Spiderwebs

 

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Introduction

Thou Shalt Not Lie, so says a commandment in the Bible, but sometimes telling the truth is more trouble than its worth. On the flip-side, when you try to hide the truth it tends to shine through you like a light beam penetrating a stained glass window. It may have started in one steady stream but it has to fight to pass through life’s barriers, and once it does, it spills out all over the place in millions of shards that have no mercy, and no qualms about cutting you deep with their brightness and awkward angles without permission, rhyme or reason. Maybe I can avoid the chaos and the pain if I give up-front honesty a try.

“I walk a fine line, dancing dangerously over the veil that defines two worlds. One is the world as you know it, and the other is a world where every belief is personified into an uncontrolled reality. In that world survival is rare, fears are rampant, and hope is fleeting and always just out of reach. The only thing to cling to is the one thing that tears the world as you know it apart; the truth. In this other world, there is no such thing as a lie. There are no masks, no deceptions, no hiding who you really are and no hiding what others mold you into becoming.

“When I was a toddler, passing back and forth between these worlds was as normal to me as breathing. When I would tell Dad there was a monster under my bed or in my closet, he insisted it was my imagination. A cold, dark presence clinging to my soul and weighing me down was nothing more than a bad dream. When “friends” piggy-backed a ride through the veil with me, Dad insisted he could not see them; that they were not real.

“I continued to grow up, and as I did, Dad was less and less patient with my ‘stories.’ I began to understand that he truly didn’t believe me and that feeling of invisibility pulled me into a deep, confused depression. He eventually took me to a psychiatrist and because I told the truth, they suspected I might be displaying early warning signs of childhood schizophrenia. I was forced to take various drugs. For a while, I was locked away in a hospital and although I knew I could still move through the veil as easily as I could take a breath, I started telling them I no longer saw it. I understood that in order to survive in this world I had to deny the other. Because it appeared as if I was cooperating with my treatment, eventually the doctors let me return home.

“I continued to grow up. I eventually made friends in this world, and unfortunately, enemies too. Despite the dangers, I began to miss the other world and its unmasked simplicity. Here, evil hid behind a facade of virtue and the kind-hearted were branded with false scorn. There, true intentions were out in the open for everyone to see. The hate may be burning bright in the eyes of an enemy but those eyes were never hidden behind a warm smile.

“For the first time in years, I crossed the veil. I was doing so in order to run from an enemy but my life as a young adult was now much more complicated than it was when I was a small child. I unknowingly brought that enemy with me, in my heart, and there in the other world it grew to take on a life of its own. It became the living embodiment and personification of everything dark inside of the person that I carried over. The more I feared it, the stronger it became. It began to destroy that world and when it was still hungry, it used me to pierce the veil and enter this one.

“The deaths that you think I’m responsible for, I am, and I’m not. Its my fault this demon \spilled over into our world, but I didn’t kill anyone. So, have I cleared things up for you?”

Obviously I knew better than open my mouth and let those words spill out like bile. At this point Dad would probably welcome my delusions because he would find comfort in thinking I’m insane. A person who isn’t sane isn’t responsible for their actions. What hurts me the most though is that Dad actually believes I did it. Dad believes I killed people. The policemen who arrested me believes it too. Even my own defense lawyer thinks I’m guilty. Their evidence is circumstantial at best right now but even I had to admit it was rather convincing. I couldn’t give them an alibi and I couldn’t offer words that could serve as my defense. Dad was terrified that I would be locked away forever in jail but I feared a fate far more sinister. These deaths were only the beginning, the start of an apocalypse that no one knew was surrounding them because rather than presenting itself as a virus that wiped out humanity in three days flat, it was sneaking through the back door to quietly corrupt the souls of every man and woman who crossed its path. I knew this because I had already watched it destroy one world. I had failed to stop it there, but maybe I had the tiniest sliver of a chance to stop it here. I doubted it, but as the twenty-one year old blonde girl solely responsible for birthing a malevolent being so powerful that it has destroy one world and is devouring another, I owed it to my fellow humans to at least try.

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