Into the Other - Prologue - The First Nights
Most people would describe me as an oversleeper, a drop out, or a slacker. They would of course be perfectly correct in their description but that is only half the truth. Those who know of the other half of my life - which this tale tells of - have described me as royalty, a great warrior, and a just ruler. Most have called me Andy Smith or Andy for short. No one knows me as Mr. Smith. No one has ever thought me deserving of the title of Mr. Those few who describe me as royalty call me His Highness Sir Anthony the Great, the Bringer of Light and Death, and the First King of the Other. It’s a long title, I know. The full title is used only on formal occasions which I do my best to avoid. I am generally called either Your Highness or Sir Anthony. Those rare few whom I consider friends call me simply Anthony.
But I seem to be getting ahead of myself. To tell this tale out of order would be far too confusing for even the nimblest of minds to follow. It is confusing enough told in as linear a fashion as possible. Therefore I shall start at the point which all must consider the very beginning of my tale and skip and skim over those parts of it which have no real impact upon the tale of how I rose to be called King.
I was born at the stroke of midnight on December 21, the winter solstice, in a hospital. Nothing interesting happened after that for 8 years, 14 hours, and 13 minutes. I lived a normal life for those 8 years, 14 hours, and 13 minutes. I went to school and got mostly B's, a few C's, a couple rare A's. I had a few friends. My family and I moved across the country twice. There are of course are a few funny stories during that time, but none of any real importance. The first two interesting events which occurred in my life are admittedly uninteresting in and of themselves. It is their effects on later events which make them truly interesting. The event that happened 6 years, 15 hours, and 43 minutes after my birth was my returning home from school to find a new puppy in my yard. He was holding a stick in his mouth that was twice as long as he was and looked totally content. He was a mutt with long brown wavy hair, a tail like a whip, and the friendliest personality you can imagine. I fell in love with him on sight. He was a birthday present for me; I had been begging my parents to get a dog and they finally had. I named him Styx after the stick which always seemed to be in his mouth. We had recently been studying greek and roman mythology in school and I simply thought that sticks was spelled Styx. Instead of naming my dog after a piece of wood, I named him after the river of the underworld, a name which in the end was perhaps more apt. It was 11 years, 364 days, 2 hours and 18 minutes later that Styx died. I was going to be 18 the next day and I was in the middle of my senior year of high school. I decided that I was too old to cry so I didn’t.
The next interesting thing that happened to me occurred only 5 hours and 59 minutes later, midnight, exactly 18 years after my birth. I hadn’t felt like doing much of anything after Styx’s death so I was asleep. More precisely, I was dreaming. It was a fairly common dream of mine. I was standing alone on the sidewalk in front of a creepy, rundown old house. The sun had just set, it was dusk. Usually, I would walk up to the front door, every plank of the porch creaking with each step I took. The door would slowly open by itself just before I reached it. I would enter the house and just as I crossed the threshold, the door would slam behind me, leaving me in pitch black darkness. I would turn back, trying to open the door and finding it locked and unable to open it. My eyes would slowly adjust to the little light filtering through the dirt covered windows and the dust filled raggedy curtains. I would start making out the dim shapes of chairs and other furniture in the dark. Then a deep raspy voice would speak from out of the dark and I would wake with a start. I could never remember what the voice said, but somehow I knew it always said the same thing. Admittedly, these dreams were dreamt before I became 18 years of age. Yet these dreams were not truly events in the practical sense. They occurred several times with slight alterations and therefore have no specific time of occurrence which accompanies events.
This time was different. I was still standing on the sidewalk in front of the house when my trusted companion Styx joined me. He rubbed up against the side of my leg and licked my hand, letting me know he was there. Then the strangest thing happened, Styx looked up at me and said, “You know there’s a backdoor, right?”
It was so unexpected that I woke up, not in fright but confusion. I lay in bed and silently stared up at the ceiling. That was when I looked over at the clock to see it showing 12:01. I didn’t sleep at all the rest of the night. It wasn’t until the next night that I returned to that dream.
There I was, standing looking at the rundown house when Styx joined me once again. This time he said, “Don’t freak out.”
“I know,” I said, “Let’s go around back.”
“This way,” Styx said as he ran to the side of the house. I followed his wagging tail around the house to the back where there was a screen door. I found Styx sitting, waiting patiently for me to open the door for him. I opened the door and followed Styx into the house.
“There’s a light switch by the door,” Styx said, turning around to look at me.
I looked, and sure enough, there was a switch. I flicked it and the light came on. There wasn’t much light because all but one of the bulb of the ceiling fan were burnt out. One of the fan blades was snapped off and lying on the dust covered floor. White sheets covered the four chairs and small table in the room. Dark wood panelling covered the walls. I followed Styx’s footprints through the dust to the stairs near the front door. He was sitting at the top of them, looking down the stairs waiting for me to join him.
Dread was beginning to build within me. I could not begin to tell you why at the time. I found myself walking up the stairs when I had finally decided that I wasn’t going to walk up them. I couldn’t stop myself as much as I struggled. It was as if my body was responding to commands not my own.
“It is alright,” Styx said. “This is what is supposed to happen.”
“How do you know that?”
“This way,” Styx said, ignoring my question as he wandered off.
I followed him down the short hallway and through a door into what appeared to be a bedroom. There was no bed, but there was the large empty spot where a bed should have been. There was a large backed chair facing the window. Without being able to see the occupant of the chair I knew he was there.
Styx was lying down in the large empty space where the bed should have been.
“Welcome,” said the raspy voice of the chair’s occupant.
“Who are you?”
“I am the man sitting in this chair.”
“What?”
“I am the man you are talking to.”
“What is your name? What are you called?”
“I am called many things. I have been given many names and taken many others.”
“What do I call you then?”
“I don’t know, wouldn’t you know that better than I?”
“What did your mother call you?”
“What ever gave you the impression I had a mother?”
That’s when I woke up. I am sorry for it being such a horrible place to end the dream. It is not really where I was meant to end the dream. You see, I was woken up by the sudden sound of my horrid alarm clock. I had always been a heavy sleeper and my alarm was set to blaring mostly static at full blast from the other side of my bedroom to get me to wake up in time for school.
I shall not lay out the boring facts of my day for you as they are boring and therefore make for horrible story telling. I shall simply say that I concluded that I had dreamt an exceptionally strange dream and proceeded about my day as usual.
In fact, I shall here and now lay out a significant portion of my life, at least the uninteresting half. For you see, the rest of my life is best described as two lives. One, the traditional one, lived in this world. The other lived the my dreams which I would come to know as The Other. The uninteresting half is of course the traditional life lived in this world known as Earth. In that life I graduated high school and went to college for a semester and a half before dropping out. I failed several courses while barely passing the rest. The reason being because I spent much of my time asleep, dreaming, missing classes, and - in one case - final exams.
For a time after I dropped out of college I lived as a bum in the local tent city. After a time, I was given a house which could easily be called a mansion to live in. The reason I, a bum at the time, was given a mansion is because of the other half of my life, my life in The Other. I shall get to that reason much later in the story.
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