If you have been reading Angelfall, I hope you are enjoying it, and thank you for the support.

Obviously, a plot is already in motion, but it's not the only one. There may be other things hidden that may also be very important.

Think of it as a clue hunt. Everything you find opens the story to understanding a bit more.

Sincerely,

Thryden

pmtuliel rsiatelosiepn

The weather had improved, even if my condition really hadn't.

I woke up in the alleyway later, a throbbing ache in the front of my skull, with no idea where I was or what happened. Until I remembered the ambush, and Anti the not-demon.

I hobbled out of the alleyway into a dreary, grey morning. On the sidewalk, I decided to make a call.

I pulled out my phone, dialed a number. Waited for the call to be picked up...

"Hello?" asked the voice on the other end, though she knew perfectly well who I was due to my contact name.

"It's me," I said, knowing this perfectly well, too.

"Will," she said in a tired voice, "what's up?"

"Not Will. Matt. My human name is Matt," I corrected her. My human name is Matt Faller, but when I was an angel, my name was Will. We tend to call each other by our angel names, but it's not a good idea in my mind.

"I know," agreed Rebecca, also known as the fallen angel Sophia. "What do you need, or are you calling uselessly?"

"Something's wrong," I said. "There's someone new in town."

A pause.

"Where are you?" she asked, suddenly all business.

I gave her the address, and she picked me up relatively quickly.

Soon, we were cruising at a safe but boring speed and talking relatively quickly. I told her about the alley.

"Anti?" she asked. "That's not a standard demon that I can think of..."

"When I asked him his name, he waited a second, too," I added.

She swerved slightly, the car slowed down, and then she regained control.

"He what?" she demanded.

"He's not a demon, but he's not human and he's not an angel, either. I don't know what he is."

Rebecca shook her head. "There's something seriously wrong with this."

"You think?" I commented.

She gave me the can-you-please-shut-up look I tend to get from her a lot.

She sighed. "If anything else Anti-related happens, tell me. You have my number, obviously."

It took me a second to realize we had reached my apartment.

"Well, nice talking to you," I said, climbing out of the car, closing the door without looking back, as we've done in more ways than one. But I won't get into that.

I walked into my apartment, took my shoes off, collapsed onto the couch. Next thing I knew, I was asleep.

End of Chapter One

"So... are you coming?" the man asks you. Since nobody actually left a comment deciding either way about trusting the man and getting in the car, you just stood there between stories and struggled with indecision.

This, Reader-Character, was a terrible decision, but it had to happen.

When the man sees you staring out into nothing, he decided to make your decision himself. Of course, he couldn't leave a comment on the site, or possibly control the in-story world by pure force like some beings can (you, like me, must avoid them), he just did it in the story.

He suddenly grabs you and drags you to his vehicle. The people who are standing around watching just ignore this, figuring it's something you only really understand when you're involved.

You, of course, don't fight back because you're still thinking.

He throws you in the trunk, which he slams closed, and climbs into the driver's seat.

You realize where you are (bit late there) and attempt to escape, but it's too late. You are now being kidnapped to buy kittens, a situation you did not expect waking up.

Here's the problem with this situation: nobody knows where you are. Other than me, being the author, and you, and, of course, the kidnapper, your whereabouts are as good as nonexistant.

"HELP ME!" you scream, which probably doesn't help, considering the fact that a) it's a little late to do since you're already in motion, and b)the driver's the only one who can hear you in the first place.

Where will you end up? Good question, even I don't know, and I'm the one writing this. That may not necessarily mean that I'm the only one controlling this story, but that's also besides the point.

After a while, the car stops. You hear the car door open, then close, because you're in the car and this just makes sense. The man is about to pull you out of the trunk.

So what will you do? You can either go along with it or possibly fight back. If you leave a comment making your decision, that decision will be made. And no, I'm not comment fishing, I'm just making an interactive story for you. A story that I'm not telling actively, you must look for clues.

So what's your decision?

I'm just going to write something.

I don't know what. Most authors brainstorm a plot beforehand. I don't really have any ideas. Or any characters. That's why I decided you can be the main character.

Now obviously, I don't know you. You might not even be reading this because it looks like some boring book on the Prose like all the other ones. But I want to be different, I'll be honest. I want to be famous, to have even Prose itself be like "That's pretty clever". The idea of you being the main character's pretty fun too.

So let's see...

You wake up. This is rather normal, and rather unfortunate. You're right where you always sleep, just wishing you could pass back out and not wake back up for a few blue moons.

Here's the thing, Main Character. You don't really have a choice, unfortunately. I have a not-plot planned, but you have to be awake and ready to go along with it.

Let's just imagine there's a knock at your door. You get up, you go to the door, tripping over your own feet out of fatigue.

You open it up.

"Who is it?" you ask.

"It," I answer, "is a middle aged man you've never met with a bundle of papers that are apparently especially for you in his hands." Of course, being the dashing, honest author I am, I'm not lying. I just made that up as I typed it.

"Hello," he says, smiling. "I'm selling kittens."

Here's the thing. I don't know what you would normally do in this situation, but then again, this is a typed story. Whatever you would normally do, no offense, does not matter. I am controlling this story. As our parents once said "Just go along for the ride."

You decide to see if his offer is legitimate or not. How you do this, I don't know, but you get bonus points for trying.

You almost ask him where they are, but that's a dumb question, so don't ask it. You ask instead how much he is selling them for.

"$25 each," he exclaims happily.

What a deal, don't you agree. Ah, I don't. How about we raise the price a little. Maybe...

"$50," he exclaims happily.

Whoops. I seemed to have forgot a word. See if you can figure it out... yes, each, that's right. I accidentally made it cheaper, now it's $25 for the whole litter.

I can fix this.

"$5.0 each," he exclaims happ-

No, I hit the wrong key.

"$50 each," he exclaims happily.

You agree this is quite a steal, even though your old deal of 25 for the whole litter was ruined. You settle for things easily, apparently.

You check your money supply. You have... ah, I won't insult you by saying it. Let's just say only one of those kittens will soon be yours, and you can share your drywall diet with it.

You agree to buy one.

"Great," he cheers. He points to a car on the curb. "Just hop in and I'll take you there!"

Readers, this is your choice. Do you want to go, or not? I personally wouldn't, but feel free to leave a comment deciding. Maybe in the next installment, you might actually get a choice.

Until then, you'll be paused staring at his car and thinking very hard about how you're going to raise a kitten.

I am a fallen angel. I am also one of you.

I could sit here all day and explain exactly how this works, but I can’t. You cannot know who or what I am. That would be dangerous.

Suffice it to say we are among you each and every day. When an angel falls, we are born into a human body. We are like you, yet we are not.

There are thousands of us, yet you know none of them. We keep our secrets well. We do not endanger you. We protect you.

Because there are worse beings than us.

It had been raining all day, and at a drowsy eleven at night, the ground was wet. A light mist blanketed the city, and street lights appeared to have haloes in the glow.

I walked down the street, wrapped in my own thoughts, leaving work, though my lack of a vehicle made it slower than I would prefer. My route also took me through the baddest part of town.

I was not concerned with this. If somebody attempted to hinder me, they would quickly regret it.

You do not hinder a fallen angel.

I turned into a small, dark alleyway, hoping to cut a little travel time off of my journey. The walk home could be so long, anywhere between a half hour and double that.

I felt the air stir on my skin, and immediately I knew something was wrong. My vision, stronger than the average human’s, caught a flash of shadow in front of me, as I sensed movement behind me.

“Stop right there,” commanded a cocky-sounding voice. I could barely contain a smile.

So the local kids wanted to try their luck?

I slowy raised my hands, making sure to keep them displayed. “Having a nice night?” I asked.

They seemed silent for an instant, wondering why I was acting so brave. Apparently, they decided I was faking it.

One of them, a tall man with a cruel, chiseled face, stood right up in front of me, and growled “Keep that mouth shut.”

“Righty-o,” I said, and just as his face contorted with anger, I slammed my fist into his chest, throwing him back across the alley.

I heard and felt a knife, slashing through the air, and, with a grin on my face, spun and caught it as though we were simply playing catch.

“Dull,” I commented, glancing at the blade, before snapping it like a twig and body-slamming its wielder against a dumpster.

The third hoodlum attempted to fire a gun. He was soon unconscious.

I heard the first man approaching yet again, and I felt my eyes glow white as I bent the light in the alley.

Every fallen angel has a power, what we call a trait. Mine happens to be Lightwielding. even in a dark room there was still a surprising amount of light. In this alley, there was plenty.

I solidified the light and threw it like a wall behind me.

I heard nothing...

Suddenly I felt hands on my shoulders, and I was thrown into one of the brick walls bordering the alley.

I landed and quickly glanced up. What was this man? A demon? He had to be, he wasn’t a fallen, I could tell.

He picked me up the the throat, slammed me against the wall, and pain lashed up my spine.

He leaned into me, a hateful look on his face. “Little fallen angel want to mess around in my part of town?”

“Who... are you?” I gasped, my windpipe closed off by his fist.

He didn’t answer immediately, which scared me. When a fallen asks a demon their name, the demon will immediately answer.

He seemed to take his time, though it felt longer being unable to breathe.

Finally, he tilted his head. “You can call me Anti.”

That’s when I finally realized his eyes were a strange color - a deep, dark purple, the color of fear.

He slammed his head into mine, and I remember nothing after that.

My name is Matt Faller. I am a fallen angel, and I battle things you couldn’t being to comprehend.

End of prologue...

itnA

edis krad ruoy ma I

I didn’t remember being in that house. Then I did.

It was as though I had been in that room for some time, but just noticed it. I wasn’t sure how that made any sense; I didn’t remember getting there, and I sure didn’t remember just standing there, staring at an unpainted wooden wall.

But now that my sense had returned from whatever fugue I had entered, I overruled the senate of my mind’s indecision, the part of my mind that wanted to keep staring at that wall for a while, and ruled that the most important thing to do was look around.

I was in a small room, with bare, dirty wood walls, an uneven floor, and a broken cabinet. A bedframe sans mattress sat nearby, simply taking up room. Flecks of paint, a remnant of previous life dotted the walls.

At least, I hope it’s paint…

I fought away these negative thoughts when I looked at the bed. A picture frame sat face-down on the bedframe. I walked over, my steps seeming like thunder in the death-quiet room, and picked up the picture off the bedframe.

The room seemed to get even quieter, except for the roar of blood in my ears.

It was a picture of me, younger, sadder, standing with my parents in front of a lake. Mom’s curled hair. Favorite hat. Sunglasses. Dad’s signature khaki pants. Smile on his face. Salt-and-pepper hair. Me. Hollow looking. Like there was nothing left but eternity and emptiness.

Memories flooded through me, as unstoppable as a hurricane, as smothering as a drowning flood.

I was thirteen. I lived with my parents. Our house was a short walk’s distance away from my grandparents’ house, so I visited a lot.

My grandfather was a tall, burly man with large hands, but a kind face. My grandmother was thin, but lively at the same time, somehow slender in a healthy way, with glasses that expanded the size of her eyes. They lived in a nice, one story home that seemed huge when it really wasn’t. This was due to my grandmother’s skill as a decorator… and to the caring atmosphere that rebounded off every corner. We were always in the family room. It had comfortable chairs, a television that collected more dust than channels, and a door that attached to a small bathroom. A convenient coffee table served as just about everything from cookie pan pedestal to board game holder to scrapbook shrine.

Although she unsuccessfully tried to show it, she had struggled with illness often. But there was no hiding the blood she occasionally coughed up, the pain that crossed her face often. The doctors had diagnosed her with cancer on top of the tuberculosis she already knew she had. Then she finally lost it, though in her own little way., baking pans of cookies for the five of us to enjoy a little too often, and talking about the past. About memories. About school, uncomfortably. Even about the senile, blind dog that had been buried where she had always buried her favorite bones. But she never talked about medicine, or doctors, or illness, or the big C word, the dragon that hung over every conversation, watching us as it gazed at her. We never talked about anything so grim or gray

But I’ll never forget the day that we were invited over, like any other day. What I regret the most is that, on this most fateful day, I had to use the bathroom. I walked in, shut the door, and prepared to do my filthy business.

Then I heard a voice outside the door, a voice that has haunted my nightmares and conscience since.

“Grace?” My mother’s panicking voice. My grandmother’s name.

A silence deeper than dying eternity answered back.

I willed myself to go faster, just to speed up, because something was happening right outside the door, and here I was. It frustrated me then; it haunts me now.

Mom’s voice again, like a hammer to the gong of fear.

“Grace!?!”

She sounded terrified.

I was done, finally, but even then, freed to help, to save a life, I froze. I couldn’t react. I simply stared at myself in the mirror, fighting a losing fight to build up the courage to simply twist a doorknob, pull, that’s it.

But I don’t. I’ve never stopped blaming myself for this, and I never will.

“911!?! It’s my mother-in-law! She’s on the ground, she- sh- she’s unconscious I think, she’s not responding, she’s- GRACE!?!”

I could hear my mother tearing apart in that one syllable, unhinging. Some instinct in me, a cry in the soul, cried out in pain, but I was paralyzed, petrified.

The world seemed to become a roar after that, like a waterfall hitting a lake, and I was just as beyond help as my grandmother was physically. After that, she checked for a pulse (faint), and listened for breathing (fading).

Yet there I was… in the mirror… staring back at myself. I wondered if this was a different person. The fear in that person’s eyes couldn’t possibly be a part of my life. I didn’t understand.

Next there was a blur of ambulance cabs and waiting rooms.

And there I was. In the hospital room with my grandmother. She had woken up, and was asking for me. I remember walking in from the waiting room I had been sitting in, and seeing her, so frail and thin healthy no longer. Her glasses had been removed, and somehow the shrink in her eyes seemed to be the final sigh that she was going out of this world.

She looked at me, and a weak voice that could not possibly be hers whispered “I… love you…”

Somewhere in me there was a tearing sensation. Something had finally cracked, I thought, as a single tear trickled down my face.

I looked back at my grandmother’s face, just as she spoke.

“The darkest path… shall soon be light….such is the…nature of day and night.”

A short line she had come up with as a child, that she had used constantly to remind us that all bad things end eventually. An irony beyond painful as she laid on her deathbed; not a comfort as she intended, but a mockery of her situation.

I remember crumpling to the floor, hearing a flat beeping noise as my grandmother’s golden heart stopped, a flood of blinding tears… and then another longer, more painful blur.

They told me later a tumor my grandmother had had had blocked a blood vessel, and she had essentially slowly bled to death from it. Brutal. Painful.

Hopeless.

A war had soon begun in my head. Self-hatred. Blame. Grief. Rage. Loneliness. Or all of them in a single deadly venom. Through the hospital, being at home, the funeral, my parents’ tears, staring out the car window, the war raged on and on. My parents soon decided that a vacation would help; maybe being away from home, from the neighborhood, might just cut off the memories that preyed off of me so remorselessly even as they were built up of remorse.

We packed our bags, something that somehow felt painfully final, as though we had finally hit the switch on my grandmother’s life. As though she had been alive in my grieving until I tried to recover.

This only made my pain worse.

I looked down at the picture, feeling all the pain that was back, the blame and the hatred and the remorse and the rage…

But even as I felt it, it melted away like something half felt, even as the memories slowed to a trickle.

The picture had been taken by an old lady who had passed at an opportune time. My parents had smiled, bittersweet smiles if you knew how to read them. I tried to smile, too. But now, looking at the picture, knowing its backstory, the smile looked flimsy. It seemed as though the explosions from the war in my head gleamed in my eyes, giving me a soulless look.

I could feel the emptiness returning, slowly. I needed to distract myself before I lost myself.

I turned and looked at the door. There was something beyond this room, this reminiscence, this old wound.

I walked to the door, opened it slowly, wary of any danger to my wellbeing – at least, an external one. I had no idea what I was so afraid of, but something seemed wrong.

How had I gotten here? Had someone drugged me and put me here, or maybe knocked me out? But how had I lost so many memories? And why would someone put me here just to watch me break slowly from old pain? An experiment? If that was true, I didn’t appreciate being a guinea pig with the curse of self-awareness.

I leaned my head out into the hallway, looking left… right. I was in an extremely long corridor, all like the room I had been in, terribly worn, broken down, planks exposed. On the right end, it seemed to end at a T junction. The other end seemed to sprawl infinitely into the distance.

What was this? Some kind of military base designed to look like an old, broken down mansion?

I took the left route into the infinite hallway, and started to walk through what seemed to be Time itself, it was so long.

It seemed to be longer than the universe itself; the end of the hallway remained as something to be imagined only, but the only thing that told me I was making progress was that the hallway, if it was possible, got worse. Holes appeared in the floor, that seemed to show the corridor below me, making me feel like a hopscotch player as I avoided the weak parts of the corridor I was in. Nails randomly protruded, but somehow I managed to not nick myself.

Then I made a single misstep. I heard a SKRAK! As the floor collapsed out from beneath me, and I felt my heart plummet, apparently imitating me as I slammed into the corridor below the one I had been in.

Pain blasted through me, and I felt my mind snap loose for a second, simply stunned from the landing, unable to breathe. There was a timeless moment as my mind tried to react to what had happened and failed miserably.

Then my initiative came back, and although the pain didn’t fade, I could at least think and breathe again. I took a look around…

…and gasped.

The entire hallway was – I’m not sure how to put it – brutal looking. The walls were spattered with blood; nails randomly stuck out of the walls here and there. It looked like a murder scene, an unsettling phantasmagoria of pain and death.

I slowly set off down the hallway. More blood, more nails, more cracked planks… the hallway didn’t seem to change at all. Just one infinite stretch of physical and mental agony.

A few times, I glanced over my shoulder, feeling the instinctual tug of pursued prey, but all I saw was darkness as the hallway faded out of view. I felt as though something was hunting me, hiding in the dark recesses of blood, but when I tried to find it, it laughed at me in my mind and danced out of view. I quickly became unsettled as I felt like this entire mansion was staring at me inwardly, grinning madly, eyes twinkling, as I lost myself in it.

A door loomed out of the darkness, and it actually startled me, my nerves were wound so tight.

As my hand moved toward the rusty, dented knob on the door, I felt myself freeze. What was behind the door? A staircase, hopefully? But as I glanced around at the macabre decorations of the hallway, I began to wonder what this entire house was really about. Was it just old memories… or was it something darker?

And why was I the one becoming subject to that darkness?

As I very slowly opened the door, I felt like a goat, mindlessly being led to his slaughter, but wondering what the leering looks of the onlookers was about, why there was a blade against my throat, what happened to the world I had known –

I slowly stuck my head through the door I had opened.

On the other side, a single trashy bed was in the center of the room, misaligned and holed. It looked as though it had seen too many days of use taken for granted, as though it was weary and done with this world. A single dresser stood against the wall, dreary and badly painted, standing as oblivious sentinel to guard the room it didn’t see.

A moment passed where I felt as though my soul was being torn out of me, as though I was a glass tower that had cracked and was now collapsing under its own weight.

I recognized this room. It was mine.

On the bed. A cracked leather belt. Fear, as I realized exactly where I had seen this room…

Two years after the death of my grandmother, my parents were gone, too.

A car crash. A single second of dodgy driving. Two lifetimes cut short like so much yarn.

I knew way too much about the accident; morbid curiosity had forced me to learn how the two people I loved the most in the world had been killed. As though this was really important knowledge.

Like I couldn’t live without it.

My dad had been driving. They had been cruising down the road, happy, innocent, at a speed that no police officer would look at twice. Letting the world mind itself.

A truck, massive and modified, had been driving at a speed that would make an officer pale and pray for safety. The people in that cab had been heavily intoxicated – alcohol, drugs, stupidity, all of the above.

I had not been with them. I had felt a little sick at the time. Not a gut-busting retch-a-thon, necessarily, just your everyday sickness. A little under the weather, not on top of your game, feeling a little crummy. I hadn’t wanted to go, and they had agreed like the fair, perfect people they had been.

The only reason I was alive after that accident was because I hadn’t felt like spending time with them. Guess I got what I wanted.

I had gone to an uncle on my father’s side of the family, an uncle I had been warned about excessively. Just like the people in the truck, but more evil, more psychotic.

The first two days had been fine. Just grief and regret and self-blame, but at least it had been uninterrupted, left to die on its own.

On the third day, my uncle Gordon had gotten a raging hangover. When he had reached that state, everything had been wrong, inappropriate, unfixable. But he would do everything he could – mostly cursing and hitting – to make himself feel like the problem had been sufficiently cowed.

I still remember that day. He had walked into the living room, a foggy look in his eyes, like a bear out of hibernation with a raging case of indigestion. His eyes had landed on me, and what I saw in that face made my spine decided that the weather wasn’t cold enough.

“Did you clean your room?” he had asked, and some kind of malevolent, hatefully satisfied spirit had shown in his eyes, like a wolf spotting prey. I had always compared him to a wolf after that.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, though the words felt out of place. That ‘yeah’ should have been intended for my parents, not for this wolf-thing that was staring at me like an unwanted stain on his favorite shirt.

“Too quiet there!” he yelled at me, spitting and waving his hands like a signaler on an airfield waving a plane down to land. “YOU NEED TO SPEAK UP LIKE A MAN!”

Suddenly he was gone, babbling to himself and walking out of the room in a cloud of beer smell.

What was that? I wondered.

“I don’t know,” I answered before I realized what I was doing.

And then Gordon was back, and there was a belt in his hand, and he was swinging it, and I was screaming, it burnt like a small sun, and he was yelling at me to yell, but I couldn’t, there was too much pain-

This carried on. Over and over for three years. Somewhere, I heard about a lion that wanted to be free. A song, I thought. And that became the struggle: I was a lion, he was a wolf. Lions and wolves.

Every time I turned around, Gordon had found something that wasn’t up to his muster: for example, “YOU DIDN’T GET THE MAIL!” and “THE KITCHEN’S NOT CLEAN!” I learned that belt’s texture better than I could remember my parents’ faces. And that was what cinched it. The only reason I was here was because I hadn’t loved my parents like I should have.

I deserved what I got. Lions and wolves.

I stared at that belt on that bed. Something like a hand from the grave crawled up my body, maybe it was my parents finally pulling me to where I belonged –

I needed to get out of that room. That hallway.

This mansion.

I turned and pushed the door open, trying to remember where I was. I paused as I felt something funny about the atmosphere around me.

I slammed the door as hard as I could, and that’s when I put my proverbial finger on the not-so-proverbial problem

I couldn’t hear the door.

I clapped my hands together. No noise. I spoke aloud, saying “Hello,” and didn’t hear it. No noise.

I turned to the right, and darkness confronted me.

But something was seriously wrong with this particular patch of darkness. It was too deep, too well-shaped…

It took me a moment to realize it was moving toward me.

This Darkness was different from the black surrounding it. Almost intelligent in the way it moved toward me.

As it moved toward me, I felt something foreign and unwelcome in my mind. A shadow as dark as the one in front of me. Something was developing in me, and I didn’t like what it was

I turned heel and ran as fast I could without stabbing myself on a nail or slipping in the blood, racing through the depths of this infernal mansion, not hearing it as a Shadow leaked/floated like a liquid/cloud fluid that simply wanted my soul.

A staircase came up on my left, and I turned, took the corner too fast, tripped onto the staircase, hurt my arm. I tried to get up, but that’s a little hard to do face-up on a staircase. The Shadow, at the foot of the stairs, following me up the stairs, barely feet behind me, and that developing mind-cloud seemed to get louder as it was dead-silent.

I spun, threw myself up the stairs, swung a left.

I took a few more turns, but the Shadow, well, shadowed me, chasing me like a tail. I had to hide, or this mansion would become my tomb.

I recognized the hallway suddenly. Door on my right, T-corridor at the end. I had reached the room I had started in.

But it was too late, the door was behind me. I’d have to lose the Shadow before I could go back in, but I couldn’t, of course, since I needed the room to lose it in the first place.

I reached the T-corridor in complete silence, took the left turn, dived into a room on my left. Wardrobe, bright colors, not important, and now I was inside the wardrobe.

I did my best to quiet my breathing, which, considering the circumstances, wasn’t exactly difficult. I had no idea if sound simply stopped existing when the Shadow was around, or if only it could hear. I wasn’t sure I wanted to test that.

I could barely see through the cracks in the wardrobe door. Could just see the door on the other side. The jamb, a small stretch of the door’s top.

I slowly caught my breath, and I wondered where the Shadow had gone.

And there it was. Seeping under the door like a weird mix of gas and water, following me, knowing exactly where I was, ready to tear me apart and leave nothing behind.

The Shadow seemed to look around the room, seeming almost predatory as it hunted me out like a wolf. Lions and wolves, I thought again, though I was a Cowardly Lion if I was hiding in a wardrobe and watching the wolf try to sniff me out.

I closed my eyes. Seemed like a terrible, great idea: see no evil, it stops existing. Any scared child can tell you that.

I stood in that cramped space, listening to my heartbeat, just hoping, praying –

Listening

I opened the eye I had jammed against the opening. The room was finally empty.

I slowly opened the door, glancing around like a mad bird, but there was nothing but sun and grass there.

That is, painted sun and grass. The walls were covered in a painting of a field, with grass and a sunset sky and flowers and rivers. The bed was fluffy and pink, even though I didn’t like that color.

On the bed, as usual, was a memento. This particular one was a toy lion.

Lions and wolves…

After I turned eighteen, I moved in with a high school friend. I finally was able to enjoy my life. College. Writing (I wanted to be an author as my life goal). My friend and I got close, and somewhere we kissed, and somewhere we slept together, and somewhere we agreed to be everywhere with each other.

We had two kids, both boys, and we had a nice house as a few of my ideas for books actually got published, which was the most surprising thing that had happened to me in approximately twenty-one years.

Life was looking up…

I put down the lion and glanced at the door. Back at the bed.

What was this mansion? Bloody hallways, lions and wolves, brightly colored rooms, happiness and sadness, pain and love… was this an experiment using my memories?

I took a step back and didn’t hear it.

Poof. Into the wardrobe.

The Shadow came in, and now I found myself wondering what that thing was. A hologram? Smoke and mirrors? Just without the smoke. Or the mirrors. Pfft.

No, that was something unaccounted for in this dark place. That Shadow was an accident, a mistake, a screw-up, an unintentional thing. An error that was currently trying to kill me.

It was an experiment gone wrong then. Or was it the effect of memories on the survival instinct of the brain? I was no psychologist – my entire understanding of the human mind was basically two phrases; lions and wolves and trauma isn’t fun.

The Shadow was gone, I could hear myself think (basically revving in neutral; a lot of noise, not a lot of results) and I made my final decision.

I had to escape the mansion.

I opened the door, and sprinted, hearing the steps. I passed the hallway I had started, in the left part of the T-corridor now, and I pushed all of my strength and energy into running as fast as I could.

The mansion was like a maze; it turned in on itself, spun circles, went up, went down, but I didn’t feel like I was actually getting anywhere…

…until I found the staircase. It was straight and surprisingly long, probably going all the way from my floor (second or third?) to the ground floor. The ground floor, where the exit was, the way out of this mansion, this experiment.

I took a step. The stair moved. I didn’t hear the creak.

I turned, and the Shadow greeted me.

It was humanoid now; its old, undefined form was gone. Now it looked like a werewolf, almost, and lions and wolves, with unnaturally long arms and a feral expression.

It pushed me down the stairs, and something about that physical contact burst the bubble in my head, the developing shadow I had forgotten, and hate, regret, loathing, poured out, filling my head. I pushed it away, plummeted for the second time, and all those emotions finally did their job, dredged up the past, the pain I had hidden…

…life was looking up…

…I managed to awkwardly jam myself between the walls on either side of the staircase, stop myself from falling all the way down out of control, from potentially breaking my neck…

...but most families are fortunate enough not to know the pain of losing a child from cancer…

…I stood up, and the Wolfshadow was coming down toward me, and like the proud, valiant-hearted lion I was, I ran, away from the Shadow, because if it touched me, if that hate came back, combined with these memories, I would stop breathing…

…we did everything we could for that boy, but he was gone, then, and we felt like we should have done more…

…I flew down the stairs, sensing the Wolfshadow move down behind me, ready to consume me as it broke my mind, crippling the prey before it killed it, like a vulture watching death do his job…

…my other son, like a blessing to have then, ended himself, followed his brother, and that ended the relationship that shouldn’t have been able to end, brought an end to my infinity…

I was in a large room, the entry room, and the Wolfshadow was right behind me, right there, and I was almost ready to give up, but I wouldn’t…

…I hadn’t then…

…and I wouldn’t now.

I was almost out. There were two big doors on the other side of the room. The exit. I was there…

…the death of my sons drove their parents apart. I was alone then, and that was the worst pain. But I did what I always had: blamed myself.

I got pets to make up for the pain I had caused myself, but they were temporary, there and gone, dogs and cats, lions and wolves, and I had to put every single one of them down, but I was still there, lonelier and lonelier, in that lonely, dark house, the greenhouse of my torment, just wishing for

The end. I opened the door, the Wolfshadow chasing me, and I ran through, expecting to see open field, grass, sky.

Instead there was a hospital room. Bed in the center. Life support. And in that bed…

…it was me...

…the older me…

…the real me…

Isaac Thompson had had a hard life. A perfect relationship with one Corrine Malkers, a perfectly good couple, until that dragon Cancer carried out its terrible wrath on them.

Isaac had eventually got in a car accident, and the hospital crew caring for him wondered whether or not that made him happy, just obliviousness, somewhere to run too.

He had gone into a deep coma then, and they knew he would never wake up, he would simply tick away like a clockwork until only eternity was left, and then it would end, too.

The hospital crew sometimes wondered where he was right now. In Heaven? They knew he certainly deserved it after the hand he had been dealt. They had no idea…

…that I am in the Mansion of my Mind.

I turn around, see the Shadow, but now it is an undefined, cloudy shape again, almost fragile, the way it floats there.

The rooms: different chambers of my mind, with the memories that belonged in them. I just journeyed through the darkest parts of me, and yet I still feel as though I missed the point.

But I knew why I was in the room. It was finally over.

The End.

I had to move on.

I walk to the version of myself on the bed, look back at the Shadow: my hate, my anger, my self-blame. It tried to consume me, but it failed.

I turn back to the real me, reach out, take my own hand…

And nothing happens.

I frown. Maybe I’m wrong. Am I reading the grand scheme of the universe wrong?

And then my Mansion tremors. A spark comes into view.

I am moving on. The Mansion is finally collapsing after years of barely standing.

And then I know why I don’t feel complete yet.

The Shadow fades, moves away from me, and I act on a last instinct.

I follow it.

I chase my Shadow through my Mansion as it burns down, and I know there is something wrong with this. It’s not over. Lions and wolves.

But now I and the lion are one.

I’m getting deeper and deeper into my Mansion, into the dark recesses, and I know what I am about to face.

All problems in the human psyche are subconscious. They create tremors that affect us on the surface. I have to face the problem before it can leave.

That’s a hard concept, moving on.

The Shadow goes through a door, and I follow it, and fog surrounds me, a room of mirrors, and the floor is dirt, soft. In front of me, a grave is recently dug.

The Shadow retreats into the grave. It’s gone.

I wonder if that was it. Pfft. What a therapy session. Oh, brother.

And out of the grave climbs Me.

Or at least it’s almost me. I’m apparently locked in my teenage state, and that’s what I was looking at, except for the eyes.

My eyes are green

His eyes are black as Death Itself.

I climb out of the grave and look at myself.

There is a moment of quiet that passes, me, myself, and I, lions and wolves.

And then the other me speaks.

“So, long day, right?” he asks.

I can’t speak, I’m stunned into silence. Apparently, the other me senses this, but he doesn’t care, he just goes on.

“This whole time, you blamed yourself. You created me.”

“I…” I start. I gather myself, I continue “I created you?”

He laughs, a cruel, cold leer. “I’m a part of you. I’m a part of everybody, in my own way. That little voice. But that’s beside the point.”

A burning plank lands right in front of my feet.

He looks down at it. “That’s the point. We’re dying. So I have an offer: let’s go out how we lived. Rebellious. Lions and wolves, right?”

I take a step back. “What do you…?” I stutter, but again, I cannot speak.

He grins, and I think of a wolf’s skull. “Life sucks. It really does. But I have an offer: get over it.” There is a cold tone in his voice, and he stalks toward me with incredible speed.

I retreat, running into my subconscious, the hall of mirrors. Every reflection is the voice, and I jump every time. The fog hides the ground, and so I cannot tell where I am.

“Where ARE you?” howls the Hatething, somewhere else in the maze.

He’s playing with me. He knows where I am. Exactly where I am.

“Are you scared?” I hear him taunt. “You deserve it. You should have been in that CAR!!!”

The room tremors, and a flaming chunk of wood shatters a mirror near me, killing that other, reflection me in the mirror, but the Hatething’s still in here somewhere.

I run into a long corridor of mirrors, and the Hatething meets me in the middle.

A sharp grin covers his face, but it’s no he, not the wolf, it bares its teeth at me.

“Boo.”

I bump into a mirror, scaring both myself and the one in the mirror.

The me… in the mirror…

And I get a scared idea. This hate, this pain, this Hatething, all grows from one thing.

I turn, look at myself in the mirror, ignoring the Hatething’s triumphant gaze, as though it’s won, as though it’s taken my mind for itself.

I know this will be hard. But it’s the first step to recovery.

I take a breath.

The Hatething’s infernal eyes widen. It knows what I’m doing.

And everything happens at once.

It yells “NO!”, leaps toward me.

I look at myself in the mirror, eye to reflected eye, in the split second I have before it reaches me. And I speak. One simple sentence.

“I forgive you,” I tell myself in the mirror.

And the Mansion of my Mind collapses as I move on.

But in that last split-second, I see it. A flash.

As the Hatething simply disintegrates.

As the life support systems that were wired into Isaac went off, informing the world that he was, finally, gone, the medical crew walked in, faces grim, postures low. They had agreed that, when Isaac left, they would let him leave, let him go home and finally sleep tight.

But as they entered the room, ready to do the unfortunately normal routine, they stopped in the doorway.

Evidently, in his last seconds, Isaac had triggered a facial muscle spasm, and the muscles had held. The muscles were simply stretched, and the difference made the crew wonder where, in fact, Isaac had been in his coma.

For Isaac Thompson was smiling.

if i were psychic, then i would read the future

and see what is in store for us.

then i would rewind, figure out

how we got there, because

everything we do is leading us there.

we hate and it comes back to us

because war kills more than it heals

yet we do not see that

if i were psychic

i would tell people what they

are doing wrong so that they could

fix it, if they believed me.

if i were psychic, then i would

save humanity before it ended itself

The cemetary's been there since I was a kid.

I've never been to it. It's only up the hill, just a short walk through a rather beautiful patch of woods, but something about it has always scared me off. When I was a child, it was the idea of all those dead people, only six feet below the ground, waiting for nothing, watching with empty gazes. I didn't know what I would find there, and that scared me.

When I was seven, my father was killed in a car accident only three miles up the road from where I lived. The funeral was rather pitiful. Thirty years of love and life, ended by an unexcited old man reciting Bible verses that fulfilled nobody inside, though we pretended to be relieved of part of a pain.

Then my father was buried in the graveyard up the hill, and the fear of it only worsened. Sometimes I awoke from nightmare dreams where I met him in the graveyard. Sometimes he would hug me. Othertimes he would scream and yell until I cried myself awake.

Eventually, I determined that it was time to go to the graveyard. I'm not sure how I made this decision. It had probably stewed in my subconscious, cooked in nightmares and pain until it finally broke through the thin veil protecting my consciousness.

One morning, on a Saturday, while the world was drowsy and unmoving, I dressed in warmer gear and, as quietly as I could, crept out of the house.

I don't remember much after that. Just tree fronds and terrible fear. I was so lost in my own thoughts that even when I reached the old cemetary, I was twenty or thirty feet into the grounds before I even realized I had arrived.

Immediately, my heart was in my throat. I was finally here, after avoiding it since I had been born. It was too late to turn back; the demons I had stirred up had already seen me.

I walked slowly through the graveyard, glancing left and right, and it took me a moment to realize I was looking for ghosts.

I found his grave relatively quickly. How I found it, I'm not sure, but it was almost as if I had been drawn to it, with little choice, like a light beckoning to my very soul.

The name was easy to read. Andrew Zavil. The gravestone said only that, and his birth and death date. There were no other words on the stone. As though the people who had buried him had simplified his entire life to a name and a date range.

The next thing I knew, I was crying, hugging his gravestone, and even as I realized it I felt no need to stop, to quell the tears pouring down my face. I hadn't cried, not in the weeks since his death, but simply stayed empty, tried not to risk allowing emotions to grow simply to die.

I remembered his face. How he laughed when I made small messes at dinner rather than getting angry.

Soon, the storm inside was gone. The sun was rising overhead, and the light made the fall leaves surrounding me seem to glow.

I remembered being so afraid of the graveyard. I was afraid of ghosts, or the dead. But the only thing to be afraid of, I realized walking home, was memories.