Shadow Worlds and Chaos Lights
folder
Original - Misc › -Slash - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
14
Views:
2,344
Reviews:
0
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
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Category:
Original - Misc › -Slash - Male/Male
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
14
Views:
2,344
Reviews:
0
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead and any likenesses to unoriginal characters are purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work.
Chapter 2
THE MOON was shining through the window and spread its silver glow over the apartment. Dusky shadows played with the imagination, inviting it to explore the darkness' most mysterious secrets.
The moonlight and the shadows gave a fairytale atmosphere to the otherwise ordinary objects in the apartment; it was reflected in the TV-screen as if it was a high-tech version of a forest pond from a storybook, swept over the tiny kitchen area and made the coffeemaker and the toaster on the counter shine as if they were of purest silver instead of plain stainless steel, continued past a couple of wall lamps and a small desk cluttered with student literature along with a laptop marked 'Property of St. Isolder's University' until it finally lingered on a black mini-stereo on the nightstand next to the bed.
A young man was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a book. A spring storm earlier that day had pulled down some of the electrical wires in the area and left the people that were living there without both electricity and hot water, so the man had equipped himself with a flashlight with which he illuminated the text on the pages as he read.
The man's name was Heedan Ortus, a name his few but loyal friends used to say fit him because it was pronounced almost like the word 'Heathen'. His surname Ortus meant 'Daybreak' in Latin, and was a name Heedan found both corny and a little romantic in a gothic kind of way. That name was, by the way, one of the few things that connected him to a father he had never met, so Heedan had kept it as his own.
As for the 'Heathen' part, it couldn't be denied that Heedan was more or less a heathen.
Not that he was an atheist or that he didn't believe in anything, because he did, he just didn't believe in the God they talked about in church.
The church was boring, the services were dull and one-sided, and the priest's monotone chanting about a God, who to Heedan didn't seem to care the least about the people that were living now, didn't interest him at all. He understood that the words from the priest's mouth and the rituals he performed in the service had some kind of meaning for the believers, but to Heedan they were just empty words; there was no life in them.
No magic.
It was the occult that called out to him, astrology, tarot, crystals, other realms, the unexplainable. But most of all, he was fascinated by his childhood's fairytale characters, vampires and werewolves, fairies, trolls and goblins, ghosts, all those beings that lived in the nature beyond human knowledge and to some extent the angels and demons the priest spoke of in his sermons. And they weren't fairytale characters to him; they were real.
At least they had been real when he was a child.
As a child Heedan had been living with his mother, Ailene and his uncle, his mother's twin brother, Adrian, as the only child in a small and quiet suburb where the rest of the population were older men and women that wanted to spend their final years away from all the stress and noises in the big city.
He had been a shy and silent child, who kept mostly to himself and even avoided to play with other children at the rare occasions when their neighbours had had their grandchildren or great-grandchildren visiting.
His mother and uncle had been worried about him and the fact that he was always alone; they hadn't understood that he'd never really felt lonely. He had friends and a lot of them too, friends that played with him, cared for him and some that really scared him.
He had seen trolls and goblins in tree stumps and stones; the trees had been demons that'd reached after him with their branches. He had seen satyrs and dryads dance in the moonlight, heard fairies sing him to sleep at night and seen angels play hide and seek in the clouds during thunderstorms. His mother's clean laundry on the drying rack had been ghosts captured by his mother's clothes-pegs and the darkness under his bed had been occupied by a whole bunch of zombies, werewolves and vampires.
He had believed in all those things that grownups came up with to scare or amuse their children, like the Boogieman, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. But as the years went by, they all had disappeared one by one.
It had begun when Santa Claus had disappeared one Christmas, or maybe not so much disappeared as transformed into Uncle Adrian with a fake white beard and big pillows stuffed under the red suit. The magic had disappeared around the jolly Christmas character and the rest of Heedan's friends had slowly but surely followed the same path.
The trolls and goblins had turned to stones and tree stumps; the demons had become regular trees. He never saw the satyrs dance again or any angels that played in the clouds and could no longer hear the fairies singing. The ghosts had turned back to clothes and clean sheets that Heedan had had to help his mother hang when she had too much do to at work, and the only thing he could find under his bed were dust bunnies and occasionally a single sock that had lost its mate.
And that made Heedan sad.
Others might have laughed, embarrassed by the reminders of such silly childhood fantasies, but Heedan was different. They hadn't been fantasies to him. They had been real and he missed them as much as anyone would miss friends that they had to leave behind when moving to another town. And, when he thought about it, that was in fact exactly what had happened; he had grown older and moved further and further into adulthood. He had left his childhood's shadow creatures behind, lost the magic, lost his ability to see, and lost his friends. And he had spent the latest years of his life trying to find them again.
The bookshelf in Heedan's apartment was a testament of how far he really had gone in his search for his lost friends. There were a great number of books about how to train the ability to see the invisible, how to speak with the dead, communicate with animals or foretell tomorrow's weather in the bottom of a tea cup.
There were books about the dark arts, tarot reading, crystal healing and sexual magic, about white witch Sabbaths, parallel dimensions, UFOs and reincarnation. There were even books about how to grow and prepare different herbs, that would give strong hallucinations which would let the user come in contact with the other side, but to be frank, the closest to contact with anything the users got was the contact with the doctor that took care of them after they used the advice from the book.
Almost every subject that was associated with the supernatural was represented in the bookshelf; no books were too insignificant or illogical.
Heedan had bought them all with the single hope that they might hold the answer of how to find his friends again. However, so far they all had failed him and now they stood in the bookshelf collecting dust, like gravestones over his decreasing hope.
In boxes at the bottom of the bookshelf lay different folders with papers, from the uncountable courses, séances and seminaries he'd been to, divided into two groups. The first one was for courses that had been so obviously fake that Heedan, right from the beginning, had noticed that it was just a way to rip people off, to get their money or those that had started out good but then turned out to be as false as the first one when the people that arranged it started to talk about book subscriptions at exorbitant prices or wanted him to join whatever cult they belonged to. He didn't even know himself why he kept those papers, but he guessed it was for the same reason he kept all the disappointing books; as a proof to himself that he had done everything in his power to find answers.
The second group, however, contained papers from the courses that most likely had been for real; there had been no cult memberships or expensive subscriptions that would mark them as a fraud, and Heedan had seen it in the eyes of the other participants, as they had left high in spirit over what they just experienced, that there really had been something there. Heedan had been glad for their sakes, but he himself had gone home with an aching emptiness inside. Whatever it was the others had experienced, it hadn't been for him. Those nights he often cried himself to sleep, begging for his friends to answer him, to let him return to them so that he once again could feel whole.
Still, he hadn't given up. He continued searching for his lost friends with a passion and an obsession worthy of a knight on a quest for the Holy Grail. He went to even more seminars, he read even more books, grasping at straws for anything that could help him fight the voice of reason that told him that maybe his friends from the past had been nothing more than fantasies created by a lonely child, and that it was time to accept that and grow up once and for all.
Heedan knew he was isolating himself, and that he let this research of his take up way to much time in his life, but he wouldn't have it any other way. So what if his classmates and even some of the teachers thought that he was an oddball because he never socialised with people? Who cared what they thought? They weren't important.
It was another thing when it came to his family, of course. Last Christmas, his uncle had talked to him, one of those talks with a capital T, where he urged more than suggested that Heedan should see a psychiatrist for a routine check-up, since they had had cases of schizophrenia in the family. His mother had been a little less dramatic and simply but not so discretely hinted that maybe a girlfriend would ease his loneliness and get the thought of his imaginary friends out of his head once and for all.
But not even his family could make him change his mind. He knew he wasn't sick or insane and he definitely didn't need to "get laid," which was exactly what his mother meant, just in different words. He knew that his friends had been real and someday, somehow he would find them again. He had to find them.
So that was the reason why he sat and read yet another book about the supernatural, hoping that this time he might find what he was looking for.
The light from the flashlight moved over the pages, momentarily taking a detour to shed its light on the second hand curtain's pattern of light blue flowers as the hand that held the flashlight temporarily changed position when Heedan turned a page in the book, and then back to the pages again.
The book he was reading was titled 'The Invisible;' it wasn't as bad as some of the other books he had read on the subject, but it wasn't actually good either. The story was told by a woman, Ruby Clark, who, several times in her childhood, had been abducted by something she had named, as the title said, The Invisible; supernatural beings like the ones Heedan had met himself when he was a child. Unfortunately for both Ruby and her readers, she only got to tell her story in the first 3 chapters, then the author of the book, apparently some journalist, had taken the rest of the book's 12 chapters for himself where he did his own interpretations and made long and pompous parallels to Black holes, Area 51 and the Bermuda triangle. The whole thing felt rather pointless.
Heedan yawned and glanced at his wristwatch. The digital numbers that glowed softly in the darkness told him that it was almost three in the morning. He rose, and put the flashlight on the table, stretched and yawned again. He should have been in bed hours ago, and he knew for a fact that it would be hell to get up for school the following day, even if he did go to bed right now.
He sighed and fought against the feeling of disappointment; another day had gone by and still he hadn't found anything.
He was just about to close the book and silence the long-winded journalist in the middle of his parallels when suddenly a piece of paper fell out from pages of the book and whirled to the floor with a fluttering sound. Heedan picked it up and was just about to put it back in the book when the light-circle from the flashlight, which still lay on the table, fell upon the paper and allowed Heedan to read what was written on it.
Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!
There wasn't anything strange about the paper it was written on. Nor was it anything weird with the writing; the handwriting was neat and straight without any characteristic twists and turns and the two words were written in red ink, repeated over and over again, from the top of the paper to the bottom; “Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!” But still Heedan couldn't stop looking at it. He couldn't explain why a totally ordinary piece of paper had suddenly appeared to be the most remarkable thing he'd ever seen, or why he felt forced to repeat the words to himself over and over again; “Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!”
A strange yet familiar feeling came over him. That feeling he used to get in his childhood when he could stare intently for several minutes on what everyone else said was only a stone and just know it was a troll. The feeling that this was something different; something that didn't belong to the grey reality.
His pulse quickened; his legs turned to jelly; he heard the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears and the hand that held the paper trembled. "Yes!" his soul rejoiced; this was it; this was what he had been searching for for so long.
But then suddenly, as unexpected as the feeling had come over him, it was gone. Heedan shook his head as if he had been in trance and a sob ripped itself from his throat, "No! Please don't leave me alone again."
Still a little dizzy from the experience, he carefully put paper in the book and closed the book's covers around it and, as if that had been some kind of magic ritual, when that was done, the peculiar atmosphere had completely vanished. Had it really happened or had it just been his sleep-deprived body playing tricks on his yearning mind?
He glanced at his watch again and couldn't stop a gasp from surprise. The glowing numbers on the watch showed 04.02. Heedan knit his brows; how long had he really stared at that paper? How could an hour go by in the blink of an eye? Could his friends really be behind this?
For a couple of seconds he just stared at the watch, bewildered, but then a sad laugh escaped him. Of course it couldn't be his friends' work; there was even a perfectly logical explanation to the mystery. He probably hadn't looked good enough when he looked at the watch last time and simply believed that it was 02.57 rather than 03.57, a perfectly logical reason and an easy mistake to do.
With a dejected sigh, Heedan changed into the washed-out t-shirt he used as pyjamas, got into bed and pulled the comforter around himself. He looked towards the table, where the book still lay with the paper hidden between its covers, one final time – “Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!” Help who? He didn't know - and turned off the flashlight.
That night he dreamt about blood, not a few drops or a puddle, but whole oceans of blood that reached as far as he could see, and in the middle of this blood ocean was a pair of eyes looking at him, their gaze filled with a silent plea.
He didn't remember the dream when he woke up.
The moonlight and the shadows gave a fairytale atmosphere to the otherwise ordinary objects in the apartment; it was reflected in the TV-screen as if it was a high-tech version of a forest pond from a storybook, swept over the tiny kitchen area and made the coffeemaker and the toaster on the counter shine as if they were of purest silver instead of plain stainless steel, continued past a couple of wall lamps and a small desk cluttered with student literature along with a laptop marked 'Property of St. Isolder's University' until it finally lingered on a black mini-stereo on the nightstand next to the bed.
A young man was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a book. A spring storm earlier that day had pulled down some of the electrical wires in the area and left the people that were living there without both electricity and hot water, so the man had equipped himself with a flashlight with which he illuminated the text on the pages as he read.
The man's name was Heedan Ortus, a name his few but loyal friends used to say fit him because it was pronounced almost like the word 'Heathen'. His surname Ortus meant 'Daybreak' in Latin, and was a name Heedan found both corny and a little romantic in a gothic kind of way. That name was, by the way, one of the few things that connected him to a father he had never met, so Heedan had kept it as his own.
As for the 'Heathen' part, it couldn't be denied that Heedan was more or less a heathen.
Not that he was an atheist or that he didn't believe in anything, because he did, he just didn't believe in the God they talked about in church.
The church was boring, the services were dull and one-sided, and the priest's monotone chanting about a God, who to Heedan didn't seem to care the least about the people that were living now, didn't interest him at all. He understood that the words from the priest's mouth and the rituals he performed in the service had some kind of meaning for the believers, but to Heedan they were just empty words; there was no life in them.
No magic.
It was the occult that called out to him, astrology, tarot, crystals, other realms, the unexplainable. But most of all, he was fascinated by his childhood's fairytale characters, vampires and werewolves, fairies, trolls and goblins, ghosts, all those beings that lived in the nature beyond human knowledge and to some extent the angels and demons the priest spoke of in his sermons. And they weren't fairytale characters to him; they were real.
At least they had been real when he was a child.
As a child Heedan had been living with his mother, Ailene and his uncle, his mother's twin brother, Adrian, as the only child in a small and quiet suburb where the rest of the population were older men and women that wanted to spend their final years away from all the stress and noises in the big city.
He had been a shy and silent child, who kept mostly to himself and even avoided to play with other children at the rare occasions when their neighbours had had their grandchildren or great-grandchildren visiting.
His mother and uncle had been worried about him and the fact that he was always alone; they hadn't understood that he'd never really felt lonely. He had friends and a lot of them too, friends that played with him, cared for him and some that really scared him.
He had seen trolls and goblins in tree stumps and stones; the trees had been demons that'd reached after him with their branches. He had seen satyrs and dryads dance in the moonlight, heard fairies sing him to sleep at night and seen angels play hide and seek in the clouds during thunderstorms. His mother's clean laundry on the drying rack had been ghosts captured by his mother's clothes-pegs and the darkness under his bed had been occupied by a whole bunch of zombies, werewolves and vampires.
He had believed in all those things that grownups came up with to scare or amuse their children, like the Boogieman, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. But as the years went by, they all had disappeared one by one.
It had begun when Santa Claus had disappeared one Christmas, or maybe not so much disappeared as transformed into Uncle Adrian with a fake white beard and big pillows stuffed under the red suit. The magic had disappeared around the jolly Christmas character and the rest of Heedan's friends had slowly but surely followed the same path.
The trolls and goblins had turned to stones and tree stumps; the demons had become regular trees. He never saw the satyrs dance again or any angels that played in the clouds and could no longer hear the fairies singing. The ghosts had turned back to clothes and clean sheets that Heedan had had to help his mother hang when she had too much do to at work, and the only thing he could find under his bed were dust bunnies and occasionally a single sock that had lost its mate.
And that made Heedan sad.
Others might have laughed, embarrassed by the reminders of such silly childhood fantasies, but Heedan was different. They hadn't been fantasies to him. They had been real and he missed them as much as anyone would miss friends that they had to leave behind when moving to another town. And, when he thought about it, that was in fact exactly what had happened; he had grown older and moved further and further into adulthood. He had left his childhood's shadow creatures behind, lost the magic, lost his ability to see, and lost his friends. And he had spent the latest years of his life trying to find them again.
The bookshelf in Heedan's apartment was a testament of how far he really had gone in his search for his lost friends. There were a great number of books about how to train the ability to see the invisible, how to speak with the dead, communicate with animals or foretell tomorrow's weather in the bottom of a tea cup.
There were books about the dark arts, tarot reading, crystal healing and sexual magic, about white witch Sabbaths, parallel dimensions, UFOs and reincarnation. There were even books about how to grow and prepare different herbs, that would give strong hallucinations which would let the user come in contact with the other side, but to be frank, the closest to contact with anything the users got was the contact with the doctor that took care of them after they used the advice from the book.
Almost every subject that was associated with the supernatural was represented in the bookshelf; no books were too insignificant or illogical.
Heedan had bought them all with the single hope that they might hold the answer of how to find his friends again. However, so far they all had failed him and now they stood in the bookshelf collecting dust, like gravestones over his decreasing hope.
In boxes at the bottom of the bookshelf lay different folders with papers, from the uncountable courses, séances and seminaries he'd been to, divided into two groups. The first one was for courses that had been so obviously fake that Heedan, right from the beginning, had noticed that it was just a way to rip people off, to get their money or those that had started out good but then turned out to be as false as the first one when the people that arranged it started to talk about book subscriptions at exorbitant prices or wanted him to join whatever cult they belonged to. He didn't even know himself why he kept those papers, but he guessed it was for the same reason he kept all the disappointing books; as a proof to himself that he had done everything in his power to find answers.
The second group, however, contained papers from the courses that most likely had been for real; there had been no cult memberships or expensive subscriptions that would mark them as a fraud, and Heedan had seen it in the eyes of the other participants, as they had left high in spirit over what they just experienced, that there really had been something there. Heedan had been glad for their sakes, but he himself had gone home with an aching emptiness inside. Whatever it was the others had experienced, it hadn't been for him. Those nights he often cried himself to sleep, begging for his friends to answer him, to let him return to them so that he once again could feel whole.
Still, he hadn't given up. He continued searching for his lost friends with a passion and an obsession worthy of a knight on a quest for the Holy Grail. He went to even more seminars, he read even more books, grasping at straws for anything that could help him fight the voice of reason that told him that maybe his friends from the past had been nothing more than fantasies created by a lonely child, and that it was time to accept that and grow up once and for all.
Heedan knew he was isolating himself, and that he let this research of his take up way to much time in his life, but he wouldn't have it any other way. So what if his classmates and even some of the teachers thought that he was an oddball because he never socialised with people? Who cared what they thought? They weren't important.
It was another thing when it came to his family, of course. Last Christmas, his uncle had talked to him, one of those talks with a capital T, where he urged more than suggested that Heedan should see a psychiatrist for a routine check-up, since they had had cases of schizophrenia in the family. His mother had been a little less dramatic and simply but not so discretely hinted that maybe a girlfriend would ease his loneliness and get the thought of his imaginary friends out of his head once and for all.
But not even his family could make him change his mind. He knew he wasn't sick or insane and he definitely didn't need to "get laid," which was exactly what his mother meant, just in different words. He knew that his friends had been real and someday, somehow he would find them again. He had to find them.
So that was the reason why he sat and read yet another book about the supernatural, hoping that this time he might find what he was looking for.
The light from the flashlight moved over the pages, momentarily taking a detour to shed its light on the second hand curtain's pattern of light blue flowers as the hand that held the flashlight temporarily changed position when Heedan turned a page in the book, and then back to the pages again.
The book he was reading was titled 'The Invisible;' it wasn't as bad as some of the other books he had read on the subject, but it wasn't actually good either. The story was told by a woman, Ruby Clark, who, several times in her childhood, had been abducted by something she had named, as the title said, The Invisible; supernatural beings like the ones Heedan had met himself when he was a child. Unfortunately for both Ruby and her readers, she only got to tell her story in the first 3 chapters, then the author of the book, apparently some journalist, had taken the rest of the book's 12 chapters for himself where he did his own interpretations and made long and pompous parallels to Black holes, Area 51 and the Bermuda triangle. The whole thing felt rather pointless.
Heedan yawned and glanced at his wristwatch. The digital numbers that glowed softly in the darkness told him that it was almost three in the morning. He rose, and put the flashlight on the table, stretched and yawned again. He should have been in bed hours ago, and he knew for a fact that it would be hell to get up for school the following day, even if he did go to bed right now.
He sighed and fought against the feeling of disappointment; another day had gone by and still he hadn't found anything.
He was just about to close the book and silence the long-winded journalist in the middle of his parallels when suddenly a piece of paper fell out from pages of the book and whirled to the floor with a fluttering sound. Heedan picked it up and was just about to put it back in the book when the light-circle from the flashlight, which still lay on the table, fell upon the paper and allowed Heedan to read what was written on it.
Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!
There wasn't anything strange about the paper it was written on. Nor was it anything weird with the writing; the handwriting was neat and straight without any characteristic twists and turns and the two words were written in red ink, repeated over and over again, from the top of the paper to the bottom; “Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!” But still Heedan couldn't stop looking at it. He couldn't explain why a totally ordinary piece of paper had suddenly appeared to be the most remarkable thing he'd ever seen, or why he felt forced to repeat the words to himself over and over again; “Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!”
A strange yet familiar feeling came over him. That feeling he used to get in his childhood when he could stare intently for several minutes on what everyone else said was only a stone and just know it was a troll. The feeling that this was something different; something that didn't belong to the grey reality.
His pulse quickened; his legs turned to jelly; he heard the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears and the hand that held the paper trembled. "Yes!" his soul rejoiced; this was it; this was what he had been searching for for so long.
But then suddenly, as unexpected as the feeling had come over him, it was gone. Heedan shook his head as if he had been in trance and a sob ripped itself from his throat, "No! Please don't leave me alone again."
Still a little dizzy from the experience, he carefully put paper in the book and closed the book's covers around it and, as if that had been some kind of magic ritual, when that was done, the peculiar atmosphere had completely vanished. Had it really happened or had it just been his sleep-deprived body playing tricks on his yearning mind?
He glanced at his watch again and couldn't stop a gasp from surprise. The glowing numbers on the watch showed 04.02. Heedan knit his brows; how long had he really stared at that paper? How could an hour go by in the blink of an eye? Could his friends really be behind this?
For a couple of seconds he just stared at the watch, bewildered, but then a sad laugh escaped him. Of course it couldn't be his friends' work; there was even a perfectly logical explanation to the mystery. He probably hadn't looked good enough when he looked at the watch last time and simply believed that it was 02.57 rather than 03.57, a perfectly logical reason and an easy mistake to do.
With a dejected sigh, Heedan changed into the washed-out t-shirt he used as pyjamas, got into bed and pulled the comforter around himself. He looked towards the table, where the book still lay with the paper hidden between its covers, one final time – “Help Us! Help Us! Help Us!” Help who? He didn't know - and turned off the flashlight.
That night he dreamt about blood, not a few drops or a puddle, but whole oceans of blood that reached as far as he could see, and in the middle of this blood ocean was a pair of eyes looking at him, their gaze filled with a silent plea.
He didn't remember the dream when he woke up.