VESSELS: Persistent Wills
All members of the Occult Club gathered around a wooden roundtable located at the center of the room. Sylvia had placed a projector on the table, and Zander helped with setting up the screen. The other two didn’t bother to so much as lift a finger to help; Lee leaned back on her chair, steadily rocking it, while Isaac kept his head down on the table, pretending to sleep. Bel on the other hand sat down with his head still hung low, almost in shock at how easily he was convinced to be roped into the whole thing.
Bel lifted his head up to look at Lee and Isaac, but his brief glance caused Lee’s rocking to stop and made Isaac look up.
“Let me guess, you’re wondering why we haven’t explained jack shit right?” Isaac groaned, “The stuff we deal with, it’s better to see it with your own eyes. Words don’t do any justice.”
Bel let out an audible gulp, and Lee burst into laughter. “Come on Isaac, quit scaring the poor kid. Well, he’s not totally wrong you know. It’s just from experience, we’ve known that the whole talking thing doesn’t always work out too well, it’s a long story but just know that it’s partly my fault. Plus, Sylvia likes her little presentations.”
“Long story? It took Sylvia three tries to convince you that you weren’t just high during all your P.W. encounters, and that everything that was going on was real.” Isaac scoffed.
“Oh, come on, that’s not fair, you were born into this crap. You can’t blame normal people like Bel and I to be bought so easily by this voodoo shit.” Lee’s retort made Bel slightly embarrassed. What if this really is just some elaborate prank? Bel thought to himself; he admired Lee’s skepticism, but he was strangely reassured by it and was convinced even further that this is reality.
“P.W. encounters?” Bel asked.
“Ah, perfect timing!” Sylvia responded.
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The projector had been successfully set up, and on the screen displayed the Occult Club’s logo, a simple 2D monochrome vector of an eye, purely symmetrical, with six strands of eyelashes, three on the top lid, and three more on the bottom.
Sylvia presented herself in front of the projector screen, “Welcome to the introductory briefing for new members of the Occult Club.” Bel looked around the room again, but he was sure that he was the only new member. Isaac and Lee were paying no attention, and Alexzander was simply staring at Bel, giving a double thumbs up and smiling for reassurance.
“Firstly, what is the Occult Club? The Occult Club is a task force comprised of unique individuals who are sensitive to the other worldly beings that walk alongside us. They come by many names, tortured spirits, frightening ghosts, ghastly ghouls… ghoulish zombies perhaps? But from our, albeit limited, understanding, we refer to them as Persistent Wills, or P.W.s for short.” Sylvia pointed at the images that were shown on the screen with a metal rod, a few black and white photos of unexplainable looking creatures.
Despite the quality of the images being subpar, Bel could tell they were real because the pictures gave him the same uneasy feeling as when he first encountered the Fisherman. A sense of pure dread and hopelessness, as if all his danger senses were telling him to run.
Sylvia then continued her presentation, “Scriptures from many different cultures in the past, along with research personally done by one of our members, who unfortunately could not join us today, pinpoints that these beings do not fall in line with the terminology we use regarding ghosts and the like, but they can be similar in nature. Coincidentally, the Fisherman you encountered last night makes for a great example. You see, reports of disappearances at the lake had surfaced a couple months back. Our members scouted the area the night after, and the night after, but no more incidents took place until the following month.” Sylvia let out a deep sigh before continuing further.
“Suddenly, new reports came in, and more people had disappeared. We checked the following night, but our efforts still left us with no clues. However, we have Viktor to thank for last night's success. By the second incident, he was able to deduce the Fisherman’s hunting pattern,” said Sylvia, this time with an endearing tone. She seemed lost in thought, reminiscing, but quickly snapped back into reality.
“Oh, my apologies, Viktor is the member that I was referring to earlier, the one who is unfortunately unable to join us today.”
“The booooy genius!” Isaac mockingly interrupted; his head still sunk into the table.
“Ahem, as I was saying…” Sylvia flipped over to the next slide, displaying a drawing of an old man on a rowboat, grieving as the lifeless body of a young man floats on the water beside him. The image was drawn in the style of something that could be found on an old book about pagan folk tales for children.
“This is your Fisherman. I found it on an old copy of a short stories collection,” said Sylvia. Her statement left Bel with a puzzled look on his face, but he didn’t dare to interrupt and decided to keep an open mind instead.
“The story revolves around a father and his son deciding to go out fishing in the middle of the night; after discovering they had no food left in their house. They rowed to the center of the lake, which usually promised the biggest fish. However, by the time they got there, something pulled their paddles, and their grips loosened, causing the paddles to slip away. Now stranded in the middle of the lake, the Fisherman’s son made a bold decision to swim to shore and get help. His father had a wooden peg for his leg and was forced to stay and wait for his son to return. Not wanting to feel useless, he urges his son to take the lantern so that he could see where he was swimming.”
At this point in the story, Lee and Isaac had begun to give Sylvia their full attention and were immersed in her storytelling.
Stolen novel; please report.
“However, the light it gave off was faint, and there was nothing they could do to refuel it. The son had told him to keep hold of it, so that he could make his way back to him once he got help. As the son swam further away, time began to pass, and the father lay still, waiting patiently for his son’s return.” Sylvia’s tone changed into something softer, and Bel could just barely make out a hint of sadness behind her words.
“Before the father had realized, he had slept until morning. The lantern had died out in the middle of the night without him knowing. He was awoken by something hitting the boat and rocking it. As he looked over to see what it was, he could only let out a silent scream, while his son’s lifeless body floated on the open water, making its way back to him.” Sylvia then paused, as if to give a moment of silence, but Lee started to clap and sarcastically pretended to wipe a tear from her eye.
“That was the best one yet, bravo!” she exclaimed. Isaac on the other hand, had a more somber look on his face. He didn’t make any comments and buried his face back onto the table.
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By this point, Bel was annoyed at Sylvia’s presentation, “Fairy tales come to life? Seriously? Is that what this is all about?” He was angry, justifiably so, and crossed his arms, indicating to Sylvia that her next few words would decide whether he stays or storms back out.
“The Fisherman died on that boat, and he lost to Limbo,” Sylvia continued, pressing the remote to go to the next slide. “Bel, did you experience any memory loss from last night? Or more so, you feel like you’ve forgotten something important that happened to you?”
“I remember everything up until shaking Zander’s hand, and then I found myself waking up in my own room.”
“That’s nothing to worry about, you just passed out and I carried you over to your room. Wasn’t hard to find out where you lived.” Zander chimed in.
“Strange, everyone who has experienced opening their Mind’s Eye always experiences a feeling of memory loss.”
“Maybe he’s a late bloomer.” Isaac suggested.
“Will you just explain to me what’s going on already!” Bel’s patience was at its limit. As his agitation grew, Sylvia repeatedly pressed on the remote, skipping over multiple slides. Bel counted around seven different slides skipped over but couldn’t make out any of the contents. Sylvia finally stopped after landing on a slide titled Mind’s Eye.
“Viktor, after countless hours of experimentation and cross-referencing various historical data regarding different cultures and religions, came to a conclusion that we are made up of three different components. Our body, mind, and soul—”
“Now hold on! You expect me to belie—” Bel wanted to protest but was swiftly shut down as Isaac slammed his palm on the table, lifted up a paintbrush dipped in white paint, and drew a fire symbol on the back of his right hand. He snapped his fingers and fire spawned right out of his palm. The flickering flame made Bel fall silent.
Sylvia continued to speak, “What we have now, may simply be theory, but it’s the closest explanation we have. There may be a chance in our lifetime, one in a million, where the physical state of our body, the consciousness of our mind, and the will of our soul, all reach a state of equilibrium, and that is when our Mind’s Eye will proceed to open.”
“It’s a like a sixth sense if that helps!” Lee added. Bel attentively listened, processing all of it slowly as Sylvia kept on explaining further.
“Once opened, we can start to see and feel everything around us more clearly, and certain abilities can manifest within us. As you can see with Isaac, he can create fire out of thin air.” Bel was left in awe, and Isaac seemed proud of the reaction he got.
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“So you’re telling me I can shoot fireballs too?” Bel asked.
“Hah, dream on!” Isaac replied.
Sylvia answered Bel with more detail, “Not exactly. You see, all of our abilities are a manifestation of our will. For example, the room we are in currently is my ability, Antique Room. It’s a pocket dimension where I can get lost in my studies, a peaceful place that I had always dreamed of.”
Bel started to put the details together piece by piece. He remembered how adamantly he did not want to die that night, and the strange blue figure of himself that he manifested to stop the hook. Could that have been my ability? Bel pondered, it all started to make sense in his head.
“However, when our Mind’s Eye opens, we all end up with something changing inside of us that we can’t quite remember. While researching Abrahamic faiths, Viktor came across the concept of Limbo, the plane between life and death. He found stories recorded by shamans, priests, and magic-men of the like who had opened their Mind’s Eye, discussing about how they had survived a plane similar to Limbo, however, all of them had experienced different events within it. The evidence isn’t concrete, but Viktor claims that we all must have survived our own trials in Limbo and are in turn rewarded with our abilities.” Sylvia proclaimed these statements truthfully by mentioning that it is simply theory, but she sounded so very confident whenever referring to Viktor’s finding that they may as well already be hard facts to her.
“You see, Bel, when we are near death, our body starts to shut down, our mind dissipates, and our soul leaves our body. Although still a rare occurrence, equilibrium can be achieved, and this is how most people end up opening their Mind’s Eye, but not many can survive Limbo. In cases like the Fisherman, it’s likely that he died while in Limbo, with his Mind’s Eye activated. However, the ability he manifested, the personification of his will, persisted after death, creating the monster you encountered last night. This is what a Persistent Will is, it’s the leftover will of people that have passed on.” Sylvia finished her long-winded exposition, and waited for Bel to take it all in.
Bel had believed some of Sylvia’s words, but most of the information was still too much to blindly accept. The claims about mind, body and soul, and about Limbo still made him skeptical of the whole ordeal. After a long silence and deep sigh however, he gave in, “Alright, fine, I’ll stick around until everything’s sorted out. This is all still really confusing for me, and you guys are all I’ve got for the moment, but this doesn’t mean I believe everything you say.”
“Impressive! You’re already about 3 times better than Lee”, Isaac declared, causing Lee to mutter insults under her breath. Zander jumped up and down repeatedly, celebrating Bel’s decision to stay. Sylvia gave a melancholic smile at the group, seemingly happy that she was able to invite another person to her so-called home.
Bel felt a strange, warm feeling in his gut. He didn’t realize that being accepted, that being a part of something bigger than himself, was something that he had ever wanted until that very moment.
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In the meantime, Rita Orchid finds herself lost on the 4th floor of the Anthropology building. She had walked in circles for the past hour, and could not seem to find the exit, nor any other students. Pitch-black smoke had accumulated outside of the windows, and she could neither see outside nor open any of the windows. Feeling weak and hungry, she decided to enter an empty classroom, where she could not help but break down in tears after sitting down. She quietly fell into a long sleep but was eventually awoken by a mysteriously loud BANG! just outside the room.