Ftaires! -=005=- Part the Second, in which Johnny rambles.
Purgatorium is the house.
The house is owned by a family.
The family is in a documentary.
The documentary is in a book.
The book is written by Zampano.
Zampano is blind as a bat.
Zampano is dead.
...
Prolix--your word...
My dear Zampano, what have you lost?
Mother.
...
Women, women, it's always women.
Thumper.
What was I writing before I came here...?
Oh.
Right.
In that hotel room.
...
With a little luck, you'll dismiss this labor, react as Zampano had hoped, call it needlessly complicated, pointlessly obtuse, prolix--your word--, ridiculously conceived, and you'll believe all you've said, and put it aside--though even here, just that word, "aside", makes me shudder, for what is ever really just put aside?--and you'll carry on, eat, drink, be merry, and most of all, you'll sleep well.
Then again. There's a good chance you won't.
This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish, and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize that things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you once believed you were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what had granted you this awareness in the first place.
Old shelters--television, magazines, movies--won't protect you anymore. You might even try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you know longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much deeper.
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying to believe you're some sort of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad that you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or even some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then, for better or for worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.
...
I hope I actually managed to type all that before I came here. Whoever finds my body -- assuming that I'll be dead by the time I figure my way out of this place, or the thing'll get my like it did the old man, maybe...They'll heed the warning.
Probably not, though.
The human mind is too curious.
It's cold.
But isn't that what Navidson said?
"It's freezing in here."
OOC: Huge quote from House of leaves is huge, and copywrited Mark Z. Danielewski. Please don't sue me kk.