Chapter I

The Boy Called "Oddball"

[Part III]

[L i m b o]

  Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. 

   Somewhere in the darkness, water was dripping onto stone, driving out the last traces of a pleasant dream. 

   Tap. Tap. Tap.

   The noise was incessant. The noise was unchanging. The noise was maddening. 

   There was a muffled, hollow rush of air moving against plastic, before it entered his mouth and filled his lungs. It tasted foul: soggy and mildewed. The reek of soaking stone and rotting wood lingered in the atmosphere. The dark recesses of his skull began to flicker with awareness. Something fled from there, evading the grasp of memory. The faintest, ghostly remains of a familiar image burned themselves into the walls of his mind’s hallways as a souvenir of its presence. The distant echoes of a heavenly voice dared to linger for a moment before moving on at the coming of perception. Consciousness snuck in through the back door like a rebellious teen after curfew. He exhaled and drowned out the metronomic tapping of the water. 

   He was aware. He was alive. He was awake. 

   He was…freezing? 

   The sudden realization accompanied by the unanticipated arrival of lucidity set his muscles into a violent fit of trembling and shaking. Oddball’s eyelids snapped wide open as his arms took on a life of their own to coil themselves tightly around his body. His eyes flung themselves about wildly in the confines of their sockets, choking on the flood of information that the waking brain wasn’t quite ready to process. The world was red and dark and cold and unfamiliar. He couldn’t see the walls. He couldn’t see anything. He was cold. He was so cold. Too much. It was too much. The shaking grew more intense. His chest tightened fiercely, crushing his lungs. His brain reeled from unwanted consternation. His heart began to fight to punch through his ribs and escape his chest. Something hot accumulated and clung to his eyelids, distorting the world into a blurry red and black and cold mess. His body began to contract unnaturally, trying to mold into itself and create a ball of human putty and imaginary warmth. He squeezed his eyelids shut, feeling something drop from them and trickle down his cheeks. The world began to sway and heave and spin. Some feeling of tension began to form in his belly, and he thought he might vomit. 

   His brain regained composure and balance, trapped inside a body out of control. Breathe. The command went unheard by his lungs. Gotta breathe. Foreign voices were beginning to flood his skull, creating a dense, deafening clamor of confusion that his brain had to shout over. 

  Where? Why? How? Gotta breathe. Just breathe! 

  Where am I? Why is it so cold? Breathe!! Please! 

  I want to go home. I’m scared. Just take one breath! 

  Please stop shaking. God, make it stop, make it stop, please make it stop. JUST. BREATHE.

   He seized control over his lungs, forcing them to drag in heavy air. They shuddered and struggled with the effort, and he stifled a coughing fit. After what felt like days, his lungs were full and pressing against his ribcage. They wanted more. His shaking body and racing heart demanded more. If they could, they would break free of the skeletal prison and expand until they popped. Instead, he slowly released the air, clenching his teeth together as if to try and stem the flow. He drew in another, and then let it hiss through his teeth again. The shaking reduced to shivering. Another breath. Muscles began to loosen and joints unlocked. 

  Keep breathing. You’re safe. The voices of turmoil and terror began to quiet, and he could hear himself think once more. You are home. He opened his eyes and found himself lying on an uneven, rough surface. It was drenched and frigid, rendering his clothes the same. Traces of tears clung to his face, which soured into a bitter frown. He hated crying. 

  Oddball slowly sat up, still shivering. His clothes, sodden and plastered to his skin, provided him no warmth. Reaching up to his face, his fingers met a slab of white plastic—a mask—that they pried and lifted off so that he could breathe freely. He folded his legs to sit criss-cross and let his hands, still holding the mask, rest on his legs while he refamiliarized himself with his surroundings. Still here. Still safe. 

  He was sitting on the floor in a long cave: a tunnel naturally carved into black, slick stone that extended a fair distance in both directions before disappearing around jagged corners. Water dripped from stalactites in the ceiling, creating that infuriating tapping noise that had woken him up. A thin, crimson, glowing fog hung over the ground, and compounded in the atmosphere in either direction he looked, keeping him from seeing too far into the distance. He was alone here, and safe, wherever he was. When did I fall asleep? He cursed under his breath into the blood-red mist, trying to dredge up something, anything, from the pits of memory. 

   He couldn’t escape a strange feeling that lingered in the corners of his head: a feeling like he’d been doing something or talking to someone and had been interrupted. Something reminiscent of guilt chewed away at him, but he couldn’t bring himself to shake it off. For some reason, he didn’t want to forget. He locked glazed eyes with the black ones set into his mask, and allowed his fingers to absently trace the crude, inky-black question mark printed down its middle. He scraped at the walls of his mind, trying to peel what remained of the image off so he could get a better look. It reminded him of a face, and something about it made him feel…warm. Why did it look so familiar?

   No. He shook his head slightly. Don’t even ask that. It was a stupid dream, nothing more. 

   “Right.” Oddball forced a laugh. “It was just a stupid dream. Nothing happened.” For the first time in a while, he noticed how quiet it was. “Just a silly dream,” he said to the walls. The walls did not reply. “Absolutely right,” he muttered, saying what they couldn’t.  “Just a dream.” The image was gone, and somehow the hallways of his mind felt a little emptier than before. He sulked there a little longer, caressing the mask’s markings without noticing. Just a dream, he thought, as he swept the remains of the crumbled image to somewhere where they wouldn’t be seen. Just a dream. He took his time forgetting about it. 

   The silence was becoming unbearable. The walls were mocking him with their stillness. He looked down one end of the tunnel. The call of adventure that had brought him here was silent. A new call had taken its place: a deep longing to spite the walls and see the silence broken. Maybe the Monitor’s there today… He turned to gaze in the other direction, where he’d walked from. With newfound resolve, he slid his mask back on, rose to his feet, and started on his way.

   As he walked, Oddball lost count of his steps over and over.

   As he walked, Oddball did his best to wring his clothes out. He started with his tattered pair of pale, fingerless gloves, which he then shoved into his damp pants pocket. Then, he pulled off his hoodie and did his best to wring that dry, before tugging it back on. There was nothing to be done for his shirt and pants, he figured, staring at the remaining dark patches of moisture on his white clothes despite his best efforts. They would dry eventually. 

   As he walked, Oddball passed through more of the same in different shapes. Stone—some wet, some dry—stretched as far as the eye could see. Some tunnels branched and splintered into smaller tunnels, while others let out into rooms of various sizes and inconsistent shapes. No two tunnels or caves were ever the same. Most notable were the doors. Small doors, big doors; old doors, new doors; rotting doors, pristine doors. Some doors were entirely made of wood. Others had windows: some were covered with metal grates, others remained unobstructed; and all were coated in a layer of filth and grime so thick you could never hope to peer through them. Once, he’d even seen a door made entirely of glass, cracking in some places. Sometimes, light peered through the windows and the cracks in the door frames. Muffled sounds of life could be heard within those doors: dogs barking, cats yowling, families mingling; children laughing or crying; lovers speaking sweetly in hushed tones, or fighting bitterly in shouts and wails. There was joy, there was sorrow, there was anger; a muted symphony of emotions that always lied just out of reach. The doors that didn’t have lights on, alternatively, were dead. No sounds came through them. They were often the oldest by appearance, decrepit and falling apart. However, Oddball had seen one or two that were in fairly good shape like that. 

   As he walked, Oddball drew a large black knife from a sheath snugly clasped around his thigh. He passed it from hand to hand, letting the handle roll loosely in his palms so that the shiny silver scratches in the black blade caught the red ambient light, flashing the defaced inscription over and over. 

   As he walked, Oddball gripped this knife a little tighter every time he came across a door with light daring to seep through and sound daring to tempt him. Their handles called to him. Deep down, he felt the urge to fling them open and dive through; to join in the laughter or the crying on the other side. 

   And as he walked, every now and then, Oddball stopped at these doors that dared to have life, raised his weapon to let it bask in the red glow of the cave, and drove the cold, black blade into the doors’ facades. Thunk! The light vanished from the window. The laughter evaporated. The warmth that radiated from the door dissipated. A violent crackling filled the air, and the door itself began to disintegrate. Glass shattered and crumbled away into dust while wood turned to splinters and chunks. These chunks festered and rotted before his eyes, until all that remained was a pile of rapidly drying mush and twinkling glass-dust that used to be a door. He stared at it with a tepid expression for a few moments while he wiped the blade clean. He gripped the knife a little tighter, feeling as though he’d lost something, before shoving it back into its sheath. You don’t belong here, he thought bitterly to the pile of mush. Stay out there. 

   He’d been walking for a long time now, there was no denying it. He followed an invisible pull that always brought him back to where he’d come from, so he was confident he’d never get lost. He trudged up slopes, waded through pools while letting off a string of curses at his re-soaked clothes, and crawled through narrow passageways; all the while beginning to wonder: had he really walked this far? He began to argue with himself.

   The cave didn’t look familiar to him. It’s been a while, you’ve probably forgotten. He was passing doors he swore he’d never seen. New ones appear all the time. His legs grew limp and ached to the bone. Just a little further, and you’ll be there. Then you can rest. He scowled at the sight of another unfamiliar turn. You can’t be lost, remember? You can feel it. He closed his eyes and felt for the instinctual tug, a feeling like an unseen string pulled taut around his wrist. He was certain he felt it. So he couldn’t be lost. You’ve probably just forgotten that you’ve seen this all before. He rounded the corner. 

   “What…the hell…” His heart plummeted and dragged him down with it. His knees struck the ground, sending waves of pain shooting up to his waist. 

   Before him was a pale-cream colored, semi-translucent figure of a slender girl in some kind of coat, with the hood drawn up to obscure her head. She was sitting, huddled on the ground, and casting off a dim radiance that bathed the tiny room in cool light. A barely visible white fog almost seemed to roll off her outline. It was like looking at a ghost. She must have noticed him, because she lifted her head and drew her hood back, revealing the shape of tied up hair that lacked all detail and definition. She was faceless: her visage was smooth and featureless. Even still, she regarded him and cocked her head to one side, slightly. 

   “Why are you here…” Oddball struggled to untangle the words from his dry tongue. He recognized her, but didn’t know her. He knew where she had come from. There was an open door at the back of the room, resting slightly ajar. He knew the bleached expanse lay behind it. “You don’t belong here…” 

   She belonged to the white void. She belonged to the eyes and the voices. Every muscle in his body felt weak. He reached for his knife but didn’t have the strength to pull it. His hands were trembling, and too slick with cold sweat to grip the weapon. The air felt thin. The world was spinning, and a dull ringing filled the atmosphere. The white void was becoming all he could see. The cacophony of mockery and shouts was becoming all he could hear. He felt every razor sharp gaze rending him apart. All at once he was a nameless boy again. He was there. Even without stepping through the door, he was there. 

  Get a hold of yourself, said his brain, once more trying to reign in his body. You’re not there. Look around. There’s no eyes or voices here. He wrestled air through gritted teeth, trying to steel himself again. You’re safe here. 

  The phantom girl sat there, looking to the ground with her legs crossed and her folded hands resting in her lap, as if she were deep in thought. Oddball managed to regain control of his breathing, but his heart wouldn’t stop thundering away. Finally, the phantom looked back to him and spoke in an echoing voice that radiated with the warmth and life of all the doors he’d destroyed.

  “By the looks of it, neither do you.”

Hi there! I'm back! Sorry for the lack of a post last week, I was overloaded with school work! Post schedule should return to normal starting from now. Thanks for your patience!