EYE OF THE ATLAS

His eyes feel like they are closed now, for the darkness has taken over. It is pitch black with his eyes open, and Wade stops moving. ‘Have I died?’ he thinks. After that thought echoes in his mind, his body falls from the wood. He hears metal clashing together and blocks of wood clanking above him. Gravity takes hold, and he starts plummeting from that initial spot. His body rotates from the fall, slowly upside down. Wade can feel the cold air around him rush through the hairs on his skin. He is naked and free-falling into the dark. After a few minutes of madness, the black sky around him twinkles with tiny white lights. Wade believes them to be stars, but then they start growing into colourful shapes. Triangles, circles, stars, patterns, growing and expanding, changing colour all around him. They eventually all blend together to what looks like a pattern of grained wood. The design of the sky slowly rotates around his body. He spins out of control, down into an endless abyss. Closing his eyes, he tries to imagine himself somewhere else. He pictures his child, Tao. Flashes of him when he was a toddler. He imagines him holding Rayne when she was a baby and his wife Julia smiling beside them. He draws a smile from these thoughts.

“There you are.” He says in his head. “My family.. my beautiful family.”

Without a minute passing, an image of Leah comes in from behind them with a red bucket in her hand, filled with blood. She pours it on top of his smiling family and stares directly at Wade while she does it. It drips down their bodies as Leah stands behind them with a smirk. She then slams her hands down on their bodies with her palms and crushes them into a thousand floating pieces of skin and bone. Wade opens his eyes, and the same image in his mind surrounds him. Her face staring directly into Wade’s eyes follows his body as it moves around through the air. Wade yells at the top of his lungs, but he can only hear the faint squeal he has heard since he woke up. Suddenly a voice starts to creep over top of the sound.

“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today, to witness WADE RUSSEL, fall to his certain death. He chose this path, so let’s all cheer him on, shall we?”

The echoes of applause ring out, and everyone that has ever come in contact with Wade appears around him, clapping and smiling. He closes his eyes, but the image remains the same. The applause gets louder, and Wade’s body starts to tighten with shock.

Don’t let the memories turn into nightmares, Wade.

You are falling close to home,

and your answers lie below the fire.

Wade screams, but the sound of the people around him is too violent to hear his own plea. He looks down at his body and focuses on his hands as he draws them near his face. He stretches his hands out in front of him and locks his eyes on his fingers. As they turn into a fist, he can feel the muscles bind in his forearms. There are holes in his wrist, and he can see right through his body to the sea of people around him. He charges up a roar inside him to scare the applauding faces into fear. He belts out a silent scream within himself and closes his eyes. The people around him stop applauding and stare at him with contempt. Wade opens his eyes and looks all around. The people he’s seen all throughout his lifetime start walking back into the dark void. They become so small that they turn into speckles of white light.

The maze out of here is a long and tedious one.

There are no shortcuts to redemption.

You are exiled now from reason.

Beneath every memory is an answer.

In the blink of an eye, his body hits a dirt floor. His bones crack from the impact, and a shock of pain is distributed throughout his body. Wade screams in pain, but the sound is muffled by the screeching sounds of the impact. He attempts to move his body, but his muscles don’t respond. Wade bellows out an exhausting breath after a minute of laying in the dirt and moves his right arm towards him. He then moves his left arm. Focusing on his body, he lifts his right leg up, putting his knee on the ground. He does so with his left, pushing himself up from the dirt onto his feet, and looks around. He is surrounded by thick green shrubs. They reach far above his head, and he cannot see over them. The floor beneath him is covered in dirt. Above him, the sky is a light blue. He looks down at his naked body, his skin pale and covered in dirt. The temperature is cold, and he starts walking forward through what seems to be a maze, shivering. When he gets to the end of the path that meets more bush, he looks to his right to see the path continues.

“A maze.” He says out loud. In shock, he can now hear his own voice. It sounds gritty and tired. His body shivers down the next path of dirt and meets an intersection. To his left, he sees a woman standing naked thirty feet in front of him. To his right, he sees a dog lying in the dirt, panting. Wade decides to go left and walks towards the woman. The closer he gets to her, he sees it is his mother. She is pregnant and holding her womb. She is looking down, and as Wade approaches her, she lifts her head up and stares at Wade. She looks frightened. He turns back around and sees the dog is gone now. When he turns back around, his mother is on his knees, holding his father’s hand. She is looking up at him, crying in pain. His father consoles her and rubs her hand. He then looks at Wade and says, “This is all your fault.”

Shocked in fear, Wade backs up from them and falls backwards. His eyes flinch from the fall, and his parents disappear. A baby is left crying on the ground in a pool of blood. The sound of the baby’s screams reverberate throughout the maze, and Wade stands up in a panic.

“Is that, me?” He asks himself as he stands up. “Oh my god..”

Wade says, approaching the baby. It’s lying on its back, crying while blood pours from its mouth. Wade goes to pick it up, and he hears a dog barking. He turns his head around and sees a little brown puppy wagging its tail, barking up at Wade. Turning back around, the baby is gone. The blood has disappeared, and the sky above him turns red. It starts to rain down into the maze. The droplets hit the dirt and create tiny spiral patterns around Wade.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

This is all your fault, Wade.

Your parents even know you are a mistake.

You caused this pain, coming into their life.

You are the reason they are DEAD.

On his knees, Wade looks around him as the rain starts to downpour. When it touches his skin, it turns into a light shade of red. Dripping off his skin into the dirt, he watches the spirals melt into each other. He stands up, looks around him in a panic, and screams in frustration. While his breath is still emanating the scream, crows fly out of the hedges in front of him into the sky. They circle above Wade, and as he looks up at them, he hears faint laughter coming from behind him. It changes pitch and direction. It sounds like different people are laughing at him from different positions of the maze. Looking around him, scared, Wade starts walking back in the direction of where he seen the dog. His feet are squishing into the wet dirt. As he focuses on the path before him, Leah emerges from around the corner. She cackles at him as she walks left down a distant pathway. Wade runs up ahead to see where she is going, and at an intersection, he looks left. There is a small fire at the end of the path. It is underneath a pedestal that has some sort of object on top of it. As Wade walks closer toward it, the flame grows larger. When he turns around to check his other option, he sees the dog again sitting, wagging its tail, staring at something just right at its intersection. A man appears in front of the dog and pets it. He looks over to Wade and says,

“GRAB THE BOOK.”

Wade pauses and turns around to the pedestal. There is a book on top of it, and the fire is still burning beneath it. As he walks closer to the book, the flames grow taller. Almost at arm’s length, the fire catches the leather-bound book, and it sets on fire. “GRAB THE BOOK, WADE.” The man yells from a distance. Wade takes a deep breath and grabs the flaming book from the pedestal, and the rain puts out the fire, scorching the pages. It singes Wade’s hands, and he drops it into the dirt. When he looks back over to the man, he laughs at him and says, “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YA, BOY? DON’T KNOW HOW TO READ?”

The man laughs hysterically at Wade, and in frustration, Wade picks up the book. It is covered in dirt, and ashes fall off from inside of it. When Wade opens up the blank cover, it turns out that it is hollow inside, and there is a ring in the centre of it. Picking up the ring, he looks at the side of it. As he spins around the ring, the text wraps around it, reading,

‘Heaven and hell. Light and darkness. Consumed by a demonic paradise. Your eyes hold the answers. Find the mirror. Then find the child.’

The text disappears as Wade continues to turn the ring around. He places it back into the book and drops it into the dirt. “Find the mirror.. find the child..” Wade whispers to himself.

You are within a mirror of yourself, Wade.

You are the child.

You are the answer.

How can you not know this already?

How have you ignored all the important things

in your life for so long?

This is the part, where you change.