Notes from the Future: Dreams of the Sleeping Porpoise, Part VII

Behind Door Number Two, Chalk Eddie is seeing two images: hospital type room and barn space. Then a voice speaks to him, some kind of large glowing light source floating in the air next to his hospital bed, pulsating with every word; the words themselves are shown in subtitles. This presence wants him to find a key, a key in numbers; he says he needs a chalkboard. The outline of a chalkboard begins to follow him around through the dream.

He gets in a car with Veronica and Max and two other people, they go to Val's; while there, two creeper crazies come in from a door that wasn't there before and stand over Chalk Eddie, discussing his death; they are drawn in colored chalk. They are clean-shaven. Then they go away and Veronica returns to the car with the nice people and Max, all smiling. They all drive off through the Hayward Hills on roads that don't exist, back around toward Castro Valley and San Ramon and Bollinger Canyon Road. Many months have passed. Chalk Eddie is asleep, wakes up. Veronica takes bandages from his eyes, he sees everything is burned and yet new, green plants are growing here and there. The western base of Mt. Diablo is a wasteland, unrecognizable.

Chalk Eddie sees the digital clock in the car and seems to freeze, peering at it. I type, YOU ARE DREAMING; INSIDE YOUR DREAM, WAKE AND TAKE CONTROL.

Nothing happens.

From the ground all around the car, hands begin to burst from the burnt soil. Burned hands followed by burned arms and shoulders and faces. I am reminded as I watch this of the time a friend saw a dead cat near a sidewalk construction site while walking to school, and how upon returning home that day she saw that the dead cat had been submerged in the cement and now looked as though it was pushing its undead way out of the ground, its jaw mostly gone, an expression of supernatural feline rage consuming its features, and how she laughed and laughed. I had such a crush on her.

But what comes out of the ground now are Prophets, burned and decaying, teeth sharp, converging on the car. I type, LOOK CLOSELY AT AUTO CLOCK. Chalk Eddie does so, and peels a sticker away: the clock is broken and what he was looking at was a sticker of blurry digital numbers.

I type, FIND DIGITAL CLOCK WITHIN THE DREAM.

A dialogue bubble appears above him, "THIS IS NOT A DREAM, EDWARD."

I type, FIND A LIGHT SWITCH. A bunch of burned Prophets throw themselves onto the road in front of the now-speeding car and it begins to get very bumpy for these chalk adventurers. So many Prophets pile up that the car hits a Prophet wall, stalls, and the occupants stumble out into the burned wastes, to be followed by lurching undead Prophets. I'm leading them with the control, they are following Chalk Eddie and he's running left, away from the Prophets. We run past all sorts of geologic formations: basalt, rock things, other rock things, crystals -- and one strange, rounded crystal. I type, TAKE GLOBE.

Chalk Eddie stops, looks around, shrugs at me.

I type, TAKE ROUNDED CRYSTAL.

He takes it, the Prophets are converging and I make them run left again. They run past the car and the Prophets are coming from the left now, so I make them run up screen (which I would call North if I didn't know it was East). Mt. Diablo gets progressively closer, and in the third screen up, there is a hand mirror in the crook of a burned oak tree. I type, TAKE HAND MIRROR.

Chalk Eddie takes the mirror. I turn him and wait, expecting Prophets to come from the South. None appear. Mt. Diablo blows its top. With a sound like a dropping bomb, the top of the mountain starts whistling toward us. I turn him to run down screen, and THUD. The mountain crushes us all. Mocking chalky music commiserates with us and Chalk Eddie appears outside the second door, looking at me with his arms crossed, tapping his foot.

I send Chalk Eddie through the door again and this time, the moment the undead Prophets begin to appear, I type, GET OUT OF THE CAR. He does, as do V, Max and the nice people. They follow hobbling, limping Chalk Eddie to the mirror; some undead Prophets are following, but not as many. Chalk Eddie leads the way, at my behest, to the crystal. More Prophets are there, but nothing -- oh --

Mt. Diablo just blew its top, but more spectacularly than ever before. Water is flowing in around it from all sides, and now a bigger, scarier Prophet (Boss Prophet, I'm guessing?) appears, gnashing his teeth and charging down toward them. The chalk music is ominous and exciting. 

I type, PUT CRYSTAL IN FRONT OF MIRROR. Nothing happens. I try, PUT CRYSTAL ON MIRROR.

Chalk Eddie puts the crystal on the mirror and it clicks. He looks at himself in the mirror and his face is huge.  He looks at me, smiling like I do; I begin to understand why so many ex-girlfriends are still angry. The Boss Prophet is getting too close, so I run Chalk Eddie and his entourage down and right, two screens each. 

It takes a moment, but the Boss Prophet is at the top of the screen, coming toward them slowly.

I type, PUT MIRROR IN FRONT OF PROPHET. Chalk Eddie looks confused. I type, SHOW MIRROR TO PROPHET. Chalk Eddie looks alarmed, scratching his head. I type, REFLECT PROPHET'S FACE.

Chalk Eddie steps in front of the Prophet, they struggle; the music reflects said struggle. Finally, with Mt. Diablo exploding in so many different colors that one wonders if this is a Sid and Marty Kroft production, Chalk Eddie gets Boss Prophet to look at his magnified reflection. To positively thrilling music, Boss Prophet freaks out, has a heart attack, convulses several times, melts, explodes, then dies.

Text appears as a heavenly banner; it reads, "Thus, holding a mirror up to corrupted nature, you destroy Evil with Truth. So Mote It Be!"

Chalk Eddie, Veronica, Max and the two nice people all join hands and dance in a circle. There is a star in the center of the circle, shining brightly. Max joins paws and dances upright, in exactly the manner a dog would dance if he could, and yet remarkably graceful. Max is athletic that way.

To triumphant music, our Honda rolls on and we all get in; it sprouts wings like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and we all fly off to the East, toward the mountains, avoiding rocks and chunks from Mt. Diablo.

Chalk Eddie appears outside the second door and gives me a thumbs up. I'm getting very sleepy. I need to lie down, but I want to play the game, still. 

As I'm thinking this, my chair and table become a recliner with a tray and I have a blanket over me. There are electrodes to stick to my temples and a few other places. I place my right palm against the top of the controller (tip of the joystick, if you will -- and I know you have, zing) and as I start to fall asleep, 

I am in the Chalk World! Am I CHALK EDDIE?!?!

Bolting upright, it's hours later. I can tell. I lay back down. I breathe deeply. I stay calm.

It takes a couple of tries, but after a few near misses I am able to open my eyes in Chalk World and not freak out. Everything feels the same, it's just made of chalk. So there's the smell, but that's easy to deal with. 

I step toward the third door. I open it, step through and close it behind me. On the other side is a lecture hall that doesn't exist at Solano Community College. All I'm carrying is the Riverside edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

The lecture hall is full of Monsters.

And there's a creepy old Grandma with two long narrow legs segmented like a thirty foot tall Preying Mantis. She's long-leggity stepping over the chairs to come after me, screaming at the Monsters to get me, to bite me, to tear me and devour me before I can figure the way.

The Monsters are doing her bidding.  I turn to run back through the door. It's closed. All doors are closed, locked and barred. 

There is no escape.