In the eye of a hurricane, clouds revolve around me. Slowly. A single basement light on a chain hangs over a desk, somehow planted in the middle of a grassy field. A woman walks toward it_phasing, splitting, and combining with each step. She sits, and a blonde appears. We make eye contact. Suddenly, she's inches from my face, leaned in, her breath a whisper in my ear. "We all drown in the Lethe garden. Can't you smell the flora?" Her lion eyeshine•orbs reflect the bare bulb in the dark. "Forgetting something?"
"What is all this?"
The creature looked past me, as if at a ghost, then its focus snapped back to me. I heard its voice in my head, a torrent of questions that weren't my own, even though it never moved its mouth. Why him? What do you see? Well, he isn't afraid? But he should be. Maybe he's just naive? "This," it finally purred, "is the world beneath your saccharine, sweet-nothing existence. The darkness. The abyss. The void. The fray. Erebus."
At the final word, howls echoed in the distance. "What is its purpose?"
"This is where the monsters live."
"No," I countered, "that's where I reside. You're just synaptic wiring_internalized. Reality has its own monstrosities. They're called mankind."
It leaned closer, a low growl rumbling in its chest. "The mind is more powerful than any pen. Trick the mind, and the world follows."
"Right. Into a padded cell."
Its growl died. "What do you want?"
"She left me a message. I'm here. Why don't you ask her?"
"I can't ask her. She's dead," it hissed, taking a step back, suddenly wary. "I'm asking you. What is your goal? You should not be here."
"Why do you keep saying that?"
"Because you don't believe in ghosts."
A long pause stretched between us. I looked around. The scene was far too calm, too ordered_more unusual than my own brand of mental mayhem. This was definitely not my average conversation. "What are you?"
"A Goddess."
"Hahaha. A Goddess?" I scoffed.
"Yes." Her voice was cold, impassive.
My laughter died in my throat, my brows furrowing. I held her gaze in a long, deliberate stare. So long it became uncomfortable. I made it awkward on purpose.
She broke first. "How did you come here?"
I scanned her flawless face. "I took a nap."
"If you offer one more jest," she warned, her voice dropping to a dangerous low, "you will find out precisely how real I am. How. Did. You. Come. Here?"
I leaned in, our faces inches apart, and gave her a slow smile. "Bitch, I closed my eyes."
She didn't flinch. She simply stuck her hand out. "Arca mortis aperta est." Her fingers snapped.
I bolted upright in my bed. In the same instant, the TV screen and every lightbulb in the motel room crack•shatter•exploded. I pinched my arm, hard. Awake. I'm fucking awake. I sat there, frozen, just for a moment. "Okay, 'bitch' was too much. I see that now." Thankfully, I have the room for the weekend. Everything's replaceable. I stepped outside, my hands shaking so bad I could barely light my cigarette. It was windy as hell, but there was no storm, no lightning. I was trying to rationalize it all as I reached for my phone to check the time. It was shattered too. A shard of glass from the screen sliced my hand as I pulled it from my pocket. I finished my smoke, wrapping my bleeding fingertips in a piece of my white t-shirt. I walked back into the room looking like I'd just botched a murder, and rinsed the wounds in the sink. "Guess ghosts are real?"
The motel room was a wreck, a mirror of my own shredded nerves. My hand, amateurishly wrapped in a strip of t-shirt, throbbed in time with my pulse. Wind, a pissed-off banshee, rattled the fenestra. No shit. That blonde broad wasn't kidding around. A goddess of what? Bad dreams•property damage? I kicked at a shard of a lightbulb with the toe of my boot. The rational part of my brain screamed coincidence•hallucination_faulty wiring coupled with a stress-induced nightmare.
But that's what it had felt like, being in that dream-space with her. Suffocating. And the cuts on my hand were real. My phone was still a spiderweb of cracked glass. The memory of her voice_'This is where the monsters live'_was an echo burned into my brain. I had to get out. I grabbed my keys, Beatrix's chests_her life story scrawled in crimson cursive and the intricate jack-in-the-box she'd built just to fuck with me_and hauled them out to the Ram. The whole world felt slick and unstable under my feet, like that pier in my Japan dream.
Doko e itte mo moeru. No matter where you go, it burns.
Driving was like breaking the surface of water after being held under too long. I aimed the truck toward the shop, the familiar route a flimsy shield against the burgeoning weirdness. The sky was the color of a day-old bruise, a sickly purple-grey that did nothing to soothe my fraying mind. The shop was dark and quiet when I arrived. I dumped the chests in my small office in the back, the one that always smelled of old parchment and dust. I needed a drink. A real one. The motel's cheap-vodka-and-tap-water cocktail wasn't going to cut it tonight.
I flicked on the desk lamp, its yellow light a small circle of sanity in the gloom. My gaze fell on the second chest, the one marked 'My Life.' My hand hovered over the cold metal latch. Every instinct screamed at me to leave it closed, to take the fifteen grand from her collectibles and just walk away. Let the dead bury their own damn dead.
But curiosity has always been my most persistent demon.
I flipped open the lid. A stack of notebooks seemed to mock me from within. I picked up the one on top, its cover bearing a crossed-out number and the title, 'Queen of Madness.' The handwriting inside was different from her usual script. Tighter. More controlled, yet pulsing with a frantic energy.
'A fog twists on the edges, a desk in the center. She comes to me here. Whispering tales for me to tell.'
I dropped the book as if it were hot. I fumbled in my desk drawer for the emergency bottle, the one for when the world completely flops. I chugged a quarter of it in one go, the burn a welcome distraction. I picked up the journal again.
'First, she tells me poems. Then, she asks for my help. She says she uses my spiritual body to handle the monsters in the shadows. I can't see them. She can. Her eyes are made for this place.'
Another quarter of the bottle went down, but slower this time. The hesitation wasn't from the booze. It was from the quicksand feeling, the sense of being pulled under. One person's crazy dream is one thing. But two people having the same hallucination? That's not as likely. Maybe she slid subliminal messages into her writing and I got turned upside down. Right? Yeah. That had to be it.
'Then she invited me to her condo. In the center was a tree with glowing fruit. Twelve sideways rectangular windows lined the back wall. It was foggy, and though there was light, I felt like I was underground. From the treetop, a fountain poured down into a pool at the tree's base. On my left hung a painting of a bridge connecting three orbs against a background of clouds: black with a gold railing, connecting an orange•large•top-right orb, a green•medium•center orb, and a blue•small•bottom-left orb. A staircase was built around the tree in a quarter•90° spiral, leading to another floor. The tile was obsidian, the walls white, the trim silver. She came for me there.'
An extremely detailed mind-reel. I took another sip, this time just for the taste. An anchor. But what good is an anchor when you're already lost at sea? A ghost ship crewed by skeletons, music drifting up from below deck, but no one at the helm.
'First day, she came into my reality. She wore my face instead of her own.'
A dream bleeding into reality. That part, strangely, was relatable.
'Second day, I saw her in every sliver of darkness_in every cabinet left ajar, under every door. Just her eyeballs and that eyeshine.'
Now that's a fucking scary visual.
'Last day, I woke up to her choking me. I broke free, but she caught me by my hair, and I did the unthinkable... I bit the bitch's throat out.'
What?
'Now I write about it like it's nothing. Just talking.'
A Jungian experiment gone horribly wrong. Beatrix found her shadow-self, but I don't think the blonde goddess was part of that package. That's what felt so familiar about this whole thing. Beatrix was integrating with her own inner darkness. Everyone's experience with that is different. Some have no trouble. Others, like her, get physical manifestations of their inner demons. But this doesn't explain the goddess. She allowed Beatrix to use her spiritual self? To vanquish what was on the edges? Was this some kind of egregore_a shadow being crafted by a trickster whispering in her ear? In myth, that 'glowing' is always 'eyeshine,' and based on my one encounter, the blonde radiated a malevolence that felt ancient. Yet_she wasn't acting purely evil. She was acting like a guard. I took another shot, trying to wash down the absurdity of the conversation I was having with myself.