After learning what could have very well been a bunch of lies, Josh had returned home to his dorm and sequestered himself. His mind was awash with doubts.
Was anything Margot told him even real? It all seemed too fantastical to be possible. But he’d seen her lift that desk, and many other heavy things when her body looked like she could hardly have any muscle at all. Something was strange about her at least, supernatural or no. And then Sara and Connor had the same marks on their arms as Margot. The exact same. And there was no possible way they were made in any conventional way. But they weren’t strictly speaking impossible. And the light Josh had seen when he witnessed Sara get her mark could have been performed with some kind of lighting and mirrors. Really nothing he had seen couldn’t be explained away by some sort of illusion or deceptive tactic.
Dismissing what he had seen didn’t sit well with him though. The explanation he had been given didn’t seem to have an ulterior motive, at least not one that Josh could see. Though the method he was being given information made it feel like there was something dishonest going on behind the scenes. There didn’t seem to be a reason why Margot wouldn’t tell him everything, or at least more than two questions. Even if it was complicated, it would have made more sense to explain as much as possible so that questions could be asked while they were still freshly thought. It made Josh afraid that there was something genuinely dangerous or sinister waiting for him just a little further down the path; something which, once he heard about it, would make him want to bail out. But of course, at the rate he was learning, he would be too far invested to bail out at the proper time. He’d fall victim to the sunken cost fallacy and probably be stuck paying for the decisions he had just made.
And as Josh laid in bed, trying to ignore the sound of Kerry socializing in the next room over, he couldn’t help but hash out every possible danger and risk he now faced. And when he had accumulated the list of likely dangers, he moved to the less likely ones—the ones that hinged on some sort of magical force being real and active in the world—and from those to the unlikely and increasingly more sinister scenarios. Normally the activity would have been calming, as he could apply logic and reason to eliminate the unlikely and absurd things that scared him so that he could exist apart from those fears. But the world was different now, even if the powers that Margot and Sara had led him to believe existed weren’t real there was enough doubt in his head that he couldn’t dismiss the absurd and illogical fears.
Even as Josh fell asleep, the terrors in his mind began to gather and multiply, and his dreams were poisoned with the touch of the uncertainty. What should have clearly been dreams could have been real and Josh would have never known. In fact, he didn’t realize he had started to dream when his dreams began that night.
Without being able to recall where he had come from or where he was going, Josh found himself walking down the city streets around campus. Passing by his preferred bakery, the campus library, and then the science building where he had met with Sara in the observatory that very day. Of course it didn’t feel like he had met her that day. The day itself felt like the first one he had spent at school when he had ventured out to explore the surrounding area ad get a feel for it. Even the weather seemed to match that first day.
But as Josh walked about the city, it dawned on him that things were out of place. Locations that were next to each other as he passed them were not normally so close together. The world around the corners of what he saw was blurry and the more he noticed and the more he moved about the space he found himself in, the more sluggish his vision and sensations became. And then, as he began to realize that he was dreaming, and his vision began to black out sporadically, he became aware of a shift in the dream. Someone had approached him. And as Josh strained to open his eyes, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. His eyes opened suddenly to see a masked man pull a knife free of his body and retreat into an alleyway. Josh looked down at his hands to see them covered in blood, before pain began to course through his body. For a moment, he thought he would wake up, but the pain didn’t startle him into consciousness. Instead Josh found himself lumbering down the alleyway after his attacker. He left blood smears on the walls and a steady trickle trailed behind him on the ground.
The net moment Josh looked up, there was nowhere in the direction he was going. Whoever he was chasing was gone. He looked down and the blood on his hands was dried and dark. The alleyway he had stumbled through was crumbling. The ground was splintering into cracks beneath his feet. And for a second, just a brief second, Josh looked up and saw tree roots protruding from an earthen dome above him. But as he looked up, he fell. Into darkness for a brief moment, and then into blinding sterile whiteness.
As he was engulfed in the empty white void, he ceased falling; at least, the sensation of falling was gone. Rather than fall, a translucent pale indigo bubble formed around him. It never touched his body, and if he was falling it was falling at the same speed and positioned just perfectly that he couldn’t touch it if he wanted. And while it was uncertain and mysterious, Josh felt safer knowing there was something between him and the endless expanse beyond it. Safe in the same way that a diver feels with goggles on. Josh looked through the opaque bubble—partly because there was nothing else to do from within it, partly because something ineffable within his mind urged him too—and watched the void he had entered and was shielded from. And as he looked, he noticed that it was not quite as empty as he had thought.
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There were other similar bubbles off in the distance. He couldn’t tell how far away they were, or how big they were, but they were there falling with him. Or were they falling. Josh still couldn’t surmise if he was moving in a direction or not. But the other bubbles seemed to be offset from him, some higher, some lower, some closer, some further away and partially obscured by other bubbles. If they were all falling, Josh imagined that the collection of bubbles might look a lot like pearl beads being broken free from a snapped necklace as they plummeted to the floor. But there wasn’t any floor, just like there wasn’t any necklace to fall from.
The more Josh looked out from his bubble, the more disoriented he became. He no longer remembered which way he had fallen initially, or if there was a way that was up at all. He couldn’t tell how long he had been in the bubble either. In fact, the only thing that alerted him to the passage of time at all was something out of the ordinary. A bubble dropped— or moved, Josh couldn’t be sure the way it moved was down, but it moved parallel to the way his body was stretched out—close by his own. There was an indistinct shadow in a human shape concealed within it. Soon after the other bubbled sped past, Josh saw it stop.
It didn’t stop suddenly, or completely, not at first at least. But it looked like it was caught in a sheet, or like it landed in a thick syrup. It bowed down against some invisible elastic plane, popped back up a short distance and then settled back down to a point where it sat. And while it sat there, Josh realized that he too was moving toward the same vertical position. He was falling. The other bubble had just been falling faster.
With a lurch, Josh impacted the same elastic plane as the other bubble had. For once, his feet touched the indigo barrier around him and he was forced to collapse into the bottom of it. Unlike the sensation of being stabbed, colliding with the bubble was not painful; though, it did feel unnaturally painless. As the bubble jostled back up into a more level place, Josh could feel it stick to whatever it had come into contact with. And as it lurched back upwards he was flung into the top of the bubble and fell again painlessly to the bottom. After the impact, the bubble was still and Josh felt a sense of direction again.
The bubbled that had landed first was surprisingly close and roughly the same size as Josh’s. He couldn’t see through the surface of it, but if he were able to reach past the limits of his own bubble he would have been able to touch the other one. And as soon as that crossed his mind, he was filled with an uncontrollable urge to try and do so. The urge made no sense, but as Josh reached out with his left hand, it passed through the indigo barrier. Josh had to brace himself against the barrier with his right hand, which strangely did not pass through it, in order to reach out in the right direction. His hand made it through easily enough, though it felt a little numb as it exited the bubble, but as soon as his arm began to be exposed it began to burn. Not like a heat burn, but like an acid burn. And worst still, there was a force pulling it further out like an incredibly powerful vacuum. Josh couldn’t fight against the pull and it slowly became too painful to feel. By the time his arm had been pulled out up to his elbow it was completely numb.
And that was where it stopped. But Josh quickly realized that it was more than just pain and numbness. His arm felt distinctly and indescribably different, as though it was not his arm but a phantom arm sewn own from another body. More noticeably though, and to Josh’s horror, there was a pattern on his left arm now. A mark like a tattoo but it seemed to shine and change color subtly. It was formed by a band at the wrist, a band just below the elbow, and four lines that made a tight spiral between the two bands. Josh recognized it immediately.
But the mark appearing on his arm, which was not really his arm, was not the most horrifying thing that transpired as he slept. What woke him was.
His arm was stuck where it was, partially outside of the bubble and reaching towards the other one that was close by. And while he was trying to pull his arm back in, Josh saw a movement in the bobble opposite him. The humanoid form obscured by the bubbles opaque outer sheen shifted into a position not unlike his own, braced up against the side as it was. And like lightning, an arm whipped out from the other bubble, reaching well beyond the limits of its elbow, and grabbed hold of his hand. The touch was cold and clammy, as if it had been submerged in water for a long time and it was wrinkly and weak. But the grip was strong and powerful. It began to pull Josh’s arm and more of his body was pulled into the void around the two bubbles. The pulling was slow at first, almost unsure, but as soon as the other arm felt some give it yanked hard and Josh was quickly pulled out of his bubble altogether.
For a moment, Josh felt that strange sensation that had been localized to just his arm before. That alien sensation that came from himself, like his flesh was someone else’ and did not belong as part of his body. For a moment, as his whole body was exposed to that feeling, he felt whole. And for a moment, as his hand was pulled into the other bubble, he felt something wet and slimy—like he had dipped his hand into a vat of thick grease. And as his head was pulled through, in that sudden jerking motion he had been dragged along with, he woke up.
Josh bolted upright in his bed. He was still in the clothes he had worn the day before, as he had never bothered to change them. And he was covered in a cold sweat. His dream had been mortifying, perhaps more as a product of his brain producing the chemicals that stimulated fear than witnessing something actually terrifying. And while the last thing he had seen was the oncoming wall of indigo he had been pulled into, the last image that stuck in his mind was that of the arm that had grabbed hold of him. It had been a left arm. And it had had a mark on it, but it was not the same mark he had seen on Margot and Sara and Connor. It was distinct. And recalling the pattern in his mind filled him with dread.