Previous Entry: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/17ntzrs/the_abyss/
2:
What is your name?
What is the date?
Where are you?
What are you looking for?
There are no innocents in this case. Last night, I dreamt again. I got no sleep.
I saw the inner slopes of my skull, curving downwards, and I was following the gradient. There was the brain, and all around it, a strange red glow. I couldn’t tell where I was going, but for some reason, I felt that I was headed downwards. Then, suddenly, once I had reached the bottom of my cranium, I was surrounded by darkness. There was no noise, and there was no light. Only darkness. There, I saw myself for what I was.
Everyday, some odd curious detail comes back to me. And these do not come back to serve my investigation, oh no. I’d be stupid if I was to believe that these small revelations would aid me in my pursuit. No. This is all to confuse me. It gets hard to distinguish the real from the fake.
But after a while, it becomes a game. Memories are funny that way. I paint the slopes of my skull along my basement wall, and I can hear flies buzzing behind me. I sniff the air, and recognise mould.
Today, I remembered about the boy who went missing the day after Sara. We went to the same school. Of course we did. There is only one school in the whole of Wynsburg. Mr. Gibson saw to it that we were all kept together.
Sheeps in a pen. All of us, waiting for the wolf.
We were in all the same classes. Yes, that part is true.
But anything else, I cannot remember. I don’t remember his face. His voice. His demeanor. Nothing. He is a faceless child in my memories. Nameless, too.
But as I watch the branches in the woodlands stretch for the sunset, more comes back to me.
In those days, when Sara wasn’t around no longer, I often walked by myself. That involved trekking along the long stretch of road, right by the woodlands. In the late November periods and especially winter, this road came back to haunt me in my dreams.
When I think about it, I don’t remember anything about Mother. It’s like she never existed.
One of those days, now as I’m thinking about it, I was walking that same road. Alone. No Sara to hold my hand. I wished that she was there. But she was gone.
That day, I had left the school late, and the sun had already set. The road ahead was dark, and only the trees made noise around me. But then I looked off into the distance.
The road was built upon a hill, and far ahead, I saw someone cycling over the hill, putting no effort into the climb. Strangest of all, they made no noise as they cycled forward.
I slowed down, and focused in on the cyclist. But soon, the shape came into focus, and I realised that it was but a small boy on a bike.
I waved out to him. He did not wave back. The light on his bike explored the dark road ahead. It was us two on that road.
I looked at him as he passed me by. Then he looked at me.
I knew then, just from the body, the arms and the hair, that it was that boy. It was him, who went missing. Right then, I thought it was a miracle. For everyone was in grieving for they thought he was lost, or worse, dead.
But no, he was out here, cycling on the road. It was when I looked at his face that I realised that it was no miracle that I saw him right there before me.
I looked into that face, and I saw nothing, for the child had no face.
It’s true that I don’t remember what the child looked like. But this memory that has come flooding back to me has reminded me of all those strange, inexplicable dreams that I had a few years back.
I had dreamed of this scene many times. It was always the same. And yet, everytime I saw the silhouette of the boy on the bike, I was expecting him to appear to me with a face, but he never did. Always the same scene. And yet, I always have the same, unexplainable fear within me when I’m walking down that endless road in my dreams.
What was the boy’s name?
What did he look like?
Did he ever even exist? What is a person?
What is an entity?
These are two different things. A person is something tangible. And an entity is something you feel. It’s a presence. A message, I think. But this is just what I think. I must learn not to fear the dreams.
I take one last look at the forest, and see the bonfires again. Whose fires are those? Their messages rise up into the air, for me to see, no doubt. I close the window, and remind myself of all the times when I have seen the shadows of entities within those woods.
It is a forest of faces. Faces that have no shape in this world, but have form in dreams. And there are things in dreams that we can only see in reality.
Everyone is guilty.