I Have A Theory

Chapter Eight, Horror

A lurch. Horror starts like that--it comes from within you, then branches out and infects reality. This horror begins in the depths of me, as a cold and frigid silence, moving outwards until it touches the edges of me, spills over. In real life, there's never chilling music, clicking noises, or monstrous breaths. Still, I Imagine I hear something imperceivable--a low, wet note--as my worst fears are actualized.

My stomach moves, squirms slightly. My insides spin in ways I couldn't imagine.

And then I know.

Shoot out of bed, throw off the covers, because my existential despair only serves to goad my curiosity. Open the sleeping shutter, throw my feet over the edge, drop down. Sprint the short distance, into the place I know he'll be.

Enter through a door, which stands unaffected. So banal.

He sits in the middle of the study hall, his back towards me when I come in. Inexplicable red glow comes from everywhere, droning into my eyes in bloody, visceral tones.

"Kimberly."

"God."

He shakes his head, but it's more of a rightwards jerk of his chin. "I'm not your God, even though you think I am. I'm just a person with vision."

"I know what it means that your eyes are always bleeding."

"Oh?" The red glow deepens, as though in question.

"It means that ever since you saw the things within the flesh, you've not looked back, not related to a single person. When I spoke to Jeong-Su, I saw him, and I couldn't persist in the delusion that nothing mattered, because he said meaningful things..."

"So you gave up more dimensions, more colors and sights and theories? You forfeited all of that, just so that you could ascribe meaning to his words?"

"Don't you have to?"

He frowns, and his eyebrows frown with him, as he removes his circular shades. "No, you don't have to. Once you acknowledge another thing's personhood, you lose the visions. So you can choose to become the only person in the world."

Shudder, pull my shirt tighter around me.

"Then why are you even talking to us? We don't exist to you."

He shrugs. "I used to play video games sometimes. There were characters in those, and sometimes I'd talk to them."

"Are we characters in a video game, then?"

He shakes his head, "How can I possibly take that question seriously? Does it matter how I answer? Nope--not in the slightest. I don't care about you, or anything you have to say... It's all flesh and bone and--strangely--roses."

I take the idea to its most evident conclusion, "So if you win, then everything is gone. All stories, all math, all logic and sense?"

He grins. "Wasn't intending anything of the sort. But why not? You're starting to see the truth the flesh really alludes to, right? That under the surface--below every system of belief we've tried to formalize--there exists infinite spirals of assumption. Of absurdity." He smiles, and his teeth seem pointy in the dim, red light.

I swallow numbly.

He leans in, and there's a deepening sound now; ethereal bells are ringing in the background, droning in my ears. They come from nowhere. They come from him.

"Park Jeong-Su's parents could have gotten back together, or his father could have killed his mom, or they could have been drug dealers, or she a prostitute and him an alcoholic. They could have raped him, or loved him deeply, or given him a hereditary, neurodegrenerative disease. You'd still be around. I'd still be around. The rest of the world would still be around, and a few conjectures might take hundreds of years longer to be proven."