Part XI - 13: Where the Path Leads

The purple tube turned and twisted as I continued to slide down its slippery interior. Loops and sharp turns constantly caused me to lose my orientation as I slid sideways and backwards as much as I did forwards. The speed at which I was traveling was always increasing, but never to the point where it was so fast that I didn't see the turns the moment before I hit them.

I wasn't scared in the least. I could feel Joey right there with me, going down that tube just like I was. Even though I couldn't see him, I knew he was right beside me, experiencing everything I was. So instead of being scared, we were enjoying ourselves. Neither of us realized we were dreaming, but we somehow knew there was no danger.

But just as we were finishing a triple loop with a hard right turn at the end, I felt an incredibly strong force pull me right through the purple surface of the tube.

My panic started to rise when I found myself free falling in space... without Joey.

I reached out and tried to find him, becoming very alarmed when I found nothing but emptiness. No one was out there with me. I was completely alone.

There was nothing but blackness all around me. I wasn't cold or hot, and there seemed to be plenty of air to breathe. But I felt completely naked and defenseless and finally gave into the urge to curl up into a ball to block out my empty surroundings.

Only minutes later, I felt a warmth on my right side. I opened my eyes and found myself laying in bed facing a brilliant column of light.

"Michael?" I called.

A flash of light to the left of me drew my attention to the coin on my nightstand. As the coin began to glow with a white light, the other column of light suddenly flashed and surged forward towards me.

Before I could react, the column of light passed right through me, making every hair on my body stand on end. The moment it made contact I knew it wasn't Michael. This was something far more powerful than anything on Earth. But before I could even process this information and wonder who... or what it was, it was gone.

When I got over my shock, I found myself watching Michael's vortex of light grow to full size, and remembered that Joey should have been here with me. But try as I might, I couldn't feel Joey, or anyone for that matter. I wasn't powerless, just blocked from the real world somehow.

The whispering started again, but something was different about how the sparks of light were acting and the tone of the whispers. I nearly jumped away when Michael's hand formed out of the light and reached out to grab my foot.

His grasp was feather soft, but it felt as if it was pulling energy from my body at a near painful rate. His grip got stronger as my very being was pulled from my body. I felt like one of those Stretch Armstrong toys with two boys trying to stretch me so far that I snap in half. Luckily, just like the toy, I didn't snap in two. But I was pulled out of my physical body and suddenly found myself in a gray place.

There was nothing around me but gray. I appeared to be standing upright on a floor, but when I tried to judge how large of an area I was standing in, I couldn't tell were the floor ended and the sky began. Everything was just... gray.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my 'shoulder'. I turned around to find Michael standing behind me with a grin on his face.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," was the only thing I could think of.

"So how does it feel to be dead?" Michael asked.

"Dead?" I said with a shiver.

"Yeah. Don't worry. You're not really dead. You could say you're just visiting."

"Is this heaven?" I said looking at the nothingness around us.

"Nope. I'm not really sure what this place is, but it's kinda neat. Here, have a seat."

A pair of gray lazy boys and a gray table suddenly appeared beside us sitting on top of a circular patch of gray carpet. Michael walked over to the lazy boy nearest to him and sat in it, almost disappearing because he too was gray in color. In fact, I suddenly realized that I was also gray, and that if I looked too closely to anything, it disappeared to my 'vision' because everything was actually the exact same color of gray.

I pondered on that for a moment before sitting down myself. I didn't understand what I was 'seeing' since everything was one color. No shadows, no different shades to distinguish where one 'object' ended and another began. By looking for these things, everything around me simply melted into a single field of gray, temporarily blinding and disorientating me.

But each time I started to panic from this, Michael made a noise or movement that distracted me enough that everything was suddenly there again.

When I lost my vision the fourth time, Michael said, "Don't try and make sense out of it. I spent nearly two days trying before just giving up so I wouldn't go crazy. And then later I thought that this may be what a blind man would see in his head if he tried to imagine what it was like to have sight."

"Hmm... I guess you're right. No use trying to figure out something that probably can't be figured out... Uhm, how did you bring me here? And why?"

"He thought it would be easier for us if we could 'hear' each other, that's all. He made it work, all I did was pull."

I sat there for a minute with gray goosebumps traveling up and down my gray skin. The thought that I had been touched by God... It was almost too much to even recall what it felt like when that column of light went through me. But when I did, I found myself not really convinced that it had been God. Something about the way it had felt... There was something... individual... something with clear personal motivations that I believed a divine being wouldn't possess.

"Tim, I don't have much time... " Michael said, bringing me out of my deep thought.

"Oh... Sorry," I said a little sheepishly. "Uhm, can you tell me anything to help find them?"

"No... " he said sadly. "But I can tell you a little about what they have done and what their plans are."

"That's even better. With your help, we could set a trap and... "

"Tim, look over there," he said pointing off to the right. "You see that kind of bright spot?"

"Uhm, yeah. It's actually not the same color as everything else," I said, mostly to myself. I wondered why I hadn't noticed it before.

"He said when I see the bright light, I had to enter it. If I waited too long, I would be trapped here forever. It used to be so bright that if we were looking at it with eyes, it would have blinded us for sure. He said if I didn't pass through tonight... Tim, I won't be able to help you after I pass through. And I don't... "

"Okay... I understand. Tell me everything you know, then maybe if you have time afterwards I can ask you questions?"

"Yeah, that should be okay," he said with a look of relief. I had the feeling he would have sacrificed his chance to move on if I had asked him to. That disturbed me because I wasn't sure if I would have done the same if the situation had been reversed.

His expression saddened as he stated, "Steven never drugged Penny to make her do these things."

"What?!" I said almost standing up out of my chair. "Then how did he turn her into... "

"He didn't," Michael said, letting a gray tear fall. "She's been helping him willingly. She's changed, Tim. Steven offered her power and an equal share of anything he gets. Penny didn't even get upset when Steven beat us up. I even think it was her idea to test our brainwashing by raping and beating us like that."

"But WHY? Why hasn't Steven used the drug on her? He must have done something to her to change her! I know she would never do it without being made to. I probably know Penny better than anyone. She and I explored each others... Oh shit. She saw my every fear, every regret, and probably every weakness I have. Oh, man... I'm in trouble if she can remember all...

"But then again... " I said as I realized I wasn't the same person I had been that summer. In fact, probably the strongest weapon she could have used against me would have been my fear of becoming corrupted. But that fear didn't exist inside me anymore. Because I had been limited by all those lines I had made in the dirt back then, anything she remembered about my weaknesses probably would be useless. She would try to make me cross a line to break my will. She didn't know that not only did I want to cross those lines, I wanted to stomp, crush, mangle, twist, spit, piss, and finally shit on the damn things. And then I'd get really nasty.

"Steven started staying with them about two months after you left her with her mom and dad. When her dad stopped having sex with her, she got really depressed. Steven convinced her that everything was your fault and that he could help her get revenge. He really did a good job getting her to hate you and believing that the only thing more important that getting her revenge was becoming the heads of their family.

"Penny invited me and David over to her house for New Years Eve. She said she wanted to apologize for the way she had been ignoring us. We fell for it and got knocked out by their father's tranquilizing gun as soon as their front door was shut. The next thing I knew, I was strapped down in a chair in a laboratory with Steven holding a needle with that green stuff in it while Penny was wiping... <sniff> wiping my arm with a cotton swab of alcohol <sniff>."

He paused and wiped the gray tears from his face, and I diverted my eyes while he pulled himself together. But the moment my eyes left his face, they were drawn to the hard on he was trying to hide at the same time.

"I'm sorry... " he said when he realized what I was looking at. "That drug makes everything they say feel so good to hear, I can't help but... never mind. Ignore it. It doesn't matter to me anymore.

"I sorta remember Penny telling Steven things while he brainwashed me. I think she was telling him how to do it, but I'm not really sure. By the time he was finished, I loved him like a god and wanted nothing else but to do whatever he wanted.

"I don't remember everything that happened after that, just bits and pieces. When I wouldn't tell them about what you did to their father, they thought my... brainwashing was starting to fail. That's when Steven raped me and beat me up. He told me I needed to be tested to see if I was truly faithful to him. Shit, Tim. The whole time he did that, all I could think about was how much I loved him and that I wanted to be his most trusted slave. I passed the test with flying colors, and it was about a week later that Penny called Suzi up.