I tried to explain what happened to Anne, but not even she could understand. I didn't understand myself. So, I decided to go to the one person that would.

Harrison's trailer was in the middle of an empty lot between two buildings, where, I assume at one point, there was another building. The grass was knee height, broken up by bits of junk and debris.

I went up to the door, trying not to step on anything hidden in the grass. I banged on the door.

"Harrison! Open! It's cold!" I shouted.

Harrison opens the door in a pink bathrobe. It looked like he might have washed his hair for once.

"Quiet down!" He whispered loudly. "You'll wake the neighbors! Do you know what time it is?"

"Sorry," I said. I just stared at him.

Harrison looked at me with annoyance and exhales through his nose.

"Okay fine, come in," He finally said.

I walked out of the cold and into the trailer. Harrison closed the door behind me. I took off my shoes.

The furniture looked like it had been picked up off the side of the road and repaired with duct tape. The walls were cover in torn out comic book pages. The rug was a shag that looked straight from the 70's (I wonder if Harrison got it the same place, he got his car). There hasn't any dishes in the sink but judging by the empty pizza boxes Harrison probably didn't use dishes very much, if he even had them.

"Welcome to Fort Harrison," He said.

"It's not as messy as I was expecting," I said.

"Man, you don't know how to give a compliment to save your life do you?"

I sat down on the couch. It was old but comfortable enough.

"Do you want a drink or a smoke?" Harrison rumaged through the cupboards.

"Nah I'm good." I rolled my jacket into a ball, to use as a pillow.

Harrison turned back towards me. He poured himself some vodka, I didn't recognize the brand but on the label, it had a cartoonish red Soviet, I could see the word comrade printed somewhere in the title. He poured the dark liquid in to a very worn, world's best dad mug that had several chips in it and the text had come off so much that it was barely readable.

“So, Stockton, what has you showing up turn my place in the middle of the night?”

“Something happened.”

“No shit, he said giving me another once over.”

“I'm not exactly sure what happened, I don't even know where to start.”

Harrison took a sip from what was once some dads coffee mug.

“Then start from the beginning.”

I told him everything, everything I had told Anne, everything that had happened. He listened to it, calmly, occasionally nodding, and giving therapist like verbal cues to show that he was really listening. Overall, he took in the information like a friend being told about a Fender Bender or some other mundane misfortune, and not that I had apparently fallen through a hole in the fucking universe.

I finished spinning. Harrison put the bottle of vodka away and then through the mug into the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. He turned back towards me with his arms crossed.

“What do you want to do?” Harrison asked.

“I don't know, isn't this your wheelhouse? Can you tell me what's going on? I think what happened to me would qualify as genuine supernatural experience.”

“Well, here's the thing stacked in. I could clue you in on what's really going on in the world. I could lift the veil and show you what's going on backstage, real good look not just the little peek you got. But then you would be committed, you would start down the path that couldn't go back from.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Or you could forget this little incident ever happened. You could go back to your normal life and live out the rest of your existence thinking that there is a Wizard of Oz and not looking behind the curtain.”

Harrison's inflection was like I had never heard it before, he sounded mature almost between that and the stern look on his face I knew he was being serious. There wasn’t the usual hint of juvenility. It was almost disturbing, like you were getting a serious lecture from your childhood cartoon icon.

“So, which is it? Do you stay in the Truman show or do you follow the path of John Murdoch in dark city?”

I thought about one of the launch titles for the PlayStation 3, superhero simulator 2009. The start screen is just a scene of an idyllic city, children playing in the park add their people walking around in the daytime minding their own business, you can even hear birds chirping in the background for extra effect. Then as soon as you press start there is a massive explosion and robots start to attack the city this into the opening cutscene of the game. If you, as the player, never press start, the city would maintain peace. You wanting to play the game caused the super villains to attack with their robot army.

“I need to know what happened to me, Harrison.”

The paranormal investigator just nodded and then placed both of his hands on my shoulders and leaned in close.

"Do you party?" he said.

\\\*\\\*\\\*\\\*

Harrison and I waited on the street corner for the guy with the connection. In hindsight, taking the drug was probably a really bad idea. I just had to know what the fuck was going on.

Harrison called it the elixir. Supposedly taking it would answer all of my questions better than Harrison just explaining them to me. He would even take the drug with me to guide me on my trip, or so he claimed.

“Where is Oliver?” I asked.

Harrison fiddled with a bottle of water he brought.

“Patience Ward, Patience.”

A figure interrupted the light. He was a balding middle-aged man, with free-flowing Einstein hair and a shrink’s face. He licked his lips; they looked like sandpaper. It felt like his face was exploding, his head radiated energy.

“Needwater,” he said, cough-laughing.

Harrison handed him the water bottle. Oliver drank it like he just got back from the desert.

“To be held of morning “water”, this is what I want,” he said. Oliver’s voice sounded like a radio host.

“Do you have the connection?” Harrison asked.

Oliver ignored Harrison and instead turned his attention towards me.

“You look like, shadow water, boy,” Oliver said, his shadow flickering in the light. “The other things are cold; know the metal human.”

“Ain't,” Harrison said, “yeah, like, a bowl of cereal blows.”

What the fuck is going on? I couldn’t tell if what they were saying was random.

I pulled Harrison aside. Oliver just stared at the streetlight.

“Harrison,” I said. “Why are we buying drugs from a crazy homeless person?”

“First of all, Oliver lives in an apartment,” Harrison said, “secondly, he’s not crazy. He’s just taken so much—uh—product over the years that he’s words get a little jumbled sometimes.

“A little?” I asked.

“The way of the throat,” Oliver said to literally no one, “the way of the bathroom.”

“Sometimes?” I asked again.

“Trust me,” Harrison said. “Also, he’s like the only guy I know who sells Thirdeye; so, there’s that.”

Harrison made the deal with Oliver. I didn’t understand a word of what either of them said; or more that I understood the words, just not the salad order they were put in.

Oliver led us back to his apartment. It was painted an off white. The floors were wood. Every wall was covered in metal crosses and pieces of wood with bible verses written on them.

The dining room table was this massive wood table that looked like it could kill a horse if you dropped it square on it. Behind me was the piano, it just sits collecting dust. In front of me was a fake medieval tapestry with what I assume was a princess and a unicorn and like a tent or something in the background.

To my right was the window. I looked outside. I was the wind rustle the tree branches against the pain and here them tap on it like the monsters did in my nightmares. The trees were bare so actually the branches did kind of look like long malformed monster hands.

Finally, Harrison brought back two baggies with a joint in each.

“Smoke the static and lick the sandpaper,” Oliver said like it meant something.

We both put the rolls in our mouths. Harrison took out his lighter.

“Ready?” he asked.

Oliver continued to ramble on in the background.

“The leather circle will know,” he said. “They said the cup will tell the man’s magic secrets, but when I turned it over it imagined something else. The signs that water made. In the room where the more you die, the more you see everything; whisper magic and gulp like omens said that you would.”

Harrison and I lit up. I inhaled.

“The down witnesses weep religious tears that soak their bibles,” Oliver continued. “The elicit don’t weep. Genuine raids on the materials of the just. Imagery of raids without age. People are not officers of their own being. The risk is okay, we are the wrong owners, it was by accident.”

I exhaled. I took a second hit. The drug was quicker this time. It was Egyptian anatomy. I sat down on the couch and sunk in and kept sinking until I was under water. I dropped through the blue ink like a cellphone somebody dropped into the erotic ocean. The flight of least peril.

I finally reached the bottom. I could breathe, but I exhaled bubbles. I was on the massive stained-glass disk of myself.

“The enlightened Canadian’s report passes darkness. Be it the irony, the newsman pops. Strike now with expression against the levels of the enlightened in difference it’s contained in.”

Everything was becoming clearer now, my perception sharpened.

“Witness long religious sarcasm; viewers talk, interaction caught in homes through towers. This is why we humans must be sarcastic; St. Convicted; Through interviews the weatherman forces the rain to come down like a fascist. On the attempt of his showers, he made me regulate the words. They make everybody regulate the words through the fascist rain.”

All the colors around me began to bleed into each other like watercolor.

“It’s man over a stall all,” ended Oliver, coughing. “Out of Egypt and into the fire.”