SUBCUTANEOUS 1.8

We're just about ready for things to start spiraling deliciously. The sugar is on, the heat is turned up, and we are waiting on the caramel.

Enjoy, dearies.

__________________________________________________________________________________

It’s not real.

It’s not real.

She drank her hot chocolate, finished her tea after, and pretended to keep digging, distracted herself with the idea. 

It’s not real.

There was nothing under his dreads. Any indication of movement came from the swaying of his hair, the jogging. It wasn’t real. There was nothing under his hair that blinked at her. There was nothing wrong with Jay. There is nothing wrong with her. She’s just tired. 

She…

She maybe shouldn’t play the game again.

There’s a voice calling her a wuss, mocking her for getting freaked out so easily. It’s like watching a horror movie and having nightmares- obviously it’ll happen the first few times, but for someone experienced? It should be a cakewalk, something to enjoy. And she has enjoyed it.

But from how jittery she is now? Maybe it’s best that she takes a break. Some time off. The game isn’t going anywhere, right?

…but fuck. Fuck. It’s just starting, and it already has so much going on. 

…Fuck.

Ilia hasn’t been to therapy in a while, but that doesn’t mean that she’s forgotten the tricks. One of the big ones, at least for her, is that when she wants something that’s hurting her, it’s usually not good for her, even if she enjoys it. Even if she wants it. Usually especially then. 

She should take a break. The game, and the mystery behind it, isn’t going anywhere. There’s time. It’s a boring idea, a bland one, one that feels almost wrong compared to how much she enjoyed playing it, how easily she fell into that obsessive energy of engaging with it. But it’s… probably the safe one. It’s the right call. Play something else, something outside her VR set, go to work, live her life.

A straightforward, regular life. Where normal things happen. And she’s… herself.

Fuck.

She sighs, finishing packing up. In the end, she doesn’t stay long- panicking over what she saw (didn’t see) in Jay’s hair doesn’t make for a particularly comfortable experience, and even now that she’s calm, it’s still a lot. The drinks, as always, are delicious, and the aura of the place is impeccable, and that’s enough to refresh her. Next step is to head home and enjoy what’s left of her weekend, find something to wash away the messy feelings of the last few hours.

She sighs and walks out, heading back to her car. It’s a piece of shit, but the sight of it alone is enough for her to feel a sense of comfort, a little moment of reality. A piece of the world that’s hers, and that she can rely on, no matter what all those blinking lights on the dashboard try to convince her of. 

She walks three steps forward off the curb, heading to the door- and it opens on its own.

Ilia spends a good five seconds not moving an inch. 

The driver side door is a sturdy and strong-willed bitch of a set of steel and hinges, which is another way of saying she’s heavy, hard to move, and damn near locks in place if the weight hits it even slightly wrong. She has to slam it shut every time, and yank about as hard to rip it open when she has to. It does not, has not, and should not ever simply click open.

You’re being paranoid, she tells herself. You’re spooked and seeing patterns where there are none. It’s fine. It’s ok. It’s just a door.

But she’s starting to feel like she did when she was playing the game. That creeping sensation that all the little weird things are starting to pile up, that something doesn’t make sense.

The door is heavy, and it sticks, and she knows she locked it before she got out and slammed it shut properly. 

But it could have opened on its own. It could.

She gets in, sets her laptop bag on the front seat, and carefully sits in her car. The idea of a car bomb is ridiculous and strange and dumb as hell- and it still pops up anyways.

Nothing happens when she sits down. Or when she closes the door. And then closes it again, harder, when it refuses to stick, feeling the heavy mechanism clunk closed just like it does every time she slams it. And when she turns the key in the ignition and starts to drive out of the lot, slower and more carefully than she normally would, nothing happens. Except the traitorous flashing of the ‘check engine’ light, but that’s expected.

She lets out a sigh, pulling out of the lot. It’s fine. Things are normal. She’s just freaked out, and really shouldn’t play MEAT again anytime soon. 

She makes it all the way to the end of the road, easing to a stop before a glaring red light, before her windshield cracks. 

She startles, jumping up out of her seat and landing on her tailbone with a gasp. Fuck. Now that’s all she needed, a gods-damned broken windshield that-

…

That’s an arrow.

A sideways V, jagged and sharp, with a single long line extending from the midpoint, pointing from her windshield over to the left. 

Her route home from the Golden Roast is nearly a straight line. One right at the light past this one, a left at the light after that, and then right on to a complex of condos as banal as it is cheaply made. A hundred thousand just like them, all across the continental US, bought and paid for for the sake of real estate management and farming rent out of people. Nothing special, but good enough not to be an issue, even if it’s plenty expensive even with three roommates helping her.

The door that shouldn’t have opened.

The crack in the windshield, pointing to her left. 

The glimpse of movement beneath Jay’s hair.

That feeling of something writhing when she took off her headset.

Something is wrong.

And despite everything, it’s not fear that pushes her to turn where the arrow points. It’s the idea of something interesting happening. The mix of dread and anticipation at taking a risk, at turning in a direction that ends you know not where. 

She could just go back to her apartment. She could turn back anytime. Her therapist would probably have recommended that.

But she has a bad habit of wanting things that she knows might hurt her. An even worse habit of enjoying them. 

And the thought of her psychological health, of avoiding risk, of reasonable and helpful advice, somehow feels far more threatening than the idea of everything she knows about the world being off.

The light changes, bright carmine turning to a dull, sickly green.

She turns left. 

______________________________________________________________________

She drives for almost half an hour in a straight line.

The beauty of small towns that aren’t more than a hundred years old is that most of them are built on a grid, and once you leave that grid, everything is set up at right angles so long as its paved. Ilia drives until the buildings get smaller, less modern, and keeps driving past that. She sees what was once the road leading to some old mill, long-ago shut down. She sees the beginning of farmland, the edges of suburbia placed smack-dab in the opposite direction she’s heading, such that the city turns to forest and then to fields faster than one might expect.

The crack (and it’s insane she’s attributing motivations to it) can’t have meant for her to just go in a big left circle. That would be stupid, and would most likely indicate that the mysterious “arrow” is just her seeing patterns where there’s nothing. Considering no other cracks have appeared, then the instruction (if it ever existed) must have been to just turn left the one time and go straight. Surely. 

Five more minutes. She’s got the day off, technically. It’s fine. She can just do a u-turn when she gets tired of this. When she’s sure that she just went temporarily insane. When she knows for sure that it’s just her mind betraying her in an all new way. 

Five more minutes. 

The alternative is to keep driving until she’s sure that life is exactly as simple and banal and overwhelming and empty as it has always been and can only be. She’s failed at acquiring that surety for almost twenty five years, and she doesn’t have the gas money to drive that long. 

She turns on the radio. It warbles between stations of its own accord, the age and quality of the radio making preset channels (or even staying on the channel she was last on) more a suggestion than a rule. It briefly settles on a gospel channel, just south of Christian rock, before she turns the dial back to something that won’t just worsen her mental state.

Through the static, there’s a brief flicker of a pop song, something jazzy half-drowned in white noise, a thumping bass of-

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

She slows a bit as she looks down at the radio. 

Thump-thump.

The display marks the radio signal as 108.1FM. She’s never seen it go above 107.9. Point of fact, she assumed that was the maximum range for FM radio, at least in the US. 

Thump-thump.

Thump-Thump.

Louder. Just a little bit, but louder. 

She decides not to touch the dial. Experimentally, she presses the gas pedal down a bit further, speeding up just a bit.

THump-THump.

And then-

THUMp-THUMp.

And then-

Thump-thump.

She checks the rearview, her heart pounding. Her throat feels tight, and there is a feeling of cold that runs through her body, spinning out from her sternum, flavored by adrenalin.

The road behind her is empty as far back as she can sees. The same goes for the road ahead.

Before she can change her mind, she switches the gearshift into reverse and presses the pedal.

THUmp-THUmp.

Louder again.

THUMp-THUMp.

Back to its height. She looks out the window, turning her attention from the rearview mirror and from the heartbeat singing in her ears.

To her left, woods. Trees and underbrush and deer country, tightly packed between acres of farmland on either side.

To her right, the exact same… and a fencepost.

Not a fencepost. A regular post, with a little perch connected at the top. A mailbox, sans mailbox. 

And there, half-hidden by the underbrush, overgrown and crowded in by trees, is what might once have been an unpaved side-road.

Ilia looks down at her phone, dead and quiet on the car seat next to her.

She looks at the road, vast and empty in either direction as far as her eyes can see.

THUMp-THUMp.

She pulls onto the side of the road, puts on her hazard lights, and puts the car in park.

THUMP-THUMP.

And then… nothing.

She looks back at the radio.

107.9. The next closest functional channel is 107.5. 

She listens to the hissing of static for a while.

Then she turns off the car. Turns off the hazard lights.

She’s not crazy.

She’s not crazy.

She’s not about to wander off into the woods pursuing a series of nonsensical hallucinations and coincidences.

Ilia breathes, slow and deep.

Count to five. Breathe out. Count to four. Breathe in.

Name five things your senses feel right now.

Ilia can feel the pleather of the carseat under her hands.

She can taste the lingering traces of sweetness and peach in her saliva, at the back of her throat.

She can feel the afternoon sun on the back of her neck, streaming in through the rear window.

She can smell a long-expired air freshener trying to fight back the funk of human existence.

She opens her eyes, and sees a wooded trail, not quite large enough for a car, leading into the unknown.

She’s not crazy.

And if she is… then maybe this is the moment she decides. Maybe there’ll be other hallucinations, and she’ll be able to point to this moment as the one where she realized she couldn’t listen to them. Maybe she’ll get more therapy, and some medicine, and every time she sees something strange or that feels impossibly connected, she’ll look back to this moment and her choice to look away.

Or maybe she makes the other decision. 

Because if she decides to follow this, then there’s no value in thinking it’s not real. An indulgence of her own madness is the one thing this can’t be. It is either real, or it’s not. If it’s not real and she’s indulging it, then that means she’s crazy, and the madness won, after all the depression and the darkness and the anxiety and the doubt it won, and if it is real, then… then letting herself doubt, resisting what she’s seeing and feeling, is only going to keep her blind.

Either none of this is real, or all of it. Either it’s too weird to be real, or its too weird to be anything else. 

Ilia opens the door, locking it behind her and slamming it shut. Armed with a phone camera, keys, and a wallet, she wanders into the woods, past an empty mailbox and down a quiet road.

The wind blows through the trees, and for a moment, it makes a sound like percussion.

THUMP THUMP.