Phantasmal ((or, ‘The Bulbous Peril’)(a short Eldritch Story))



‘Dangerous illusions within a sphere,’ they called it!

It was 1997, Sulla had fragments coming into his mind, disjointed fragments, in dream and illusionary form, and so he conjectured, presupposed, he was losing his mind, he was living at the time in Roseville, Minnesota, on Larpenteur Street, in a two bedroom apartment, or at least that is what he would have told anyone had they asked him, because it is what he believed. He lived there with his mother. He had talked to a psychologist about this, and they simply told him, in time it would all pass, thus, he took a different approach, he sought within his dream world, to talk to a psychological seer, to get to his problem.

“I wasn’t motivated at first to figure out my situation until the frequency of this illness of mine, mental illness in this case vastly increased to the point I seemed to float like a ghost within my dreams, or visions or nightmares, whatever they are. My mother didn’t either know what to call them, she said very little about it. But I needed to have some control over both worlds, and I was losing that.
“How strange—so I thought at the time Henry, for me to try to cling onto these so called acquired wandering ghostly imaginings, the ones I am in now; I mean to say, it is by far another whole world here, that appears so real, and I must have tried, because I am still living within it. But let me go on, I sought you out within this dream because the human psychologists all classifying me as a psychological fruitcake; was too much.
“During the day I remain in our apartment quite a lot, a building apartment, which I live on the third floor in, there I remain almost fearful of leaving, even if I wanted to go, I couldn’t simply get up and go because my legs will not allow, as for now I am talking to you in my dream world because you seem to understand more than the doctors in the real world, and my neurological disease confines me in a wheelchair. So you see Henry, it is nothing but an ongoing nightmare. I prefer this dream world to reality.
“I tried to exercise when I first acquired this disarming illusionary disease, of drifting back and forth into this dream world without any control, but it didn’t go away, my nervous system broke down even more, and my legs gave into the disease leaving me a vegetable, and so I was even hoping I’d stay in the dream world longer. In the process I somehow created mental barriers between the real world and this marginal outline of a world, and you, you even seem real to me but I know you are a ghost in this imaginary world. This new world, the one I fall halfway asleep into, and fall out of, but like because there are less restrictions, limits.
“And so you see Henry, circumstances tell me the real horror is coming back to this wheelchair in the real world. I’d rather stay in my dreams, floating about, in this unworldly world with folks like you who listen.”

Said Henry the ghostly seer, in his own paranormal ecstatic voice and mannerisms,
“When did the real horror begin?”
“A few months ago,” said Sulla, “I beheld great masses of vapor as it seeped through my body as if I was all residue and not flesh, steadily I became less and less solid, less distinct until at last I somehow could project myself into this new flexible world, without that wheelchair, does that make sense Henry?”
“What world are we talking about, Sulla?” asked Henry, staring into his unblinking eyes.
“The worlds I live in, and the world I dream in, those two worlds are what we are talking about, are we not Henry?” said Sulla.
Henry’s eyes lit up big as headlights on a car, to a yellowish thick mist, “I think,” remarked Henry, “your residue, substance has expanded to create inside your psyche an intrusion, a virus given to you by another source, another alien,”
“In simple laymen terms, what does that mean, Henry?” asked Sulla.
“Well it depends. In the world of the so called living, it would mean you are having nightmares, but in the ghostly world, or your world, because I think you have forgotten you are a ghoul, it means you’ve escaped through a nightmare—that there wheelchair you are talking about, is the nightmare, your reality is in the here and now, the so called free floating world, here with me.”
Sulla looked about, said with almost fright, “How can this be?”
“There is,” said Henry, “an individual difference here, that you have not looked at, a primal corridor, all ghosts live in, it is natural, and like anyone else we ghosts have a code, a genetic code built within our residue, and this code looks—when you draw it on paper—like a primal corridor, with rooms here and there: in essence, someone planted a plague in you, more on the order of a virus in one of those rooms, found within your corridor, sort of speaking, this disembarrass the mind, to make it think whatever the code of the virus is programmed for, in your case it would seem to have made you think you are human, when in essence you are who you are, a ghoul, like me, you have for sure went down a bizarre avenue, purely abstract.”
“So I am not human?” responded Sulla.
“What a hideous question,” said Henry, “if you were, you’d be in that wheelchair now.”
“Who gave me the virus?” asked Sulla.
“I can take a wild guess, and if I did, it would be those monstrous trouble makers from the Planet Moiromma, outside of Earth’s solar system, it is a planet they transfer such virus from: an orderable peril of a game, of the mind, to see if they can control it from afar. They call it, ‘Dangerous illusions within a sphere,’”

Written at Starbucks in Surco, in Lima, Peru, 8-3-2008