A Nightmare in Red.

[Cowardly Leon]

I've had some strange experiences in my misbegotten adventures but this one has got to be the strangest of them all.

It was about six months ago I was with the whole group dealing with a cult in Anaheim. I mean the entire group. You'd think that with so many of the group all in one place they wouldn't need me but yeah... they dragged me into this anyways.

We loaded up my RV and went on a crowded road trip and well... you ever hear that old saw 'No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy'? Yeah... turns out it's pretty dead on target.

We didn't have any plans to go in noisy and hot, we had spoken to the contacts we had in the local police force to be ready for what we were about to do to get no less than five messed up girls away from the harem of the leader. (I swear Bernie must have offered their families a group-rate)

Long story short things got a little hectic when we found out they had some sentries ready for intruders. Big Hairy sentries that had claws, canines and walked on two and four legs. Fortunately good old George was ready for that. Man... I was worried at first when he put himself between them and us but he was a former golden gloves boxer. He was damn proud if that too, wearing bright silver rings on his meat hook-like hands that not only were as good as brass-knuckles but they even spelt out his old nickname. The "POST MANN" Believe me when he calls out that corny catchphrase of his you remember there was a reason he was a contender. So there he is 'delivering the pain' to the big-and-nasties while I run on ahead to get the RV and get it into position to get the terrible tweens on board.

Anyways I start driving down a narrow alleyway when a man in a bright black robe steps out of a door and motions to some people up on the rooftops. It's then that what I had thought was a pipe connecting two structures unrolled revealing a huge 'curtain' made of... well... I think it was Mylar. Basically it was huge and so shiny it looked like a mirror shining the lights of my RV back at me, blinding me.

All I remember was someone shouting "No! No you fools! Not THAT truck!" and suddenly I felt like I was being stretched out like slab of silly putty. The lights and the sensation were over with as quickly as they happened and other than a moment of disorientation I was ok.

Or so I thought.

I stopped the RV at the location we agreed and suddenly I was struck by how eerily quiet it was. I was expecting alarms, bells and whistles. (...and big hairy things with teeth and claws but I wasn't complaining about that.) I took a moment to kill the engine and listen to the total silence... silence that was only occasionally punctuated by a far off howl or a scream from some distant location.

I then realised that it was nearly dawn when the shinola began hitting the fan but now the sky was so dark once more. I mustered up my courage enough to step out of my vehicle and look in the direction of the sunrise.

There, rising in the midnight sky of the east and barely illuminating a city skyline that came from one of Tim Burton's worst acid trips, was a pale sun the color of fresh blood.

Ladies and gentlemen.

I can say with all honesty that at that moment... I suddenly needed the location of a phenomenal pants-specialising dry-cleaner.

[Cowardly Leon]

Sorry for the delay in putting down the next part but lately I've been needing to watch the sun rise. Especially considering the place I came from doesn't HAVE a sun.

Yeah I know I saw a sun rising in the east on my first 'day' there but that's only my first impression. Let me continue and elaborate on my experience.

So after a quick wardrobe change in the RV I took a better stock in my surroundings. Yeah it looked a lot like Anaheim and yet... not. As I slowly drove through the streets I became more and more aware of the differences. First of all I wasn't even getting ONE bar on my Jitterbug, so there was no cellphone service at all out here. Most of the streets and buildings were there but they were spiky and littered with gargoyles. The normal sounds of the city were gone, replaced by feral beast noises and sounds of human suffering. There was a sun of some kind moving slowly across the sky and yet... Well, I was suspicious as to it's status as a real sun. I mean the sun doesn't knock over the antenna on a tower as it passes overhead, does it?

There were cars on the street but they were all parked and covered in dust. Not only that they were all real 'yesteryear' models. I mean I saw cars there from the 40's up to the modern day, and other than a few that were really torn to pieces, nearly all of them with little-to no real show of wear or tear. They were like someone just bought them and plunked them on the street for show. Under far more normal circumstances I'd have stopped the RV for a better look at one of them but... there were THINGS on those streets other than vintage autos.

While the streets were emptier than normal there were people, but the way they moved it was like they were sleepwalking through life. As odd as this seemed I could have easily shrugged it off, I mean this was California. Odd behavior wasn't all that odd over here. No, what really freaked me out was when I saw a man in a tattered three-piece suit run out of an alleyway. He looked haggard and in bad need of a shower and a shave, he was limping and obviously in a panic. He started hobbling down the street when two... hell I don't know what they were. They looked like a man and a woman but the woman was missing half her head and it was hollow on the inside while the man had a large knife buried in his chest. They followed him out of the alley and overtook his shambling gait with their purposeful and almost robotic strides. They dragged him, struggling and screaming into a nearby building and you know what? The sleepwalkers didn't even react to this bizarre abduction.

After that I just drove. I think I was in shock because I have no memory of reaching the seashore until I did, and it kinda snapped me out of it. There was the beach... only the beach didn't stop. It just kept stretching out further and further into the distance as if the tide had gone out and didn't know where to stop. There was no sun, there was no surf and I was in a city of sleepwalkers and monsters who looked like men.

I think I lost it a little right there. I just sat at the wheel of the RV, giggling and crying for a while. I didn't know if I was in some kind of post-apocalyptic future or walked right into an episode of the twilight zone but I came to the realisation that I wasn't going home. Magic, temporal physics and all that stuff was beyond me. I wasn't a wizard or a scientist, I'm a tinkerer. Without someone to help me out of this jam I was... doomed. Whether horrifically in an unnatural manner or perhaps naturally, I was with all likelihood going to live and/or die in this land of shadows.

Oddly enough that thought seemed to calm me. It was like admitting it to myself that I was going to die, let me move onto the other side of my fear and panic where there was just... a calming acceptance.

So I got my crap together, so-to-speak, changed into my best Hawaiian shirt and got my camera out and resolved to be the last tourist on Alter-Earth.

First stop... a certain magical kingdom.

[vulcan]

*gulp*

[Cowardly Leon]

Well my trip to the amusement park was pretty good. I left my RV parked at a... uh... 'seaside' hotel that I was using as a base of operations, and used my electric scooter to get around. No other traffic on the roads than parked cars made for some easy driving, and the lot was fairly open. Sure all the best spots were taken up by some seriously bizarre mounts and vehicles but I didn't mind the walk. I don't know who had the horses but it looked like someone had beaten a dead horse or two until they got up again and began pulling the chariot again.

All in all it was easy getting in. There were no lines at the gate, the Girl at the booth wasn't even taking money she was just handing out tickets to whomever came past (cute girl for a sleepwalker) and the turnstile was well-oiled.

The park on the other hand was really... different.

If I had to describe it, it was like someone tried texting 'Amusement Park' to the contractors and autocorrect turned it into 'Abusement Park'. My ghawd, where do I begin?

Half the bumper Cars had small sharp spikes lining the interiors and the other half had exaggerated steel rams on the front. The Carousel animals were suspended from the mechanisms in the roof and people were tossed into the fenced-in area when it was on and either managed to climb onto the backs of the unoccupied animals or get trampled under their wooden hooves. The log flume ride had people strapped to the fronts of the logs and while not expressively harmed wound up half drowned with each 'splashdown'. They had a 'swing' ride but instead of swinging chairs on long chains they had... meat hooks. Everything had a sinister, painful bent to it.
I took a ride that normally would be the 'Let's be neighbors, one and all' ride, I was handed a BB Gun and found out that in addition to the relentlessly cheery repetitive music, people had been tied to automatic pistons and jostled about while the riders were encouraged to treat it like a shooting gallery.

Despite how disturbing it all was I began to see a pattern. Nothing here was really built to kill but instead to torture, maim and cripple. It was if there was a way to run the world on pain and misery this park would be the equilivent of an oil refinery. The weirdest thing was after you just accepted the fact you were in a chamber of horror with a corporate sponsor it kinda got... fun. Everything you found in our version was here too... just the worst aspects of it.

The Jungle Boats let you watch real predators chase real people dressed as explorers, hunters and tribals, the N'awlens area had voodoo and slavery right up front an in your face, the Futureworld section looked more like the daily grind you saw in that old movie Metropolis although I gotta say the one that was my favorite was Pyromanics of the Caribbean.

Throughout it all I walked past sleepwalker tourists, staff and strange Mannikin people in dark glasses who acted like security. There were also people surrounded by large entourages . Those people seemed to be VERY aware of everything and had people fawning over them like they were A-list celebrities. I swear I saw some of them who looked just like some I recognise from back home.

I wound up with a lot of memories and pictures from my whole day there... such as day is in this twilight world... and went back to the hotel completely unnoticed.

Or so I thought.

[Cowardly_Leon]

Just on the border of your waking mind
There lies another time
Where darkness and light are one

And as you tread the halls of sanity
You feel so glad to be, unable to go beyond
I have a message from another time

Yeah. Been having that ELO prologue running in my head every so often. Nothing seemed to really catch the spirit of that place quite like it.

No sun but there was light of a kind from somewhere. No oceans but the beaches were present. No Anaheim but there was a city that looked a lot like it. During those moments you forgot how alien it was you could almost believe that you were someplace normal.

On the third day I dubbed my location 'Nightland', hoping that if I gave it a name it would somehow lose some of it's power to scare me.

So, interesting thing about 'Nightland', while there are 'sleepwalkers' wandering around the streets and working many jobs there seems to be not quite enough of them to go around. For example the seaside hotel I was staying in had no staff and as far as I could tell, no guests.

I was pretty much on my own there, helping myself to the laundry and stuff. At times I would even pretend to be the owner to amuse myself, sometimes I might go to the 'forever beach' and pretend I was on vacation, I went to a movie theatre once and got the projector to work... some really disturbing films in Nightland, but I sat in the empty audience and heckled my heart out... Denial isn't just a river in Egypt ya know.

Guess this population deficit was starting to get to me. I nearly jumped out of my skin when there was a knock on the door of my room. When I covered enough. I picked up my stun stick and cautiously opened the door and found a weathered-looking man and a middle aged woman standing there in fairly ordinary clothing, asking if they could come in where it was more private.

I know what you're gonna say about inviting people into your personal space but I didn't care. I think I was starting to go pretty crazy there and was desperate for real conversation of any kind.

The woman called herself Judy and she was some kind of quantum physicist-scientist type and the fellow was a Colonel in "her majesty's armed forces" who went by the name Thompson. They were part of a small organization of men and women who had come to 'Nightland' to establish a beachhead there while they study it and act as a combination of military observers and (if necessary), hobble any threats to the 'real' world.

Turns out there's a lot of threats from this place.

Even after all this time I'm still having trouble wrapping my brain around the information that Thompson 'touched base' on. Apparently Nightland (which they apparently really liked as a name and used as a designation) was a dark mirror of my earth and run by a batch of aristocratic monster-men and women. There was a kind of an evil twin of every major city run by one of these Lords or Ladies and they treated human misery almost as if it were some kind of currency. There were factories full of people working day-in and day-out making weapons for their armies and oh boy... there were a lot of those. The Nightland Aristocrats had monsters and magic and even spies who looked EXACTLY like people we had in the real world...

But in our favor they really didn't LIKE each other, and many of their plans were hobbled by their own private ambitions and spiteful dirty little wars.

Anyways it seems that Judy and Thompson were quite impressed with my ability to blend in by being obvious. Because I wasn't lurking about, apparently I was assumed by any.. one watching that I was another Sleepwalker.

They had taken a look at my motorhome and seen the gear inside and asked what I did for a living and well...

Colonel Thompson drafted me.