Tale #45: Down and Outliers

Tale #45: Down and Outliers (Part 4 to the 'Shortcomings and Goings' series) (Content Tags: Surrealistic horror, existentialism, ongoing story, messy diapers, strangeness) I hadn't been able to get the belly of the beast out of my head. My traipse into the creature's core had shaken me more than any drug trips that I'd had in college, and it'd left me with a profound sense of stakes. Those reels, the ones that I'd wrestled outside of the monster's emaciated gullet, I knew that they held a key to all this. I'd seen a reel of my own history, but I'd also caught glimpses of unfamiliar scenes. The entity had scores and scores of those memories within it, and many of them were from other people entirely. How many victims had it claimed? How long had it been stalking people and consuming their existence? Ultimately, the question boiled down to: what *was* it? I kept my guard back up after my encounter in the garage with it. It'd been foolish of me to think that I'd be safe from it in there, and in the wake of that, I'd grown yet more paranoid. My house was still a safe haven away from the beast, and it still was warded off by the presence of others, but I became more skeptical of what might constitute those rules. If the garage wasn't considered a part of the house, then it made me wonder if there were any other rooms or areas around the property that also offered less defense than I initially thought. I became more withdrawn, limiting myself to rooms I knew I was safe in, and trying to stay near my parents whenever I could. I was haunted though. Haunted by the hungry eyes of the monster, and by the primeval nature of it. Of course I'd known of its animalistic behavior already, and of the supernatural way that it hunted, but seeing it in that gnarled form... I really didn't want to find out what the creature looked like underneath the skin-suit that it bore. My dreams become more frequently bizarre and uncomfortable. It felt like the beast was in my head, or rather that I might be entrapped in *its* head. I kept reappearing in that place, in that void of the monster's stomach. Reliving the room of reels, night after night, while feeling I was being digested whole. Each morning I'd wake up to a devastated diaper, ones much fuller than my standard fare at this point. I'd also awake with the feeling that those eyes were inside the room with me, though they thankfully never were. After a week of these awful nightmares, I began to feel more in control of myself during them. I could reason, I could make choices; instead of being an idle spectator of a scene unfolding, I was put in the cockpit and given the joystick. With newfound control over these restless phantasms, I knew I needed to act. Each 'film reel' inside the void was covered in unfamiliar images of strangers. The long strips depicted broad strokes of life, from infancy to adulthood, but I couldn't yet figure out what the pattern may be. Each one of them trailed on at length, but the end of each one led to a white door in the sea of shadows. The doors piqued my curiosity, but they also filled me with the same existential dread that the demon did. Many nights in a row, I'd approach the end of one of the film reels and the door would stand before me. I'd reach for the knob, but then quickly lose my nerve, and the dream would end. Even stretching out my hand for it would cause me to start to shake and sweat; there was something beyond that threshold that I needed, but fear was the killer of the mind. In the daytime, I was telling myself that I needed to overcome this mental hurdle. If I couldn't even open of those doors, I reasoned that I'd never be able to vanquish the monster and free myself from the jaws of its all-consuming hunger. Every embarrassment that I was made to suffer as a time-warped tot, I used as cement for the wall of my resolve. I couldn't live like this forever; not only as a little kid in soiled diapers, but in this state of paranoid terror. Nostalgia had long run out on any charm that this distorted reality had for me, and my days were spent in diapered doldrums and a messy malaise. There was something else there too. My life wasn't simply oscillating between the paranoia of the waking world and the fear of the sleeping one. There was a third component that I didn't want to think about. It was a niggling query that I'd tried to bury back in a hole after the creature had gone digging; the psychological casket had been buried deep, but now it was but a shallow grave in the landscape of my mind. Had I resented my own maturity? It should have felt silly to think about. It was such a childish response to the inevitable passage of time. No kid really felt they were ready to grow up, right? But then any dwelling on the question would make me feel more and more uncomfortable. If I were to plumb the depths, might I discover that such a feeling had pervaded my every fiber, well into adulthood? I could remember thinking that I was in a rush to grow up, even from a relatively young age. That too was common, was it not? The desire to be seen as bigger and more capable? To be viewed as mature and responsible, worthy of the dignity of being 'grown'. These questions gnawed at the furthest corners of my mind, and it made me wonder if my own psychological profile had anything to do with the creature targeting me in the first place. Was it possible that these deep-seated feelings had chummed the waters? Had I been steeping the pool of my existence with emotions that enticed the beast to pick me? Or was it simply a flub of fate? There was only one way to find out, and it meant that I needed to summon my courage for real. If those other lives were the other victims, then I needed to peek behind those doors, and I needed to see what had become of them. If I refused to face this, then I'd only continue to wither into nothingness. I would finally open one of the doors, and hopefully, I'd finally begin to get some answers. I went to bed that night with that mantra in mind, the repeated internalization that tonight would be the night that I shed my shameful cowardice. Just as every other night since my last night encounter, falling asleep brought me back to that dismal place. Finding the nearest reel, I began to follow its length. The man, or rather, the 'person' that was in those pictures, was completely unfamiliar. Calling him a man seemed shortsighted, since when dealing with the entity, age became something of a fathomless continuum. Infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood... All those marks on the map of a life, they were rendered completely meaningless. A victim of the entity couldn't be defined by their age, and by the time that I'd reached the white door at the end of the reel, I'd had another epiphany on the nature of my own existence. It was odd that the thought had never crossed my mind, but regardless of the layers that a person covered themselves in over time, the person underneath never became a new being. An adult was still a child, because by this definition, a child was simply what lied at the core of every lifetime. If I were to strip away the pomp and circumstance that had led me to this point, then what else could remain but the youthful face that I once saw reflected in the mirror? This form that I'd been reduced to, was it not just the result of shedding the extraneous adulthood that I'd heaped upon myself? My hand settled on the doorknob. Confidence surged throughout my very being, or perhaps a certain level of acceptance was to blame. I might not have fully actualized this concept for myself, but the little wisdom that I'd attained here was more than enough to get me through this gate. I opened the door, and my eyes became seared with a radiant light of the unknown. My alarm clock started to go off, my arm stretching out to hit the snooze button. I let out a groan and rolled over, caught in a foggy daze of grogginess. "What a weird dream..." That's all it'd been, right? A strange dream that'd stretched across what felt like a fully lived lifetime. I got out of bed and shuffled to my wardrobe to get dressed for the day; looking in the mirror, what greeted me was unfamiliar at first. Curly red hair, freckles, green eyes...That was all normal, but, I felt uneasy to see myself. It was like looking at a stranger. I tried to shake the feeling and instead stripped my pajamas off, grabbing some clothes and heading off to the bathroom to take a shower. There remained a wavering concern, something undefinable; maybe that crazy dream had been harsher on me than I thought! It *had* been more like a nightmare, had it not? The feeling of being stalked by an unknowable monster, the feeling of being utterly defenseless, to be reduced bit by bit into nothing but a dim toddler. That part had stuck out the most, and it was what I kept focusing on while I later ate my breakfast and then took the bus to school. There was something appealing about it. As frightening as the creature had been, I'd rather enjoyed the return to a simpler age. The comforts of being so young and pure; to not yet have the weight of the world thrust upon my narrow shoulders. Even having to go back to diapers, while it should have been humiliating, I'd found the experience cozy. The more that I fixated on the fragments of the dream, the more it felt that something was terribly, terribly wrong. I didn't quite feel myself, like I wasn't supposed to be who I was; every glance in a reflection showed me an impostor, like I was wearing the skin of another kid who was going to elementary school and failing to learn the recorder. It grew from being mildly disconcerting to becoming overwhelmingly unpleasant. The lifetime that I'd lived in the dream, for as little as I could glean in these remembered portions, that was what felt like reality to me. Here I was, in music class, feeling that my own flesh was but the slumbering ember of a dead man's dream. I had to leave, I had to be alone, before I suffered a full-blown panic attack in front of the rest of the class. I excused myself to the restroom, but instead found myself heading outside; in my breakdown, I desperately hoped the serenity of nature would dissuade this artificial feeling that overcome me. "Do you like being in fourth grade?" My head acted on a swivel. Seems I wasn't the only boy who'd left class and opted for the playground. There was an unfamiliar boy standing right beside me, though I hadn't heard him come up. He was probably just a little younger than me, but his presence filled me with an odd dread. "N-not really, no...Things were easier before I went into the fourth grade." The boy cocked his head, seeming uncaring of my answer. "Do you want to wear diapers? Do you want to be treated like a baby?" Such a personal question brought a blush to my face, and my first instinct was to vehemently deny it. I was nearly ten! Of course I didn't want to wear diapers or be treated like some stupid baby! That's what I wanted to say, but it'd be a lie. The padded life of a coddled tot had been made so alluring by that dream; it'd shaken up feelings I hadn't thought of in years. "Y-yes. I wish I still wore diapers like a baby does...And that I had an easy life like one too. Getting older is scary..." Why had I admitted that? And how had I articulated it so quickly, when I didn't even understand it myself? Such questions paled in comparison to the ones that followed, such as wondering why my underwear suddenly felt so big and puffy. My hand went around the back of my shorts and felt around; there was no denying it, I was wearing a diaper! "How did... How did you do that?" The boy licked his lips hungrily, but otherwise ignored my question altogether. Instead, he presented me with another one: "What was the most embarrassing accident in your pants that you've ever had?" Again, I should have had no reason to be open about something so sensitive, but my lips were moving anyways. "Um, two years ago, I ate a bunch of fiber gummies because I thought they were candy, and then I ended up pooping my pants at my classmate's birthday party." Suddenly, a horrible cramp rolled in my gut and my belly burned fiercely. It was such a profound pain, that I doubled over and held my stomach with my hands. It was familiar, it was exactly what I'd felt at that birthday party. I had to relieve the pressure, so I let a longwinded fart burble into the back of my newfound Huggies. "U-ughhh..I have..I have to g-go.." There was a double-meaning there, but only one would be satisfied in full. The levees quickly broke, and a filthy mudslide flooded the back of my diaper with burning muck. The gassy eruption brought immediate relief to my gut, but the humiliation of soiling myself in front of this boy was a pain of a different sort. I could only stand there, messing my diaper and staring at the ground, while I strangely began to feel like myself again. The boy in front of me was less convinced. While he appeared satiated by my shame, his cold eyes betrayed an emotion other than hunger. Was it confusion? Was it shock? "Who are you?" Reality broke for me. It broke into a million tiny shards and each one contained a piece of the life that I thought was mine. I woke up again, but not as a scrawny ginger on the playground. I was in my bed, toddler rails beside me, and a squishy diaper within my footed sleeper. Things were disorienting at first, but I quickly came to terms with what had happened. In opening that door at the end of the reel, I'd become the boy in those pictures. I'd stepped into his life, and while my soul had been constantly under threat of rejection, I'd fully believed that this life was the dream. It was surreal, to think I'd been privy to that other boy's first encounter with the creature, that I'd lived it. If each of those reels led to the personal realities of the monster's victims, then had anyone ever opened my own door? Had I played host to an outsider? Or did I stand alone as the only victim to ever see beyond the looking glass? Additionally, I hadn't just played spectator to a memory, I'd changed things with my presence; did that mean that these realities were fluid, that they could be altered? I needed to open more doors. I needed to understand the tapestry of torment that the beast had weaved between me and countless others. The dagger that I'd plunge into the beast's heart, the truth of truths, it existed somewhere in the dilapidated dreams that called to me. It was time to fight back. It was time to slay the demon.