It’s night, and I am outside. Surrounding me are the ruins of old stone buildings with their skeletal timbers jutting upward toward a dark sky. The landscape feels like the property of my old house, before it was renovated. There’s a chill in the air, despite the torchlight that illuminates a few points in the distance.

There’s a group of frightened people waiting to the left of a cellar doorway. I step over the shambles of a wooden farm fence, and find that they’re arming themselves with makeshift weapons. Pipes with large bolts, kitchen blades, Molotov cocktails, and other less intimidating things. 

A man rushes over, and presses a grenade into my hand. “They’re coming!” The crazed look in his eyes frightens me more than his dire prediction. “He shouts to no one in particular, “Get ready!”. People gather on the lawn, facing this cellar door. The doors are missing, revealing concrete stairs that descend down into a dark hallway beneath the ruins of a large house. I recognize this as the ruins of my old home.

Undead emerge from the cellar steps into the torchlight. I’ve released the grenade, and tossed it down the stairwell. The explosion sends shards of concrete everywhere, and as I fall down I lose my glasses. Scrambling to retrieve them, the world devolves into blurs of movement, and torchlight.

People sound like they’re panicking, and attempting to run while other attack the undead. I see struggling forms falling to the ground, and back away while still laying on the ground.  In the darkness, I retreat away from the cellar door, toward the road. Still without my glasses, I find a heavy steel pipe weapon nearby. Up the stairs and toward me move a woman and child, both dead. A man takes down the woman, and with startling speed, the child bares its small teeth as it rushes toward me.

*  *  *

The rest is a blur. By the time I can hear anything beyond a high pitch whistle in my ears, I realize that I am covered in blood, and slumped on my knees next to an oak tree. I feel like I'm in shock, and have a deep sense of vertigo. Gradually, I regain my composure. 

To the right of the house is another ruin, but one that has a door and first floor but no roof. Side stepping the corpses the litter the ground, I walk over to the house and sort through the garbage can next to the doorway. I hope to find something useful. Inside, I find a box-cutter, an empty DVD case, and a bubble envelope. An old man stops me as I back away from the can, and explains that he “put them there for a reason”, then returns the objects to the garbage. 

I walk through the door, and up a short flight of stairs. I am standing in a kitchen that has a window facing the road. I turn on the kitchen faucet, but realize it’s too short; a stubby bathroom design. The water doesn't reach the sink. Instead, it pools all over the dusty counter top. 

My father is standing nearby, reading pages from a binder. It looks like he’s seen battle, and his pants and shirt are tons and frayed at the knees and elbows. “I need to get out of here”, I tell him. He explains that he’s going ahead to Quebec to locate a safe zone for the family to move to, but he needs me to stay here to watch out for the family while he’s gone.

I can’t do this though. It’s his responsibility to look after the family, not mine. The dream reasoning blends with reality as I realize that I am moving overseas for work, and I can’t stay behind. The sounds of the undead echo off in the distance as my father remarks “Do what you need to do.” He turns back to studying his binder of papers.

I don't want to abandon my parents to the threats outside, but I know that my presence here can't stop what's coming. I walk outside into the night, but there’s no longer any torches lit. Looking out over the ruins of the house, and the featureless sky above, I feel a deep sense of dread.

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 step off a 19th Century steam engine into a desert landscape. The rock formation feel wrong, like undersea eroded stone, filled with curious gaps.

I walk toward a house built into a cliff face. It looks like the porch to my grandmothers old house, but blended into the rock. It's windows reflect the grey sky.

I enter, and notice a side doorway to my left. Outside is a primordial ocean, filled with algae. In the distance, more alien rock formations. I begin to panic. I don't know where I am, and retconned into my dreamscape are two children. One is sick, and needs help.

Though the window, I notice two beings approaching in the distance. I mistake them for dinosaurs, but realize they are pink-skinned, with hides like an elephant. They walk on reverse jointed legs, with a long neck ending in a humanoid like face. I'm frozen in terror, watching these two beings approach the front door. One looks right at me, and speaks: Hello, do you need help? 

Confused, I open the door. I ask how it can speak English, and the second being explains. They are from a parallel reality where their galactic cluster is in close proximity to Earth. While lacking contact, they know rudimentary English communication. I don't know how this is possible. They gesture to the sky, and instead explain that this world is in the process of being adapted to suit their biology. The beings offer me supplies, including tube-like respirators for myself and the two children. We are to use these during the terraforming process to avoid suffocation.

As shock-waves sounding like fireworks explode in the sky, I hold the breathing tube over my nose and mouth. One child runs off down a darkened hallway, blending into an institutional setting. A janitor watches me from the unlit hallway. The dreamscape is rapidly changing, but I want to know more about the pink, long necked creatures. I look back, and the alien landscape is gone. Outside the hallway windows is a bright light.

I stood on a cobblestone path at twilight, around me was a sparse Forrest. I remembered it reminded me of something from an old fairy tale. I walked, but flickers of motion that would abruptly vanish distracted me.

A deep sound that began above 20hz, but quickly fell below, and crippled me. Like an air raid siren you feel, but don't hear, the assault continued as the world shifted. I stood through the same Forrest, but I was surrounded by plague victims - blackened and dying, the ran towards wooden steps that led up the hillside. Pursuing them were armed men in hazard suits and frighteningly anonymous gas masks.

I wrapped my blue wool coat  tightly around myself, and ran up the stairs. At the top was a ridge and the sky filled with stars. A ship unlike any I'd ever seen stood docked to the stairwell. It was
constructed from many copper pipes, canvas and other materials.

Looking vaugley like a creation of Jules Verne, it was suspended in the air by two vast, oblong balloons. Through the scuffed glass of a nearby window, a man wearing a long brown coat and tousled hair screamed at me. I turned toward him as he pounded on the window and screamed again "It's a Time Crash! Get out! Run! -"

Another wave of deep bass descended, shuttering the outline of the ship. A great pressure built up behind my eyes, and I stumbled. Time and perception fractured, showing me the events of 50, or perhaps 70 years from now, jumbled with the present. The hazard teams, the quiet gray Forrest, the diseased people fleeing, the empty cobblestone path - the conflicting epochs shuttered and froze, fracturing and skipping into an indistinct haze.

* * *

I laid in a large freight elevator, slumped against the wall. The lift came to a stop, and opened on to a boardwalk lit by a deep red sunset. I searched for the man in the brown coat, but the boardwalk was empty.

Standing on the wooden sidewalk, I looked into the horizon until black dots swam around my eyes.

* * *

I walked amidst foggy streets and empty yawning homes made of aged, almost blue plank wood. I was looking for a place to rent.

The streets were empty of people and sound, but there were lights on in a three story building on the street corner. The second floor opened on to 3/4 rooftop deck, fenced in with chicken wire, while the third floors windows were dark.

I was with a group of friends - faceless and indistinct, they drifted down the hall, led by an elderly woman describing the fixtures and appliances this house offered. I walked up a steep, rickety set of steps to the second floor - opening on to the 3/4 second floor deck.

There didn't appear to be any way to the third floor. Curious, I climbed on the railing, careful not to fall by gripping the chicken wire. I reached the third floor after locating a seam where the wire was not completely affixed to the ceiling above.

Entering through a window, an old man sat in a worn rocking chair in a long, narrow room. In the dim light, this room connected to another larger room facing the front of the house.

"Things don't always come back the way you want" the man said sadly. He looked at two encircled rings on the floor in front of the door. They looked like two circular gears set into the old wood finished floorboards. An identical ring assembly was laid into the floor of the larger room at it's center.

I realized something troubling. From the outside of the building, there was no larger room. There was only this small, one room apartment atop this old building.

Looking through the doorway, the light shifted, drawing odd shadows in ways that light should not behave. I touched the doorway, and realized it was solid - a mirror. Abruptly, the rings on the floor began rotating in place and the sound of gears moving filled the room from below.

The world went askew, and straightened. I stood in the larger room, now lit with grey light. An identical old man sat in his chair, and mumbled something I couldn't hear.

_____
Though recollection becomes fuzzy from this point onward, I learn that the gear assembly is actually a gateway between parallel worlds. However, physics and the interaction of matter isn't consistent between each universe. Amino acid chains and protean don't react the same way in one world as the next. The old man and his wife had two children who were heavily disabled.

Upon sending them through this gateway for medical help, their DNA now recombined to correct missing strands - two horrors emerged instead.

What was a normal human being in one universe became an ogre in another. Violent, and looking very much like the disfigured guy from "The Goonies", I ran through this confusing parallel dreamworld, trying to escape a bestial creature damaged by its transition from one world to the next.

_____

As I awoke, a compressed epilogue of some kind was produced - showing me that this house and the work within were part of a larger war between worlds. The creation of terrible creatures, produced by the forced transition from the physics of one place to another. A vision of a single warlord, adorned in bronze armor, inlaid with the familiar gear-motif stood atop a concrete barricade, and released unmitigated horrors upon another opposing side of disfigured, but still visibly human soldiers. Wearing the hazard suit-armor of the semi-humans, I fled this conflict - up a set of stairs, through a door, and into the blue mist.