You stand there, just past the door to the hospital, and for one brief and terrible moment contemplate just… forgetting. Telling yourself that you had a bad trip, that the pills Jen gave you to help focus your mind were clearly bad, that everything you saw and heard and felt during that extended journey was just an increasingly elaborate series of hallucinations.
It would be simpler, wouldn't it? To push it aside, tell yourself it didn't happen, leave it all unexamined and just get on with your life. Go back to class, focus on your studies, graduate and find a job and send money home, drag your parents and your whole extended family out of the ruins of their old life inch by bloody inch…
You can't do it.
Even if you wanted to, even if you were the kind of person who could turn aside a revelation in the interests of your mundane concerns, you simply cannot do it. Even now, standing in the empty air of London by night, something feels different. The world around you, once so chaotic and confusing, now seems… shallow. False, almost, like a fresh coat of paint slapped down over a moldering ruin, a plastic bag deforming beneath the weight of too much cargo. It feels like you could reach out and brush it all aside, take the blinders from your eyes and see the truth once again, glorious and terrible though it may be.
You chew your lip, then let out a short bark of hollow laughter. You can't turn aside from the true significance of what just happened to you, but that doesn't mean you need to drop everything and go hearing off in search of answers right this very minute. If nothing else you've got class in a few hours, an early morning lecture on… honestly you can't even remember, but enough of your professors are sticklers for punctuality and reliable attendance that you simply can't afford to just blow this one off in favour of some free time, even if you
would be using it for a good cause.
So. Legal theory now, divine revelations of cosmic insight later.
Still making that odd, breathless noise that you rather hoped would sound more like laughter, you duck your head and set off down the street. A cold wind whips at you from the looming maw of a nearby alleyway, and with a shudder you pull the hood on your jacket up and tuck your hands as far into the pockets as they will go. It's not a complete cure for the cold, you left your good coat at home today, but it's enough to stop you dying of exposure so long as you keep moving and that will simply have to suffice for now.
It doesn't take you long to find a station, the distinctive red circle and blue bar shining softly in the early morning gloom. Stepping inside, you make your way over to the wall and it's sprawling map of rail lines and connected bus routes, trying to determine where you are in relation to where you need to go. It takes you a few minutes to work it out, and when you do the first thing you say is a curse. No wonder you didn't recognize the name of 'Oak Hill', you're halfway across the bloody city! No doubt the bobbies dropped you off at the closest medical establishment worth the name, which means you must have been walking in an unseeing daze for hours at the least… how the hell did no one else see fit to stop you, or at the very least take note?
Shaking your head, you fish the small blue card the government gave you out of your pocket. Discounted rail travel is about as far as the powers that be were willing to go in making your commute to and from the university any easier - not free, of course, never free, not when they can yet milk even the smallest drops of wealth from your lean and shallow frame - but you've had plenty of cause to be grateful for it all the same. The system is on automatic at this time, the staff reduced to skeleton levels huddled further in around the few functional heaters, and the clatter of metal and the bang of automatic doors slamming open echoes loudly in the cold night air.
On the platform, you tuck yourself in against a pillar to stay out of the wind and allow yourself to think at last.
The world, it seems, is… well, if not fake, then at the very least considerably larger and more fantastical than you had ever previously considered. You don't have nearly enough information on what is going on or indeed what you saw to make any kind of reasonable judgement, but assuming that you didn't literally eat the heart of god then it seems safe to assume that symbolism of some sort plays a significant role. You can't currently see anything particularly strange, yet the sense of fragility persist, so… two worlds, overlaid on one another? Does it stop at two? What is the connection between them?
Is there a connection? Already the list of questions you have is enough to fill a book and you have no doubt that the answering of many will produce further avenues of enquiry in turn, and yet the thought is not nearly so daunting as you would have expected.
Indeed, you feel
invigorated, relishing the mere thought of being able to slowly peel back the veil of lies and half-truth and see at last what lies belief. Who knows, maybe the world beyond this one isn't so relentlessly shit for everyone you care about. You wouldn't put money on it though. Do cockney blackbirds even use money? Questions for later.
During your introspection, your gaze has wandered, and with a start you realize you have begun studying the series of signs and informative posters displayed along the crumbling red-brick walls. They are as familiar to you as the sight of your own face in the mirror, that peculiar combination of simplistic artwork and bold-font type designed to convey as much necessary information as quickly and reliably to the audience as possible, and yet when you look at them you cannot help but feel that there is something… more. Not new information, precisely, but… new words, new phrases, a different way of putting it almost, which makes very little sense and yet…
Slowly, as though caught in a dream, you raise one hand and draw a key from within your pocket. You touch it to the brickwork next to one of the signs, and in a series of quick, flowing motions you scratch a symbol into the wall. Then you lower the key and survey your work. The symbol you carved into the stone looks like no language you have ever seen before, has no real artistic merit to hint at higher meaning, and yet just looking at it you find that you
understand. There is meaning there, in that handful of hastily scrawled lines, significance that almost seems to cast the rest of the wall into a vague and irrelevant mess, a wealth of warnings and protocols condensed down into a single symbol.
Huh. It seems you're bilingual now. Neat.
The dull clatter of echoing rails signals the arrival of the early train, and with a certain reluctance you step back from the wall and turn to wait by the side of the platform. The slender, tube-like vehicle emerges from the tunnel like some kind of grand metallic worm, and you fight the sudden impulse to wonder if that point of comparison is one of idle thought or half-realized insight. Legal theory now, divine revelations later.
The interior of the train is, thankfully, clean and so warm, for enough people use the underground for their daily commute that inflicting miserable conditions on them would backfire immensely, and with a sigh of relief you sink down into one of the cushioned seats and let your head slump back against the wall. There don't appear to be any other passengers in your compartment, unsurprising given the unholy nature of the hour, and as some of the heat begins to return to your skin you opt to stare vacantly out of the far window in lieu of any greater thought or diversion. The train lurches into motion once again, and with slow grace the view outside the window changes from bare stone walls to the sprawling bulk of the City as it begins to rise in preparation for another working day.
Legal theory now, divine revelations… screw it.
You close your eyes, trying to recall the state of mind that occupied you sometime last night. You take a breath, doing your best to ignore the antiseptic stink of cleaning chemicals that someone recently soaked the carriage in.
Then you open your eyes and
look.
At first, everything looks the same, albeit somehow more distant, more washed out, as though you are looking at the world through a thin haze of smoke or mist. The same looming buildings dominate the horizon, the same glittering roads criss-cross the landscape, the same dull grey strip of water divides the city in twain.
Then you look to your right, and a metallic centipede grins at you with a thousand felt-wrapped teeth.
You've never been easy to scare, but even so you feel your heart leap into your throat and it is a real effort of will not to start screaming as you watch the gigantic insect scuttle it's way down the carriage towards you. Except… no, it's not going down the carriage, it's going
through it, swimming through glass and metal and plastic as though they were nothing more than water. You look closer, peering at the creature in undisguised fascination; sparks flash from it feet at irregular intervals, it's shell seems to be made of laminated plastic, the light behind its eyes looks like nothing more than a pair of beaming headlights… oh.
It's the spirit of the train.
You watch it scurry past your feet with inches to spare, apparently judging you entirely irrelevant to its morning commute, then turn your attention to the window once again, and this time you see them. The lumbering oxen with hides of glass that stir within the office blocks, the chittering demons of light that dance within the confines of every lamp and bulb, the orchestra of data-spiders that weave their web of light across the sky, the dim shadow of something huge and monstrous swimming past beneath the surface of the Thames…
Everything has a spirit, a soul of it own. Every last thing, from the pebbles on the street to the sun in the sky (and you swiftly learn not to look too closely at that one because fucking
hell that hurts). Billions of them, in numbers fit to drown the globe, separated from the world you know by a layer of lies and misdirection thinner than the weakest tissue.
This… will take some getting used to. The full implications of this are simply beyond your ability to process in the moment, so for now you content yourself with sitting on the train and simply watching. Observing as the world within a world that you called London comes slowly to waking life once again. It is a sight that will stay with you until your dying day, you can feel it in your bones.
It also causes you to miss your stop.
Eventually, once class is over and his assignments for the day complete, James has a chance to actually start investigating the truth of what he has found about the world in more depth.
Where do you start?
[ ] Animism. Everything has a spirit, it seems, so really you can start anywhere. Go home, get comfortable, and have a chat with… the TV, maybe? The bed? That cat that likes to pester you for scratches?
[ ] Archive. You were in the library when this kicked off, and you remember seeing some works there that you had never encountered before. Go take a look at some of them and see if what they say matches up with what you can see.
[ ] Expertise. This is London, so there's bound to be an occultic bookstore or general place of freakery somewhere around the place if you look hard enough. Drop by and see if you can find someone who sees the world as you do.
[ ] Write-in
