Took out card of shots. Look what happened. Is this an omen? Where did the ladybird come from? I don't like this at all, it was in a dream I had, and a weird kind of scraping sound. I'm going to stop taking fotos. It's just vanity, anyway. I'm sitting here waiting for a fellow named Tyler. More later.
LATER: You could say this wasn’t such a successful day.
To put it mildly.
I lost a visitor. Nearly froze my ass off. Passed out somewhere for no reason, and woke up at home, but in weird clothes. Like I said. You know nothing about the game. No-one does. But it’s getting more and more scary. I heard those voices before, but I never believed them. Haha. Well, now I’m seeing them…
Maybe there’s some chemicals in those pools, some fumes or something… or the paste – it’s all handmade. That stuff was more bizarre than usual. Way more. Maybe a bad batch, maybe someone messing with our heads. Maybe the government. Da Gubber Man, K. calls it. “da gubber man comin’ fer ya”.
Maybe…
I have to go back over the day step by step here, maybe I can find a clue to what happened, what went wrong.
Maybe, if I look closely enough, I can work out what happened to Tyler. Maybe he isn’t dead. Maybe I can get him back.
I’m a sucker for dreams, and last night’s was a bad one. This morning’s, I mean, must have been about 11 a.m. I was gliding along in a dark bar – everything red – and there’s this strange, but strangely familiar guy sitting at the end of the bar, sort of hunched over. When I get down there, he just looks up at me and smiles. Except it isn’t like a real smile, more a sort of sick grin. Like he doesn’t really know how to smile, but he’s having a try. Then he gets all serious and I start to panic. Chills, and I wake up to some screechy noise… turns out it’s the phone, and it’s Tyler who wants to go ‘in’ that afternoon. OK. This is what I do, after all. Someone been blabbing my name around again at some party.
Tyler gets here – late, like everyone else – and he seems OK. he’s got the usual crap in his pockets, but at least he’s got matches, which shows he’s been thinking a bit. So we set off and it’s fine.
By the time we reach the tracks I feel fine. I put in my contacts in private, so I get a jump on the visuals. Good job I did, too, because they kick in way too early (warning sign??) and I have to grab Tyler and get him off the tracks. He thinks I’m nuts, of course, because he can’t see or hear anything. So I give him the lenses and he puts them in. the gook looked different, I think, but I didn’t pay attention. Anyway, now he can see the train and he does the usual freak out, ‘Is that real?’ ‘Is it dangerous?’ I guess I was messing with him, because I didn’t really answer his questions.
This is what I’m worried about: I was way too eager to just get inside. Am I getting too hot? Like everyone says, ‘good’ is good. But ‘hot’ is bad. Really bad. K. has had friends disappear. Till today I thought that was just BS. Or they fell off a roof. Now I dunno.
We’re inside and while I’d like to say it’s all ‘normal’, I can’t. I really enjoyed it today, at the start. ‘heightened’ isn’t the word. I was glowing. Every color, every sound was so crystal clear, and I could feel every step every breeze. Like coming home. I hardly noticed Tyler struggling along behind me. Even on the tracks, the changeover was so crisp, I thought I was going to fall through for a moment. And those funnels. In the past, if someone’s been a real idiot, I’ve told them the funnels were weapons to breathe fire. Actually I think they were once used to pump cement dust into trucks. In the real part, anyway.
When we got to the stairs, I could see Tyler was having problems. I should have turned back. BUT I REALLY WANTED TO SEE THE PLACE AGAIN. I mean, screw him, he could just wait.
So he followed up, and it was almost like music, much richer this time. I don’t think he got it, but he followed well enough. Certainly he wasn’t seeing it right, but the paste must have been affecting him, I know he stumbled a couple of times, and it wasn’t that dark.
At the top, at the end of the tube, it was just beautiful, so calm, so exciting. We got to the edge, and I don’t even remember if I told him not to lean on the empty railing. Anyway, I just stared. God – it was night! How did that happen? I don’t know how long I gazed at that, but when I came out, Tyler had gone – heading back down.
This is how I rationalize it: I had made it clear as a bell not to go on ahead. I guess he wasn’t seeing much, and he kept poking at his eyes, so he decided to go back down. Except, as we all know, there is no ‘back’.
And that’s all I know about Tyler. I ran down the stairs, and yelled for him, but there’s miles and miles of passages and side rooms. A mess. I made sure I didn’t get sucked in.
I really had the feeling someone was leading me along, or away, or anyway, really scary. Noises, too. Not just the usual wind and echoes, or even the loops from the game… like stones shifting…
When I got back to the places I knew, it was hopeless. I have to go back, with K and the others. Some kind of methodical search. Oh God, we didn’t even get inside the city!
The green room. Full of water. What is that? And then I find an item box – way out in the passages! With a wetsuit in it? I know I was being played. But Tyler’s bag… and a stupid little flashlight fallen in the water. He was somewhere close – close in the game’s sense, I mean… ten feet or ten miles away.
And when I swim through, I’m not on the other side of the green room at all. I’m at the top of the stairs from my dream.
Then I’m in it, and there’s the guy staring at me.
I glide down and instead of – what? – biting me, or something, he just hands me this paper, some kind of book or plans… and I wake up, lying on the floor of my room. In a dress. With the plans.
Here I am. What am I supposed to do now? The worst thing is: all I want to do is go back inside again.
