“Thomas, you need to stop this. I know you’re upset, out of your head with grief even, but this isn’t the answer.”
I had spent a hellish five hours since my brief surprise phone call with Thomas waiting at the airport, waiting on the plane, waiting for a rental car and then driving as fast as I could to get to Mills’ house outside of Austin. I didn’t think he would hurt her, but I hadn’t thought he would tie her up either. When I knocked on her door, he answered right away, and though I could tell he had been crying he looked oddly happy to see my face. He actually went to give me a hug before seeming to absently remember he had a small revolver in his right hand. With an embarrassed shrug he gestured with the gun for me to come in.
When I first entered the house, I moved past Thomas and started calling for Mills. She yelled back and I found her laying on the bed in her room, her ankles and wrists tied with thin, yellow rope. I had untied her right away, knowing he was at my back with a gun but not caring. Once I knew she was okay, I hugged her and turned to look at Thomas, who asked us to come sit on the sofa in the living room. It was there that I started trying to talk him back from the edge he was teetering on. But looking at my friend, his eyes weighted down with a hard glaze of insanity, my heart sank as I realized I wasn’t going to be able to reason with him.
“No, no, Alex. You’re wrong. I’ve thought it all out. We created this thing, right? And it’s powerful. Able to do all kinds of things. It’s magic. So what’s to stop it from helping us out with Cassidy?”
“How about the fact that it just fucking killed her last week?” Mills snarled at him, the anger and fear in her voice scaring me more than Thomas. I needed to get her out of here. At least she’d be safe and maybe I could calm him down alone. But Thomas didn’t seem angry. He was nodding and smiling as though being patient with children who just didn’t understand.
“I see your point and why you’d think that. But the last few nights, I’ve been having dreams. Or really the same dream repeatedly. At first, I thought it was just stress and grief, but when it happened the third time…well, I realized it had to be the Professor. It was sending me a message. Telling me about what it could do.”
Mills gave him a warning look. “Thomas, stop it.” Looking at me, her eyes worried, she said. “Do you remember a girl named Alicia?”
I had been holding her hand and I gave it a squeeze now. “Yeah, I do now. I came from my mother’s. It…didn’t go well, but she told me about my little sister. I’ve spent the last few hours remembering more and more about her since.” I felt myself getting choked up again and pushed it down, turning back to Thomas. I loved Mills for being worried for me, but I was tired of being protected. “So what did you see in the dream that makes you think the Professor will help? What doesn’t Mills want you to tell me?”
Thomas smiled wide, his eyes glittering in their sunken hollows. He looked ten years older than even after Cassidy’s funeral, and I wondered for a moment when he had last gotten any restful sleep. His voice and his movements had a disquieting jerkiness to them, like a corpse dancing to an electric current. I stifled a shiver at the thought as I tried to listen.
“…and then I was floating in the old gym at Stonebrook. Floating past the floor and down into that old pool. You don’t remember when we were down in that pool, do you, Alex? Well, that’s all right. But I was down there, and I could feel the ol’ Professor down there with me too. But I wasn’t scared. I was happy. It was like seeing an old friend, except I couldn’t really see him too well, of course, and he kept looking like different things. But then I heard something moving around in the shadows of the pool, sloshing around in that smelly water down there in the dark. It was funny—I could see down there, but I couldn’t see either. Not everything. It wasn’t until it started floating out into the middle of the pool that I saw clearly what it was.”
“It was Alicia. All grown up, or at least a lot bigger than when we lost her. And she was alive! I don’t know how, but she was alive down there in the dark. I saw her look at me, and…well she kind of smiled I think. Just think, Alex. If it can keep her alive all this time, it can bring back Cassidy. I felt like that’s what it was telling me.” He stopped talking suddenly, staring at me as though he expected his words to have answered any questions and solved any conflicts.
“That’s fucking crazy, Tom. That’s impossible.” I stood up, and he raised his gun half-heartedly, but I ignored it. “If it was the Professor contacting you and not just a dream, it wasn’t trying to help you. It was trying to trick you. It’s killed Ellis. Did you know that? It fucking crushed him against the ceiling of a parking garage like a goddamn roach. That’s your buddy the Professor. That’s the thing you’re siding with over your fucking best friends.” I was standing over him now, and his lips were quivering as tears began to fill his eyes. I heard Mills start softly crying behind me at the news of Ellis, but I kept my gaze on Thomas for the moment as he struggled to speak.
“I…No…I…we just need to try, okay? Get the Professor to sit on our chest, any of us. Talk to it. Even if I’m wrong or crazy, we need to try and talk to it, right? Find out why it’s killing us?”
I reached down and snatched the gun away from him without resistance. “I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about. ‘Sit on our chest’? What the fuck does that even mean?” I cast my gaze back to Mills who had a haunted look on her tear-streaked face. “Do you know?”
She nodded slowly. “I do, yeah. But I think it’s a bad idea, if it would even work now.”
Thomas looked past me at her. “It would. It would with him here. Alex was always its favorite.”
I went to rub my face and realized I was still holding the gun. Frowning disgustedly, I emptied it onto the floor and then set the gun down on the coffee table before stepping back to face both of them. “Look, I want to know the rest of what’s going on. Mills, I think you should leave or me and Thomas can. He can catch me up on his own.”
She was already shaking her head. “No, I’m not leaving you. No offense, Thomas, but I don’t trust you for shit at the moment. And you’re too upset to tell him everything anyway.”
Thomas was crying softly now, his head buried in one of his hands. “I know. You’re right. I’m fucked up. But please tell him. Maybe he’ll understand if we tell him the rest.” He looked up briefly, his eyes red. “I really am sorry. I’d never hurt you guys. I’m just so fucking scared and alone.”
I squatted down next to his chair and gave him a brief hug. “We’re all scared, man. But you’re not alone. Let her tell me the rest and we’ll figure something out, okay?” He nodded and I stood up again, moving to sit with Mills again.
She was still almost painfully beautiful—even scared and exhausted and terribly sad, her face shown with this inner light that touched the core of me. Watching her trying to find the right words, working to find the least painful path through making me relive the worst thing that ever happened to us…I knew then that I was still in love with her. Would always be in love with her and only her. It was a strange time to have such a happy revelation, but I held onto the warmth of it as I waited for her to begin.
By the end of eighth grade, the Stonebrook Six pretty much ran the middle school. We didn’t bully anyone, but the strange combination of fear and mystery surrounding us was a powerful brew. We were popular without trying, at least on a surface level. And that’s all that really mattered, because as always, we really only wanted to hang out with each other anyway.
When we got to ninth grade, things were different at first. Despite sharing the same main building and campus, there was a fairly sharp social divide between the two schools at Stonebrook, and we were now going from being the eldest middle schoolers to lowly freshmen. It meant older kids, different teachers, and more time having passed since the last tangible signs of the Professor.
People like to forget things that don’t suit them. They use time and the elasticity of memory to sand off the rough edges of the past, and those things that are too hard to be reshaped are stored away in a musty corner of their mind.
The Professor, as compelling as it was in some ways, was an uncomfortable thought. And like any uncomfortable thought, it spent quite some time walking on the knife’s edge of the townsfolk’s collective and individual consciousness. On the one side, the eventual oblivion of rationalization and explanation. On the other, the same neglect and dusty demise that befell childhood memories and unpleasant pasts. During most of our ninth-grade year, I think the Professor was teetering between those two kinds of death, and its balance on the blade grew weaker with each passing day. If we had only left it alone, it might have faded away for good that year.
But we didn’t. We didn’t want the Professor to die, and I think we could all sense it needed our help to survive. Without any plan or coordination, we all began talking about the Professor again in our subterranean hideaway. I mean, we had always talked about it a little, even if just in a joke or passing reference. But by the spring of our freshman year we were back to discussing it regularly, the breath of our words fanning the embers back to life.
I was largely to blame. I had taken it upon myself to do research on different myths and legends--specifically magical creatures that seemed similar to our Professor, if I could find any. That was how I wound up reading about tulpas and telling you all about them.
Tulpas, from what I remember, are supposed to be beings created by the mental or spiritual energies of one or more people. Kind of like an imaginary friend you make real by believing hard enough. It was a strange idea, but it seemed to fit the Professor better than anything else based on what we knew about it.
Around the same time, Ellis came up with the idea of trying to see the Professor. We weren’t even sure it was still around, and the idea of verifying its continued presence in some way was attractive to all of us. Ellis’ idea led to us getting a large baby pool and sneaking it into a back room down in our secret lair. We filled it with a few inches of water and then began calling to the Professor.
The idea was this: The Professor was always invisible, and past attempts we had made to just ask it to show itself had gone unanswered, so either it couldn’t become visible to us or it didn’t want to. But if it was at least willing to come and visit us, and if it had some kind of physical form, we might be able to get some sense of its size or shape in the water. It was an odd idea, and Ellis admitted it was a longshot, but we figured it was worth trying, with the fun and challenge of sneaking the pool into the school almost worth the price of admission by itself.
The funny thing was that it kind of worked. We set the pool up, asked the Professor to come as we stood around the water holding hands, and this time it came. We could all feel it there, and after a few seconds Cassidy let out an excited gasp as the water began to slosh in the pool. As the liquid settled, you could see voids where the water didn’t go. It was hard to say for sure, but it looked as though the Professor was standing on two invisible legs in the pool. Except then it became four voids instead of two. Then one larger one, then eight small ones. On and on we watched as the water would slosh and settle, slosh and settle, every time around a different shape or configuration.
Then it was gone. We all began talking excitedly, and at first, we didn’t really understand what we had just seen. Then I realized what it was. It was changing shape repeatedly as it stood in the water. Big, small, many legs or none, it must have shifted between a dozen things in the span of a couple of minutes. We were excited about all of this, of course, but rather than satisfying our curiosity to know more about the Professor, it just made us hungrier for the next step.
Alex, you were the one that came up with a way of communicating with it. One day when we were all skipping a school assembly together, you started telling us about a theory you had. You said that if we really had made the Professor up, made it what it was, why couldn’t we make up a way of talking to it too?
The idea caught on with all of us right away. We talked about it for a couple of weeks, figuring out and agreeing on the details, but by the end of the school year, we were ready to try it out. The end result was very simple, in part because making up rituals can be hard and in part because I think we instinctually weeded out the elements that didn’t work. I understand that’s contrary to the base idea we were working from--in theory, any idea for the ritual should have worked so long as we believed in it enough. But that’s just one example of why I don’t think we had as much control of things as we thought at the time. At some point, the newest and last member of the Stonebrook Six started guiding us.
The ritual went like this. We sat cross-legged in a circle, knees touching and one of us holding a lit candle. We repeated the phrase, “Professor come and join us. Professor come and talk to us.”, and with each repetition, the candle would be passed to the next person in a counterclockwise manner. If the candle flame turned green, it meant the Professor was present and willing to talk to us. The flame change was important, we had decided, because we wanted definitive proof if the Professor came to talk.
We were all excited to try it out, but when we went to do it the first time, we were all laughing a little and making jokes. I remember thinking it was odd that the year before the idea of trying to talk to the Professor directly would have terrified me, but now I was somehow not only okay with it, but very concerned that we weren’t taking it seriously enough for it to work.
But I needn’t have worried. The Professor wanted to talk to us, and the candle hadn’t made a full circle before the flame turned a bright, eerie green. You were holding it at the time, Alex, and suddenly the Professor was on you.
Having the Professor speak through you is an odd sensation. You don’t feel like its inside you, but rather that its sitting on top of you somehow. You feel an immense weight on your chest, and while it completely controls your voice and expressions when it’s on you, it doesn’t really feel like that most of the time. It’s more like someone is sitting on your chest and blocking your face from everyone while drowning out what you’re saying with their own words and emotions. Which, of course, is where we came up with the name.
Over the next few months we talked to the Professor several times, and it sat on each of our chests’ more than once. Most of those seemed like magical experiences at the time, as though we were talking to a miracle…which I guess in some ways we were. But the first and last times were terrifying.
When you were holding the candle and the flame turned green for the first time, we were all shaken. I don’t know that any of us really expected it to work, and even if it did, we had no way of knowing how the Professor would try to communicate. We had actually brought down a small chalkboard and a Ouija board just in case it needed a way to talk to us.
Instead it used you.
“Hello, children.”
The Professor’s voice was always so strange. It would vary from moment to moment much like its shape had in the pool. One word it might be high and squeaky, the next it might be a deep baritone or an almost bestial growl. Odder still was that though we heard its voice through your mouth, we also heard it in our head. There it wasn’t a voice at all really, but some kind of song--one that we could understand and that was somehow the same as the words being spoken.
We all looked around at each other as we heard the voice both inside and out. For a moment I wondered if we would all be too scared to speak when Ellis popped out with the first trembling question.
“Are you the Professor?”
What might have been a short laugh echoed through the room, though it sounded more like a mixture of a crow’s caw and a woman’s scream. “Yes, Ellis, I’m the thing you call the Professor.”
Another glance passed between us and then Thomas was asking, “Are you a tulpa?”
A brief pause and then it answered. “Tulpa is just a name really. A label for a larger concept that goes beyond what the word describes. But to answer your question, no. I’m not a tulpa, though they do exist.”
“What are you then?” I asked, my concern growing. “Are you a demon?”
Another cawing scream of a laugh, this one long enough that I began to get worried. “No, no, Mills. Not a demon of any sort. What I am…well, there’s no easy way to explain what I am, but I will try.”
“This place, this world, is one of an infinite number of such worlds. Alternate dimensions you might call it. And by one way of thinking, these infinite worlds sit at the center of a larger expanse of reality.” The Professor turned his gaze--your gaze--to Cassidy. “You remember that time you and Alex cut open the baseball?” Cassidy nodded vehemently, her eyes wide.
“Well, it’s kind of like that. If these infinite worlds are the core, the next layer out are the Seven Realms. I don’t know everything, and I don’t know all of the Realms. Hell is one of them, the Nightlands is another. There’s the Incarnata, which is where your tulpas come from Thomas. And there’s the Void. That’s where I came from.”
Ellis leaned forward, his expression thoughtful. “The Void? What is that? Are there others like you there?”
The Professor shook your head. “Oh no. There’s only one of me. And the Void is a place where nothing is…something. It’s a place of unthought of and undreamt of things. Some might call it a dead place, but that would be wrong, because dead is something, and the Void’s only substance is nothingness. Personally, I think of the Void as a place of endless potential.”
It drew back your lips in a ghastly facsimile of a smile. “Look at me, for instance! I was floating in the Void, dreaming lost dreams in an endless sleep, when I sensed something new. It was a small and distant light. In that light I could see Alex here, bored in class and thinking about this school being haunted. In some ways, I was watching myself be born.”
“Even though it burned and hurt me, I moved toward that light. Soon I sensed something else. I was hearing Thomas telling the story of the lovesick Professor’s suicide. I was hearing all your wonderful stories, pulling myself along them like a lifeline until I pushed through the membrane into this world.”
The Professor let your lips go slack as his eyes took us all in. “When I said there is only one of me, I meant it. Even in all the infinite versions of you and this school, only this version had the right combination of ingredients to create me. I’ve seen worlds where you all never meet or are all dead. I finally stopped looking at them because it saddens me so.”
It paused for a moment, so I took the opportunity to ask another question. “Why does it make you sad?”
It didn’t use your expressions this time, but its strange voice sounded hurt, as though I should know without having to ask. “Because I hate to see any of you suffer. In many ways, the five of you are my parents as much as you are my friends. And I love you all.”
I swallowed and was going to ask something else when Cassidy jumped in. “We love you too, Professor!”
Another ghastly smile from you and I decided to wait on asking my next question. But then your eyes were back on mine as the Professor answered my question without it being asked.
“Mills, I just want to enjoy existing and keep doing so. Help my friends and keep growing.” Your eyes stretched wide as though held up by invisible hooks. “In some ways, I’m not that different than having a puppy.” It swung your eyes toward Ellis. “Or a tiger cub. I need to sleep and eat so I can keep growing. I’ve been asleep these past few months, and now I need to eat again.”
It licked your lips absently. “And I’m very hungry.”
---
Credits
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