THE JOURNAL OF LUCAS BROWN. PART 3

March 27th, 2001

The dancing stops so infrequently.

It waits quietly for a moment for any slight movement for it to pounce on or bounce off of. I try to stay still, lying flat on my back with my arms at my sides and regulating my intake of air until my breath is as shallow as possible.

Still, it doesn’t work. So I have to get up, try to walk through the dizzying cacophony it spills as it surrounds me with what feels like malicious intent, it wants to corrode my senses, to make my mind collapse in on itself.

I can’t help but think there is a connection between this phenomenon and the latest development that has occurred within the confines of this room.

It sounds impossible, but I am quite sure that the package I was delivered has grown.

On the desk where I placed it right after signing my name and inheriting its existence it waited for me to glance upon it again. It looks bigger, not by much, but it definitely is larger.

There is no return address on the package and the characters that make up what is supposed to be my name are barely legible, faint as if the pen was running low on ink and scrawled as if the hand that parted with them was unable to guide it steadily.

I will keep an eye on it.


March 28th, 2001

My experiment begins now.

I have to answer the call of certain necessities, namely going to the bathroom. I tiptoe as silently as possible, making sure the door is left open after every visit as to not awaken the groaning call of the rusted hinges. The toilet itself is becoming full with my waste, I refuse to deal with what I know will come with the noise of using the flush. My standards of living have been violated by this faceless intruder. No, that doesn’t make sense. I can’t rightly say it is faceless, or bodyless or that is does indeed have a face or a body or even a shape. I can’t fathom a word at this moment for what it feels like, I just know that it is there.

After my last visit to the bathroom I glanced over at the package again. This time, its shift in size was undeniable, it had expanded at least 3 inches since I lay quietly observing its behavior from my bed.

Back to my experiment.

I have chosen to prove to myself that the package is in fact growing, that my eyes are not to blame for this inexplicable metamorphosis. I have placed it in one of the drawers in my wardrobe. The ordeal this caused was awful but necessary if I am to prove this point. I closed my eyes and forced myself to follow through with it. I am sure I nearly lost consciousness, but I managed to open my eyes and do what I intended to. When I entered it, the package took up approximately half of the drawer. I will check in intervals of 2 hours for changes.

The clock next to my bed tells me it is 4 am. Sleep is out of the question, there must be a purpose or discoverable reason to this.

I need to know what it is.

THE JOURNAL OF LUCAS BROWN. PART 2

March 24th, 2001

Ever since the incident in the car park I have not been myself.

Something about those vibrations shook a part of my insides so that I am never comfortable, I feel uneasy and unable to concentrate.

Everything looks a little different. I can’t say why or in what way, but everything is definitely different.

The remnants of that period fear seem determined to not slip away, they still appear to be coursing through my veins and instilling in me a continuous dread of its return.

The rudimentary task of acquiring a pen with which to write these words was imbued with this foreboding.

I leant over my desk towards the shelf, hand outstretched towards the object. My fingers folded all too softly to pluck it with success and it tumbled down from the elevated wooden compartment. As it did so time seemed to slow down. I watched helplessly as it crashed to the floor, the fact it had done so reverberating around me in quick succession, one after another mimicking the sound that came before it but at the same time not being quite identical.

Why does that matter?

I know I need to keep using the pen, as much as it may scare me.

March 25th, 2001

I’m not myself again today.

But then I think I may never be myself as there is no way of me knowing what that is. This morning, as I lay upon my bed with the world spinning around me, bouncing back off of itself to torment me a knock at the door slowed things momentarily. I eagerly got up, rushing to the door in the hope that it would be some news, something that would set things back to the way they used to be, some kind of eraser that could blank out whatever caused me to fall into this seemingly reasonless yet somehow familiar spiral. Let me explain. I am completely in the dark as to the nature of my plague, yet I feel a deep seated understanding and this only makes me fear it more.

Back to the knock at the door.

There stood a uniformed man in light blue. He looked down at a clipboard in front of him and then straight into my face.

“Are you Lucas Brown?” he asked me

I almost collapsed at the utterance of my own name. I held myself up by putting my hand on the wall for support. He looked confused. I managed to force a nod in his direction so he handed me a piece of paper and asked me to sign it. My hand shook as I placed the ‘L’ on the page. I slowly followed with the pattern of letters I had been designated at birth yet they felt so alien. What do they mean? They mean nothing? They are at once nothing to do with me, mere scratching, and yet somehow indicative of my existence. I have been given symbols with which to state my being and it sickens and terrifies me. I dropped the pen, my hands unable to maintain a grasp, it crashed and caused the storm again, I was feeling intensely ill by this point. He picked it up and thrust the package into my hands, eager to get away from me.

I closed the door as quietly as I possibly could, but the slight click it generated still made me shudder.

I put the package aside, completely disinterested with what might be in it (I still have not opened it).

I could not get the sound of the uniformed man saying my name out of my head. I made the impulsive decision to shout out my own name.

It shot out of my mouth, so comforting at first, so beautifully familiar, but as it danced around the room it quickly became something else all together. It became someone else.

It is me and is not me at the same time.

I think I will lie down again, I can feel it watching me, the thing that is both me and not me. Maybe if I close my eyes for a while it will stop dancing.

I need it to go away.

THE JOURNAL OF LUCAS BROWN. PART 1

PREFACE

In submitting this to the wider world and minds a lot sharper than my own, perhaps more sense will be made of what has somewhat eluded me.

On 25th of November 2007 I moved into a small room that had been advertised in the local paper. It was on the third floor of an old building (my knowledge of such things isn’t great) and had probably once been the servants quarters. Stone steps led from the back of the main house beneath up to its sole entrance. I had only looked around the place briefly before agreeing a rent with the landlord. It only took me one car load to transport all my items, and after about an hour and a half the abode was kitted out to be something I would call my home.

I didn’t find it until the third day of my living there. Not having enough things to fill out the large chest of drawers, I had had no cause to open the bottom compartment. Why I did so that day is something I can’t figure out and if I think too much about it in relation to chance, fate and destiny my head starts to hurt in a way that makes me feel hollow.

Since that day, my life has been completely overrun by an unquenchable intrigue. It started as a casual curiosity; I would spend perhaps an hour of free time a day examining my bizarre discovery. Yet slowly but surely, I found myself drawn towards it in a way I cannot articulate. My curiosity snowballed into obsession and I found myself renouncing most other activities in order to spend more time investigating and contemplating the journal. Once I had read it, I never seemed to stop looking at everything around me through a lens that shattered every feeling I always thought was certain.

I have tried to find out more about the man that left it behind. The landlord claims the room has always been uninhabited since he purchased the house, that I am the first occupier under his watch. This completely contradicts the dates Lucas wrote on the first few entries to the journal.

I don’t know why, but the possibility that this is all some strange joke does not seem feasible to me. The feeling I get, the feeling I am getting now as I write this cannot be part of a joke. Lucas Brown left something behind, but it wasn’t a joke.

I have promised myself this is the last I will say on the matter. With these last words I move out of that place, both physically and mentally.

I hope.








March 22nd, 2001

At first, they fascinated me. I didn’t know why, nor did I particularly care, all I knew was that they held some strange significance. Back then, I found them so compelling that I would seek out locations whose contours would allow for such vibrations and shout out in open invitation. I attempted to beckon them forth from chasms, great hallways and anywhere else where a successful invocation looked possible.

But slowly, for reasons I cannot conjure, that all changed. It started with a gradual loss of interest. No longer would I troll for spaces in which to summon them (this wasn’t a conscious choice, I just found myself not doing it). The fascination began to leak out of my head, dripping away until I couldn’t even remember the joy they once instilled in me, and I didn’t seem bothered about trying to revive it. For once, I was comfortable in my own skin and gave my periodic fixation no further thought. They were now only slight echoes in my memory.

It was a strange reversal.

Something had happened to me which caused them to have an effect my former self could never have predicted. I had parked my car in an underground lot, It was dimly lit by the artificial glow of overhead fluorescents ( that seems significant, although I’m unsure why). I automatically went through the vacating routine, culminating in me slamming the heavy door. That was the trigger! It shuddered back at me through quivering layers. Surprised, I called out a frightened “Hello?”. That only made things worse. Several me’s (although not actually me’s) returned the question (greeting?) in quick succession, each delivered by a voice more faint than the last (or maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was that the me it returned was being slowly extinguished, its cries becoming more faint as the universe suppressed its existence until it simply ceased to be.)

Or maybe it’s not that either.

At least here, in my writing, there is little chance of them coming. I dare not speak these words aloud.

Why do I find this so terrifying?