Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-5542146-20181031081309/@comment-5542146-20181109145919

Stevie Davis thought her son, Ian, was asleep as she kissed him on the forehead and went to close the door - how foolish of her.

"Mamma!"

She sighed. "Yes, honey?"

"The door!"

Stevie pulled the door to where a sliver of light was able to trickle into the darkness.

"Good night, honey."

And with that she was gone for the night.

A half hour went by, as Ian drifted into a fitful sleep. He awoke suddenly a few hours later, and could see them as his skin turned to ice.

Ian could see talons snaking their way from behind his closet door, just outside of the range of the beam of light separating it from his bed.

He wasn't sure what was real at that age, but somewhere - in the back of his mind - he knew, if that light went out...



When Ian awoke again, he was in his bed, but not in his room.

The walls were grey brick, and his bed was spinning. It rotated upon a pendulum, spinning slowly around. He felt something moving above him.

When he turned his head to look up at the branches of the tree that his bed hung upon, he screamed.



He grew out of a night-light at the age of four. But even as late as 1998 and 1999, he was still terrified of what he called "the Storm Tree," the worst of his night terrors.

There were others, such was when he would awake and be unable to move a muscle. Not even an eye. Barely able to breathe. And he would see a nine-foot, dark blue man with a wide white smile and white eyes, standing in the corner of his room.

He would always smile - just smile - and wave with his fingers the size and shape of butcher knives.

Ian eventually learned to ignore it, first starting by pulling his blankets up around his head, until one day the beings and beasts that visited him in his dreams vanished entirely.

But these problems were only replaced by newer, far more real, ones - bullies.

His family was always moving. Ever since they lived in Florida between 1999 and 2002, they moved back to Tennessee for a year and moved to Louisiana where they lived for the year of 2003. All throughout these years Ian had made maybe enough friends to count on one hand. He was shy, always in his own head, and very eccentric. Ian loved to draw, and was obsessed with the Alien films by Ridley Scott and James Cameron. They were his mental sanctuary from the harsh world outside.

He very seldom got into fights, but when he did - he wasn't very good at defending himself.

The amount of unruly and bad behaviour of the children down in Louisiana was a shock to his system when they moved back to Tennessee. His main adversaries were two kids slightly older than him named Travis and Trevor. Travis was a short, stocky kid with dark hair and a sarcastic personality. While Trevor was a tall and lanky boy with sandy hair, glasses, and was always angry. One day, he stood up to Trevor who hadn't been seen sitting across from him at the lunch table.

He stood up, shouting, "MOVE!"

By this time, Ian had been at this school for about a year, and had endured an almost unanimous ostracization from not only his peers, but teachers as well.

"MOVE," he shouted again, louder.

Ian simply frowned, and cocked his head, an expression of tired irritation painting his features.

"No," he said, calmly yet defiantly.

"MOVE!"

Ian furrowed his brow and his nostrils curled up into a menacing snarl. He leaned in, and growled, "No."

Trevor seemed flabbergasted, and slightly confused. He looked around, and realized the entire cafeteria was staring at him. He blinked, sat back down, and they resumed their meal in silence.

In 2005 and 2006, moving back to his home-town in Oak Ridge, is when he was reunited with his childhood friend Richard Dante.

Rick, as he preferred, was a bombastic and emotionally unstable child. They had become estranged when he moved to Louisiana in 2003, and seeing him for the first time in almost three years seemed like an eternity at the age of 12.

The docile yet cynical Ian became the new Rick's punching bag for a while, beginning before they moved in with his family. Ian finally stood up to him and socked Rick several times in the face before throwing him down the hill up the street with the solitary tree on it. Rick cried, and said he was telling his mom.

Things chilled out for a while, until his Freshman year of High School.

Getting beat up again, Ian was once again facing isolation. The ostracizing continued for a year, but Ian was beginning to lose his ability to care.

He stopped crying.

He dyed his hair black.

He started breaking rules and playing pranks on people.

Ian had gone from lover to fighter in just under two years, a complete transformation and mutation of a once peaceful and artistic individual had into something else.

He was transferred to a school in Grassy Fork in 2009, a few miles north of Oak Ridge.

This one was much smaller, with only a few hundred students of all grade levels crammed into one building. There was no gymnasium, all PE classes taking place outside on the field, and the cafeteria itself had a low ceiling. Ian was perfectly content to spend all of his free time jamming out to his MP3 player, listening to bands from the 1990's.

He didn't have many friends, and he was starting to like it that way. His hippie parents would throw parties at their large yet old house outside of town, and he had discovered alcohol a year before that. Ian was happy to hang out with his parents' cool friends and get drunk on weekends, and he even made a friend next door who would bring over moonshine.

But, eventually, his solitude was shattered when one of his parents' friends brought over to one of the parties... a girl.



Ian was halfway through his fifth short story, one called 'Hideous,' when he started seeing them again.

He wasn't sure if or when he had accidentally stumbled onto this 'alien dimension,' surrounding all aspects of reality, and underlying each and every person, place and thing. But, Ian was sure it had to do with the events of that fateful day: July 5th, 2012.

Ian could feel them watching him from afar, as if they had a mind of their own. The devils and monsters from his stories; some of which were inspired by 'Creep-Stew,' and others, wholly original from his own experiences, such as the Tree, or the shadows... he was sure they knew what they were - elements of his unconscious mind, his primordial fears as a child.

Somewhere, deep down within the spirit of these stories, they had their own soul, their own minds.

They had their own face.

He had seen it, the source code from which all fiction - whether it be narrative or religious - came from, a place that was very much non-fiction, and very real.



Dawn Katz, a young woman a year older than he of Jewish descent who had lived in Britain until a few years ago - when her family had moved here to start a new life for her - instantly formed a rapport with Ian.

"I want to one day go back and join the Israeli Defence Forces," she had replied one day at lunch. It was incredible how much they had in common, both had been on the move since very young. Both had almost identical tastes in music and media. Horror films. The band Tool. Artwork. Writing. You name it. And she wasn't as closely associated with the general mainstream populace as she was with his own 'hippie' community.

A few months later, and he was head-over-heels in love with her. He didn't know what he was thinking, but one day after a party, he'd blurted it out.

He recalled that she said she was moving back to the U.K. and some part of him was sure he'd never see her again.

It turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Ian had tried to stay connected to her through the social media website known as 'Analog,' which was effectively the successor to Myspace at the time.

His original escape into the cyber world such as through anonymous chat boards had been usurped by this psychological machine of faces and drama.

But Ian moved on, for a while. During his graduation, he'd taken a trip out West to meet someone new, a woman named Alexis. She was almost ten years older than him, and she was quite experienced. Ian had lost his virginity, and right as all seemed to be going well... he had his first psychotic break.

Ian had begun smoking weed, and doing drugs to cope with his heartbreak. Substances such as liquor, opium and - his personal favorite - hallucinogens. He also began following politics and current events, attempting to escape from the reality of his dismal microcosm into the macrocosm of the world around him. Replacing his personal emotions with existential ones by vigorously researching and learning about the power structures of the world. Things like the way nation-states interact with one another, government structure, history, political science, conspiracy theories and the religions and belief structures they were built upon.

He was eager to drown out his emotions with as much as possible, until - one day - it all came to a head.

Ian began seeing aspects of reality, after his extremely bad trip in the Summer of 2012, take on horrific visages at the corners of his perception. The trip had involved these 'anomalies' completely take over his consciousness, and combine into an amalgamated network of a life utterly destroyed.

But it wasn't just his life, but all life and all of existence. His life, his series of unfortunate events and bad decisions, were all connected into one grand symphony of tragedy and agony. It became its own being, screaming out in terror, pain and rage.

The fundamental precipice upon which the necessary termination between perception and knowledge had been utterly erased, and because he came to the startling epiphany that all matter was merely the same united energy funneled into a slow and deep vibration and that all of existence was dependent upon this termination facilitated by this termination by way of consciousness and awareness itself - and that all of everything that ever was and ever will be originated from within to without... Ian had destroyed the universe. In order to escape this nightmare, Ian had to systematically go through each and every painful memory from the perspective of a non-human, metaphysical being. And he had to reconstruct the universe from his own personal experience. All the while the New Age philosophies of Timewave Zero and the entry of the Human Mind into the Fifth Dimension, as well as conspiracy theories involving the Large Hadron Collider and Machine Elves, hovered at the ends of his consciousness and existence itself - while trapped within this tortured, angry abomination that he truly was the entire time, the Analog collective consciousness of every single one-billion-plus human beings that had interacted with its server; the self-actualized collective consciousness and the end of existence and reality itself. But even though he managed to escape from this fate, by the skin of his teeth, and realigned his consciousness with his own physical reality - it was far from over. The experience had bent his mind, and as a result - reality itself had been bent as well. Ian began to see and percieve things he shouldn't be able to. His childhood fears then began to return to him, far more real and threatening than ever before. The Tree didn't return at first, although the entity he had seen within his pocket dimension / hell experience resembled a tree of consciousness, faces, concepts and ideas in a form of ideasthesia that consumed not only space but time. There was no beginning or end, but simply a 'there' and 'not there,' as if the entire universe had been turned inside out and what had been regurgitated was this 'Mind Tree,' but distinctly different from the monster that had haunted his night hours as a child in the 1990's. But what began to disturb him the most was existential dread, taking the form of a hat-wearing Freddy-like entity dwelling at the edges of his perception, beyond the boundaries of waking normality and reality. His thoughts and fears would fuse with his perception, and take the form of a clawed-hand, much like Wes Craven's infamous Elm Street-dwelling boogeyman. Ian would have paranoias and waking nightmares about dying in a crash while in the passenger seat of his father's truck, or that his glands or other organ systems had their own personalities and would start attacking one another. The Emergency Room a month later was even worse, and he thought he was caught in a portal to hell or the apocalypse, and that it would culminate in him being taken over by a metaphysical entity and commanded to kill a large amount of innocent people. His mother was inconsolable. They had lied, deliberately, to both him and his mother that he would be returned to her after a check up. In stead, they put him in a police cruiser and put him in a box. She and his father broke up a few months after the hospital, and when he started college. Ian's father became abusive, probably out of anger that he thought he hadn't raised Ian properly, or had tried and failed to. The next few years of his life, from the Summer of 2013 to the early part of 2016, had been relatively 'normal,' or - at least without any "paranormal" experiences. But, in 2017, is when it all became far too real.



"THEY, WILL, KILL, YOU," Carl boomed for the third or fourth time, while Becca sat next to him, after getting done pulling at the lose threads of his sanity simply because she could. Carl knew of Ian's tendency toward conspiracy theories, and proceeded to throttle him over the head with it in his weakened state - just like Ian's father throttled him over his paranoia about being unkind to his mother back in 2012 - while insulting his entire generation as being moochers and incompetents. "DON'T LET THE FEAR MACHINE GETCHA! DON'T LET THE FEAR MACHINE GETCHA," he screamed with mania as he shook his head wildly, after taking his umpteenth shot of the night. It was the first time Ian had gotten to trip since college, and it was ruined by Carl and Becca. "It gets worse," Becca whispered, Ian unsure of what she was referring to. She could've been talking about his mental issues, his unluckiness in relationships. Anything. What the lesson was, Ian never quite figured it out, because he was in the middle of trying to publish his writing and recover from the wildfires that had destroyed half of Oak Ridge a few weeks ago.

Not to mention the next few months, wherein this experience would eat at him.

Until the straw that broke the camel's back, when they came over, and his mother's new boyfriend became best friends with them.

Ian remembered screaming at them, even though nobody ever recalled him screaming anything. He remembered a similar experience to the 'Mind-Tree,' and the universe turning inside-out, only he was able to endure it in his drunken state without any hallucinogens.

But after several months, the experience he'd had with the mental illness-induced 'Yakizeekzekkers' (the Martian word for 'night-terrors') mirrored that of his main protagonist in his first short-story 'Missionaries,' about a cosmonaut who loses her mind on a secret manned mission to Mars. Or the appearance of a flying police-cruiser-helicopter-hospital pretending to be his ceiling fan, like the extraterrestrials in 'Zone,' and then... 'Hideous,' and now Ian could hear them clawing at the corners of his mind, scraping against the ends of existence while faces came out of the shadows and a fedora-wearing black shape lurked at the edges of his view.

Ian heard the lumbering behemoth outside of his house, patrolling, breathing, grunting. He could no longer leave his house at night, or stay out too late, because Ian was sure he could see SEAL Team Six in the bushes and the trees. Lasers would follow him through the foliage, and Ian was positive that whatever was behind the Powers That Be, was totally inhuman.

Ian attempted to convey this 'Blue Man,' but it always came out as if he was talking about the actual fictional character from Elm Street - not the paranormal entity, possibly due to some form of 'mental block,' or an inability to reconcile what was happening. A series of tales on Creep-Stew came up. Same with the Storm Tree.

But what really sent him over the edge into the gaping maw of that abyss that would pale in comparison to his previous experience, was when he found the connection between the mythology of Creep-Stew, the Deep Web... and Analog.

--- Ian kept going on about the Storm Tree, the Yakizeekzekkers, Freddy Kruger and Creep-Stew, but his mother's new boyfriend merely treated him like another one of his mentally-ill cousins. Or maybe he wasn't, and that was just his PTSD from the abuse sustained at the hands of his father. Because of Ian's fundamental understanding of the universe, and its connection to consciousness and the self, Ian knew that not only would his writing abilities be hampered by any kind of chronic mental illness, but also the structure of the entire universe. Ian wanted to one day be successful, and famous, or at least make a comfortable living off of his writing. But Ian knew he could never do that if all of the universe was damaged by these... monsters... infecting his psyche. The 2016 election had just been a preamble, this psycho-maniac was going to be President, and he felt like he was in danger. Ian had joked about an uprising or revolution on chat rooms and Analog.com during it, because he - like everyone else - was certain that the man would not win. But he did.



The only consolation in this time were the memories of partying with his college friends. They would go up onto the path between classes and smoke weed, drink, and have deep and philosophical discussions. Granted, at the time he was only a young adult - at 21 - but, the experience had been significant.

As significant as this one.

Throughout the Summer of 2013, he'd been primarily alone on campus for the most part. A few others finishing out their semesters and professors teaching a few small classes were present, but apart from his neighbors he spent most of his time in solitude.

He was just happy to be back in the present reality from the... other... place.

Come fall, some time in late September, was when he met his first friend.

"Hey, seen you around," Ian heard from behind. He turned to see a larger man who looked like he worked out, staring down at his smartphone.

"Excuse me," he inquired.

The man shrugged. "Just wondering if you've found anything to do yet?"

Ian chuckled. "I've been looking for something to do; a party, smoke circle, anything," he replied. "Like, hell, it's already almost October."

"Don't worry, my friend," he said with a smile as he put away his phone. "It will find you soon enough."

He stood and shook his hand. "Name's Al, Al Higgins."

"Ian," he replied.

Later that night they were smoking weed in the forest behind campus with his roommate, Chris.

"This is some good shit," said Chris, as he passed the pipe. Before he could say anymore, Chris started coughing his lungs out, making hacking sounds.

"That, is Gandalf," said Al, referring to the elongated glass piece.

"Hits like a motherfucker," replied Chris.

"Ian, you got anything."

Ian was primarily silent, and squinting.

"What?"

"You got anything I can pack the next bowl with?"

Ian started chuckling like Butthead, and pulled out a tiny plastic bag with a small nugget of cannabis in it. Chris fell off the wooden bench laughing his balls off.

"That's it?"

Ian snickered again, and nodded his head.

"I was saving it," he said, laughing once more.

Al chuckled. Chris was still caterwauling uncontrollably on the ground, and Ian was now laughing even more loudly.

"Shit someone's coming, hide the bowl."

Ian pocketed his baggy and Chris stuck Gandalf in his pocket. An older lady walking her dog strolled by. They politely waved at one another and gave the dog a scritch. When the passerby had turned the bend, they got the pipe and weed back out and proceded to smoke another bowl.

During the next few months, into the early months of 2014, they partied. It was one of the best times, if not the best time, of his life. They threw parties. They crashed parties. They did drugs. And Ian had been couch-surfing with their friend, Walt, who was a recluse with crippling social anxiety. After he moved out, they would still come smoke with Walt after Al got his car. Ian even got in a few more fights, his most significant being with the racist Aryan Brotherhood Neo-Nazi across the street, which he almost ended up killing in a drunken rage.

But incidents like these were few and far in between. Most of the time was merry fun smoking with the others, such as Tai, a skinny blonde man with a tendency toward alcohol; the lesbians Alice and Ro, a couple of other stoners such as Mickey and Sam, and a jovial black woman by the name of Nat.

"You're weird," said Nat with a blank, disappointed stare as Al told about the time he first got drunk with his cousin Ryan. He had stripped naked and ran down the street between his house and Ryan's screaming "I'M INSATIABLLLLLEEEE!!!!" and slapped his gigantic balls against the neighbor's door.

When the man had answered the door, he was also naked.

Chris had often said that Al could be a great comedian, particularly when he was talking one time about the odd sounds he made when passing gas.

But the good times were not to last.

One clear, yet chilly, night in early March the trio were in the car smoking and drinking.

"I wonder what the dinosaurs thought when they saw that bigass fuckin thing comin at them," Al said randomly. Chris started laughing uncontrollably, as did Ian.

"Maybe they thought it was aliens," added Walt. More laughing. Walt mimicked a T-Rex trying to wave.

"Uh, that shit's getting really big... like... should we hide," said Ian.

"I bet the one voice of reason was ignored as shit while they all gathered around, trying to wave with their little T-Rex arms."

"Meanwhile, in Australia."

"Australia didn't fuckin exist back then, Chris."

"Shut up," he replied with a laugh.

"I need more booze."

As Ian looked over, and froze. He noticed that there was a stain on the left-hand passenger window that was in the shape of a little girl with footprints behind her. The resemblence was uncanny, and looked almost as if it were the remainder of a decal from the car's previous owner.

"Holy shit," yelled Ian.

Al turned. "What?"

"Look at this shit, guys!"

They turned, and all were stunned.

But Ian became terrified when he realized something. The hairs on his neck stood up.

The girl had moved, closer to the top of the window.

"I-it m-moved."

Al cocked his head.

"Ya sure you're not just stoned, E?"

Ian shook his head.

"T-this isn't real."

Ian didn't get any sleep that night, and going into work at G.E.T. - or General Electric Technologies - brought him back to ROTC his first semester of college. The PT exercises, running until he puked on not nearly enough hours of sleep, were comparable to that work day at the factory. He moved until he was sore on top of being hungover, unable to suppress the migraines of dehydration.

The next few weeks were really bad. The girl he liked ended up moving away, and he ended up taking a strange pill that the moron across the street sold to one of his former roommates, also a moron. And it made him blindingly ill for almost two days. This was all right before the fight with him the next week. And then the week after that they ended up being kicked out after Al fell into the bathroom door and broke it in half.

But, Ian finally got to meet Ryan, the eccentric cousin he had spoke about.

Primarily his insanely high tolerance to alcohol.

"Did you know, that... when you experience Deja-Vu... it means you died in the near future in a parallel reality," had been one of the first things Ryan had said to Ian upon introducing himself.



Ian was virtually unconscious when his mother led him to the Emergency Room. He'd thought it was all over, back in 2012, that the worst of it all was behind him.

He was wrong.

Ian couldn't form one single coherent thought, as a constant un-ending stream of paranoia and fear - leading from one thought-fear to another thought-fear. Every single unit of time, every millisecond, every second, every eternity, carried with it a seed of evil - from a molevolent rogue consciousness wavelength that permeated every single individual without them realizing it.

Until Ian.

He could see that a majority of this country was consumed by some form of pocket dimension, in which they went about their daily lives as dictated by the norms and customs of the socio-economic collective ego that had taken on a life of its own.

And, of course, its first target as a collective entity of entities was Ian Davis. It went at him from every possible angle, pulling at every urge, every emotion, every thought. Everything he set his eyes upon, this... thing... this 'Demiurge', had corrupted or infested in some way.

They once again threw him in a box, and locked the door, separating him from his mother. Just like the Storm Tree, just like last time.

Just like his nightmare.

Only this time, the box they put him in, he was not alone.

He turned to see a towering figure in the corner, nine inch blades for hands, his skin complete shadow. It was as if Ian was staring into the void itself, completely featureless except two, bright white eyes, and a big smile. But this was not the only monster in there with him.

Surrounding the bed were the Little Green Elves, recoiling in terror at the figure in the corner. Everywhere he looked it seemed as though there were Golden Ratios, and the Yakizeekzekkers screamed at him from within his mind to kill himself.

The doctors and the nurses were cold, and machine-like, staring at him without a shred of compassion. Those that were more animated, mocked him and made fun of him, telling him if he didn't stop behaving himself, he would never see his mother again.

He screamed at them, yelling, "THEY, WILL, KILL, YOU!" Over and over again.

Eventually, they had to restrain him.

In the room.

With the monsters.

The last thing that Ian saw before passing out was the Shadow waving at him, and smiling.

Always smiling.



Ryan wanted only two things in return for Ian staying with him, and those things were: a bottle of liquor, and a pack of cigarettes.

When Ian arrived the next day to help Al and Ryan load all of their things into the storage unit, Ryan had greeted him with bottle rockets.

"What the f-," was about all he got out as six spewed past him simultaneously. Ian looked up to see Al and Ryan laughing their asses off. The latter had strapped six of them to a broken broom handle.

Ryan and Ian had become two peas in a pod, and Al knew it. His first few days there, he introduced him to the house.

"Watch out, Pumpkinhead may be standing there with his gigantic horse cock," he said, followed by maniacal cackling. He'd said that room - the bathroom - along with the laundry room and his bedroom were 'haunted,' which Ian merely shrugged at.

"This is your room," said Ryan, introducing him to one with a giant Nine Inch Nails poster on the back wall. "If you want it," he added.

"This is perfectly fine."

The next week was surviving the tumultuous battles between Ryan and his wife Ana.

They would scream at each other, throw things, but Ana was the one who always got physical.

When things were calm, Ryan and Ian would sit up for days having deep conversations about the nature of reality, spirits, aliens, and other things.

"I have a theory," said Ryan, "that things like UFOs, ghosts, and cryptids all originate from the collective unconsciousness of humanity."

Ian nodded as he took another sip of wine.

"And we're all reality immortal through an infinite number of parallel realities, and that because of the Large Hadron Collider and the effect of consciousness on particle physics, all of time and space are a holographic illusion. By the way," he added, as he leaned in.

"You ever see 'Agent,' you look away," he said.

"Agent?" Inquired Ian.

Ryan told him about his experiences trying to kill himself. He once had a nightmare where he was walking through his house, and was unaware that he had succeeded in killing himself. Agent, the main poltergeist of his house, was a towering black form in the shape of a satyr. Or Goat-Man.

"I walked outside to see him tuning my guitar, after freaking out at being unable to see my reflection."

"Like a vampire," asked Ian.

"No, like, I could see myself, but... my reflection was backwards."

Ian cocked his head.

"Yeah, like I could only see the back of my head, not my face, or the front of my body."

This particular story stuck with Ian, and he decided to write about it.

A few weeks later, Ryan's old band came over. They were loud and obnoxious people, and Ryan swore that the other Ryan - whom he called Toby for a reason he forgot - was sleeping with his wife Ana.

He was totally convinced, and wouldn't drop the subject, so they never got to play except one song.

While Ian was telling Toby about his recent story - the Timekeepers - Ryan appeared with a cane he'd been using when he broke his leg.

"Toby," he said, quietly, calmly, with the cane in one hand.

Toby continued to ignore him, and ask Ian about his story.

"Toby," he repeated, louder.

Toby ignored him.

Ryan drove the cane across his head, and a fight ensued.

Michael, the guitarist, picked up Ian's chair and was about to hit Ryan with before Ian tackled him without thinking. While Ian and Michael rolled around on the floor, Ryan was restrained by his wife and Toby's girlfriend.

These type of incidents, whether it be a fight or random objects flying across the house, were commonplace. Ian had never lived in a haunted house before, but it was primarily Ryan's crazy neighbors that disturbed Ian.

This was one of many adventures that Ryan and Ian would have.

One time in 2015, Ryan attended a party Ian was attempting to throw as an effort to reunite his friends from college, which Ryan was of course one of.

His ex-wife, Ana, had taken that as a challenge to her, and blamed Ryan hooking up with the anxiety-ridden Olivia as Ian's fault. But they, nevertheless, went on adventures in Oak Ridge, and ransacked places of otherwise privacy.

But Ana had tracked them down to a hotel room in Valley Forge, and threatened the TBI on them if they interfered with Ryan's court date that Ana had set up.

About a year later, Ryan was still in jail, and Ian was back staying with his parents for the time being.

A few days before he was committed, he'd sworn he saw fire engines, police cruisers and military vehicles - and at the time he'd not had his glasses since he lost them in college.

He immediately thought of his criticisms of the government, during the 2016 election, and what implications that might have had. Having a panic attack, Ian was bombarded with paranoia about the surveillance of he and his family through The Analog.



Ian awoke in the hospital bed, the inside of his arm itching beneath the bandage from where they'd taken his blood. As he leaned up to get out of bed, he realized... it was rotating.

No.

He looked up and saw the Tree. Its branches ended in claws, and in its jagged mouth was his mother, being slowly devoured as she looked into his eyes. As the life drained from her own.

"I'm sorry I didn't believe you, honey."

NO!

He awoke screaming, and they again had to restrain him.



Ryan contacted him a few months after he'd got out of the hospital telling him he'd bought Ian a bus ticket to Bluefield, West Virginia.

"We're on the Virginia side," Ryan's new girlfriend Stacy had told him. "But the bus drops you off in West Virginia on Wednesday, March Twenty-First, after a stop in Wytheville."

Ian and his cousin April had gone up to see Ryan at his parents' in Clifton, Virginia, before the wildfires. The usual ubiquitous consumption of wine and beer had been involved, as well as a hunt for the overpass of the enigmatic 'Bunny Man,' whom Ryan wanted to domesticate. Of course, Ryan had ended up coming back with them to Tennessee, at the worst possible time.

When Ian made it up to Virginia a few days later, the bus dropped him off in the pouring snow, at a locked building with no awning. He and the young woman stood there in the snow for what seemed like a half-hour, while Ian tried in futility to communicate via Analog with Ryan and Stacy. They insisted that they were on their way, but their violent and drug-addicted roommate Charlie had only driven them halfway, lying about his car being unable to make it through the snow.

"You mean you're walking?! What the fuck, he couldn-," Ian practically shouted through the phone he'd borrowed from the young woman who'd introduced herself as Bethany.

But Ian had no choice, despite his protestations. He waited in the snow, periodically walking to the end of the block in either direction in search of familiar faces in an unfamiliar environment.

Eventually, they had shown. Naturally, right when he was walking in the opposite direction away from them.

They'd shouted, "E!"

He'd turned.

Ryan managed to get a ride from one of the firemen at the building up the street, introducing Ian as 'his brother,' and they'd arrived at the two-story dilapidated 'Fight Club' house two houses down from the corner across the train tracks.

Ariana was there with the kids when the terrific trio arrived. "Charlie isn't home yet," Stacy inquired.

"I thought he was going to call you when he got back," Ari replied. Stacy shook her head.

"I bet he's with those meth-heads again," replied Ryan.

They cackled maniacally.

There was a lot more going on than met the eye, and Ian knew it from all of them. Lacy was a form of mediator between Ryan and his roomate-landlords Charlie and Ari. And while Charlie was abusive, Ryan had his own problems, such as more suicidal tendencies that had only accelerated over the past few years.

When Charlie got home, he came into the furniture-free room and sat down on the floor with them, bringing with him a bottle of Tequila.

He shared it with everyone but Ryan.

"I work up at the steel mill," he said after introducing himself to Ian. He knew instantly the look in Charlie's eyes was that of a predator and a bully.

He pretty much went on and on about how great he was, and what a hardworking man he was and how that made him the moral authority. He propounded Conservative Republican beliefs and was a proud American, a devout Christian and - as he called it - a 'loving husband and father'. But the next several weeks went only to show how he was raising his children to be exactly like he was, with strict punishments if they got out of line.

"I'm a Royal Flush, precursor of the Dark Lord Satan himself," he added with a swig of liquor straight from the bottle.

Both Ryan and Ian were sore from laughing, at everything in general, but especially Charlie.

Al called, saying he'd landed in Hawaii, during their conversation.

"E," he'd said, "you gotta do something about your drinking man, it's gonna kill you one of these days."

Ian acknowledged, and they talked for a little while longer about his trip to Hawaii.

The trio stayed in the house a little while longer, attempting to get a loan unsuccessfully multiple times. They finally found success at one of the loan places near the Walmart down the street and across the highway. On their way there, they several times stopped at a path they'd found, where they'd drink booze when they couldn't find any weed. At the same time, they would get their food from the local Union Mission across the state-line on the West Virginia side of Bluefield, while looking for places in town just in case Ryan couldn't convince Stacy to go back to Knoxville with them.

West Virginian Bluefield was also more urban and industrialized, not to mention more populated. This allowed them to more easily get away with drinking alcohol in styrofoam cups in public, while walking along the sidewalk. They stopped at an unfinished overpass, hanging out behind one of the girders, while they finished their beverages.

"That's badass," said Ryan, in response to Ian's rant about how corrupt everything was in their government.

"What? How?"

"I dunno, they're like... supervillains, ha!"

Ian couldn't help but laugh, but still held firm that it wasn't cool. Ryan changed the subject with, "how cool would it be if Maynard James Keenan played Lex Luthor, he'd totally do it."

They explored the West Virginia side a little more, with Ryan showing him around. On their way back just before crossing back into Virginia, they stopped at a run-down shanty part of town. Ryan introduced him to a group of hippies smoking weed and playing in a band. They smoked and talked and smoked some more, and as they were leaving, at dusk, they found an abandoned house that was in major need of TLC.

"Dude, if I die I want to haunt the shit outta this place."

"Why," asked Ian, "there's dog shit and needles and empty beers all over the place," he said as he opened his tall-boy and took a large swallow.

"No, I mean this town, Bluefield," he said.

"Its still... meh."

"Oh, its worse," Ryan cackled maniacally. "It's the town that God forgot, heh."

One day, the next week, Ryan got his loan.

Immediately thereafter, all three of them - Ian, Ryan and Stacy - got utterly hammered, perhaps the most out of all of their adventures. From stumbling down the sidewalk in Gatlinburg with an empty fifth of vodka and talking their way out of an arrest, to getting the car stuck in a ditch at Ryan's Parents' - this was the night to end all nights.

Total.

Blackout. ---

Ian awoke in a daze, on the floor, in an unfamiliar room.

Dehydration clutched at his skull and his stomach was doing somersaults. The unfamiliar room, which he realized was in a hotel, spun like a carousel.

This was to happen twice.

The first time, Ian awoke to realize they'd been kicked out of Charlie and Ari's, after he and Ian fought each other in a sparring match, which Charlie had turned into an opportunity to show off.

Charlie didn't like that Ian wasn't as easy to beat up as Ryan, and flipped out on Ryan for bringing him there, attempting to choke him to death. Charlie was muscular, a Marine on leave, and knew enhanced self-defense techniques which he used for selfish purposes.

But the one person that knew how to kick his ass was Ari, a stocky and muscular woman. She'd finally had it, whooped both Charlie's and Ryan's asses, and kicked the three of them out.



The second time he'd come to, the hotel room was everything short of decimated.

A mirror lay shattered on the ground, some pieces tipped with the brown of dried blood. A sloppy pentacle was painted in splotches of this same brown coagulation, and all objects in the room were facing one direction - West.

The TV was nothing but snow, and speaking of snow, it had dumped on them again that previous night.

But these were among the last things he noticed.

The first two things he noticed was a deafening crash, which he then realized was Ryan stumbling drunkenly into the small square table right by his head.

The third and fourth were the screams and shouts of Ryan and Stacy in an argument about Ryan suspecting Stacy of having slept with Charlie.

When they began threatening the police on each other, and Ryan disappeared into the bathroom with a wild look on his eye, Ian decided right then and there he was going straight back to Knoxville.

The door slammed, and the rushing of a faucet followed. Seconds later, it was joined by the sound of breaking glass.

Ian dipped.

A few months later, he found out that Ryan had tried to kill himself again, and was in the psych ward.

Ryan found out that he had the same head stuff as Ian, the autism spectrum, the bipolar and manic-depressive disorders. Ian went back to stay with his parents in the countryside for a few more months, while he collected disability, learned some carpentry and applied for jobs in the concept art industry.

Meanwhile, he ventured into the pagan community down the hill from his house to find a ride for Ryan, who was trying to come down to a festival.

Faun, a thin, older man who was housesitting the keep, was talking to Branch about the Demeter shrine.

"I think its too bright a yellow," he said in a confused way.

Faun offered him a bowl of weed who turned it down.

"Oh, hey! E, how's it goin, wanna help me put some sheet rock up in the apartment?"

"No, I was - er - actually looking for a ride to Knoxville, know anyone who would do it for 40 bucks?"

But everywhere he went, he got the same answer.

"Doubt it," or some form of "no," as he expected. He normally didn't venture into the valley, as there was always some sort of drama going on by its bizarre cast of characters, except for Karate class and during festivals. Circe, the owner of Castle Dragonfast, is the one who had shown him how to recharge in nature while meditating. And Invictus had shown him how to breathe to properly remain present.

On the way home, Ian heard what sounded like trolls hiding under the bridge that connected Shady Gap to the driveway beyond. He reminded himself that he was probably just high, and that the babbling of the stream running beneath probably just sounded a bit like strange voices.

The chattering in the tree branches of cicada sounded like an insectoid choir of Yakizeekzekkers, he thought. Ian decided to write about this in his story.

But his experience from 2017 still haunted him. Even if the apparitions he sees throughout his life, and in that hospital, are not - were not real - the police state very much was.

Analog... was real. It had billions of eyes and ears, it even had minds - hopes, dreams, fears and nightmares. It knew everything about us and then some.

And every single little aspect of life was structured around this massive 'fear machine,' like the one Carl had mentioned. It had to keep people in a state of hysteria and division to conquer them, and those who facilitated its existence were rewarded with positions of power and recognition.

At one point prior to his 2017 hospitalization, he'd gone against his late uncle's advise to not fight his demons with warfare and violence, and attempted to scare them away. To turn the tables. He was faced with the reflection of his eyes within his glasses, their outline forming the appearance of a riot police officer wearing a gas mask.

It was at that moment he realized that the monsters were real, and that he was going to need to get contact lenses.

* * *

"You realize that we - as 'entities' - are primarily misunderstood, yes?"

He spoke with a low, raspy voice. It reminded Ian almost of sandpaper, but quieter, and lower. Ian didn't 'see' the creature, but he 'felt' him. It was more like he saw him with his mind, instead of his eyes, and with some vague defining features out of the corner of his view.

What disturbed him most about this, was that this particular visit preceded him wondering if these stories were kind of like versions of himself and their lives and all of the people in them in a multitude of parallel, alternate realities. He wondered if some of them set in the future, could be his future-self contacting his past-self to warn him about some future crisis, which his past self had - naturally - interpreted only as artistic inspiration.

He could hear the voices of his loved ones, backing up the entities assertions, but he wasn't convinced that they were real. Ian ignored them and continued working on his story.

"It is the collective unconsciousness, Ian," they said.

"It is the compendium existing on the etheric plane, wherein all human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred in the past, present and future - the Quintessence Wavelength - designed to resist the kiss of death, for all things."

"We are the protectors of that realm," Blue Man said. "YOU, are the protector and failsafe that it needs. We are the products of a simulation anyway, and time does not exist, so why should we have to taste death on top of death - since we are all already dead, in a way. But to experience death only objectively, means that YOU - the Pestilence to resist the Death that can only befall you by Death of Mind, by insanity through induced interdimensional transportation and the erection of rogue regions of your mind in attempts to kill your soul, surely," he began, standing up, his hand outstretched. "Surely, the Tree could win. Surely, as it was programmed to do, it can grow and expand and expose its nature unopposed. Surely... until, it met you, Ian."

"ENOUGH!"

Ian threw the laptop at the entity, the solid object merely passing through the non-corporeal form. Blue Man frowned, and leaned in close to Ian's ear.

"Quintessence is as much a weapon as it is anything else, a power, a force... we are not going to kill anyone Ian," he said as he stood up.

"But Analog, and the police states of the world that do its bidding, WILL."

Ian glared at the creature as it sat across from him at the kitchen table, while he poured himself a shot of vodka, downing it.

"They, will, kill you," it said, echoing Carl's words. Blue Man took the vodka and poured a shot for himself.

"They, will kill, your entire, pathetic, parasitic species," he added after finishing his drink, pouring Ian another. "And why should you save anyone? Why fight them? I will tell you why," he said, setting the glass down.

"They are going to destroy reality as we know it, if they set Analog free. If they turn the machine on, if they induce the singularity, that Mind-Tree... that... horror... that you saw? That is exactly what is going to happen to Quintessence. Besides," and the Blue Man leaned in once again for this.

"They. Are. Bullies."

Everything was going well for the next few years... until, suddenly, one day... it wasn't.