Chapter Text
Hey, guys.
My name is Jonah. Haven’t been around these parts before, but I’ve been hearing about it on end for years now. Always sounds like something new or weird is happening around here. Any other week, I’d lean back, smirk, and say I’m jealous.
I’m sure that sounds overly formal, but I can’t think of any better way to ease people into this. To put it bluntly, my problem isn’t just that I’ve gotten no sleep.
I’ve lived my whole life in Bustersville, Minnesota. Never heard of it? I wouldn’t blame you. After some trips to Lubbock and Levelland, I’ve come to realize it’s about as generic a town as you could find. We barely even have any store chains, most of them are just generic labels. “Gary’s diner,” “Books-a-plenty,” “Laundrorama.” If you ever think about a generic store or hangout, chances are you’ve got the layout of one of these down to a T.
The sleeping issues only started about six weeks ago. My best friend held a huge party for his little sister’s birthday, but it went wrong in so many ways. I could sit here all day expositing about it, all that matters is I unwittingly went to bed past midnight. Ever since, I’ve only been able to wake up on time about twice.
I’ve tried just about everything in the book. I’ve taken sleeping pills, set an alarm, watched a comforting show, listened to a CD of calming tunes, none of it has made a dent. It’s not a huge deal, mind you, my job doesn’t really require me to come in at a specific time anymore, but I’ve desperately missed that sense of normalcy and routine. Oh, have I ever.
My problems only really began to start two months ago. You know that friend from before? His wife (Alice, 34) overheard me talking to him about my troubles, and suggested that I try getting myself a new mattress. The only place I could find that sells them within city limits was an oldie, just labeled as “Mattress House, for your Homes.” In retrospect, I should have just bought one online as soon as I saw that name.
The one I went for isn’t anything special. I was tempted to look for a purple one (that’s my favorite color), but the cheapest option was only $500. The most interesting things about it are just some lime highlights and how long it took to make it fit through my doors. By the time I actually figured it out, I didn’t even need the mattress anymore! I just needed to take a deep breath and lie down.
I got down and closed my eyes. After four minutes, I adjusted the pillow. Eight minutes after that, I turned to face the east side of the room. I was still asleep at 10. At 20, I gained a mild headache. Assumed it was just from how I was laying. I put my face into the pillow. At 34, the room started to get cold. I almost thought to myself that I left the window open, but thinking would have kept me up longer. A little over an hour later, it just kept getting colder, almost like I was in a freezer. Enough was enough.
I tried to open my eyes. Nothing happened.
My eyelids felt like they were frozen in time, but I didn’t think that hard about it. I tried to rub my eyes like I do in the morning. The closer it got to my face, the number it became, until I jerked it back and couldn’t move it any further. My hand was now stuck closed, but I could hardly even tell. As my body started getting colder and colder, I felt my arm less and less, not even able to fidget it around anymore.
I tried to roll off the bed in a panic, and that I did. I just didn’t fall off the bed. As things reached a minimum temperature, I couldn’t feel anything. Not my hand, not my arm, not even my body. All I could do was think and feel the chill, but with no mouth, I couldn’t even shiver. There was no air, no texture, nothing but an empty pain. I tried everything I could, but nothing worked until I managed to look up.
My eyes were never closed.
Above me was what looked like dirt. After a moment to take everything in, I came to a sound conclusion. I was in the middle of a lucid dream, and above me was bedrock. Just like that, any ounce of fear I had disappeared. I tried to get a better feel of what was above me, and that’s when everything clicked. If I focus on something, that’s where I go. It was like I was a floating ghost eye, or a spectral telescope. Easy peasy.
In no time, I managed to fly(?) my way outside of the dirt. I call it dirt, but it didn’t fully occur to me that’s what it was. It looked almost reddish, and it only gained texture when I got close enough to it. It was like one of those optical illusion pictures where you’re supposed to see Sonic’s head in the middle of some wave-like shapes, or something like that, but without anything actually there. Probably not the best example now that I’m typing this all out loud.
Before I knew it, I woke up exactly on schedule. The first thing I did was reach for the alarm clock with the same hand I tried to scratch my eye with. Good as new, like nothing ever happened. Everything on that day went about as normally as I wanted. I took a shower, grabbed a bowl of cereal, sat in a chair for six hours, all that jazz. By the time I was about to go back to sleep, I had all but forgotten about the dream.
In truth, I’ve been having this same dream on and off again ever since. At first, it was the same thing verbatim, but by the time I started questioning why I kept having it, I discovered something new. I could go through the dirt. In an instant, I went from being in-between a gaping void and layer of dried mud to floating above my hometown. In that same moment, I almost felt weirdly excited, seeing everything from a fresh new perspective.
My first thought was to get the hang of moving, which came to me far more quickly than I expected. From there, I tried to check my reflection, see what cool ghost design my mind whipped up. All I could see was the inside of my neighbor’s house, I couldn’t even see a reflection of his tree or bushes. This dream lasted only a couple more minutes, but by the time I woke up, it was noon.
Three days later, I had the same dream yet again. This time I was able to phase upwards instead of clipping into the ground. I was not in my bed. I just thought to myself ‘makes sense, you can’t see yourself in dreams.’ From there, I tried to look around a bit. I flew all around the neighborhood, looking at stuff from weird angles and cracking dumb puns. I assumed this was just what every lucid dream was like.
Two days later, I made a breakthrough.
By this point I had gotten kind of sick of this dream. It wasn’t the only dream I was seeing, not even when I had it. The day prior, I phased into the ceiling while having a normal dream about… eating postcards, and was mildly disappointed I couldn’t explore the volcano land of that dream. Having gone through the floor dozens of times, I was starting to question where this idea even came from. I knew a guy in high school, Roger, who liked to screw around with a game called Big Rigs. Always said he could “noclip” through everything and drove faster by going backwards.
I decided to just float around aimlessly, maybe checking out a few places that could have given me the idea to turn into a ghost or whatever. My body(?) hardly even felt like it was cold at this point, the temperature (I assume absolute zero) just felt par for the course for these trips. Thinking back to the idea that this was inspired by the game, I caught my sights on the local arcade. I was never much of a gamer, but I passed by the arcade every time I went to the grocery store. Figured there might have been some reverse Ghostbusters cabinet I partially forgot I saw, or something like that.
Instead, I noticed a series of lines. A dotted line, to be precise, protruding out of the building in a vaguely circular shape. It then occurred to me that these same lines were underneath the streetlamps. These lines were where light was supposed to be. Just as I started piecing this together, I accidentally got too close to the glass, and I saw him.
A young boy, about thirteen years old.
If I could feel my jaw, it would have completely dropped to the floor. Never before did I consider the possibility of other people being in this. Sure, he wasn’t interacting with me, but he wasn’t supposed to be here either way. Turning around, it dawned on me what he was doing. He was seemingly homeless, with a dark navy hoodie covering a bruised, sad looking face. He seemed so relieved at the internal heating and lights, he didn’t even seem to care about the games.
Just as it occurred to me to try interacting with him, I sprang out of my bed, struggling to breath. I quickly got to my feet, only to realize my alarm hadn’t gone off. After catching my breath, I tried to stretch. I wasn’t tired. I looked at the clock, and it was 6:00 AM. You try telling me how that made any sense.
For the first time after that, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. The strain it held on my mind felt eerily reminiscent of when my life flashed before my eyes in middle school. Not helping was that it didn’t take me long to get some clues to what happened. The second I turned on the TV, I saw a report on the kid. Turns out he wasn’t homeless, but he was a runaway. If you hadn’t already guessed, I had caught the infamous Tommy Rokkler, that one kid who’s been on the news for the past few months. The initial story was that he fled from Deevens to escape an abusive father, only to actually meet his mother. Realizing what I had witnessed was like peeling off a bandaid that proceeded to pull off my arm.
I’m sure I sound crazy saying this, but whatever was happening to me wasn’t a dream. Believe me, I checked online. I had to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy. I checked every record of where he went, what times he was spotted, I even found someone who figured out the precise route he came into town from. It was physically impossible for me to have already seen him before I fell asleep. All this time, I had a superpower.
Unfortunately for me, I was in denial about the situation.
I didn’t enter ghost mode, or whatever you wanted to call it, for another week after this. I almost thought that this realization “cured” me of it, but alas, another night, another trip. This time was different; I proved to myself that I was projecting outside of my body, meaning I could potentially do some good. On Monday, I spent my free time looking into potential crime bases or shady alleyways. On Tuesday, I spent my night checking all my candidates while I could. On Wednesday, I realized this was a dumb idea and that this town wasn’t interesting enough for credible threats.
By that Thursday, it finally hit me that I didn’t even know if I could even interact in that state. Everything I saw with Tommy was stuff he would have done regardless. As it happens, this also marked one of my odd days off, so I had the time to think this over.
On Friday, I just decided to wander aimlessly, while paying more attention to my surroundings. In the state, I wasn’t exactly able to blink. Not that it stopped from doing it on instinct. After realizing I was seeing everything devoid of light or shade, I accidentally strayed too close to a neon sign and blinked. All the sudden, everything looked normal, with the dotted lines being scarily accurate markings.
I wasn’t able to figure out the specifics or order, but from then on, I tried to see what else I could do. I went to the park, thinking that I could potentially freeze the fountain or do some weird trick. Instead, I was quick to find two more people, about my age. Two young women; one black, one brown. Looked like they were in the middle of a conversation, but I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. It sounded like they were speaking English sideways.
Instinctively, I tried to reach out for them, but I had no mouth. I tried to wave, but I had no hand. I tried to take a deep breath, but I had no lungs. Once again, I tried to blink, hoping to activate some convenient power… and that I did. Without warning, everything around me froze. The fountain, the birds, the clouds, the women, they were now all stiffer than a statue, and I had no idea how.
For a moment, I (rather stupidly) assumed this meant I paused my timer, and so I thought maybe I should experiment a bit. I tried to think it over, and before I knew it, I felt… weird. It took a second to realize, but I was capable of generating light. To me, it looked like a spotlight, but it felt like a mix between an arm and a tentacle. At first, I tried to waggle it around. I expected it to work like a cursor, but the directions never made any sense.
When I wanted to aim it left, it went up. When I tried to go down, it went east. A few times it even just straight up teleported to spots outside my field of view, which thankfully reminded me I wasn’t seeing in 360°. Someone out there’s probably smart enough to figure this out, but it felt like walking through a maze blindly. Whatever the case, I tried to see what I could actually do with this.
It immediately magnetized to one of the women. Before I could try to move away from her, she began to float upwards, meanwhile the other lady was left motionless. I tried to move my arm away, but as soon as I did, I noticed something new: her eyes were now moving. I tried everything in my power to let her go, but the more I tried to fight back, the more parts of her began to animate.
At first, it was her left foot, which she tried to flail as much as she could, until her fully laced shoe fell off. Next, it was her elbow, which she jerked as much as an elbow could, banging it against her neck as if to knock her head off somehow. By the time her hips activated, she was able to move her limbs, but not her joints. Even without a voice, I could tell she was in unimaginable pain, throwing her limbs around in ways not even the world’s greatest contortionist could. Everything I was doing was just going to hurt, so I tried to stop.
As I was trying to calm down, I couldn’t help but notice something… off. Just as I unwittingly blinked, she had stopped moving. Instead… she began to melt. Slowly but surely, her body was slowly turning into an olive green puddle floating twelve feet in the air. Her eyes were the part that took the longest to convert, and they were as distinctly horrified as one could get. I tried to blink again.
She was now a statue.
Just staring at her was one of the most haunting experiences in my entire life. The sheer look of terror in her face got worse the longer I was situated there. I tried to look away for a second, hoping to get the inspiration for some way to fix it. When I turned back, what used to be her clothes were slowly being converted to resemble an ancient greek dress. In a panic, I tried to blink again, while thinking to myself how much I wanted her to be back to normal. She was now converted into a doll.
I spent what had to have been an hour there, and she only became increasingly less recognizable. While a doll, she went back to being dressed like herself, but her gaze was replaced with a forced, generic smile. If her soul was still there, she would have been wishing she were dead. If it weren’t, it was my fault for killing her. All this did to me was show my mind was playing a role in what I could do in this form.
Making matters worse, it eventually dawned on me that there was another woman with her. I couldn’t get a good look at either, but from her perspective, nothing had happened. She was just as alive as the grass or a kitchen counter at the moment, the last thing she saw was to her left.
Me.
Just like that, I instinctively retreated eight feet. The woman was back to normal. As normal as a bleeding corpse could be.
The next week was a haunting mirror of the Tommy incident that only got worse and worse. When I woke up, it was 9:30, not that I cared. I rushed to the TV, and there she was. The woman’s name was Heidi, and her death was all over the news. Veronica, her wife, was as horrified as you can imagine, describing it as her suddenly tripping and collapsing like she got shot by an invisible bullet. The only difference between that morning and the night prior was I could do nothing to hurt her any longer.
The next night, I was back in flight mode, and I had enough of it. There was no exploring, no investigation. I wanted no more part in this. When I realized I had to wait it out, I stayed in the ground, contemplating my actions. Her death was solely my fault, and yet there was no way I could stop myself from this ever happening again.
For the next week, I did everything I could to try getting to the bottom of my situation. I cleaned up the entire room, only to get no results. I went through several mattresses off eBay, Amazon, and then finally Mattress House again. I slept in the guest room and crashed at all my friends’ houses. I even tried to reevaluate my medication and diet. Nothing was able to cure me of whatever I had gotten myself into. Best I could do was try and fall asleep through my ascension.
Things were only able to get somewhat better on Monday, when I stumbled upon a new update on her case. Somehow, she was now alive. You would think this would be all over the net, but I only managed to catch it while surfing random channels on TV. According to the station, she just emerged from her coffin while in the middle of her funeral, the only remaining evidence of her death being a white streak in her hair.
I repeat, nobody paid notice to the woman who came back to life. As far as I can tell, she didn’t even have any sustaining injuries, just the white streak. She’d probably just be able to dye it back to normal anyway. By this point, I truly wanted nothing more to do with this gift, curse, whatever… but this was my mistake. The moment I fell out of my next dream, I knew what had to be done.
I rushed back to the park as fast as I could, only making sure the world wasn’t paused. I was able to get back to where I was in a flash, I think even getting back to the same angle. I checked above and below the spot I saw her, nothing out of the ordinary was there. I tried to stray too close to a midnight jogger, he didn’t budge, even when stopping for a drink. I was so desperate for answers I was contemplating approaching her, but that would require some kind of proof. What would I even be able to tell her? Was she even awake when I was corrupting her body? I had a million questions running around my head, but only one would really get any direct answer.
Why was it starting to get hot?
Behind me for lord knows how long was something I knew for certain wasn’t supposed to be there. At first, I thought it was some kind of giant floating head, with some weird ring circling it, but that became more of a stretch the more I looked at it. Every detail felt impossibly long, as dark as it was clear. The best I could call it was a visage, almost vaguely reminding me of a flying saucer. It was staring right at me.
I tried to hide by a tree. Dumb as it was, it still saw me. I went into the sky, only to be met by multiple of the columns I previously created. For the first time in this journey, I truly felt a sense of dread. Whatever this thing was, it was after me.
I tried to flee to the very bottom, right where I started. The lights couldn’t reach me there, right? It was in the middle of the ground. Instead, I was given a front row seat to something I truly never considered being able to see. A sea of greasy, white of tentacles, slowly tearing the ground apart, atom by atom. I couldn’t even see the Visage, but it didn’t matter. I fled as quickly as I could, trying to think of anywhere I could hide.
My gut reaction was to try blinking again, and to my shock, it actually worked… to an extent. The Visage was completely immobile, but not frozen. It looked like it was in considerable pain, becoming almost cubic or like a sedimentary rock with no beginning or end, but all that mattered was I had an opportunity to escape. We were now in the middle of the suburbs, it would be ideal to just hide inside one of the houses.
By this point, it had felt like I was just flying through walls. If this meant I unlocked a body, got used to this form, was coping with the imminent threat, anything of the sort, I didn’t care. The most obvious place to hide was a closet. I frantically tried to find one, hoping to respect whoever this house belonged to. Regrettably, the only closet I could find was in the bedroom.
I tried with all my might to pay no mind to the people sleeping, but without eyelids, it was hard to look at. Not that there was much to even gaze towards. For a moment, I thought that I had stumbled upon two decapitated heads, but the faces looked far too… calm for murder victims. Reluctantly, I took a closer look.
There were two people in the bed. One male, the other female. The only reason I could even tell was because of the heads, which laid face up on top of their pillows, indented like they were faced on the side. In place of their bodies, were seemingly random organs and bones, floating in mid-air. None of them were moving, and none of them possessed any form of shading or… soul, if that makes sense. It was like staring at two mannequins at a science conference, yet I could immediately tell they were real people.
After seeing the Visage, I tried to keep a level head and not think too deeply into this. I took one last look at the couple, and the father was now slightly more realized. Like they became more alive the more I looked at them. It was only then did I realize I was wasting time, and fled out of this house. To my luck, the Visage was seemingly still molting.
The only other immediate place I could think of was the Mattress House. As crummy as it was, I was pretty certain by now that the mattress itself wasn’t the problem, so chances are the Visage wouldn’t find me there. I tried to make myself comfortable, immerse myself in the surroundings. Pretend it was a normal day, during the day, where I was simply on my way to buy or sell a product. I thought back to the owner, Clementine Barnes, or something like that. I could see whatever I wanted here, and she would never know!
I acted out a whole conversation in my head, about how much I got to do and see… even if I couldn’t touch anything. I tried to immerse myself some more, pretending that I could leap onto the mattresses like a pile of leaves. I told myself all kinds of jokes, but it wasn’t enough. I thought back to when Ms. Barnes first sold me the mattress. By the time I was done, I had realized I could feel my hand, firmly on my chin.
The first thing I felt was my body coming back. It didn’t materialize, or even feel abrupt. It was like I was back to normal, in all but sight. I tried to get a good look in the bathroom mirror, but I couldn’t move. First I was stuck in a generic, thinking pose, but soon, I started to move against my will. It was like being encased inside my own body, as it walked over to the purple mattress I wanted and laid down, just like with the people I intruded on.
The walls all began to slowly tear themselves apart, almost like they were melting out of existence. Soon, so did the floors. Then the entire town, except I could still see it. I could see all of it, in fact. I could see everything in town, all at once, while it was slowly being destroyed in ways I cannot describe. In the center of it all, the Visage was staring at me. I call it a visage, but it made no expressions I recognized. Not until I stared closely at it.
The more I stared, the more I could make out a vaguely, humanoid face. It was almost pixelated, but instead of cubes, it was made of microscopic stars, not that it looked very different. I tried my hardest to fight back at it, but the more I thought, the more we were both surrounded by a rich, blue mist. I couldn’t tell you what it was or whether I was in control of it, but I couldn’t help but feel this is what Heidi was seeing.
This was all yesterday.
When I woke up, all I could see was the blue mist. I didn’t even realize I had woken up until I saw two firefighters rush into the house to rescue me. I’ve been in the hospital ever since. Nobody has been able to identify the mist or where it came from. When I first arrived, the first thing I saw was the image of the Visage. It’s been on every TV for the past five hours.
I’m sure this all sounds crazy, I’m sure you people can see about a dozen or so holes in the story, and I’m almost certain I’ve gone in circles a few hundred times already. What matters is that this is all I’ve gone through. So far. Could be delusions, could be drugs, I’m even more than willing to be convinced it’s all some prank by Alice. This is the first time I have ever told anyone what I have been experiencing, much less expressed through text.
When I first started going on these treks, I was ignorant and incurious, yet safe from any real danger. Now that it’s crossed into my regular life, I’m not sure if I’ll even have a tomorrow. All I can do now is pray the Visage doesn’t find me awake.