Thomas Grey: Chapter One

Below is the initial chapter of a short-story I worked on. I wrote it after breaking my arm in November 2016. It was never that good, but there is still some value to the concept. Hopefully you enjoy reading it.

Introduction : In which I explain myself and why I hate my neighbors.

Have you ever hated someone? I don’t mean when someone cuts in front of you in line or talks during a film at the movie theater. I’m talking about wanting with every fiber of your being to destroy the person that you despise. To completely eradicate this single person from the face of the earth with no remorse or sense of mercy. Many would say that true hatred is hard to come by, but I can say with absolute certainty that I hate Charles Walker.

To be honest, I don’t know Charles Walker. I’ve never met him. He’s dead now, so I can’t ask him about his stupidity anyways. I only know his name, what his ex-girlfriend told me about him, and what he did to me. The hatred is true though. If I was given the chance, I would certainly obliterate him again without a second thought. You may be wondering what he could have done to deserve such hatred. After all, I haven’t told you anything about him or what he did to me yet, so you may be questioning the reasoning behind my emotions.

Charles Walker was a twenty-four year old idiot from New Hampshire. He graduated from Dartmouth with a bachelors degree in Computer Science. He also thoroughly enjoyed masturbating and practicing in the occult. To be fair, I know that what he did to me wasn’t his intention (at least that’s what his earlier girlfriend Rachel tells me), yet I can’t help but be completely baffled by his choice to experiment on me.

He was my downstairs neighbor. Granted, I know that if I had actually taken the time to introduce myself, he most likely wouldn’t have cursed me with this ridiculous situation and I probably would have continued my normal existence without the need to hate anyone. Meeting your neighbors is an important rule that I certainly will follow, especially now that my life has been utterly destroyed.

Charles studied “Black Magic” in his free time. Rachel never told me what sparked his fascination with the spooky shit that he plagued me with, but my best guess is that he probably got bored and clicked on a few links that he probably shouldn’t have. Whatever possessed him (and I wouldn’t be surprised if something actually was possessing him at one point or another) to practice on me is a complete mystery to me. Maybe I pissed him off by stomping too loudly when I brought in my groceries or my dog Baxter got on his nerves so he figured demons and hellfire was the best solution for his annoying neighbor.

He graciously gave me the ability to see the paranormal word. It’s just one of the many planes of existence that exist just outside of our reality. Forever present, parallel to our realm of existence, and rarely seen by average movie theater employees like myself. Whenever your mom dies or when its time for the unfortunate school shooting to occur, they pass on to another plain. It’s not usually to the supernatural one (The one that exists alongside ours).

Usually, most people just end up in a loop of their own reality that they create for themselves based on their spiritual beliefs. They actually end up in a strange sense of limbo that takes decades for you to actually figure out how to properly control. Imagine a video game that you play with your sibling, but it takes you a bit before you notice that the controller was never even plugged in. Your idea of death isn’t what you actually think. It’s all just the next level in a game that you didn’t even know that you were playing. Imagine my surprise when I was given the correct instruction manual (not insulting your religion, I just know that the shit that happens to me and my now deceased asshole neighbor is proof for my creed).

The irony is that nobody is really wrong when it comes to religion. Those other plains that I talked about earlier are actually the other religions and universes that are created by the collective human mindset. There is quite a large number of other people on this planet, all with differing ideas of what happens when they snuff it. The life you grew up living is really just a single chapter in an existence that just keeps going, and knowing that your life is meaningless in the eternal stupidity of reality only makes it easier to figure out that you are indeed the author of your own reality.

Let me offer you an example. One man lives his entire life following a single religion (the one his parents so graciously indoctrinated him into at a young age so it was easier to warp his perception of reality and what it means to exist) and another man is told that there are no rules, as long as you don’t intentionally be a dick and harm others in the name of an all knowing being that controls everyone. Which one is right in this situation?

If you guessed neither then congratulations, you understand what it means to exist. The truth is that existence is all in your head. The signals your brain receives are all just single bits of a greater reality that you can only begin to fathom once you kick the bucket. A blind person doesn’t understand the world in the same sense as a person with vision, so how can you even begin to think that there are only five senses that really exist. An insect lives a completely separate reality that you couldn’t even begin to imagine, so please stop over thinking your own existence. You are the product of sex. A long line of sex. As long as you choose to continue your genetic bloodline in the human race, the rest is just a bonus.

Charles and his girlfriend had sex constantly. It was often loud, annoying, and usually late in the night. I however didn’t choose to alter the reality of my neighbor with the dark arts when I was pissed off at him, so I suppose that makes me a nicer guy. I was content with being the single, mild-mannered dork with the dog. I don’t usually connect well with others, and now that I have visions of demons and other things so terrifying that if I described them you most likely would vomit from sheer terror (which I am often known to do now, thanks to Charles) having a conversation with me at a bar has only become that much more difficult.

It isn’t only visions that my dumb ass neighbor gifted me with. Oh no. That is only a side effect of the mental scaring that constantly fuels my nightmares. I also gained the wonderful ability to fall out of my reality. Not knowingly open a portal or walk through a enchanted wardrobe (which actually exist on some plains, much to my surprise), but actually fall out of my universe. It happened last week when I was cleaning the restroom during the end of the night shift. One minute I have my hands full cleaning a toilet, the next I’m falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. The irony is that Wonderland actually exists in some universes and it is far from pleasant. I happened to end up there once. If I ever see that damn March Hare again, I’m gonna strangle it.

The sensation of leaving your own reality isn’t a fun experience. Imagine a professional boxer sucker-punching you in the gut. Now apply that to your entire body. Its like getting randomly kicked it the dick. My life is now an endless montage of getting kicked in the dick. I wasn’t kidding when I said endless either. Thanks to my good buddy Charles, I can’t die now. One of the benefits of the dick-kicking universe hopping. Turns out that when someone leaves their own reality, all other possibilities open up in their perceived timeline, so death doesn’t occur. If I’m unfortunately stabbed by a pirate, or beheaded by a queen with a fetish for head rolling, I’m simply knocked back to my reality, which I can’t die in either. Thanks Charles.

To be perfectly honest, it isn’t all bad. I’m just a bit over 100 years old now and I haven’t aged a day passed twenty-two (The year I was when my neighbor decided that giving superpowers to your neighbor as a test-run for yourself was a good idea). It turns out that you only can do so much before you piss off the wrong supernatural entity and get yourself in trouble. The powers that he gave me were a one-time deal. If he had the hindsight to just give them to himself instead of using me as a guinea pig , I wouldn’t be in this mess and he wouldn’t have called upon the demonic forces of Anu.

After questioning me about the “visions of other worlds” and “the ability to get to them”, he decided to give the ritual another try and ended up spraying his bodily organs all over his nice sacrificial occult room. Rachel ended up having to explain to me what was really going down now that her fiancé was a new lovely shade of salmon wallpaper. At the time, her explanation didn’t really make sense, and even after a hundred years of experience in the wonderful worlds of universal exploration, I still only have a small grasp on my situation.

Rachel isn’t even human. Not anymore at-least. Her boyfriend made sure of that by summoning her from another reality because he was lonely and tired of donating to the wank bank. Turns out she is the physical form of Ishtar, an ancient goddess of love and shit. You would never even guess that behind the frail exterior of a mousey brunette with a penchant for knock knock jokes and a love of ice cream stands a goddess with enough power to alter reality and the ability to turn your dog inside out (she does this when I piss her off and its as horrifying as it sounds).

I’ve asked her to just let me die at this point (which I am more than happy to get it over with), but it turns out being “blessed” by a “priest” doesn’t ever go away. I am now stuck with my afflictions forever and all I can do is make the most of it by gaining endless knowledge of the infinite universes that I can now travel to. I decided to just roll with it at this point, so I started to document my travels with a camcorder, my journal, and my phone, which I keep on me most of the time for when my universe decides to kick me in the dick again.

You are currently reading my Journal. If you found it, you most likely should have found copies of the video files to go along with each entry. If not, then I guess my journal will simply have to do. Perhaps I should write some basic details about myself for whoever decides to read this, as I possibly didn’t give this to you and you may be reading this with no information about myself.

My name is Thomas Grey. I was born on March 3^rd, 1994. I’ve lived for far longer than I ever should have and I will probably exist forever. I know I said I was over a hundred years old, and that shouldn’t be right according to my birth date (unless its past the year 2094 when you are reading this, in which I say, wait a second for me to explain). The years that I have lived have not always been in my home reality (the one that this journal should exist in) and because I have very little control over when I jump back and forth between worlds, sometimes it takes a bit of time for me to return. Whenever I return back to my original world, very little time has passed. It’s usually a few minutes, but sometimes it can take an hour or two. I’m well over how old I should really be, but if I go by the year I started this journal it looks like I started it when I was in my late twenties.

I have only visited about 30 other worlds and I figured it was time for me to start writing them down, considering that eternity is quite a long time to live and I’m bound to forget some things. This won’t be a daily journal, that way I don’t have to read a ridiculous amount (think of how long this journal would be if I made an entry every day for a hundred years, and then think of how long an eternity is.) I don’t want to spend all of my time re-reading my history. I will only write down the important things (Or the things that I think I should remember).

Tomorrow I’ll fill in some more details about my rather unique situation, but as for the rest of this entry I feel that I have explained myself fairly well. Until next time.

– Grey

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