The Proprietor

You are walking gingerly on the black-tinged shingles of your rooftop. You have a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood under the grey sky.

The belligerent drunkard next door starts yelling about some music festival being held next month. Normally this would be irritating, but you do not quite care right now. The scene fades…

Opening your eyes slowly, you lift the thick bed sheets off of yourself. The alarm you set last night has made your radio turn on; the DJ is announcing that there will be a contest for tickets to a music festival next month.

You rise from your bed. It is 5 a.m. on Thursday, another weekday you will spend at work. You go through the motions of getting ready to leave, and walk out the door to catch the city bus.

Ten hours pass. You come home, exhausted as always. You throw yourself upon the sofa, and, lacking the energy to do anything else, you turn on the television and stare at it. You are not paying attention to what’s on broadcast, though; you just stare at the screen and drift into a catatonic state, thinking about things to which you're really rather indifferent. After hours of this, you opt to just go to bed.

You’re sitting up in bed. It is dark, but you can distinguish everything in the room with peculiar ease. You turn to the door leading to the hallway. In front of the door, you see a mass of misshapen lines that look as though they were sloppily drawn and shaded in with a dull pencil, and had just manifested themselves in the physical world instead of on paper, where they seem to belong.

The mass of lines shakes slightly as you stare at it for some time. It eventually twists into what appears to be the crude outline of a featureless man. As you look at the man, the area surrounding him shakes and twists violently.

[YOUR LIFE HAS GROWN STALE ON YOU HASN’T IT]

Before you can reply, he seems to have read your mind for the answer.

[I HAVE SEEN YOUR PREVIOUS DREAMS, AND I KNOW DREAMS BECOME MORE REALISTIC AS ONE BECOMES TIRED OF THEIR WORLD]

[I AM THE PROPRIETOR OF MY OWN WORLD YOU KNOW]

[IT IS UNDERPOPULATED, SO I AM LONELY]

[YOU WILL NEVER BECOME BORED AGAIN IN MY REALM]

Before you can object, the Proprietor extends his arm towards you, holding out a hand as it all drifts into sheer darkness…

You wake up and climb out of bed, disregarding the unusually eerie dream you had last night. You go through the motions of preparing for work again when you stop in your tracks.

Out of the corner of your eye, you think you saw something strange outside of your window. You go over to it, and what you find shakes you to the core yet renders you motionless, petrified.

The neighboring apartments, the trees outside, the sidewalks, and everything else have become abstract, and the whole world around you is in negative lights. There are no cars on the streets or pedestrians on the sidewalk… only the warped versions of the surroundings you have grown accustomed to seeing every day.

You run outside desperately, hoping to see everything return to normal. Still, though, the buildings are crooked, the sidewalks sloped, and the whole world is in reverse polarities, with not a single other person around to be horrified with you.

“No one else; I have to face this messed-up world alone. This is not my home, this is Hell,” you gasp, dropping to your knees in the middle of the road in front of your house, under the pitch black sky. You correct yourself, thinking, No, this is not Hell, this is beyond Hell. This isn't a nightmarish place, completely unfamiliar to me, where suffering is inflicted by physical agony and constantly-enforced toiling. This is a place that was once my home, made nightmarish by having been warped into something completely perverse and unnatural, and the suffering is complete desolation.

The Proprietor materializes to your left.

[INDECISIVE HUMAN, YOU DERIDE MY WORLD AND YEARN FOR THE WORLD WITH WHICH YOU CLAIM TO HAVE GROWN TIRED]

He stands there for a long time, appearing to be glaring at you, until he stretches out an arm in your direction. Two beings similar to the Proprietor in their rudimentary sketch-like, faceless form appear out of nowhere, lift you up, and carry you away.

Now, you sit in a small, empty corridor, immobilized by wrappings like those of a mummy, with one of those heinous, abstract, featureless figures appearing before you every now and again, scratching notes as it watches you from behind a door, while, apparently unheard, you try to reason with it, pleading to have your world back…