My sleep was mostly peaceful, something I desperately needed, I was in a pub sort of area. Dreams always seem strange, or at least that's how you remember them once you wake up, as if some fog or sweat is smeared over everything, a liminal area of surreality.
The floor was impossibly clean and there was no one else, just me, a bartender and a third man sitting two stalls across, wearing a tall hood concealing his appearance. I don’t remember him ever talking but somehow we ended up playing chess. Within the dream realm, you don’t need to say or do anything for things to go how your mind wants it to, it controls this world and will do as it pleases. Without a word, the game continued, but I started to feel odd, like somewhat of an out of body experience as I started to feel like a part of the board itself, and somehow I was, as if playing both myself and the game. On the board, I looked around, I was tiny, even smaller than the pawns. The real me looked dead, no not dead, somehow asleep with his eyes open, breathing all the while. The man took his hood off, he had no hair and a strange grey beard, styled to curl near the bottom. His eyes were blue, vibrant blue, enough to stare through your soul and turn round to relay what it finds. I was standing on a black square but without warning it gave out, leaving me to fall into whatever was underneath. I fell. And for what felt like an eternity I fell further, sinking deeper into a rabbit hole and finding no bottom for minutes until slamming onto the ground, with all the impact of pushing a slide of paper off of a table.
I was back, in the void. The Pile.
The chair was still there, and now a wall behind it. A single solid brick wall connected to nothing else, I looked around and it formed a square, some kind of strange building. Each edge had another chair, each identical to the first. The void smelt dusty, as if the brick cube had been hit with a sledgehammer, spreading it all across a land of shadows. But upon moving round, something caught my eye, there was a distinct gaping hole, caved in with great pressure on one end. I reached my arm in, curving around ends that scratched and ripped at my hand and found a piece of paper, pulling it out.
Looking closer, it was a missing poster, two in fact. The same ones I had seen with Billy at the station.
For the first time I had a closer look at what I was actually seeing. The first was of a young girl, 14 years old. The photo on the poster was a school portrait, she looked short, young even by the displayed age and weak. She smiled as you would in those photos, but with no teeth, looking awkward in the presence of the camera.
The second was of a boy, slightly older, 17 years old. There were two photos, another school one, wearing the same uniform albeit with a far more inviting appearance, he was smiling almost menacingly,
Billy had told me about the homophobic rumours, I guess I hadn’t realised their different genders. What did they mean then, was he a pedophile? The two terms were somewhat collated around these parts, at least they were with the older folk, but not with girls it wasn’t.
I would have searched their names upon my wake but it was scratched out, ripped away from the paper with what seemed like some anger.
I took them off of their resting place, as if to “bring with me” out of the dream, when I was overtaken by an overwhelming force, as if the gravity of the void had collapsed with me at the center. I fell onto my knees, gripping my jaw, it felt as if it would explode into chunks. My head was buzzing, that feeling of intense TV static that hits before you vomit, but it wasn’t food that released from my mouth.
I watched in horror as my front teeth popped out of my gums, swollen and raw, falling into my hands and rotting, melting into my palms in a matter of seconds before leaking through my fingers. And all the while I could hear that sound, static white noise slamming my ears as if my cochlea was about to unravel into a straight line, and stab out of the body. I could feel a burning on my tongue, like sawdust shaved in a meat grinder directly into my mouth and served hot, melting my lungs as I screamed. Not that any sound was heard.
And then it was gone, and I was back in my bed, fully conscious, away from the pile. I hadn’t made any loud noises, otherwise my parents would have noticed, but I could feel my sweat seeping through the mattress, my throat was as dry as sand but no water rested upon my desk, and so I got up to take the trip downstairs.
Friday November 17th 2028 - 03:23
The kitchen was pitch black, my phone's flashlight was the only view that could be formed as I drank lukewarm tap water out of a plastic cup, sitting in a yard chair on the pavement outside our back door. The freezing cold Autumn wind was a nice relief from the sweat that still lingered from the Pile. I would have taken a shower if it weren’t so late, or early I suppose.
I ended up falling asleep on the couch in the living room, still in nothing more than a dressing gown.
Friday November 17th 2028 - 08:12
I was awoken by Ma coming downstairs, I sat up and tried to look as dignified as I could, to appear as her stable, ideal son who still had a job and social life and who didn’t pass out on her couch last night.
“How long have you been down here Jay?”
“A few hours, I couldn’t get much sleep upstairs, that's all.”
“Of course, you never really did. Do you have plans to do anything? Are you staying down here again? Your father and I would be more than happy to-”
“I don’t know about that Ma, I don’t quite know what I want these days.”
She looked incredibly sad at that, as if I had intercepted her offer to give the harsh reality that I didn’t plan on living with them beyond my childhood. One part of me needs them, I can’t not meet up at the very least, but another part relies on independence, my ability to escape from childhood and into the corporate ladder. This age was a curse, a stupid middle ground. According to the law I wasn’t a kid, but no one treated me like an adult yet, including myself. Truth is, London wasn’t any kind of place worth living. I had barely made social connections in 2 years.
“We miss you, you know that Jay… you left too early for us.”
“How old were you when you lived alone Ma?”
“...18… But it was different then, the world wasn’t quite as dangerous, quite as expensive.”
“I suppose, but I’m here now, I won’t leave for a while it seems.”
“What motivates you son?”
The word echoed in my head, I hadn’t expected the question. But it made sense. I never did things for others, I had always been selfish but good at hiding that fact. At my core my fundamental inability to connect came from that simple fact, one Ma had figured out long ago. Something was motivating me to stay here, but I wasn’t about to tell her I saw a ghost.
“I suppose, I need to figure out what motivates me wherever I am, not just here. I can’t do that whilst working, living here gives me the space to discover some things about myself…”
It was simultaneously the truth but also a bogus lie, one to push away the fact I was getting involved in a supernatural fantasy. Ma briefly nodded and went to say something, then stopped herself and left to get ready. These people still had jobs, lives, things to do.
Somehow I was jealous of the simplicity.
Friday November 17th 2028 - 12:01
I was standing in front of the post at the train station. It had been a couple hours but part of me needed confirmation that what I saw in the dream was true. And there it was, two posters, one of the same girl I had seen but the boys was slightly different, not the poster itself but the graffiti covering it made it almost impossible to know for sure. Words such as “kidnapper” and “rapist” were stained across the entire thing in red marker.
I was able to get down their names, however: Alicia Graceson, and Keiran Hill. I wrote the two into my phone’s notes app.
Friday November 17th 2028 - 14:31
I had spent roughly an hour or so going down a rabbit hole of who exactly the two were. Online, there was a British website dedicated to missing persons I found that documented both of them with almost no information other than 240p images of the posters at a bus stop, their names and the name of the person who created the articles. It was an open-source esque website, anyone could update it to spread awareness of their family or friends, or just missing people in the area.
I wrote the name of the writer, Eduard Stevenson, into the notes page. I ended up cyberstalking onto linkedin, he was a police officer, and seemingly a wannabe detective, as well a co-creator of the site, currently based out of Norfolk, who took suggestions and information from friends in order to create an archive of missing people in the country.
The part of the page that piqued my interest however was that the website had a “gossip” column, which was certainly an interesting choice for someone who wanted to get into real detective work. There were a few comments on the page for Keiran, and only one for Alicia:
“Poor boy was taken against his will, and his parents continue to display this gender nonsense”
-Anonymous
And that was when I began to put some pieces together regarding what Billy had mentioned regarding the homophobia regarding the case, not to mention the lack of police attention regarding Keiran. Looking at the comments on Keiran’s page, I found a couple people claiming he stole her, Alicia clearly being a transgender girl and Keiran assumed to be a gay kidnapper, in some kind of gay-panic related cult. I remembered hearing similar things in the past, not to mention the other panics that led to claims of cults surrounding videogames and DnD.
I decided it was probably in my best interest to get in contact with the creator of the column.