Shackled Mind

A Truth Not Worth Seeking

Age: 22
Date: Saturday, January 21 2023
TW: violence, disturbing content, insects/spiders

My grandma was dead. She had been for a long time. What I didn't know was that something would happen that would enrage her ghost. She asked me to find the truth. My grandparents' beautiful home was more worn down that I remembered, and longer from the inside than it was outside.
Over this journey, I remember or discover some truths about my grandma that were not true. That she liked making lemon meringue pie just to make obscene jokes about it. That was not true, but at the time her ghost was very convincing.
In the library that did not exist in my waking memory, I found a contract. It was signed between her and my grandfather. They had a verbal agreement to do 'something', but what? They had sealed the agreement by burying the key to it all beneath a stone in the walkway leading to the front door. So I took a shovel, and my ghost grandma and I dug it up.
It was a sparkling, shiny geode. It meant nothing and solved nothing. My grandpa came walking, and I hastily put the beautiful geode shards back. I told him I didn't find anything. Did he believe me? I don't know. He just shrugged and went inside.
Sometime later, I crept down the stairs to the basement. There, my grandpa and a young man I did not know opened a great black door, only it was not a real door. They walked right through it. I waited until they left, and then resolved myself to find the truth. My grandma's ghost was no longer beside me.
Everything became more lucid. As I approached the door and walked through it, it was cold. Frigid, down to my bones.
Inside, it was a catacomb. There was an old, broken coffin and massive black spiders skittered in and and out of it. I could hear their horrendous furry legs tapping against the ancient wood. The room was lit by candles, but it was sickly green.
I stepped forward and looked into the coffin. There, were the empty sockets of a skeleton with old meat still clinging to its bones. But it was not the corpse of an old woman. Oh, no.
The horrible truth of the matter was that it was me.
My grandfather grabbed me and screamed at me. He threw me into the coffin with the skeleton and the spiders. Everything writhed and suddenly the skeleton was on top of me, biting into my flesh. Spiders ran into my eyes and mouth. I couldn't breathe, and my bones wouldn't move when I struggled. I suddenly knew everything. I was not the real me. I was dead.

I woke up, in the dark. My heart was pounding out of my chest and my breaths came fast. But I couldn't feel the air hitting my lungs. The thought swirled around in my head of the dream, and I was too afraid to sleep. But it was the middle of the night, and if I didn't sleep I would ruin my sleep schedule. So I slept, and I dreamt a different nightmare.