Saturday. The clock said seven, but Alex couldn’t tell from the hazy light in the bedroom and his own disjointed mental state if that was morning or evening. Either way, he was in no shape to return to work on Monday, but he was out of time. Short-term disability? Nervous breakdown? He giggled, still half-drunk. “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” he sang off-key, rising off his unmade bed to stumble to the bathroom. Plopping down onto the porcelain toilet seat, he gently cradled his head in his hands and forced his mind into some semblance of clarity, trying to take stock of his collapse.
It had been over a week since he had put himself into his other life, but the visions hadn’t faded. If anything, they’d grown stronger, constantly lurking just out of the corners of his eyes, waiting to thrust themselves into his mind without warning. He’d be sitting in his office at work, staring at projections and reviewing budgets, and his eyes would unfocus, staring into too-blue waters at a reflection not his own, hearing the distant splash of salmon and the chirrup of cicadas in the trees beyond. The feel of wood ripping beneath his claws, of rough bark against his back would haunt him in the bathroom. The train ride home every afternoon plunged him into an unlit cave filled with dried mosses and pine needles, surrounded by the scent of his own dried sweat.
Bed was the worst. Sensations danced in the theater of his mind whenever he lay down to sleep: the subtle green-on-brown of grass-stained fur rippling in a light breeze, the suede-soft caress of a pawpad against his shoulder, the heady scent of the rabbit’s natural musk. The too-real hallucinations no longer had to compete with the world at large when he lay on his back, trying to relax into the calm numbness of oblivion. Out of the darkness, flashes of sunlight from her eyes would reflect into his mind and jerk him upright, panting, soaking the sheets in cold sweat.
The pile of blankets had remained where he’d left them, still in disarray. The disc of his scripted imagery remained in the tray, ready for him to play it. The rest of the weekend, he’d thrown himself at it, desperate to regain some semblance of normalcy, but to no avail. The words, his own prerecorded voice, sounded false. He’d knelt there for hours surrounded in flickering candlelight, hands on his knees, head bowed, listening to the monotonous buzz-saw of his prerecorded voice playing back over the stereo speakers, feeling every moment like a perfect damned fool. After the third time the CD had restarted, he’d quit and returned to his bed, staring at the ghosts that haunted the backs of his eyelids.
He spent a weekend once, years ago, with every moment he could spare in the other life, learning to open his eyes and move, to actually see his surroundings with his own eyes, feel the dirt beneath his paws. He’d spent the next week so distracted, unable to focus on anything tangibly real, the afterimages so persistent that he’d forced himself to take a break, away from his visions, immersing himself in the real world. Over time, the intrusions from that world had left him, fading to recurring dreams that left him refreshed when he awoke. This time, though, avoiding it only seemed to make things worse.
After four nights of sleeplessness, he’d fallen asleep at his desk, a thin puddle of drool smearing the black printer ink and red margin notes into a rusty stain that spread across four pages of a report. His boss had found him there, sitting in a musty, wrinkled shirt and unwashed jeans, unconscious. He snorted and jerked about fitfully, trying to force himself awake, sending a cascade of papers from the pile on his desk to the floor while his boss tried to ask him questions, first angry, then worried when the simplest requests met with foggy confusion.
He’d been ordered to go home and get some sleep, as if a managerial dictate could cure his insomnia, or his hallucinations. He’d already tried sleeping pills and alcohol, first separate and then together, but they either left him drowsy and that much more vulnerable to a sudden flash of memory, or else they knocked him clean into unconsciousness, from which he woke physically rested but that much more emotionally drained.
Alex rose with a groan from the toilet and slumped forward, cranking on the water in the shower as hot as he could stand it, hoping to dredge some sanity back from the mixture of vodka and valerian root coursing through his system. He knew it wouldn’t cure his hangover or his dreams, but it hopefully would at least make him feel better.
The heat suffused his system, and his skin rapidly turned pink under the onslaught of the stinging spray. The scent of cheap perfume assaulted his nose as he snapped off the lid to the shampoo, but he lathered his hair with it anyway, clawing at his scalp as if to pry his brains out through the top of his skull. A vigorous scrub-down with body wash followed, more of the fake floral scent clinging to him in an aura that rattled his sinuses. Then, washed if not exactly clean, he leaned forward, his forehead against the cold tile, eyes closed and breathing through his mouth.
Something crawled across his brain, a spider creeping through his senses, making him shiver despite the steam rising from his skin in the muggy confines of the bathroom. He opened one eye, then closed it again, but the unnerving sensation—not quite an itch, not quite a tingle or headache—remained. It wasn’t any feeling to which he could put a finger, but it danced at the edge of his mind, raw, real, hovering just behind his eyes.
He felt watched.
One hand shut down the shower, the other pushing aside the curtain to grab for the towel. The almost-throbbing in his mind grew stronger as he hastily mopped the dripping water off his back and chest, wiping down as he opened the bathroom door. He grabbed a pair of shorts from his bedroom floor and his keys from his dresser as he walked past, spotting the carpet with water as he paced down the hallway, lacing the keys between his tightly clenched fingers.
A werewolf sat in his living room. It looked up from a leather-bound hard-backed book—clearly taken from his bookshelf—and cocked its head to one side. As Alex stood there watching, his mind seizing in shock, it rose from his leather recliner, set the book down on the end table beside his chair, and lay a length of ribbon across the page to mark his place.
“Mr. Demont? My name is Watcher, and we have much to discuss.”
Faced with a talking werewolf that knew his name, standing in his apartment, Alex did the only thing that came to mind: he fainted.
Did we skip forward a week in time, or are the other events with the fire happening in a different timeline? Alex isn’t Shadowdancer, is he?
The events are happening somewhat concurrently. The fire broke out, Watcher went to deal with the fire, Alex showed up unannounced, Briar went to find Watcher, Watcher left Briar to tend the wolf so he could go follow up on Briar’s inquiries.
These would make more sense, I suspect, if I could post them in full chapters, but since it seemed like people weren’t reading them at full length, I split them up into subsections, which is somewhat hurting the sense of continuity. If the confusion continues, I’ll recombine them back into full chapters and damn the consequences. Beautiful World, I refuse to split for that very reason, though it means adding new parts is somewhat slow going.