Cosmic Confluence

Chapter 8: bit by bit

You may have forgotten the sign of a visit located inside my sketchbook, done by The Man with Long Teeth that I was reluctant to explain earlier on. My reasoning behind that is because, it mattered more than ever now in comparison to any other time I could have explained it.

By now I was back home and the clock had just clicked to four on the dot. Each time I was at home just doing my own thing (which varied from watching horror movies, to dicking around with fire, to reading) it just felt weird. I felt like such an idiot to keep doing the enjoyable and mundane things I liked doing even when I was going to die soon, for all I knew. Still, I went to my room to draw because despite my demise creeping up on me, there wouldn't be any more drawings by Mary after she died. And in a way, each drawing I made as my days were being counted down by God was worth even more as the last one. I guess I'm implying my artwork would have sentimental value but also, like, people might offer to buy a dead girl's shit because that's kinda cool. Then again, you can't gain anything from money when you're stone-cold dead.

I put my earbuds in right before I started getting into drawing. I chose to listen to An Iris Pseudocorus by Sleep Party People, a song I felt would be fitting for the subject I wanted to draw. I couldn't forget the image of all those floating shadowy figures in the sky like Jaymie had described, so I felt like it'd be good to cope by drawing it in a relaxing way. Which was weird, I thought, as I sketched small and unclear black bodies over the paper. Mack Gardner's face being eaten was freakier, right? I wasn't sure if I could judge actually, but the figures in the sky were certainly more puzzling to me.

This was because I had never seen The Man With Long Teeth do anything remotely like that.

I mean, I bet he had all kinds of out-of-this-world shit he could do, and I think I always thought about it that way. But this time, discovering a new thing about him felt... different. I'm not exactly sure what I meant by that. Maybe I'm trying to say that this time things were feeling a lot, larger now. I couldn't tell really. And it made me feel like I actually didn't know anything at all to a degree. I was apart of the most intelligent species on my planet and even if I had an IQ of 200 I still don't think I would be able to tell what was happening.

Maybe I was never supposed to get it or understand what was happening; because it was my fate and I couldn't do anything to stop it anyways.

Like I said, I couldn't tell.

I realized that the repetitive lines I drew to depict the shadowy people across my sketchbook were making me more depressed, rather than giving me a little sense of closure.

I turned the page.

"what the fuck..." I mumbled, my hands trembling slightly. There was already a drawing there that I knew I didn't do myself.

I hadn't seen something like this, and the closest thing my brain could compare it to was some kind of computer circuit layout. Only it was on paper. The drawing didn't even look like it was done with a pencil, or even by a person by that matter. Thin lines in a true black were marked from top to bottom in a way that was so straight and perfect, one would easily say this was the work of a machine.

The picture had one short, single vertical line at the very top of the page which then split into two lines. Those two lines then also split into more lines, which then split into even more lines. I was getting the pattern. The entire picture was made up of these lines that were branching off like roots or something.

Then everything came to me.

It was a sickness that was contagious. It was a loop that repeated itself.

And it was a curse that carried from person to person.

From me to Jaymie.

From Elijah to Mack.

I was right, things really were becoming larger.