So, I've been trying to piece together this in a coherent story. I've forgotten a lot of it, but I sat down with Agnes and she reminded me what I had told her before. Things I had said. I even have a notebook that I tried to write it all down in, but it just descends into random words.
Anyway, here goes:
Have you ever seen that old show Twin Peaks? That rhyme they had on the show: "Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds...fire, walk with me." Well, we were certainly between two worlds right now and I was walking with fire. I was walking with the Slender Man.
The woods stretched around us, seeming to go on forever. The Slender Man took long strides and I walked quickly to try to catch up to him. Questions sprang up in my mind: "Why did you bring me here?" "Where are we going?" "Why haven't you killed me yet?" I said nothing.
Finally, the Slender Man came to a stop and I stopped just in time to not bump into him (which would probably have been a very, very bad idea). I looked at the woods in front of us and then looked around, so that when I looked back, I was very surprised to see there was a door. A door standing in the middle of the woods. Leading to exactly nowhere.
The Slender Man stood aside. I assumed he meant for me to open the door, so I did. I turned the handle, opened the door, and before I could do anything I felt a hand on my back push me and I stumbled through the door and fell. The Slender Man had shoved me.
I stood up and realized I was now back in my apartment. I looked for the door, but it wasn't there, then I looked around. My apartment was distressingly empty. No laptop, no books, nothing. Since I didn't have a cellphone to call the cops, I decided just to walk there.
Outside, it was a dead silent. This was when I realized that the Slender Man hadn't brought me back to my own world. I was somewhere else.
Trash littered the ground (like in those cheesy post-apocalyptic movies) and there was way more graffiti than normal. There were symbols spray-painted outside my building – they looked like two hourglasses.
As I walked down the street, I realized that I was probably going to walk for a while. I didn't seem as if there were any buses or vehicles of any kind on the street.
As I passed a church, I saw the marquee outside now read:
life sucks and then you die
drop out of the human race
give up the past, give up the lie
come accept the archangel's embrace
Blocks up from that, there was graffiti which read:
the rAke At the gAtes of hell
Finally, I found someone else. There was an alleyway with graffiti on it that read:
out of the dark was suddenly heard
welcome to the home by the sea
And standing underneath the graffiti was a young man in a brown hoodie. He was hurriedly spray-painting what looked to be the omega symbol. "Hey," I said to him. He turned to look at me with an expression of pure shock and then began to run.
He didn't go far. At the end of the alleyway, he tripped on some wires. And then the wires started to move and twist and turned and they wrapped themselves around the man and as he screamed, they dragged him away. (Unfortunately, his scream is one of the things I do remember – it was so loud in that quiet world.)
I ran. I turned from the alley and started running. I could hear something slithering behind me, but I didn't look.
Suddenly, there was a jeep on the road. It slowed down beside me and the door swung open. Inside was Special Agent Aladdin Sane. "Get in!" he yelled at me and I followed his orders without question. In the rear-view mirror, I could see what looked like watery pieces of cable trying to follow us. "Goddammit," Sane said and stepped on the gas. The cable was quickly left behind. "You just had to wander into its territory, didn't you? Couldn't make things easy at me." He began to laugh and I realized that he was very different from my world's Sane. "Don't worry, we're in safer territory now. We'll be coming up to base camp in a few hours. You got any questions?"
"Yeah," I said. "But I think every answer will just bring more questions."
He laughed again and I shivered. "I like you," he said. "Didn't think I would, but I do."
"I'm glad," I said. "Where are we going?"
"Base camp's near the beach," he said. "Funny thing is, it doesn't like the beach. Doesn't like the ocean. Likes everything else except the ocean." I didn't particularly find that funny, but I stayed quiet.
"So," I finally said. "Where's Liza Jane?"
Sane got quiet. "You knew Liza?" he asked. I nodded. "She was a good partner. I liked her. Got too involved though. Tried to save her sister from the kid."
"Agnes?" I swallowed nervously. "What happened to her?"
"The kid took both of them," he said. "I don't want to talk about it." So we both stayed quiet as he drove us closer and closer to base camp, whatever that was.
It was at base camp that I really found out what was going on. When I learned about the war and the quiet. That's where I met myself.
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