First off, let me apologize for the long wait. Everything’s been so hectic that I’ve hadn’t had any time to actually sit down and type everything.
Let’s start with the action part. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to find a restaurant next to an abandoned construction site. At least in terms of asking the waiters/owners of the restaurant to see if they recognized Erik or Axel’s face. I supposed seeing a tall white guy and a short Japanese guy together was somewhat special.
I called up an old friend from high school - Uriah - to accompany me to the construction site. Never mind safety reasons - by the time we found the place, the sun was already setting. Given everything that had already happened, I would have probably shit myself if I had gone alone.
Erik wasn’t kidding when he mentioned in his update that all they did was draw circles. “Yo, Lyon.” Uriah pointed his flashlight towards the numerous of circles on the walls. “Did your bro have an obsession with circles?”
“You kidding me? He didn’t know what pi was until tenth grade.” I reached up and rubbed some of the material off the wall. It was red and chalky, and somehow, it sent shivers down my spine. There were various drawings - ranging from a simple pentagram to an overly complicated mandala kind of thing, yet they all revolved around a circle. They were everywhere - on the walls of the what would be buildings, etched in the dirt, and drawn on the ceilings. The place reminded me of some sort of satanic scenes from the horror movies I’ve watched over the years. That and the slowly darkening sky did nothing to help calm my nerves.
“Holy crap.” I turned around to see Uriah staring at one of the bigger circles - unlike the other ones, it had several smaller circles making up its design - on the walls, glancing at the red dust on his fingers. “Is this...blood?” He looked back at me, and I saw the mixture of fear and confusion in his eyes. “This has to be something else, right?”
I couldn’t answer - honestly, I was just as shocked and confused about the entire thing as he was. The place looked like something pulled straight out of a horror movie. The circumstances we were in didn’t make it any better. “I don’t know, man. I’m not even sure if the human body has enough blood in them to paint these many circles.”
Uriah just glared at me as we continued to shine our flashlights onto the dozens of circles surrounding this place. “Hey.” Uriah pointed at one of the circles near the ceiling. “That one looks like it’s made of paint. It’s peeling.” He reached up (he’s pretty tall) and scratched off a bit of the circle. Needless to say, a tiny strip of dark red paint peeled off the wall. “Looks like the stuff they sell at Home Depot.” I opened my mouth to reply when I heard a tiny crunch behind me. The sound that gravel under someone’s shoes makes. “Oh, this is the crap paint - Lyon, duck!”
I blinked, not registering his words for a moment. There weren’t any ducks around the area - at least not now. But then, I heard a brief swooshing sound next to my ear, and by the time I managed to move, something crashed into the top half of my head. Before I knew it, I was on the ground, gagging on a mouthful of dirt. “Holy shit -” I blinked the stars out of my eyes, trying to ignore the ringing in my ear as I somehow managed to get back onto my knees. “What the actual fuck?” Uriah was shouting his ass off, though when my vision finally refocused, my stomach dropped.
There, right in front of me, was my little brother holding a long metallic pipe in his hand, slowly advancing towards Uriah who was pressed up against the wall looking at him in horror. “Lyon!” I could hear the fear in Uriah’s voice. “Now would be a fucking great time for some brotherly love!” I couldn’t move. Erik was here, at the construction site. From what I knew, he was supposed to be watching TV with our mom or something. “Lyon!”
Uriah’s voice jerked me out of my trance, and scrambling, I grabbed the taser, firing after a second of hesitation. I saw the probes hit Erik’s body - I saw him jerk - yet he didn’t collapse to the ground like Axel had. Instead, he turned around and glared at me with pure black eyes.
“What the fuck?!” I screamed as I scrambled up to my feet, backing away from him as Uriah took the opportunity to run from the wall. Erik’s eyes were blue - not black. And even then, his irises were so dark that I couldn’t even see his pupils. It was almost like he was staring right through me. “Erik?” I gasped as I stepped back from him. “Is that you?”
Erik - or whatever was inside him - let out a growl didn’t even sound remotely human. I remember taking a huge gulp as I stepped even further back onto the dirt. Before I even realized it, I had stepped onto another one of the circles etched in the dirt - smearing one of the outer lines of the circle.
I barely had time to blink when Erik lunged for me. “Erik -” Without thinking, I fired the taser again. And like before, it did nothing. “Oh crap -” I dove out of the way - just in time to avoid the swing of the metal pipe, crashing into the dirt again. My phone tumbled out of my pocket and made a little buzz as the screen flashed. I won’t go into detail on why my phone didn’t have a passcode on it at the time, but the phone unlocked and immediately switched over to my “reddit is fun” app. Whether it was just a stroke of luck that it was on that particular page or some divine being helping me, I don’t know.
“Right, I was getting to that.” Axel grabbed a piece of paper on his desk and handed it to me. On it was some address closeby to my old house. “I said there were a few smart people in this body,” Axel offered as I looked over the paper. “We think we’ve found a way to return everyone to their original bodies. The catch is,” he said before I could say anything, “we need your help.”
My entire body stiffened when I heard his last words. Ever since that chatroom, I hadn’t been a big fan of that phrase. I even had a panic attack the first time I heard it again when my roommate asked me to help him move some boxes. “Why?”
Axel sighed again. “Because you were the one who started this entire damn thing, remember? Something about needing the start to end.” He beckoned at the piece of paper. “I got a pass to leave the building for the day tomorrow. I can meet you there at noon and explain a bit more.” I glanced at my watch - visitor’s hours had almost ended.
Something about needing the start to end.
Whether or not insane or sane Axel said that, everything clicked in my mind. The circles. They were an endless loop - the start always met the end. Erik had only appeared when Uriah disconnected the circle with paint after scratching off that tiny strip. And then he had turned to me when I messed up the circle drawn in the dirt. “Uriah!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, praying that he was still there and hadn’t run off, ditching me in the process. “Break the circles!”
“What?” He screamed back at me. “Did you go insane too?”
“No - just do something to the circles! Doodle over them, piss on them, scratch off the paint - I don’t know, just make sure that the lines aren’t connected anymore!”
Uriah shouted something back at me - probably calling me insane again or something, though I couldn’t make out the words as I saw Erik’s black eyes widen and his back turn towards the place where Uriah’s voice had come from. “Erik, you piece of shit!” I threw a rock at his head, and the moment it made contact, he whirled around and glared at me with his dark eyes. “Sup, bro.” I said, drawing a line through the dirt with my shoe, clearing screwing up a perfect pentagram drawn on the ground. “Heard you like circles?”
Did that piss him off? Hell yeah, it did. He lunged at me again, though this time, he seemed even faster than before. Purely by luck, I managed to dodge, making sure to kick dirt over another smaller circle on the ground - ruining the design on that as well. Judging from the inhuman roar I heard behind me, I figured that whatever was in Erik did not like what I was doing.
So naturally, I took off running, dragging my feet through the dirt in order to destroy every last circle there was on the ground. I was on the outer edge of the building - and the circles were primarily drawn on the floor. Uriah was further inside - where the circles were more on the walls and ceiling. It would take him more time to break them - and honestly, I was the one who dragged him into this mess. I had to keep Erik away from him.
I must have destroyed at least 30 circles by the time I looked over my shoulder to see if Erik was still hot on my heels. I wish I hadn’t it.
Whatever had been my brother had...warped. Twisted into some disfigured being that barely resembled a human being. The thing’s skin looked almost like wax as it hung off its cheeks and elbows unevenly while patches of hair fell out in clumps onto the ground. The entire body looked unbalanced - yet it didn’t do anything to reduce its speed as sprinted after me - this time on all four limbs. The only reason I knew it had been Erik was because of its black eyes.
I barely managed to drag me feet across the last circle in sight when the thing finally leaped onto me. I screamed - half in pure terror and half in horror as I felt its waxy skin burning into my own.
“Lyon!” By some miracle, the thing suddenly disappeared as Uriah slammed his foot into the monster’s side. “Okay,” he gasped as we made a break for it into the building, “Plan Circle finished - didn’t fucking work. What’s Plan Rectangle?”
I stared at him, “You got broke all the circles? Like every last one of them?”
“Hell yeah - and I made sure all of them were thoroughly broken, scratched off part of the design and everything. Didn’t do anything except make your little brother terrifying and my high school geometry teacher cry.” I glanced back and realized that the thing was much closer than I had originally expected. “Lyon, any fucking time now!”
I would have replied - probably something just as sarcastic and whatnot - when I ran into a wall. Literally. As stupid as it sounds, in the midst of our conversation, Uriah and I hadn’t noticed that we had been running into a wall. I smacked into it face first - and I felt liquid beginning to drip from my nose. Of course, a nosebleed. “Oh shit -” I stopped when I realized which wall we had run into. It was the one with the blood. The really complicated one with the tiny circles inside it.
“The circles!” I screamed, and though Uriah looked at me like I had really lost it, when he saw me scratching at the tiny circles that made of the design of this wall, he quickly caught on and began scrubbing at the dried blood. It wouldn’t come off. At least not in time. “Oh shit -” In desperation, I wiped off the blood dripping from my nose and as I felt a hot breath by my ear, I dragged my hand down the piece of stone in front of me.
I don’t remember anything else except hearing a scream that sounded like a million people screaming at once. According to Uriah, the monster slammed into my body, knocking me out cold. Since Uriah’s own phone had run out of battery, he ran to get mine (which I had left in the dirt) to call 911. By the time he got back, the disfigured mutation of a human being had all but faded away, leaving behind a sobbing Erik who wouldn’t even move when the police came.
When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed - apparently having suffered a broken nose and a minor concussion. As you may have guessed from the time it took to get this post up, it took me a while to sort out all the information being thrown at me.
Here’s a basic summary of everything we managed to piece together - at least now that we have Erik. He wouldn’t even speak to us for the first two days, though after I showed him the continuation of his nosleep thread, he started to open up. After he had wrote the second post, he had gone with Axel to the construction site where almost all the circles had been already drawn. Axel had gotten Erik to draw the gigantic circle with his own blood - insisting that because Erik had made the contract, he had to complete it in order to return all the souls to their original bodies.
That was an obvious lie. Instead, the next time Erik managed to regain awareness, he found his own body being moved against his will. I won’t go into detail on how he found out everything, but soon, Erik realized that original “Thing” that had sent him the deal in the first place over the chatroom had negotiated with Axel - the Psychotic Axel (or Axels, I don’t even know anymore), I mean. In return for allowing all the Axels to remain in ‘our’ Axel’s body and thus allow the ‘evil’ Axels to retain control, they would have to lure Erik into completing the contract that would allow the Thing to possess him. Had everything gone to plan, the Thing would be able to live on Erik’s body while ‘Axel’ would eventually be released from the hospital and continue his killing spree.
In an effort to prevent that, Erik managed to convince the Thing inside him to allow him to write the “Update” on the second post (Hidden Message Update), saying that it would put the readers (you guys) at ease with some sort of closure - no matter how crappy the closure was. By the time the Thing realized what Erik had really wrote, I had already changed his password - which resulted in the Thing trashing Erik’s computer in a fit of anger. Fast forward, my blood had ruined the design of the last circle, severing the link the Thing had to our timeline, dimension, or whatever you wanted to call it, forcing him out of Erik’s body. Because Uriah and I had destroyed all the other circles, there was nowhere left for it to run.
For those of you wondering about Axel - I asked Erik, and he said that since the entity that had brought all the additional Axels to this timeline had been banished, all the extra Axels should return to their original worlds as their link to this timeline had disappeared. Currently, the only one inside that body should be the Axel we’ve always known - though I haven’t visited him myself yet, so I’m not so sure.
So now, I’m sitting here, finally back at home, typing the last post of this story or whatever you want to call it, about to upload it. For all of you who followed me and my brother to the end - thank you. Really - the fact that I’m writing this all down somewhere is probably one of the only things that’s keeping me sane.
I’m going to give this account back to Erik to use now. Hopefully, he’ll be able to use this without fearing that some monster will jump out from the screen and possess him again.
If anything happens in the future, I’ll be sure to update you guys again. Hopefully, that won’t happen though, right?
Because this morning, when I came back home, I found a little pentagram painted by Erik’s broken laptop with red paint.
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