He thought he would keep falling forever.
But he didn't. That feeling of plummeting went on for a while, and then suddenly it was as if something had caught him from below. Not a soft, cushioned catch, but an abrupt stop, like crashing into a mass of incredibly thick water. Allen's mind was jolted upward, then dropped back down. Light, as light as a half-burned scrap of paper, slowly spinning in the darkness.
It took him a long time to find "himself" again.
The first thing to come back was his heartbeat... One beat, then another, very slow. The sound came from somewhere extremely far away, like someone beating a drum on the other side of several walls. Then his hands; he felt that he had hands again. His fingertips were cold, as if just pulled out of ice water. He tried to move his fingers, but something seemed to be pressing lightly on them, and they moved slow and stiff, like wading through syrup. And after that, his breathing. He tried to take a breath. There was no air. There were no lungs either. But he "breathed" anyway. It was only a vague, habitual motion of the mind, the way people still breathe in their dreams.
It was dark all around.
He slowly "opened" his eyes. He had no eyelids, no eyeballs, yet somehow he could see. That darkness wasn't a color; it was more like a space. It was very deep, very wide, without any boundary. Allen "stood" in the darkness with no ground beneath his feet and no sky overhead, nothing but emptiness above, below, ahead and behind. But strangely enough, he wasn't falling anymore. He was suspended, as if hanging from an invisible thread, swaying gently.
Then he saw the eyes.
He didn't know what word to use for them, but they really were a pair of eyes. Only they were far too big. Too big to be eyes... Very, very far away, straight ahead of him and a little above, two points of dark red light were quietly staring at him without ever blinking.
Allen's heart skipped a beat, then raced.
He remembered now. On the plane, in the clouds, that dark red light that had looked like an eye. Even back then he'd felt that the thing was alive. Now he knew it hadn't been his imagination. It was here, it had been here all along. From before he sank into this darkness, to when he drifted into that current of light, until now, it had never once left.
The eyes were watching him...
Allen wanted to back away, but his "body" wouldn't obey. He wanted to look away, but the eyes seemed to exert a pull, holding his whole mind fast. All he could do was stare back, like a frog caught in a snake's stare, unable even to tremble.
Just when he thought he'd stay frozen like that forever, the eyes moved. They didn't blink. Their light suddenly grew a little brighter, as if someone had blown gently on dark red embers. The red light spread out through the darkness in a faint ring, like oil spreading across water. Allen could make out the shape of the eyes now. Long and narrow, slightly upturned at the corners, like lines carved into some ancient stone statue. They had no lashes, and none of the shifting depths a pupil should have, but they really were "looking." That gaze was heavy. Allen felt as if something had shone through him from the inside out, turning up even those memories that had shattered and been barely pieced back together.
"So that's how it is."
It was that voice again.
It had no direction. It didn't come from the eyes, nor from behind him. It seemed to seep out from the back of his own skull, or to be spoken by the darkness itself, far and near at once, low and heavy, with a faint lilt at the end like a laugh.
"It truly is the same kind of thing..."
The voice paused. In the darkness, those two points of red light came closer. Not because they moved, but because the darkness itself was shrinking, as if someone had gently folded the whole space inward. Allen felt the eyes growing bigger and bigger, closer and closer. Only then did he realize that the thing had a "body." A dim silhouette, almost melted into the darkness, was slowly surfacing from the distance. But it was too dark. So dark that only the red eyes hung there, like two drops of blood floating up from the deep sea.
Then he heard a heartbeat.
At first he thought it was his own, but no. His own heartbeat wasn't that powerful. This heartbeat was very slow and very heavy, like someone with a drumstick striking a drum, beat after beat, somewhere far away. Each beat made the darkness around him shudder. Each shudder made Allen feel a little lighter. He was plainly listening to someone else's heartbeat, yet he felt his own blood flowing to its rhythm... One beat, then another. Closer and closer, louder and louder, until he couldn't tell which was his heart and which was the thing's.
The feeling was unbearable, like being stuffed into a shell that wasn't his own, or like being wrenched bodily out of his own shell. He felt sick, he felt cold, he felt something crawling up along his spine. He wanted to shout, to scream, to beg the thing not to come any closer. But he couldn't make a sound. His mind felt as if it had been shoved underwater, with only bubbles escaping from his lips, floating up one after another and bursting one after another.
"What's this? Shaking like that." The voice came again, and this time it could not have been any closer. So close it was as if someone were speaking right behind his ear; he could even feel the breath. But he had no ears, and no nape of the neck either; he had nothing at all right now. Yet he felt it anyway. It was as if someone had put a mirror inside his head, and the person in the mirror was leaning their face in toward him.
"I haven't even done anything to you yet." The voice laughed. Very soft, very short, like a razor blade slicing through the air.
Allen finally forced out a few words.
"Get lost..."
He had no idea how he'd made the sound. It was thin and broken, like a few threads torn out of his throat. But the thing heard it. The red light in the darkness froze for a moment, as if it hadn't expected him to still be able to speak. Then the two points of light grew brighter. Not with anger, not with surprise, but with a thick, amused glint. Like a cat watching a mouse that's playing dead suddenly kick its leg.
"Interesting," the voice said slowly. "At this stage, and you can still mouth off to me."
Allen's mind was shaking, but he was still "looking" at those eyes. He thought this was probably the last thing he could do. He didn't want to close his eyes. Closing them wouldn't help anyway. Those eyes were already carved into his mind. They were tangled up with the deepest, most frightening things in his memory, like red thread, like burnt wire.
"What... has happened to me..." He squeezed the words out one at a time.
Every word he forced out made his head throb. But he still wanted to ask. Even if he was going to die, he didn't want to die without knowing why.
The darkness went still for a moment. The red light seemed to draw back half an inch, as if sizing him up. The pressure eased a little, but only from "crushing" to "holding." Allen could finally "breathe." He gulped in breath after breath, even though all he took in was black, was emptiness, was that chilling void. It was still better than getting nothing at all.
"You were drawn into the Interstice," the voice said. "The crack between one world and another. That plane of yours just happened to graze its edge. Very unlucky. And very lucky."
The Interstice... Allen repeated the word in his head. He didn't understand it, but the voice was unhurried, as though it were reasoning with a child who couldn't follow what was being said.
"Ordinarily, all of you would have fallen out on one side or the other. Perhaps the human world, perhaps the Demon Realm, perhaps something even further away." It paused, and its voice suddenly dropped, as if ground out between its teeth. "But you're different. Your soul is too much like mine."
Hearing that, Allen felt as if he'd been doused with a bucket of ice water... Like it? Like it how? Which part was like it? He wanted to argue, to say he was just an ordinary person, but the words couldn't even break the surface of his mind. He suddenly remembered what the voice had said at the very beginning, "the same kind of thing." Not a person, not a soul, but a "thing."
"Are you... a person or a ghost..." Allen asked. He didn't know how he'd managed to ask that either.
The voice didn't answer. The red light came a little closer again. This time, Allen could finally make out the outline of a face.
It was very dark. So dark that only a few lines surfaced faintly from the darkness. Deep brow ridges, a high nose, a hard line of jaw. The face didn't resemble most of the people in his memory, and yet it bore an eerie resemblance to one person.
Himself.
Not the "self" he was right now. The man in his mirror every morning. That man in his twenties, hair a bit messy, stubble a bit dark, the outer corners of his eyes drooping slightly as if he never quite woke up. Allen couldn't have known that face better. But this one was far too cold. The same lines, on that other person, looked as though every trace of warmth had been drained out of them, leaving only a layer of skin wrapped around stone. Above all, the eyes. A red so deep it was dark, a dark so deep it gleamed.
Allen heard his blood surge through his body, a rush so strong his vision went black.
"You..." He got out that one word and could go no further.
The face slowly surfaced from the darkness completely and stopped at a point where Allen could see it clearly but not touch it. It wasn't smiling, and it wasn't angry. It simply looked at him, the way one looks at something that has long belonged to oneself. Then it spoke. Its voice was like its face, cold and hard, with a warmth that slowly steamed up from somewhere very deep and very dark.
"Now you understand, don't you?" it said. "What flows in you is something of mine."
Allen didn't believe it. He wanted to say no. But that gaze was too steady, as steady as a wall. He was pinned against that wall, and even arguing seemed laughable. He wanted to shake his head, but the eyes never blinked, nailing him where he was. He lowered his head, not daring to look anymore. He looked at his own hands, hoping to find some proof there that he was still himself. But all he saw in the darkness was a very faint ring of dark red light, crawling from his fingertips up toward his wrists.
He jerked his hands back. It was no use. The light didn't hurt or itch; it was like a thin film of blood that had only just begun to congeal. As he stared at it, for the first time he truly felt that he was being replaced, from the inside out, by something.
"I don't want this..." he murmured.
"Too late," the voice said.
The darkness closed in. From every direction, it wrapped around him slowly, slowly. In his last glimpse, Allen saw only those red pupils, like two lamps that never go out, burning on in the depths of his mind.
And then, all was still once more.