Chapter 9 - Always A Door
I came back two days later, three if you count that it was almost two in the morning. I was in a different mindset following a mass layoff due to the virus affecting all businesses. I did not want the night to end because the next few days would not be easy. The essential jobs were likely to be the only form of income, but a lot of people would be unemployed until the virus died down. At the very least, I did not want to worry Lila about the things happening in my reality. I would get by somehow.
As I entered the room under the library, I found her sleeping there on the couch. Maybe since I provided my day-night cycle, she aligned to it. I did not want to wake her. Her face looked so calm and I wanted to keep it that way. Rather than leave for the night, I went upstairs to see if the alchemy-magical circle she made in the floor had any success over the days I had been away. It became apparent that it did not capture the person in question, as the drawn strands of wood curved into a lotus flower of warped flooring.
I circled it for a moment, then motioned at the lotus to try and mend the library. It did not budge at my creationism call. Instead of giving it a rest, I pushed harder, hand outstretched to the formation in yearning to make it work. This was no longer the library Rebecca lived in. It was just a copy from a story. Maybe the shadowy man was also from a story, brought here against his will only to question his reality. It could have been someone from the Garavand story, an advanced form of the shadow cloak perhaps. That would mean physical form, which would definitely get trapped in the magical circle now lotus.
The night was getting to me. As I caught my glasses from slipping off my nose while nodding off at the screen, I knew the day I wanted to never end, the night that I never wanted to become dawn, was already past. I did not get to speak to Lila about my troubles, and I could not do anything about the man in the shadows. Once more I pushed with my mind onto the object in the library, but the lotus did not budge. I was powerless in the above library, but it was mine to begin with. I clenched my fists one last time with intent to heal the floor, and thought I saw the wood stir, but it had to be the sleep deprivation finally hitting. I would be back the next day to explain things to Lila.
break
I came back the next day without much change. I formed up in the room downstairs, but she was not around. It was too early for sleep. No matter what, Lila would keep trying to contain the mystery guest. The question was whether this shadowy person was in the untethered space from the start, or if they somehow arrived into it. I had a terrible feeling that I brought him out. Creationism was that difficult of a beast to control. Giving something life was easy, but taking life away was akin to murder. Lila had no problem with it, but as with Finn and Rebecca, my issue with that stemmed from spending my life alone with my thoughts.
It was those endless thoughts of possibilities that expanded into the theory of the Infinity Void, somewhere I could go even after being a bad person on the basis of society. I wanted it to be a place that did not judge, because even though many people in the world have flaws, they are just people. I loved the idea that after death you could see what pain others suffered to get a true account of their actions. What if anyone could paint the worst figures in the world based upon their suffering from a first-person account? I only wanted to understand, even if some wanted to kill others or instill a new order based on belief.
It was all the same in the end, but my dive into the mind questioned where my ideas for stories came from. The idea of stories endlessly repeating circled my mind into a circular reasoning argument. The ideas repeated because they all happened already, and the place where they all went was accessible by everyone freely by a fragile connection of the subconscious to that one impossible space of no matter or time. I looked within the idea, and found a voice there. Other voices joined the babbling brook, reaching out to me for recognition. Before I knew, it was a torrent of voices all screaming to live again.
It fractured me. I could not focus on my life while a part of me wanted to note down every idea and explore it. I split JJ off first, the mind of endless wonder that kept me childish. Without him, I saw the grimy world in a way that most adults perceive it. That was when beast became the prominent driving force, to trick those I found attractive to let down their guard. I wanted to hold living flesh in my hands, then squeeze until there was no life left. I wanted to take from those with the brightest smiles, use them and leave them to the cold realization that they had not found someone after all. He was a sickness in my head, and had to be divided out.
I shook my head. The thought had me stuck on the spiral staircase. Lila was probably upstairs, trying to figure out a way to contain something that was possibly immaterial. All the while, JJ was thinking that I created the being myself when I wanted to have Lila tracked for my own selfish reasons of simplicity.
“Lila?” I asked the library room, once I managed to continue my ascent. I scanned the open library with bookshelves and the staircase to the second floor, but she was not there. The tall windows peered out onto the darkness, yet the inside was bright as day. “Are you here?”
“I’m upstairs!” A voice called from up the stairs.
“In the bathroom?” I called after her. Something caught my eye in the window, and I turned to find the menacing, golden glowing eyes that Lila described. They hovered at the top of the central window then angled as if the person tilted their head in confusion. Just how much of a full being was this shadowy person. I motioned to try and capture him, but nothing came to be at my call. I was powerless in the library. If I wanted to bring something out, it would have to be from the stories I knew. I decided to produce a communicating device to learn more about who this was.
“Hello,” I said, lifting my hand to snap a FRisk module into being. “Can you tell me what you want from Lila?” I threw the module at the window. I knew the panes were made of sticky glass, a substance perfectly clear until broken. The broken glass turned ooze, holding the orange puck in place. The eyes remained still, until the orange disc vanished into the dark. I created another FRisk and hesitated before putting it to my head.
“I’ll be right down!” Lila called from upstairs. I wanted to tell her about this, but there was no point until I knew more. I affixed the module to my temple and waited. If he was watching, I hoped he would repeat the motion to link our thoughts, if he had any. I felt nothing while looking into his eyes, until I saw myself inside the library from his view. The eyes closed, setting the whole library to look like a simple line drawing. These were not normal eyelids. When I opened my eyes, I saw the yellow eyes in the darkness again. Beyond his vision, and the strange sense of cold all around him that I enjoyed, there was almost nothing left of him.
Left of him? Why did I think he was missing pieces? I could not understand why, but no being could be that empty. There could not be a living being… Maybe he was a ghost. Were there rules to ghosts that they retained their memories? Was an emotion said to keep the spirits locked to the living plane of existence under some voodoo notion? What if a ghost was simply emptiness, a void-being left behind after everything else had been removed. Even if I got absolutely nothing from him, he got life from me. I watched his mouth open glowing yellow, and the glow darkened to an orange hue instead. It had about the shade of a sunset now.
“Jack! There he is!” Lila shouted from the top off the stairs. I looked away to Lila, and when I returned the glowing face was gone. She ran down the stairs, almost tripping near the bottom. “He was there, did you see it? What’s… a FRisk?”
“I wanted to communicate with him,” I said. A deeper emptiness hit me like a heartache. Something so empty had no reason to exist, and yet it was still sentient and curious enough in the endless void to find this weird spot of untethered space that was actually tethered to not only two worlds but the whole of the Infinity Void. At least as the source code of it. “There was nothing on his end. It was like he was empty beyond emptiness.”
“That was dangerous, Jack!” She said, and came up to remove the FRisk module from my temple. “Did anything reach him from your mind?”
“That, I don’t know,” I said. “I can only assume that an emptiness such as his, would seek to be filled.” I felt an eerie sensation that I had not felt in a long time. It threw me back in time to before Rebecca and Finnelgamin even existed. Before the torrent of ideas from the Infinity Void was the normal mode of my brain. The emptiness that he felt was peaceful to a degree, yet so very sad.
The doorbell rang all of a sudden, turning both Lila and I to the door. A feeling of dread shivered at my back. I did not want it to be Kara, or anyone from before. It COULDN’T be anyone from before. Rebecca left, cutting herself off to make a new universe somewhere else. Did the reason that the small room ended up in untethered space mean that someone from the Infinity Void had access to it? The bell rang again, but Lila held back my motion to walk over.
“This could be a trap,” she said. “It often is in moments like this.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I can just vanish from here instantly. You can use some sort of creation to teleport yourself to the room downstairs. I feel like... I need to answer the door. Why is it always a goddamn door? I think it’s a deep-rooted idea to expect strange things behind doors. It’s overused, but how often is there a doorbell? It begs the question that whoever is on the other side is smart enough to lay a trap, or to be courteous. I think we need to flip that coin.” I motioned for Lila to let go of my arm. Her hand tightened, then released me. The bell rang the third time, this time repeating three times.
“Hello,” spoke a voice I was far too familiar with. It was my voice. A sudden memory of an old episode lit up in my brain. It was about a copycat creature from a strange new environment that a group was touring. The creature in question put itself into others however, unlike this instance. I opened the door and was met with shock. My own face was staring back at me at the door on a body just like mine.
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