VIII: The City of Shadows

My apologies for the hiatus. For some time there, I found myself in a very... particular situation. It would seem that, regardless of any embellishment that may have been done, Rose's story was very much based in reality. I visited the city myself, you see.

Not willingly, mind you. I realized something was wrong in my last post. This is because I had started to see ever-shifting shadows without casters, doors that seemed to open to places other than where they should have lead. It was when one of the shadows began to speak that I knew something was seriously wrong.

"Open the door, James Templeton," it said. "Any will do. All roads lead to Rome."
I stared at the shadow, certain I was hallucinating and that the encounter I'd had with the pale woman so long ago was finally driving me wholly insane.
"If you don't go to the city, we'll break you," said another shadow, this one from behind myself. "We'll rearrange your head and take out everything we don't want in there. It's very tempting."

I opened my bedroom door. It was not my bedroom that lay beyond it, but a city, tall and dark and looming. A place filled with shadows and dark corners. It was impossibly cold there. I stepped out into the darkness of the city, and when I looked back, the door, and the rest of my home, were gone.

The city gave me whatever I needed. Food, water, shelter. All of it, that is, except companionship. I was only able to remain sane because I found a dog there which I named Fenrir, and even then, sane is a relative term. I frankly cannot say how Fenrir survived. I never saw him eat any food or drink any water except when I offered him my food. Perhaps the city makes you immortal, and it was only for the sake of keeping up appearances that I kept finding bakeries with fresh bread and hot coffee and diners with hot soup and fresh sandwiches.

I could not say. One way or another, though, I am gone. Another door opened, and it led me home.

But I do not feel like I am gone. I still see the shadows follow me. Perhaps my last visit was too short for their liking. I still think of the Pale Maiden and the sister she took from me.

Or, at any rate, I believe she did. When I tried to find the book in which I read of Rose Templeton, I could not.

I was unable to find information on it even when I still had it in my possession. Did it ever even exist? If it did, how rational is it to connect a work of fiction to my own life on the basis of a shared name, a similar appearance, and a visit to a strange city?

If there are answers, I cannot find them. I fear I never will.

VII: House

I can't help but feel that there's something wrong about this house.

VI: The All-Consuming City

I suppose I may as well elaborate on the story I discussed, regarding the character who reminds me of myself. Her name is Rose Templeton, and one day, for reasons left unclear, she enters a world with nobody in it, just a huge, sprawling, ever-shifting city that wants to eat her alive.

Of course, it is just a story, but the coincidences are too numerous to overlook.

V: Rose

I had dinner with my parents yesterday. Things went quite well at first. However, one thing they said was... striking, to say the least. They mentioned how sad they were that someone named Rose was missing. They seemed to be deeply tired, in the way of grief that has long since transitioned from sadness to exhaustion.

I wasn't certain who Rose was, but I had my suspicions. They were confirmed when my mother mentioned that she was my sister.

My first instinct was to doubt their sanity. Of course, when I remember that... encounter I had, I'm forced to consider the possibility that perhaps my own sanity is what is lacking. Either way, my concern over what my parents said was plain. Fortunately, I managed to use it to my advantage, explaining that I was just worried about Rose's health. I think they bought it.

I fear Rose, not something as simple and mundane as a song or a book, was the thing that was taken from me. That my sister was taken away by the pale woman and that I alone had my memory of her erased.

But it has been a year since I met the pale woman. Surely I would have been reminded of her by now, somehow or another. If my parents still remember her, wouldn't they have mentioned it before now? Or have I remembered her again and again, but had her memory taken anew each time?

I do not know. I can only hope I am wrong.

IV: Templeton

One of the protagonists of the book I mentioned last post has the same surname as I do. Templeton. Her hair is dark, as mine is, as well. How quaint.

III: Tales of the Titans

Recently, I came across a horror anthology. Supposedly, the stories within were, or were originally based on, true stories. Of course, anything can be said to be "based on a true story" if you distort things enough, but I thought perhaps the stories themselves would be enough to make up for their frame narrative. I bought it. I have yet to read it; perhaps I will share from it if I find it interesting enough. (Not the whole thing, of course. I'm a blogger, not a book publisher.)

II: Mementos From A Doomed World

We will all die someday. The world will be destroyed. I don't like to think about it, but when I remember that day... maybe some things are better off dead.

I: The Pale Woman

Around this time last year, a peculiar and somewhat unsettling thing happened to me.

It was a crisp January evening, and I was walking home from a café. I was nearly there when I came across a young woman with white hair who seemed to be looking for something. She was turned away from me, and in curiosity—I didn't recognize her, and I have lived on that street for the entirety of my adult life—I tried to get a better look at her face. She froze up for a moment. I cannot seem to recall what happened after that, though the distinct and almost haunting impression that I lost something in the encounter refuses to leave my mind. Certainly, I cannot remember what her face looked like, other than that she had golden eyes.

For a long time, I felt my inability to recall what it was that I lost to be vexing, even infuriating. By now, though, that has given way to sorrow.  There are so many things we lose over the course of our lifetimes, but the worst are sentences that slip our minds before we could speak them, stories we wrote long ago and cannot find again, songs where we can remember only a fragment we cannot look up in any index or on any website. The pieces we lose when we are broken apart.

No matter how carefully I read and reread the journal of my memory, I cannot find even the blank space where the words she stole were meant to be written. I only know that something is gone, and it is tearing me apart.