Across the darkened street, the reddish, orange light, embossing objects from the deep violet shadows. A slight shift in the perceptual reference into something on its own terms, an alternative regime?
And: the feeling, not of things undoing, unraveling, but becoming.
The man in the white plastic chair, seemed as embedded as the objects themselves, as though this were more his domain: the single streetlamp casting more than just a circle of light: it’s own empire. No construction: a presence or sense of truth settled obliquely, although closer than it ever had.
He had the sudden and irrationally terrifying thought that the Cobbler's elaborate constructions were perhaps solely for the benefit of the client.
8801: journal entry day 10, cycle 7
I feel as though I share a truth with the girl at the Deja vu parlor, a fragment of it, tethered to me. Ever since I started writing, recording the fleeting moments in which I feel as though I am about to remember something important.
I saw some text she had written, we wrote with the same hand. Perhaps these experiences are altogether human? Do we all experience these fugues, are they dreams? Is it only my dreams that I am afraid of?
I write down what was written in her journal as best I could from memory. I don’t so much remember the words as I ‘remember’ what they point to, an unfurling thing.
She writes (what I remember):
A city perhaps, buildings or large vessels, they seem to glow with a substance that covers them, it might have been something living. I feel as though these structures or tall buildings are closing in. I realize they must be forming a maze and that I must find my way out. But every way I turn, I am met with dead ends, the sense of dread grows stronger. I hear laughter and I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame.
I find myself walking down yet another alley, then I hear the voice. It is mocking me.
“Well, well, another rat in a maze”.
It asks me to do something and I say yes, knowing if I don’t, something dreadful will happen and that I won’t survive. I am supposed to write something, the voice, an impression of flashing teeth in the light. The growing sense of dread I can’t escape.
I find myself looking around me for something to write with, there is a man on the ground. There is something in his eyes, he is blind. His eyes are filled with some sort of sooty substance.
I take this black substance from his eyes to write with. I try to write down what the voice tells me, but somehow I can’t, the words become tangled in my mind and I can’t write them properly, the letters are all back to front.
“Try again” the voice says triumphantly.
My vision is dark and I don’t see the full picture, the letters I write are unfocused and back to front, I am trying to get them in order. In desperation, I try again, knowing I am running out of time and chances.
I hear the voice say the words again and again, and again I try, but I can’t seem to write them in order. I know now, I am being tricked.
That is how I remember it, what I/ we wrote in the journal. She must have been writing down a dream but something about it seems so familiar, as if I have dreamed it also, walked through it, as if she is describing this city and my amnesiac night wanderings. I have felt the same dread, unarticulated, pressed in around me. There is a sense that the words are walking me through miles of unknown known, excavating something I leave behind each night. I can’t tell if it wants to find me or if I want to find it?
558:
The man that sat under the single street light, existing discreetly inside of something and distinctly outside of something else: the only true outsider. There had been, a moment before, the perceptual glitch after the cube had projected the interlocking geometries of its representational manifold onto the surrounding structures.
And the sound of small feet against the pavement, laughter disappearing around an ever present corner.
“some clocks tell time and others change it” a discarded avatar stuck on some broken behavioral logic? Although, again there was a sense of passing recognition. The clockwork of hidden machinery moving the pieces of an invisible pattern. Had the Cobbler’s hand been in all of it?
***
An artifact of light, a moving seam of refractions spreading out, rippling over everything in the field of vision, its outer boundary, like the edge of a burned Polaroid, coalesced into a fading patch of luminous white. In its wake, a subtle shift in atmosphere and light, charged with something that slightly altered the protocol of reality: the archangel code…
Comments on the last few chapters:
I challenged myself to write a chapter a week for this t2 writing contest. They are first drafts and sometimes I feel as though they lose direction, I just allowed it to write itself to an extent. Although I now have a better idea of where the story and the characters are going, it just had to resolve itself through these chapters, through this slightly convoluted process. I found it was a necessary exercise.
As you’re writing, you sometimes ask yourself: how did I end up here? Or: how did my character get here? Where the hell do they go from here? It's not where you thought you’d be when you started out. But if you’re committed to the process, you don’t get off the ride until the story is told, until something has been resolved.
The last paragraph of this chapter is trying out an idea and not knowing where it would fit, it might become the beginning of the next chapter or it might find itself worked into a previous segment when it becomes reworked (as they inevitably will).
As these chapters have yet to be edited, look out for the updates, some parts of the story might change and others might be rearranged so bear with me.