The Endless Road

The Endless Road

I don’t when I started walking this path, I remember pieces of what came before but they were only broken fragments. I know well the scene I am in, the dull grey cobbles matching the murkiness of the twilight sky. This place is forever stuck in eternal dusk; the last glimmer of sunlight was consumed beneath the horizon, yet the shroud of night never descended into its usual plumage of fathomless onyx.

I remember this well enough, over and over and over. I know I had many moments like this one, where I remember this place.

But where did it begin? There were no answers to be seen. Endless, changeless fields of golden grass that stretched all the way to the skyline.

Desperation was clawing, where was I? This isn’t dreaming, this isn’t living either. I surely would have stopped at some point; my legs would have given in to cramps, or my breath would be taken from exhaustion.

I dared to look within rather than without, my memory frayed as rotting rope. I stepped into the broken cage of my own mind, empty thoughts with only a single strand holding steadfast against encroaching nothing. A beautiful, flickering shard of gold, not unlike that of the endless acres of grass. This poor thing was the last survivor of a lifetime of lost recollections, but when were they lost?

I comforted my lone companion; it was completely unaware that it was alone. As my metaphorical hands wrapped around its cooling embrace, things started to make a modicum of sense.

This was the memory of… Hair. Not mine, mine was unimpressive and ultimately cumbersome. A woman’s who name I had forgotten in this endless limbo, still I remember the pigment of her locks. She always appeared as if she wore plumes of brilliant sunlight, her smile reflected similarly inexplicable kindness that bordered ephemeral dreams.

But that last time I beheld her was not as beautiful. Her face had been buried beneath a thick ooze of crimson, her soft and stripped skin screamed with hundreds of lacerations still weeping blood when she should have none left to offer. The dread of something so wonderful now unspeakably defiled caused me to pause with abject horror, my body wanted to retch until my innards yielded, this couldn’t be true.

But why did it happen? Why do I remember this?

I dared to preen my fleeting memory for more, the pain it wracked as I attempted to will impossibility into existence. Recall something that I simply couldn’t! Something that I might have never known. But in time that which was lost crawled its way back in.

The room was encased in darkness. It was not the regular gloom of encroaching shade in the absence of light, electrical bulbs had kept whatever groggy warehouse room I found myself in perfectly illuminated. It was alive, swarming and twisting and contorting endlessly as the fathomless mass caressed my skin; like the embrace of an old lover that I never knew I had. Its gentle touch made the once sickeningly depraved scene before me feel acceptable.

She deserved it. She had wronged you, tormented you, debased you in ways you dare not recall. It whispered but the words simply appeared in my own mind as if they were my own internal monologue.

This thing that was once something I admired, yearned for… Potentially even lusted, now devolved into a half-decaying pile of rent flesh barely worthy of being called a body. Whatever had happened to snuff the last ember of her life was long ago, flesh had started to pungently decompose.

I could not see myself, had the darkness not lurched to my comfort I might have never known I was even here. The bliss it offered me in these agonizing moments was the only tether that held me to sanity in this… This… Horrendous nightmare clinging onto me.

But the moment ended there, my poor friend, my last memory in a dead world of my psyche ended there. Though much to my dismay, I looked around and suddenly found that it was not as lonely here as I had thought. Shards of previously neglected feelings returned: the soft alabaster walls of my bedroom, the gentle fields of my village home, the drab but comforting cubical of my workplace. These were normal, these were what they were supposed to be.

It was a nightmare, it had to be. That was the only explanation that made sense. The same nightmare that I must be stuck in…

I pulled myself away from my metaphysical isolation only to be greeted by the same setting I had been trapped in when I made the plunge, the same road marked by golden flowers and dusky skies. Still walking, always walking, even without realizing I had continued to follow the path all this time.

If this wasn’t a nightmare, then what was it? It wasn’t borne of my own mind; I had a vivid imagination that was as much a bane as a boon as my previous finding had confirmed. This was something else, it didn’t feel the same, I couldn’t simply pluck myself out as I normally would.

There are no answers to be found out here. Nothing changed, nothing moved. Was I even moving? I could feel my legs taking strides, but everything was the same, always the same.

I pulled myself back to my mindscape, my lonely friend sputtered and spent of answers to give now found itself amongst a small community of fractured, insignificant thoughts belonging to once-lost vistas.

Another of its size loomed away from the rest, this time it manifested a grey miasma unfurling like thick mist; the same dull colour that marked the unchanging overcast outside. It wasn’t like the last one, this one pulled itself closer as my conscious drifted toward it, inviting me in.

It wanted to be witnessed, who was I to deny myself?

The grey reminded me of an overcoat, large and baggy built for a man far bigger than myself. I knew its owner well though I could not say it was with the same admiration as that sun-kissed woman. We had known each other since our adolescence, he had always been stronger and more impressive than myself; a trait he used frequently to oppress me to do what he wanted.

I had never hated him when we became of age, I merely accepted it for childish tendencies that we abandon when we mature. I never spoke to him after, we both went our own ways in life with little more to say. But when I saw him here, shackled by rusty chains, I knew exactly who the crass roughneck was.

His limbs were bent so awkwardly it suggested more than one part of the bone had broken, like they had been squeezed and contorted though there was barely any blood. The same thick veil of living night blocked my vista from the natural midnight, I could hear the gentle ripples of water smacking against indomitable walls, but the soft ambiance was once again snuffed by wordless relief.

This was justice, justice for you, only you. Only you deserve to have justice.

I was solemn nonetheless, I never liked him though I could equally never wish such a horrible thing to happen to anyone, even somebody who might have rightly deserved it. Cruelty wasn’t an answer to cruelty, that is always what I chose to believe.

I think.

I could not say I hated seeing this, the only part I could hate was this niggling sensation that my hands could cause such disgusting acts. He was never guilty of little more than youthful bullying, it was harsh, yes, but hardly criminal. I tried to thrash against what I saw or the implications it drew upon me, but that soft embrace eased me again.

But why was I seeing this? These pieces of reality have tangibility of imposed events, but I could never do such a thing, nor do I remember doing it. But here it was.

The fragment ended as its predecessor did, though I could sense a serenity about this fragment when it did, contentment. How very strange.

Colour began to swirl and swerve wildly across my awakening mind, a larger shard showed my exact same worry in the physical world. No doubt when I first started to contract these nightmares, I brought the worry to my medical consultant with these dreadful things I had imagined so intricately they felt real.

I still can’t remember the face or name of the one who provided me with an answer, but I remember what they said now. It was likely a type of paramnesia; a memory disorder that caused a person’s brain to confuse real and artificial memories produced by imagination with one another.

Much like me, they found it concerning how brutal these supposedly fabricated memories were; they didn’t fit any known parameters of the disorder. Confabulation was common in those affected by paramnesia but was mostly applicable to the everyday, filling in forgotten blanks of day-to-day with easily predictable answers, not murderous fantasy.

I can’t recall the outcome, there were vague suggestions of medication, but did I take them? Could they even break a mind so badly like the state my shattered self was in?

No, no, I refused them at first. A reserve if nothing else could fix it, I needed more answers. Like I do now, there’s still pieces missing.

I hopelessly continue to ponder the strange purgatory I am locked in, the defining features along the endless road were pieces of these fake recollections, the strongest things that managed to catch in my mind like trapped debris. Was this place a reflection of them? If so, the last piece must be whatever this cobblestone path reminds me of.

Pulling away from the mindscape again to glare upon its worn facets. I didn’t need to pluck wires of my dysfunctional head to find the answer. They were as worn and aged as the person who lived there, a house for the elderly, a caring place of respite for those who had done a lifetime of hard work. Simple, welcoming, peaceful.

I was welcomed in but the person I was trying to find… He had perished in his chair, he was gone. No weeping gore, no rusted chains, no overwhelming brutality, just a simple and quiet death of expiration just as nature intended.

Solemn? No, he didn’t deserve it. You know he didn’t. It was there again, reassuring me even with poisoned words. I dared to ask the one question that remained in my mind as I finally pulled myself to a mirror in the room, my features were basic bordering generic, simple and smooth black hair, checkered shirt of blue and white.

Who was I really? Someone who could conjure these necrotic scenes time and time again?

“Safe” it whispered, not as it did before, it claimed my lips and spoke with my voice through the reflection of peerless glass. “You are saved, free of these burdens.”

“Saved?” I finally dared to speak, my body raced with terror and yearning blended into one shot of fiery adrenaline. “I can’t remember anything, anyone! I can barely remember myself! But you… You are here, you were always here.”

“Yes.” The reflection’s face turned to a sharp, inhuman grin far too distended to even fit on my face, teeth mangled to sharp, serrated needles so elongated they threatened to burst from its exposed gums. Its eyes turned pure hollow bulbs of pitch black, skeletal horns erupted from its forehead as flesh writhed to reshape its now triangular face. “I am here because I gave you what you wanted.”

I could do nothing but seek flight, tearing myself away from the unmentionable thing that now claimed my reflection. Even as I escaped from the mirror’s radius, it still stood there with benign pride. “You need not be alarmed; your aching head was to be expected. An unpreventable side effect of my patronage.”

“Your patronage?” I didn’t dare approach, looking around at anywhere but where this demon manifested, hoping for some shred of solace.

“Yes, you had great turmoil roiling in your heart. Delicious hatred that you dared to repress. You claim what you have seen is falsification, but you have dreamed of it every day.”

I tried to scramble for words, argue whatever this creature was saying was the real falsification, before I could speak his long claws pulled something from the depths, the pristine face of that golden-haired woman. “She was the first. You were aroused by her appearance alone and when you found her personality as loving and warming to you as her flesh was, you craved her.”

“But she denied you because you weren’t attractive enough, your words couldn’t keep her attention enough. She refused you for others… And you hated it.”

The moment flashed in my eyes again, where I stood before that dissected carcass, I saw myself looming over what remained, holding a knife completely drenched in sanguine within in an old warehouse. I didn’t need to know how it happened; I had pictured it countless nights for this moment.

“You ruined what once pleased you because you couldn’t bear it being with another. And it was perfect.”

The face faded and was replaced by harsh brute of a man wrapped in his favorite grey coat. “You thought you could escape the urges of your past. You always wanted him to suffer as he made you suffer, a single moment to be repayment of decades. You would watch as his prided brawn was denied, as he was left to starve while the winds whipped his pleading face.”

The same sensation felt me as I stood along those docks with the bulbous pipe locked between my hands, I had broken so many points along his bones that there would be little but fleshy paste left. None of it could be fatal, I had to let him watch me finally win, finally give him what he deserved and worse. He would die by sunrise.

I simply left him there to scream for mercy; just as I once had.

“You were different this time. The first is always difficult and your selection made it all the harder. But when he came into your vengeful sights, you didn’t need nearly as much convincing. This hot sin was yours alone. I even recall you grinning like a devil when you were done.”

“Even here.” Its command whirled me back to this mental pocket I found himself in, pointed towards the elderly man in his chair. I followed its unspoken orders, looking over a face that would look exactly like mine when the inventible clutches of time would whisk me away. “Your last target, the last remnant that brought you into this world. A being you had once argued for mercy.”

“Oh, he housed you and fed you and watched over you. But he found your whimsy too bothersome, many of your tribulations ignored by his growing disinterest, his growing lack of faith that you would ever be anything in this world.”

I pulled myself back to look at the creature again as it just kept that horrid grin of gnarly teeth. “By the time you proved him wrong, he was helplessly senile. This time you felt only pity as you choked the last breath from his lungs.”

What was I supposed to say? This thing knew me too well, how I had repressed every thought of violence in the daring hope of becoming a “good person”. It knew any answer I would give would be either admission or lies, for those were the only options I had.

“And now…. My work is done, you are free of these burdens.” It allowed a rattling cackle to escape its throbbing throat as it faded away. “And granted you far greater ones to take their place.”

I didn’t need to ponder, it now made sense. These pieces of the road were the corpses I had created, this prison was the graveyard I had cleaved.

And the eternal walk was my atonement.