Bubble Whispers ( Progressive Collaboration) by Arcadia Tempest

UPDATE** OUR STORY HAS AN ENDING ….WE HAVE GOT OUR CHARACTER BACK HOME. MANY THANKS TO EVERYONE.
WILL POST OUR COMBINED WRITING EFFORTS TOMORROW :o))

OUR STORY
The open door was begging for me to enter so I obliged.
I tripped on the rug on the way in, there was something under it, or should I say some things tucked away securely from prying eyes, yet bulging ubiquitously so that one couldn’t help but fall flat on one’s face.
As I fell I noticed the bulge moving a bit.
A hand reached out and grabbed my ankle.

I knew this place. It felt like I was revisiting a room in my past where symmetry and harmonization had lived in faultlessness, though now I realize that such apparent perfection was an illusion.

I closed my eyes and remembered his coffee-flavored kisses.
The room smelt strangely of last night’s pizza, there was still remnants of champagne in the lipstick smudged, stemmed glasses and more unnerving still, 50 ways to leave your lover was playing in the background.

But none of this explained the bulges in the carpet or why I was lying face up on the rug. “Do you mind moving a bit to the right?” a deep voice asked from somewhere within the rug. I edged further to the left and he let go his grip on my ankle.

Then I heard another voice tell the deep husky voice to stop talking and with an air of confidence that held no real substance I gingerly rolled over and grabbed the corner of the rug and pulled as hard as I could.
Two people were laying there.
Oh my God one of them was…….my doppelganger.
And then she spoke, “I’ve been waiting for you for ages to lift the mat. I’m sick of being a doormat. It’s time to stand up and be counted."
I threw the rug back over her face, be damned if today was going to be the day…so I crawled as fast as I could toward the light emanating from down the hall.
That was when the realization hit me in the face with the force of a thousand lashes next to that other me was another me in a masculine form.

I was starting to think that the door-to-door espresso machine salesman was taking things a bit too far.
He had grinned at me as I sampled his coffee proclaiming "its gunna take ya to another world!”

I wanted my world to return back to what it was.
My monotonous world made up with the scrub of a thousand shoes with each plate washed with each bed made and remade with every shirt thrown my way to iron that enslaved.
My world that had the dig of a stiletto heel in my heart from when I last really danced ….with him.

My mind I realized was not my own.
This freakish world in which I had landed held me in a helpless mass of trembling terror. I was at their mercy.
Where was the real me?
I searched inside myself for the door that would release me from this nightmarish lapse of faith.
Would I be able to find the key in time?
Would I be able to separate the myth from truth?
I gazed at the female and male copies of me and felt the scream rising in my throat.

I closed my eyes and took three deep slow breaths in an effort to calm myself. When I opened them, the cubicle architecture of the room began to swirl around me, and kaleidoscope.
It was as though all matter telescoped into a tube-like opening. I pinched myself to make sure that I wasn’t imagining this.

My mind was no longer intact as I walked further away from the insanity of reality searching for the entrance to the world I left behind, a thousand doors and nowhere to go, cryptic messages on each.
I wondered if I would ever dance again as I sipped my espresso laced with LSD and mushroom tea.
I then sauntered into another world full of Gummy bears that fell from the sky.
“All mine, mine, mine.” jumbled out of my mouth.
“By the way you fuck release my ankle please”…said another voice.
I knew who that voice belonged to.
Someone who never failed to be there when I needed them.

It was the look of surprise on Jon-Phineas’s face that I next recalled; had he never seen one person suddenly become two, singing Harvest Moon on the back of a magnificent African bull elephant before?
Surely yes?!! Or was this all just a dream…..?

This trip had to end. I had journeyed way too far. The entities were open mouthed in their laughter spewing nonsensical jingles that played along the raw nerves of my spine.
Like looking in a twisted mirror, my faces staring back at me. Lightning flashes struck followed by rolling thunder.
Dark clouds loomed where the ceiling used to be.
I stood alone as the rain washed over me. I had passed through a door not knowing how or when.
My bare feet stood in something red and sticky. Why was it not a running liquid with the falling rain?

Suddenly it came into focus and there it was.
My heart has dissolved at my feet refusing to move, determined to drown me in hurt.
Why was all this happening to me?
It was as if life had exploded all around me and there was nothing making sense of where I had come from.
Why was the rain not washing it all away?

I started exploring the cryptic message doors, opening one by one and peeking inside, and then quickly closing again as behind each, it seemed, was another doppelganger “with” a different person.
Kind of a doppelganger banger going on.
Just as I reached an unmarked door Jon-Phineas came from nowhere and we entered that room together and closed the door.
If you can’t beat’em…

Jon-Phineas be damned, no joining the doppelganger gang.
I wanted me just me and I wanted the world to right itself.
I wanted the rain to stop falling and the red to stop being so red.
I closed my eyes for just a moment and found myself back inside the madness of door after door.
Would this nightmare ever end?
I heard an elephant trumpeting down the hall and the clang of tambourines. Darkness seem to be falling around me, wait a light, that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, maybe, perhaps.
I started a slow walk toward the light.
I emerged into the light where a hundred thousand voices screamed at me inside a coliseum.
“What madness is this?” I thought as a heavy force thrust me into the arena.

Mind magic….
Must get my heart back together to spin another tale.
If I can undo, I can weave again and my heart will spring to life.
I must walk out of that door.
“Don’t turn back” said my own voice.

I wondered tentatively “Would this be a good time to go to the bathroom?”
Now that spoke a good omen to me.
Some sense of normality seeping into all the ‘Hydra Madness.’
Reality was close…. and yeh coffee always made me feel like a pee.
A force was with me as I turned and said, “I need a piss.”
The force replied, “No time for that, dear,” and pushed me hard.

I resisted and closed my eyes tight but opened my mind wide to expel all this madness and reclaim a sense of normality, a sense of sanity…..the voices hushed as my mind started to calm, my pulse started to ease and flow in a reassuring and smooth rate.
Once silence had settled around me, it was only then that I dared to open my eyes.

I was lying on the floor like a broken doll discarded by a bored child.
My coffee cup was in two pieces next to me with a black brew abstract stain on one side.

“Get a grip,” said the voice I’d heard earlier.
“I don’t really think all that melodrama is needed, do you?”
I looked under the rug I’d first tripped over.
“There’s no need to invent more of you; one seems loud enough.”
“Who are you? And where are you?”, I asked.

“Didn’t you say you needed to pee? Go to it, there’s a good girl. I’ll explain life and everything when you return.”
And with that, the hand reached back out from under the rug and patted my ankle.
I felt oddly reassured and at peace as I headed off to the loo.

Upon my return the room seemed oddly quiet….a stillness different to the madness of pre peeing time…. whispers and an odd sense of calm were surrounding my thoughts as I reached for the broken coffee cup.
My palms were sweating as I turned the piece over in my hand I noticed a trickle of bright red blood and then the laughter started.

I laughed until my sides were aching and my breathing heaved in staccato gasps.
All those years of avoiding and dodging but the rest had found me anyway.
I was amazed how so many had decided to come out all at once.
Still the up side of having so many personalities you are likely to get a gem like my wonderful Jon-Phineas, he looks out for me.
Mind you I really could of done without that woeful woman with the bleeding heart business…. oh dear.

And when we get our hands on that door-to-door espresso machine salesman he sure is going to be one sorry fella.
He must of put some kind of chemical enhancer in my coffee which reacted with my meds.
Hmmm or was he part of my new gang?
Well he makes crap coffee!