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All Chad knew was that occasionally, on nights that he couldn’t predict the coming of in advance nor interrogate the contents of later, nights on which he inexplicably found himself feeling sober—crystally clear-headed—he would have dreams.
Visions.
In some, he’d find himself in the middle of an enormous hallway, feeling as though he’d just come to, as though awoken from a deep, eons-long sleep. He would turn about, disoriented, a dark foreboding rising within, threatening to consume him.
And just as the vertiginous intuition is sure to overwhelm him, a hand reaches out!
Mother’s.
But it isn’t really his mother—or not just his mother.
She terrifies him.
In the dreams she guides him towards a brilliant light at the end of the hallway, so intense that he can’t gaze upon it directly. It is of no hue he’s ever seen. It is every shade of pink and gold and white, in comparison it is as if everything else in the hall is a mere fading afterimage, The Light the only thing intrinsic, the only thing lending shape and substance to this world.
The source of the radiance is always incalculably distant, and although he’s always had the sensation of having walked eternally, he had never reached it.
But he knows that there, at that point, is the source of all things, where all places, all times, become one.
And he knows that when he reaches it, he too will become one.
Mother was taking him there.
When he awoke he would usually find that he’d wet the bed, or shit himself.
More often than not he’d have ejaculated.
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There were other nights when he’d lay back into his mattress and suddenly find himself in emptiness.
Although he’d never a reference point, he would know that he was in a vast space, tumbling slowly through the aether.
Inchmeal the vista would resolve.
The space in which he turned would retract, and though still dim, he would become aware of the walls, so close around him: red-tinted, flabby things that pulsed and thrummed.
He felt as though in a womb.
The walls were folded, twisted, draped in distended growths. Warty botryoidal masses extended in fractal profusion on every surface.
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There were 4 walls.
6 edges.
4 vertices, equidistant.
Chad knew well the feeling of that particular topology.
At the approximate center of each face: a passageway. Chad thought they resembled giant anuses.
They reminded him of 6th grade biology class and the specimens that he and his classmates had delighted in vandalizing, seeing how many writing utensils could be inserted before the limits of ductility were discovered. Pulling and stretching turning to tearing and ripping.
The chambers’ giant anus doors had yielded much more readily to Chad.
The air in the chambers was fetid and moist, it wrapped around him like a blanket as he hung there, suspended in the center.
By merely willing, he could effect the desired change in his velocity. Thusly did he locomote from wall to wall, door to door.
Wresting through those orifices veinous placental films, he would find himself confronted with another identical chamber—4 walls, 4 doorways.
Identical, except that no two seemed ever exactly alike. And there seemed infinitely many. Impossible he knew—but he also knew that perspective worked differently here, and that such a packing of wombs might not be so impossible after all.
In truth, he knew the number of rooms wasn’t actually endless. He perceived this intuitively. There was a knowing deep inside him that, though it might take a span of time unfathomably vast, there would come the day when he’d seen the last room; that the seemingly limitless variety on offer wasn’t actually so.
After all, there were only so many possible permutations of boils and blisters, of encrusted folds and weeping sores and bloated tumors.
Someday he’d writhe through that final sphincteric threshold, gaze upon that ultimate transmutation of lacerated, disfigured, exquisite corpulence, and then—at long, long last—he would be arrived at the Center, and there he would apprehend the Pattern.
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Chad had gone through several phases in which the voices had come to him.
Sometimes in dreams, other times when he’d been sat at the kitchen table practicing his long division under the encouraging watch of his father, or when helping mother dry the dishes, later still when he was stumbling back to apartments at 3am.
It had started in his dreams first, shortly after he’d learned to pronounced the “th” in the family shitzu’s name, rather than calling her “Deo”.
At first his parents had assumed it to be the typical childhood nightmares rousing young Chad in the wee hours of the night; later on, a more serious bout of night terrors seemed a possible culprit.
In the beginning, Chad could never remember why he’d wake up panting and screaming, even if he could have, he certainly couldn’t have articulated what had scared him so.
But after a time, a picture began to resolve from those repeat journeys to the land of nod—however blurry—and Chad started remembering things forgotten, or at least their general shape.
Although he could never quite remember what they’d said, he knew that he’d heard voices speaking to him.
There were times when some infinitesimal part of him, a piece at the very core of his being, was aware that the voices were uttering the true name of The Source.
That same part of him also knew that such a sound could never be expressed by any combination of phonemes in 3 dimensions, but hear it he would—and then he would wake with a jerk and a scream next to his mother, who’d taken to sitting by his bed.
She’d pat his head and tell him not to be afraid there is nothing to be afraid of it’s just a bad dream my love just a bad dream.
Chad had never known how to tell her that it wasn’t the dream that had frightened him so, it was the leaving it.
Later, the voices had bled over into waking life. It took a while for anyone to notice, but after the 50th-or-so request from their son to repeat themselves, Chad’s naturally-worrisome parents had solicited professional opinions.
He was run through the gamut of psychological tests, which concluded that, yes, your son does appear to be experiencing auditory hallucinations of a sort.
His mother had fretted that her little Chad might be developing schizophrenia just like her aunt, her father, her mother’s mother, and her 2 cousins had.
His father had had to remind her that her aunt, her father, her mother’s mother, and her 2 cousins weren’t blood-relatives of Chad—and that 8 years old would be rather unprecedentedly young for such a diagnosis.
Ultimately, the good docs had opined that young Chad’s unprompted soliloquies, relatively infrequent as they were, didn’t, at the time, seem a significant detriment to his development, this—and the spontaneous resolution of symptoms within the year, mostly the latter—had sufficiently placated his parents and allowed them to write the whole ordeal off as one of those quirks of childhood.
Only a few times during his preteens did the bouts of nocturnal screaming and self-talk return, and they were short lived enough to register as barely half a blip on the radars of overworked, underpaid dad and restless, alienated mom.
By the time the illusory voices finally came back in earnest, Chad was well in the midst of that hormonal typhoon of puberty. Thrown about at all times by the raging storm of conflicting demands and desires, he’d still had the presence of mind to know that hearing illusory voices, let alone responding to them, was not a very good way to Fit In, Be Cool, or Get A Girlfriend—regardless how veridical a representation of reality said voices seemed.
So he concealed them. Damned if that eerie trumpeting from the unexplored back-alleys of his mind was gonna stop him from getting laid.
And so he learned the tactic he was to employ for the rest of his life: he’d hide the symptoms in those months they’d manifest, and then he’d almost forget about them entirely during the long years they were absent.
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