighting the room up in a pale glow. Fully lit, the room had the appearance of an ordinary office, complete with a bookshelf, desk, computer, and even an impressive stereo on the far wall near the twin windows. As soon as Neil noticed it, one of the CDs in the five-CD changer slid into position and began to belt out “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones.

“But I like you, Neil. I really mean that. You saw an obstacle, a threat, and you took immediate action. That’s the kind of enterprising spirit that makes men powerful. Makes us respected. And as long as we don’t get too hung up on the little things, we can accomplish a hell of a lot.”

“Little things?” Neil asked.

Levant took a sip from a glass of scotch on his desk and held up a patient finger. He swallowed hard and then turned back to the young man.

“Little things. Family, morals, all those things that lesser people use to give their life worth and value. I got news for your, kid. There ain’t a God, there ain’t a heaven. I’ve seen to the end of the universe and back and no higher power ever reared his ugly smug head,” he took another sip, and once again his expression turned hostile and dark. “I have seen a hell though.”

“So life is meaningless and we may as well destroy it, right? To hell with the consequences?” Neil wasn’t sure what he could do to fight this man, but his desire to do something was burning within him. He wanted this man to pay, but he still had no idea what his aim was.

“Don’t do that,” Levant shook his head, setting the glass down on the desk. “Not a hero speech. You’re better than that. We’re both human, we both have ambition. And you have been given a shitload of raw power that you don’t even know how to handle yet. And kid, let me tell you when you figure it out, none of that stuff is gonna matter anymore. Why would you care about finishing your degree when you have the wealth of a multiverse at your fingertips? Why try to better yourself when you can witness the fate of thousands of alternate realities just by closing your eyes and going to bed?”

“You’re a madman,” Neil hissed, turning away from him. He was disgusted by the sight of this person he once respected. Something wasn’t sitting right with him. Neil was missing something, and he wasn’t sure what.

“I’ve peered into your heart, Neil Brown. And I’ve seen what you want. You want your mommy back? You can have her. You can have ten thousand different variations of her. You like girls? That sweetheart Erica of yours? You can visit a world where she worships the ground you walk on. Or maybe you’d rather have Angie? Or both? I’m not a prude, kid, and I remember what it was like to have those urges.”

Levant moved closer to Neil, placing a falsely compassionate hand on his shoulder. Neil brushed it off hastily.

“Get to the point.”

“Right,” Levant nodded. “The point. The point is when you’ve seen what I’ve seen, eventually those childish desires will go away. They simply won’t matter anymore. I’m not a god, and neither are you. But we’re as close as mankind is ever going to get. And I’m telling you, the Somni are intentionally withholding your access to the power. They fear what you can do with it because they fear what I have done with it. I said you were the first human Binder, Neil. But do you think you were the first person they approached?”

Neil stared into Levant’s soul. He gauged him for any sign of deception, but he couldn’t tell.

“Leave that part out, did they? I’m not surprised. The Somni are playing a dangerous game after all. They thought I would be a useful puppet, but I’ve got enough life experience to know a bad deal when I hear it. They probably hyped you up, right kid? All this ‘Chosen One’ bullshit. Heh, you aren’t Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. You’re Neil Brown, a mediocre college student with one neat little trick that he doesn’t even know how to utilize. But I could help you with that.”

“What do you want?” Neil asked. “I don’t get it.”

“Buddy, I’m not laying all my cards on the table at this juncture. I’ll leave you guessing a little while longer. But if you’re worried about me trying to destroy the universe, don’t. Kosmaro has his objective. I’ve got mine. The two coincide up to a point, but I happen to like this universe. So, what do you say? You gonna keep being a boy scout for people who don’t even trust you? Or are you gonna stick with your own kind and see what we can really do?”

The song stopped, and the room was once again bathed in a neon green glow. As Neil looked over to Levant’s face, he saw in his eyes a sort of unholy hunger that he had never observed in anybody before. At least, not anybody human. And that’s when a thought occurred to him. All of the ghouls he had seen thus far, all of the creatures who had haunted him. They were sent by this man. And they were all the victims of a lost world; a lost timeline.

“Doctor Levant,” Neil asked. “Do you want to go home?”

Levant’s cocky smile turned to a scowl. “You understand nothing.”

Suddenly, Levant leapt across the desk towards him, but Neil ducked out of the way just in time. He rolled away and reached out towards the green sphere which now rested idly on the desk. The orb was heavy and felt almost electric to the touch.

“Don’t you dare!” Levant shouted.

But it was too late. With a great effort, Neil hurled the sphere at the stone wall behind him. The sphere shattered, and the mist within dissipated into nothingness. The fantasy surroundings faded away into a black fog, which Levant and Neil were left standing in, mere feet from one another.

To Neil’s surprise, Levant let out a little laugh.

“Well, kid. I guess you wouldn’t be much of an adversary if you didn’t win a battle now and again. Just think about what I said. Eventually, the toll will be too great for you to handle. And I don’t hold any grudges.”

Levant faded away, and the black fog faded slowly to white.

Suddenly there was a loud knocking sound from somewhere outside of time, and the voice of a familiar girl, calling his name.

“Neil? Are you in there? It’s Erica.”

#commission #writing #shortfic #cosmichorror #scifi

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micahrodney · 3 years

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Thread; Chapter 6 - Jabberwock

This was a commission for MatthewCaveatZealot. For a university town, Voxton's home-grown hospital was nothing to write home about. Somebody with the money and influence of Mr. Levant would usually not be caught dead in it, even if that was precisely how he would arrive there. The standard plan was to drive into Pittsburgh where their family doctor was. However given the potentially serious nature of Mr. Levant's injuries, it would have to do. Mrs. Levant assured him that it would be no more serious than stitches, but getting those stitches was urgent.

As a show of solidarity, Neil came along too, after bidding farewell to the crowd of acquaintances. Angie seemed genuinely crestfallen over the sudden departure of Neil, which simultaneously wounded and thrilled him. Once he had time to process that reaction, he felt guilty. There was the fate of millions at stake, and he was having an ego trip.

Ordinarily visiting hours shut down at 9 PM, but Mrs. Levant was insistent that she was going nowhere without her husband. She and the doctors finally reached a compromise where Mrs. Levant would be allowed with him, but the children would have to wait outside in the lobby.

Mrs. Levant did offer to drive Neil back to his dorm, but for better or worse he was part of this now. After all, it was his fault Mr. Levant was in the hospital to begin with. Of course, he did not mention that he wasn't entirely sure if he still had a part to play here. Rem had been unhelpfully quiet for the past several hours.

So the three of them sat in the waiting room of the hospital, watching idly as people stumbled their way in for everything from bad headaches to broken limbs. Every time the doors to the back opened, they tilted their heads up hopefully, only to have it dashed. As the clock rolled over to 2 AM, Talia was asleep with her head on her brother's lap and her jacket over her as a blanket. Damian was having trouble keeping his eyes open and had listened to the same cassette on his walkman about four times over.

For his part, Neil was sitting across from them, trying to pay attention to a late-night news broadcast. A young blonde newscaster was reciting the events with an eager “first day on the job” energy.

“Well, the humans strike back!” She declared jovially. “Today Garry Kasparov got revenge on Deep Blue, defeating the chess-playing supercomputer in their second match. The machine had to resign when the players found themselves in a stalemate with one bishop a piece, but Kasparov leading Deep Blue three pawns to one.”

“You know I was quite the chess player in high school,” interjected the aggressively middle-class anchor beside her. “Maybe I should challenge him next, d'ya think?”

“When would find the time between cutting into my segment and cheating and your wife?” She retorted bitterly.

For a moment, Neil was certain he misheard her and started to perk up. When he did so, he noticed that Damian and Talia were gone. Stunned he looked around and found himself in an utterly deserted hospital waiting room.

“Hey Neil,” the newscaster purred, now staring at him directly through the television screen. “Do you want to take me home?”

“This is it, right?” Neil retorted, standing up and facing her. “A Crossroad, huh? Just a fancy word for nightmare?”

“It's no nightmare, Neil,” the co-anchor chimed.

The camera now shakily turned to him. The formerly wrinkled face of a middle-aged talking head was now stark and skeletal, with yellowed eyes that seemed to be rotting out of his head.

“This is reality now. Your reality,” he droned on, in a raspy and hollow voice. “We want to go home.”

“I'm going to help,” Neil said, doing his best to sound confident. “I can fix this and then... then maybe you can go home.”

It is too late for them, Rem said warningly. Don't promise them false hope. They exist now to feed on the pain and agony of others. They don't want you to succeed.

With a whip, Neil was flung around by a thin but surprisingly strong arm. He was now staring face to face with Angie... or at least what used to be Angie before her skin melted away beneath a thick layer of decay.

“Forget your other girl. Forget your other life. You can be with me now,” she cackled, clutching Neil's wrist and pulling him in closer.

Acting on instinct, Neil brought his leg up and kicked the phantom squarely in the chest. With no other avenue of approach, he bolted through the doors leading deeper into the hospital. As the figure of Angie slowly followed after him, he looked for something to bar the doors with. His eyes fell on a discarded IV pole, rusty but solid enough.

With some effort, he jammed the pole down between the hooked door handles and the guide-rails along the wall. That would keep the doors shut for a little bit, but he wasn't banking on that lasting. The shade of Angie pressed her rotten face against the glass window of the door.

“Come on, Neil. Don't be nervous. You're my dream guy.”

Confident that he had at least bought himself a few seconds, he turned around to face the room ahead of him. It was an open floor-plan with smaller hospital rooms parceled out. A handful had the luxury of closing doors, most of them were simply divided by sheet partitions. This was as he would have expected in the real world.

The alarming quality was the relative lack of lighting, apart from a neon-green glow that shone from the emergency lights above every door. The central reception area was littered with papers and binders that seemed to have been haphazardly scattered around. The few computers they had were non-functioning and one of them even had a shattered screen.

As Neil approached the reception area, looking for another exit, the phone on the desk began to ring. The sterile digital chiming of the touch-tone was slightly discordant, as though the sound were being filtered through a long pipe. Presented with no other options, he hesitantly lifted the receiver.

“Hello?”

“You know, you don't take care of me, right,” came a tired, brutish voice.

“Who is this?” Neil asked.

“You. Your body. The thing you stuff full of burgers and junk food while you sit around all day,” the voice replied.

“You're kidding,” Neil interrupted. “What do you want?”

“What I want is to go for a walk now and then, and for you to maybe force a fucking vegetable down that fat neck of yours,” the body explained. “If we were in better shape you wouldn't be moments away from death, and I got news for you, kid, I'm not much good without you. Not that I'm all that good with you anyway.”

“This is-” Neil was going to say “weird” but then realized he was well past that at this stage. “Why are you calling?”

“Because you've got about two minutes before the crypt keeper back there figures out how to break through that barricade and you're no good at running,” the body sneered. “Believe me, if it comes down to a footrace you'll lose. But hey, I can help you. You're looking for the door to the stairwell access in the back right. Head up to the next floor and go have a chat with the Doctor, okay? He'll tell you what to do so you don't strain your precious little head over this too much. And don't forget to grab that map on the wall beside you. We wouldn't want you to get lost and wind up running straight into limbo.”

“Sure, why not,” Neil grunted, snatching a yellow parchment paper blueprint off the opposite wall while holding the receiver to his ear.

The thin white lines against the parchment were more or less reflective of the original hospital layout, but on the second floor the labels grew increasingly archaic and with terms like “Conservatory, Cathedral, Butcher, Flesh Market and Sensory Deprivation.”

“Alright, get going tubby, before she catches you. And if you make it out of this place alive, seriously, just one freakin' bike ride a week, eh?”

The line went dead and Neil let the phone clatter to the desk. There was the sound of a loud clattering from the far end of the hallway and the IV pole landed just beside Neil. He ducked instinctively beneath the cubicle walls. Ice filled Neil's veins as he slowly crawled under the desk. His breath caught in his throat and escaped a half-second later as a visible cloud. With each step the skeletal figure took, he heard the crunch of fresh snow underfoot.

“Come out and play, little boy,” the demon called.

Her bony feet fell on the opposite side of the desk and stopped dead. Neil tried to control himself, certain his shivering would give away his location.

“Hide and seek, is it?” She cackled. “Do you honestly think you can hide from us in here? This is where we live now. This is all we have left.”

The footsteps continued moving down the corridor towards one of the patient rooms. Neil slowly began to crawl, making his way towards the opposite end of the room from her. He carefully avoided a stack of particularly dry-looking paper, afraid of the sound it would make if he put any weight on it. Lifting her head, the creature began to sing. Her voice was wretched, as though she were choking on a pool of her own blood as she gargled out the words.

“The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout,”

At last a moment of hope. Neil saw the bright red Exit sign, illuminating the entrance to the stairwell. He just had to get there without alerting her.

“Down came the brain which blocked the spider out,”

The young man delicately lifted his knees over another stack of papers, pressing his back against the opposite side of the cubicle wall. It was a straight shot now. All he had to do was get down the corridor. He was so close. Ten feet, maybe less.

“Up rose the Son, who filled with the world with pain,”

Rising to his feet, he tried to remain hunched over. Speed was of the essence now. That creature's voice was rounding the room and drawing ever closer to him. What happened next?

“And the itsy-bitsy spider reclaimed his throne again.”

Suddenly, Neil slipped on a discarded pamphlet and fell back against the particle-board barricade. A massive stack of binders tumbled down to the ground in a hideous crash.

“There you are! Come play with me!”

Her voice was a banshee's wail. Neil bolted for the door to the stairwell but she caught him around the neck again. In seconds of thrashing she was on top of him, her hands around his throat, and her jagged and broken teeth inches from his neck.

“I'm going home! I'm going home! I'm going home!” She screamed.

Neil reached for the nearest convenient object – another binder – and jammed it into her mouth to stop her from tearing into his flesh. He tried to kick her off of him, but that trick wasn't going to work this time. The only other option he had was to try and roll her over with his mass, and that seemed to do the trick. He was now on top of her, thin cardboard the only thing keeping him from a fatal jugular wound.

He pressed his knee into her chest, barely more than an exposed ribcage at this point, and to his uneasy satisfaction, there was a sickening crack as the bones buckled beneath his weight. The shade of Angie now swiped at him with her free arms, with white knuckle bones acting like claws. Neil was struggling to hold her back, but with a final jostle, the spine snapped in two. The legs which had wrapped around his were now motionless and Neil leapt up pulling away from the still mobile upper half. Bounding back towards the door, he put about five feet of distance between himself and the chattering skull.

“You bastard!” The phantom shrieked, her smug malevolence now replaced with insane rage. Her bony fingers clawed in his direction but could not find purchase on the smooth tile floor. “I'll kill you for that. I'll chew on your fucking heart! I'll drag everybody you love into this nightmare with me and feast on their agony until the end of time!”

Neil stood up tall and dusted off his legs. “But how will you catch them?”

He turned towards the stairwell door, leaving the shattered remnants of his attacker wailing on the floor behind him. The stairwell was brightly lit, in stark contrast to the previous room. Bright yellow florescent bulbs lit up the concrete stairs with metal hand-railing. According to his unusual phone call, he only had to go up one floor, a task that would have been mundane in any other setting. But in the terrifying limbo that was the Crossroad, nothing was ordinary.

He took a second to catch his breath and reflect on the situation he was now in. How suddenly he had just collapsed into the dream world without even a moment's notice. One second he was across the aisle from his friends. The next, stranded within a construct of his own delusions and fears, manifesting themselves as the land where time intersects.

“Rem? Are you there?” Neil asked.

I have never left you. Though I may not always be able to communicate with you, Rem replied dutifully.

Neil steadied himself, brought his hands to his lips, and then expressed himself as rationally as he could manage at the moment.

“What... the fuck... was that?”

Just another shade from an abandoned timeline. A phantom who wants you to fail. You have encountered them before and will encounter more throughout your journey.

“And they're all projecting images based on what's in my head, right? Just like the Crossroad itself?” Neil asked.

I told you it would be easier for you to see yourself. You are a Binder. In effect, this is your world, not theirs. You must learn to use that knowledge to your advantage.

“Ah yes, about that,” Neil interjected. “What am I meant to be doing here?”

The Crossroad must be solved. You will find something in there that can alter the events within the real world. Remember, a Crossroad is a place where all timelines converge. Your actions, though they may seem like little more than piecing together a puzzle, will have a profound impact on thousands of realities.

“Vague as always,” Neil grunted. “Well, I have a doctor's appointment, but by all means, stick around speaking in riddles.”

Rem did not favor Neil with a response.

“Of course,” he sighed.

Neil took the stairs at a bit of a jog. He was anxious to be out of here and trying to shake the nagging doubt that had clawed its way out of his subconscious. The would-be hero had always used humor to release the tension of uncomfortable situations. A crack here, a witty comeback, or even just a pun; any of these are preferable to experiencing the emotions presently.

Pain wasn't to be felt in the moment but reflected upon later. Fear was to be suppressed entirely if at all possible. And grief, well, grief was meant to be felt a little bit at a time. Paid off like debt in tiny pinpricks of agony.

The night his mother died, he had been stabbed. But even that was a flesh wound compared to what would follow. He knew the next blow would be fatal. Instead of letting himself feel it all at once, he simply shut down. If only he could stretch it out, rather than get it over with at once. Because to handle it all at once would mean to face the reality of it and in that instant, he might succumb. And then he would be left bleeding out onto the floor with a wound too great to recover from.

No, this was better. Droplets of blood marking his path up the stairs towards enlightenment. If he was clever enough, these wounds might not hurt so bad. Might blend into the background of his depression and anxiety and be washed away without him ever having to accept it. He could sail forever on a sea of his unshed tears.

The door to the second floor was tied off by a long line of plastic tubing, the kind used in IV injections. Neil grunted in annoyance but found that the barricade hadn't even been knotted.

“Quite the obstacle here,” he quipped as he began to unwind the tube.

As he unwound it from the door, he gathered it up in his left arm, deciding that a length of the stuff may actually serve him well in case any more ghouls decided to chase him. The feel of the material on his palm made him uncomfortable for some reason. There was a deep-rooted phobia of the stuff that was bubbling to the surface as the coil grew thicker and thicker.

What was more immediately concerning was that the line around the door did not seem to be getting any thinner. Each bit he unspooled seemed to come out of thin air, and the door was no closer to opening. After a few loops, the weight of the coil he had formed grew so heavy he had to drop it on the floor. He tugged with both hands now eagerly trying to make some progress but there was none. Finally, he just gave up altogether on trying to be neat, twisting and pulling the cord in frustration.

There was the sound of a bulb popping just above his head. The lights at the top of the stairwell, some six stories above him, went out, and glass sprinkled down in harmless droplets onto the ground below him.

Neil stood motionless for a second as he calculated his options. Then the bulb on the fifth floor shattered, releasing far larger shards in its wake and he lost his grip on the situation.

Ignoring the tubing he rammed against the door with his full weight, shoulder-first against the door. It barely budged at all. He went for the glass window with his fist, but he only wound up with a bruised and bloody knuckle for his efforts.

The fourth-floor bulb went and half the stairwell was cloaked in darkness. Now, even in his panic, Neil could make out the sounds of whispering from the floors above. He considered retreating for the moment, even with that shade back there. Desperation mounting, he tried to kick out the hinges. This was a technique he had only ever seen on TV and by men in far better physical condition than he was.

The third-floor bulb died, the jagged glass whizzing past him and cutting his cheek. He turned to bail on the endeavor when the bulb on the ground floor went as well, cutting off his escape. Inky blackness surrounded him, in which lurked a thousand eyes of shades eager to make a plaything out of him. Neil moved as far back onto the landing as he could, and he swore he felt fingers snatching at his clothes.

With a bellow, he charged the door and jump-kicked at the bound handle. The lightbulb above him exploded, and Neil was left suspended in the dark, frozen on a heartbeat at the mercy of time.

#commisions open #writing #shortfic #cosmichorror #nightmare

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micahrodney · 3 years

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Thread; Chapter 5 - Fantasyland

This was a commission for MatthewCaveatZealot. There was a terribly familiar thump as Neil's head hit the ceiling above his bed. The same precariously rigged alarm clock on his loft bed was blaring, and the disorientation that came with it. Neil wanted to believe that what he had experienced was a dream, but he knew better by now. He was awake, for certain, but he had not truly been asleep.

The question now was how he made it back to his dorm room, though he feared the answer was obvious. Another day or so of him running on “autopilot”. Let alone what that must have been like for his family.

His family. God, he missed them so much right now. In the past week, his universe had expanded a thousand-fold, entirely against his will. All Neil wanted was the safe surroundings of his old family home. He wanted Travis's insufferable theatre music blasting at all hours of the night. He missed Dawn spending every hour of the night playing on the NES they had. Just as comforting were the random pop-ins from Kim, and the sight of his father hard at work, with papers sprawled all over the coffee table.

He wanted his mother. Just his mother being there. Her presence.

The hole in his heart was warmed by a bit of metal. It was then that Neil noticed that he was wearing an amulet of sorts. It was on a chain of silver and ended in a pendant made of some otherworldly metal. It shone as brightly as freshly pressed steel but had faint transparency to it. Etched into it with crystalline blue lines were several stars, connected by points: the Crossroads, of course. Roughly, they formed a constellation similar in appearance to the Southern Cross.

“Can you hear me?” Rem asked, directly into his mind.

As the Somni spoke, the blue lines glowed faintly.

“Yeah,” Neil replied, dazedly. “Are you going to explain this?”

“We simply moved this one to a more convenient position along this thread. But fear not, you are in your original world, as Nox promised,” Rem explained. “To this one's family, the transition was natural. That is to say, this one did not do anything untoward or unexpected in its absence.”

“If we're going to be communicating regularly,” Neil said, exasperated. “You could try being a little easier to understand.”

“What does this one mean?” Rem asked, as patiently as Neil had ever heard him.

“For starters, you could stop calling me 'this one.' You know, use 'you' and 'your',” Neil replied.

Rem waited for a moment to respond as if he were trying to wrap his head around the new mode of communication. “Very well. Neil. I will attempt to speak more plainly to... you.”

“I appreciate the effort,” Neil praised faintly.

“It is difficult for me,” Rem added. “Somni are not accustomed to dealing with other races. Your presence is honestly slightly confusing to me. It upsets our natural order.”

“Well, I can't exactly stop existing to make things convenient for you,” Neil retorted, thinking back to their first exchange where he had nearly been reduced to atoms by his soon-to-be mentor.

“Indeed not,” Rem agreed. “Now are we going to spend the rest of the day discussing our feelings on the matter, or shall we get down to business?”

Rem was consistent, Neil had to give him that.

“Alright, boss,” Neil said, leaning his head back against his pillow. “What's the game plan?”

“The Crossroad we are concerned with is a crucial event that will take place this evening at your friend Damian's house. Something will happen, we know not what, but you must be there to witness it occur,” Rem explained.

“Wait, that's it?” Neil asked. “You don't have any more information than that?”

“We observe only the surface level information about these changes. I may as well ask you about the inner workings of an ant colony. It is up to you to be at the right place at the right time. The event should be significant enough that you will not mistake it if that is any consolation,” Rem said, without any sign of sympathy.

“Cool,” Neil sighed. “And then what am I supposed to do?”

“Binders can read the movement of the Crossroads and correct their course. When you finally do enter the critical moment your perception of events will be rather metaphysical,” Rem began. Here, for the first time ever, his tone softened somewhat, though it retained every ounce of its original rigidity. “The experience can be quite frightening. Just know that I will be watching over you and you will not be in any personal danger. However, if you fail-”

“I get it,” Neil cut him off firmly. He didn't need to be told. Thousands of timelines erased in an instant. Trillions of lives cut short.

“Good,” Rem uttered. “Now what is your plan?”

“I just have to get to Damian's house, and I know the perfect way to get there.”

---

Angie stirred her coffee idly as she listened to Neil's proposal. The tiny booth at The Junction was not an ideal location for the chat, but it was her lunch break and the poor boy seemed so desperate. It was quiet enough for two in the afternoon, with a drizzle keeping most people off the streets.

“So you finally want to join my game?” Angie summarized.

“Yeah, I mean,” Neil rubbed the back of his neck. His own coffee was barely touched, but the aroma was satisfying and kept him alert. “Damian always talks about how great it is.”

“Normally I wouldn't let you just pop in last second. I mean our session starts in like four hours,” Angie began. “But honestly Jack and Violet can't make it tonight so it will probably be a good one for you to test out the waters a bit.”

Neil knew about Jack and Violet but was not familiar with them personally. Honestly the fewer unfamiliar faces the better for his purposes.

“Is this just about the game?” Angie asked, leaning into Neil slightly across the table. There was a peculiar expression on her face which Neil couldn't read.

“What do you mean?” Neil asked, somewhat defensively. He had made the decision to wear a blue sweater today and he felt like he was drowning in it under her gaze.

“I mean... a little birdie told me about Erica,” Angie replied, tilting her head slightly. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

In all that had happened over the past week, Neil had completely forgotten about Erica. The girl he loved for years, and who broke his heart completely out of nowhere. He guessed he should still be feeling sad about that, and yet when the fate of the multiverse was at stake, a young romance seemed pretty insignificant.

“Oh, well yeah,” Neil shrugged. “I mean, I'm okay and all. It was just so sudden.”

“Take it from me, breakups suck, but they also just kind of... happen, you know?” Angie said, leaning back in her seat. “It'll hit you every once in a while. You'll get reminded of them and what you had, and then, boom, you're crying into your pillow again for no good reason. But it gets easier, bud.”

Neil coughed uncomfortably. He wasn't sure how to process this new and unsolicited advice. Naturally, his brain defaulted to asking the worst possible question.

“You've had a breakup recently too, huh?”

Angie rolled her eyes at him. “Tactful.”

“Sorry, I'm just really bad at this,” Neil laughed.

“Utterly hopeless. Too bad I can't teach you how to talk to women since that requires a brain,” Angie teased.

The two chuckled nervously and there was a brief silence, during which a thousand possible conversations could have happened if either party knew what to say. Neil wondered for a moment how many different threads had just been created at this moment involving either of them being just a little bolder.

“So who all will be at Damian's place tonight?” Neil asked, as casually as he could manage.

“Trying to meet somebody?” Angie teased.

Neil blushed slightly. “I mean, I just wanna get a sense of the crowd, you know. Usually, when I'm at Damian's house it's just his folks and kid sister. And they have a pretty quiet household usually. It's-”

“Settle down, champ,” Angie said, knocking her fist on the table to get Neil's attention. “It's gonna be Damian, Ash, and Victoria. And now you, I guess. Which reminds me, do you already have a character created?”

“Oh, uh,” Neil's blush intensified. Perhaps this was a bad idea after all.

“Hang on, I always carry the Rules Cyclopedia with me in my backpack. Hope you don't have any plans for the next hour and a half,” Angie chuckled.

---

Damian's house, or more accurately his father's house, was practically a castle. The post-modern nightmare was rigid white walls with wide bay windows and a wrap-around patio. It looked more like the office space of some high-tech startup than it did a residential home. To complete the effect, the home was surrounded by twelve acres of dense woodlands with neatly lined cobblestone paths. If Damian's dad had the power, he would have evicted the animals too.

The main ground-floor living space was technically called the “sunroom” but all the shades had been drawn and track-lighting illuminated a rectangular mahogany table. Six comfortable leather desk chairs were arranged around the promising assortment of battle maps, books, bowls full of various flavors of chips, soda bottles, and even a tray of deviled eggs, courtesy of Damian's mother.

Angie sat at the head of the table, a beautifully illustrated dungeon master's screen creating a sense of distance between her and the players. She had dressed up for the occasion, with a grey wizard's robe draped over her shoulders and clip-on elf ears.

The players were more casual, the only one who really got into the spirit of the event was Damian himself, who was wearing a maroon vest and bracers to mirror his half-elf rogue character: Quem. He was sitting just to Angie's left and fidgeting with his dice.

Opposite Damian was Neil himself, who had, after considerable effort of grasping the rules of this strange new game, had settled on a gnomish wizard named Frobozz the Magnificent. This was definitely not his usual scene, and he much preferred games on a computer screen to those played with pen and paper.

But duty called.

At the end of the table were Angie's friends Ash and Victoria. Ash sat beside Damian, his chiseled features and slight stubble capturing the image of the rugged Marcus, the human fighter he played. He wore a black t-shirt bearing the album artwork from Metallica's “Master of Puppets”.

Victoria was dressed somewhat plainly in a grey v-neck and jeans but wore a black pick around her neck as a sort of talisman. Damian had mentioned that she was the guitarist of a local garage band, and the connection between these two and Angie started to make more sense. She was controlling Elwin, the halfling bard.

“Alright guys,” Angie said waving her arms in a grandiose bordering on the satiric gesture of welcome. “As you all know we are joined by a new face tonight. This is Neil.”

“Hey, man,” Ash nodded respectfully.

“Welcome, welcome,” Victoria greeted.

“Uh, hi everyone,” Neil replied nervously. “So yeah. First time.”

“It'll get under your skin,” Ash said.

“He's not wrong,” Damian chuckled. “I was just gonna play a session or two to see what I thought. Now I host the game.”

“Yeah, Damian, I gotta say, this doesn't seem like your scene,” Neil said, feeling slightly bolstered by the presence of his friend.

“Hey, I get to spend five hours a week pretending to be the world's greatest thief. What's not to like?” Damian shrugged.

“He only started playing because he was trying to sleep with my friend Liana,” Angie corrected.

“Lies and slander!” Damian chuckled a little too brazenly.

“I mean, fair enough, you stuck around after she moved, but you were not subtle about it,” Angie added, fiddling with a sheave of notes behind her screen.

“Get used to this,” Victoria said conspiratorially to Neil. “D&D is about 80% game to 20% trash talking.”

“Don't forget the snacks and beer,” Ash added.

---

When the game finally began properly, Neil had to admit the appeal. Gone were the five random strangers sitting around a table. In their place were a team of four heroes being led through a fantasy realm through Angie's skillful story-telling.

The heroes had been tasked with the recovery of an ancient artifact from the ruins of a long-abandoned castle. Elwin, Quem, and Marcus began the session already at the gates of the castle, where they had left off the previous week. Angie used this as an opportunity to introduce Neil's character. Frobozz was a former wizard of the fallen kingdom who had been magically sealed away in the castle dungeon for many years. Now Frobozz was helping the heroes while he decided what to do with the rest of his life. It was a simple story that allowed Neil an out in case this wasn't for him.

But it was hardly necessary. Within the first hour, he already knew he loved the world that Angie had created. The castle was filled with deadly traps and terribly clever puzzles to solve. And when they reached their first combat encounter and Angie broke out the battle map and clay miniatures it went to the next level.

“I don't have a gnome wizard mini yet, so you'll have to be a goblin for now,” Angie said apologetically as she placed the figurine on the map.

The battle was fierce, with the four of them facing off against four undead warriors, each one mirroring the players themselves. A hulking zombie still in plate mail led them, followed closely by two skeletons, one wielding a dagger and the other a bow. In the rear was a spell-slinging shade. And considering Neil did not know what he was doing, the battle was especially hectic.

It was about halfway into the melee when there was a knock on the sunroom door. Ash was explaining the finer points of the Magic Missile spell to Neil, while Victoria was desperately searching through her character sheet to see if she had any Potions of Healing left.

“Come on in!” Damian called.

The door slid open and his little sister Talia entered the room. She was wearing a set of lime green pajamas and holding a stuffed Babar the Elephant.

“Talia, what's up?” Damian asked, walking over to the young girl.

“Mama needs your help,” Talia said. “In the kitchen.”

The plan was for their family to have a traditional dinner around this time, but Damian would be excused to bring his plate back to the sunroom. As for the others, Mr. Levant had ordered them a couple of pizzas out of consideration for their palate.

“Hi, Talia,” Neil greeted politely.

Talia froze in place and gave the unmasked expression of shock that only kids can truly manage. She then covered both of her eyes with her hands, and meekly muttered, “Don't talk to strangers.”

“Stranger? That's Neil,” Damian laughed. “You're being silly, kiddo.”

“Sorry, I'm not trying to frighten you, little miss,” Neil apologized, scooting his chair back in.

Stranger... maybe I am a stranger. What if this isn't my thread after all?

“It's about dinner time, isn't it?” Ash asked.

“One-track mind,” Victoria teased.

Damian ignored both of them and took his little sister's hand. “Alright kiddo, take me to her. Angie, I'll just be a few minutes.”

Neil leaned back in his chair a bit as he tried to consider what he would do as soon as Damian got back. He was in a tough fight and had no idea how to get out of the mess they were in. As his brain whirred with the possibilities Ash and Victoria were debating, he felt a pulse from the amulet.

“You are near the Crossroad now,” Rem informed him. It was clear that nobody else in the room, except him, had heard the voice. “It's not in that room. Somewhere else in the house. We still don't have a clear picture.”

Neil was taken aback. For a moment he had almost forgotten why he was there. Now that he was reminded, he needed a way to excuse himself from the group.

“Uh, I'm gonna go see if Damian needs any help,” Neil explained.

“You can just say you're using the can, dude, we're grownups here,” Ash said.

“Allegedly,” Victoria smirked.

“I'm not the one who tried to seduce a dinosaur, okay?” Ash shot back, referencing some prior adventure of theirs.

“It's a valid strategy, I'm a bard. I'm sorry you don't understand our love,” Victoria laughed.

--- Neil slunk down the narrow T-shaped hallway from the sunroom in the southeast corner of the house into the open-layout public space. The western side of the house was an open space, with carpet for the living room half and tile for the dining room. Around the corner from this, facing the front door, was the stairwell leading up to the bedrooms. On the opposite side of this were the stairs leading down into the basement. The kitchen was off to the side of the dining room, on the opposite side of the house from the sunroom.

“So any bright ideas?” Neil whispered.

“It seems likely that it is in the floor below you,” Rem offered.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Neil sighed, moving towards the basement door and placing a hand on the basement door.

“Talia!” shouted Damian's mother from the kitchen. “Don't touch the pan, it's still hot!”

Neil jumped at the sudden shout, and his fingers rattled the doorknob. Footsteps approached from the stairs above him and he quickly let go, attempting to act casual. He was temporarily frozen as Anders Levant rounded the corner.

Damian's step-father was an impressive-looking man; bald but with a neatly trimmed beard that lined features nicely. He was wearing a black collar shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and draped in grey suspenders that connected to his matching pants. The man looked constantly ready for action, and this was no exception.

“Evening, Neil,” he said with a smile, but with the grain of unflinching seriousness that coated everything the man said. “Break time from the grand adventures, eh?”

“Mr. Levant,” Neil nodded. In truth, Neil had only met him once or twice before. He was something of an enigma and wasn't one for large social gatherings. “Sorry, I was just going to see if I could help your wife set out dinner.”

“Were you?” Mr. Levant said, his voice raised slightly.“ I'm certain she would welcome that. You're going to make some woman very happy someday. My generation never got taught 'woman's work', you know.”

Mr. Levant let out a deep bellowing laugh and patted Neil on the shoulder. There was a slight, reflexive grip as he reached Neil's neck. A tight pinch, and then he let go. His touch felt like lightning at the moment, but it was over as soon as it began.

“Right,” Neil nodded. “I mean, I figured. I guess I'd better go into the kitchen then, right?”

“You know where it is, oh grand explorer,” Mr. Levant nodded. It was a statement, not a question, and it carried the subtext of dismissal.

“Yes sir,” Neil said, sliding past Mr. Levant and walking down the hallway towards the kitchen. He glanced briefly over his shoulder to see Mr. Levant sliding a key into the basement door and locking it shut.

“It's him.”

Rem's message was unnecessary, as he felt a powerful burning in his chest at the sight. The pieces were falling into place right before him, and now he just had to do something about it. He had to get into that basement. Something horrible was going to happen down there. But what? And how? And how did it relate to Mr. Levant?

Suddenly, the doorbell rang.

“Pizza!” Talia cried.

“Tiny one, that is for your brother's friends!” Mrs. Levant said. “You can have one slice after you finish your dinner.”

“I'll get it!” Neil said, opening the front door.

There was another way into the basement. A window on the lower level. It was narrow, but Neil was slim and he could probably squeeze his way through it. He just had to get outside and work his way around to it. This was going to require a distraction and the pizza man was perfectly timed. He opened the door to a haggard-looking college kid holding two large boxes and a couple of 2-liters.

“Hey sir, it's $18.78.”

“I'll grab the food from you,” Neil said, taking the pizza.

“You gonna pay for it too, Neil?” Damian asked, appearing from the kitchen and patting him on the shoulder.

“I'll get you back for it, I promise,” Neil laughed, trying to hide his nerves. As he turned around, Mr. Levant was still standing by the basement door.

Damian handed the guy $25. The window was closing, and he was being watched closely. He couldn't exactly bolt out the front door after the pizza guy. Holding the food and balancing the two-liters anxiously he moved towards the sunroom. Neil felt a knot forming in his stomach. His time was running out.

Then he considered another strategy. One born from desperation and recklessness.

“Rem,” Neil whispered, his lips hidden behind the two-liters. “It's Mr. Levant himself, right?”

“Correct. What does that have to do with-”

Before Rem could finish his thoughts, Neil acted. Feigning himself slipping on his shoelaces, he barreled into Mr. Levant, food first. Pizza and soda went everywhere and Mr. Levant was knocked back against the rear wall, his head making contact with the molding of the dining room door-frame.

“Son of a bitch!” Mr. Levant cursed, as he reached back to his head. His hand came back bloody.

Neil didn't look much better as he had hit the opposite frame, except his forehead took the brunt of it, leaving a nasty gash between his eyes.

“Oh! Daddy's bleeding!” Talia cried.

“Dad!” Damian cried out, rushing past Neil to help his father up.

“I'm sorry!” Neil blurted, doing his part to keep up the illusion. “I slipped, I'm so sorry!”

“Hey, is everyone alive?” Angie asked, poking her head out of the sunroom.

“We've got to get you both to a hospital,” Mrs. Levant said, emerging from the kitchen. She had been through far worse and was doing a wonderful job of maintaining her composure. “Talia grab some towels. Damian, you start the car. Are you alright, husband?”

“Looks like you got me,” Mr. Levant chuckled, calming down slightly as he sat up to stare Neil directly in the face. “Boy, you certainly do know how to throw a party, don't you?”

There was an understanding between the two of them at that moment. They were both going to play their part, certainly. But Neil felt it as sure as he felt the burning in his breast from the amulet, and the uncomfortable way the light glinted off of that phony smile of his. Anders Levant knew exactly what he had done, and – somehow – why he had done it. There was far more to this man than Neil could have ever possibly imagined.

It's him, alright.

#writing #writingcommission #commissionsopen #cosmichorror #shortfic #scifi

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micahrodney · 3 years

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micahrodney · 3 years

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Thread; Chapter 4 - Through The Looking Glass

The following is a commission for Matthew Caveat Zealot. The morning of the memorial service was especially bitter and cold. A slight drizzle had started which threatened to turn into lake-effect snow at a moment's notice. Kevin made his kids pack up everything just in case they couldn't make it back to the hotel, and the trunk had a fully stocked emergency kit. It was something of a Brown family tradition to prepare for the worst, but this quality had been more pronounced since the accident.

“How's this?” Neil asked, fiddling with the knot on his tie.

“I don't suppose you'd consider a clip-on?” Travis teased, moving in to correct the full-hearted but half-studied attempt at a Windsor knot.

“Can't tie a tie, little bro,” Dawn said, waggling a mock judgmental finger. “They aren't teaching you anything at that school.”

“You're just upset that I'm not in the psych ward,” Neil shot back, running a comb through his hair while Travis fiddled with his tie.

“Injustice of the century,” she smirked.

Kevin, Kim, and Rocky were already downstairs eating the continental breakfast and no doubt having “adult” conversation. Travis was still in the kid's group but only by virtue of sharing a room with Neil. Dawn had been dressed since 7 AM, but only because Kim woke her up by loudly dropping her make-up kit on the bathroom floor a half-hour prior.

She looked quite nice in a simple black dress with matching leggings, though Neil wondered what their mother would have said about the heeled boots that she wore with them. Combined with her unique hair coloration, the whole effect was very “Bride of Frankenstein”. But then Dawn had always been avant-garde in her fashion sense.

Travis was wearing a chocolate brown suit with a charcoal tie. It didn't quite match but then Travis didn't own much in the way of suits. Not that Neil could talk, he had only ever owned the black suit that his father bought for him for the funeral three years prior. Wearing it to every memorial service since probably did not help the mounting anxiety and grief. It was as though a bubble was forming in the pit of his stomach that threatened to consume him the moment he let his guard down. There was the choking sensation followed by the slight urge to vomit.

“There you go. Dad will be proud,” Travis announced, completing the adjustment to Neil's tie.

“Cool. Can you tell him I did it?” Neil joked, his stand-by for keeping the nerves in check.

“If you think he'll believe it,” Travis replied with a weak chuckle.

A moment followed, where the three youngest Brown children sat in uncomfortable silence. They knew what happened next and each was dealing with it in their own way. Dawn was aloof as she always was, but she wasn't drowning her senses in her electronics. There was a stillness to her mind that was a precursor to the waves of emotion that would inevitably hit her around the halfway point of the service. She had notably forgone mascara today, the easier to pretend she wasn't crying.

Travis felt compelled to “big brother” more, and Neil's clumsiness with his tie was a perfect opportunity to let him express that. He wanted to reclaim some of the control he felt he had lost in his life after their mother's death. This was especially potent considering his past addictions. Travis had been balancing on a tightrope across a chasm of chaos for so long, and this day was the hardest one of the year for him.

Neil was unsure how Kim was coping. She was the oldest, he was the youngest and their age gap meant she had been out of the house for most of his life. He had gained a portrait of his older sister in the family meetings and stories from Travis and their father. Still, it was fascinating how incomplete these recountings were. Humans were complicated but at least when you lived with somebody for a time you got to understand how they behaved. Without this context, everything else in their life was as shrouded in mystery as if they were a stranger, and carefully curated stories never did them justice. Sometimes it baffled him how little he really knew about somebody so close to him.

As for Neil, jokes, pointed asides, flippancy: these were his allies. It was not that he was going to try and avoid feeling sad. The pain would come and he would fully experience it, making no attempt to hide his tears when the time came. He just didn't want to cross the bridge yet. Things had to go according to a schedule. If he could contain the emotion, then he was in control of his emotions. Perhaps he and Travis were not so different.

“So,” Travis said, breaking the silence. “Breakfast?”

---

Saint Mary's was Colleen Brown's church as a child. It was just a few blocks from the river and had a rich history to it, about which Colleen could recite paragraphs at a moment's notice. It was founded in 1850 and much of the original foundation was still intact. While clearly weathered, the chapel was remarkably beautiful.

The centerpiece was, as always, Christ the Redeemer upon the cross just above the dais. He was flanked by John the Baptist and St. Peter. Further out on the walls adjacent to the stage were the Virgin Mother on the left and Joseph carrying a depiction of the baby Jesus on the right. As far as Catholic churches went, it was a fairly humble affair. There was just something inherently wholesome about the building which Neil found comforting.

The only people in attendance at this quiet ceremony were the Brown family, Rocky, and a couple of Colleen's friends about whom Neil knew very little. All in all, there were roughly ten people including the priest.

Father Dwight McMahon was a person who Neil had come to know, at least somewhat. He was a family friend long before he took to the cloth. Their mother had described him as an “inspiring young man”, though how they had initially met was unclear. However both Kevin and Colleen had taken a liking to the young man as though he were a foster son, and he had often attended any family occasion of note, at least for the past six years. It seemed only right that he, having joined the clergy around the time Colleen passed away, preside over the ceremony.

“Let us pray,” the Father began, as was his custom.

The attending lowered their heads respectfully and clasped their hands together.

“Most Holy and Gracious God. We meet before your sight this day in remembrance of your daughter Colleen Angelica Brown, who departed three years ago. We seek your guidance and comfort as we honor her memory and uphold the traditions of her family. We thank you for your blessings and tender mercy, for surely you are the light and the way. In humble gratitude, we pray. May our lives please you, oh Lord. Into your embrace, we offer ourselves. For what lies on the journey ahead, God only knows. Amen.”

Dawn swallowed hard. Travis's head was lowered. Their father could barely keep his eyes open. Kim was already openly weeping, and leaning on Rocky for support. As for Neil, he just felt empty. There was a pit where his heart should be. It was the same as every year. A horrible reminder of what he had lost. Neil forced himself to look up at the Reverend, to try and connect with the man who had begun reading off the life story of his mother.

He let out an audible gasp, perhaps mistaken as a sob for how Travis put a consoling arm around him. But it was not grief that overcame Neil, but terror.

McMahon had been wearing the standard black cassock, but now stood draped in off-color robes with a wide-brimmed hood. In that instant, the nightmares he had forgotten about came screaming back into his mind. The deep pit, the darkness, the pool of suffering, and the frozen temple in which gathered a black mass of robed skeletal figures.

“We all want to go home,” McMahon said, his voice now hollow and raspy. “We can never go home.”

“We just want to go home,” came a pale imitation of Dawn's voice from behind him.

“End our suffering,” Travis uttered, his bony hand now clasping itself around the back of Neil's neck.

Neil wanted to scream. He wanted to react in some manner, but it was as though every joint in his body had locked up.

“This is a nightmare,” Neil said to himself. “I've fallen asleep and this is sleep paralysis. That's all it is.”

Hail began to pelt against the windows of the chapel. A ferocious wind burst open the doors, wood crashing into brick with a loud crack.

“You cannot go home,” came a stern and familiar voice. “Because your home no longer exists.”

At once, Neil stood up, suddenly free of the grasp of terror that had consumed him. He turned to the figure who now stood in the doorway; purple translucent lines containing a field of glowing stars.

“Rem,” he choked. “Is that you?”

“It is us,” Rem replied simply. “The thread of this one is broken, difficult to follow. But we have finally found you. You must come with us. The Dreamer awaits.”

“Go where?” Neil asked, still processing the new reality. “I'm in the middle of my mother's memorial.”

“Are you? You are here. Your body's location is ultimately irrelevant for our purposes,” Rem explained.

“Am I... asleep?” Neil asked, desperate for more information.

“Approximately,” Rem replied, his voice growing sterner. “There are complications to that term, but it is perhaps the closest understanding you will grasp. At first.”

“Go home,” the phantom priest bellowed.

“Want home!” screamed the nightmare Dawn.

“Your thread is broken,” Rem explained again. “But you still exist. Were you any different, you would be as they. Lost in time and space, a shadow of your former self.”

The shades moved closer to Rem, their movements foul mimicry. It was as though they were marionettes with a few cut strings.

“Home!”

“We want to go home!”

Rem raised his hand. “Your homes are no more. You return to the Dreamer now.”

With a wave, the chapel and all of its inhabitants vanished. The fabric of reality melted away, revealing a field of stars in which the two now floated. The great planet on which Neil had spent several eventful hours in the prior dreams was directly beneath them, as was the iridescent star.

“You have seen this world as it once was. I will show you what has become of those who once dwelt upon it. Soon, you will understand, Neil Brown,” Rem announced.

Without warning, Rem placed his hand on Neil's forehead, covering his eyes in bright pulsing light from the stars within. His retinas burned, his head throbbed, and soon he felt nothing as the light overtook him.

---

Neil shook himself awake and leaned forward, gasping in shock as the sleep paralysis wore off. The dream had been especially vivid, and utterly horrible. But at last, it was over and Neil was in the safety of...

“Where the hell am I?” He exclaimed.

The young man was surrounded by stars, safely observed through translucent panes held in place by a silvery steel framework. He had been lying on one of several identical beds, though he appeared to be the only occupant, each raised high off the ground the better to appreciate the cosmic light show. The air was crisp and manufactured, the low hum of some alien technology thrummed somewhere beneath him.

This was not a dream.

“You are awake, Binder,” came Rem's rigid voice from just behind.

Neil turned to greet the figure once more, though he noticed that his would-be savior was now wearing a silvery robe which seemed far more opaque than the rest of him. His footsteps were a musical chime on the metallic floor.

“What is this place?” Neil asked, repeating his concern now that a supposedly sympathetic ear was present.

“We refer to it as The Cradle,” Rem explained. “Throne of the Dreamer and safe haven for the Somni.”

Neil tilted his head slightly. “I mean... could you start from the beginning?”

“Nox will give you a more thorough explanation. I am to take this one to her,” Rem replied. “Please accompany me.”

Rem gestured towards the center of the room, where a railed circular platform hovered a foot or two off the ground. Just above it was a tunnel through the ceiling which went up quite a ways. The lift could hold perhaps three of these Somni at once, but Neil barely took up a tenth of the space.

With a slight jolt, the lift began to rise. Neil almost lost his footing at the sudden momentum but was able to steady himself. After the initial shock, the rise was smooth and swift, rocketing the two of them up several hundred feet. The lift tunnel was illuminated by pure white rings of the light in even intervals. The effect was almost hypnotic, not that Neil felt any desire to sleep.

The lift finally reached its destination, placing the two of them on the rear wall of – there was no other term for it – a space station. The room was massive, at least ten times the circumference of the galactic dormitory they had just departed. The silvery steel framework branched out around the room creating a dome-like structure, offering a mostly unobstructed view of the cosmos. At ground level, a variety of holographic panels were erected, forming a semi-circle opposite the lift. Indecipherable glyphs relayed incomprehensible data at lightning speed, observed by a host of these Somni.

In the dead center of the room was one particularly large well-like structure, above which hovered a glowing cerulean orb, bound up in crisscrossing threads of white light. At varying intersections of the impossibly dense thread were tiny golden spheres. A horrible sense of deja vu overtook Neil as he beheld the gentle turning of this web.

“You behold the Threads of Fate,” said Nox, moving out from behind one of the holographic terminals on Neils' left.

She was adorned in a cerulean robe with golden pauldrons. There was a royal aura about her, and given the uniform attire of all the other Somni in attendance, it was clear that she was the one in charge.

“I,” Neil began, but words failed him. So much was happening so quickly. He had no idea where he was, what he was doing there, and what his family must be going through with him suddenly gone.

“This must be quite troubling for you,” Nox offered, grasping his shoulder in a comforting yet strangely hollow grip. It was as though he was being touched by a ghost.

“This is just so confusing,” Neil explained.

“Perhaps we should start from the beginning then,” Nox said.

She gestured to Rem who busied himself at the central well. With a few flourishes from him, the scene changed, and the cerulean gem in the center took on the appearance of a planet.

“Millions of years ago,” Nox began. “We Somni lived as you do. Mortals upon the blessed planet of Somnus. Ours was a paradise, and from our bountiful came a wealth of technology and hoarded knowledge. In time, we began to become aware of not only the existence of other planets throughout the universe which sustained life but entire planes of reality apart from our own.”

The planet's image changed slowly, with a number of the continents now covered in sheets of ice, while others succumbed to wildfires and volcanic eruptions.

“However this knowledge came at a terrible price. We suffered calamity after calamity, which we later discovered to be deliberate attempts to destroy us. The Somni had grown too powerful, and we were becoming a threat.”

“A threat to who?” Neil asked.

The image shifted once more, a black cloud now consuming the entire planet.

“We came to call it Kosmaro: the Nightmare. It is an entity as old as time itself, in constant combat with the Dreamer. One creates, the other destroys. As the final catastrophe rent our world asunder, the Dreamer reached out to a select few of us and granted us with these forms.”

Nox gestured to the room at large. Neil only noticed then that several of the Somni had gathered round to witness this retelling, starry gazes twinkling gently in the dim light.

“So,” Neil interjected delicately. “Why am I here?”

Nox let out an approving noise; a musical hum exhaled from her like a sigh. “For you are a Binder.”

“I've heard that term a lot lately,” Neil replied. “But I have no idea what it is.”

Nox turned her attention back to the well. “It comes down to the Threads of Fate. The history of our universe is one full of opportunity and choice. Yet several events are preordained and must occur according to the whim of the Dreamer. Their dream, their plan. Yet the incidental day-to-day interactions upon which new realities may come to exist are immaterial to them. No matter how many threads are created, all will eventually converge upon a Crossroad.”

Nox pointed to the bright golden stars floating around the threads. Neil could now notice in greater clarity that thousands of these strands all seemed to converge around every one of these points.

“This is a multiverse then,” Neil offered.

“This one is familiar with the theory,” Rem said almost approvingly, before returning to his usual stoicism. “Though their kind has barely begun to scratch the surface of the implications.”

“With a Binder in their midst, perhaps they will learn more,” Nox chastised. She then elaborated. “You see, Neil. Kosmaro has been attacking these Crossroads. And when a Crossroad is destroyed...”

With a wave of her sleeved arm, a single golden star flickered out of existence. The white strands that connected to it floated about aimlessly for a moment, connecting to nothing and seemingly adrift in the void. Another wave and a second Crossroad vanished. Now those few threads which had been connected at both points faded from existence.

Neil swallowed hard, as he remembered the desperate cries of those phantoms.

We want to go home.

And what had Rem said?

You can't.

“My family,” Neil sputtered. “Are they dead?”

Rem, frank as ever, immediately responded. “A few thousand variations of this one's family have been lost to the phenomena, but they number among several quintillion lives. It is of little consequence one way or the other as far as you are concerned.”

“Rem,” Nox warned, her tone approaching annoyed while still retaining its ethereal quality. “The thread from which you originate has not been lost. However, it and many other adjacent threads remain in jeopardy. It is fortunate that we discovered you when we did.”

The image above the well zoomed in on a small section of the web, Two Crossroads were now enlarged, with the threads between them more easily distinguishable. What Neil had once taken for a few hundred were in fact several thousand.

“Binders are Somni who are able to traverse the Threads of Fate to repair the damage done. Kosmaro is as old as time itself, and thus the strain on our universe is an inevitable part of it. Some day in the future, Kosmaro shall, eventually, win the battle. But Binders do their part to delay that unhappy hour as long as possible,” Nox explained.

One of the golden lights dimmed into a dull grey, and the threads were once again floating about in tatters, loosely connected to the other. It looked like a badly frayed knot.

“And to do that, Binders must enter these Crossroads and set the actions right. Things must play out according to the will of the Dreamer. If they are successful,” Nox touched the dimmed Crossroad once more and its light returned, setting the strands right again. “Balance is restored.”

Neil was doing all he could to keep his head straight. In summary, there was a multiverse full of temporal weak points, and these strange alien beings were saying he was one of a select few capable of repairing it.

“How?” Neil spluttered out finally. “How am I supposed to fix those? I've never seen anything like this before.”

“It is better to show you rather than tell you,” Nox said. “But for now, you should return to the world from whence you came. Rem shall be in contact with you, and will come for you when the time is right.”

“Rem?” Neil asked nervously. The stern specter had not done much in their brief interactions to inspire a sense of camaraderie in him. “Can't it be you?”

“Nox is the Voice of the Dreamer. She has matters well beyond the scope of managing this one,” Rem sighed. “I shall serve as overseer and – if the need arises – protector.”

“Take heart, Neil,” Nox said soothingly. “It is a long road you have ahead of you, but we shall be your allies every step of the way.”

With a popping sound, all the lights on the station dimmed. The room slipped away to darkness, and Neil Brown felt himself falling once more into nothingness.

#writing #cosmichorror #commissionwriting #shortfic

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micahrodney · 3 years

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Thread; Chapter 3 - Over The River

The following is a commission for Matthew Caveat Zealot. Neil screamed, and started forward. His head collided with something hard, but it wasn't his claustrophobia-inducing ceiling. As the foam-padded leather made contact with his face, he realized he was no longer in bed. The young man was sitting upright, belted into the rear passenger seat of his father's Plymouth Voyager.

“Whoa-” Neil's father cried in response, nearly losing control of the vehicle. “Are you okay?”

Taking stock of his new reality required some mental recalibration. Last he remembered was spending the evening with Damian. The people-pleasing and worldly youth had been attempting to get Neil to broaden his horizons – and more relevantly his palate – by eating some chicken dish called Tom Kha Gai. Afterwards they went back to Neil's place and may have had a bit to drink. He vaguely recalled getting a voicemail from his father. His dreams were vast and vivid, but as he tried to scrape together the scattered fragments of his vision they faded away. More importantly was the rather noticeable gap in events.

Neil took a deep breath as his father began to steer the vehicle towards the side of the highway. The digital clock above the tape deck read 5:45 PM. A large highway sign revealed that they were just 60 miles outside of St. Clair, Michigan. They were 300 miles from his dorm room.

To his left was his sister, Dawn. She was the younger of his two sisters, but she still had two years on him. While the older sister, Kim, had been the spitting image of their mother, Dawn looked more like their father. Her hair was naturally chestnut brown, though it was presently dyed black with electric yellow streaks, the better to match her grunge aesthetic. Dawn's usual attire was comprised of leather jackets and jeans, though she was wearing black sweats for the road trip.

Occupying the passenger seat, into which Neil had just rammed his head, was his brother Travis. His beard seemed to have grown two inches since they had last spoken. The boisterous one in the family was oddly quiet today, wearing a plain forest green sweater. This was also a far cry from his Hawaiian shirt obsession.

“Neil?” His father asked, after putting the car in park on the shoulder. “You good?”

“I'm sorry, I just had a nightmare I think,” Neil explained. Maybe he was still having a nightmare.

That, or he had somehow lost several days of his life. They were on their way to his mother's memorial, which meant he had somehow fast-forwarded his life by about three days. Which begged the question: how the hell did that happen and why could he not remember any of it?

“It's a nice change of pace, dude,” Dawn said, her attention split between her Gameboy, Walkman and the stick of gum she was chewing on. “Honestly you've been kind of a zombie since we picked you up.”

“Oh yeah, says the Borg,” Travis teased.

“Don't hate my tech. It makes the real world way more bearable,” Dawn retorted, resting her temporarily-misplaced headphone back over her ear.

Neil took special notice of the word 'zombie' and decided to expand on that thought. “Have I been acting weirdly?”

“I mean I figured you were just sad because of... you know,” Travis gestured towards the others in the car.

It had to be especially hard for him, now sitting in the spot where their mother had for most of their lives, until the accident. Three years had passed by in a miserable blink. What were three days in the grand scheme of things?

“This is gonna sound weird,” Neil began, and that was putting it mildly. How exactly did one ask the question he was going to ask?

“That would be a first,” Dawn quipped sarcastically. Clearly The Smashing Pumpkins were not excluding her from the conversation.

The proud patriarch Kevin Brown turned to Neil and gave him that same kind and understanding gaze that he always did. His gentle eyes, that distinctive cleft in his chin, and a soft smile that won over even his mother. Neil could trust this man, out-of-touch as he was, with anything.

“What day is it?” Neil asked.

“Neil, you're scaring me now. Are you okay?”

“Dad, please. What day?” Neil insisted.

“It's Friday. We picked you up from your dorm this morning,” Kevin said. “Neil... you're not on drugs are you?”

“No, dad it's not like that,” Neil scoffed. “I just- I don't know, I haven't been sleeping right lately and everything is all... hazy.”

“Dude, it's dad. If you're on something he won't get mad at-”

“I'm not on anything!” Neil shouted. The confusion had devolved into frustration and Travis's well-intentioned comment was doing nothing to abate it. “Just because you fucked up your scholarship-”

“Hey!” Kevin interjected soothingly, reaching back to place a bracing hand on his shoulder. “Easy now, there's no need to go off on your brother like that.”

Travis had turned back to face the road. A few cars passed them, one even blaring on its horn unhelpfully. Dawn popped a bubble between her teeth.

“Now listen, son. If you say you're not, then you're not. I trust you completely,” Kevin said. “We'll take you to a hospital when we get to St. Clair and have the doctor check you out, okay?”

“A hospital,” Neil nodded. “Yeah, that's probably a good idea.”

“Maybe they'll put you in a straitjacket,” Dawn smirked.

There was no malice behind the comment. Underneath the would-be nihilist's harsh exterior was a tiny grain of affection for her family, especially her younger brother. This was her twisted way of trying to calm him down and make him feel at home. And, oddly, it was working.

“Sorry, Travis,” Neil said. “I'm just really... I don't know.”

“You don't have to apologize,” Travis said, still not turning around. “It's a hard time for all of us.”

He had the biggest heart of any of them, but it was also the most easily wounded. When they were younger, Neil had been intensely jealous of the theater kid brother of his. He was the center of attention, and by a wide margin the “favorite” child of their father. As a result, the two boys fought constantly and viciously.

Things only started to change when Travis left for college and started to mature. But with the maturing mind came evolving tastes. He was a self-described “party animal”. And one night he had partied too hard on the wrong side of LA. Within a few weeks he was absent to all of his classes, and a no-call no-show termination at work.

They found him on the UCLA campus between two bushes. It had taken a lot of work, but their father had managed to turn a five-year jail sentence into two months of rehabilitation. Being a lawyer's son had its perks. The true penalty was the loss of his football scholarship. That and the expression on their mother's face when he confessed to her he was an addict.

Neil regretted his words now. Apart from being the one big taboo in the otherwise accepting family, making such a cheap shot at his brother made him feel unclean. When Neil had first found out, he was a little too keen to finally have something to one-up the perfect son with. Teenage hormones were no help, and he hadn't developed a proper sense of empathy yet.

“There but for the grace of God go you,” their mother would always tell Neil.

That was bullshit as far as Neil was concerned, in the infinite wisdom of a adolescent. He was better than Travis. He was smarter. He didn't fall into the stupid obvious traps that all drug users did. The mandatory D.A.R.E. Program had done a number on his concept of nuance. But even as Neil railed on his brother, all their parents could do was just shake their heads with a mixture of disappointment and sad amusement.

Disappointment. That was a potent word. And that's what Neil felt like: The family disappointment. In spite of Dawn's fashion sense, Travis's past, and Kim's taste in men, Neil was the one who didn't fit in. And it was nobody's fault but his own.

---

St. Clair, Michigan was the homestead of their mother. It was as far removed from Voxton as you could be. The scenic town was nestled in the isthmus between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. It was founded along the St. Clair River which flowed somewhat unimaginatively into Lake St. Clair.

The river was one of the geographical borders which marked the edge of the continental United States. Across the river to the east was Canada, should one feel inclined to attempt a crossing in the frigid waters. Neil had only been here a few times in his life, and never while his mother was alive. For some reason it was her dying wish to be interred in the family plot a few miles up-river, but she'd never expressed any interest in visiting the place.

This was their fourth trip to the charming post-card worthy dell, where every street corner looked ripe for a postcard and every citizen seemed to come straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The skies were blue, the horizon dotted with lighthouses and the only noise was the sound of motorboats gently cruising down the river.

“How are you feeling, Neil?” His father asked, when they parked the car outside their hotel. While Kevin Brown dressed to the nines when he was with clients or in court, he preferred a casual look; khaki's with a crimson-and-grey striped cardigan.

“I think I'm okay for right now. Still a little fuzzy on the past few days,” he replied.

Fuzzy, but details were coming back to him. It was rather odd, more like he was recalling an episode of a television show which he'd fallen asleep during. He seemed to have some vague idea of stumbling to his classes for the week, but there was something hollow and robotic about the memories. They had no spark to them, no authenticity. It was like he was on auto-pilot, which may have very well have been the case.

For a moment he did consider the possibility that he had been drugged. But the only people he had been with in the past week were Damian and his classmates, none of whom had the means or motive to do so.

“We'll have a doctor check you out anyway,” Kevin said, in the way that brokered no argument. “There's a nice new facility just south of here in East China. Only opened up a couple years ago.”

Modernity was Kevin Brown's sole rubric for quality.

“Daddy!” Came an overeager feminine voice from the opposite end of the parking lot.

Kim, the oldest child, was eternally dressed like was late for a board meeting. Straight out of the 80s with a shoulder-padded salmon pantsuit and her dyed-blonde hair in a perm that framed her slightly chubby face. She had come a long way from the auburn-haired teen in overall's Neil had a vague memory of from his childhood.

She was tailed by her current boyfriend, a middle-aged trucker who chose to mark this momentous occasion by putting his least-stained plaid shirt. The corners of his stubbled mouth were still dripping with chewing tobacco residue.

“Honey!” Kevin said, embracing his daughter. “And this must be uh...”

After disentangling herself from her father, Kim lifted a hand gesturing vaguely in the direction of the gentleman. “This is Rocky.”

“Pleased to meet ya, sir,” said the trucker, taking Kevin's hand.

“Uh, likewise Rocky,” Kevin replied, shaking it hesitantly. He was presently engaged in trying to calculate the staggeringly narrow age-difference between him and the man now dating his first child.

“Guys how are you all!” Kim said, pulling all of them in a group hug.

Only Travis truly returned the hug. Neil was trying not to suffocate under the noxious fumes of whatever perfume she was wearing, and Dawn with her slender frame had managed to slip out of the grasp entirely.

“Glad to see you haven't changed, sis,” Travis teased. “Still pushing papers?”

“Papers nothing, little bro. Real estate has never been this good. You know I don't know what that guy in the White House is doing right now, but if keeps it up, I'm gonna be filthy rich,” Kim laughed in a way that she surely thought was musical.

“Maybe you can buy some clothes that come in colors that don't belong in an old folk's home,” Dawn remarked, her attention somehow still fixed on the Gameboy which should surely have been running out of battery by now.

“Oh you,” Kim sighed, giving Dawn her own special hug. A sour-sounding electronic chirp seemed to indicate the gesture had cost Dawn a life. “I love your hair! I bet this is such a fun time in your life.”

That was the saccharine-sweet way of saying “this is just a phase”. There was definitely a wide line between the two older children and the two younger. Travis had been made humble by his fall from grace. Had he not, he would have turned out exactly like Kim. Brimming with sunshine and not a drop of it genuine.

“So,” Kevin said, cutting in. “The ceremony begins at noon tomorrow. We have to run Neil to the hospital real quick.”

Kim let out a dramatic gasp. “Oh no! What's wrong, little man?”

“It's nothing big,” Neil replied, dodging another attempted hug. “And it's kind of a private matter.”

Kevin caught the comment and nodded his approval. “Dawn, Travis are you two going to be okay here at the hotel by yourself?”

Dawn nodded and began walking towards the hotel. If she had enough AA batteries, she could have survived in a cardboard box.

“I think we'll be okay, Pops,” Travis said. “I hope you feel better, Neil.”

Neil patted Travis's shoulder in a conciliatory way, and the two parted. He was unable to dodge the second attempt at a hug from Kim, who pushed her head into his shoulder, even though she had to lean down slightly to do it.

“Feel better, buddy!”

“Thank you, Kim,” Neil grunted, more than a little embarrassed.

---

The doctor's visit was about what could be expected. There was nothing wrong with his brain, according to a CAT scan and an MRI. Kevin Brown's money always did the talking about both procedures were tackled over a five-hour period, despite a warning from the doctor of potential complications with the readings.

His father was brilliant and humble, but he knew exactly how to get what he wanted. To benefit his children he would go to any lengths. After Neil had been poked, prodded and had an unseemly collection of fluids removed from and added to his body, the final diagnosis was remarkably unhelpful.

“Stress-induced narcolepsy?” Kevin asked. “My son wasn't asleep, he just doesn't remember anything.”

“That's the best conclusion we have right now. Some patients with narcolepsy can also experience somnambulism; sleep-walking. It's uncommon, but it has happened,” replied the stoic, but clearly annoyed Dr. Faust.

“I just,” Kevin sighed in frustration. “I don't understand.”

“Sir, your son's brain chemistry is fine,” Dr. Faust explained. “Apart from a little sleep deprivation his scans are perfectly normal. Furthermore the toxicology reports show a clean bill of health. Only that came back was a little bit of underage drinking. It's not drugs, it's not some form of mental disorder. The truth is, sir, I don't know what happened to your son. The best thing we can do is keep an eye on him and if he has another attack like that, bring him right in so we can examine him.”

“This is unbelievable,” Kevin fumed, his docile nature slowly ebbing away from stress.

“It's okay, Dad,” Neil said, placing a hand on his father's shoulder. “Let's just go, it's midnight and we have the memorial tomorrow.”

Kevin was willing to stay there all night if he had to, but Neil's pleading had worked. He put his jacket back on, without bothering to roll up his sleeves and straightened his tie. Ever requiring the last word, he turned back to Faust.

“I hope you're right, Doc,” Kevin declared. “Come on, Neil.”

#writing #commission #shortfic #cosmichorror #scifi #sliceoflife #fiction #serial #thread

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micahrodney · 3 years

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Thread; Chapter 2 - Pool of Tears

The following is a commission for Matthew Caveat Zealot. The first thing Neil heard was a soft rumbling noise beneath him. It was low and steady, like a distant river. The boy opened his eyes to find himself surrounded by stone and darkness, illuminated only by a brass lantern a few feet in front of him. The chamber was relatively small, but there was a connecting tunnel just beyond the light which seemed to stretch out into infinity.

He was certain he was still dreaming. Voxton wasn't known for its spelunking industry. The recent sequence of events before he blacked out were still fresh in his mind. Perhaps he had woken up briefly – as one does in the middle of a restless sleep – and his mind had returned him to a new dreamscape. "Well, I suppose I had better see where this goes," Neil announced to no one in particular. Hoping to instill himself with confidence, he picked up the brass lantern. He almost immediately dropped it again when he caught the gruesome visage of a partially broken skeleton laying against the rocky wall. Despite himself, he let out a scream, which echoed through the cavern. "What the fuck?" Neil exclaimed, lantern rattling as his hands shook. Just above the corpse were words, penned in blood and written with a mad, desperate scrawl. It is dark. I am likely to be eaten... The author had clearly not had time to finish his thought, but the phrase was familiar to Neil. In his mind, he had often imagined the scaly reptilian scratches of the dread creatures which stalked his favorite text-adventure. He heard in the distance that same patter of feet and a low collective gurgle of the hungry creatures now aware of his presence. "This is just a nightmare then," Neil said, though he felt no braver for the admission. "Grues. Great. Where's the mailbox, eh?" Picking up the lantern, he slowly approached the tunnel into the next chamber. The ever-present scurrying swept around him in all directions, some warily distant, others uncomfortably close. In the clamor, it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. Neil almost expected to look into the darkness just beyond the lamplight and see a hundred blood-red eyes staring back at him; catlike, hungry and always watching. His first footstep into the tunnel was met with a cool splash of water soaking his right foot up to the ankle. A quick scan with the lantern revealed a small but shallow stream running through the cave. "Damn it." There wasn't anything to do for it but press on and hope the other chambers were warmer. The tunnel opened up to a vast chamber fathomless deep. The sound of his casual pursuers was less pronounced here, but they were by no means gone. A narrow ledge lined by stalactites curved steadily upward to his left. Just over the edge was a black pit. An overwhelming sensation of deja vu overtook him. What had been his dream previously? A vast spider's web, and a deep pit which sunk endlessly into the earth. The horrid green light that rose from below seeking to claim him; it was all very familiar. However, the musing did present him with an idea. "Rem!" Neil shouted. "Nox! Anybody out there?" A chorus of hisses and skittering was all that greeted the futile gesture. Perhaps Neil should have known. It wasn't a proper nightmare if you could just will yourself out of it. He attempted to gather an idea of the scale of his looming ascent, but past the first rung, the lantern's light was too weak. The unexpected adventurer made his initial few steps up the rocky slope when his foot slipped on something flat and smooth. He stumbled forward a bit and caught hold of a sturdy stalagmite. He turned back towards to see a face-down polaroid photograph. "Well, that doesn't belong there," Neil muttered, bending down to lift up the picture. He wished he had not. The image was of his mother as he had last seen her: vibrant and healthy. Neil wasn't sure how so much simultaneous joy and sorrow could radiate from a single picture. The memories overtook him; how much peace she brought to his father, the unconditional love she filled her household with, and the gaping void she had left in all of their hearts when she died. Suddenly, faint white text appeared in shadowy wisps just before Neil's eyes. There is no concept of nothingness. If something ceases to exist, it leaves a void where it once was. Reality is a zero-sum game. The moment Neil read the final sentence, the silvery script dissipated into the infinite blackness. Just like her. One moment a steadying, constant presence in Neil's life. The next, a wound that bled with memory; each photograph a bloodstain, every story scar tissue. For a moment he considered discarding the memento. His fingers gripped the edges, knuckles tightening in preparation for the tear. But he couldn't follow through. To destroy it would be like snuffing out one of the last sparks of her existence. He slipped the picture into his jeans pocket and turned to face the dizzying climb once more. Neil marched skyward for what felt like several hours, yet every pass seemed to bring him no closer to the surface. The darkness was as all-consuming as ever. It was only on his hundredth time around the chamber that he noticed a slight change in the surroundings. A tunnel just on his left, from whence he heard the sounds of skittering feet and gurgling growls of his stalkers. He briefly considered entering the tunnel, until the same sense of repetition struck his nerve. Neil spun the lantern in the direction of the bottomless pit and noticed the same stalagmite he'd stumbled onto hours previously. Impossible though it was, the youth was somehow back where he'd started. Pulling out the image of his mother, he considered his options once more. The same words appeared again, etched in mist just before him. If something ceases to exist, it leaves a void where it once was. His mind was toying with him. Taking his adventure-games and presenting him with a real-life puzzle to solve. "It's a hint," Neil declared, gripping the photo between his thumb and index finger. The only "void" was the pit, and Neil was certainly stuck within. He couldn't return his mother to life, nor restore the cavern in his heart to its original state. There was no bringing her back. All he could do to move forward was to let her go. "I wonder." With a brief pang of guilt, he tossed the photo into the pit. The moment it disappeared, a giant stone column fell from above stopping just at Neil's height. There was a faint white light from the other side of the chasm now; a door. Before Neil could congratulate himself on his fine detective work, the flicker from the brass lantern burnt out. Save the pinprick of hope ahead there was nothing. The patient predators had been waiting hungrily and now saw their chance to strike. A mad scurrying of claws on stone raced towards Neil, heralded by ravenous howls and demonic shrieks. Neil made a dash for the door, but the light was so distant. The claws were mere feet behind him. There was no way he would make it to the safety before the fiends devoured him. This was no dream, these were the last moments of his life. His ultimate fate was to be torn apart by slavering monsters of his own imagination. A claw swiped at his ankle, but he kept going even as he felt the crimson run down his feet. A stone, hurled from overhead by one of the crawling beasts hit his shoulder. The pain was unbearable but salvation was tantalizingly close. The light grew but was still too far to shield him in its glow. The boy hit a rock and tripped, falling face-first into another stream. The cold water kept him alert even as one of the hulking skeletal brutes mounted him, pulling back at his hair. A reptilian finger reached for his throat. There was nothing left for him; just death and dismemberment. Neil screamed for aid, but none was coming. In a final defiant moment of self-preservation, he reeled his head back, slamming it into the foul creature's face. The monster lost its grip and fell back into a dense crowd of them. Taking to his feet again, Neil scampered towards the light, running faster than he had ever dreamed possible. Freedom ahead, agonizing death behind, Neil was less running than flying. The beams of light kissed his face, and a piteous collective wail of starving abominations pierced the chamber. The great rumbling revealed itself to be an avalanche of stone and gravel which collapsed just behind Neil as he fell out of the cave and into the world beyond. It was several hours before Neil could bring himself to even look up. Part of him had hoped that he had reached the conclusion of the nightmare, and would find himself safely in his bed. But the sounds of distant howling had not ceased, though it did slowly dim after some time. The pain he felt was real. His ankle, shoulder, and neck had deep wounds that stung fiercely. With effort, he slowly convinced himself to lift his head, and ascertain his new whereabouts. He was in a field of tall-grass with strange alien sunflowers, blue-hued rays around a crimson disc floret. The world was bright under the light of a familiar incandescent sun, and the sky was chromatic, shifting through all the colors of the rainbow, like light through a prism. Behind him lay the gateway into the mountain from which he had escaped. Ahead was a stone building on the banks of a vast lake. The architecture was peculiar, twisted jagged columns of green gemstone which seemed to naturally blend into the slanted awnings and conical roof. It was as if the entire structure had been carved wholesale out of a giant emerald. The point of the cone seemed to be emanating some kind of light; Neil could barely look at it directly. "Anybody out here?" Neil called, knowing full well the answer. Apart from the sound of the beasts, there was no sign of civilization. The temple, while spectacular, was barren without so much as the sight of a torch to indicate any resident. All the same, Neil found himself drawn to it like a moth to flame. As he drew closer he began to truly appreciate the scale of the place. The columns towered nearly a hundred feet above his head, and the steeple was higher still. The sound of the lake was unsettling, as the gentle ripples of water seemed to magnify and crash about the crystalline halls. Through a great curved archway was a straight path to the other side. Neil was able to see the water, deep violet in color. Placing trembling hands on either side of the archway he felt compelled to call once more. "Is anybody home?!" Neil cried. Home. Home. Home. We want to go home. The voice was not that of Rem or Nox's. It was hollow and hopeless. As Neil stepped through the threshold, other voices came to join in the chorus. Our threads have been cut. Our lives have been stolen. We want to go home. Home. Home. The center of the building was a round chamber with passages in all cardinal directions. On Neil's left was what appeared to be a chapel. Stonework pews all faced a great metallic statue of something unnerving. The entity seemed to shift, at once a terrible mouth with sharp fangs made of razor blades, to a long-legged spider whose forelimbs prodded each pew, to a single individual humanoid whose face was twisted in a cacophony of features; hundred-eyed with a dozen mouths.

Neil could bear the sickening sight no longer and turned to his right. He nearly screamed in shock. A host of robed individuals stood in a perfect semi-circle. Their raiments were jet black and speckled in starlight, and their hoods were pulled down far enough to leave only their mouths exposed. Most appeared roughly human in feature, but others had features that defied expectation. Suddenly a hellish crash came from the lake and Neil turned in time to see a massive wave of splash up in a great column which instantly froze, creating a pillar of ice on the surface of the lake. The freeze spread to the lake water and on to to the surroundings. A furious blast of frigid air bellowed through the corridor, setting Neil's skin on fire. When Neil was able to open his eyes again, the robed figures were gone, save one who lay huddled over for warmth. He was shivering and clasping his bony hands together. "H-hey," Neil muttered through chattering teeth. "Are you okay?" Home. Neil put his hand on the figure's shoulder, and it slumped to the ground, the body within vanishing in a puff of smoke and ash, leaving nothing but the starry robe behind. "What the hell?" Neil cried, falling back to the icy ground. His palms tingled in agony at the unholy chill. Neil could stand no more and in a borderline panic, he reached out for the fabric and stuffed himself within. The sting abated somewhat, but he was far from warm. Wrapping the hood tightly around his ears, he looked for some source of warmth. The sun seemed to have melted out of the sky, Neil's surroundings illuminated only in the dim blue light reflected from twin moons. They hung in the sky like the watching gaze of a beast preparing to strike. Neil could not bring himself to leave the building and face the fierce winter, so he turned back to the chapel. The statue, which had been endlessly transmuting, was now frozen in a peculiar pattern. There were three pillars surrounded by six stones, round and flat. The gems were red, black, white, brown, blue, and yellow. At the base of the statue was a placard. Though written in an unfamiliar script, the words revealed their meaning within his mind. Ours was paradise, thrice-damned for virtue, The titan's bite consumed, the heaven's gaze doomed, the fire within entombed.

"Another riddle," Neil cursed. The core of the puzzle seemed fairly obvious, describing three horrid calamities that had befallen the inhabitants of the temple. Through numb fingers, Neil lifted each of the stones, feeling for any additional hint. Unfortunately, the exercise yielded no fruit. The information was in the words, but Neil couldn't ascertain which stone went to which calamity. "Titan's bite," Neil said aloud. The closest thing to a bite he could conceive at the moment was the recently inflicted wound in his leg. Wounds sustained in the dark cavern spiraled endlessly. Eternal darkness, one that only the light of a cheap brass lantern could penetrate. And when the light flickered out, there was nothing left but utter darkness. Infinite black. Neil picked up the black stone and set it atop the first pillar. The stone seemed to shimmer for a moment before freezing solid in place on the column. Reasonably convinced this had been the correct choice, he turned his mind to the second clue. "Heaven's gaze," Neil pondered. At first, he considered the white stone which seemed fairly "heavenly". But the wording set him back. "Heavens gaze doomed". Doom caused by something from heaven. In the chill, the answer came quickly. Neil looked up to the sky once more and set the blue stone on the second pillar. The clue about fire was perhaps the most obvious, and he reached for the red stone, but just before he set it atop the third pillar, there was a rattling from behind. He turned to see the robed figures once more, standing in silent judgment. In unison they took a step forward, cloth falling from their bony figures. Each of them glowed in a pale green light. Home. Home. We want to go home. Neil dropped the red stone on the pillar, and suddenly the ground began to quake. The familiar tremors he had felt twice before in his dreams. Every time the dream came to an end, the world ended with it. Each stirring was an annihilation; an apocalypse. What if he wasn't truly waking up? Home. Home. We want to go home. The figures gripped Neil's throat, pinning him down to the frozen floor and tearing the robe from his flesh. The image of his mother came through his mind once more, the polaroid falling from the sky before his eyes. On the one side, her vibrant face, on the reverse, a hastily scrawled text in blood-red lettering.

God Only Knows. The inferno overtook all, ice melting in an instant, and still, the skeletal creatures clawed at him. Neil could do nothing but scream as another existence came to an end.

#writing commission shortfic #cosmic horror #writing #shortfic #commission #matthewcaveatzealot

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micahrodney · 3 years

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Thread; Chapter 1 - Lost Boy

The following was a commissioned piece for MatthewCaveatZealot. Awakening with a start, Neil managed to bash his head on the ceiling of his dorm room. He collapsed back into his loft bed, running his hands across his temple. He had always known this was a distinct possibility with his sleeping arrangement; there was barely three feet of clearance between his mattress and the unsettling popcorn-style stucco which always left flakes in his bedding. The only damage appeared to be a mild contusion, and a slightly hurt ego. The boy glanced at the alarm clock, which was inelegantly tucked into a corner of the frame, cord precariously taut.

8:35 AM

“Shit!” Neil cursed.

In his panic, he practically hurled himself over the rail of his loft. Fortunately, his faded blue bean bag chair – presently covered by a week's worth of dirty laundry – broke his fall. Fishing in the bureau just beneath his bed, he managed to dig out a clean pair of jeans and a grey tee.

As he reached for his bookbag, he noticed he'd left his computer on. The dull white of a Lotus document was burning into the monitor. Upon reading the salutation of “Dear Erica” the previous night's phone call came rushing back to him; three years discarded in two minutes. He had trouble saying what he needed to say in that call. Truthfully, the shock of it had rendered him phased out of reality. There was a hollowness that consumed him upon hearing those words, an emptiness that had to be embraced lest it consume him.

He couldn't even bring himself to cry. Tears would only validate the nightmare. That had to be it: a nightmare. One that he would wake up from in a day or two when she called him back and apologized. When she remembered how happy they had been together and realized what she was giving up. After a few hours, he had passed from denial to bargaining. Every possible scenario played through in his head simultaneously, from magnanimous acceptance of her apology to him banging at her door and pleading to take him back. That was when the rational approach of writing her a letter presented itself.

Without bothering to save the document, he flipped the switch. The dull fizzling sound was always a strange comfort. To Neil, it represented the end of a day. Maybe that's how he should view Erica: just another chapter in his life that he would move past. And maybe, like the document itself, there really was nothing worth saving there anyway.

---

Voxton was once a whistle-stop town just outside of the state capitol. It was the home of an active farm community, and the state's number one exporter of unemployed drunks looking for better opportunity in “the big city”. Then somebody decided to build a college there in the wake of the 1973 stock market crash, presumably with hopes of turning the state's fortune around.

McCain University – presumably named for its founder, though Neil had never bothered to find out – had grown to become something of a Mecca for the technically inclined. If you wanted to break into engineering or computer science, you went to McCain, assuming your parents weren't wealthy or connected enough to ship you off to MIT.

Thanks to a grant from the Governor, the school had an entire campus building dedicated to the most powerful machines on the market. Perhaps this was why Neil insisted upon using a personal computer from the 80s, despite the fact that his father had offered many times to buy him something newer.

The IBM 386 was more than a little dated, but the chunky machine could do the important things in his life. Sure his classes had him learning on top-of-the-line Power Macintosh hardware, but it had been the computer he grew up with. Its impressive 32 MB memory was stuffed with the text-adventure games of INFOCOM. While his first love would always be Zork, it was the murder-mystery Moonmist that made him want to become a writer.

These dual interests had conflicted before, and while Neil's father was supportive he was also wary. Writing, after all, was a hard market to break into. But computer technology was in high demand and only rising. When he had embarrassingly tried to connect with his son by saying maybe he could learn to make “some of those Nintendo games”, Neil had politely laughed and agreed to consider it. The boy's consideration didn't take long. As a lawyer, his dad always was the better negotiator. Perhaps it was overkill to mention that it is what his mother would have wanted.

Neil opened the door to his usual morning haunt, a student-run coffee shop called “The Junction”. The place was barely bigger than his dorm, but they also had the best muffins in Voxton. He stumbled up to the register and barely sputtered out his order before his bookbag slipped off of his shoulder, sending his notebooks scattering.

“Damn,” Neil cursed. “Sorry, Angie. A blueberry muffin and a coffee to go please!”

“Running late again, Neil?” The senior asked, tying her long ebony hair back with a scrunchy.

“I know, they're lucky to have me as a student,” Neil mumbled bitterly, shoving the papers haphazardly back into his bag.

“Four bucks. Your dad's Amex, I trust?” Angie replied, extending her hand.

“Cash today. I forgot to grab my wallet, but luckily there was a five in my jeans,” Neil chuckled benignly, handing her the bill.

“Moving up in the world.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Lemme grab your breakfast, champ,” Angie smirked.

Neil took his change and leaned back against the bar. The place wasn't really all that bad. Sure two people couldn't walk side-by-side behind the bar, but the little brick shack was alright. He had particularly liked the ironic name. Before the University reclaimed land for a parking lot the place had been a rail depot. The result were tracks that didn't lead anywhere just behind the restaurant and for few miles north and south respectively.

“And in offbeat news today,” droned a local news anchor on the 16 inch TV in the corner of the bar. “IBM supercomputer 'Deep Blue' went six games against chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov yesterday. Although Kasparov won the match with four games to Deep Blue's two, this is the first time a computer has ever defeated a world champion under tournament regulations. Truly this is a sign of things to come. Just how more advanced can these computers get?”

“Neil!” Angie called, snapping her fingers in front of his face. “Muffin, coffee, late for Computer Theory 221, remember?”

“Right, sorry!” Neil sputtered, grabbing his food and bolting out the door.

---

“Mr. Brown. How nice of you to grace us with your presence.”

Professor Barker was generally a nice guy, but Neil had tried his patience one too many times. Tardiness was just one of Neil's offenses against the would-be silicon valley elite. In short, Barker didn't like his attitude. He didn't like that Neil would sit through his classes, mind clearly on other things. But what he hated worse was the fact that Neil continued to ace every assignment in spite of his lackluster classroom performance. It wasn't Neil's fault that he felt he got very little out of the lecture hall experience, preferring instead to study on his own time.

“Sorry, sir,” Neil apologized half-heartedly. “Rough night.”

“Wait until you become an adult, then you'll learn what a real rough night is,” Barker scolded.

The aging technician looked like a slightly sunkissed Steve Wozniak. He had the beard and the plaid collar shirts, but his face was a bit more rugged. Barker had learned computers while serving in the Army during the 70s. The synthesis was a computer nerd who looked like he used to beat kids up for their lunch money.

“Now that Mr. Brown has found his seat,” Barker sighed. “Let's resume. Where were we now? Ah, yes! The potential of virtual reality. Now, this ain't your 'Virtual Boy', we're talking about actual virtual reality.”

Barker was nothing if not fond of the sound of his own voice. The lecture was more or less him pontificating about the achievements that had been accomplished with the budding technology and his wild-eyed fantasies of future use. Of particular note, Barker's assertion that we could one day use virtual reality to explore the entire planet's history in first-person seemed especially romantic.

“Imagine, if you would, you put on a visor and are instantly transported to the wild west. With a few mouse clicks, you are in the Roman Empire, or watching the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.”

A loud digitized beep came from the clock just over the door. It was already 11 AM.

“Ah, well, I seem to have rambled on right to the end of class,” Barker chuckled. “Alright, that's a good stopping point anyway. I'll let you head out. Mr. Brown, a word.”

The students began to pack up and make their way towards the door, as Neil marched down the steps of the lecture hall, prepared for his weekly chew-out session. The beard of the middle-aged educator seemed to twitch in anticipation and annoyance.

“Neil, do you want to be in this class?” Barker asked bluntly.

“Yes sir,” Neil stoically replied.

“You know the class starts at 8:30 AM every Monday and Wednesday, right?”

“Yep.”

“The winter semester has only just started and in the six classes we've had together you have been on time to one of them.”

“That's correct, sir.”

Barker sighed and waved his hands about in front of him as if he was grasping for something to strike him with.

“I don't know what you expect from me,” Barker steadied his hands and pointed a finger in Neil's face. “But I know I expect from you. I can't have you barging in after the class starts. If I have to lock that door, I'll do it. Your work is good, but if you want to stay in my class I expect you to show up on time.”

“I understand sir.”

“Well, I hope so,” Barker grumbled. “I'm not kidding about that lock either.”

---

Monday was, by design, Neil's easiest day. He only had the one class, and he used the remainder of the day to run errands. So as soon as Barker let him out, his first stop was to the Store24 to pick up some groceries. Considering his food storage options in his dorm was a mini-fridge and the top shelf of his closet, he only wound up with two bags and a twelve-pack of the store-brand cola.

He dropped off the bare essentials of sustenance and took a brief moment to tidy his room. There wasn't much cause to impress anyone, but he felt compelled to use the time. It felt better to accomplish something – anything – rather than waiting around for the day to end.

The next two hours were spent overseeing a load of laundry in the dormitory laundromat. It was pretty depressing, featuring bare stone walls and illuminated by a single dirt-specked window. with a line of six washers and four driers on opposite sides of the room from each other. There was a table in the middle, slightly off-set from the window in a way that mildly infuriated Neil. There were technically chairs, but two metal folding chairs took a certain wear-and-tear over the decades and had never been replaced.

Neil found himself sitting on the edge of the table, staring out that window and reflecting on the bizarre dream that had woken him with such a start. The events of the day had driven out most of the fantastic experience from his mind, but bits and pieces still lingered. Those omnipresent voices, speaking in grand detail about him. An idyllic planet that was repeatedly destroyed. The beast from within the pit, as Neil was bound and helpless on a web of light.

He considered whether or not he wanted to try and duplicate the effects of his lucid dreaming again tonight. Was it a story worth picking up? Or did he want to find himself once again at the genuine mercy of some phantasm?

A low blare came from the drier, in what was more than once mistaken for a fire alarm.

Discarding the shards of his recollection, he set about folding his clothes for about five minutes, before hastily shoving the rest of his clothes into his basket and resolving to just “do it later”. This was perhaps his favorite lie.

So it was, at 3:00 PM, Neil found himself back in his room with nothing else on the docket. The young scholar now had to decide between drowning his mounting sorrows in video games, television, or – if he were feeling particularly adventurous – both at the same time.

Looking to a torn up photo of Erica on his desk, he considered what he would be doing if last night's conversation had not happened. The weekends were theirs and sometimes she would visit him Monday night as well, to hit up a movie when it wasn't crowded with people. She wasn't a terribly social girl, and Neil had always done his best to accommodate that.

They both used to joke about how she was a “cheap date”. She was the kind of person who genuinely enjoyed an experience-driven rendezvous. Erica would much rather walk through the Voxton arboretum or take in one of the free community light-shows at the planetarium rather than actually go out and spend money.

On their first date, Neil had nearly blown his chance with her by trying to flaunt his dad's wealth. He had been given $100 to “impress the girl” with. Erica, in that way she always did, knocked him flat on his ass.

“I'm not here to get to know your money, I'm here to get to know you,” she said, before insisting on having dinner at the cheapest restaurant in Voxton, where she paid for her own meal.

The wake-up call had worked, and he loosened up considerably; enough so that she was agreeable to a second date. In spite of the rough start, they had gotten along famously. But apparently not as well as he had thought.

A knock on his door disrupted Neil from his day-dreaming.

“Hey man, open up. You're decent, right?”

Neil chuckled as he opened up the door. His friend Damian could only be described as “dashing”. The heart-throb of choice for all the girls when they were in high school together, his looks had only improved with age.

“Did they finally let you in?” Neil teased.

“Dude, they let you in,” Damian retorted. “If I wanted in, I'd be in. But money is good in the sales game.”

“You work in retail.”

“Retail sales. If I sell ten computers, they give me $50 of store credit,” Damian replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Anyway, we doing dinner? My treat. Gotta cheer up my sad-sack friend, don't I?”

“Damian, you don't have to-”

“Nah, brother, I insist,” Damian smiled, patting Neil on the back. “Breakups hurt. I've been here, and you're gonna be fine. We will eat, drink, be merry and this weekend we will go out dancing and find a girl to make you forget all about her.”

It was this benevolent nature that led to the two becoming friends in the first place. In middle-school, they were both slightly awkward, but Damian had the further disadvantage of being an immigrant. His mother Tabitha had fled Egypt shortly after that assassination of Anwar Sadat, carrying along a four-year-old Damian with her.

The pubescent Damian was dealing with bullying and trying to adapt to both a new country and a stepfather who Neil had never met. The two had met while Damian was hiding out in the library during one fateful lunch and they managed to hit it off over Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. Neil had just started reading The Black Cauldron, but Damian was already on Taran Wanderer. A young boy's excitement to talk about his favorite fantasy series led to the longest-lasting friendship either of them had enjoyed.

“Damian, I'm not sure if I really want to 'forget' about her, you know?” Neil sighed. “But I don't really need to get into that now.”

“Why not now?” Damian asked. “Take the time, friend. Dinner can wait.”

“It just seems kinda,” Neil struggled to find the words. “Pointless. I mean she's made her decision. I have no idea why, but she made it clear she was done with me.”

“Your feelings aren't pointless,” Damian replied, tapping his chest for emphasis. “It's all we really have in this world. Of course, if you don't want to talk, I won't make you. But, uh, make a decision quick. I skipped lunch.”

Neil laughed and opted to continue keeping his thoughts concealed. At least for now.

“Alright. Dealer's choice,” Neil said.

“What a dangerous power you've given me,” Damian chuckled. “Thai food it is.”

---

This one is hard to position. The thread is destabilizing.

Neil was not dreaming. The voice was not in his head. It was just on the opposite side of his dormitory door. The room around him was shrouded in darkness, and only the door was illuminated. If he could just reach out and grab the handle...

A terrible weight was dragging him down, and his limbs felt as though they were made of concrete. A biting cold was gnawing at him, and there was a presence just behind him. Somewhere in that darkness, a great unseen thing wanted to devour him. Panic seized him as he flailed his useless forelimbs at the impossible contraption. A doorknob; he had seen thousands of these. But his brain could not process how to manipulate one.

With looming annihilation mere inches from him, he resorted to throwing all of his weight at the wooden barrier, hoping it would yield under the force of what, to Neil, felt like two tons of his own mass.

If the thread is lost, we lose the Binder. This is unacceptable.

“Nox?” Neil called out, vaguely remembering the kindly voice from the other night.

We are here, Binder. Patience. We will pull you into our realm. You will not be sundered.

At this pronouncement, a hideous shriek invaded Neil's mind. The darkness wrapped around the young man and began to flay him, leaving crimson marks on his arm. By the time the third sinewy tendril had lashed him across the face, he felt an uncomfortably familiar tug around his midsection as he was dragged out of the darkness and through the door, beyond which lay the sea of stars from his prior visit.

As the distant sparks sailed past him, the memory of that Eden weight heavily upon his mind. He wanted to see it again, and yet he could not bear to watch it be destroyed once more. The thought of having to relive the same disaster over and over again throughout eternity was unbearable. How many times would he have to suffer the same loss? How many people would abandon him to the darkness of his own mind?

Hey Neil, it's Dad. Hope you've had a good Monday. You're probably out with Erica, but I just wanted to get in touch with you about... well, your mother's remembrance. It won't be a big social gathering like last year's. Basically just gonna be your siblings and me, but we wanted to coordinate with you. Just give me a call back when you can. I love you.

His father didn't know yet. Of course, why would he? That was only last night?

Focus on the moment, Binder!

Rem's voice was as stern and monotone as ever, but with a renewed sense of urgency. There was a planet on the horizon, but it was no paradise. The world was molten rock and scattered space-dust, perhaps one in the process of still being formed. Or was this was had remained of the other world after the disaster?

See past the reality of your eyes, Binder. They are not a reliable path to truth, Nox urged.

He is weighed down by his emotional attachment to his own thread. We are losing him, Rem added.

The planet was quite hot, and Neil felt his flesh beginning to sear as he drew ever closer to it. He closed his eyes as he fell through the atmosphere of a dying world, the weight of his grief dragging him into oblivion.

#thread matthewcaveatzealot commission #scifi #short story #90s

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micahrodney · 3 years

Text

Thread; Prologue

The following was a commissioned piece for MatthewCaveatZealot.

Prologue “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Neil was racing down a corridor made up of alien stonework. The stone was silvery with glowing veins of a strange azure plasma. There had been no beginning, and as far as the young man could tell, no end. The streaks of blue became a blur which slowly faded, first into indigo and then a deep impenetrable violet.

“Is anybody there?!” Neil cried, feeling the walls closing in around him. “I need help! Please help me!”

This one rejects realignment.

The words were coming from inside Neil's own mind, and yet they seemed to echo through the halls; loud as an explosion but soft as a whisper.

“Who is that? Where am I?”

Another entity spoke next, in a deep monotone. It was as rigid as the rock around him; stern, unyielding, judgmental. The voice of a god who cared nothing for his subjects.

It cannot be altered. Its thread is broken.

The original speaker now cried out defiantly, over the first. They sounded almost feminine but it was impossible to tell. He had never heard anything like it before. With each word she spoke, her meaning seemed to manifest through the fabric of reality itself. Every sentence was a pronouncement, each phrase gospel.

Not broken! The threads cannot be broken! This is his doing.

“Who are you talking about? Where are you?”

Neil whipped his body around desperate to find the source of the conversation. As he spun the hallway began to fade, consumed by blackness. Yet Neil did not lose consciousness. He rode on invisible torrents of energy which swept him this way and that.

No crossroad will accept this one. No thread binds this one. It is an anomaly. An error.

Not an error! His is a spark. A Binder, no doubt.

Nonsense. Mortal. Temporal. Finite. It is unheard of.

The threads twist and tangle. It was inevitable.

A bright explosion of vermilion nearly ruptured Neil's corneas. There was an intense weight from his stomach that pulled him towards the calamity. Within moments thin white pinpricks of light dotted the blackness around him. The twinkling was so faint at first that it took Neil several moments to process what they were.

“Stars?”

A massive rock barely missed him as he sailed towards the sea of infinity stretched out before him. The boulder seemed to grow as it sailed further from Neil, expanding to the size of an asteroid and then a small moon. By the time it was planet-sized, there was a lurch that sent the waylaid dreamer rocketing in another direction. Relative to how Neil was facing, it was “down”, but floating in this distant pocket of space the actual trajectory was anyone's guess.

Rippling pockets of energy surrounded him as he fell through the wormhole. Neil could only scream as the sensation of rocketing towards certain doom overrode any other thought. When the hellish ride was over, he was floating freely around a cluster of stars. Though they were far too bright to look directly at, the visual symphony of their reflected hues on the varied celestial bodies around him was one of the most beautiful sights he'd ever beheld. Blue, yellow, red, orange, and purest white, cascading in beams across a field of asteroids and moons, at the center of which lay a majestic planet.

The waters covered nearly all of its surface and the few large landmasses were vibrant green, untouched by anything other than nature. Life radiated from the planet, welcoming and warm. This was it; Neil had died, and this was surely the paradise that awaited him in the endless beyond.

Suddenly, a great red tear formed in the middle of the largest continent; an eruption. This was larger than any volcano, it was as if the very planet itself was being rent asunder.

This one defiles the thread. It must be purged!

It is not his doing, he doesn't understand his power.

No power. Finite. Error. We will purge it.

All existence ruptured as the planet was destroyed in an apocalyptic fireball, which sent cascading waves of liquid flame towards the young man. He tried to cover his face, in hopes of limiting the unbearable pain which awaited him.

It never came.

Lowering his arms, he found himself on firm ground, in the middle of a verdant field. A lone mountain towered over him but otherwise, the plains were surrounded by water. Seagulls cried overhead, barely audible over the crashing waves.

You have realigned this one?

No. I have saved it from your purge. It can transition. It remembers both the old and the new thread, and neither is its point of origin.

Impossible. Temporal. Finite. Mortal.

Possible, if you would only open your eyes and see what I've been saying. This one is not temporal. Not finite. Mortal, yes, but only temporarily. He will transcend, and join the other Somni.

“Who are you people?” Neil shouted, getting rather sick of these disembodied voices speaking about him as if he were not there. “What's happening to me?”

Curious.

Indeed curious. But nonetheless, inevitable, as I said before. He is a Binder.

Neil felt a hand on his shoulder, smooth but steadying. He started and turned around to face something utterly incomprehensible. The entity seemed to be made up of the stars themselves, roughly humanoid in shape, outlined by a thin purple line of translucence that contained the shimmering beacons. A particularly large white sun was in roughly the spot of the creature's face, and it pulsed gently as it spoke.

“You are human. Finite. Temporal. Mortal,” said the being in the same deep rigid voice that had moments ago had declared its intent to destroy him.

Neil found himself stunned into silence for a moment, unable to respond.

It had been over a year since he took an interest in perfecting lucid dreaming. At first, he could only direct the general course of his dreams, and within a few months, he had gotten to the point where he could make conscious decisions about what to do, fully aware of the fact that he was still asleep. He almost felt as though he was truly awake, but he had never crossed that threshold into genuinely tricking his senses into believing he was within another world.

Not until tonight.

But he didn't feel in control of this dream. And the longer the fantasy went on, the more genuine it felt. He tried to grasp at what could possibly be happening and even allowed himself the briefest glimmer of a possibility that this wasn't a dream.

“My name is Neil,” he finally stammered out, holding up a hand in a flimsy attempt at a greeting. “Who are you?”

“We are Somni. Infinite. Boundless. Immortal,” the entity replied. “You may call us Rem. We speak for the Dreamer.”

“The Dreamer? You mean me?” Neil asked. “So I am asleep after all.”

“Tiny dream. Immaterial. Phantasmic. Yours is not the Great Dream,” Rem replied solemnly. “Yet you seem to play a part within it.”

“The Great Dream?” Neil scratched his head. “I'm confused.”

Another Somni appeared just beside Rem, taller and more slender. This was clearly the other speaker Neil had heard.

“All will be explained in time,” she declared, her tone soothing and motherly. “I am Nox. And you are a very special mortal.”

Before Neil could resume asking the slew of questions that continued to flow through his mind, the eruption started again.

“This thread is also collapsing. Kosmaro follows this one with great interest,” Rem noted. “Hopeless. Endless. Chaos.”

“We will talk again, Binder of the Great Dream,” Nox said, placing her hand on his chest. “Do not be afraid.”

The collapse of the planet happened within seconds, but once again Neil was hurtled through space, seemingly into an endless abyss of blackness. There were no more stars or celestial bodies, and for a time there was still disquieting peace.

Then Neil realized he was no longer floating. He struggled against bonds made of silvery light, fastened tightly around his wrists and ankles, securing him to a translucent web. Beneath him was a black pit, fathomless deep. Neil's stomach quaked at the realization that being bound was all that kept him from the maw. His brown hair tangled in the springy thread, and the ever-present void below him made any attempt at escape futile.

A low guttural growl echoed up from the bottom of the pit, and a thin pinprick of green light wormed its way up from the depths. In response, a chorus of wails and shrieks rang out just above him. The agony of a million voices seemed to reverberate throughout every strand of the trap. The threads started to shake as the green light grew, now consuming the pit entirely. Neil forced himself to look away from the subtle, hypnotic light. His gaze fell skyward, and he screamed.

The spider – if it could even be called that – clicked its pincers menacingly as it lowered its teeth towards Neil. Oblivion was approaching, and Neil could do nothing to stop it. The green light now filled the entire chamber, and he saw that it was full of webs just like his, each with hundreds of thousands of people held captive in sinewy strands.

His bonds broke, the screaming now filled his very soul and Neil Brown fell down, down, down...

#writing commission scifi fantasy shortstory serial cosmichorror dream

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