Antigreen

"No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity."

- H.P Lovecraft, Through the Gates of the Silver Key

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Calliope Mondegrene was so fantastically, impossibly high that she might as well have shuffled off the mortal coil absolutely for afterlives unknown, to wander into sidereal spheres of influence the waking self had never dreamt of–for how could it? Standard-issue consciousness was blind and numb to such things, unaware of where–beyond the wall of sleep–dream daemons dwelt in every redoubt of the mind.

In that far-flung mental realm, what dreams may come would give her pause if she were sober. But she was not; oh how ever was she not. Sure, the bold, insistent tones of the long-forgotten party still made deafened impact on her optic nerve and eardrum, but to no effect; she'd cast herself off fully to the vacuum of psychedelic space, and no further input was required or requested. Euphoria reigned over her mind, and while her real body was slumped back in the armchair somewhere–God bless it–the little packet of essence she called a self pinged listlessly through a kaleidoscope that put so-called reality to shame. She might have been drooling, even–tracing a silver route of saliva behind her in the astral murk, as she lurched onward on her drunkard's walk. Maybe that could help her find her way back, because no trip lasted forever: it had to end, even if in its ending she ended up a bit misplaced from where she had began. That was to be expected. One couldn't sail the same stream of consciousness twice, just as the Earth and sun and stars never staged the same syzygy for a second time.

In simpler words: she would come down eventually and probably be a little worse for it. But right now, that was no matter–Calliope didn't and couldn't care about such things so long as she got to enjoy herself. And enjoy herself she did, bumping off one inchoate thoughtform after another on her journey to everywhere and nowhere.

Until something several standard deviations beyond strange happened: she was no longer nowhere; she was no longer alone. All around her, that background of eyeless eigengrau that she never bothered to take notice of before… It was suddenly perforated with vigintillions of compounded lenses, all of them zeroed-in to stare at her out of the pink noise behind her eyelids.

Thought froze, even as the beating of her heart rose to fever pitch. Callie'd weathered bad trips before, of course–usually some nightmare or other from her past would straddle her brain and buck her about like a ragdoll for a while, leaving her with a little more trauma than before. It was unpleasant, but manageable–usually avoidable too with the proper protocol, which she hadn't followed. Somewhere in that vapid assemblage of neurons she strung together a thought: that she was stupid to have used again without someone to trip-sit for her. Again. It would've been helpful when something exactly like this happened: when her thoughts took a dark turn, when things started to go very very wrong, when she longed for the comfort of another person to guide her through the worst of it. But there was nothing she could do. She was far too high to move her body, and all the commotion of the party meant that nobody would be coming to check on her. She was alone with her thoughts. Calliope mentally prepared herself for a bad time.

But This was no ordinary nightmare, no dark thought conjured from the inkling depths of her imagination; This was an influence from well Outside. Where a moment ago she'd swam through a stream of consciousness in a dreamlike trance there was now only the ocean of Its Presence, all-encompassing and blacker than shadow. It felt alien, un-thinkable, not of her own making; It fixed upon her tiny thoughtform like it was a tardigrade in a microwave, and the outskirts of her head began to sizzle.

"Um, God?" She voiced, nervously. The walls were closing in around her skull; the pressure hurt like nothing else. Calliope wasn't exactly religious–despite her upbringing's attempts to make her so–but she always wondered if getting high brought her even an inch closer to the divine, if any existed. She figured it couldn't hurt to ask the Presence to explain Itself–unless of course she were unlucky and the divine leaned towards antiquity in temperament. If It harbored the misanthropism of some forgotten pagan God, she was well and truly fucked.

The answer was noncommittal and nonverbal. As It rushed in and swelled to every corner of her brain she realized that she'd been mistaken: now, It was all-encompassing. In, in, in… It filled every crevice in her mind the way the ocean fills a fractal coastline, and she'd confused bathing in brine to drowning in it–the salt of It rubbed against her grey matter everywhere it touched. Even her hyponatremic ass wasn't built for such salinity.

Back on Earth, her beating heart was nearing a tempo that would be lethal in just a few minutes; the expression of terror on her face went unseen under the dim house lights. Nobody was coming to save her.

Earth. That was where she was from. Cuh-lye-oh-pee, right? Riveting. Moments of her life flashed in her mind's eye like the world's shittiest flip book: learning to ride a bike when she was eight years old–rickety training wheels rattling. The school spelling bee–lost on the word "isosceles". The time her voice broke at chorus in her solo, and she'd been so embarrassed and ashamed and quit and hated it so much that she'd wished to die for the umpteenth time. Then: every other time she'd wished for such an ending, all at once. The sudden release of destrudo threatened to consume her, the torrent of emotions accompanying the memories far too thick to breathe through. It hurt to be rifled through like that… hurt worse than the time she'd broken her arm skating, worse than when she hurt herself, on purpose, gouging glaring gashes into the soft skin of her groin. The memories of the pain stacked atop one another–like someone placing pepper rounds over her eye–were far worse in gestalt than the sum of each individual experience.

"Stop," she begged. The voice in her own head sounded small and feeble. Small, like prey–like it had to hide from the predator much larger than itself that intruded into its domain. Blotches of pink, cyan and yellow exploded in her vision as It hunted her down. The Presence was inside her, in her very soul, picking and probing at the whole of her for some unknowable purpose–or maybe It was simpler than that and meant only to devour her once It finished Its appraisal. She hoped It'd be quick about it.

But the deluge of memories stopped as soon as it had started. Her hope rose; did the plea somehow reach her captor?

A pause, and a great shifting in every direction. Preparations.

WHY.

The word may as well have been branded into her senses. It hurt to look at and to hear and–rather than reverberating–it stayed there fixed and demanding, an ichorous wound carved into her awareness. It smelled of clove and sulfur; it left the taste of metal in her mouth; it rang discordantly like a thousand ancient timbrels. The image of the frog she'd refused to dissect in ninth grade figured prominently, its legs twitching in undead galvanism as if to taunt her: & WHY NOT seemed to be the subtext there. Calliope was overwhelmed; she prayed that she'd come down soon, that she'd maybe taken less than normal and the trip would soon be over, but knew it was only that–a prayer, a pointless thing in a place like this. There was no pleasant God to hear it in the confines of her altered mind.

WHY.

It said again, twisting the question into her like thumbscrews. The void around her broke apart; at every angle now there was a great tessellation of mirrors, reflecting and observing her. Every facet turned her way cut into her skin, into the very core of her being, despite the separation. Callie hated to be observed, to be seen; now it was unavoidable. There was nowhere to look without seeing her naked and pathetic body repriflected to infinity. Horrible; it was beyond horrible.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Be-because it hurts, damnit!" She cried out. She might as well have shouted at a tidal wave or a collapsing star; whatever frightful concept gripped the reins of her trip seemed unlikely to listen to reason.

But It might have. There was a drawing back–a pouring and draining–as the entity wrapped around every wrinkle of her brain withdrew. Calliope exhaled what felt like an inaugural breath. The pressure clamped over her skull released just in time–she was barely a heartbeat away from bodily death, though she couldn't know it.

The Thing coiled back in all directions. Back It slithered, back through the edges of the mirrored walls that remained focused on her. She could actually see as It went: grotesque tendrils of alternating sable black and charnel white that prickled unceasingly, like a colony of chiaroscuro centipedes. In a moment more they disappeared all through the cracks, leaving only a million images of herself to be seen in Its lens, which rotated about in a stochastic pattern as if to resolve every molecule of her one by one.

Then those reflections moved of their own accord. A million mouths opened to speak; the resulting voice again drowned out all thought. Two million eyes fixed on her own; there was nowhere she could avoid eye contact.

"WHAT ARE YOU," It said in a full spectrum of tones.

Okay, so It could form sentences even, not just words, this manifestation of a bad trip. Maybe… maybe she could calm herself down by conversing in turn? Humanize the thing, bend the nightmare to her level–that was the strategy.

Calliope was unsure which mirrored face she should address, though. Perhaps they were all the same and it–like all else–didn't matter; in the end, she chose one at random.

"I'm, I'm a person. Hi. Are you like, I dunno, my subconscious or something?"

Her curiosity would cost her, for It did not identify Itself in words. No–instead, It showed her–she would forever wish that It had not. Mirrors became windows; windows became bottomless pits yawning open onto things so alien they may and must not be described. She could see the whole horrible breadth of It, every limb of Its extension, the way one might see a globe and imagine the shape of the Earth, but she couldn't grasp it, no more than she could hold the planet in her fingers or infinity within her brain. Every single little facet opened onto something so very very large; the sight of all of them at once frayed the edges of her fragile mind. It was like nothing she'd ever conceived, or could conceive, or would ever desire to conceive: the sum total of her being was a blasted heath against the fractal fruit of Its potential. Such gross complexity should never be–and yet It was. And yet It was far too much. Calliope's heartrate skyrocketed again and fueled a terrible foreboding: glimpsing the endless expanse for too long would definitely kill her.

"I… I don't understand," she whimpered; she could not understand. At once the panorama coalesced. A reprieve; next there was just a single image in her head: a single ant atop a circuit board. Millions of miles of silicon wafer lay about it in a labyrinth, incomprehensible to its antennae. She knew in her bones that it was supposed to represent her. Jesus, Mary and all the other useless saints; what kind of drug laced with evil had she taken?

"YOU ARE SO VERY SMALL," Her own voice spoke to her. The mirrors instantly returned to cloak the scene from view. Calliope tried to still her reeling head, while the walls resumed their intermittent spinning and refocusing.

"Y-yeah, or, or maybe you're just big. What the fuck is this?" She tried to stay calm, but fear betrayed her: even between her own two ears her voice was warbling. Panic and paranoia now reigned uncontested.

"You are so very small, but you are new." The voice came from behind now. She spun round, only to come face to face with… herself. Or a thing that looked like her, anyway. It was like one of the reflections had abandoned its siblings and gained mass; the doppelganger floated some feet ahead.

She gulped before addressing it: "Can you just, like, go away? I'm not having a great time, and I'd really like to not be high right now."

"You are an unknown facet. You are fragile: a speck, scarcely there. To move away would destroy you in our wake."

"Gosh, thanks… Wait, 'us'? Oh, don't tell me–I'm finally fucking losing it, aren't I?" This was it: she'd finally damaged her brain with drugs beyond a threshold of madness that held no hope of return. That put quite the mad damper on things.

"You are but a droplet; we are an ocean. At a distance, your multitudes become a single point; ours persist, so 'We' are many. This is the basis of your thought, no?"

Calliope only half-understood the double's meaning. Even for a god It seemed arrogant. Perhaps her ego escaped the cage in which she kept it down, repressed, and was at present holding court with her? Either way, it wasn't fair.

"That's… kinda rude, right? I'm just one person, so–not really a fair comparison."

The double gave her a blank stare and little else: Its limbs went limp, like its puppeteer had left the stage abruptly to deliberate something. It took almost an entire minute–from her perspective, who knew how long that was in realtime when taking it all into account–to return and remove slack from the strings.

"Explain." It sounded terse, upset; Callie wondered if it was possible to be at odds with your own subconscious. She had a better chance at that than anyone.

"Er, you know–I'm just one person, I'm sure if you added up all of humanity or whatever maybe that'd be enough. An ocean's worth of people or something."

The response just puzzled her reflection further.

"There are more? We do not see them. It is only you."

Calliope almost snorted. It spoke with the confidence of someone insisting that the Earth was flat, with no hesitation despite being so incredibly wrong.

"Well… I guess you wouldn't, huh? I'm really fucking high right now, and you're probably a hallucination–never had a self-aware one before though, congrats–so of course you wouldn't really know about the real world."

Another stare lacking in expression. Her confidence rose; she was actually doing it! If she could just outtalk this figment of her imagination until she was lucid again, maybe she would be okay.

"We have seen the totality of you. You are nearly nothing; you are alone. Communication has been needless courtesy."

The semblance of dialogue had caused her to overstep, to speak out of turn. Now she was really in for it: tar-moiréd strands began oozing back through the edges of the mirrored walls. They reached towards her, needle-sharp and hungry–shit, she had to think of something! Anything, anything she could say–

"Yeah, well, not my fault if you've never heard of reality. Just get it over with. The pain, I mean." She gave herself a swift kick in the mental rear in the wake of her defiance winning out at the worst possible time.

But the tendrils stopped nevertheless. Her double flickered at its borders without a change in face… come to think of it, she was unsure whatever puppetmaster that directed it knew what facial expressions were well enough to affect them for Itself.

"Show us." Flat-faced though It was, It sounded like a child then–like a kid asking to see the plate of cookies that Santa had allegedly eaten. The curiosity was palpable enough to cause a pause, which meant the turns were tabled; she'd achieved mastery over the trip demon! In spite of her situation, Callie couldn't help but feel a little smug at that.

"Sure, I'd fucking love to–except as I literally said, I'm wayyy too high right now to be lucid. And you're not even real so, you're just gonna disappear when I'm sober anyway. Sorry!"

Her half-apology rang out into a second, longer pause. There was a faint, almost imperceptible murmuring all around, like countless voices conferring on… something. Something about her.

"You are a little network. Many links are dark which may be brightened. Many links are bright which may be darkened. That pattern will be altered. You will show us?"

It wasn't quite a statement or a question, but somewhere in-between–a prophecy, perhaps. She stared at the figure, at all the figures–the calliope of Calliopes–reflected around her, waiting for an answer. The meaning of the cryptic words penetrated her understanding: It was offering her a deal. Wake up, be lucid, walk the world a little… but bring It back with her to sobriety. Yeah, right.

That was nonsense, wasn't it? The only lasting psychological consequence she'd ever experienced from tripping was maybe an extra nightmare here or there. Nobody'd ever split their personality by getting too high, or anything like that, that was absurd… so there was no danger? Somehow that felt wrong; in her heart she knew that the thing wearing her face was definitely not part of her. That It was dangerous, beyond her understanding. Maybe beyond the sum of human understanding. This would be no ordinary trip, and she wouldn't return alone or unchanged.

In the end, a mixture of curiosity and weariness got the better of her. Calliope didn't even have to fully voice her agreement; It began before she was aware she'd made a decision at all. Darkness gripped her again from everywhere at once, the clammy sensation in her skull destined to become familiar. It was feeling around in her brain again, searching through every crack, doing who-knows-what. But no memories flashed before her eyes this time. This work was much more subtle.

It flushed the foreign neurotransmitters from her system one by one; no doubt her poor liver would be working overtime for hours afterward. Fantastically, impossibly, Callie felt her sound and sight returning to the world of the living. She was coming down.

And that

was how,

one high night at a party,

Calliope Mondegrene began the ending of all things.