A Parallel World (Short Story)

Prologue

The darkness of the night looms around the theatre. The Cirque has one artist, hundred acts, and a thousand faceless strangers.

Lights lit up, and the spectacle begins.

The actor transformed into different persona with agility and theatricality – deception does not exist just pure talent emerges from his very soul.

He amazed thousands of folds every looming night and their eyes resembled a glowing St. Elmo’s fire in every acts of impersonation. For many years, he provided astonishment, eventually it all has to end; Leopoldo Fregoli buried with the words “his last transformation” in his sepulcher.

A poignant conclusion to a dramaturgical life.

Meanwhile, in the beginning...

I

At night, a man envisioned a tragic occurrence, he saw two silhouettes approaching his house, the bandits broke the door, and tried to kill his family.

He thought it was all a nightmarish dream, his family survived but he did not.

He is sent to the great wide open, a limitless realm of the soulless beings lost between two worlds. The gods have made a decision, he belong to neither – a wanderer, and a nomadic soul confused whether to strive for revenge or become a Prometheus.

He is the first man in over a century to float between spectral realms; he can be the Forethinker or the chaos maker.

II

Months had passed and the dawn commences once again, a widowed woman awakened by the mere silence of her surroundings.

She opens her eyes and welcomes the daylight with sheer passion for the new day and suddenly she realized the love of her life is gone and that strong passion eventually faded as the veracity of time unfolds.

She knows that silence can be deceiving and that it is a reminder that not so long ago, a murder happened in their abode and the very victim is her husband.

The house is almost empty while underground carries all the lost sentiments.

III

Times elapsed, depression, hatred and anger clouded the depths of the woman’s hemisphere. She succumbed dreadfully in despair, illness hit her, and until one monotonous night, she heard a noise in the upper room wherein his two sons are sleeping.

She opened her eyes to a disturbing reverie.

She suddenly felt cold and shaking uncontrollably as she saw faces of the two bandits that killed her husband, she picked a knife and without hesitation she strike the man’s body with fulsome revenge.

A voice of an abrupt-awakened man pitch up and shouts “Mother! What are you doing?!, stop!”. “He is your father’s killer!” the woman groaned, “no! He is your son! My brother!” the awakened son responded as she pushed her mother and grabbed the knife.

A murderer’s psyche is a mystery that demands a surgical deconstruction.

IV

A dreamscape is a different realm than the Earthly abode, it is harsh and mystical. It is both a place for man and the soul. Akin to the wars of angels and demons.

A son is dead, gone from a weary world towards the unknown celestials. He seems lost among the dead stars as he floats amidst darkness with a faint light shining from a vanishing stellar afar.

This faint star is the dwelling of the guardians, the masters of man’s dream and the architects of our nightmares. It powers their barren world with our own soul energy. This man feels he is lucid, although he cannot hear his heart beating.

This departed man has started his quest in becoming a titan.

V

The mother is confuse with the concept of her husband’s demise, as much as the authorities have no clue in what had transpired that night.

The rise and fall of her circadian rhythm signifies a deeper problem, and yet it has become her solace. Peace, something that is quite futile and elusive, a fleeting moment of it is almost ethereal. A faint heart is better than an ischemic heart; it is ripe for conquest, by what entity is the real question.

A mother’s love for her son is almost otherworldly; to cause the death of one is hellish. It has caused a tremendous pandemonium within her and towards the other son.

The casket has long been beneath an ancient acacia tree but the memories are still simmering on the surface, the fog of war is underway.

VI

A transcendent phenomenon is almost always non-existent in man’s lifetime, a subsequent tragedy, you would start condemning the high gods above, and it is a crusade from reality to the celestial realm that we do not comprehend.

A son’s soul is troubled and yet at a certain degree of acceptable peace, the heavens would sing him praises as his earthly persona departs for something mythical.

This concept is a high contrast from our learned reality, far omnipotent than a merely mortal. In the woods where the distraught family lives, a wanderer has been observing them closely, albeit hidden along the tree line.

An entity that is nomadic, transcending space and matter, hiding behind a broken moon, in disguise of a noble man.

VII

What had transpired is almost a geometric pattern brought to life, the way each tragedy intertwines with its cosmic counterpart. The mom has endured a monumental misfortune, while the remaining son is on the verge of a catastrophic delusion.

The battle to resist in realizing a hallucination is exhausting; at some point, you will lose before you triumph over it.

He is a non-prophet, meant to be a simpleton. A grounded eagle longing to reach the firmament, stranded by the tragedy of his bloodline.

VIII

Man’s navigation of the social world is a persistent endeavor, far off from how our souls traverse the otherworldly, transient failures are rare.

The mother is delirious of her current reality, she longs for something peculiar. She is starting to believe that her reality is a delusion. Is she still grieving? Or has she moved on from the Shakespearean misfortune?

She is beginning to misidentify her own world, hoping for an alternate world where the moon is not broken and gravity has everything else set in its rightful place.

IX

Over half a century ago, a deeply psychological phenomenon began inflicting random people; the hallmark of this disease is its cerebral complexity that has puzzled foremost psychiatrist.

The patients would often misidentify strangers as someone in disguise, typically as the person who is close to them. The deluded person is encompassed with this contradictory error to the point that the delusion is acted upon as real.

As these strangers supposedly take the form of a familiar person, it becomes a chaotic kaleidoscope.

X

A diagnosis of a problem is only as powerful as the assessment of the symptoms; it is pure science with a pint of intuition, no witchcraft here or potions. Often than not, it is an art guise in science, algorithms lost in paradise, a heaven of hell.

A psychological deconstruction of someone’s reality is a fool’s errand as the subjectivity of it all is encompassing. The reverse morality of it all is simplistic albeit almost inhuman as the mind is an armory of the universe’s history.

As psychology is merely the quest to find the buried humanity within our brain’s synapses.

She knows that true love resides in an alternate world.

XII

The dense woods surrounding the solitary house is eerily silent. The occasional howling of a hunting pack evokes the pain that the forest has witnessed; it also conjures an enigmatic portal to a parallel world where death is impermanence.

It is all about finding the way home, which is humanity’s unfathomable mission in its finite lifetime. In the end, intuition is the universe’s personal star engrained to man… inescapable, as it shines brightest in your darkest of nights. Look up, close your eyes, and see it through... Go home.

XIII

The overall construct of Earth has morphed over decades. Climate that was once a pinnacle of man’s scientific understanding in terms of predictability has become the opposite. This affected man’s biology and its very own genetic makeup, albeit the transformation is slow.

Earthly realms adjacent the planet’s magnetic fields are highly susceptible for portal formation as it goes through numerous magnetic reversals, where north and south poles swap places. The anomaly is transient, affecting only a handful of the populace.

The frightening concept is that the deviations are hardly recognizable for the ones living in monochrome. The shifting of Earth’s magnetic field reoccurred a decade ago.

XIV

The lonesome son has traversed the dense woods near the house, acquainted with it and thus aware of minuscule variations such as the birth of lowly petal to the death of an herb. He is aware of the peculiar singularity affecting his own family.

When someone’s sanity is tested repeatedly to the borderline of insanity, that turn makes it conceivable. This son is on the verge of embracing that darkness until he pieces together all the changes that the forest is revealing. He begins to understand that a murder is rarely a mystery in its own motive and blaming his mother is outlandish.

He took a few steps forward along the tree line, cautiously as sense an ominous presence he inadvertently ignored in the past - overlooking the precipice as the sun descends, a fire lights up within him to seek for the truth.

XV

The mother convinced that her delusions summons the imposters who in turn murdered her husband. This tragedy pushed to kill her own son, a trickery that blamed her psychological state.

A deprived locale from a far-flung county where every citizen are on its own. She begins to look into this as more than a misfortune beseeching her family.

There is an invisible war transpiring and her family is in the middle of it. As clear as her mind has become, the veins of reality became visible.

Dreary nights in the forest are often overshadowing the silence and the sporadic howling. Townspeople clamors for the first hint of sunrise, a ray of faith amidst a bleak terrestrial.

When you have lived darkness, every speck of light signifies hope. In turn, you seek that light.

XVI

The world upside down, turned into upheaval, chaos reign against modesty. A world adjacent to utopia, and yet seems so out of reach. Out of the woods, the society is aching to turn inwards while the woods adore the solitude and ignorance. Everyone seeks to be a woodsman in a world proliferated by a digital fortress, untethered and drifting inside a confusing nirvana.

The reportage of the murder is a ghostly apparition among the news world, non-existent.

The remaining son uncovered an anomaly by the woodland that is ethereal and celestial, the existence of a portal to the otherworldly, he thought of it as his heaven, too naïve to welcome the idea of hell.

XVII

40 years ago, the world experienced a wraithlike singularity wherein a radical atmospheric change caused an enormous magnetic shift called the Laschamps Excursion.

He unearths numerous ancient Kauri trees, witness of this godly event, a tumultuous time in an innocent world.

Poetry engrained as a radiocarbon signature that chronicled this world’s sorrow, so painful to the point that its two poles reversed and brought about a metaphysical detachment of one’s soul. This soul acted akin to an alter ego that is ultra-ambitious, insanely destructive.

These souls have veered towards a parallel world and as years goes by, dreamt of being the solitary version of itself, not merely a construct of the host.

Epilogue

The mother and son journeyed through the forest, along the river line that seems never-ending, towards a mystified gateway to this unknown world. As recently as they discovered the presence of their half-entity hell bent on murdering them for eternal damnation and the attainment of their own soul.

They have long attempted to understand metamorphosis of their own humanity to something supernatural, that thing we seek to not comprehend and yet feared. They grasp the otherworldly, the bizarre, the unnatural, as realities seems so afar even when it’s within reach.

They went through different stages to achieve this acceptance, an irrational explanation of these murders. They have come afar from the weight of the unexplained, and now they are hunting for their freedom, the talisman that would shed light on this murderous phenomenon. The townsfolks abandoned them and castigated as lunatics in the woods.

They soon witness an apparition.

A parallel being of their own liking.

Alive and yet soulless.

Levitating, non-breathing.

Meditating to kill their Earthly being to ascend on their own world.

Mother and son, a familial quest for survival and lineage.

Confused and yet seeking to understand the extraordinary.