#mag120

Statement of Elias Bouchard, regarding the dreams of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, currently unresponsive.  Details pulled directly from subject.

Statement begins.

The Archivist does not know where he is, and in many ways that is correct, for to say that he was anywhere would be an error.  He has no conception of his body, lying on that grey hospital bed, perplexing the doctors: heart unbeating, lungs unmoving, but mind and nerves alive and firing wildly.  Everything but braindead…well.

Almost everything.

His abdomen is swollen, visibly bloated.  It gurgles, it churns, especially audible in the absence of breath.  There is no inflammation, no blood, no necrosis or trauma, all the theories put forth proven false by tests and imaging.  An endoscopic sample of his stomach contents defies identification: a thick and heavy fluid that seems to move and twist and branch on its own, iridescent as oil, infectious and vile in its brightness.  He is digesting normally (and quickly), growing fuller all the time, and so they leave him to it, as they have with everything else.  He is a medical mystery no one feels a need to solve.

Every calorie is put to use.  Nothing excreted, nothing burned, lying supine among the steady chirp of machines made useless by his condition.  Already, days after his initial admittance, the hawklike severities of his face have begun to soften, jawline gentling.  Sawblade hips and washboard chest steadily recede beneath a tide of excess, as snow falling over a corpse.  If one were to touch him, press a finger to his gut, they would find a thin layer of soft, downy fat already accumulated; most of the weight will go to his middle.  Predisposition.  Need.

The Archivist is where he exists so often when his eyes are closed.  He wanders the dreams he was given, and he feeds.

A cold and well-cleaned room, sterile metal tables that overflow with a gentle trickle of blood.  The familiar screen, the familiar woman beneath it, typing IT HURTS.  The long and desolate road, slick with the downpour, a police car’s lights flashing over the unmoving van, the coffin inside with the words carved deep into the splintered wood: I AM FOR YOU.  The train, twisted and pressed in on all sides, nothing but shrieking metal and cracked glass.  A yellow door, the dream behind it gone, the new one something the Archivist is deathly afraid of seeing.  The ants, a terrible rolling wave along the hard-packed ground.  The incinerator, with its burning silhouette inside, ingrained upon the Archivist’s racing mind as surely as the scars left by her worms are ingrained upon his flesh.  The dark building and its two occupants, creeping through it with an alert hunger on their faces.  A moonlit graveyard, peaceful, cool and damp as the rolling, foggy fields stretching out in all directions.  And finally, another dissection room, its single occupant standing calmly, and looking at the Archivist with pity, as opposed to all of the others, who have regarded him with fear and hatred and bitter acceptance.

His eye watches it all, and cannot close.  It pours into him, unstoppable, unending, thick and warm and sweet as honey, and even though he cannot feel his body, part of him knows what is happening.  The phantom stretch and groan and ache of his middle, ever-expanding, obscene and unreal.  He has no choice but to gorge himself at the font of horror.

If he had a choice.  Would he take it?

He wanders, his body here in the dreams lithe, mobile, unburdened.  He is searching, though for what he does not know.  He passes those places he can no longer watch, which no longer feed him: the silent wards of peeling skin; the empty warehouses of thick darkness and frightened children; the rusted train car that smells of eager, infectious hate.

All through it, above him, the shape that gazes down upon him, bloodshot and unblinking, as swollen with the fear as he is becoming.

At last, the Archivist looks up.  At last he looks into the eye that sees all and knows all and clutches at the secret terrors of your heart.  The ceaseless watcher of all that is and all that was.  The voracious infinite hunger that tears at his soul, invoking him to discover, to observe, to experience all and everything and forever and to glut himself endlessly.  It stares into him and it stares out of him and he is falling into the devouring eternity of its pupil even as he devours himself.  He wants to cry out in horror, but he cannot.  He is whole.

He is full.  And yet he wants more, as he always does, as he always will, as he always must.

He does not wake.  Wandering his slim collection of gifted nightmares, passing the grey and lifeless remains of severed dreams he can no longer eat.  He waits, but not for long, before they all begin again.

The only question is when he shall wake…and how large he shall be when he does.