The half-forgotten
Other half of my short life
In short story form

 
Since I Left
8-02-2002

I spawn on a dark, bleak beach during early nightfall. The sun is down, but there's still a lot of light, perhaps from the stars or the moon. I'm right on the shore, and directly to my left, just inside the shoreline, is a long wall the length of the beach.

I immediately break into a run, as if I have a purpose. I find a doorway in the wall and enter a thin hallway, only large enough for one person to walk in. To my left (I'm now facing the other direction), toward the beach, the wall is transparent like glass, and I can see a previously hidden room (it's still on the other side of the wall I saw on the beach). The room has a strange shape, like a rhombus, and at the two foci of it, as if it were an ellipsoid, are two pedestals, each with some treasure on top. The treasure is encased in a glass ball.

I find a slit in the wall, barely big enough for my skinny self to fit sideways into. I run up to the pedestal on the left and shoot the glass, getting a white text message in my vision that I can't carry the "crf" or whatever until I have a "crf".

As I approach the other pedestal, I see through a window on that side of the room, a stocky pitch black creature with long arms and no legs. It walks on its arms, and it's walking toward me. I instinctively know its name is Thromboid, or Thrombus, or similar. There's a tripod-like, tentacled spider creature with it, too, and a tiny ball of energy hovers by its shoulder. I get the impression I'm in deep shit.

I scramble back into the hallway and pull out a grenade just as I stumble face-to-face with the creature. I drop the grenade right on the thing, but then realize with dismay that my pack was somehow attached to the grenade, and that I'd just lost all my weapons. I get some sort of telepathic transmisson from Thrombus that says my attack was useless. Without moving its massive arms, it hurls an ethereal skull-like-blob-thing at me. It silently glides past me, assumably landing several feet behind me. I figure it's because I'm so close to it, that it can't attack me with its ranged weapon so close. Just then, it starts draining me somehow, with little sparks of energy. I'm about to resign that I'm done for this round, but then it snaps in my mind that I don't have to settle for this, that I can escape, so I run.

I run back to the beach, then through a hallway up to the central building. It reminds me of the Waterstreet Pavilion from when I was a kid, except it's all outdoors. I see two little girls romping around while their mom eats at a table by an empty vendor. I easily climb up the wall, aiming to get to the roof to hide from Thrombus, but then I see the two girls follow me by way of some stairs a few feet away, and realize that the roof I aimed for was just another floor. I look up and see that the building goes up a few more levels. I opt for the stairs this time, and run up another level.

It occurs to me at this time that I'm going about this all wrong, that I can never outrun this creature, no matter how slow it is, and that I have to be clever and somehow hunt it instead.

I find a clothing store with people inside, so I go inside. I go to the back. It's just clothing hanging around. I hide underneath a table that has suits lying on it, and shoes underneath. I figure my sneakers won't match well, but then notice I'm actually wearing a pair of nice socks instead. Might work. I get someone to lay a suit over my head to conceal it, then I hear Thrombus' silent advance into the store. It doesn't bother anyone else, but does wander by me. It doesn't see me, so it leaves. Then some pesky customer with curly hair removes the suit from my head with a "ha ha look what I did, I spoiled your fun" look on his stupid grinning happy face. Thrombus comes over, and does a good job of looking surprised for a creature with virtually no external features. Its head kinda jerks back and up in surprise as I leap out of my hiding place and run from the store.

Running up another level, I see a meatball store or something, but it's closed. This level is narrow, with an outer walkway that overlooks the lower levels, and shops in the center. I pass another eatery. It's closed, too, but the door is open to air is out while the two remaining employees inside clean up. One's behind the grill while another wipes down tables when I rush in, look around, and see that it's too bare to hide in. It's connected to another shop, so I run into there. It's an art vendor or something, very bare, so I continue out the open doorway (except this time it's huge, and there's no door) to the walkway again. I skillfully skid down to the ground level, faster than any elevator or staircase, and notice that Thrombus is walking around on the top level, looking for me. I figure I can get away now.

I run down the beach again, this time with the water on my left, toward the pier. I think they have putt-putt golfing there. Not open anyway, since it's night. Beyond is a taller building. I follow a man and a woman toward it. I look over my shoulder to see Thrombus leaving a vantage point at the old building, its fairy-like familiar following it. "Good thing I paused for a bit back there," I think to myself, "or else it would've seen me." We're supposedly at the airport, but it looks abandoned to me. "Why's noone inside?" the woman asks her man, who comments that it's after hours. "It's odd that the escalator isn't going," she says. The escalator is outside the building. We start climbing the escalator, and when we almost reach the first floor, it starts moving in reverse, sending us back down toward some people who are, paradoxially, standing on the very same escalator, moving up towards us!

It hits me that something this nonsensical like this could only happen if it facilitates the an event, the importance of which supercedes the laws of physics. I figure that the event is my death, that I somehow cheated it back in that hallway, and that Thrombus is going to hunt me down until I'm dead. I communicate this to the man and woman, and start to descent the escalator of my own will, when it shifts into moving upward for us instead. "Or not," I think to myself. Looking up/forward, I see Thrombus on another escalator, coming down toward us.

I'm in my roommate's car, in the driver's seat, but somehow he's driving. It's ultra-early pitch black morning, like 4 AM. We're driving through my childhood neighborhood. I comment how we could check out my old house, and he pulls up to some other house. We go inside, and he and some girl to into the kitchen to putz around. I can hear the residents upstairs. A furry little puppy dog runs up to me and wants to play. I ruffle its head, and it paws at me. A claw gets stuck in my leather jacket, and that's when I've had enough. A woman calls down if anyone's there. "Someone's here!" I shout back. She calls down, asking what I'm there for. "Hold on," I yell as I go back into the kitchen. I ask R why we're there. "Well, you wanted to see your old place," he says. "This isn't my old place!" He's like, oh. The couple comes down from upstairs as we're leaving. From her voice, I imagined a jolly fat black woman, but it's two gangly hippie white folk. We get back in the car, which has been parked horribly diagonally in the driveway entrance, backwards, by the way, but not before taking their cat and putting it in the driver's seat.

The cat hangs one arm out the window like a cool frood, the other paw on the steering wheel, looking about with that collected self-assuredness and assumed territorial ownership that cats have. In reality, R is using the gas pedal and steering with his left foot and hand from the passenger's seat. And yet I'm in the driver's seat, too, superimposed on the cat, I guess.

"Where to?" R asks me. "Straight. No, left." I instruct him through my old subdivision, temporarily torn between showing him my elementary school or my old house. I opt for the house for now, turning left onto Rollins (I think?) from Fern.

We pass a flaming, skinny humanoid thing that's walking down the street. I think nothing of it, but then figure that R's never seen that before. "Did you see that?" I ask. He didn't. "We get that around here. There, another one." We come up on another flaming ghost and ram it with the car, obliterating it. Kinda scary, actually. "It's worse than when I was a kid, though. Back then there were only these screaming skull things on the curb, but now..." Two little egg-like things with tentacles speed toward the car, exploding when they hit it. I seem to remember them from when I was a kid, but they seem mutated now. "It sucks if you're riding a bike. They can really screw up your brakes. The explosion will rattle up through your bike and crush this mechanism..." I muse that kids must not play outside at night much here anymore, and remember how the trees used to grab at me as I rode my bike around here at night.

I forget about the next left turn onto my street while these monsters assault the car. Another explosion from the mini things. Then I'm on a bicycle at the corner. Two girls are there, too, on their bikes. They seem new to the area, as if they're there for college. "Can you believe the monsters here?" I ask her. "They're pretty bad," she agrees. "Nothing like when I was a kid," I comment. The light changes green and we turn right. I think about going down through that one trail, the one down the rocky slope by the bridge that goes through the forest and comes out by the old elementary school...from another dream...but instead I end up stopping in some dusty part of the neighborhood when the two girls stop.

The one I talked to is white, and the other one is some unknown exotic, yet plainly American, ethnicity. From far away she looks cute, but the closer you get, the more imperfect she is. It's daytime now, and she's getting a box from a table and taking it inside some building. I look at the other boxes on the table, and they're all the same, and all contain some sort of transceiver. I get the feeling that hers is an old one, and she's pulling an old switcheroo.

I see CF by a car parked by. The ground floor of the building he's parked at is upraised, as if for parking. The road and ground here is all dirt. I call out to him, and he can't believe I'm there. Some other kid I know is there, too, and we all talk. CF pulls out a sheet of paper and puts it on a table, asking if I was interested in so-and-so. I ask what it is, and get the impression he's doing it for his mom's failing welfare. There are eight names on it, "...and it's forever," he assures me. Apparently it's some idea that I give X amount money and get one of these street names changed to be named after me. Novel, but I can't afford it. "I have loans to pay," I explain. "But you have your whole life to pay those," he retorts. "Yeah but I also don't have a car, so I'm saving up for that right now." He looks very defeated and sad.

I'm ready to leave, and my SB friends are suddenly there. The Ps both say they like the atmosphere here. They have to be joking, but then, they did come from backwater places. Looking to my right, the ground is just mud, and there are three tents set up, each with some witch-looking person in them doing lame goth-like things. To my left the dust continues toward a pier and a putt-putt golf course.

I head over to the course, and make small talk with a fat man in line there about how so much has changed here since I left.


posted by Phlegm at 11/26/2003