The Watcher Beyond Mirrors

Never look behind the mirror. You might like what you find. 

Transcript

I was awake. 

That was not usually a strange thing. I understood almost all of my self as being a person who was awake. When I was awake I did things. When I was awake I could move things. When I was awake… 

When I was awake I could feel things, too.

I didn’t feel anything. 

No, that wasn’t true. I felt the presence of my body, felt the hot blood running through it, the hairs rising and falling as I breathed. But outside?

I tried to open my eyes, yet I couldn’t. Things were wrong. Things were very, very wrong.

No. I steadied myself. Steadied my mind, rather. I was just experiencing sleep paralysis again. It was a problem I’d solved before. I could wait, or I could try and break free from the stasis I was cast in. Either way, it would be resolved. Not pleasantly. If I waited, the Watcher Beyond Mirrors would certainly show up, stare at me with their brightly shining eyes, curdle my blood with its presence like I was full up of strawberry milk. And if I struggled? Why, the subconscious did not want me here. I was a mistake. I was supposed to haunt the daylight hours. I was meant to be gone, to be enjoying the bizarre contours of my dreams. There had been a jungle, and a rainbow, and a very large beetle…

But I couldn’t go back. That was always the problem. Whatever mechanism cast me from my slumbering visions locked the doors behind me. I was awake, yet not. And there were just those two solutions waiting for me. To wait, or to struggle. Every second that ticked by was torturous, yet struggling would be torture even more. 

I would struggle. I almost always struggled. The Watcher Beyond Mirrors was coming. Maybe they were already there, just at the edge of my static plagued memory of my bedroom. I did not want to see them. They always saw me. 

Why did I have to be seen? Why couldn’t I be insignificant in such a way that I never had to perform? To be in a way that was… 

No, no, no. Those were questions to ask when I wasn’t effected by the maddening dissonance of existing in my body, yet having absolutely no control over it. It was a sensation, that was for sure. Bad? Yeah, pretty bad. If I existed in it forever, maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible, but as it stood…

I reached out to my body. It hissed at me, doubled back in the places where I touched it, tried to reassert control. It did not like me being there. It wanted a rest. I worked it too hard, and it tried to tell me so during the daytime with a constant, rumbling pain. But did I listen? No. So if I wasn’t going to be kind to it in the time when I held the reins, why would it be kind to me now? 

I pressed harder. I felt a tiny twinge of sensation return to my arm. I could feel the air in the room warp around it as my body breathed. That was good. That was all I needed. 

I sent more commands to the arm. It screamed in terror as it shifted a millimeter in purposeful movement. Great rivers of pain flooded the area in question, smothering the screaming, trying desperately to drown me out. 

I shrunk back from the pain and ran over to the other arm. It took less cajoling. The pain responded just the same. 

That was hell, plain and simple. I really was in hell. Nothing to my name but my thoughts. Any scrounging any little bit more from the thing I thought I was entitled to, and there was the flood of static. The thing that would annihilate me at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But some time. Inevitably. 

I flipped my conscious mind over to the chest. It was working normally, pumping blood, sucking in air, you know, regular old chest stuff. I thought about directing my attention to the lungs. Grasping control there would surely rip me from the waking nightmare, as the subconscious panicked and nearly asphyxiated itself. It had worked every single time I had tried it. 

Every single time I had tried it? 

Yes, every single time. But that wasn’t the peculiar thing, of course. Of course it worked. The body was more afraid of dying than I was. I, the mind, was less of a thing than it ever had been, so I had less to lose in dissolution. So it always gave back control to me when we were dying. It was just that… well… when I woke up, I knew that I wouldn’t remember the other times. It would be strange if I remembered this time.

And yet it had happened multiple dozen times, hadn’t it? 

I was half dreaming. Yes, that was the problem. At the space in between space, right at the vaunted gate of the lucid dream. And yet… 

The space between space was the worst thing that could possibly be. It was there that the Watcher lurked. Where the Watcher already was. 

He… er… it… the thing was already there. I had known the entire time, but I had to win over a little of my faculties to notice it. I could not see it, but I could feel its heat.

How could could a being be so hot? Surely hallucinations didn’t produce heat. When I was dreaming, like actually, really dreaming, temperature never really played an important part, and yet here the thing was, its heart raging with the fire of a furnace. 

If I gave up, if I waited in the space between spaces, I would slip down into the abyss, the infinite void of possibility where I was completely powerless. And where I was most safe. If I struggled more, now, when it was here…

It would notice me. 

It had already noticed me. It brushed a spindly little finger against my chest, right over my heart. Right against the rushing fire of my blood, and it was still hotter. 

What did it intend to do with me? Could it have intentions? 

That was the worst idea. Maybe it was different in a way that I couldn’t even begin to understand. I had seen other demons in my waking paralysis. Most of them were shaped in the forms of people, knives cradled in their hands, looking to carve my eyes out for some slight that had ballooned a thousand times out of proportion. But the thing that lived behind the mirror… what was it? Where was it from? Where did it go?

If I struggled, if I noticed, and it noticed me back, maybe it would answer my questions. 

Maybe. Or it could take me to the place behind the glassy surface of realization, to where understanding was meaningless. 

What was that place like? Was it as terrible as here, a place that crafted for me a replica of hell just because I committed the sin of falling asleep?

Or would it…

I never answered out of fear. Fear of the unknown. Struggling, I knew. Pain, I understood. These things weren’t novel to me. Nor was being powerless in the face of existence, or even in the face of the normal functions of my body. Sometimes I tried to not breathe. Did that work? Did trying not to fall asleep ever function for me? Or how about fasting? 

No, the powerlessness was not foreign. I would be powerless in the face of the Watcher, as I was powerless when I dreamed. What about the equation changed? What about anything changed?

I sent another command to my body, this time attempting to disrupt the automatic controls running about my head. I willed my eyelids to flutter open. They didn’t, but I gained enough understanding of them to see the shadow of the thing kneeling at the foot of my bed.

Kneeling?

And yet it towered over me. 

How large was this thing? 

Very. 

Must have been.

And yet, that was never the frightening thing, was it? Of course it was big. It demanded my attention, my fear. Would a small thing garner those? No. Absolutely not. 

It was a fragment of my imagination, another part of the thing I considered myself that I didn’t actually have control over. What did I actually control, then? If not the body or the mind?

It didn’t matter. I was still stuck. I could see the vague impressions of the Watcher’s shadow behind the faint red glow of my closed eyelids. I could feel its breath. It stank of swamp water. 

Did it really matter if it was real or fake? Either way, even in the real, I wasn’t. In the real, a bad night’s sleep could push me out of my body, make me less than a whisper on the wind. What did it matter either way?

I went back to the lungs for the moment of truth. I shouted commands at them, and they shouted back in turn. I missed one breath. Two. Three.

I was supposed to have jolted awake. It never took more than two.

Four. 

I was still… 

Five.

I started panicking. It was an emotionless panic, still cut off from my endorphins. 

Six.

How many breaths could I even miss? 

Seven. 

I sent commands around the body in a scatter-shot, haphazard way. I could feel the stinging static of awareness everywhere. Pain followed it, like always. Bristling hot.

Eight.

My lungs heaved themselves up and out in a great wheeze. 

It hadn’t worked. For the first time, it hadn’t worked. 

The Watcher Beyond Mirrors was frowning. The Watcher had no mouth.

It wanted to answer my questions. It wanted to be recognized. Was it angry that I had failed to see it? Or was it angry that I had tried to dispel its existence? 

It didn’t matter. I was my body again. Not fully, but mostly. I could feel the subconscious melding with me, dragging me back down into the abyss of sleep. 

The whole ordeal was painful, anyway. Pain was bad. 

I gave up struggling. I gave up clinging onto the existence that allowed me to wait. And so I fell without even seeing the chasm I plummeted into. 

I woke up with golden sunlight streaming through the slits in the blinds. Birds were tweeting somewhere outside, a sure sign of spring.

It was the weekend. Thank God in heaven, it was the weekend. I let out a deep breath of relief and rolled over to my side, letting my face caress itself in the pillow. 

It was then that I noticed something; I was awake. Like, awake awake, and the memory of the night’s paralysis had not left me, not even a little. Normally even half lucid dreams were like bubbles popping on the surface of the ocean at this point; there for a minute, but vanishing, gone. And yet, there it was. All the sensations, all the ideas. The only thing that had changed was the time, and the newfound friendliness my body held me in.

I remembered it all; the pain, the static, the hopeless panic. But more than anything, I remembered that heat on the surface of my heart, the fetid stink of swamp water. 

No, I more than remembered it. Memory meant that the thing was in the past. The stink of swamp water lay in the present. 

It was coming from the kitchen. 

I felt real, genuine panic this time. My body demanded it. It was here. It was there. It was not only watching us beyond the mirror, it had fully slipped between the spaces. It would kill us, gut us like a fish. It was…

And waiting silently in the bed would do nothing, now would it? If the thing was real, not just a fevered imagining of my dreams, then it certainly knew where I was, what I was, and a thousand other details that would help it to slay me just as well in my bed as anywhere else in my house. 

I moved my limbs about, rustling them against the blankets that lay atop me. There was a brief echo of that static as I worked the slumber out of my body. I was alive. I was awake. I was…

I wasn’t seriously thinking about confronting a demon, was I? If the thing had intnetions to murder me, it could have acted on them a thousand times over when I was paralyzed by my own sub-consciousness. Whether I was truly extant or not, well, that was really just a formality. It could destroy me. Obliterate me. Not us. Me. What point was there in getting up and giving it a reason to do something it had never wanted to do before?

Problem was, of course, that there was a point. I wanted to see it. I wanted to smell it, feel the warmth on the surface of my heart when I was fully in control of my body, and thus able to catalog everything as a memory. 

I wanted to know it. 

And that was stupid. There were a trillion things in the world that if I knew, I would die. What this thing actually looked like was certainly one of them. I mean, seriously. I didn’t know how the vacuum of space felt without a suit, or how a spear point to throat stung, or what cobra venom running through my veins felt like. And the examples could keep on going, from here to the sea. 

It was ridiculous. But…

But if it…

No, no, that idea was ridiculous, too. The Watcher didn’t care for me. That was not why they Watched. 

And I knew that because…? 

Because it was a sleep paralysis demon, of course. Idiot. The word ‘demon’ was in the name. 

And I knew it was a demon because…?

Because it…

Because the instincts that guided my mind to safety didn’t know. They thought everything was scary, even stuff like calling my phone company to troubleshoot my Internet. That was scary to the stupid little side voice. 

There was a slight rustling sound coming from the kitchen, like the thing was messing with my pots and pans. I started to second guess myself again. Maybe it was just a robber. That was a simple problem, with the simple solution of pretending I didn’t exist. I mean, they could have had a gun, right? And if you’re breaking into someone’s house, why…

Why would you stink like swamp water, though? And no, it wasn’t the stench of river water. Swamp water. It has this more muddy, aged quality to it. There was a river in town. But no swamp. 

Or I could have been wrong in that, too. I was no sommelier of water stenches. There probably wasn’t a single person on Earth who was. I was just coming up with excuses to try and manifest a situation into reality where I would find some mystic revelation that broke the bounds of reality, making my mundane life into something…

Well, I wasn’t really hoping for better. I was hoping for different. Larger. The world I lived in seemed static and stale to me. The fundamental concepts were forever unchanging. The Watcher promised…

Nothing. But I promised something to myself in the Watcher.

I nearly leaped out of bed. My feet made far too much noise as they clomped on the ground. The skittering sound from the kitchen paused, as the thing in the other room became aware of my presence. One second, two seconds, three seconds, four. Then, thankfully, it went back to rummaging through my kitchenware. 

I could feel my heart thump against my chest. It knew I had moved. It knew I was awake. It knew…

And it had already known, hours, if not days before the present. So I crept forward, towards the kitchen door, trying to make sure I landed my feet on the ground with the tips of my toes first, letting the balls of my feet touch the floor with great care. 

The thing in the next room kept to its business. 

Step by step, step by step. I had reached the threshold of the next room, and the stench of rotten marsh water was thoroughly assaulting my nostrils. 

It was my last chance. I could still turn around, let the world return to its boring, unenchanted self. Was I willing to die for nothing more than a revelation?

Well, yes and no. I wasn’t willing to die, per se, but I was willing to risk death. Those were different things. I risked death every day driving to work, especially since nobody used their turn signals nowadays. 

But the magnitude of that said risk…

Was unmeasurable. And I meant unmeasurable, not immeasurable. It might have been grand. It might have been small. 

I turned the corner, jolting my face towards the cabinet the beast was sorting through. 

A raccoon. It turned its eyes to me in shock, chattered a bit, and then scurried away. I turned the light on. The front door was open. I had left it open the evening before, on accident. I’d just been exhausted, and a wet raccoon had wandered into my house. 

Sleep paralysis, a wet raccoon. That was it. That was everything. That was all there could ever be.

I had work in the morning, and it was going to be a terrible workday at that, so I did little else but close the door and return to my bedroom to sleep. 

There was a strange discoloration on my bed. 

No, that was the wrong way to phrase it. There was a strange discoloration in my bed.

It was a shape. 

I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. But the smell was still there, sharper this time. And boy, did I feel that strange, piercing warmth rub up against my heart.

There was somebody sleeping in my bed.

Not just somebody. Something. Somebody. Me.

Except, of course, I was the one standing at the foot of the bed, looking at it, and not the other way around.

It was me. My body. The same. Every nook, crevice, and cranny. A perfect replica, save for the eyes.

They were closed. Correction. It was closed. The one, singular, cyclopean eye. 

I was stunned. Almost literally. I didn’t move a single centimeter, beyond that which was required for my chest to rise and fall as I breathed. 

There it was. My sleep paralysis demon. In my bed. It was real. 

I had no idea what to do. Absolutely no idea. I wanted to shriek, but shrieking would alert it to my presence. But it probably already knew I was at the foot of the bed, and…

I wanted to run away. But it was my home. It was my bed. If I left, the thing could supersede my life. There would be nothing left for me. Oh, sure, I could call the cops. But my phone was underneath my pillow. The pillow the beast was laying on. 

But by far the most tempting thing was…

It would be so easy to lean forward and wring the beast’s neck. It deserved it. It certainly did. Dozens upon dozens of nights it tormented me, chained me to a body that was supposed to be mine, but acted like it wasn’t. 

I had knives in the kitchen. If I couldn’t strangle the beast, a sharp edge would do it, bring it to its knees choking on its own blood. Or maybe something heavy. I could brain the beast, knock it unconscious and then render blunt force trauma unto it until it at last stopped breathing. Even a demon must be able to die.

That was when the irony of the whole situation smacked me upside the head. It was like looking into a mirror. The exact same thing, just flipped. Was it the Watcher that smelled like swamp water? Or was it myself? 

Night after night, perhaps it had thought the same thing. Where were we, anyways? What were we? Was I where I was supposed to be? Or was it? 

Again, these were questions of madness. When I looked around myself all I saw was my room. The pile of shirts in the corner that I would never never wash, let alone wear. The piles of boxes filled with things I had forgotten, and would never remember. The bed, ruffled in the exact same spots where I would lay my body, now… now occupied by this terrible, foreign entity. 

Why was it that we always assumed that that which was strange was more powerful than we? As humans, we had triumphed over the unknown again and again. It was sort of our modus operandi, when we weren’t obsessing over sex and money. Sometimes, we triumphed via force. Other times…

I laid my hands on the mimic’s shoulders. They were warm, as hot as you’d expect from human flesh. The creature’s breathing hastened slightly, but they did not stir further. 

Yes, so close. So close that I could claim its life, and have peace in my dreams forevermore.

So close, and I could be a murderer if I so chose. I could, if I wanted to, deny myself a pleasant afterlife in pretty much any religion’s doctrine. 

But the thing was a monster, yes? Not a person. The singular eye was enough evidence of that. But…

But not all that was strange was a monster. If I was simply playing out the same scene that the Watcher had acted out a thousand times before, if our roles in the cosmic play of reality were simply mirror visions of each other, then how loathsome of a creature would I be if I actually… 

It had never killed me. It had hundreds of opportunities to do. Hundreds of times it say something sleeping in its bed, something monstrous by virtue of its two eyes. But it was restrained, each and every single night. 

I couldn’t kill it. But I wanted…

I wanted answers. I vigorously shook the mimic’s shoulders. 

No answer. The thing’s breathing grew raspy, much as mine must have done as I tried to jolt feeling back into my unresponsive limbs. 

It was pointless. He, er, the beast… they were gone, lost in the tumultuous seas of lucid dreaming, almost here, but never… never enough. Nothing would get the creature out of the situation but time. I could have tilted the creature straight off the bed, and it still wouldn’t have woken up.

Which, now that I think about it, explains the couple of times in the past year that I found myself waking up in a bundle of blankets on the floor.

I could…

Or I could leave it be. If I waited for a few hours, it would wake up, inevitably. And then we could talk, and I’d find answers, and…

And I was just letting a demon sleep in my bed. I was sacrificing a full night’s sleep for a reprehensible beast’s comfort. That was ludicrous. 

I sighed. I was at an impasse with myself. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I could do. So, instead of sitting around, staring at an incarnation of my worst fears, I decided to go on a walk. I slipped on my pants, took my keys from the nightstand, and went back into the kitchen. 

The smell was there. Strong. So was the feeling on my heart. Even when I was in another room from the beast, it lingered in the air. No, not just in the air. It clung to the walls, the windows, the dust that drifted in and out of my lungs as I breathed.

I opened the door. 

My foot squished into the ground. The familiar feeling of having my shoes ruined bolted into my head. 

I remembered. The same squish from my childhood. The same cold shock as half a gallon of water slid into my shoes, permanently ruining them. 

I could hardly see out into the cold darkness of a moonless night, but it was obvious enough. I was in a swamp.

My house, incidentally, did not exist in a swamp. It was in a city. You know, a place where people live, where you can build foundations for houses into the ground and not have them topple over. You know, that kind of place.

And yet, I was in a swamp. I could hear echoes of water lapping against mud somewhere in the distance. Vague silhouettes of trees (or tree like things) hung in the deep shadow. I reached into my pocket to take out my phone so I could put on the flashlight, only to remember that I had left it charging on the desk. The desk in the room where the monster slept. 

I didn’t have much of a choice, did I? I had to go back. I wasn’t stepping into a swamp of all things without a good source of light. And…

And nothing explained why I was, all of a sudden, mind you, in the middle of a swamp. There hadn’t been any predictions of rain. Indeed, even if there had been and the whole town had been flooded out, shouldn’t I have heard it in my sleep? And wouldn’t the houses still be there? 

The swamp wasn’t real. It squished and smelled like it was real, but that was simply a thing that could not be. Houses and people did not transpose themselves across the whole scheme of reality. That was impossible. Or, if not impossible, the most unlikely thing to ever happen, short of the universe itself coming into being. 

My shoes squanched in the mud. I hated it. I hated swamps. They were gross, wet, and full to the brim with the worst kinds of bugs imaginable. I would almost rather starve to death than walk through a swamp, even if in that swamp I found answers. 

So I turned around, and walked back in the door. To my home. 

I closed the door, and opened it back up again in rapid succession. I figured that maybe, just maybe, there was a chance that my perception of the swamp was the thing that held it in being, and that once I couldn’t see the thing, everything would warp back into being the way it was supposed to again. 

It didn’t. The swamp was still there, even as I opened and closed the door a dozen times. Cheap physics tricks were not going to rescue me from madness. 

So that was that. I was lost. My home was still around, but not my bed. That thing… that thing was responsible for all of the lunacy I was facing. That monster had burrowed itself into my brain and taken away my life. 

I would kill it. I would destroy it for what it had taken from me. It was only right.

I marched back into the depths of the house, my socks curiously clean and dry. Yes. There it was. The thing. The warped beast, more red and healthy than it had ever been before. I steadied my hands. I had never never killed anything. An ant, maybe. A spider, possibly. Nothing larger than that. Could I, even? It seemed so easy in stories and movies. You just wrapped your hands around their neck and gripped for dear life. 

No. That wasn’t it. Nothing could be done logically. It had to be done emotionally. I felt the fire of hatred raging in my heart. I let the heat sweep over my body, until everything was flame. 

It was easy, then. Easy to clamp my hands around them at full force, to choke, to kill.

As I shook the beast I could feel the very ground beneath my socks melt. Not just the ground; everything. Everything dissolved. Everything crumbled. Everything became nothing, until I was no longer shaking anything but the air, my feet ankle deep in brackish water. 

The house was gone. Completely. The beast had woken up, and with it, the illusion of paradise had died. 

A mosquito landed on my shoulder. I slapped it. Another. Another. Another.

I understood. I understood everything.

The Watcher Beyond Mirrors wanted out. I wanted out. We were simply two sides to the same coin, I just felt more natural, more deserving of the kind reality that I knew because I was the one who showed face up when the coin was caught in the air. Waking the beast dissolved the illusion of reality because the beast had usurped my own world, because I had let it. Because it had unnerved me so much that I had given up something, something that…

I understood nothing. It was hell. I was trapped in hell. For no reason. No sin I committed made me deserving of this punishment. A million mosquitoes, a hundred leeches, a horrible squishing feeling at the bottom of my feet. And it was hot. So hot. 

I wandered. In what direction, I know not. North, south, east, west. It didn’t mattered. I might have walked in circles. Nothing changed. It was dark at every hour. The swamp never changed. It simply was. It existed ot torture me.

An eternity passed. I felt lightheaded from all the blood the pests had stolen from me. I could not lay down to sleep, I could not trudge forward to a space that did not change, I could not…

There was a house in front of me. 

My house. 

The door was unlocked. I opened it. 

It was night. Again. But the date on all the devices had ticked up by one. 

And there, in my room, was that same pallid monster. 

And there I was, watching them.

Yes. I had understood. We were cursed. On one side was I, on the other…

I stared at them. The beast. They looked much more human than I remembered. In fact, they almost looked like me. 

They had always looked like me. Just a bit more pallid. That was all.

Pallid from blood loss. From exhaustion. From having the only decent time in their life be the brief period when their counterpart fell asleep. 

When I fell asleep. When they fell asleep. 

Yes, staring at them was the way to salvation. I could see them squirm about under their blankets. Some day, one day, they would have forgotten what it was like behind the mirror. And they would look beyond it. And then, and then…

And then I would be where I belonged.