Tba

Claire’s Journal

1 Day Since “The Appearance”

I should do a SOAP note on the ghost showdown but right now it’s hard to think. The shit from the Waterman house feels like it happened to someone else, and trying to pull up the memories is like watching TV through the door of a scummy shower. Dissociation. Not exactly a shocker. What’s truly insane is that everything Andy told me about last night feels sickeningly real and clear. The spider. Some alt-universe version of me. Bizarro Claire.

What Andy saw sounds a lot like the monster from the fever dream. No, not a monster, I need to shake that mindset. The dream-spider isn’t what I first thought—it wasn’t toying with me or stalking me, it wasn’t boxing me in, I wasn’t prey.  It was trying to protect me. It attacked that consuming darkness, that black mass of evil lurking just outside my field of vision. Or maybe my comprehension. And while that’s fucking awful enough by itself, I’m more worried about what the darkness was doing there. Who it was after.

Honestly, it could be any of us. All of us.

Before I can deal with the dark, I need to know more about the spider. Why a protector figure is manifesting as my worst fear. I need to know how to purposefully and reliably move in and out of the Dreamlands, how to control my form, maybe even use it to my advantage. Most importantly, I need to know that when I go to sleep, I won’t slip into spider mode, shit webs all over the house and cocoon my teammates into hero smoothies.

Andy and Cole don’t know much about the Dreamlands, and they don’t know of anyone else that does. But I’ve got a few leads. I wrote my dissertation on religion and folie à deux, focused on cases like the Seven Sleepers and the Searching Suns, which led me down a rabbit hole to the aboriginal Everywhen, or the Dreaming, a land inhabited by ancestral figures with supernatural powers. And that tracks with the vision of the indigenous people we saw in the cave, right? The ones that gave us the pemmican? Who were guarded by the massive spectral wolf?

Just how fucking crazy have I gone that my first instinct is to entertain all of this as reality? Isn’t it more likely that I’m suffering from folie à deux? That Andy—a convicted murderer who shows literally every symptom of paracosm, very possibly brought on in early childhood as a coping mechanism for extreme trauma and later used a defensive strategy to deal with horrific crimes—has induced psychosis in the rest of us? That we’re all living in Andy’s Everywhen? And if that’s true…does that mean the Shallow Ones might have been actual people? That the ghosts…?

It's not possible. That can’t be possible. I would have heard it on the news (unless I’m rearranging that reality as well). Cops would be after us (maybe they are).

I should leave. I should get help. Berg would listen. He’d keep an open mind. Then…he’d force admit me. And if this is real—if any of this has even an ounce of truth—then I’ll be sentencing him to death. Maybe myself too, without the rest of the group for backup.
Okay, so not that. Not yet. For now…I don’t know. Just keep away from the others, in case Webster comes back hungry.

Claire’s Journal

3 Days Since “The Appearance”

I’m stacking up rejection letters from Wilto Yerlo, Gumurrii, the Koorie, the Badanami, the William Cooper Institute and the Harvard Committee on Australian Studies. The message back from UniSA seemed weirdly pissed off. I don’t understand. My inquiry didn’t even sound unhinged. If anything, it was painfully dry, rooted solely in sound psychological and sociological practice, with a hypothesis that…oh. Fuck. I told them I wanted to write off the entire basis of Aboriginal culture as a mass delusion. That’s…damaging. On so many levels.

Okay, so obviously that’s not what I want to do. I’m just trying to explore every possible avenue of explanation, academic, scientific and socioreligious. And since the academic and scientific routes are currently blocked…

There is one name from my previous research, a member of Wirangu nation working as an aboriginal guide--Yarran Darri. After coming in too hot with the universities, I’ll lob him a softball--start with questions about the meaning of spiders in the Everywhen.

Claire’s Journal

4 Days Since “The Appearance”

I heard back from Darri. We traded cell numbers and connected in WhatsApp. That man is so kind that it’s almost upsetting. After expressing a puzzling but seemingly genuine excitement at reconnecting, he reminded me that aboriginal dreaming stories have been written off as fairy tales, but once upon a time they were regarded as truth, or at least tools to convey cultural information to the youngest members of the tribes.

He said he knew a story of the Spider Clan passed down from the Koori. Everything from that point on got weirdly metaphysical; Darri gave me a disclaimer that dreaming stories contained many layers of knowledge, the first of which was secrets. As you would expect, these can only be passed down to persons with the same level of knowledge or higher than the storyteller. The secrets are never told within the story but are remembered separately from the story itself. This is an important component of any story, and it is the knowledge of the secrets which determines the level of the person’s worthiness to own the story.

For a moment I was afraid that Darri wouldn’t--or couldn’t--share what he knew. But instead, he kept explaining the layers of knowledge. The second layer--the laws to be obeyed. The third layer--the lessons to be learned.

Then the story of twin siblings, Mararan and Marareen, the rulers of the Spider Clan.

It was long. The gist is that a war between Mararan and Marareen resulted in two kinds of spiders--some that are big and fat and live in dark places and have poison bags that will kill you. The others who live in branches and bushes and trees and who weave nets across pathways who will not poison you when they bite, but who know the secret of how to cure the bite of the big venomous spiders. That was the law to be obeyed. The moral is that when a promise is made, it must be kept--that was the lesson to be learned.

As for the secret...Darri wouldn't tell.

It was interesting, but I don’t think it’s what I’m looking for. *Note to research Cherokee spider myths instead. After all, they were the ones we saw in the vision at the cave. And we found a book in Cherokee at Waterman's house. There's clearly some sort of link.

In the meantime, I thanked Darri and asked him to tell me more about the Dreamtime. Specifically, if he thinks it can be entered. And if so, how.

Claire’s Journal

7 Days Since “The Appearance”

Inola Awiakta. She’s a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and a guardian of American indigenous history and culture. Of the people I contacted, she’s the only one that contacted me back.

She was not as easy-natured and forthcoming as Darri. In fact, she put me through an intense pseudo-interview process, I think to gauge the source of my interest and my intentions. I finally lied and told her that I was having persistent, lucid dreams about the Cherokee people, and about spiders (even though I’ve never had a single dream in my entire life). It was as close to the truth as I was willing to get.

After that revelation, she softened, but only a little. She told me about the Cherokee myth of Grandma Spider, how she carried a piece of the sun in a clay pot halfway across the earth to bring light to the darkness. I asked about other tribes and nations, and she described how spiders are sometimes tattooed on a woman who is held in high esteem. In Hopi culture, the Spider Woman assumes the role of creator of all living things, including humans. Among the Navajo, she is a heroic helper and wise advisor who protects the innocent and restores harmony. She said that regardless of the culture, the spider is usually associated with a woman or creation, and always a powerful figure of good and positivity.

Which is interesting, but tells me nothing.

I steered the conversation to dreams. She said that many American indigenous tribes believe that human beings have two souls, one of which travels at night and lives in the dream world, outside the limits of time and space, where they can visit the future or the past, enter the realms of the ancestors and make contact with their Guardian Spirits on a higher level.

This sounds a lot like a different way to describe the Aboriginal Everywhen, and the Dreamlands. The twin souls part sounds uncomfortably close to what I’m experiencing with the spider, which Inola referred to as my “manitou.” When I asked her what it meant, she explained it was like a Guardian Spirit, only attached solely to me, so close that it was now part of me. Which made as much sense as any of this does.

I asked her if there was a way to purposefully enter a dream to speak with…me. She said outside of normal dreaming, that I might try a vision quest.

The first step for a vision quest is to be purified in a sweat lodge, then bring a gift of tobacco to a remote spiritual location--a place that is felt to be unnatural, formed by neither humans nor nature--and remain there while fasting for four days and nights. I asked Inola if I could speed up the part where I go brain-dead with ayahuasca or mushrooms, and she said that I could, which definitely bumped the vision quest higher on my to-do list.

She said that during my time on the quest, I should focus on my manitou, specifically asking for its purpose. She said once the vision was done, I should report the interaction back to those capable of helping me unravel the meaning--that these visions were meant to be shared for the greater good of the community.

She also suggested I start carrying a representation of my manitou, something that evokes the essence of its spiritual power. In this way, I should be able to more readily call on the manitou for assistance, guidance and protection. I asked her what that representation should be. She told me to ask the manitou on the vision quest.

At this point, I’d become so comfortable with Inola that I asked her if there was a way to start remembering my dreams, so that I had a better chance of encountering my manitou on a more regular basis. She paused; I’d forgotten that I’d lied to her about the dreams so that she’d speak with me. She had not forgotten. She asked me what was going on. I hesitated; I could have shared with her the vision of the indigenous people in the cave, but something in me was saying that I’d involved her enough.

So I hung up. And took some stock.

Since the prison, my belief in the supernatural has waffled. At first, I couldn’t deny it; the two weeks locked away with the doctor were way too real to ignore. But the farther I got from the time at the prison, the more I started to convince myself that what I thought had happened hadn’t really happened, that I was buying into Andy’s vision of the world as part of my own trauma response, as a way to explain the truly vile shit the doctor had done to me. But, if I’m being honest with myself, I was enjoying Andy’s world, and so I didn’t question it, had decided I’d live there for a while, like an ex-patriot from reality.

Then the spider. That was a shade too far, a stretch beyond belief. Except now, as more time passes, it’s…I don’t know. Starting to make a weird sort of sense? Starting to track with shit from my past? And there's a basis for all of this in indigenous cultures, a way to explain it all that works even better than academia and science...

And honestly, what's the harm in a vision quest?
This message was last edited by the player at 16:46, Wed 17 May 2023.