Before Heaven

Chapter 11

X

The night four nights away from the end of pre-simulation, I have a dream.

It initially appears as all dreams do at first; visuals and noise, completely discordant with each other and all other the place, passing through the dreamer's mind and leaving them unable to comprehend what is happening before them. The moment I realize this is a lucid dream, however, the complete chaos of the dream stops and everything becomes visible.

I'm at home. In my bed. My room's wide, the walls a deep shade of dark green, windows with silken curtains above my king-sized bed. I've got tall drawers on the sides of the room, every shelf in the drawer filling to the brim with clothing, which in turn is tossed here and there around the room without much care. Some of my shirts are draped and strewn over the top of my drawer, upon which stands a red-numbered digital cloak and a plastic stand of RoboCop. I love that little bastard. My desk, at the other side of my bed, still has a few stray papers on it that I quickly recognize as homework. I stand myself up, rubbing my eyes – even though I'm still asleep, my physical body's eyes closed tight – and look at the sheets of homework strewn across the desk.

Math. Horrible. The dream distorts and exaggerates the numbers used in the equations – 493942 times 394943 divided by pi. My simple little brain just breaks down when I stare at the equations and I lean down.

This is all familiar to me. My mind is recreating a memory, an experience I'd had prior. There's a general feeling in the air of inevitability, of something bad to happen, something as I recognize as something I'd felt long ago. I clutch my head in confusion and look at my hands.

They're small, babyish, smooth and free of any stray zits or bruise marks. The top of the left one is free of a notable scar, as well; I'd cut my hand deep when I was nine on a sharp rock pointing out of the ground. Dad had told me to stop being such an i***t back out in the yard. Mom just ignored me despite my sobbing wails, as per usual, cooking up some pasta or something close to that. That had been when I was nine. In the dream, something tells me I'm eight. I feel eight, so eight is the age I go with. I feel as if something's to come, just soon. I look at the door as a stamping noise becomes clear, traveling up the outside hall to my room and ceasing at the door just as the door throws itself open.

It's Mom and Dad. Betty and Hilson Winters, the Winter Couple, the stars of the industry. Dad, possessed of a round, hoary black-haired face with a stubbly chin and a pleasantly wrinkled smile – projects an image of being a kind, warm, loving individual who was nothing short of fatherly to those who's shows and movies he'd produced and those he'd interviewed on Winter Tonight. He is the queerest opposite behind that; a brooding Grinch of a man who struts about from menial chore to menial chore, quiet, solemn, keen to drinking fills of beer and leading some semblance of a miserable life the few times he actually gets to go home. He is indifferent to me, and indifferent to Mom. The two barely interact outside of television – which once again advertises them as the loveliest people you can meet – and tend to do their own thing separate from each other even as they live in the same house, as though they are living in different planes of reality, totally ignorant to each other. The rare times Dad did speak, it's usually to complain; of the flagrantly ignorant media, the devilish machinations of Fox News, whom he is now funding, offering ghoulish, half-true reports of his doings and betraying the very person who makes their runs possible, of senseless, color-spattered tabloid magazines, stocked in the shelves of convenience stores and one corner of the library desperate to make sales, of the very world around him to every weird stare he receives from an audience member or every single time he lightly stubs his toe crossing the stage in Winter Tonight. The delightful facade of the bubbly man who hosts Winter Tonight peels off at home into some gruff, stubble-faced shell of a man who eats every meal and passes every look with a scowl on his face. Most of his anger is channeled into silent fury, thank the Lord, but other times, it slips and he vents it out on us. The moment I'm dreaming about – something that had happened to me when I was eight – had been one of those times Dad had let his anger loose. Despite all the fame he knows, Dad is still somehow disgruntled.

Mom was some tall, wide-shouldered gypsy of a woman, with luscious chestnut hair brushed and tended to with an agonizing patience, silvery blue eyes that are almost hypnotic to look to, and a wide pair of vividly pig-pink lips, curling down into some slight but disapproving frown. She, for lack of a better term, doesn't give a s**t. Not about the industry. Not about the fame. Not about the adoring masses, or the opulent house, or the varied and controversial opinion of her held that the media had formulated, and not about me or her husband. Mom and Dad have nary a wink of love for each other, I think. The most affectionate they get when the camera's are off is a look at each other that's not rife with tension and shared virulence. Still, Mom remains apathetic as can be. It's almost inhuman the way she holds herself still against Dad's occasional tantrums. She remains perpetually glum – almost a satire of the woman she claims to be on television. Dad is likely enraged by Mom's incapability of being intimidated, so he goes on the next target – me. I usually idle about the house, in the yard, in my room, down on the lower floor, engaging in whatever activities appeal to my young mind. When Dad talks to me, he's almost confrontational about it. He degrades me for every slight I do, and it becomes exhausting baring it all after a while. Mom, on the other hand, says nothing to me. The most she interacts with me is an automatic "bed time, Jackson" the moment the nearest visible clock hits 10:00 PM triggered simply as a force of habit. It is astounding the lack of social contact between our family.

That night Dad barges into my room, he has a savage look to him, his inner, black-eyed Grinch rising to the surface and staring at me with the most intimidating face an adult can have to a child. His fist is clenched, balling in such a way he can deliver a punch to my face and snap my neck with the force of it. Mom is behind him, a blue-striped cigarette puffing out between her lips and her eyes dull with a lack of interest, her frowny lips even lower and heavier than they usually are. Mom plucks her cigarette between two vulture-like nails, gives Dad a bored look, and then glares down at my shrinking form sitting on the bed.

"So what are you going to do?" Mom says, her voice choked and slightly raspy from smoke. "Beat him over cat puke?"

Oh, Jolly. I remember it more clearly now. This was that day our bombay cat – named Roger, and one of two we had roaming around the house – puked in Dad's room, and he'd ordered me to clean it up. I'd conveniently "forgotten" to do it and awakened shortly after Dad had realized my lazy eight-year-old ass hadn't cleaned up the festering cat puke from the rug of his bedroom. He hadn't been pleased. Mom, apparently, can care less.

"Be quiet, Betty," Dad snarls behind him, which prompts Mom to roll her eyes and put her cigarette back in her mouth, before Dad looks back at me. He strides a few steps further and waves his arm across the room. "You ignored your chores, Jackson. You up and just f*****g ignored them. Why? Why?"

I'm already crying from Dad's vicious temper, recoiling further to the bed. "I-I'm sorry, Dad-" I begin to plea.

Dad has none of it. "That s**t is staining my f*****g carpet Jackson. I'm going to f*****g eviscerate that cat and I'm going to tell the press you did it. How the f**k do you think I feel?"

I start outright bawling, my little voice choked with sobs. "I'm sorry, D-Dad, I'll cl-clean-"

"Sorry isn't good enough," Dad snaps. He takes hold of my chin as my tear-filled gaze starts to drift back to the bed, and forces my head to look at his fuming face. He slaps my face with a stinging burst of pain when I look away too far and my crying amplifies. "Why didn't you just do it, Jackson? That'll cost too much to f*****g wash out. Look at me when I talk to you. Look at me when I f*****g talk to you, Jackson."

Dad keeps forcing my head to look right at him every time I try to recoil or avert my gaze. His fingers dig into my chin and grip it firmly and harshly. I continue to sob. "Wh-Why should you even care!? You don't e-even care about me!"

Dad's face grimaces with disgust. I don't know if he's aiming that face at the notion of him not caring about me, or the fact I was so pathetic to break down like that in front of him. "f*****g honestly, Jackson," he spits, physically yanking me off my bed and onto the floor between me and my desk. "Go to the kitchen, get a paper towel, and clean that s**t up. Do it now, Jackson."

I kneel up, my face tightened into a sheer distraught picture of a child furiously crying, tears pouring from the shock of being tossed off my bed and the fear I had of Dad and his anger right now. I look down from Dad, and he just stares at me in contempt as I shuffle over on my knees to mother. She continues to look away, at stray motes of dust on the ceiling or some vacant space as she thinks idly to herself. She's not even regarding me. I don't see a mother, there. I see some cold life form, some anti-social being with all the love of a lifeless boulder and probably chiseled from the same stone, tasked over watching me but not caring for me. She's just uninterested in any look of horror I shoot at her in response to her disgusting antipathy.

"L-Look at me, Mom!" I say, desperately shuffling to her and my voice collapsing in tearful moaning that drowns out the coherency of what I say. "Please. Why don't you love me, Mom? Why do you just ignore me? Why?"

Mom doesn't so much as look down. Her arms are cross together. I want to figure that she just doesn't want to watch, but some part of me said she was ignoring the situation because she well and truly doesn't care.

"Why?"

Dad eyes me with impatience. He's done with me being a child. He's impatient for a man; someone who can act, someone he can train, someone he can mold in his own image. All he has right now is some shivering, snot-nosed, crying kid possessed of some unbreakable innocence. I still refused to believe Santa Claus wasn't real, though. That Tim Allen movie told me that Tim Allen would come to my house at Christmas, and if I were to kill him, I would become the next Santa Claus. That imaginative fantasy brought an honest glee to my little heart.

"Why, Mom?"

My tearful sobbing continues. It's the only thing anyone can hear in the house. Just some poor battered child, wailing his head off to the thing supposed to be a mother. Cowering from the person supposed to be his father. Nobody cares for me. I beg for an answer. I just wail and plead to the people doing this to me – over something as trivial as cat puke – to give me some semblance of an answer as to why they treat me this way.

"Why? Why?"

Dad's done. He seizes me by the hair and drags me off into the kitchen as I writhe in his grasp in pain and protest. Mom continues to stare, with eyes as freezing cold as an Arctic glacier, as deep as a canyon with how far you could look into them, as emotionless and dead as the eyes of a corpse. Her skeleton is ice. Her face is a cold baron staring down at faceless masses. She is as a statue; unregarding and unmoving.

The dream stops being clear to me there. I once again writhe in the grip of nightmares. I'm in a chaotic haze of mashing blood-reds and choked-out purples, clashing and morphing together in some wavy world around me. The ground is made of swirling shapes, with the consistency of cold glass, and stretches on forever in every direction. Something crawls from the haze, some horrific creature with skin as pink as the flesh on a plucked turkey, supported by bounding insectoid limbs protruding from a thin, cylindrical body, gnashing fleshy claws together and looking at me with a face peeling back to deformed, elastic lengths by hooks stabbing out of its skin, its fanged mouth stretching halfway across its back and its white eyes peeled above me. The thing pursues me, slavering and snarling, as I desperately attempt to flee into the infinity around me. It's like I'm trying to wad through tar. My legs are being pulled down like magnets to the ground below me. I struggle to lift them and they move as slow as molasses. The thing quickly gains on me and is a second from shredding through my vulnerable, panicked form before reality collapses before me, the world shattering around me and the ground disappearing. I felt myself falling, falling through an infinity twisting into impossible curls and shapes and shifting, twirling abysses around me through hues of garish red and blue and violent flashes of crimson beating against purple, every single one harsh as flint to the eyes. The monster above me twists into some horrid mash of skin and bones, fragments of flesh and malformed limbs. The center of the beast is mashed into some porridge of flesh and shifting images, going from one familiar face to the next. Mom. Dad. The first jeers at me with her apathy, the second stabs at me with his impatience. Harlow. Ash. Those who subtly mock me for my circumstance through their indifference and caustic sarcasm. Maxine. Penny. Arno. Ken. Billy. Faces, good and bad, I recognized as strangers around me. I was here like everybody else, but I had one difference from every single other person; I didn't want to be here. It forms into Chayne. I feel some measure of trust when I look into her powerful, authoritarian blue eyes. I feel she's plotting something, that she's still hiding something behind that strong mask, but regardless, she's someone I can look at with some measure of fondness. Jenny. Someone I've come to call a friend, someone I can confide in. Someone I can relate to in a powerful way. It's mutual, as well. Lastly, I see none other than Alice.

I don't know what to make of them, at first. At first, their face is almost genuine, practically sincere except for one almost invisible flaw in their eyes that hinted at their sinister motives. It's almost magnetically pleasing to look at and I'm mesmerized by their small smile, their temperate blue eyes, that impenetrable sense of calmness and placidity they radiated at every time. I think I can understand them, in that moment. What a fool I am. I notice that flaw in their eye quickly and my eyes widen as Alice's smirk grows wider. Their eyes light up. Their flesh starts to bubble and their jaw breaks into a full-on Joker grin, their teeth no longer pearly and white but savage, flickering and pointed. The thing devolves into chaos around me as that twisted, jumbled mass of flesh with Alice's face on it approaches closer to me. I'm still falling as the Alice-demon lunges towards me, sinking at a pace that made me think it had control over how fast it could fall. Two wavy arms, their flesh peeled back and rot in their skin, the rotted spots a horrid green, extended toward me from the Alice-demon's body. I struggle to move as the thing and its tendril-like arms descend towards me. Then I slam into the ground beneath me, the Alice-demon hits me before I can even process I've landed, and everything I see goes black. For all of a second, there is nothing but pure darkness, empty of anything other than me. It's literal nowhere. But then, there's the sound of a large light snapping on and casting some glowing spotlight below it. I look behind me.

Alice is standing far away from me, and beside her, clutching their hand, is Jenny. Both have their backs turned to me, their faces completely hidden to me. Jenny's in a green t-shirt with a purple floral pattern stretched across it, and gray, black-striped shorts. Alice is in a black-and-white – colors I identified with Alice – long-sleeve shirt, a sweater slung over their shoulder, puffy black shorts on and socks patterned the same way as their shirt hiked up to their upper thighs. There's a small pocket of flesh between the top of their sock and the end of Alice's shorts, their foot swallowed up by plain black loafers. Neither of them react to me. They stand in complete silence, facing something or someone I can't see, hand-in-hand and as reactive to their surroundings as statues. I start towards them, confused, cautious, but desperate.

"Jenny? Alice? What are we doing!? What's happening?" I beg, my eyes filling with tears from the overwhelming fear of the situation and my voice hoarse from exhaust. Alice and Jenny remain completely still as I bound towards them, my steps awkward and shaky. I put out my hand to Jenny and pulled her back.

"Jenny!"

Jenny slumped down all of a sudden as she turned to face me, and Alice supported their now limp body by the arm they clutched. Her eyes were white, as blank as sheets of paper, her pupils erased and leaving nothing but inhumane blank spots where humanity should have been. Her lips are crudely sown together, thick brown threads digging in and out of her skin and zigzagging across her lips. They were tied into a broken, slightly crooked frown, the lip peeled open just a bit and the sides of her face sinking. The frown was the most broken I'd ever seen on a person. It told me the person behind it had their humanity smashed before them, leaving behind some trauma-gripped shell. Jenny looks less like a person and more like a doll, her form about as lifeless as she dangled in Alice's grasp. She's like a broken toy. I stare in horror at Jenny for a bit before I look over at Alice's face.

Their eyes are bulging, their pupils pinpoints and their irises wide, trembling with some perverse excitement. Their face was locked into a Gwynplaine smile. Seeing a low, slight, but meaningful smile on Alice was a common thing. It was often their default expression, and their face lit up whenever we spoke. The smile I saw on Alice's face was so misplaced it was horrifying. Every inch of their teeth were smiled, peeled into some maniacal, malicious smile, the corners of their mouth going as far up as they can go. Maybe a little farther. It was so nightmarishly uncanny on Alice. So exaggerated. So devilish. Alice was possessed of this quiet subtlety about them and they usually felt like some benign presence, an angel at its most vague. But somehow, I felt this visage before me – this literal demon, eyeing me with eyes of hate and envy – was more to the truth than the gentle Alice. Alice held the broken Jenny up a bit further and grinned even wider, Jenny motionless in their grasp. Jenny's head hung limp to the floor as Alice locked me in their gaze. I can't move. No matter how hard, I can't move anymore. Maybe Alice, maybe the Alice-demon – maybe one in the same – gives me an eager look that brands itself into my mind for all time to come.

"I broke her," they – it – cooed, victoriously. "I broke her-her-her-her-her-her-"

A second before I went insane, I woke up.

The presence was still there. Maddening. Maddening.

I got up, my head in a daze and my entire field of view blurred.

The presence could feel me. Touch me. Soak me.

I clutched my head and squinted at the alarm clock. 7:23 AM. Just a few hours before my alarm was timed to chirp into my ears.

The presence wouldn't leave. The presence wouldn't leave.

My entire head was in throbbing agony. It felt like there was a small tumor in my brain, maybe an agonizing blank spot where knowledge should have been, filled up by pain.

I could feel it. Know it. With every fiber of my being.

I was sore all over. I could feel my pain still throbbing at the back of my head, further amplifying the power of the other sore spots. I had a legitimate migraine, and it was only getting worse by the second.

It was God. I was in touch with God. I could recognize this feeling now. This is the Holy Father's light. Has He finally recognized my plight?

I felt my head hit my pillow again and my eyes strain for a second to look up. It didn't feel right waking up so early. Something was wrong. Something had woken me up.

God wants me to know something. What is is, God? What have you for my simple ears to have heard?

What the hell was it? What? What? What the f**k had made me wake up so abruptly?

GOD WAS RAPING ME GOD WAS RAPING ME GOD WAS RAPING ME

"GOD IS COMING."

I blinked. That sentence flashed through my head for a split second, and I fell back onto my pillow, dreaming whatever mad dreams came into my violated mind for another two hours.