My mother is running a small hotel. The foyer is large, and looks like a converted orchestra hall; like something off of the titanic. Immediately behind the foyer is a single hotel room. I don't believe it odd that my mother maintains a hotel with just one room. This fact seems very normal. No one seems to visit this hotel, and I do not remember seeing my mother, although it is her business.

I'm visiting, and I'm aware that mother allows me to stay at the hotel in this room. My wardrobe of suits, dress shirts and ties hang in the sliding door closet beside the bed. I organize and reorganize the closet's multiple tiers. Perhaps for efficiency, maybe due to worry or boredom.

An old woman enters the darkened lobby, and rings the front desk bell. She wants to book a room. I (and I assume my mother, although I never see her) experience that sensation of being unprepared for a professional interaction: like the first person who shows up at a yard sale in the early morning - you feel woefully unprepared, and rush to compensate.

Leaving my clothing in the room, the woman simply walks in, and sets up in the room - closing the door behind her. I'm left standing in the darkened foyer, as the last light of day filters in through the windows.
I set up spare sheets on the sofa on the foyer right side, underneath the stairs. Echoes of structure from my high school flicker around me. A party, a situation - both those are all dreams within a dream.

The next morning, the old woman who rented the room demands breakfast, and I stumble over setting up a cafeteria meant for hundreds of people for the sole guest. Large packages of shrimp, giant bags of ketchup.

The woman leaves on errands as I clean up. Afterwards, I sit down at a glass table at the top of a staircase above the rented room. I notice the old woman left her knitting and a leather bound tome. Curious, I open the book and see "Spells, and ways of speeding up time" is the topic of the first page.

Outside, a large group of people are on the beach. It's evening, and they're concerned over how to cook an entire dismembered elephant. I offer my help, using the information containing in the old woman's book. I speed up the cooking process of the elephant in a matter of seconds, and the strange beach-goers consume the elephant whole - legs sitting on the sand like sitting logs at a campfire.

The process of speeding up the cooked flesh seems to continue long after the people consumed the elephant: the meat's accelerated time frame causes it to putrefy and rot minutes after it's been consumed. People rush away from the beach to be sick somewhere, except a single man sitting by the campfire. He smiles, and offers me some of the french fries he'd been eating instead.

I'm standing in line at a coffee/sandwich shop late at night near the airport. The line stretches around a wall divider and around a rack of post cards and souvenirs. There's only one guy running the register and making the food, so the line progresses slowly. I recognize him as a bearded employee from the Silver Snail. 

I'm talking idly to a woman in line about "...if you were asked to total up all of what you spent in your lifetime on anything, it'd look ridiculous..." She nods in agreement. The line moves up, and I'm near the wall divider, looking at the wall menu. I decide, then look outside through the glass window-front. 

The night is dark and foggy. The door is propped open, letting the cool night air inside. The air feels strange, like there's a pressure in your ears, and behind your eyes. Everyone seems irritated. A short Asian guy in a brown trench coat (who looks like an actor from 'The Tomorrow People') is fed up with waiting in line, despite being 2 people away from being served. I get to the register, and the man tiredly asks me what I want. I order Ramyen for $2, and a bottle of water for another $1. He rushes off to make the food, muttering how he hates when he has to do the cooking.

Everything goes silent, leaving a tone whistling in my ears. Outside in the distance, large rectangular puffs of air in a formation 'blow' from left to right - creating fog-less voids in the air. The lights flicker. Some people notice, while others are too wrapped up with what they're doing. A distant airport loudspeaker echoes a coded all-call: "Echo, Tango, Bravo. All is clear, all is bright. I repeat, All is clear, all is bright." That catches some peoples' attention, as they trade confused looks. I leave the line-up, and have a rising sense of panic.

A large silver-grey frame folds out of the fog in mid-air. One exists in the shop, a dim reflection of a larger version outside outside where the puffs of rectangular air once appeared. The frame exists at an impossible angle, like watching an object from two sides simultaneously. Inside the crooked silver frames are knitted grey overlays, shifting like living crochet. The frames expand, shift, and alter. Air begins rushing from the room, from everywhere. 

People look onward in shock, and begin to back away. The frames then collapse inward, creating a void in air pressure. The result is like explosive decompression from an air plane in reverse - pulling everyone and everything toward them in an earth shaking rumble.

I'm outside, running through the foggy night. A brassy-chord echoes off the tarmac, a sound like the lowest possible note. There's a pressure behind my eyes as a round the corner of a large concrete sign. Three other people are braced against that concrete as the next wave hits - signs, cars, and people are hurled up and past us towards the nearest void. I'm pulled against the wall, smashing my head against the concrete and passing out.

* * * 

When I awake, the other three people are gone. I can only see a smear of blood on the concrete sign beside me, and rubble strewn nearby. The night seems darker with no star light and the fog gone. I stumble toward a shuttle-bus loading platform and  see an airport television screen. It's still attached to it's housing. The screen is fractured, but shows a live news feed from the control tower - a large jet with a blue stripe down the side is attempting to land on the runway. Masses of people are running along the tarmac toward the plane's docking area. The next scene is one of madness: someone jerkily pans past a pyramid of people - all climbing atop one another. A woman in a dress is at the top, and leaps off toward the plane as it lands.  She misses, and disappears into the mass of humans below her. Horrified, I back away. I don't know what's happening. 

I enter a steel door into the underground mall connected to the airport. Thousands of people are milling around - many have dried blood around their eyes and ears. I descend down level by level until I'm in the waiting area. People appear more agitated, and are attacking one another for reasons not clear to me. I crouch down, and make my way toward an VIP waiting area. This connects to a rail-shuttle leading to the tarmac. There's two other people doing the same, and appear to have the same level of caution as I do. An Italian man in his 40s gestures for us to move toward an empty stairwell. He leads us through an emergency exit - ending with a steel door he unlocks. We exit into a service hallway adjacent to the VIP area. I excitedly move down the hallway - there's no one here but us. The others hang back, unsure of what they're find. I round a corner, and see a man in sunglasses and a black suit dead on the floor. His gun is missing, as are a few of his fingers. Blood decorates the hallway. Taking the other junction, I can see the masses outside through a frosted window. These people look glassy-eyed and ragged, and are hurriedly filing into the VIP staging area.

I run back to where the Italian man was waiting, but he and the other are gone. In the darkness of the airport terminal, everything again goes silent. The air pressure changes, and in terror I know what's coming.

I'm standing in a dingy apartment that has the same layout as the house I grew up in. The first floor had a narrow kitchen that exited on to a living room.  This apartment belongs to a Chinese man, and he's showing me his operation. I politely walk alongside him as he explains all the broadcast and routing gear stacked against the far wall.

The man runs a high-tech brothel. His second in command - a guy who looks like John Leguizamo - shows me the rest of the operation as the Chinese guy leaves to attend to something. The sky outside is the color of grey static, and a constant high-pitched ringing noise pervades the room.

The 'lieutenant' pours me a drink, and tells me to make myself at home. I sit down on a sofa, watching a live feed of random interfaces - mostly Asian women having sex with guys through some kind of body mapping tele-presence. The guy sits on the arm of the sofa, and leans toward me. 'You wanna try?' I feel really uncomfortable, but also intrigued. It's virtual reality after all, and lacking any memory of where I came from, or where I was going - it seemed like a good idea.

I connect up, and experience a welcome/warmup that transitions into something more elaborate. The high-pitched ringing is getting louder, drowning out all other sounds - I yank the VR helmet and electrodes off my head, interrupting the broadcast.  Leguizamo-guy spits out his drink, and shouts 'Oh, shit, that's not good.', looking at one of the monitors. Since I was connected directly into the core system, my disconnect caused a hiccup in the VR data was handled - and displayed.
 
The telepresence feed streams from somewhere in Asia, with an actual woman starting the process. However, once the sequence is initiated -- the avatar/appearance remains the same, but the person controlling the motions shunts to Russia, where a man takes over.

I realize then how the Chinese guy makes his money, and why there's no much routing hardware in this place. By paying a smaller number of women, and passing off the control to lower paid men in Russia, my host made his money.

I just glance at the screens, and back to Leguizamo-guy, looking for an explanation. He shrugs, and says ' Hey, it's all virtual, right?', downs his drink and leaves the room. One of the Chinese man's  daughters enters the room to bring me some tea, then goes to work fixing the hardware malfunction I caused. I just sit there, listening to the high-pitched ringing noise as my tea goes cold.

An Orwellian world, dominated by surveillance. The State control is absolute - no privacy, and no religion are permitted on this planet. This is an arm of a multi-universal governing body. 

Across multiple versions of Earth, it expands. Destabilizing from within, then slowly replacing political figures over time. It's conquest is not one of military victory, but one of the mind. A slow, methodical conversion over generations.

In worlds without religion, the only threat to their control is belief in something more. Empirical proof of an afterlife, of heaven and hell. Incursions by demons threaten to destroy this control with evidence of hell. The Home Office employs individuals to contain these incursions, and their threat of belief.


A creature, not unlike a Cenobite stalks the night. It moves with a eerie grace. It wears a white leather full length skirt, but a bare torso. It's skin is a whitish pink, covered in horns, ridges, and and thin, reedy spikes emerging from it's back. It appears human, but a ghastly parody thereof. It leaves a warehouse containing two large cubes - gateways between dimensions, but also timelines. Levithian's influence expands, but the demons motivation isn't grounded in politics, or control. It's death and pain. 

A man watches this creature cross a parking lot. It's late at night, and all surveillance is temporarily suspended in this area. Anyone else coming in contact with an entity is flagged for later execution. The demon calmly walks across toward the treeline, but pauses. It changes direction and approaches a bag of candy on the ground by a tree. As it picks up the bag, a trap is triggered, launching a razor thin blade from the tree, bisecting the creature's torso.

It's head still intact, it stumbles backward. The man races forward, holding a garrote tightly between both hands. Avoiding the long spikes, it pins the creature to the ground. It speaks --  "How?" It asks. Struggles to press the garrote across the creature's jaw, he says "It was all over the house in your last victim's place. You're a creature of habit." He jams the razor right to the ground, decapitating the creature. 

* * *

I’m getting work in northern Canada somewhere, possibly out west. The weather is dark and cold. I take a bus for hours, and finally arrive at a gas station/bus stop. I enter, and the place is a ghost town.

I go into the shop, as I'm hungry and want to buy something to eat while I wait - there's nothing to buy here. I walk past racks of post cards and small key chains, to find an empty convenience store with no shelves - only an older native man running a lotto desk. He doesn't make eye contact.

I'm boarding with someone in this town, and they drive me to the hour where I'll be staying: a 2 story cabin, four rooms across, with a large central room downstairs. It seems familiar, but I can't place from where.

Tired, I go upstairs to unpack and get to bed. I enter a room, and I'm horrified. Nailed to the wall are upside down pair of dolls feet. The chipped paint underneath show where the rest of the sculpture was attached to the wall, but it was removed long ago. The shape mimics an upside down cross - yet only the feet remain.I run to another room, and discover the same thing, but recreated with a Barbie dolls' feet and legs hanging from the wall of an empty room. There's a lot of water damage in this room, and some in the dimly lit hallway.

This horrifies me on a level outside of the dream - I remember a dream from my childhood where I was in a cabin, perhaps at camp, and found these dolls nailed to the wall in an inverted St. Peter on the cross way.

I run down stairs, and into the family that's boarding me. They are dressed in some kind of KKK-esk ceremonial garb, with two women bent over, prepared for some kind of sex ritual. I scared of what's happening here, so far away from everything, late at night in a strange city. I run for the door, but one of the brothers in this family tries to stop me - I club him with a nearby lamp, and make it outside to the front lawn. I feel disoriented, swirling vertigo as I stumble and crawl across the dew-damp lawn. The sun’s coming up, and there are wet cardboard boxes strewn around the lawn. One of the girls from the family is outside, and trying to explain to me it was a big joke - the brother, sister and friends staying at the cabin were just trying to freak me out. I can't understand why - and why the weirdly religious, quasi sexual angle? The woman just shrugs.

*  *  *

I'm tearing lined pages out of a spiral bound notebook, and trying to trim the edge with scissors. I'm late for something, and realize I haven't had a chance to shower or dress properly. I rush to a cafe, but it's the middle of the night. The air has a quiet stillness, with everything in shades of grey. There's nothing around for miles. I walk down a dirt road lined with trees on one side, and an open field bordered by a fence on the other. As the road ends at a house, I realize there's a cafe table with seating outside. I'm simultaneously indoors at this cafe - closed, with the metal shop front gate closed to my left --- and I'm still outside, with the dirt road, and tree line to my left.  It's disorienting.

I'm supposed to meet someone here, a lawyer. He needs me to present something about the "nature of desolation" using bits I had in a notebook, and pages from an old Dark Horse comic I had with me. The lawyer is late, so I take a seat at the table / indoors. I start up a conversation with the people there, who are the defendants in the lawyers’ case. I'll be helping them somehow. I speak with a man to my left, sitting on an L-shaped sofa the runs around one side of this table. He says he's from G----- college, part of my old university. We're getting along really well, and a female friend of his switches sides of the table so that she's sitting beside me. They're all part of an organization that's being sued for something, and they're all waiting on this lawyer.

There's a man drawing very accurate space ships at the table next to his, but has 2 other people shading them with pencil crayons. One I recognize. He shows me his poorly colored picture, and then returns to what he was doing.

I'm simultaneously outside and in. The sun is rising - filtered through the trees to my left. The table and people are still there, but they're outside -- the two rooms existing within the same three-dimensional space. I see a man walking through the treeline down a road. It's the lawyer. I meet him half-way, and ask what I need to do for the trial. "You'll know when you're there." is all he says. He's friendly, and it feels like I've seen him before.

There are chimpanzees nearby, and one lying slumped near a tree as we walk back to the table. The lawyer shoves it over at me, and it falls into my leg. The chimp is partially decapitated, with the head only attached by a small bit of flesh. This is horrifying and confusing. "Why did you do that?" I yell at the lawyer. He just shrugs.

We get to the table, and immediately we're no longer outside. The left side security gate, with the exit beyond into a darkened mall exists now. The lawyer gets everyone up to leave, and I help pull up the gate area, holding it high enough for everyone to slip though.

As we leave the gated cafe behind, the twilight illuminating the room fades, and the room becomes a black void. I turn to catch up with the lawyer and defendants as they walk off into the darkened mall, but all I can hear are their distant voices receding in the distance.

Hiding in a ditch, sand blowing overhead. The sky was washed out, with shadows at the edges like a dark storm approached. I crawled out of the culvert on to a cracked pavement road. Around me there were the remains of storefronts, all with blown in or missing doors and windows. Beyond were dark, featureless hills.

I came across a group of people surviving in a gymnasium, the remains of a red cross camp, or something similar. There was no rooftop, it was open to the sky. I coroutched near a fallen file cabinet as missiles flew by overhead. For the first time in many years, I felt a deep, chilling fear in my dream. Everyone felt they were nuclear - and knew if you can see the missiles flying overhead to it's target, you were within the blast radius.

The missiles detonated kilometers away, leaving only a plume of fire and smoke. Non-atomic. A dirty, ash smeared man crouching nearby looked visibly relieved.

* * *

I left the camp, and wandered into the hillside. A tall man wearing a black top hat was following me. Accompanying him is a much smaller man, rotund with ugly features. They're hunting me through the tunnels. As I exit the other side, there's a farm gate. The area beyond it made the surrounding area seem less saturated - as if this world was a pale reflection of what laid beyond. I understood without reason that the men could not follow me past this gateway, as only children are allowed inside. Without thought, I was again a child. I enter this place, and realize it's an alternate world version of my old high school. This one was built against the shore, and had four extra stories. Aspects of it's pre-renovation structure existed, yet hallways connect to places they shouldn't.

The halls were abandoned, and old. Yellow water stains were the only decorations on the once white walls. No ones has been here for a very long time. I climbed down a set of stairs, and out on to a balcony. I looked down at the dark waters below, and notice a steel door near the water. I climbed down a ledge, and perilously down a drainpipe. I need to know where this door lead to. Inside, it was unlike any other room in the school. Where the outside is saturated in browns and yellows, this room is clean - giving off an almost sterile blue look. The lighting functioned, and there were bald men in hockey gear sleeping on the floor, near benches. I quietly walked past these men, and up a flight of stairs. It exited on to the main hallway.

The rooms are shifting now, the whole building is becoming smaller, collapsing in upon it's self. Where there were two rooms, there are now one - there was only ever one. I'm only aware the merger happened for the briefest instant as it occurs - then all that remains is a sense of unease without meaning -- until it happens again. I enter the staff room, and into the front offices - now office. Now cubicle. There's a window.

* * *

I'm standing on an outdoor escalator, in an old market. An attractive Asian girl stands next to me, flat bangs, and a noticeably rounded nose. She's smiling. We're going shopping.

The market square is lined with shops in antique looking houses. We enter the shop on our right as we get off the escalator. Inside the sliding wooden shop door are books, CDs, clothing, and costume items scattered among old shelves. Together, we try on costume items, laughing at the more ridiculous items. Masks, feather boas, tacky jackets. A faceless person - the store owner -  silently places a stained cardboard box from under the counter on top. Within the box are objects that shouldn't exist. A geodesic cube I remember from another place, another time. Also within it is a Nintendo Power Glove. I never owned one of these items, so I try it on. It fits my left hand, although the fingers feel too short. On the outer fist are 3 slanted, glowing bars, which is unusual - this item was never manufactured with such a feature. They cast a fluorescent blue light, which fascinates me. I take it off, and put it back in the box. I continue around the store with the girl, and examine some old books on the shelves. My eye keeps wandering to this unique looking power glove. I buy it, and we leave the store together.

It occurs to me this girl has been with me the entire time - my memory of the desert apocalypse area, and of the alternate universe high school are rearranged. She accompanied me the entire time. 

I wonder to myself, "How could I have forgotten?"

I'm in an open field during the fall, next to a grove of birch trees. A man holds me at gunpoint, and a police officer escalates the confrontation  The hostage man struggles physically with the cop, and his gun goes off, directly into my head. For the first time in a dream, I die.

I'm in an office building without windows. Beige walls, yellow counter tops, with 1990's era computers and CRT-monitors arranged on desks. I believe I'm at work, and sit down to operate one of the humming machines. I'm confused, as weeks seem to have passed, and all my files are gone. Nothing seems right.

I go into a break room, lit by harsh florescent lighting. The room is eerily silent. A girl is sitting down to eat lunch, and I move to join her. I can't hold a fork, or chopsticks to grasp the noodles. My ears buzz, and vision blurs whenever I try and interact with anything. I focus, and the vertigo goes away, allowing me to eat lunch with my chopsticks. The girl silently ignores me. I look away, and back - she's gone. Hours have passed on the wall clock. The food I was eating seemingly never existed.

I return to the computer, and attempt to move files around. An Asian man, wearing a white short sleeved dress shirt and tie approaches me. He looks remarkably like 'Harold' from the film 'Harold & Kumar'. He explains that I'm dead. 

Disbelieving, he shows me a series of work orders, each with elements missing from them.
"Were do you think this stuff goes?" he remarks. "We quietly manipulate the manifests, shaping the company - controlling the world."

"Ghosts?" I ask. He opens a concealed wall panel, removing a box, and showing me pieces that were repurposed or hidden away for future use. He holds up a set of brightly colored splice-cables. "Dye-set fiber optics. It slows down data transmission, lets us monitor things, and change what we need. I'm just low level. The old ones are pulling all the strings."

I look closely at the monitor screen, seeing two drives that didn't exist before. One labeled "Data", and the other "Dump". "We need to purge those drives. She's starting to see things." He pauses. "Your stunt at lunch didn't help."

The clock jumps again, yet the man and I are still in the same positions we were before. 
"Wh-what... why am I here? Didn't -" I stammer. 

"Die? Yeah. That sucks." He says. "The Older Ones put you here, to keep things running smoothly. Keep feeding them information, deleting other information. You and I help them manage the low-level business stuff." 

"What about lunch?" I ask. "I ate food. I... moved things around."  

The man walks over to a bank of server machines, and looks at the blinking lights. They seem to slow as he observes them. "You wanted to eat food, so your mind filled in the blanks. None of that happened. Nothing does, not for us. Not anymore."

A harsh, gray light began to filter in under the door. The man begins to panic. "Quickly! Dump those data drives. We can't let anyone find those. They'll know about us, about what happens after!" I try to move the mouse on the computer, but everything moves backwards, in reverse. My ears are buzzing, and the world becomes a blur.

_____

I awoke in the middle of the night, thinking about what happened in my dream. There was another aspect to the dream, but after the blur and buzzing in my ears, I have no memories.

In retrospect, I realized what my mind constructed was the idea of soul enslavement: using ghosts to power and shape not only one business, but global finance, politics, war, and the world. The Older Ones, perhaps were ancient ghosts. Of who, or what I don't know. The only knowledge I gleaned between the panic, and the blur was this: they silently shaped our world, but to unknown ends.