Ghosts we no longer recall
I forgot how to log in to LJ.
When I did remember, I was presented with an option of "restoring last draft". Curious, I said yes and this is what emerged:
I am haunted by dreams of blood and betrayal and demonic things and carnage, of being nobler than I mean to be and more foolish than I ought to be, and petty and ineffectual, as I am, and overdramatically and a little self-agranddisingly in love.
It starts, as it does, with a visual-novelesque "theatre" type dream. The protagonist on whose shoulder I ride is a boy (I think) who'd woken from a coma with no memory of who he is or was doing. He is treated with kid gloves by those in charge, sent back to school but not expected to do anything in particular. Much of the first part is about isolation and alienation, him trying to fit in but being shut out by himself and the others. Exasperated by the antics of strangers, he withdraws socially and declares he is "headed to the library", like the counsellor told him he could. But he takes a wrong turn and finds himself in a closed off section of the school, in front of a door opened by a shrivelled boy student who called an Igor to mind in his mannerisms. Inside the door was a classroom, once in the midst of being closed up, chairs on tables, desks being emptied, now trashed and dusty. And in the bowels of that room, six tables pushed together and ten or eleven kids with abnormal auras around it. They wore savage, mad looks and had bits of blood on their uniforms. And the boy who could not feel much nor remember anything remembered them, his friends, his companions, his rivals. Remembered what they were doing there, and remembered what happened after and why he tried to forget though they did not seem to recall. They accused him, all friendly, of being late to the party. In his memories, he had been at the "party". They'd squabbled and something bad and bloody, he could not remember what, had happened, something had exploded, and he was the only one left alive, bloody and cursed. He does not share the last part, suspecting in his gut that the others will kill him if they learn that he'd survived. He should have left the school, left the town, should not have stayed or come back here. But now that he was here, back in this blood-soaked room, they would not let him leave.
And we, who were riding on his shoulders like voyeurs and tourists, may now be trapped with him and these demonic ghosts with hungry eyes.
But then I was freed, and it was a boring afternoon again at school near the end of the term when they didn't know what to do with us. You were a prefect on duty, and I had a half eye out for sneaking past you and ditching, even though we were friends. But then you spotted a junior girl going up the back hill and went after her, so I came with. She took a wrong turn from the route we'd normally use to leave the school. As we caught her up and you wrote her up and I was wondering how I could slip away, we saw a boy making a break for it in the distance and I said "I'll go catch him, you bring this one back to school" and started in the general direction he was in, with every intention of doubling back and sneaking off. But then I got lost, just suddenly thrust into a weird eerie place, a mill or a quarry or some sort. The boy was unpleasant and scared and I was still convinced we'd simply taken a wrong turn and could if we could get our bearings, easily get out.
Then you appeared, with the junior girl, and I thought you'd come back this way after me, though you'd actually tried to head back the way we came. we found the crossroads between the mill/quarry, the path that we'd thought led back to school, and somewhere else, a beach, it seemed. We tried to head back to school but ended up at the mill, and hiked back up to the crossroads. We picked a different path, but it was the same. I lost my patience, as I do, not with you but with everything in general, and the procession became me, with you and the girl following shortly, and the boy scrambling around directionlessly on his own. I am systematically exploring every path, until I run into a man, some kind of jogger, at the crossroads. He says there is no way out of the mill in the hill since all paths lead back to it-- or did I say it at him? He says, this I am sure, that the sea is the only way back, but you'd need to climb the cliff down to it and climb the beach back up. We, he and I, understood what was unspoken, that he was a ghost and we were all trapped, with him, in this ghostly world. He could teach me to go back, he said in all the stylings of a manga Ma-ou, if I would stay with him and keep him company.
I want to end it with "So I said yes, and after some time, stole his crown.", but that is a dangerous thing to assert, no longer remembering the circumstances of the trade or even the dream of which I'd been writing about.
When I did remember, I was presented with an option of "restoring last draft". Curious, I said yes and this is what emerged:
I am haunted by dreams of blood and betrayal and demonic things and carnage, of being nobler than I mean to be and more foolish than I ought to be, and petty and ineffectual, as I am, and overdramatically and a little self-agranddisingly in love.
It starts, as it does, with a visual-novelesque "theatre" type dream. The protagonist on whose shoulder I ride is a boy (I think) who'd woken from a coma with no memory of who he is or was doing. He is treated with kid gloves by those in charge, sent back to school but not expected to do anything in particular. Much of the first part is about isolation and alienation, him trying to fit in but being shut out by himself and the others. Exasperated by the antics of strangers, he withdraws socially and declares he is "headed to the library", like the counsellor told him he could. But he takes a wrong turn and finds himself in a closed off section of the school, in front of a door opened by a shrivelled boy student who called an Igor to mind in his mannerisms. Inside the door was a classroom, once in the midst of being closed up, chairs on tables, desks being emptied, now trashed and dusty. And in the bowels of that room, six tables pushed together and ten or eleven kids with abnormal auras around it. They wore savage, mad looks and had bits of blood on their uniforms. And the boy who could not feel much nor remember anything remembered them, his friends, his companions, his rivals. Remembered what they were doing there, and remembered what happened after and why he tried to forget though they did not seem to recall. They accused him, all friendly, of being late to the party. In his memories, he had been at the "party". They'd squabbled and something bad and bloody, he could not remember what, had happened, something had exploded, and he was the only one left alive, bloody and cursed. He does not share the last part, suspecting in his gut that the others will kill him if they learn that he'd survived. He should have left the school, left the town, should not have stayed or come back here. But now that he was here, back in this blood-soaked room, they would not let him leave.
And we, who were riding on his shoulders like voyeurs and tourists, may now be trapped with him and these demonic ghosts with hungry eyes.
But then I was freed, and it was a boring afternoon again at school near the end of the term when they didn't know what to do with us. You were a prefect on duty, and I had a half eye out for sneaking past you and ditching, even though we were friends. But then you spotted a junior girl going up the back hill and went after her, so I came with. She took a wrong turn from the route we'd normally use to leave the school. As we caught her up and you wrote her up and I was wondering how I could slip away, we saw a boy making a break for it in the distance and I said "I'll go catch him, you bring this one back to school" and started in the general direction he was in, with every intention of doubling back and sneaking off. But then I got lost, just suddenly thrust into a weird eerie place, a mill or a quarry or some sort. The boy was unpleasant and scared and I was still convinced we'd simply taken a wrong turn and could if we could get our bearings, easily get out.
Then you appeared, with the junior girl, and I thought you'd come back this way after me, though you'd actually tried to head back the way we came. we found the crossroads between the mill/quarry, the path that we'd thought led back to school, and somewhere else, a beach, it seemed. We tried to head back to school but ended up at the mill, and hiked back up to the crossroads. We picked a different path, but it was the same. I lost my patience, as I do, not with you but with everything in general, and the procession became me, with you and the girl following shortly, and the boy scrambling around directionlessly on his own. I am systematically exploring every path, until I run into a man, some kind of jogger, at the crossroads. He says there is no way out of the mill in the hill since all paths lead back to it-- or did I say it at him? He says, this I am sure, that the sea is the only way back, but you'd need to climb the cliff down to it and climb the beach back up. We, he and I, understood what was unspoken, that he was a ghost and we were all trapped, with him, in this ghostly world. He could teach me to go back, he said in all the stylings of a manga Ma-ou, if I would stay with him and keep him company.
I want to end it with "So I said yes, and after some time, stole his crown.", but that is a dangerous thing to assert, no longer remembering the circumstances of the trade or even the dream of which I'd been writing about.