Dreamworlds

The Portal

I.

"What is in a mind? All the memories and emotions of a single life...is there more? Can one mind hold the vastness of the universe within it? Can one soul grasp the threads of time and travel to the farthest reaches of creation? I'm not a guessing man. I intend to find out."

On the south end of Norfolk, in an abandoned town lost to time and purged by disease, two men sit in the dark of a burnt out home. One man is twitching intermittently as the wind passes his feeble form, bound to a wheelchair, caked in muck and days of travel over rock, and wood, and mud. The other is knelt beside him hands clasped in prayer. They are sharing a communion. A voice speaks to them both in the darkness. A path is being laid before their weary feet.

Multiple voices vying for dominance explode in the shadows of the mind. But one voice prevails in the war for control. A voice not present in the room but far away. It has traveled over time and space to meet them in the darkness.

"The pieces are almost returned. How many shards have you found?"

"Three." Reginald, the man praying on the ground, speaks.

"Two more fragments of the whole are left to be retrieved. How is the vessel?"

"I'll let him answer for himself."

Inside the head of the man in the wheelchair is a small dark room. Within it are the remnants of the man's childhood home. Furniture from relatives, pictures half faded in misguided remembrance, the smell of nostalgia. James, the owner of this memory, sits in the corner in the dark twiddling his thumbs as three others pace the tattered wood floors. He feels shudders run up and down his spine and a knot builds in his throat. He looks on at the others as a child waiting for punishment looks on at angry parents. The others don't pay him much mind. Among them he recognizes one figure. The one he calls Cillian. A young man, of about 17, standing tall with the others. Those two, the ones he doesn't recognize, have no solid form. Their faces keep shifting, their forms as of smoke or ash pilled up to look like a person.

Outside in the cold burnt out building James' lips move to speak. With them come the voices of four men. James' voice is the weakest.

"I am fine. Where shall we meet you?"

"In London. That is where this will end."

"We will be there shortly...Doctor." Reginald says opening his eyes a smile peeling across his lips.

II.

Thomas felt a surge of twitches erupt in his neck as he sat back in the worn out chair. The boarded up shack he sat in barely held back the wind and the howling caused his skin to crawl. The words and pages splayed out before him from the journals unearthed and lost to time cast a dark shadow on his mind and the room he now sat. Each new sound caused him to jump and sent his twitches into a lightning storm. He could barely fathom what he had read. Tales of ghosts, demons, possessions, murder. And the most disconcerting thing of them all is what he now knew. The man he had seen drooling and staring blankly across the common rooms in the sanitarium was the same man who had lived in this little shack months prior. A simple man who gave his life to seal...a demon.

Each new revelation when compared to what Thomas knew about the world caused a greater twitch in his neck. He was afraid if this kept up he'd snap his own neck from the amount of violent snaps it was enduring as the information embedded itself. He dared not look again at the charcoal portrait he had put aside, the last remnants of a woman long since dead depicting a creature he dared not even attempt to describe. Thomas didn't want to even try to acknowledge the possible truth of their claims.