Johwaly Vul: Aol Mlhy Vm Ylahps Thyrlaz (Patreon)

Surprise!

Could I be doing more backlogs and edits and VISCERAE instead of starting a new project? Yeah. I don't think I'm gonna do more than this first chapter for a while, though. Might link it as a potential story sometime in the future, but I kind of just wanted to write something that's free of expectation and start to explore an idea that's been tickling me for a little bit. To anyone who cares to read, enjoy! To those who don't, don't worry, regular chapters and edits will be up soon, I promise.

Bonus story idea + chapter!

PS: the chapter title is in Caesar cypher.

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“Little solace comes

to those who grieve

when thoughts keep drifting

as walls keep shifting

and this great blue world of ours

seems a house of leaves

moments before the wind.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’

___________________________________________________________

I’m not sure when begins “I”. It is not a sharp or precise delineation in the moment before I am to the moment after, but a vague and blundering thing, frightful and strange. 

I was. That remains, carried through the moment of transition and out past it. I existed before, even if I didn’t exist now, not for a while. 

Sunlight. The taste of sharp, spicy flavors, intermingled with soups, followed by baked goods and soft sweets. Shoulders and knees and wrists, tight and stretching and getting harder and heavier as I went on, needing more exercise and care. Soft grass. A bed, its blanket so soft it feels like sinking into it when I pull it onto myself. 

A kiss. 

A night spent together, wrapped tightly around each other. The heat has us begin to sweat, but we stay that way a little longer, holding onto the moment for as long as we can.

The smell of smoke and herbs and the laughing of people I know.

Knew. 

No faces. No names. It’s almost all sensations more than tactile knowledge, something inside myself holding tight to who I was but not what I was, or why, or how, or when, or where. I spoke words, and sat before computer screens while typing, and looked at maps, but the experience of that is all that remains, bereft of context or detail.

I ate and slept. I dreamt and wondered. I thought and spoke.

I loved. I was loved.

I died. 

I felt it. The dimming. The quiet that comes from inside rather than without. The sensation of everything changing, and of everything that I was drifting away towards a distant sea. 

I felt the swirling tides. The sand, resting beneath my back as I slipped slowly out of everything I was, was black, and the rolling waves that reached out and caught me. 

I was nothing. 

For a time, unknowable and unclear, there was no I. 

And then, in a messy tumble of awareness cascading in on itself, of realization after realization and thought after thought, I am again. 

The first thing I see is the window. 

Sunlight. Again. 

It’s not the same sun that I’m used to. It doesn’t feel the same upon me. It filters in through glass, painting trails of dust through the air and illuminating everything in a spray of gold. I can feel the warmth of it, the way that it makes parts of me expand, filling me with energy and comfort, even as it feels different than I remember it ever feeling. 

I take a deep breath, and feel the air inside myself move. 

I feel a breeze waft through me, shifting the dust of disuse that lies on so much of me, touching the walls and rooms. I maybe, almost, feel just a bit of shifting in the wood, like the floorboards and plaster have stretched that slightest bit. 

I wonder where I am, and turn to look out the window again. 

Well. I don’t “turn”. Not really. I’m at the window because I’m at the window. I’m feeling the sunlight as it fills the world with warmth and light and meaning because I am there, and I look outside the window, and…

I see nothing. 

I don’t see. I don’t see anything at all. I can’t see. 

I try to blink, and the shutters shiver, the drapes wrinkling slightly. 

Of course I can’t see. I don’t have eyes. 

Of course I can’t see out of the window. I’m not standing in the room. There are no eyes that can see the glass and the light coming through it, even though I feel it and experience it and can taste and touch and almost smell it as it filters into me. 

I died. 

I saw the shore. The black sand. The waves. 

Everything that was me became quiet. 

I was. 

I was not. 

Now I am. 

I am the window. 

I am the room. 

I am all of the walls and hallways and places that can be seen and that cannot. I am floor and cupboard and pipe and plaster. I am concrete and stone and metal and wood and paint and empty space, space beyond all the rest that goes and goes and goes and goes– 

And the sound of crashing waves upon the shore. 

I was someone. I still am someone, I think. I remember a life. I remember being alive and experiencing the world and caring and loving and hating and fearing and fighting and resting, and now I am otherwise, but I still am. 

I’m here. I exist, in this place that is me, and it is real just as I am real.

I try to stretch my muscles, which no longer exist, following on ingrained experience as much as something as finicky as memory. I pull and push, and I feel the house that is my body respond as I do. The floors creak as I focus in on specific parts, flexing bits of wood and feeling the way the nails anchor it in place- except that I can move those too. I put more force into it, and one of them wiggles, making the wood creak and crackle.

I try to open a door. It takes a moment, but I feel the mechanisms of the lock, the brass of the handle, the way it touches the wood and connects to different places in itself. 

The doorknob turns. 

With a click, the door’s mechanism comes open, and I feel part of myself swinging open on cold hinges, disrupting the air that’s gone back to being so so still. 

As a test, I try to push it closed. It’s much more difficult, taking significantly more effort this time– moving the entire hunk of wood forwards and backwards takes a lot more than just shifting the knob. I have to flex over and over to build any kind of momentum, shifting it closer and closer until, at last, it hits the doorframe again, clicking into place under its own weight. 

How many rooms do I have? Do I know where that door was? It’s hard to tell where everything is relative to itself, because it’s all me, it’s all just inside. I can feel where something is relative to the things right around it, but where does that connect to an outside wall? How does that fit into where the sunlight comes from, or the angle on which it rests?

I don’t know. 

Who am I? Who was I?

Why am I here? Why am I back?

Why can I still hear that far shore? Where is it that it echoes from, down those distant halls? 

Also- why am I a house?

Click.

The sound of a key entering a lock.

I feel a doorknob turning, except it’s not me doing it.

The sunlight hits a doorway, and I feel the moment that it opens, the same way I feel the breath of something alive coming within my living room parlor. Sharp heels click-clack onto hardwood flooring, and a warm voice starts to float through my open areas.

“As you can see, the house is partially furnished, which is a nice bonus, but there’s still plenty of room to design it according to your interests. Most of the furniture is classic in style, no more than ten years old for the majority, but as you can see, there are some more… eclectic design choices made by a previous tenant. I recommend a yard sale, personally, but the uniqueness of the style honestly tends to add a lot in my opinion.”

She’s wearing a business-casual set of clothes, a nice cardigan over a pencil skirt, holding a little tablet in one hand while using another to usher in a set of two more people. One of them is wearing a long, frilly dress, bright pastel flowers decorating it in chunks, while the other is in what looks like a set of blue jeans and a button-up shirt. They’re both swinging their heads about, looking all around the open space.

Their presence helps, somehow. I know where they are, even if I don’t know where anything else is in relation to them. The sunlight is coming in from behind them, illuminating the carpet in the entryway, filtered through bright, translucent glass that surrounds the frame. The floor plan they’re coming into is open, with a bright, well-lit living room area, behind which is a smaller dining space and an expansive kitchenette. The entryway naturally blends into the slightly recessed floor of the living room, two steps leading down into a space that has a rich pleather couch, a coffee table, and two lounge chairs, all facing an exterior-wall chimney. If one turns the other way, they can see a small door for a front-facing office, a bathroom, a guest room, leading towards a back wall and a staircase leading up beside a door to the basement.

The couple (because I assume they’re a couple) walks by past the realtor, who smiles a bit too politely and a bit too fakely for my preference. She’s definitely eager to make this sale, that much I can’t fault her for, but she’s coming off as a tiny bit artificial in my opinion, anxiously holding back from launching into an entire spiel.

“And you said this place has been on the market for how long?” asks the woman in the pastel flower dress. 

“A few years now! As you know it hasn’t really been a buyer’s market recently, but with the modern construction and general upkeep, this place is both up to code and well maintained, ready for the right moment. The neighborhood is filling up fast, actually, lots of new home buyers coming into the area.”

“And the last tenants? You mentioned that they moved out because of ‘a bit of mess’?”

“A little domestic incident, actually. A sad story, but not a tragedy as far as I’m aware- there was a car accident, and they had to downsize. Nothing to do with the location itself.”

“Why is the price so low, then?”

The realtor shrugs, though I can feel her heartbeat and the warmth of her skin, know exactly how much sweat there is waiting to come out of her. “Frankly, the owner felt that it’s just gotten to that point where it would be a lot more useful on the market than not. Only so long you want to pay the property tax on an unused location, right?”

“Oh, definitely. And you mentioned the amenities, are they–?”

I start to tune them out, letting my mind drift. I follow their pathway back to the doorway, trying to see out of it, trying to look out past the threshold where it lies open. 

There is sunlight outside. There are places outside. I can hear them, just a little bit, but distantly, as if muffled through a curtain. 

Or as if I’m underwater. 

My awareness ends at the very last step of the doorframe, the very last inch of wood and metal and artificial construction. There is a world beyond it, but I can only feel the parts of it that affect me, that come inside my walls and exist alongside everything else. 

Why am I alive again? How? 

Who was I?

Why am I here?

A breeze comes in from outside, filling my entryway with the smell of freshly cut grass and asphalt and car exhaust and sunlight and dirt.

There is a world, and it is alive. 

But not in any way that I can be. Not in the way that I am. It’s outside, and I am inside. 

I feel the people walking through me, exploring things. I feel the sensations of moving water as they turn faucets, the hum of electricity coming through me as they open the refrigerator or torn on my lights, filling the hallways with illumination that I don’t need but which feels surprisingly nice to have. I feel their footsteps, echoing through the space that has yet to be properly filled with sound-shifting furniture and decorations. 

I can feel them in my house-that-is-me. I can feel how small they are, compared to me. 

They walk around the second story, seeing the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the closets. I feel them check out the attic and the basement, two opposite ends of what I assumed to be me.

It’s all so small. 

The whole house is small. They’re even smaller. I can’t quite figure it out, can’t quite understand where things connect or the lines from one place to the other, but I can tell that the doorway I pushed open and then closed again was very, very far from here. 

I see them shake the realtor’s hand, smiling at each other. I feel it, the moment they decide that this place is theirs, to reside in. To be a part of. 

They’re home. 

Down a hallway I cannot find, I hear the sound of waves upon the shore.