The tunnel was nearly pitch black, but when she turned on a flashlight, I saw it was also surprisingly clean and ordinary-looking. I wanted to ask so many questions, but something held my tongue. I felt as though I was in a dream and the wrong word or action might break the spell. And although I was afraid of what was to come, I was more afraid of waking back up in my old life with all that had occurred having been wiped away. I didn’t know if that made me crazy or a fool, and frankly I didn’t care. I knew the path I was on was the right path, the important path, and I was going to see it through.

Just then, the monster stepped out onto that path.

It was just as the journal described, just as I remembered it—tall and glistening yellow, with flesh stretched painfully and filled with gaping holes that showed the black meat restlessly stirring in its chest. And its eyes…its terrible purple eyes. I recognized those eyes, and that recognition filled me with a kind of terror I had never known before. Perhaps it was similar to the terrible realization of the lemming—or the man—as he plummets to his death: there are some things you can’t take back.

I wanted to take it all back as I looked into those eyes, those damned familiar eyes. And then the monster spoke with a deep voice that was coarse but intelligent.

“Hello Brian. Or do you prefer Alexi? I have so little use for names now, it is hard for me to decide.”

I swallowed, my fear of the monster having been wholly subsumed by what the monster seemed to represent. The inevitability of my own doomed past and future.

“You’re…you’re me, aren’t you?”

The thing made a rough, rasping noise that might have been a laugh. “You’re smarter than I am…or is that even possible? I don’t know. I know too much and too little now, I suppose.” It swung its head up and down in an approximation of a nod. “But yes. I am you and you are me, after a fashion.”

I took a step forward, needing to know it all now, needing it to be over. I felt like a man who wanted to vomit just so the pain and pressure would stop building, even if only for a short while. “How is any of this true?”

And then the monster told me.

****