Join My Cult - Original Falcon Press

ack to the state it had been in, preparing for another round with the
monstrously engaging hunchback of Denmark, Kierkegaard.
Chuckling at himself, he lay down and grabbed the book. At that very
moment, he heard footsteps, now slowly descending the staircase. Each
step was deliberate, unusually loud, as if a great weight was slowly
rolling down the steps towards him. Alexi froze. Every muscle in his
body went rigid. An icy chill shot up his spine, and directly into his cerebral
cortex. The footsteps had stopped now. He could see that his door
was locked, which did provide some degree of comfort. His mind was
somewhat prone to paranoia; he had spent many hours of his childhood
planning every single action he would take when that dark intruder
would break into the house. It was only a matter of time before that
intruder snuck in and turned everything upside down. All of those
memories came back to him in a flash. He groped around under his bed,
finding a knife that he kept there. And he waited.
As he waited, time slowed down. Listening to his breathing like
enormous bellows, he suddenly felt alive. Awake. All of those passing
moments, lost between the cracks between one memory and the next,
became a cohesive whole. Singular. Then, in the middle of his terror, he
found himself laughing. When he was young, maybe seven or eight, he
could remember lying in bed holding his stuffed dragon. Terrible
insomnia kept him up at night, the air would turn sparkling green and
purple, a lattice work like spider webs on the wall, and he would sneak
about his room with a marker, tracing them with a sharpie.
The two beaded eyes of his dragon stared at him. With a chill that
froze him in place, froze him into awakening, those two eyes turned to
regard him and he heard a voice in his mind say “I am going to have to
leave you now.” The next morning his mother chastised him for drawing
all over the walls again. He endured it, silently, not able to explain, his
dragon tucked safely under his arm. And when the bus came, and he
passed the big 13, he realized with sudden panic that the dragon was no
longer there. He had left.
The bronzed doorknob was rattling now, shaking back and forth
rapidly. Alexi leapt to his feet…darkness. Complete, absolute darkness.
There was a sensation of timelessness, of floating… Suddenly, he was in
his room again. He heard a rattling sound, and the doorknob was unscrewed.
His mother stood there, frantic. Apparently she had been trying
to get in for more than ten minutes. Looking over at his clock, Alexi saw
that it was two hours later than when he had gone upstairs to investigate
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