Chicago Exodus 

Chicago Exodus

//This is the first half of Chicago Exodus: Book two of the Travelogue Saga, a fictional story I wrote in my away messages on AIM. I'll probably finish it up soon if you want to read it at the AIM screen name "then mattf says". It's really not formatted for this site and not designed for a non-serialization. But anyway, here it is.

Matthew Fister
Chicago Exodus
Part 2 of the Chicago Travelogue Saga

Reality twisted, bent, made right angles with itself. "What kind of nonuclidean fast-food restaurant is this?" I thought to myself.
"What would you like sir?" asked the distorted, ethereal cashier.
"A cyclopean cheeseburger and a side of eldritch fries."

The say black holes are dark, sucking in everything, even light. Infinite density, yet as small as a point in size. My wallet reminded me of a black hole, for it was empty, and I had no means of paying for my fast food.


The cashier stood glaring at me.
"GET OUT!" he bellowed.
Immediately I turned and ran of the McThulhu's restaurant, exiting in front of a strangely empty Chicago street. "What was that rhyme again"

Look left
Look right
Look left again.

I crossed the seemingly safe straight. Darkness enveloped me as the static grip that I had on my y-axis disintegrated. I fell into an exposed man-hole. The problem was that I forgot to look down.

When you fall you lose all sense of time and direction. When you fall into darkness the universe is fundamentally changed. As the light above faded to a point, and then a distant star, and then nothing, I became the center of my universe. There was nothing else. My concerns, my goal of having a perfect trip to Chicago, my dreams of a perfect disappeared. I became nothing more than Matt Fister, and nothing was going to stop me.

I must have fallen for five minutes. Then, as though gravity was reversing iteself, I slowed down to a stop, floating in the oppressing darkness. After hovering for 30 seconds, With a jerking sensation, lost my phantasmic grip and slid out of my spot. This time I almost instantly hit the ground with a thud.

The darkness vanished, and my eyes struggled to get a bearing on my surroundings.

As my sight focused on my surroundings, I became aware that I was in an entirely white room that extended limitlessly in all directions. The roof appeared to be a dome sloping upwards in all directions and girdled with cocentric circles of lights. This lighting scheme had the effect of eliminating my shadow. I searched in all directions for some indication of an exit or some kind inhabitant of this bizarre structure.

Directly behind me I spied two black dots that appeared at the edge of the white room's horizon. As I made my way to them, the circles of lights above became ellipses, skewing away from me. The dots grew closer, and I could see that they were two black buttons, one in the shape of a triangle and the other in the shape of a circle. I reached forward and pushed the triangle button.

Suddenly, after pushing the triangular button, speakers roared with ghastly bravado:

Bah, bah, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, marry have I,
Three bags full;
One for my master,
One for my dame,
But none for the little boy
Who cries in the lane.

The music stopped, the lights violently clanked off, and I heard a rumbling behind me, where the other side of the room would have been.

Slowly, a sliver of light appeared there. It widened into a crescent, and I walked toward it, shaking in fear.

I reached the center of the room when I felt as though time stopped.

"Matt," a voice whispered to me, "you are a lion on a pool table, you are a man with dragon wings, you are a child in Kindergarten, you are a leaf pedastal. Remember, in the words of Marcel Schwob, 'Laughter is probably doomed to disappear'. Remember the words I sayeth, for I am Ernie to the Max, God of Surrealism."

My universe became white, faded to blue, turned purplish-yellow, tie-dyed itself, and faded back to the darkness of the chamber with a single sliver of light. This encounter made me want to run real-fast, like that kid in that RPG I once made. who ate the peaches.


I seemed to have a memory of walking into the crack of light. There on the pedestal was a blue, glowing orb. I picked the the orb up and suddenly the room began to descend. I can no longer tell if this happened or not, because I was back in darkness in the large domed room, staring into the solitary crescent of brightness.

I walked again, this time for real I thought, into the crescent of light. Inside I noticed a floating face, translucently shimmering.

It said to me "This is not for you."

I immediately knew that this was my arch enemy, Mologmar Teggen. I had never met a Mologmar Teggen before, but somehow I knew he would be the scourge of my life. I was truly frightened.

Behind the ghostlike face of Molagmar Teggen, I made up the shadow of a corridor. I ran straight at the face, and passed through it. As I did this, Molagmar's projection bellowed, "Stop!" I kept running

The stairs led downwards winding around a tight, steep square. I put my hands on both railings and launched myself downwards, sliding down approximately 10 floors.

The staircase led to commercial looking hallway in which high powered winds blew in my face.