Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Day 14

Begin recording.

It’s been one week since the confrontation detailed in my last entry. I have yet to leave the house where Sage and his followers had been hiding. This is mostly because my injuries from the car accident haven’t been healed enough to allow travel. I HAVE been exploring this house, though, and have found several things of interest.

First, this house has electrical power. There’s a diesel generator down in the basement. It doesn’t seem to fit the rest of this world, though. It’s too shiny and new, as if it were brought here from somewhere else. The electricity means that all of the house’s appliances work as well. Last night I finally got up the nerve to try my hand at cooking with some of the food in the refrigerator. Spaghetti with marinara sauce has never tasted so good as it did then, slurping noodles off a cracked plate, sitting at a rough-hewn wooden table in this house’s kitchen.

I found one other useful item in my poking around. A working radio, the first one I’ve seen. It’s an old 80s boombox, the kind you’d expect to see some kid carrying on his shoulder. I turned it on and tried the stations. There were a couple of spots where I thought I could hear voices through the static, but I was unable to tune the stereo accurately enough to make out what was being said.

Finally, this house has a working water heater. I’ve become so rank since waking up in that other room that I thought I was starting to ROT. I must’ve spent 3 hours in the shower since finding out about the boiler. It feels better than I would’ve expected to be clean again. I’m currently sitting on a sofa in the main room, floor lamps casting a muted, comforting yellow glow across the pages of the book in my lap. I’m finally reading this book of stories from my pack. They’re interesting, really, and I see why Martin was giving them as a warning to Dresden. The moral of each seems to be that people will live or die based on their own decisions and morals, and that if you stray too far to the amoral side of things the universe will come after you with a vengeance.

I keep wondering something. Why does it seem like I’m the only sane person here? Every other person I’ve met is irrational, unpredictable, more animal than human. Why am I different? For that matter, why am I here at all? I keep coming back to the girl at the docks. She said I was a “mirror” of someone. That that someone had brought me here for some reason. She called him the “dark man” or something like that, if I remember correctly. Could she have meant the monster I saw? The thing hasn’t shown any signs of sapience. I don’t see how I could be a mirror of it. No, it must be something else…something or someone I haven’t met yet.

There’s a map here that I found in what must’ve been Sage’s room. If it’s correct, the simplest route into the city is to go back, turn my car right-side up, see if it’s still running, then just continue the way I was going. The road the house sits on seems to loop around and head straight into the city center. I feel….apprehensive about going there, though. Something in my gut tells me there’s something else I need to do first. I suppose I’ll know what when the time comes.

I’ll worry about it tomorrow. For now, I need to do some more practice with exploiting the physical laws of this area before I go to sleep. Over the last few days I’ve been able to produce some very basic things (simple clothing, a comb, two carrots) out of thin air with nothing but willpower, as well as some basic telekinesis and teleportation, but doing any one of these things even once leaves me too exhausted to stand. I assume that like any OTHER skill, it requires regular and thorough practice to master. I’m feeling healthy enough now to resume travel, so I also need to prepare for that.

This is X, signing off.

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