Chapter III

The All-Seeing Monitor

[Part IV]

[L I M B O]

  Is this, thought Oddball, is this really the Monitor? He couldn’t put words to the feeling: the cold, invisible hand gripping his heart and squeezing it, as if the shape in the obelisk were reaching out and trying to smother the beating within his chest. This was a feeling beyond fear. Why—his thoughts were struggling to catch their breath—why is it…so different? Once, the tombstone-like obelisk stood on a simple raised platform; now it was a vast staircase—put more specifically, it was a stack of thick disks, each one smaller in diameter than the one below it, to form a round staircase up to the obelisk. Why is it so…cruel-looking? There were spikes too. Spikes of varying lengths made of the same black, glassy crystal that made up the obelisk and the stairs. Spikes that flanked the obelisk on either side and spikes that punctured the zig-zagging shape of the stairs to protrude at various angles. It was like a throne—a cold, remote mountain rising up out of the sea of swirling crimson mist. Even though the cavern had grown significantly bigger—so big, in fact, that Oddball could no longer see the ceiling—it seemed it could barely hold the presence of the black monolith and its alpine stage. Is this really…?

  “Hey…” the ghost-girl was at his side, squatting down into the blood-red vapor. Her hand was on his shoulder, but he couldn’t feel its weight or touch. Her voice was shaking, betraying every word she said. “Come on. Get up. We need to go.”

  Get up? The task was tremendous in concept and inconceivable in execution. He looked towards her. Her head was inches from his, but her blank face did not regard him. He traced her unseeable gaze with his eyes. A human figure was pulling itself from the flat surface of the obelisk. It was made of writhing black mist. Two white spots glowed on its face like unblinking eyes. Who is that…? It couldn’t be the Monitor. It couldn’t be the same presence that had so gently welcomed him into this place. It couldn’t be. Something lifted his arm and began to tug without grasping him. He looked down. The phantom had his arm and was doing her best to pull him. His body jerked and swayed with each yank.

  “Come…on,” she grunted. “What’s…wrong with you?! Move!” Her tone was beginning to crack, letting the evident emotion leak out and spill over her outward demeanor. Her movements were becoming quick and frantic, and she kept flicking her gaze in the direction of the shadowy being. She didn’t need to have a face for Oddball to see the terror written all over it.

  The living silhouette was descending the stairs now, slowly, like a king parading through his court. Its wavering outline began to calm as the swirling shadows that made up its body slowed. It started to take on a rough shape, but he couldn’t make out what it was quite yet. Should he run? Should he hide?

  Get up, he commanded his legs. Nothing happened. Come on. The muscles in his legs were loose. The bones had softened to something like jelly. Stand up…stand up…why can’t I stand up? It was no use: he was a marionette of flesh and bone with no strings to animate him.

  “Get up!!” The phantom-girl was screaming now. There was crying in her voice. Her body was quaking. Her voice broke as she choked back sobs. She fell to her knees, limply pulling at his sleeve. “Please…get up.”

  “I…” Oddball muttered, looking down at the useless legs folded underneath him, “I-I can’t…I can’t move…” What do I do? What do I do? The being was almost to the bottom of the stairs now. His shape had almost fully hardened. He was a human, wearing a hood and loose fitting garments. That much could be discerned from the outline, anyways, the rest was impossible to dictate. There were no details to speak of, save for the inhuman white eyes in its face. What do I—?

  “Get away from him!” The command bore down on them from everywhere at once, piercing Oddball’s ears like knives and shattering his thoughts. The being brought their forearm up, their wrist bent back and their fingers arced into talons.

  Crack! Oddball flinched as the air shifted violently next to his face.

  The phantom girl screamed. His arm fell loosely back to his side. A massive spike of black crystal had forcefully driven itself forward out of the ground, stabbing the air where the ghost-girl had been a second ago. His mind was empty, but unpleasant feelings began to churn in his stomach. Something like a sinking feeling mixed together with a dull, aching pain and a hollowness to create a nauseating elixir of emotions. His brain began to wander around within itself, picking up pieces and fragments of words. The first one that took shape in his mind was “dead.”

  “Don’t you dare touch him…” hissed the dark figure. It was off the stairs now. Its eyes were blazing with frigid fury. Oddball began to turn his head. His neck resisted him, making the process slow and unsteady, as though his body were trying to protect his eyes from what they might see if he turned. An icy hand cupped his chin in a firm but gentle grip and guided his face back forward.

  Its eyes were mere inches from his own. It was now that he was staring deep into the blank holes in its face that his feelings shifted. His muscles relaxed. His heart slowed. The air felt richer and warmer. There was something deep within those lifeless eyes. It was faint, but there. A glimmer of deep, paternal affection. This…this is… The Monitor. It was crouched in front of him, gently holding up his face with its hand as if it were a father consoling his child after they fell off their bike.

  “Oddball,” it crooned. Its voice was running circles around his head, drawing him in and making him dizzy. “Oh, Oddball…just what have you gotten yourself into now?”

  Oddball’s tongue fell loose, letting words spill out. “It’s you…I didn’t recognize…” The Monitor threw its head back and the walls of the cavern bellowed forth its laughter.

  “Come now, child,” the Monitor said, “I’ve only just redecorated.” It bought its arms out away from itself in a sweeping gesture. “How do you like it?”

  “It’s scary…” Oddball’s voice was slurred and lazy. Scary…it was scary…but it’s alright now… Something inside of him was writhing. He was forgetting something.

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  “Hmmm…perhaps it is, just a little…” the Monitor said. It reached out and rested a hand on his shoulder. Its touch was chilly. “So tell me, child. What did that wayward Echo show you?”

  Echo? The word sounded so foreign and familiar. Echo…Echo… He rolled the word around in his head a little bit.

  Tap-tap. The Monitor was tapping on his mask. “Come now, child, focus. What did it show you?”

  He retraced a familiar path in his mind, studying the animated images that he passed by on the way. A phantom-girl. White. A white void…no, color. There was color. Like a living painting. An ocean. A black and red smear. He opened his mouth, ready to spill it all forward. Something inside of him was throwing itself around like a caged animal. Something was wrong. But…didn’t I want to come here to tell it this? No, there was more…it wasn’t to tell…he’d wanted to ask it…

  “Henry!!” It was a shriek that bore all the anguish and terror of a mother finding her child playing on a railroad track.

  His tongue seized. I know that voice… His head began to turn on its own, and not even the resistance of the muscles straining in his neck to stop it could hold it back. Who told you that name, he thought, remembering the inscription scarred into the blade of his knife. That’s not my name… The ghost girl was half-sprawled on the ground, slowly finding her way back to her feet. Something washed over him like a current of refreshing water. He almost sighed. There was a mark—almost like a cut, but stark white and leaking pale vapor—running up the side of her cheek to her temple. Why do I feel so relieved to see you, he asked in his head.

  The girl lifted her blank face to him weakly. “This isn’t,” she whispered, “where we belong… Don’t tell him anything…”

  A new image started to take shape in Oddball’s mind. There was a boy dressed in white and a pale-cream, ghostly female figure. They were sitting side-by-side on a railing overlooking the sea. The air was cold and stale; the breeze was fake, and the sun casted no warmth over their shoulders in the illusion, but they both drew all the empty stimuli into themselves and let their imaginations fill in the blanks. They imagined that the air was really moving, blowing the salt-burdened, refreshing coolness of the ocean at them and airbrushing their faces with it. They imagined that the sun was beaming down heat that soaked into their bodies and warmed them deep to the marrow of their bones. They smiled and laughed as they watched the motionless blue water, pretending that it was alive and crashing over black rocks.

  “Look at that one,” they laughed with arms raised and fingers pointed, swaying to-and-fro on the railing as they kicked their feet. “Did you see that one? Did you see how high it went?” And somewhere off to their left—unseen by both but felt nonetheless—were two colored smears on the canvas: a black one and a red one, doing the exact same thing they were. Neither pair could hear the other’s voices clearly, but knew they were laughing and saying the same things.

  And then they would shut their eyes and smile together, leaning back and taunting gravity as they gripped the railing with their hands and knees. They let the golden rays of sunlight wash their faces, turning their faces red and stinging where the salt had clung to their skin.

  “Don’t you feel it now?” the ghostly girl would ask, without turning to face the boy in white.

  And the boy in white would lean back just a little more, letting his hood fall from his head so that the sun could bathe his dark, honey-brown hair. “Yeah,” he’d say, without opening his eyes.

  “This is where we belong…” the girl would say.

  “Yeah…”

  Oddball blinked away the daydream and shook his head as if clearing away the last traces of an unexpected slumber. “Outside,” he muttered. The girl’s head fell under the weight of what he could only imagine was defeat. “She showed me outside. But”—he turned back towards the Monitor—”it was strange. It…there was this ocean. And sunlight. There was no eyes, no voices…it was almost…nice.”

  The Monitor sighed. “Is that so? Don’t you know that the outside is dangerous? Don't you know that this place is meant to protect you?”

  “Is that…?”

  “What?” It sounded more like a threat. The Monitor stood, looming over him and staring down on him. The paternal glimmer was gone from its eyes. Oddball felt his senses returning. The air was icy and thin. His heart was still struggling to find its rhythm.

  “Is that,” his mouth was dry as he struggled to pluck the dangerous question from the air, “is that really what’s on the other side of all the doors?”

  The Monitor brought a hand up over its eyes, as if tired, frustrated, or ashamed. It turned from him and began to walk away. “Oddball,” it said, “I really wish you wouldn’t ask such silly questions.”

  Oddball’s mind was a flash flood of frantic thought now. I just want another glimpse. If I can just convince it… He called after the Monitor as it began to slowly ascend its staircase. “Is that really what’s out there? If that’s what’s out there, then maybe I don’t need to stay here so much! I mean, maybe the doors aren’t all connected to the white void! Maybe we were wrong!” He drew his knife and held it up. “Maybe we don’t need to keep destroying them!”

  The Monitor froze mid-step. “Do you want to leave?” The question sent a chill racing down Oddball’s back. His thoughts quieted, thinking back on the phantom’s offer and his daydream of the ocean.

  “I…” he thought aloud, “I…don’t know. I’d like to at least see what’s out there. Maybe…it’s not so bad?” That’s not so unreasonable, right? It’s just to try, and if she’s lying or if it is dangerous, then I can come right back. It’s just a quick look, right?

  The atmosphere grew tense enough that he could have reached out and plucked at it to hear it reverberate in the silence. Oddball began to glance around. Was the cavern getting darker? Or was that just a trick of his eyes? No, the cavern was definitely getting darker. The crimson fog was sinking, as if someone had just pulled a drain-plug somewhere and all the fog was rushing out. With its descent, the room was left increasingly absent of its red glow and grew dimmer and dimmer by the second.

  “I see,” came the Monitor’s voice from the walls.

  A deep, guttural growl vibrated the air. With the room rapidly being plunged into darkness, Oddball had to strain his eyes.

  Movement. A set of long, black talons attached to a bulbous shape rose up over the obelisk and wrapped around it. They pulled back, squealing and scraping against the crystal. More became slowly visible as the figure crawled over the obelisk. The bulbous shape was a forearm, thinning out into an upper arm that was attached to a tall, gaunt figure. It, similar to the Monitor, was made of writhing shadows, and while it bore a roughly-humanoid shape, it was alien. It lacked hands and feet: the arms ending with the aforementioned bulbs and attached claws, and the legs ending with similar bulbous ends but with flattened bottoms, like hooves. Additionally, the black mist of its body refused to calm and take solid form, so its figure seemed to be constantly warping and slightly changing size. Its head was rounded and bore a single, large, white spot—presumably an eye, like the Monitor’s—that casted forth a shaft of brilliant light. This spotlight flicked over onto Oddball, making him squint and raise a hand to shield his eyes. The light flicked away as the figure arched backwards into a back-breaking curve. A shrill, lengthy call, comparable to metal grating against stone, filled the air. Oddball’s hands flew to cover his ears.

  In a single blur of lightning-movement, the lanky figure leapt from the obelisk and landed in front of him. The ground shook from the impact. It raised its arms while curling its talons into crude fists. Oddball’s heart skipped. His eyes widened. Information flooded every inch of his brain. Adrenaline flooded every inch of his body. His muscles went taut. His legs awkwardly kicked out beneath him. He sprang backwards involuntarily. As he did so, the creature brought its arms down.

  CRAKK! A small crater filled the portion of the ground. If he’d taken a second longer, he’d have been in that crater. Oddball’s heart was thundering behind his ears. He was clutching his chest and frantically trying to get back onto his feet. His knife was laying a couple feet away from him.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” Oddball yelled. This wasn’t happening. What had he said wrong? What did he do? All he wanted was a chance…

  “Curiosity is a dangerous thing, Child,” said the Monitor, who was now obscured by the figure of the creature before him. “I swore to protect this place. I swore to protect us. I swore to keep you safe…” The creature stepped towards Oddball and screeched again. Something cool wrapped around his wrist. He looked down.

  The phantom-girl was finding her footing and holding his wrist. “We need to run…” she whispered weakly. Oddball looked back up at the creature, who was poised to strike again.

  What did I do? I just wanted a chance?

  “...even if it’s from yourself,” the Monitor hissed.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. I just wanted to ask…

  “We need to run right now!!” the girl screamed.

  All I wanted…

  The creature lunged forward, bringing its talons together into sharp points that it thrusted towards him. Oddball squeezed his eyes shut. He gritted his teeth so hard he felt something crack. Something hot trickled down the side of his face.

  …was to see where I really belong.