The Creegan Journals
Entry 2
"Welcome to Wonderland"
Part 1
He wasn't aware of how long he had sat there trembling on his knees while gazing
off into the steely confining space, which
surrounded him in his misery. A moth in a glass jar, trapped again and nowhere
to go. Hypnotized by his own fears, a voice in his head had previously told him
something which now echoed: "You are home!"
"I am home?" his shaking voice repeated out loud to himself. "How
can that be?" he internally questioned the rationality of the thought.
Various beings, people, or whatever the hell they were, were coming and going,
up and down this shaft that his eyes were fixed on. The travelers didn't seem to
notice him as he had watched a good deal of them falling and then projected
themselves upwards. He sat there wondering: "What is further down there
anyway? How is it that they can travel this way?" If he could have
inched his way to the other side from here to get a closer look his curiosity
would have driven him to take a peek over the edge.
"Has humanity evolved so that they can now fly? If that is possible, how
much time has passed for that to occur?" he further wondered.
"Perhaps I should follow one of them down to my death?" he chuckled
lightly instead of crying, yet he felt the sting of tears well up in his eyes.
"Follow them down the hole into hell?...Into hell where I belong!...I
belong in the ground!" He now found himself weeping. As he wiped away the
tears he scolded himself: "Just wait a damned moment! Why the fuck do I
feel this way!"
He was smart enough to realize that if he continued thinking this way he was
going to have a nervous breakdown right here, right now. He repeated in his mind
over and over: "Pull yourself together! Pull yourself together!" It
didn't seem to help, nothing seemed to help as the crack between reality and
fantasy began spreading further apart. He had to stop this madness; he had to
get a grip on himself. He felt himself falling and then heard his own voice
order: "Dammit Cole! Pull yourself together!"
Drawn back into the past, blood covered his hands and stained his clothing as he
tried to give someone CPR.
"Who was that? Who am I giving CPR too? Whose blood is on my
hands?" his present self wondered.
In this memory he found himself now staring up into the face of his
mechanical pet whose shadow stood hovering over him. His face dropped down to
the face of a person unrecognizable to himself, the person he was trying to
save. He remembered he was not alone. As he remembered it, he turned his head to
view Jinx standing a few feet back behind him crying, he had never saw her like
this before and it terrified him. He had just lost a spirit through his hands;
the man he had been trying to save was dead. Jinx's voice became frantic as he
remembered responding to the question she had on her mind by negatively shaking
his head from side to side.
"Oh God! Oh God! Rob!" she had cried out. He remembered his initial
reaction afterwards was to back away from the body.
"It was Rob Andrews blood covering my hands? Good Ol' Rob?" he
presently questioned himself.
"Fuck no, this can't happen! Rob has two small children! Mother-fucker!"
he remembered saying to Jinx while she was bawling her eyes out. He paced back
and forth frantically, panicking like a horse in a barn fire. While pacing he
heard someone else's voice.
"Oh, dear lord! What’s happened?" came the very familiar voice of
Donald Carter who had just accompanied George Bailey into the laboratory. Carter
ran over to Rob and informed them all that he was gone, something Jinx and
himself were already aware of.
He remembered his uncle giving him a questioning glare. He couldn't say
anything as the sounds of Jinx crying combined with knowing that Andrews was
dead shattered his thoughts. He couldn't seem to stop his hands from shaking and
he couldn't stop moving as he continuously paced the floor,
enveloped with the chaotic riot going on under his skin.
"Everyone calm down! Pull yourselves together!" his uncle commanded.
Hands grabbed his shoulders, he couldn't move anymore and someone was standing
in front of him. The hard slap of a hand across his face pulled his attention
from his internal struggle, and he found himself staring slightly up into the
eyes of his uncle.
"For God's sake! I said calm down!" his uncle commanded yet again.
"God's sake? God wasn't in any of this! Rob's dead!" he remembered
replying only to receive a rough smack across the lips.
"And I suppose you had nothing to do with it, either?" his uncle
angrily questioned.
He found he couldn't remember what had happened after that. There had to be
answers to all these uncanny riddles. If only he could have remembered more. If
he could remember more, then maybe he could understand why it was that he was
here.
Storming back down from a broken staircase that had lead him into what seemed to
be a whole new world, mixed emotions consumed him and he couldn't help but feel
utterly lost and alone. Complete and total shock was no longer adequate
descriptions for his current state, as a ravenous
heat filled his blood and shameful regret jabbed into his gut at the same time.
A lingering intuitive feeling after taking a short glimpse into a past long gone
convinced him that he was here out of some obligation he himself was liable for.
He now convinced himself that he was here of his own fault, for something he had
done!
How he detested himself at that moment, he hated that he didn't know why he was
here, he hated that he was so damned helpless, and he hated most of all that he
was scared. Could it be true that his instincts were correct? Was he indeed here
out of his own fault? How could it be? Did it have something to do with what he
remembered? Did it have something to do with Rob Andrews? How could any of this
be? If only he could recall in full detail exactly how he had come to be here.
Where was here anyway? Had he done something so
horrible that he had deserved to wake up frightened and alone in a world that
was nothing like the one he had been familiar with? Did he deserve to fall into
the eye of the hurricane, to forever be out of place and lost?
He just couldn't comprehend any logical reason for why he should be here, a
reason that he could convince himself to fully believe. From what he had already
pieced together about the life he had had, he knew that there had to be a reason.
The kind of person he remembered himself being would not have just volunteered
to be cryo-froze on some whim. No, he knew himself well enough to know that he
wouldn't have just volunteered for something if there was not some perfectly
damned good reason behind it all. He just couldn't remember what had possessed
his reasoning, which frustrated him. Why didn't any
of this make sense to him? Even without his memories shouldn't he know something
regarding his own nature and what kind of person he was? What was the driving
force that motivated him to do anything? Shouldn't he know that at least? He was
still the same person wasn't he?
Instead of a string of time-lined memories, his memories played themselves out
in multiple spontaneous flashes with no beginning time and no ending time. He
simply couldn't decipher what had come first from what had come later, if in the
memory there was no clear give away to the time or his age. Memories were
playing out in his mind like parts of a movie that had not yet been put together.
Half of his memories seemed to lie on the cutting room floor,
and he wondered if anything important lay cut from his mind that he desperately
had to know in order to survive in the here and now.
There was only one way at the moment to find out anything at all useful in
regards to his past. His eyes followed the ever-moving stairs under his feet. It
seemed he had just climbed these god-forsaken stairs! However, he was well aware
that whatever he was searching for could lie back down this path of stairs
passing under feet, at the end of the ancient tomb that he had known as a
laboratory. It was the only option he had available and it was back down the way
he had just come. Back down these stairs and back through memory lane. Back to
the very place he had struggled to come from. The only way to find anything he
sought after was to search the catacombs of the forgotten place in which he had
previously rested in semi-death for time unknown. He had hope that he could
uncover any existing truths that might lie buried there.
Almost before he had become aware of it, his feet had carried him to the bottom
of the stairs. Out of breath, he reached the doors to his tomb. Something made
him stop before entering back through those doors.
"To think I lay dead to the world, dreaming in nothingness to awaken
into a living nightmare! I wonder if death would be kinder... Does Cruelty
indeed beget Kindness?" he pondered.
"Could it be that this world be any crueler?" he asked the
emptiness. After his experience of waking up alone in desolation and physical
discomfort he wondered if better existed or if it only got worse from here out?
A cold chill ran down his spine as he thought that maybe it would have been
better if he hadn't woken up at all. Returning to the place he had just earlier
wished he were leaving he thought: "Well... I suppose if there is
nothing to be revealed down here... The real reason that I have returned must be
so that I can die here." He hugged himself from the biting coldness and
wished that if he were to die here it wouldn't be because he would freeze to
death. He pleaded in his heart with anyone who may have been listening to allow
him to find something or someplace warm. Though if that wish were granted he
would probably end up freezing to death in his own cold, freezer burned skin, to
only wake up in some infernal hell. As he peeked back inside the dead laboratory
he thought: "Maybe this is it - Hell! My hell!!!"
|