S3E1: The Bird

After killing Ryan, John and Sapphire find themselves stranded in a decomposing psychic hexateron.
CAST
C.j. Hackett: Ryan
Christina Vilgiate: Ryan's Mom
Timmy Vilgiate: John
Sophia Doss: Sapphire
PRODUCTION
Written, produced, and recorded by Timmy Vilgiate
Featured sounds from freesound.org, including "lava loop" 1 and 2 by fission9, "kilauea lava" by e, dry ice and piano effects by batchku, "peace and anarchy2" by noise collector, "squeaky cabinet" by bormane, "aluminum cans" by kev durr, footsteps down stairs 2 by sinatra313, "fast reverse vortex" by earlcash05, footsteps on wood by mydo1, building collapse sounds by onteca, "windy creaky old house ambience" by pfranzen, "door-creaking" by ken788, "whistling antarctic blizzard" by stormpetrel, "magpie wings flapping" by digifishmusic, "birdflap3, deeper" by agentdd, and "an afternoon with the Buller's albatross" by stormpetrel.

The other bird sounds were compiled from the Handbook of the Birds of the World's "Internet Bird Collection." I used sounds of albatrosses from the Diomedea and Phoebastria genuses.

Newest episode, automatically posted to this blog.

My eyes met Ryan's. Suddenly, he felt an overwhelming nausea, as time, memory, and all of the timelines through which his mind had wandered collapsed in on him, hitting him in waves that felt like automobile accidents, one by one. His stomach churned, and his mouth filled with a peppery burning—all of his nerves, one by one, lit up with sensation and feeling. As the timelines collapsed back into one another, swimming pools worth of lukewarm beer, mixed with vomit, bile and blood, gushed from the doors and windows of the downstairs of the house, running into the streets, making the people outside scream in terror. Inside of the house and from various buildings in the town, sheets of graph paper, illustrated with glimpses of different realities, began to fly through the air in a colossal blizzard, as his trillions and trillions of years of memories collapsed in on themselves.  He stumbled from the desk, screaming in pain, no longer able to think or feel anything but the horror of infinite time collapsing in on itself, thousands of warring realities cascading into another like a battlefield that stretched on for millenia. “Ryan?”, called his mother, “Ryan, what the hell is going on?”
        “Mom!”, he bellowed. I watched as he fell down the stairs. “I—I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!”, he cried. “What did you do to yourself? What's wrong? Baby! What's wrong!”
        “I'm sorry...I'm sorry...”, he whispered, suddenly quiet, looking around the blood soaked room with a faint smile, and a tear rolling down his face. “Ryan!”, she slapped him across the face, trying to revive him as he leaned back, “Talk to me! What did you do? Baby! Baby, please. Don't go. Don't go now. This can't...be...”, she reached for her cellphone, “Hello? Hello? Yes. Yes. I know...I know you're getting calls about that, I know...it's coming from my house...my son...he's...I don't know...he looks like he took some drugs? I need to get him to the hospital! Please...please....I don't know what drugs he would have taken. I don't...I don't know. There's beer cans everywhere and...drawings of...”, she looked down, seeing a picture of herself strangled in front of her car door, “I don't know...I don't know...Please...thank you! Thank you.”

“What now, John?”
“I—I don’t know.”

Ryan and his mother froze still, and we watched as the layers and layers of graph paper and blood plastering the streets outside melted into a viscous and churning mass that swallowed up the buildings in the city like hot acid. The earth was mangled beyond recognition, wilting into a tumultuous sea, as the house in which we stood stayed afloat, bobbing up and down like a massive ship waiting out a storm in a harbor. Sapphire crept down the stairs to have a closer look and so I followed her, warily. Already, Ryan’s eyes rusted in their sockets—by the time we reached the bottom of the stairs, his skin and the skin of his mother had crumbled from their skulls. The remnants of their flesh drifted to the ground in flakes that looked like crumbs from an old breakfast pastry, into a heap of rugged shards. They caught a faint breeze and withered off into the creeping oblivion surrounding the house. As apocalyptic as the entire scene appeared, it nonetheless felt equally calm, like the two of us were behind a soundproof window, watching a hurricane pound a city. Overrun by the hissing mass of confused and noxious liquids, the ground deflated and caved in on itself without so much as a pop or even the sound of hissing air. With an almost serene poise, the horizon marched forward into infinity, a mountainous blue and white confusion of geometries, stained with the slowly dissipating colors of roses and carnations, a howling and frozen emptiness cut from the shrapnel of an imploding mind, tossing and turning with stormy and inchoate dreams.

Sapphire stepped out onto the porch to look out over the murky, dissolving plain, and its cold antarctic bleakness. I stumbled over the pile of bones and dust on the ground to get to her. Seeing her on the edge of the porch made me worry she’d fall off, for an instant, even if she was a few feet from the edge. It was the first real lurch of fear that I felt since Ryan died. Up until then, I had expected that, any moment, her and I would return to our physical bodies, but the possibility quickly started to occur to me that we might be stuck here, stranded in this creaking, old house in the middle of a blank white oblivion. I drifted towards the window, almost mindlessly, as the idea started to sink in.

“Do you think we’re flying?”, Sapphire stooped me from falling into a spiral of existential terror, which, you know, is what friends do after all. I gazed out the window. “I can’t tell.”, I admitted. “It looks like we’re flying in the sky. Kind of.”
        “I was thinking it looked like an ocean, actually. If you look at the peaks over there. They’re like waves.”
“There’s only one way to find out, right?”
 “Don’t reach in!” Begrudgingly, Sapphire fumbled behind herself for a bone, a leg bone, it looked like, which had already been turned bleach white. She extended the bone out over the blank expanse and slowly lowered it down. A faint, dry tapping sound rang out over what we could now discern to be mountains; ground which, at a faint and unnerving pace, flowed back and forth and up and down like the tide before a wave comes in. Sapphire threw the bone out into the emptiness. Both of us watched it disappear into a cloud of fog and clink against the ground somewhere far away.

Now entering the next phase of experimentation aimed at answering the question of where we were and whether or not we could leave this house, Sapphire cautiously stood back up. Bracing herself against the porch railing, she extended one foot out onto the ground. “Oh god! I’m melting!” “No!” “Not really. It’s fine.” she plopped down from the porch and started to wander out into the wild expanse. She spent a moment or two of haphazardly exploring the yard in front of the house, kicking around the earth to see if it would give way to anything like dust or rocks, and feeling around in the fog. “Any ideas?”, I called out from the window. “Maybe…maybe we’re…maybe we’re in hell?”[she shrugged, starting to move back to the house] “I don’t know. What do you think?”

        I was at a loss for thoughts and at an ensuing loss for words. It felt too much like a dream. Like an unreal thing, happening in an unreal place. Ryan is dead. I muttered to myself, followed by a series of increasingly bored, triumphant platitudes lost in a hazy and brilliant shock: Victory. Ryan is dead. I am free now. I am not a prisoner. The fight is over. I can go on with my life now. I can forget this ever happened. “Hell doesn’t sound right.”, I was not quite in full grasp of my words, almost detached from the person who was saying them. Who was I now without Ryan? The thousands of years of torment at his hands, and the uncountable more years that I’d fought alongside him now eclipsed the tiny pinprick of life that I remembered before. And Sapphire, I’d known her a long time, too, it seemed like—the two of us had met one another, had walked through the forest, and died alongside each other more times than I could count. And where am I now, anyway? I know that I’ve won. I know that Ryan is dead. But I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how I am, or what I am, or why. “This can’t be hell. It’s just the house.. Any minute now and it will start all over.” [I muttered, with hopeful disdain] I felt like more time should have been spent on the goodbye. I wished I’d got more time to yell into his face in defiance, or to scream...or laugh and celebrate before his time had come, that having had the chance to bid him farewell before I killed him would rid my imagination of the suffocating thought of what I might have said, what ends might be left to retie, what thoughts I still needed words to express. “Any minute now.”

        Sapphire did not appreciate my pensive inaction, and stomped past me, scattering half dissolved aluminum cans across the floor. She searched through the cabinets in the kitchen, jumping up to see into them—the labels on the cans had been bleached off. A sickening feeling came over her. This entire situation reminded her of a nightmare she’d had after her first nuclear bomb drill in elementary school. “It’s the goddamn Russians! We got fucking nuked. That’s what it is.” All this stuff around her—the almost glowing white plains of crinkled, rusted paper stretching into the distance, the sudden decay of Ryan and their surroundings, it all took on a terrifying new meaning. She imagined we were shadows stained onto a wall somewhere in a home, our atoms locked in a transcendental conversation at the precipice of dying, in some mystical and otherworldly sphere, in the kind of pure light her friend talked about when she read from Dr. Leary’s book into a tape recorder before they dropped acid out by the redwoods. Sapphire’s spine shivered and her hair stood on end as she imagined what it must have looked like, the colors she’d heard about people seeing in the nuclear bombs, the sounds that must have resounded out over the city. She wondered if war sounded or looked or smelt anything as bad as her father and grandfather made it sound.

Sapphire begins to narrate…

        “No, no. That’s all over now. All the Cold War stuff is pretty much done.”, John’s eyes were still fixated on whatever he saw upstairs. He was trying to be cool, you could tell. He was probably losing his shit too but didn’t want to say anything, you know? Or maybe he was just trying to go with the flow. I dunno. He seemed like a pretty mindful person and so he’s like…yeah, okay, you know, I’m not gonna freak out, I’m just gonna go with the flow, basically. I guess dropping acid kind of helps you do that, right? Turn on, tune in, drop out. Let go of shit. In a perfect world, at least, that’s what it’s supposed to be used for—to help people. I knew better than most that it could scare the shit out of them too. I was sure either possibility could be happening for him right now. I wondered what he saw on that stairway.

        “Are you alright, man?”
“I don’t see anything on the stairway. There’s nobody there. And I’m still here.”
Ahhh….he was having a bad trip. He was definitely having a Bad. Fucking. Trip. “Hey man, it’s gonna be okay”, I tried to reassure him. I hoped I wasn’t interrupting him. Like, you know, if it was a good trip, and I was just distracting…I felt the muscles in my throat and neck grow tense, like something had clasped around them. I stopped breathing. I wasn’t breathing. I—I backed away from the window, not sure how I’d gotten there. Breathing heavy, only to feel the sensation, the empty, hollow sensation of breathing without any air moving through my nose or mouth. I looked outside. I tried to imagine that the fields of white were only fields of snow and not ash and rubble; that I was not atoms in a shadow stained into a wall. That I was a real soul, a smoldering ember in a pile of dead leaves, awaiting the passing of the solstice so that I would rejoin the trees.

        “Is that true, what you just said?”
“That I thought? About the leaves?”
        “About what they did.”
I didn’t remember saying anything. I guess I must have been talking somewhere between moving from the kitchen to the front of the window. But I don’t see why I’d lie to John about anything that happened to me. Knowing that I’d forgotten saying it only makes me wonder about what it must have felt like for me to talk about it, any of it. Let alone to say it outloud, with how fucked up it felt to even think about. “If you’d rather talk about the leaves now, we can do that, too, I guess.”
        “Or, better, we can try to figure this shit out, and not talk about the fucking leaves. Whatever’s going on, I don’t think we should just stay in this house…”
        “It’s getting dark.” (getting suddenly quieter)
        “Yeah….Maybe we can find…I don’t know…something flammable and  make torches. We’ve got all these bones.”
        “No, no. It’s getting dark…I think there’s something on the roof.” (Whispers)
        “What, something we can burn?”
        “Shhh! No, no, there’s a…there’s…there’s something on the roof that’s casting a shadow.”

I looked behind me, back out the window…a shadow circled around the edges of the house. The floor bobbed up and down. Flickers of movement came from the shadow, none of them giving any hint about where they came from.


John

        Sapphire inched away from the window, towards the doorway. I almost called out to warn her but stopped myself for fear of making a noise. Instead I desperately tried to think of something to do, to move myself out of my profoundly disturbed stupor into action. I stumbled back towards the couch, which had now been weathered down to a few red and yellow threads hanging from a steel frame. I shut my eyes and focused, trying to tune out a persistent buzzing in my head, a storm of paranoid questions and ideas. I could feel a numinous and somehow familiar presence, somewhat benevolent, a wandering soul in search of shelter in the middle of a vast desert. Almost certain it would be safe to do so, I strode towards the door. Sapphire had already made it out, and was smiling a bright and toothy smile, while pointing up at the roof. “You have to see this, man.”, I tiptoed out onto the ground—it was surprisingly motionless once my feet actually touched it, becoming a crumpled and vaguely soft solid white stone.

        A black bird with a long bill perched its webbed feet over the top of the roof, its entire body adorned in neon yellow, purple, and white lines. A titanic creature almost as big as the house itself. For a moment the bird cocked its head at us, leaning in one of its immense white eyes to study our faces more closely. I felt its mind buzzing like a fridge, a rare mind, a solitary mind, ecstatic to have found us. Snapping back into an upright position, the bird flapped its massive wings and rose into the sky, casting an odd purple light over the ruffled ground as it went, revealing us to be near the base of a giant round valley. When I realize it was a valley, my mind suddenly refound its center of gravity, and I became aware of a gentle slope that pulled me towards an unseen nadir. The bird sat on a hill right across from us on the valley’s edge, and looked at us. It eagerly bobbed its head, up and down and up and down, and then leaned in, expectantly.
        “What do you think? Should we follow it?” [Sapphire]
        “I…I don’t see why not.”
I’d seen into the birds soul, and I felt like following it would be an alright thing to do, even if I couldn’t really say that I’d looked at that many bird souls before to know what to base that decision off of. The two of us set out away from the house, cutting through its front yard and around the edge of the valley. The center of gravity again rotated—at first it felt like we were walking along the side of a wall, and then like we were walking upside down. From there, as we grew closer and closer to the bird, the plane of gravity snapped around so that the hill now seemed to tilt in the exact opposite direction, and the bird had become much smaller, the house much larger, even if further away. The bird cooed, and flew again across the valley, perching on a tall hill. “What do you think? Should we follow it?”, asked Sapphire.
        “I…I don’t see why not.”
        The bird had led us across the valley once, faithfully, and not imperiled us in any way shape or form. The ground in front of us grew steeper, and steeper, until flattening out. At that point, I stopped to look around—I’d lost sight of the bird. Was it flying again? Yes. I saw it perched on a hill over to the right of us. I tapped Sapphire on the shoulder before she could go any further and pointed.

        TO SAPPHIRE
        After walking across the flat plain towards the bird, John suddenly stumbled off course, before turning to point at the bird and redirect himself. “Yeah, I see it. (Laughs)”. Walking felt strange since I couldn’t feel the full weight of my body. I know that sounds kind of out there. What I mean is if I look away I can’t even feel that I’m really there, that I really exist, it’s like I’m just a glob of goop floating forward in space. I wonder if that’s always what it feels like to be a ghost, but I honestly couldn’t remember much of my time as a ghost…for years it felt like I was a hundred different splotches of paint on a wall, doing nothing but silently burning out the last embers of a scream, as the wall I was attached to decayed. Then I remembered suddenly peeling forward. The different parts of me crashed into each other, and I suddenly drifted off into a dream, a long, vivid, surreal one. When I woke up, I was in this weird room. Some...other version of Ryan. He looked like his skin was about to fall of his body. I didn’t notice it then. Only when I remembered it... He’d brought me to life again, if only to use me in some kind of plan. Now his plan was over. I didn’t feel like I was going back to being a splotch of paint…I still felt motion, willpower, tangibility. Enough feeling now to have a sense of bewilderment, wonder, anguish, and longing but not enough to feel like a form with moving limbs, breathing lungs or a beating heart without concentrating really hard.

        “Hello there buddy.”, The bird was now tall enough to be at eye level. Wondered if it was a talking bird cause it looked something like a parrot. Or…maybe a cross between a parrot and a duck. I don’t know. Penguin? Well, those don’t fly. So. I don’t know. It cocked its head at us again and flew away. John stumbled to my side, out of breath.  This time, it landed a little further towards the end of the field. We kept on moving. “This is so weird.” I didn’t know which part he was talking about. I could see a lot of this being weird on acid because it was already kind of weird in real life. The parrot bird thing was pretty fucking weird looking. The ground was pretty weird. Lots of things were weird. This was a weird fucking place and so I said,  “I know.”, cause, yeah, whatever he was seeing, I’d probably think it was weird too if I could actually see it, right? “You don’t feel the ground turning.”
        “Like, metaphorically?”
        “Like, literally. We’re inside out right now and starting to fold back around. It’s all turning…you can’t feel that?”
        “I can’t. No.”
        “I don’t think it’s the acid, I think the valley is in a hexateron. It’s a five dimensional pyramid. I can’t tell. All I know is the house is getting bigger and its going over us, and we’re unwinding strings. You don’t feel anything even remotely like that?”
        “Right. No, I don’t feel any of that.”

        The bird had gotten smaller again, now down to the size of a small dog, a more distinctly parrot looking creature. It chose a perch on a small grey stone. The stone jutted out of an exposed crack of silver, a small path stretching towards the horizon. John covered his eyes and muttered something under his breath, panting. “No. No. No.” I grabbed him by the shoulder. The bird cocked its head at the two of us, but didn’t fly away this time. “John, are you okay? What’s wrong?” He turned his head to me slowly, his eyes seeming to look right through me, back towards something very far away. “No. I didn’t see anything. Why?” He paused, blinking, like he’d caught himself for just a moment. I saw him struggle against it, before it pulled him back under. His eyes stayed open but you could see the moment he went back there; I’d seen the look before when my uncle and dad talked about the war. “I did it. It was me. I did it. My fault. Of course. No. No. Please, not again. Please not again. No.” The bird lashed out with his beak, biting John on the hand. “Hey!”, I chided the bird, in shock. John suddenly snapped back into reality and fumbled backwards. The bird lashed at him again, this time plunging forward with its sharp claws. He flung it off, but the bird recuperated with a powerful flap of its wings, gaining in elevation and then swooping down towards him. Without thinking, I grabbed its talons in my hand, swinging to the side and careening down to the ground. With a terrible scream, the bird crashed some distance away from me. Shaking, I moved towards its pitiful, wheezing body. “Oh my god! Oh my god, I killed it.”
        “You killed it?”
I reached out for its crumpled body, “I’m so sorry!”
        The bird started to fade away into a glittering purple substance that enveloped my fingers, soaking into my skin. My eyes snapped shut, and I saw the bird flying in the back of my eye, its bright colored geometries spinning. It soared in a majestic dance, in peace—I watched it grow closer to me and then fly away, seemingly forgiving me. As it flew, it illuminated a world inside of my pupils, a world filled with futuristic looking machines with fluid edges and bizzare shapes, almost like a mutant forest lining the edge of a river valley—the bird flew along, bringing this magical world to life.

        When I opened my eyes, I could see my nose. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it’d been a while since I’d seen my nose. I was lying face down in the ground. But, I could also feel the ground. I could tell, like, where my feet were. And my hands. That’s kind of one of those things I guess you don’t really think about until you stop being able to do it, you know? My ears rang. I felt more than I had felt in half a century, a sudden completeness. Complete peace if I hadn’t...if I hadn’t killed a living fucking animal to get to it. What the fuck Sapphire? Did you really have to kill the bird? I don’t like thinking about hurting things, honestly. I was afraid of the kind of damage people could do to each other, to the world, and it didn’t sit right with me that I’d hurt the bird, even if it tried to hurt my friend first. The bird’s poor body had completely dissolved now, leaving only a pale white skeleton. An ominous feeling came over me. “Are you okay?”
        “Well. I killed a bird. How about you?”
        “I turned into a cloud and started moving towards a mountain. Then I rained, turned into a trillion blades of grass and a herd of deer, ate myself alive until the sun grew cold, and next thing you know, there was a bird trying to attack my face so...thanks.”
        “Right. What should we do now?”
        “Keep moving.”
“You sure you don’t want to go back to the house?” I didn’t want to say so, but I had a terrible feeling about going any further from the house. Somehow, I knew, on a deep level that what I’d done had been horribly wrong, treacherous, evil. John shook his head in fear. “I can’t. I can’t walk that way again.”
        “It’s just over there…we can…”
        “How about we follow that vein of silver? Maybe it was trying to show us that so we can figure out where we are. Isn’t that what you wanted to do?”
        “Yeah. It was. Now that I... I don’t want to…I…Don’t ask me how I know this, okay, but that…I shouldn’t have killed that bird. It…it led us away from the house. It was trying to help us and I…I killed it. I don’t know, man. Like…we’re ghosts, right? So ghosts exist, right? And like, the bird’s dead now, man, and maybe that thing has a…has a ghost. I don’t know, honestly...like...I don’t want to sound like I’m going crazy but...no. No, I can’t do it. I can’t.”
        “I…I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I can’t make it back to the house. I’d rather stay with you, but I can…I can wait for you here, if you need.”
        “Well…okay. I can... [starts to head back] (sighs) …Well...”
        “What?”
        “I don’t want to be alone, man, this place wigs me out. I know it’s ‘just a bird’ and I probably sound nuts right now but I’m getting a really bad vibe from all this. Who knows what else is out here, man. I don’t think you should be out here waiting for me and I don’t think I should go back into that house by myself.”
        “You don’t sound nuts. It’s like you said, everything here is weird. Sanity probably means something different here than it would in a normal place. You’d be nuts if you thought it was all normal. I just…I think…when that bird started to attack me, it wasn’t angry. It knew it was going to die.”
        “Yeah?”
        “It wasn’t distressed, either, when it died. I don’t think it would be vengeful. And besides. Out here, it’s the size of a parrot. Back at the house, it was huge. If you’re really worried about it seeking revenge, maybe you’d be safer out here.”
        “Well, maybe I’m…I don’t know. If you’re dead set on following the vein of silver, I’ll go with you. I don’t want you to have to walk by yourself, either.”
        “Alright.”

JOHN
        Sapphire begrudgingly walked towards me, looking back at the house, which to her did not seem all that far away anymore. I didn’t want to tell her what had really happened. With the bird, yes, but also with the walk from the house. I didn’t want to bring it up again. I started up the hill towards the vein of silver. She followed close behind. Our hands brushed up against one another as we set about the path. The terrain felt nearly frictionless, like ice, but we kept from slipping somehow, and pressed onwards.