Odyssey

My leg.... my leg won’t stop twitching… please…

The white looks like it keeps shrinking day by day. From all sides. I’ve tried getting out. They took away my arms for it. I used to have a bed too. I tore it apart in an effort to find a hole, so they threw me into one of their bed-less chambers. You see, the hole I was looking for so desperately was one that lead somewhere else. Of course I knew it was futile without the potion, but I did it in the hopes I still had a little bit of the potion left in me. Even a little could have helped. Heh, I guess you could call me Alice. Heh heh…

Ah, good. The Man in the Skin Coat is back. Has he…? Yes, he has the potion with him! Finally, thank God! I lay down on my back on the floor so the Man can bless me with the glorious potion. His coat reeks of the leathered skin from all his experiments past. The blessing hurts a little less than it used to with every session. A small incision as the price of temporary freedom? Hell yes.

I feel the surge. Oh God… I’m being dragged from my body, man… it’s like the rush of a waterslide but through space and time. Then, almost as quickly as it happened, I come to a halt. Nothing but black now. I’m floating; my body was disintegrated during the transition. This isn’t the first time this has happened. One by one there are tiny white specks opening up in the darkness, all around me. Some bigger and shinier than others. Nine specks in particular make themselves known to me somehow.

The Messenger.

The Lover.

The Life-Giver.

The Savage.

The Ruler.

The Provider.

The Observer.

The Dweller.

The Gatekeeper.

Nine of them. Nine voices. They say they’re the guardians. They’re telling me what lies beyond their realm. Something they’ve been holding back since before time began. Something never seen by the eyes of man and should not be. I try to reach out and touch something, anything, but my body’s back in the white room. One by one the shining specks in the distance begin to fade, like the closing of a thousand eyes. I feel the nine entities closing in on me. They want me. I feel the vacuum bringing me back to the white room. They’re chasing me, they’re trying to take me. I don’t want to go. They want to do something horrible. They need to feed the thing they’re guarding. I know that this has happened before. I’m not the only person this has happened to. The Man in the Skin Coat has more prisoners; more sacrifices. The remaining specks in the distance fade away as I drift back into the white room. It takes me a moment to move myself around again. The Man is gone. Gone to some poor other bastard. We were wrong. So very, very wrong.