Chapter II

The Forbidden Echo

[Part IV]

[L I M B O]

  Right where we belong… Oddball turned back towards the two smears on the coast’s living oil painting. The black smudge was alone now, standing stock still. He couldn’t make out its face, but somehow he knew it was watching something. He turned. The world behind him was a white expanse stretching into infinity. Strangely, he did not feel afraid. This was not the white void, it was…different, somehow. Like peering at the white void, but through the safety of a window. Faint, black lines sketched out the shape and facade of a small building with large windows. The red blur was to the side of this sketch and slowly grew smaller with each passing second until, eventually, it dissipated into the blankness—erased from the all-encompassing canvas. Oddball felt a strange, somber feeling in his chest; it was some invisible tug, some mournful sense of urgency. Don’t go, said some voice from within him. It was his voice, but it didn’t belong to him. Come back. Keep laughing. I want to laugh with you. His body writhed within itself with the desire to give chase, to continue some conversation he’d never had with the red blur. Come back… But he was rooted to the concrete. The black blur remained motionless. Could it feel the pull too? A deep ache, crying out to the muscles to follow? No. The black smudge flickered and fanned at the edges as it turned and began to grow smaller in the same way the red smudge had. Its journey was much slower and contrite, but all the same it faded from the canvas. 

   “You feel it, don’t you?” said the ghostly girl behind him. “Don’t you feel like you belong here?” 

  Oddball didn’t feel anything, really. He looked out to the ocean once more. 

  The sky was darkening. Steel-clouds dimmed to the color of pencil lead. The ocean was turning black; only the faintest traces of midnight’s blues within its mass kept it divorced from the sharp-black spearheads of crumbling rock that punctured its rolling surface and broke it into airy foam. Some clumps of this foam took to the air as stringless kites: they raced the waves that birthed them to the shore. The breeze was growing stronger. One particular gust caught his hood and tugged it from his head. He could feel the air playing with his hair, making it shiver with excitement at the sudden freedom. He drew in one slow breath. It was cold, and not in the unpleasant sort of way that made one wake up shaking and clinging to themselves for warmth. It was the refreshing cold, the kind of air one would drink up and savor on a hot day. The air that would be sipped and held within the lungs—to marinate and to cool the body from within—before being expelled back into the atmosphere with satisfaction at the fleeting relief it brought. It tasted a little salty and bore the scent of the ocean—of dead fish and washed up kelp, branding the atmosphere with their pungency as they dried out. Yet, even the sea-breeze’s acridness set it apart from the stagnancy of the air in his home, where the only scent was that of stone stained by mildew and water. This wasn’t home, but was that so bad?

  He didn’t feel he belonged here…and yet, he didn’t want to leave. He said nothing, but knew the phantom probably understood. However, something about it all drove a stake of doubt into the soil of his mind and crushed the seeds of a nameless emotion beneath it. He looked back to the endless blankness. Even with the ocean and the air and the sky, this was the damning evidence: this was undeniably the white void. The hell of eyes and screaming voices and mocking laughter. The rest of this must have been fake. No amount of illusion would ever hide that fact. So why didn’t he feel scared? This was clearly what lay beyond the doors, the prison that he’d escaped from, right? This was clearly the forbidden place that he’d worked so hard to protect himself from. This was clearly the place his knife was meant to kill. Yet he couldn’t bear the thought of destroying it all; it just felt…so wrong. The more he thought about it, the deeper the stake went, and the soil around it began to fester, oozing a new emotion that squeezed his chest and muddled his mind’s climate with turmoil. He wanted to stay here, didn’t he? Was this some trap by the void? Was the phantom girl some snare, and this place: the bait? At the same time, was this so wrong? No, no, this was wrong. This wasn’t the safe place. This wasn’t the cavern. It was all an illusion. It was all a lie. 

  “This is wrong,” Oddball said. The invisible roots that bound him to the pavement were pulled up as he demanded his body to rise and his body complied. The phantom-girl snapped to look at him suddenly. He pulled his hood back on, as if to create a barrier between them. He could see it now. The ocean stopped moving. The air stopped moving. This was all fake. He began to search, straining his senses against the numbing paleness. Where are they? Were the voices and the eyes waiting to spring out of nowhere and torment him again?

  “What?” The phantom-girl’s voice burst with a sort of wounded shock. “No, no, no! Wait a minute!” The girl tossed her legs over the railing and practically leapt over to him. Oddball reached for his knife, only to find it missing. “Listen to me for a second—” She grabbed his sleeve. 

  Oddball jerked backwards, ripping his sleeve from her grasp. “Why? So you can tell me that this is what really lies on the other side of all those doors? You expect me to believe that?” 

  “You don’t…believe me…?” She took a step back, withdrawing. 

  “Don’t sound so disappointed,” Oddball said. “I know the true nature of this place. All of this?” He gestured to the ocean and the sky. “It’s all fake. Now let me out.” He planted himself firmly, ready to fight his way out of this illusion if he had to. The fight never came.

  “I’m sorry if this place hurt you before…” 

  Oddball paused. He’d barely heard her—her quaking voice was so small. Her hands were clasped together and drawn close to her body. Her head was facing the ground, and her body was angled away from him as if he’d just struck her across the face. She wasn’t going to fight him. She wasn’t angry at his realization. There was no sense that he’d foiled her plans in any way. There was no sense that there had been a plan to begin with… 

  Questions began to stir, all the while resisted by some presence in his skull that was becoming increasingly alien to him: Was he wrong? No. Was she really hurt by this? Maybe it wasn’t a lie… No. But what if it wasn’t? No. Hold on, why did he care so much if she felt hurt anyways? You shouldn’t. 

  “Please, just hear me out. This place…it’s not what you think it is…you aren’t meant for that other place…”

  Don’t listen to her. But what had she said before? Nothing worth your attention. Something about being a prisoner to the other place? That place is your safety, your home. Is that why he felt so inexplicably comfortable here? This place is your hell. You don’t belong here.

  This was becoming too much. The doubt-stake went deeper and deeper and rationality was choked out by its polluting emotional byproduct. What should he do? What should he do? All the while, the phantom-girl kept pleading with him.

  “Please,” the phantom sank to her knees, “just listen to me. Please. I can’t get out of that place without help, and neither can you.” 

  Who said he wanted to get out of “that place”? “That place” was his home…

  …wasn’t it?  

  The world was spinning. The painted landscape was beginning to fade and decay away—a canvas being washed clean with water. The ocean was motionless, smeared, and blurred. The sky dripped down into the sea like runny paint. He couldn’t tell which way was up. He could tell if it was his heart or his head that was racing. The white expanse began to darken. Holes started to appear in the imagery in the corners of his vision, as if the canvas was being burned now. He could see stone walls and red mist through these holes, but never when he looked at them directly. The air was stagnant again: gone was the stench of fish and seaweed; gone was the salty taste; gone was the refreshing coolness. All that remained was rotting remnants of a burning canvas, a crying, ghostly girl, and questions that were trying their best to smother him.

  Should he hear her out? But what if she’s lying? But what if she wasn’t? Who could prove if she was lying or not? Who could answer the questions of what was real and what wasn’t real? Who could discern the illusions from reality? Who? Who?! WHO?! 

  The one who protects you. 

  The resolution cast away the pollution and replaced it with the image of a small wall of glass encasing a door. 

  “I need to ask it…” Oddball said in a low voice. He started to turn away. Certainly the Monitor would know the answers. 

  The ghost-girl’s body language suddenly changed. She lunged forward explosively and seized his arm in a tight hug.“No! No! Don’t go to it about this. Don’t tell it about me!” 

  What was she so frightened of? Don’t be fooled. The Monitor protected this place, didn’t he? The Monitor keeps us safe. He stemmed the flow of questions before it could run out of his control again.

  “The Monitor will know if you’re lying to me or not…so you have nothing to be scared of if you’re telling the truth,” he murmured. The girl pulled against him. “Let go of me.” He needed answers. 

  “It’s not what you think it is! Please, just listen to me! Don’t tell it anything you just saw—”

  “And what did you see, Oddball?” 

  Oddball froze. The remainder of the illusion burned away in the instant the new voice arrived, plunging both him and the phantom-girl into swallowing darkness and an overwhelming presence. This presence was not the one that had greeted him when he first arrived here. This presence sent chills through his body that made the air here feel warm by comparison. This presence made his heart stop for a moment and trip over itself. It staggered, pounding hard and skipping beats in its desperate struggle to regain pace. His legs grew weak and he plummeted to his knees. He doubled over, clutching at his chest and grasping desperately for each breath in an atmosphere that felt suddenly far too thin. The air was devoid of scent and taste. It was just cold. Just cold and dead. Every muscle in his body locked, holding him in position, as though this presence itself was forcing him to bow to it. This was not the presence that had greeted him, and yet he knew it had to be. This was the Monitor, his protector. Oddball fought against spasming muscles and forced his head to raise, so that his adjusting eyes could grope vainly in the darkness for the shape he knew he’d see. 

  It was different than he remembered. The cavern was taller now, and the small platform had become a mountain of black, glassy stairs that rose out of the low-hanging red fog to stand over him. On top of it all sat a roughly tombstone-shaped obelisk of black crystal. In its smooth face, he could barely make out two tiny, glowing white spots. They bored holes in his mask from utop their makeshift throne.

  “Tell me,” said the Monitor in a deafening whisper that came from everywhere at once. Oddball winced: it felt like metal rods had been driven into his ears. The presence grew oppressive. He felt like he was sinking into the ground, forced by an unseen hand with immeasurable strength. “What did this remnant show you?”