“May your sins be cleansed with death,” said the speaker. The axe swung down. The crowd cheered. What the heck is wrong with you people?!
The second man was killed. The crowd cheered again.
The third man was killed. The crowd cheered again.
The fourth man who spoke against the house burning allegation yelled and resisted. He was panicking, which made the people boo again. Then when they finally killed him, the crowd cheered.
The horse slaughterer was killed without resistance, and then they put the box full of dead heads in front of me. They lowered down my head. I closed my eyes and stopped breathing so I didn’t smell what was in front of me.
“And the last one!” the speaker called out to the crowd. “May your sins be cleansed by death.”
The crowd cheered. Then everything went quiet. I felt tranquil and at peace. It was a deafening silence. Finally, I got to go back home. I wonder how much time until I had to go in again? I wonder what I’ll have for dinner tonight? Haven’t had shrimps in a while. Maybe I should take my friend out. Or maybe my editor – he’s a nice guy. I wonder… I wonder why I’m wondering? No really, what?
I opened my eyes. Then I flinched at the dead heads in a box in front of me. Then I moved back and bumped into the man who was holding me. His hands were frozen still. The axe was extremely low – it was just about to kill me, but it was frozen still too. So were all the people. Their cheering faces and thunderous applause were there like a picture – or like someone pressed pause on the movie.
I took a moment to observe the eerie silent and still surroundings. I made a low hum with my voice. I heard it myself, but it drew no response from the frozen people around. Seconds passed, and the movie did not resume.
I stood up with some difficulty and limped down the steps and off of the stage. I got up to the closest person from the crowd. I poked his hand that was stretched out. Then I moved it slightly. It moved, and remained in its position.
“Hello?” I said out loud. No response. “Hello?!” I called out louder. My voice was felt so loud in this absolute quiet.
I walked around the entire crowd to get behind them. If the ‘movie’ started playing again, I would end up getting captured.
Oh look… It was the judge, jury and executioner guy. He was at the very back of the crowd, watching me get executed. ‘I’ll see you dead’ he said. I walked up to him. He had his hat on, and this time he was in a black masquerade costume.
I got up to him to feel his fabric. I wasn’t sure of the name of it, but it felt like some mix of velvet and silk. It suited him well. His gaze was fixed at where I was previously – obviously, everyone’s gazes were fixed at my about-to-be chopped off head.
I reached out to grab his hat.
“I wouldn’t touch the hat,” he said.
I jumped! For real!! What?!
“You’re alive?!” I held my chest. “I mean, alive, as in… moving, you know.”
“I do love a good prank, I am so sorry, I could not resist,” he bowed his head to me while holding his hat on his head.
“God,” I said with a heavy sigh and looked around. Everything else was frozen still, it was only this guy. “So, can you explain?”
“But of course I shall,” he patted me on the shoulder again. “Come now, we have much to discuss.”
I followed him. We walked through the streets of this kingdom – it was all dead still. I even saw a fly above a barrel. It was almost surreal. The stillness was the kind of thing I imagined back in my school days. What if during an exam I could freeze time and copy the answers from the smartest kid in class, and then unfreeze time? Life would have been a breeze.
“Where are we going?”
“You will see in but a moment, my dear Raymond,” he waltzed through the streets.
“How do I know you’re not the bad guy?” I asked while limping behind him.
“How do I know – that you,” he pointed at me with his lacquered stick “are not the bad guy?” he then grinned.
“You’re hitting ‘bad guy’ vibes on all cylinders I’m sorry,” I was frank with him.
“Oh trust me, you will get used to it.”
Before I knew it, the place he took me to was an outdoor bar. Behind a building, for more privacy, there were a bunch of tall barrels as tables with tall stools around them. He sat down on one that was free, and I sat across him on the other side. He snapped his finger, and the cacophony of life flooded my ears. It was like I was jolted back into reality. The people on the other tables were growling, laughing and chatting. The clouds moved again, and even the slight wind that froze before became noticeable.
“What’s your name?” I asked him. He motioned his hand to a waitress.
“Wilmort Strayer,” he replied casually. “You may call me Wilmort, of course.”
“Wilmort,” I nodded. “Did you know ‘mort’ means death?”
“Back at it with the villain archetypes are you? I suppose it is only natural, being a writer you are able to pick up on subtle nuances.”
“You’re not even denying it, Wilmort.”
“Would denying it not only cement your idea about me further?”
“You wrote my death sentence!” I said a little bit too loud. The waitress clearly heard me. Speaking of the waitress… Damn.
“We’ll have two of your finest beers, milady,” Wilmort smiled.
The waitress nodded as her golden wavy hair fell over her eyes before she brushed them behind her ear, parted her blood red lips into a smile and went away.
“Now Raymond, I’m oh so very certain that your questions pile up to form mountains, but might you be surprised, I may have a few questions of my own. Raymond?”
“Huh?” my eyes were fixed on the woman as she walked away.
“Are you listening to your villain, Raymond?”
“Oh, yes. What did you say?” I looked at his face.
“Need I remind you, that none of this is real?” he leaned closer. “Everything you see here, is made of Light.”
“What are you made out of then?” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“We’ll get to that part soon,” he nodded firmly, taking off his hat and putting it on the barrel between us. “But when I say everything, I mean, everything. Does your cheek hurt?”
“Very.”
“Now imagine it doesn’t,” he smiled warmly.
“Uh…” I touched my cheek. The moment my fingertips came into contact with it the pain intensified. “Just like, imagine it?”
“Indeed,” he leaned back and observed.
I took a moment, made some weird facial gestures, imagined the pain go away, touched my cheek again, and it was still there.
“Nothing,” I avoided looking at him for a moment.
“Oh, worry not! The good news is, it will only get better from here,” he reached out for his beer.
“Better in what way?” I leaned my elbows on the table.
“Simply better. I know not what sort of deaths you had to go through and how long they took, but hopefully soon you won’t have to go through it anymore.”
“So my first question,” I brought the attention back to myself abruptly, “are you the person who wrote the message on my TV screen after the first teleport?”
“Why yes, I am,” he grinned again.
“My second question, why me?”
“I am truly sorry that it had to be you, but I’m afraid we were not the deciders of that. The signal went out to multiple transmitters at once, and it happened to pull you in by luck of the draw. Still I am ecstatic that we found a fearless writer to help us on our journey.”
“Us?” I narrowed my eyebrows.
“There are a few of us, yes!” he said excitedly.
“Are they as creepy as you?” I made a disgusted face. He laughed out-loud.
The waitress brought the two pints of beer for us. I did not look at her, it was bad for me. That kind of hypnosis should not exist.
“Four have failed,” s
aid Wilmort.
“Four?” I looked up at him suddenly.
“We have invited others before you. One was a child, the other was an incapable fool, and the other was a weak salesman. The fourth one we could not even find.”
“What do you mean failed though?” I asked while Wilmort took a sip of his drink.
“Simply put, death was not something they could handle on a weekly basis. It is after all, a very heavy burden to bear. You on the other hand – according to our radar, this is your third visit to our world, isn’t it? That means you died twice. Look at yourself, you look marvelous!”
“I am covered in bruises and I have a bleeding cheek. God knows I have a broken rib too.”
“It will all go away once you are back home, worry not.”
“You could have stopped those guards from beating me, you know?” I took a sip of my drink.
“Unfortunately, I could not. I needed to know if you could be the one we would invest into. Ah! And when I saw you smiling just before getting executed, that is when I knew you were the one.”
“You’re sick, you know that?” I looked around to see the waitress, but she was nowhere in sight. I sighed. “So what’s with the timer?”
“Humans cannot be here by default, it is simply not their environment. Your first teleport engraved Light into your body. It is a part of you now. Essentially, you are now half human, and half – not human. Depending on the fiction world, we can call you a cyborg, if you’d like. If you stay too long in the outside world without recharging your Light, your Light dies – so a large part of you dies. So you die. You fall over, you feel faint, and you die. And when you die, you are dead.”
“You’re very funny,” I nodded sarcastically. “What if I call your bluff and stay beyond the timer, and never come back in?”
“Then I’m afraid we’d have to look for yet another replacement. That would be such a pity, you’re quite perfect already. How do you think we lost the others? And how do you think I found you?”
“Through a radar?”
“It merely tells me which world you came into. I would have come for you sooner, I genuinely looked. In the first world with the strange animals, I was waiting at the Professor’s lab thinking you would come there.”
“Yeah, I didn’t make it,” I looked away.
“In the second world – well, I simply couldn’t find you. I am truly sorry.”
I sighed out loud. He’s only reconfirming what I initially assumed. Didn’t I have any actual questions for him? Of course I did.
“What exactly am I meant to do here?” I finally asked.
“That, my dear Raymond, I will only show you. And that, my dear Raymond, I can only show you when you have learnt to travel the worlds.”
“You can jump from world to world?!”
“Why yes, of course!”
No waaaaaaaaay, that meant I could go back to Cyl one day! Damn, this gave me chills. My face was lit up, my shoulders perked up and the corners of my lips lifted into a smile of relief.
Wilmort got up from his seat and put on his hat.
“So tell me, do you have a busy life in the real world? I would loathe myself if I compromised it one bit.”
“I mean… I have friends, a few of them. A mom and dad – I’m an author, I participate in writing competitions and I need to stay in touch with my editor.”
Wilmort… looked like he pitied me there for a second.
“I am very delighted to have met you, Raymond Smith,” he put on his hat.
“You sound like you’re leaving,” I stood up from the stool as well.
“My task was to find you, my colleague will pick up from here. I suggest you die and come back another day, it will help reset you. I will brief them on what happened today.”
“Wilmort,” he walked away. “Wilmort,” I began following him, the pain from my beaten up body not letting me walk fast. “Wilmort wait,” he walked through a crowd of people by the exit of the open bar. “Wilmort!” I yelled out to him.
“Hey!” some rugged buff man pushed me back for trying to cut through him.
“My apologies,” I went around as quickly I could, out into the open streets of the kingdom. Horse carriages, people, open restaurants, carriages of hay stacks, but no Wilmort.
“Wilmort!!” I called out loudly.
“Shut it you twat!” some old man’s voice called back to me.
Frick… he’s gone. Not good, not good at all. I’m supposed to die in a kingdom like this? The only thing I could think of was going back to getting executed. No, I was not going back there, I’d figure something out myself.
After sitting around till afternoon, only one thing came to mind. I had to take a really long walk to see if it was a feasible idea.
In a very long and cautious walk of trying to avoid guards, I got out into the outer perimeter of the kingdom from a side and not the main entrance this time.
Walking beyond the rocky edges and up a tall hill, my instinct paid off. I was atop a grassy and rocky cliff. Down below the waves crashed into the shore repeatedly.
I lay down on the grass for a moment, breathing hard. It was quite a climb – I let my body simply not move for a moment. The cloudy sun was in my face, the wind glided over my skin, and the touch of soft grass felt like nature was absorbing me into itself. I tore off a piece of the grass. At the tear point, it was slightly wet. I smelled it, and it smelled just like regular grass. And this was made from this so-called Light? It looked like it was going through photosynthesis not pixelsynthesis.
Once I was fully rested and relaxed, I looked down the cliff again. It was a really long fall. I felt hesitation – there was a clear difference between getting killed and killing myself.
“I’m going home,” I said out loud. “I will jump, a little plop, and I’ll appear in my living room. Then I’ll be without injuries, and getting ice cream for myself.” I nodded repeatedly. “Just a little plop. Frick…” this was scary. I closed my eyes and let my legs dangle from the edge.
As soon as my mind was still – I pushed myself off the edge.
Chapter 5
So the story was progressing finally – after days of being completely clueless, I was getting somewhere. I met the guy that would guide me through whatever it was I had to do. If he truly was a villain he would probably betray me in the end anyways in some way.
I honestly cannot imagine being a fantasy writer be more useful in any other situation than being teleported into different stories and instantly figuring out who fits into which archetype. Like, how would you use this in real life?
After taking my time getting off the floor, limbs tense, body vibrating, head aching and other unpleasant feelings like after sleeping for twenty hours, I barely managed to crawl my way into the kitchen for a much needed rejuvenation potion. I was talking about, of course, coffee.
Well, it was as he said, all my wounds healed, and I felt no more pain anywhere. I touched my face and felt no bruises what-so-ever.
With a coffee in hand, and a laptop in front of me, I opened a browser and began typing in some things.
“Wilmort Strayer,” I wrote. There was nothing relevant. Nothing at all matched that name. “Graymore Kingdom,” I wrote. Voila! It was from a movie called ‘Sovereign Lands’, about a King that rose to power in another kingdom called Lumina. The King was from Graymore originally, and after seeing how corrupt it was he climbed the ranks of Lumina for the sole purpose of waging war on Graymore and reforming it through force.
I was nowhere near that plot – I just appeared in the forest. Looking at the image search of Sovereign Lands, there it was, Graymore kingdom, exactly how I remember it literally twenty minutes ago.
Next thing I wrote – ‘Cyl and Proto’. Nothing. Damn. I tried writing an explanation of what that world was, but to no avail. It could very well be possible that Cyl and Proto’s reality was a subplot within the main story. The main story could have been held somewhere in space for example – I’d try to sea
rch again later, or ask in some forums from people that might know.
The timer said I had ninety one hours and thirty eight minutes. I got a couple of days to focus on what I needed to.
How important was what I was doing anyways? And what about the aforementioned reward? Would that reward be relevant in the real world or only the digital one? Also, is the recharge of the Light inside me based on how long I stay in that world? Or what?
I had to write all these questions down and ask them from the next person that would find me. I hope the world I end up in won’t be so bad – for once.
I had a lot of days to sit back and relax, and admittedly the first day that was exactly what I did. I watched a movie – a relaxing and calm movie that lifted your spirits. I’ll be honest, it was an animated film about a magic drawing book that turned a child’s drawings into real life. She needed imaginary friends in her life, wished for the power to do that, and voila. Its sole purpose for me was to get my mind off of things.
The next day I spent trying to be productive. As an author, my email lists were full, my inquiries and fan mails came from time to time, and a bunch of self-developing events came about as well. One thing I always took pride in was my writing of short fiction, due to there being monthly competitions of that. I had a little formula that I followed to make sure my short stories were always good – that being, have a plot twist, have a moral, and have fun. If I enjoyed reading my own stories then I was sure the others would as well.
My few days became occupied on my laptop, and occupied with absurd internet searches such as ‘tv sucking you in’ or ‘dying inside your tv’. Other searches included ‘easiest ways to die’ or ‘how to die in an empty room’. The answers were grotesque, most often dying without any props in an empty room included bleeding out as much as you could until your heart stopped. To my horror, sometimes a gunshot to the head or falling off a cliff would not be enough to kill you, and you would writhe in pain for hours before finally dying. That much I definitely wanted to avoid.
Wilmort told me something along the lines of my suffering would soon be over. I didn’t entirely take his words for granted and kept doing my own research anyways, to better mentally equip myself. I had hoped the police wouldn’t come knocking on my door for the kinds of internet searches that I had.
The Portal Page 6