The Monogram Monograph: Part VII

To Karl Kessler's ire it was Dr. Melcher who got in the first word. “I should have known it was you. You are prime among my counterparts...if any of them were to do this to my Earth it would be you.”

When he spoke it was Kessler's voice that came out.

Kessler managed to prop himself up on the couch. There was no light in this alternate incarnation of his apartment, but somehow he could still see clearly. The moon through the window was enough. “Dr. Melcher. We meet at last.” He spoke knowing full well that this was a dream, and Dr. Melcher was only a fragment of himself. He had just something about “counterparts” but it was only a blurred mirroring of his own visions of Melcher and his other selves. They had each other's face, all right, but that was only because Kessler dreamed Melcher into existence.

“Charles Kessler. You know, I've tried so hard to avoid this encounter—so that I could still pretend that I was not like you,” Melcher said. “But you were the one who first warned me that I would become a strangler of men. You, murdering people out of the ecstasy of emotions of seeing your treacherous wife.”

“My memories are true,” Kessler said. “Virginia is true, as well. She is merely lost. And I suspect her being lost is my mind's analogy for my illness. If I break my illness, she'll come back to me.”

Melcher paused before speaking again. He glanced at the floor, and on the hardwood Kessler could see a shattered tea cup. Tea hardly seemed the drink of choice for a man like him but evidently he had been having some before Melcher came in. “Why do you talk about illness? You don't have clarity of your own sickness. In my dreams, you lose consciousness every time you kill...”

“I've never killed!”

“I know.”

Kessler blinked. “You know? Then why did you accuse me of killing?”

“Who knows in this crazy world?” Melcher spoke the words demeaningly, as if they were a taunt somehow.

“This world is crazy. Because it's in my damn head.”

“I can't believe I was wrong about your lack of awareness of your inner nature. But we dream each other...improperly, I suppose.” Melcher was dressed all in black, something that wasn't pants or a shirt that just blended into itself seamlessly. Now whatever that garment was seemed to shimmer in the quiet moonlight as he paced the apartment. “It's the Divide. It cracked the Multiverse in half, and made a barrier that distorts one's view of...a world that was once part of everything we take for granted. It makes us hate our others across the Divide—it's a Divide that blurs ideology and thought and feeling. The Divide got into our dreams, Karl, that's how it manifests, and it's muddling human consciousness. You dream something and that something happens on my world, but I dream something back and it happens on your world.”

“That's impossible.” A flat statement. No room for questions or exclamations.

“I suppose you don't even know what the Multiverse is yet...” Melcher mused.

Once more, Kessler was left to blink his eyes rapidly. That was the second time he used that word... “Multiverse.” Multi- was many...-verse was...

Before he could go further, the door came in again, except now Kessler realized he had broken the door to the ground when he had burst in. The door didn't matter—the speeding shape came barrelling in, and it was Dr. Brewster. Kessler should have anticipated that he was being followed, and it was fortunate that his escape hadn't given him hope, or he would've lost that hope in that instant. But Dr. Melcher whispered something about being a very good strangler, before he seized the half-ape by the neck.

It was important to point out that Brewster was only half-ape. Gorillas, of course, had thicker necks than humans, Kessler knew. But a half-human neck would be easy to crush, especially if one had great experience with doing so. He couldn't look, and it took far too long. He covered his ears to drown out the gagging noises. Soon, Brewster was on the ground, as dead as his twin, Dr. Dexter.

Kessler was on his knees, then, and he felt tears well up. His brains churned like runny eggs—he was choking on the dream now. A dream was a string of nonsensical images, he knew, made of things the conscious mind couldn't fully comprehend, but he had always believed that analysis, that thinking about something, could fix any problem, derive any meaning. He realized that he'd been wishing for this experience to be a blessing in disguise—a chance to rebuild his confidence by mastering his dreams, and finding all the answers to his nightmares and uniting all his selves and losing his fear of being looked at by people in public.

But dreams always moved too fast, at least for him. He was probably too slow, too stupid, to solve the meaning of all this. He had just wanted to go to his appointment. That was all he'd wanted, but that was too much to ask. He kept gagging, knowing that whoever was seeing him do so was judging him. He wasn't a man he was overdramatic he was attention-hungry he was weak he was crazy he was retarded he was insane he was a freak. It was all the old stuff. All repetition, all muscle-memory motions at this point. All true.

Melcher knelt next to him. He didn't touch him, and spoke gently. “Just take a moment.”

“What?”

“Don't speak. Just let it come over you. Don't fight it—don't give in, either. Just let it roll over you like a wave.”

He didn't want that. He knew a wave like that would crush him.

But he had to try something. He was up against the wall. And so he let the waters come on him like car tires, like train steel.

He stopped squirming. His knotted back heaved and relaxed. He took a deep breath, and didn't hold it—he let it out slowly, like sand through an hourglass.

He was still crying when he opened his eyes, but he wasn't ashamed of that anymore. Melcher's face was familiar to him now, and not merely in that it was his face looking back at him. It was like he was a friend who he had just misunderstood all these years. “I can believe that you're real, but not that I've gone to another world,” he said. “I-I've had a couple of breakdowns today, plus there was Dexter's helmet, which drugged me. Melcher, whoever you are, please stay with me until we get this all sorted out.”

“I've expected this day ever since I discovered the Multiverse...I think I have no choice in staying with you,” Melcher replied.

Kessler sighed. “It's odd.”

“What is?”

“Why can't I accept the Multiverse? I can accept the idea of several splintered versions of me running around, I can accept you, suddenly and easily, just by meeting you—but you suggest me that my universe is not the only mode of existence, and there are many permutations of reality—”

“Damn, I am smart in my dreams.”

“—which contain various aspects of circumstance that would be extremely improbable in my universe?”

“This must be the manic phase. Understandable, in the wake of the hormonal stress of a panic attack. I can tell you, Kessler, that it's easier to accept your own madness, your own splintering, before considering the idea that reality doesn't make sense.”

“But reality...does make sense. I'm not religious, even if I believe in something—I've lost too much to be a church-goer—and I still believe that the universe is going in a positive direction...”

“There are many more relative directions than positive and negative.”

Once again, Kessler felt like he was going to throw up. He started shaking, and if there was one thing he hated, it was shaking. To tremble was to lose control of one's own body. Melcher helped him up and set him down on the couch. Melcher returned to his chair.

“Maybe...maybe I should indulge the madness,” Kessler said. “I-I already feel like I should try to...to move through the foreign thing, to try to figure it out and accept it. So that the fear of it can't get any bigger.”

“That's good, that's healthy,” came his own voice back to him. “Walk through your problems. Face them as they are. I will tell you what you need to know.” He could taken it farther from there. He could have explained that fate was cascading around him, and he needed to learn all this quickly before it came up the stairs and through the open door. But the man had had a panic attack, for pity's sake, and so it was okay to let him keep on disbelieving for a few minutes more.

“The Multiverse is a collection of different universes all similar to each other, with a common origin.” To Kessler, Melcher's voice was far away, but that distance soothed him. “Once, it was whole—a single unit. This was a time when dreams were just dreams, unable to impact physical reality in any way. In some sense, that's still true. The Multiverse does not change depending on the dreams of its inhabitants. But there is more than one definition to the Multiverse. Physicists on my world define particles by their spin; the two Sides of the Multiverse, split by the Divide, have a similar quality, in that they 'spin' differently in some minute way. The worlds of the Multiverse are one, but have two spins—two Sides.

“Spin one way, and you are on the A-Side. Spin another, the B-Side. Separate continua occupying the same space and time, more akin to each other than any neighboring Earths in the Multiverse. Indeed, Earth, or some equivalent thereof, is a recurring theme across both Sides of the Multiverse. Our Earth is called Earth-20181. I am from Earth-20181-B, and you are native to Earth-20181-A.”

“If this was in any way true, how would you know the orientation?” Kessler asked, trying to force himself to sleep. He didn't know what good it would do, he realized, as he still believed he was at least half-asleep.

“Because our spaces have common origins and histories, we share at least some morals and aesthetics. We've somehow all internalized the idea that our Side is...gloomier, or harder, than what's possible. Lives here are comparatively brief, Kessler. And our space is weaker, on top of it.”

“Weaker?”

“There's more magic here, which is probably how I learned about you before you learned about me. We have a talent for second-sight...it's tough to explain, just because I can't claim to fully grasp your lifestyle. I've only seen in it dreams, after all, and the Divide makes us dream things improperly, as I said. I'm sure when the B-Side was formed it was naturally weaker, because it is more susceptible to the warps brought on by how our worlds interact...your Multiverse, for example, never had to face the ravages of the Queen of Space, or the Sultan of Kaos. Earth-20181-B didn't have your Virginia Slasher, but when the Queen took control of Earth during the 19^th Century, and relocated millions to the edge of the solar system to work in her mines, it altered our history forever. This was the cumulative effect of my Earth being hit with the dreams of Earth-20181-A...”

Kessler didn't want to continue asking questions. It made him feel stupid. He was succeeding in his quest, anyway, of getting some rest.

“Dreams can break the rules of our universes because the convergence point between Sides is a place that combines all the differing possibilities of both Sides, and in doing, also contains the possibilities of neither. This omnipresent energy field is called the Lost Stream, because all within it, and all who enter, are Lost. If the Multiverse has a canon to it, like the Bible, then all within the Lost Stream is the Apocrypha. Non-canon.”

Kessler was gone from the apartment, in spirit, at least. There was a brief flash of white light, like a rainbow blending all together. This gave way to darkness—a dark room, like the one he'd just left behind (but hardly remembered). He was far away from his apartment, whether it was on the A-Side or the B-Side. As in many dreams, there was nothing to define the room, aside from the darkness.

“But the Lost Stream lashes out against the dreamers whose minds enter it, and contribute to the impossibilities swirling inside. Through the Lost Stream, dreamers change the opposite Sided universe into their personal Dreamland—and dreams begin to change the universe on the other Side.”

Kessler's body seized up. Memories came back pure as they do in dreams, and he was remembering one of his childhood habits, which he held up to the age of ten, where he would have to check the corner of every room to make sure he was absolutely safe from monsters. There was one in particular he was always afraid of, which he'd come up with one early morning in the winter when he woke up much earlier than he was used to. In the living room, his five-year-old mind had become obsessed with the idea of an enormous angry bird, constantly behind him, just out of view. No matter how fast he spun he could never look at it properly...and strangely enough, with his imagination how it was, he was worried that the longer he couldn't see the monstrously feathered thing, the stronger it would become—mind over matter.⁸

“That's what I mean when I say we dream each other improperly. Your life has been molded to my will; my life to yours. And yet we still have free will—incidents can be set for us, but we are still actors within them. In any case, it was the choice of one actor who determined that there would be a Divide in the first place.”

Kessler wasn't alone in the room. He was never alone, not as long as his thoughts were with him, but there was something else here. He could see their eyes, and hear their breathing.

“There are tales of an object that was once in the center of the Multiverse, if the Multiverse has a center. It was built by the Angels, who are known by many names, the most infamous being the Heroes of Gaudium. These beings built the object either as an Edenic paradise, or a Hellish prison. Whether there was a Serpent in Paradise or a prison break, it didn't matter. Something in that place got out that shouldn't have. It did so in a manner so violent that it created a permanent rift in the Multiverse. One that permanently altered the reality of time and space and the psychology of all of its inhabitants.”

The figure came towards him, simultaneously looking ordinary and strange. “You've always wanted to see a Marvel, haven't you, Charles?” the familiar man asked. “Or is it Karl? It's hard to keep you all straight.” A grin in the dark. “I have been growing fat on what's been coming out of your head, on both Sides of the Multiverse. I think it's gotten to the point where you really can't get along without me. Even if originally it was I who could not survive without you.”

Kessler blinked. As Marvel spoke, he still heard Melcher's voice filtering back to him.

“The thing that created the Divide found a way to travel between the Sides of the Multiverse—there have been other beings, ones of great power, who are known to us folk of the B-Side, who cannot accomplish such a feat, meaning the demon's might is great indeed. Poor Dr. Dexter's Gateway evidently found a way to replicate the method technologically, even if he'll take that secret to his grave—the Lost Stream is too horrible of a barrier to cross. And yet this creature can shrug off impossibilities like they're nothing. I-I don't mean to jinx us, Kessler, but in one of our dreams I learned the demon's name...and it's...”

“AAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!”

Kessler's scream split the apartment—he could not resist the scream, as Marvel's fingers revealed themselves, at a touch of his shoulder, to not be fingers at all.

His brain still hot from nightmare, he nearly screamed again when he saw the calm in Melcher's face. “I guess I don't get a choice in whether the name's spoken or not. The creature's name is Agh.”

Kessler couldn't divine meaning in those words—he rubbed at his temples, the Monogram flashing in his mind, its presentation of the letters A and B now surprisingly clear...now contextualized. He had reached his final madness, and he could feel the hum of other universes around him. His cosmology broadened and people become temporarily violent when that happens.

Marvel was in the apartment, then; when you speak the devil's name, he appears. As Kessler's reality fell apart, and the significance of his once-singular universe, along with his once-singular self, shrank away to nothing, he blamed Marvel. Either he'd made him dream of Virginia till he believed she was real, or he took her away from him. When he slaughtered people in his dreams, or wanted to slaughter them in his waking life, to make up for the fact that they kept him out of things and stared at him meaninglessly, she was the crux point that somehow justified it all. The approval the killer he needed.

Hadn't Melcher said that Marvel was a demon, though? The demon “Agh”—with a name not spoken, but always screamed, the raw, prototypical expression of a scream. His life was a scream wrapped in flesh, and now Marvel was that scream in a body of its own...

He was a vat of churning hormones. He was trembling and sweating. He hated the scream wrapped in flesh, and in that hate he forgot his fear of it.

He threw himself across the tatters of his home, and Marvel, with his mustache and spectacles, remained grinning as the two touched. In an instant, they were gone, and now it was Dr. Melcher left alone. The doctor shuddered icy terror flooded over him.

<< Part VI                                                                                                                         Part VIII >>

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8. In anxiety disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, the sense not only of impending doom but one's own responsibility for said doom is not uncommon. Oftentimes those who have suffered from the stigma of debilitating mental disorders for many years, or survivors of physical or psychological abuse, suffer from guilt which causes them to blame themselves for misfortunes in their own lives or the lives of their loved ones, which in turn forms and taps into a phobia pertaining to magical thinking which even healthy people can possess. The belief that one's thoughts can change one's life independent of action is a natural aspect of human psychology—Kessler repeatedly refers to this idea, especially in referencing “Dr. Melcher”'s theories, which are by his own confession a product of his own psyche. Were Mr. Kessler to be freed from his illnesses he would be quite a valuable psychiatrist under the proper training. And yet he is doomed to be forever crippled by his illness; a testament to the fact that the universe is inclined towards punishing the most gifted of us. For the rest of his sad he will be trapped with his demon—his monster bird, whom he could never find in the living room as a child.

I write this prior to having completed the section detailing Dr. Melcher's monologue, and Kessler's dream. There is a Multiverse, to be sure—I mentioned it earlier, with Dr. Dran's Earth-3133. I am certain that if there was some sort of event which separated the Multiverse into “layers” beyond the ordinary dimensions one can expect to compose a universe, the Suki Institute would have detected it. It is intriguing that Kessler was able to conjure up the idea of a Multiverse, but it is clear by “Melcher”'s references to a seeming mythology for the Multiverse that his stumbling upon the word without the aid of a Suki Institute education was accidental; his Multiverse is the creation of a fantasy writer more than a scientist. The “B-Side” is a symbolic expression of his “Dreamland,” and he all but admits it. There is only one Side to the Multiverse.

I have not been able to write in several days. As time goes on, my ability to find links between my own ongoing troubles and Kessler's experiences diminishes. That's to be expected. At this point, Kessler crosses yet another threshold, one that lies even farther away from home than his “B-Side.” Again, I intend to express nothing but admiration for Mr. Kessler; that he was willing to delve into the strange and unfamiliar demonstrates his strength. I hope to address this in greater detail at this monograph's conclusion.

I never traveled much prior to my honeymoon. Vivian and I couldn't wait until graduation to get married, and we took a semester off in our junior year so as to properly accommodate our celebration trip—we chose to go to Australia, as Vivian wanted to look for information on a new author she'd discovered, John Filmore Sherry. I can scarcely remember the details of the book but, loving her beyond words, I wanted to indulge her.

It was a beautiful trip. We traveled by car across the country to reach California, where we embarked on a ship that brought us first to the sprawling meadows and mountains of New Zealand before bringing us northwest to Melbourne. The country overwhelmed us; even gifted students of psychology are unable to resist culture shock. For the curious mind, culture shock is ecstasy incarnate—a chance to learn of new things firsthand, the best mode of learning. It's easy to become afraid of life and deny oneself these experiences; becoming like poor Mr. Kessler and others. But Mrs. Vivian Gina MacCarron (stubborn girl, have I mentioned that?) was not afraid of life, and she gave me a sense of that life for my own. We ended up forgetting our quest for Mr. Sherry, I think, instead choosing to go west to see what awaited us in the “untamed Outback.” We found hurriedly that the ground was rich with scorpions, and that kangaroos breed like rats. But even faced with plethorae of venomous and foul-smelling creatures, we enjoyed ourselves. A comrade of ours at Suki had built us a super-radio that could pick up signals far away from transmission towers, so we would sit in the sun and listen to music. Vivian fooled around with the thing in the evenings even after I'd retired to our tent.

Eventually in our wanderings we came across a tribe of Aborigine bushmen. One among them would travel to the cities to visit family, and he spoke English. We began to get along, all being amiable people, and he invited us to stay with him and his people for a few nights. During this time he related to us some of the stories of his people, taking care to give us the understanding that these were private things, not to be violated. Thus I shall not print any reference to them in the final draft—I will only, for my own benefit, log the word he used to refer to a most interesting concept, that of the Aboriginal notion of alcheringa, known roughly in English as “Eternity” or “the Uncreated.” Perhaps that, someday, will be worthy of a monograph of its own.

Upon departing their company, with new spiritual knowledge in mind, we continued further west, until eventually we came to Perth. Vivian fell in love with the city, and so we had to stay a few weeks. We already knew we would need to take next semester off as well, but that was fine. We already had degrees, and fortunes. It was a carefree time, and for the first time in my life—the very first time, a time I still always think back to when the Bat comes to me at nights—I forgot my troubles. I forgot them so well that this day, I can hardly remember them; but maybe it's that everything was eclipsed by a far larger trauma.

...I do not want to write this, but I've started, and I know from my work that I must walk through my problems, rather than away from them. My hands are shaking—my nose is slick with sweat from my forehead. Now I'm remembering when we began traveling with someone else. When we met him he called himself Seph Freder. He appeared to be German but he assured us he was an expatriate, and not a Nazi. He had been hiding in Australia with the intent of fleeing to the United States, entirely for the purpose of becoming a citizen. He, too, was a scientist, though he doubted any of his knowledge would be overly useful to the war effort. He was largely concerned with making glue.

Vivian took to Freder very quickly, even if she initially seemed embarrassed by his appearance, having to excuse herself when first seeing him—to my confusion he excused himself as well, though they both returned within twenty minutes. My first impression was that they had both merely had to attend to matters in the bathroom, but the incident stuck in my mind all the same; there was something familiar about Freder, and something bizarre about his accent. In retrospect, I should have understood, but I didn't.

Without being too explicit, Vivian and I had been regularly indulgent of our marital duties over the course of our honeymoon. This ended in Perth. Certainly there had been some nights wherein we were doing something else, but this was different. Vivian continued to make it no secret that she was visiting Mr. Freder, night after night after night. I began to lose sleep over this, inevitably. That was when I became accustomed to her habit of coming home at around two in the morning, humming quietly to herself.

I am a rational man, but there was something clearly locked within that humming. That was why I remained silent the first few times I noticed this ritual. I lost my nerve, truthfully—I was afraid of embarrassing myself by accusing my own wife of anything, even a minor offense. But I began to dread the night, and the sleeplessness that came over me, and I began to consider, by way of my own dignity, that the pain of this sleeplessness was somehow her fault. I still refused to believe it entirely, however. I needed to merely run a small experiment—one of the nights, I finally decided to say something.

I greeted her, in fact. I had been dozing, sitting on the bed, but I perked up instantly when she arrived. I didn't finish saying “Hello” before she yelped.

That was it. That was all I needed. I tried to ask, “Do you still love me?” but it only came out as, “Are you being unfaithful to me?”

For a second her face had the purest fear I had ever seen, and it broke my heart. But I remembered my own fear—the fear of the last few nights, where endless hours I should've spent dreaming were instead flooded with the noise and pressure of a racing heart. I wanted to relieve that fear immediately and what came to me next was the natural instinct of a husband with the intentions of becoming a father. Days prior I had discovered Mr. “Freder”'s room number; I wasted no time in going there. Vivian tried to stop me, which only fanned the flames—I burst in, and seized the German escapee by the throat. I shook him, knowing I would be forgiven if this was merely a misunderstanding.

“Who are you, and why are you taking my wife away from me?”

But there was something wrong about the desperate face that stared back up at me. When people are strangled their skin turns red, and later blue. He was still pale as my hands crushed his trachea—and now I could see there was a seam of some kind just below my left index fingers, weaving its way over the surface of his skin...

I stopped choking him to loop my fingers under this seam, and I pulled hard. “Freder” screamed, and for a moment I wondered if I had become unhinged enough to flay the man with my savage jerk. But underneath the skin I removed was another face, and I saw at once that it was Oliver.

It all fell into place.

They were geniuses, after all, he and Vivian. They would have anticipated that I began formulating theories when I felt her flinch away from me when Zabor was searching for us. As I later learned, they would have also viewed it as a warning sign that I had read Zabor's notes when working with the authorities against him. If they were to continue the affair they had been conducting for nearly the entire course of what Vivian and I shared—what I thought we shared—they would need to be clever. I dimly remembered something about a letter from Oliver marked as being from China. To sail from China to Perth, to disguise oneself, and to conduct a desperate final indulgence of an affair before marriage stole away one party from the other forever, would all be easy feats for a student of the Suki Institute. I had a vision of Oliver creating the mask on the boat ride over, in between late-night radio talks with Vivian—the masks were a special polymer of his, no doubt. He was a polymath of polymaths, that boy.

It didn't matter. My nose is sensitive and my eyes recognize the look of tangled sheets. I braced myself to kill Oliver, our friendship gone in a moment. But Vivian came up behind me, and with an unknown object struck my head. Everything went black.