"We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form."
—The Great God Pan
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It’s not real.
It’s not real.
I sat there after I saw what I saw. Drank my hot chocolate, and finished my peach tea after, and pretended to keep digging up possibilities for the package.
It’s not real.
There is nothing under his dreads. Any indication of movement or damage came from the swaying of his hair, the jogging. It wasn’t real. There was no gaping wound in the back of my best friend’s head. There was nothing inside that wound which blinked at me. There is nothing wrong with Jay. There is nothing wrong with me. I’m just tired.
I had a late night. I got freaked out.
I…
Maybe I shouldn’t play the game again.
There’s a voice in my head calling me a wuss, mocking me for getting freaked out so easily… but frankly, that voice can kiss my fucking ass. There’s a difference between watching a scary movie and having nightmares, and playing a game hours ago, yesterday, and suddenly hallucinating in broad daylight.
…but fuck. Fuck. It’s just starting, and it already has so much going on.
…Fuck.
I haven’t been to therapy in a while, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten the tricks. One of the big ones, at least for me, is that when I want something that I know is going to hurt me, it’s usually not good for me, even if I do end up enjoying it. Sometimes especially then.
I should take a break. Bare minimum. The game, and the mystery behind it, aren’t going anywhere. There’s time. It’s a boring idea, a bland one, one that feels almost wrong compared to how badly I want to find out what’s going on with it, how badly I want to keep playing, but… mmh. I can practically feel the obsession crawling over my synapses, ready for me to fixate on my questions. That, in turn, seems like fairly decent proof-positive that the safer choice is to not do that.
It’s the right call. Play something else for awhile, maybe something outside of VR, go to work, hang out with Jay. Live my life.
A straightforward, regular life. Where normal things happen. And I’m… me.
Fuck.
I sigh, finishing packing up. In the end, I don’t stay much longer than what it took to finish my drinks- panicking over what I saw (didn’t see) in Jay’s hair doesn’t make for a particularly comfortable experience. The drinks, as always, are delicious, and the aura of the place is impeccable, and that’s enough to refresh me, even with the panic. Next step is to head home and enjoy what’s left of my weekend, find something to wash away the messy feelings of the last few hours.
I let the door jingle as it shuts behind me, heading back to my car. It’s a piece of shit, but the sight of it alone is enough to calm me down a bit further, a little moment of reality. A piece of the world that’s mine, that I can rely on, no matter what all those blinking lights on the dashboard keep complaining about.
I make it three steps forward off the curb, heading to the door- and it opens on its own.
I spend a good five seconds standing perfectly still.
The driver side door is a sturdy and strong-willed bitch of a set of steel and hinges, which is another way of saying she’s heavy, hard to move, and damn near locks in place if the weight hits it even slightly wrong. I have to slam it shut every time, and yank about as hard to rip it back open. It does not, has not, and should not ever simply click open.
You’re being paranoid, I tell myself. You’re spooked and seeing patterns where there are none. It’s fine. It’s ok. It’s just a door.
But I’m starting to feel a bit like how I did when I woke up this morning. Like there was something crawling, just out of sight, and I forgot about it. That creeping sensation that all the little weird things are starting to pile up, that something doesn’t make sense.
The door is heavy, and it sticks, and I know I locked it before I got out.
But it could have opened on its own. It could.
I get in, slowly, and set my laptop bag on the front seat next to me as I take a seat. The idea of a car bomb is ridiculous and strange and dumb as hell- and it still pops up anyways.
But nothing happens. Not when I sit down, and not when I close the door. And then close it again, harder, when it refuses to stick, feeling the heavy mechanism clunk closed just like it does every time I’ve shut it properly. And when I turn the key in the ignition and start to drive out of the lot, slower and more carefully than I normally would, nothing happens. Except the traitorous flashing of the ‘check engine’ light, but that’s expected.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
I takes slow, deep breath as I pull out of the lot. It’s fine. Things are normal. I’m just freaked out, which is reasonable considering I just hallucinated a hole in the head of my friend.
I really shouldn’t play MEAT again anytime soon.
I make it all the way to the end of the road, easing to a stop before a glaring red light, before my windshield cracks.
I jump up out of my seat so hard that when I land, I can feel my tailbone bruise to shit on the lumpy cushion. Fuck. Now that’s all I needed, a gods-damned broken windshield that-
…
That’s an arrow.
As clear as the clicker on my own turn-signal. A sideways V, jagged and sharp, with a single long line coming from between them, pointing over to the left.
My route home from the Golden Roast is nearly a straight line. One right at the light past this one, a left at the light after that, and then right on to a complex of condos as banal as they are cheaply made. A hundred thousand just like them, all across the continental US, bought and paid for, designed to farm rent and nothing else.
The door that shouldn’t have opened.
The crack in the windshield, pointing left.
The glimpse of movement beneath Jay’s hair.
That feeling of something writhing in my sleep. The moment my headset blinked at me.
Something is wrong.
And despite everything, it’s not fear I feel, pushing me to turn. Or at least, not a fear of what might be to my left.
The thought comes back, returning as it always does.
A straightforward, regular life. Where normal things happen. And I’m me.
And a second idea behind it. One a little less fearful, in its way.
Between two systems, one which I know and another which holds only the promise of something interesting, I prefer the latter.
I could just go back to my little condo. I could turn back anytime. My therapist would probably recommend exactly that.
But I have a bad habit of wanting things that I know might hurt me. And an even worse habit of enjoying them.
And the thought of my psychological health, of avoiding risk, of reasonable and helpful advice, somehow feels far more threatening than the idea of everything I know about the world being off.
The light changes, bright carmine turning to a dull, sickly green.
I turn left.
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I drive for almost half an hour in a straight line.
The beauty of small towns that aren’t more than a hundred years old is that most of them are built on a grid, and once you leave that grid, everything is set up at right angles so long as its paved. I drive until the buildings get smaller, less modern, and keep driving past that. I see what was once the road leading to some old mill, long-ago shut down. I see the beginning of farmland, the edges of suburbia placed smack-dab in the opposite direction I’m heading, such that the city turns to forest and then to fields faster than one might expect.
The crack (and it’s insane that I’m attributing motivations to it) can’t have meant for me to just go in a big left circle. That would be stupid. That would mean that my mysterious “arrow” is just me seeing patterns where there’s nothing. Considering no other cracks have appeared, then the instruction (if it was ever real) must have been to just turn left one time and go straight. Surely.
Five more minutes. I’ve got the day off, technically. It’s fine. I can just do a u-turn when I get bored of this. When I’m certain I’ve only gone temporarily insane. When I know for sure that it’s just my mind betraying me in an all new way.
Five more minutes.
The alternative is to keep driving until I’m sure that life is exactly as simple and banal and overwhelming and empty as it has always been and can only be. I’ve failed at acquiring that surety for almost twenty five years, and I don’t have the gas money to drive that long.
I turn on the radio. It warbles between stations of its own accord, the age and quality of the radio making preset channels (or even staying on the channel I was last on) more a suggestion than a rule. It briefly settles on a gospel channel, just south of Christian rock, before I turn the dial back to something that won’t just worsen my mental state.
Through the static, there’s a brief flicker of a pop song, something jazzy half-drowned in white noise, a thumping bass of-
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
I slow a bit as I look down at the radio.
Thump-thump.
The display marks the radio signal as 108.1FM. I’ve never seen it go above 107.9. Point of fact, I assumed that was the maximum range for FM radio, at least in the US.
Thump-thump.
Thump-Thump.
Louder. Just a little bit, but louder.
I decide not to touch the dial. Experimentally, I press the gas pedal down a bit further, speeding up just a bit.
THump-THump.
And then-
THUMp-THUMp.
And then-
Thump-thump.
I check the rearview, my own heart pounding. My throat feels tight, and there is a feeling of cold that runs through me, spinning out from my sternum, flavored by adrenalin.
The road behind me is empty as far back as I can see. The same goes for the road ahead.
Before I can change her mind, I slam the gearshift into reverse and hit the gas.
THUmp-THUmp.
Louder again.
THUMp-THUMp.
Back to its height. I look out the window, turning my attention from the rearview mirror and from the heartbeat singing in my ears.
To my left, woods. Trees and underbrush and deer country, tightly packed between acres of farmland on either side.
To my right, the exact same… and a fencepost.
Not a fencepost. A regular post, with a little perch connected at the top. A mailbox, sans mailbox.
And there, half-hidden by the underbrush, overgrown and crowded in by trees, is what might once have been an unpaved side-road.
I look down at my phone, dead and quiet on the car seat next to me.
I look at the road, vast and empty in either direction as far as the eyes can see.
THUMp-THUMp.
I pull onto the side of the road, put on my hazard lights, and put the car in park.
THUMP-THUMP.
And then… nothing.
I look back at the radio.
107.9. The next closest functional channel is 107.5.
I listen to the hissing of static for a while.
Then I turn off the car. Turn off the hazard lights.
I’m not crazy.
I’m not crazy.
I’m not about to wander off into the woods pursuing a series of nonsensical hallucinations and coincidences.
I breathe, slow and deep.
Count to five. Breathe out. Count to four. Breathe in.
Deep breaths, Ilia. Name five things your senses feel right now.
I feel the pleather of the carseat under my hands.
I can taste the lingering traces of sweetness and peach in my saliva, at the back of my throat.
I can feel the afternoon sun on the back of my neck, streaming in through the rear window.
I can smell a long-expired air freshener trying to fight back the funk of human existence.
I open my eyes, and see a wooded trail, not quite large enough for a car, leading into the unknown.
I’m not crazy.
And if I am… then maybe this is the moment I get to decide. Maybe there’ll be other hallucinations, and I’ll be able to point to this moment as the one where I realized I couldn’t listen to them. Maybe I’ll splurge on some more therapy, and some medicine, and every time I see something strange or that feels impossibly connected, I’ll be able to look back to this moment and my decision to look away.
Or maybe I make the other decision.
Because if I decide to follow this, then there’s no value in thinking it’s not real. An indulgence of my own madness is the one thing this can’t be. It is either real, or it’s not. If it’s not real and I’m just indulging it, letting myself fall into it, then that means I’m crazy, and the madness won, after all the depression and the darkness and the anxiety and the doubt it won. And if it is real, then… then letting myself doubt, resisting what I’m seeing and feeling, is only going to keep me blind.
Either none of this is real, or all of it is. Either it’s too weird to be possible, or it’s too weird to be anything else.
I open the door, slamming it hard enough to hear the mechanism clunk and locking it behind me. Armed with a phone camera, keys, and a wallet, I wander into the woods, past an empty mailbox and down a quiet road.
The wind blows through the trees, and for a moment, it makes a sound like percussion.
THUMP THUMP.