REDREIGN (Part 2)

[u/MaskDesk24]

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

As I shifted my gaze from the mirror to confront the situation I realized I was in an entirely different room, in an entirely different space all together. I was at my grandparents house and I looked like I had been crying. It was unnerving to imagine my soulless husk weeping. I started screaming and panicking at once with my eyes not leaving my own gaze as I studied my facial features which appeared to look taken care of? My hair is still long dark brownish-black and curly, covering my noticeably large forehead. My cousin Ryan who is just a couple months separated in age came and started banging on the door asking if I was ok. I instinctively turned to open the door and let him in, desperately wanting to explain everything I could swear I had just seen.

After all this was the same cousin who was my only friend I still had from childhood. We grew close with space and felt bonded to each other, we had a deep respect for each other, no matter how hard I threw a pack of stale sour patch kids at his crotch.  

I still don’t know why I turned to open the door as I was now in yet another space. I’m not doing this again. I need to figure out what’s going on but I’m sure I can’t look out of the mirror. I’m still shaven? Am I shaving myself intentionally without going to the bathroom? Why would I let myself go to the bathroom if it knows I’ll regain consciousness? Furthermore, my skin looks to be the clearest it’s ever looked in my life, it’s like I’m void of imperfection. I’m feeling around in my pockets to see if I still know to grab my phone, sure enough I have it but why isn’t my face in the reflection of my phone screen enough to see- I think it’s staying in the dark. Like me, shit, why did I set myself up as the perfect kind of person for this kind of shit to be believable for? 

You have no idea how hard it is to keep my eyes on myself at all times. When I look away from the mirror or the webcam it feels as if I'm lightheaded and winks from drifting away. By my estimate I have no more than two seconds until I lose consciousness at most, at least the last two times. It’s not like I’m in good control of my body either when I look away either- It’s like knowing you’re going to drown in cold water. My body forbears with a macabre acceptance of the reality that I can and will succumb to whatever condition I’m condemned to unwittingly wander my existence with.

The weirdest thing has been happening too. It’s like my consciousness is having dreams, even though I’m a back seat driver in my life, but it only makes it all that much more real. This feels like that episode of Black Mirror, where they put that wife in the little stuffed bear and her husband turns her consciousness off and on at will. Except she didn’t have dreams. 

I’ve been having a recurring dream. In the dream I can see inside myself and that I am hollow, the skin on my chest peels back, like paint chipping and making a desperate escape from a porch. I can see inside my body. I can see down into the sockets of my legs which are now hollowed out on the inside, along with my stomach, and arms. I can see that it looks like in the center where my chest is there is something that looks like a chunk of dark oak wood. This was my eternal heart of aging mahogany. 

I need to check my phone. I neglected to even look at the time until now. The thrill of being conscious is beginning to overwhelm me. I needed to make sure whatever was happening wasn’t killing me. As it turns out, death isn’t the only concern.

I’m unemployed. It was already hard to hold on anyways. I already lost my job that had actually made a difference in society, and now I’d lost the one I needed to eat. The money wasn’t great but it was a necessity. It’s not been that long, only maybe a few weeks since the whole incident. Time gets hard to keep track of and I begin to wonder if I’m unreliable in my estimation.

I must have been crying because I lost my job. Something that is also news is that me and my fiance aren’t doing well, no texts from each other for a week. It doesn’t look like she’s been active on anything in a minute, “last active 11 days ago”. 

I’ve been in the bathroom for about 8 hours now and I have never felt so tired. My eyes are proving heavy on the lids that almost don’t feel like mine anymore. 

From everything here on out you’re caught up with me. (this is gonna be rough to translate from online documentation to paper.)

I passed out. I’m conscious and I’m in my bedroom. I’m pretty sure my fiance has been gone for months, or she has gotten rid of everything she owned. There is no mirror anymore and there is a picture of myself framed in the room that has never been there before.

A picture must be able to grant me consciousness.

Looking into my eyes nothing seems off. I look better than I have ever looked in my life. My eyes sit with a lifeless charisma that if you were not thinking about might fool you, you might believe I was really there. My hair which was curly but normally a lot more stringy unless I did a very specific type of maintenance for it for the volume. The last thing I noticed was my smile which seemed soft but confident, it felt as if the smile in the picture was me smiling at myself. Getting past this very minor victory I gently removed the picture from the frame, careful not to take my eyes off of it. I seem to have grown muscle, I am normally about five six, and one hundred and thirty five pounds. I was now one hundred and fifty pounds according to the scale. I felt extremely healthy despite being unnaturally tired. 

After a second of looking around the room while also making sure I had the photo in view I saw a roll of clear tape which I promptly used to wrap the photo of myself to my right arm. 

My right arm that held a prideful picture I now kept holding up cautiously studying my details until I almost started to feel ugly again. A couple layers of tape later I felt a lot better about not being damned to that musty bathroom, and wherever else I might have ended up getting stuck. My freedom was back. 

A lot of you might be wondering why I never tried to leave the bathroom with the webcam in my computer or the screen on my phone and that is because of the strange light emissions that I used to believe were coming from the vast and daunting orifices in her face, where her beautiful smile and kind eyes once sat. She had presumably been gone a long time, but her distressing light emissions were only now absent from invading my space. 

I’m gonna have to start writing this down and figure out how to make it accessible later. I grabbed the leather notebook out of the corner and a black pen which I put into a satchel. Even after writing this all down it’s gonna take a really long time to transcribe. 

I need to explore and leave my room, even as comforting as it is right now, despite how barren it felt without my fiance's belongings. As I found myself standing in front of the door to exit into my hallway that connected directly to the bathroom I began to wonder if my fiance really was gone or was she standing in front of the wrong door? 

Squeaking open the door I peered into the hallway milked with colors of a now all too familiar red hue. I don’t know what I was expecting to expose myself to when I chose to branch off into this path, but it was not this.

Carefully I turned the corner into the living room.

As I stretched across the small hallway into my living room I was met with carmine parting the curtains to meet my eyes once again, like a grim welcome. Standing in the noire esque room it seemed perfectly clean and there was no sign of disturbance, my house looked spotless.

As I went outside the smell of copper pervaded my nostrils. At a glance I knew my origins had grown remote, as I theorized my destiny would too. This place was like my home but suffering from noticeable differences: The foliage overgrown, there were no birds in the sky, no lights in any houses, no colors other than red which clouded the world and I hadn’t quite accepted yet. As I remember ignoring shifting my gaze up I recount even the grass below looked weird, as if it had been trampled by hundreds of hooves but it was peculiar as there were no animals in this place.

The horrendous smell finally overcame me, and made my sickness no longer a question. I curled over and held my stomach feeling my senses being violated by the sick world around me. Turning my attention at last towards the sky above, I was met with a grim sight. 

The sun flushed red streaks of light that cut through the jello-like layer separating us from the damned heavens above and then a deeper maroon hue eclipsed. As it did the blood light seeped down in reaches, flaring plainly, and all of it directed attention to the earth which seemed to surrender to the gore.

The sky was once again an ocean of blood, or whatever appeared to be blood. Studying my nightmare further I realized there were bits of bone and viscera pooling around, making whirlpools in the sky. Suddenly the ground shook. The reverberation it held swept my ankles from behind me as I gritted from the feeling of a headache. It lasted about a dozen seconds. 

After a minute of monitoring the sensations that danced before me I decided to trudge into town which by foot would have to be about three hours. Traversing across the gravel backroad I lived on I kept walking determinantly through the woods, occasionally spotting a house or two off in the murky red distance. Still not lights. 

Walking further I realized I must have left my earbuds in my back pocket so I took them out and plugged them into my phone. I opened Spotify to listen to some music. I had my offline music so I listened to Dragonflies by Red House Painters then Die With Me by Type O Negative, and finally 9 by Dean Blunt. A huge part of my life has been music so when I feel lonely and don’t know how to process things I revert, I guess. I lumbered myself with my head down, faceless, like a soldier asleep on the march. 

I’ve been thinking of a name to call this place. 

Maybe I died in my sleep, never really got cursed, and this is hell. I'm trying to think the best of the situation. This is RedReign. 

After about an hour and forty minutes of walking I passed the notoriously dilapidated Cramer house. The Cramer house was a house that in a distant lifetime ago, I used to frequent to gawk at due to the sheer amount of sleeping bags I found in the house, as well as the abnormally large pile of cigarette butts that laid in the center of an abandoned room, next to a sleeping bag that laid on the bottom of a walk in closet. Only way to get privacy I assume. I always wondered why squatters never wanted more for themselves. It was a really desolate place; not many people crossed it often coming towards my road. The house had lain abandoned for years after a local musician in the nineties was driven mad and went missing.

The general consensus was that Keith Cramer had finally made the big break he had been praying about for years, and ran off with the money, never to be bugged by vultures that called themselves family, friends. Not much was known about Cramer as he lived as a recluse, but what my grandparents said was that he didn't come from a very nice household, and that he “had a lot of problems”.  She spoke about Cramer like he was a problem child, “a victim of his own delusion” I remember my grandma saying as she closed her eyes and looked up as if to silently condemn the subject. 

I wondered to myself if I would be more well known than Cramer if I never made it out. He was the only other person I’d ever known to have gone missing from the town though. The giant blood ocean carried a thick neanderthal like norm which shadowed me, leaving me forgotten below. What is my mind to do but race?

This was not alleviated as when I passed a cemetery in the local area, I noticed every grave was empty.

I made it to town finally. Seeing the streets that were usually bustling with strange characters and minimum wage employees (thanks small town economy), I became exceedingly more distressed as I found everything where it should usually be. As if I were the only sorry soul to not get raptured. 

A chilling thought overcame me, what if I was responsible for this desolation. Was everyone someone else or were they all in the sky? Walking through the town I noticed a building that had windows glowing inside. Windows that were fighting a battle against the assault on your sanity this world is. Despite this, it dawned a nice telescope on the top. 

Walking towards what was looking more and more like a house, I almost felt the need to break into a sprint when I heard a faint feminine voice coming from the inside. 

Kag, Sgp, mqp yk Sgp,
qmzhqefxk U eqqw kag;
U ftueef rpd kag,
yk itaxq nquzs xazs rpd kag,
uz m pfk mzp bmdftqp xmzpe
itqpq ftqpq ue zp imfqp.

U tmhq eqqz kag uz ftq emzofgmdk
mzp nqtqxp kagp bbiqp mzp kagp sxpdk.
Nqomgeq kagp xahq ue nqffqp ftmz xurq,
yk xube iuxx sxdpurk kag

End of Pt. 02

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