“What are you doing here?” 

The redhead stood at the front door of the house. The door opened to a crack, and the redhead covered it up so I couldn’t see inside. Now that I think about it, calling her redhead is rather degrading, isn’t it? Maybe I should call her by her real name.

“That’s none of your business, Jessica.”

Her eyes widened when I said her name. “That’s the first time you ever said my name and not Reddy.”

“Want me to go back to Reddy?”

Jessica shook her head. “I don’t really care, but I would rather you call me by my name.”

“Okay, Reddy.” 

“Fuck you too.” Suddenly, she gasped and looked inside. Someone was yelling on the other side and footsteps began approaching the door. “There’s no one here!” Jessica yelled back.

Someone pushed Jessica out of the way and opened the door wide so I could see completely inside. Another redhead appeared in the doorway with a smile so wide that it looked like it physically hurt to keep it going. Jessica grunted beside the new redhead and walked away all grumpy like.

“Hello Reddy number one.” I say to the new redhead.

“Hello dumbass blue eyes. How’s your day been?” 

This particular redhead is named Freya Sox. I have no clue why her parents decided that the name of a Norse lust goddess was a good idea, but I’m not going to complain. Freya’s a wonderful name meant for just as wonderful a person. My last name’s Peon so in some way I could relate to her.

Just like her sister, Freya’s a natural ginger. Her pale skin is the same as Jessica’s, but she had more freckles littering her face. They were also way more prominent, growing darker the closer they traveled to her nose. 

She wore a sleeveless shirt with straps that looped over her shoulder. Because of that, I could see her cleavage and it was rather hard to keep my eyes off of them. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen her, especially like this. I can’t just think about perversions all the damn time.

Her grin widened, and she looked around her. I didn’t understand what she was doing until she looked back at me with eyes that I knew all too well. She hooked her finger over her shirt and pulled it down, revealing her pink nipple in the center of a plump bosom. Now I remember one of the many, many reasons I love her. She’s just as perverted as I am. Although she’s a lot more open about it.

After a few seconds passed with her nipple exposed, she raised her shirt back up and covered herself. My face was beet red and burning with a fiery passion. My hands ached as they wanted to touch her perfectly shaped breasts, but I held myself back. We’re outside for christ’s sake. What if someone comes by and sees us fondling each other like that? It’ll be embarrassing as hell.

“I was wondering when you’d arrive.” Freya says and moves out of the way to let me in.

I enter her home and look around. It looks the same as always. Their walls were painted yellow and decorated with plenty of family pictures. Each one showed a family with beaming smiles and excited stares. A family filled with hopes, dreams, and desires was framed on the walls for all that enter to gawk at as they remember they don’t have something even close to as wholesome as this.

I looked around, but strangely enough, besides Jessica sitting on the couch watching some rom com, there was no one inside the house. 

“Where your folks at?” I ask.

“They went on a date or something.” Jessica yelled from the couch.

“They’re married. What would they need to go on a date for?” 

Jessica shrugged her shoulders and continued to stare lovingly at the TV screen. A handsome man crouched on his knees with a black box held out to a woman. The woman stared confusingly at the box. As the man was about to open it, suddenly another man skipped on screen - he literally skipped onto the screen - and exposed a black box of his own.

“Oh my God. No way.” Jessica said breathlessly on the couch. 

I’m not going to lie, I got entranced by what was happening on screen also. It was so strangely alluring how two men could fall for the same woman and fight for her and not one of them realizes how toxic that is. It’s a train wreck that’s waiting to happen, but the law of TV says that this has to have a happy ending. How could such an event end happily?

The only path I see at the end of that road is the woman reevaluating her life and thinking that people who go to such lengths are rather egotistical. All she has to do is think about it for more than two seconds, and realize the endless pining for her isn’t because of an inherent attractiveness that she, and only she, has. Instead, they see her as a prize to be won. The trophy at the end of the game. 

At least a pervert goes after someone for their looks. They see some inherent beauty within a woman, unlike the egotistical men of that stupid rom com. Maybe she should find a man that will praise her. It’s not another superficial or toxic relationship. It’s just how the natural order of the world.

Suddenly, I feel a pair of boobs attached to a woman lean against me. That woman also has a valley in between her legs that I would like to conquer, but my embarrassment and anxiety refuses to let me just ask if we could fuck. What if she says no? Then I’ll be classified as the horndog that can’t keep it in my pants for the rest of my life. 

“Why don’t we just go to my room?” The boobs attached to a woman asks.

“Sure.” I say as the boobs magically grow hands, a body, and several other features, then uses those said hands to drag me to her room. 

As we went down the hallway that seemed to stretch endlessly with no end in sight, I looked at the walls. Such a mundane sentence, but there’s something strange about the walls that doesn’t make them so mundane. For instance, the only thing on the walls were strange pictures. Some were clowns, others were demons from hell escaping the underworld. 

Some were of the world on fire. My brain set alight the forbringers of the apocalypse. The eye that cannot see minds but knows fear with terrifying accuracy makes their way on shore. Poison fills the air as monsters rise from their graves.

“But there’s no true monster.” 

“What did you say?” I ask.

“Nothing.” I couldn’t help but feel like Freya said something, but my mind seemed to blank out for a second.

I looked around, not knowing where I was. We were in their hallway that I could barely call a hallway. It was so small that it could be mistaken for a closet if it didn’t connect to many other rooms. 

Freya opened her room door and entered. Before heading in, I look at the walls of the hallway. Unlike the living room, there were no pictures hanging on the walls. It’s way too small for that, anyway. But I couldn’t help but notice a black liquid dripping from the ceiling.

“You coming in?” Freya called me.

“Yeah.” 

I entered her room and shut the door behind me. Looking around, I forget how long it’s been since I’ve been here. The entire room looks different from before. For one thing, her bookshelf is a lot more full than before. The top half of the bookshelf is full of normal books. Mostly fantasy and dystopian stuff, but it was fairly normal.

However, the bottom half is rather worrying for the average person. It’s filled with porn. Not the wholesome kind, either. Just the raunchiest stuff imaginable. I gave one a read and when I got to the part where the father and daughter began doing questionable things to the mother, I had to give up. I have a high tolerance for this sort of stuff, but even I have limits. 

Strangely enough, her parents don’t seem to mind her buying erotica. When I asked Freya about it, apparently they said for her to not do any of the stuff in the books until she’s older. Otherwise, it’s free game. If my father caught me with this stuff, my ass would be grass. 

Then there’s the black stripes coming down from the ceiling. They weren’t there before and it’s rather hard to paint in the room cause of all the furniture in the way. So when and how did they get there?

“Want to read something?” Freya asks.

“What exactly do you have in mind?”

Freya smiles and walks over to her bookshelf. She crouches down and I immediately begin dreading what she’s about to pick out. Her eyes glazed over the titles of each book, then when she spotted the one she’s looking for, she grins and snatches it up. 

She hands the book to me and I look over it. It had a nice hard cover that felt good to hold in my hands. The cover portrayed a woman in a rather revealing outfit wearing high heels. She carried a riding crop in her hand that looked so fierce I could feel it. 

“What’s it about?” I ask, fearing the answer.

“It’s about this man that gets kidnapped by a sadistic woman, and he gets used for her pleasure.”

She said that so openly and proudly that I couldn’t help but wonder what’s in this book that makes her so excited to read it. From her description alone, I want to stay as far away from this thing as humanly possible. What kind of fetishes does this chick have to convince her to buy such a thing?

“You want to know what makes this one so good?” She snatches the book from my hand and hugs it to her chest. She looks at me, anticipating for me to ask her what made it so good. I didn’t want any more detail about the book, but those puppy dog eyes she gives are so cute that I can’t help but concede.

“Why’s it good?” I hesitantly ask.

“Nice of you to ask. Well, there’s a message in this book that made it so much more than just another piece of erotica. The man is filled with a lot of regrets at the start of the book. He doesn’t even know how to deal with all the problems he’s caused, so he locked himself up in his home, only going out for basic necessities. Then, after walking home from nightly grocery shopping, he gets kidnapped and nearly dies several times. Because of the experience, he contemplates that he should have gone out and dealt with his regrets instead of just letting them fester all the time. 

“The book ends with the message to make amends with your regrets before it’s too late. Cause when you die, you don’t want to die thinking that you could have done more.”

Is that really true or is she just pulling my leg on this one? This isn’t the first time she had me read something with the idea of it being something, only for it to turn out to be totally different than what she originally said. I thought Frankenstein was going to be a horror with a lot of death. Well, there’s barely any horror or death, so what’s the point? Why read something if everything has a happy ending? Happy endings are the farthest thing from realistic possible.

“Does the man live in the end?” I ask.

Freya looked at me with a mischievous grin. “That’s something you have to find out for yourself.”

Despite that ominous tone, there was something in me that felt a strange allure to what she said. I don’t fully understand it, but I can’t particularly disagree with the message. I do have one question though. What happens when someone has a regret, and in trying to fix that regret, they only come to regret it even more? What if the regret is so powerful and intertwined with their character that no matter what they do, it’s impossible to fully get rid of it?

Regret is one hell of a bastard. It’s a demon that whispers into the hearts of everyone, telling them that no matter what they do, because they did this one thing, then they don’t deserve happiness. Regret is a pure, bloodthirsty demon. Even in death, when regret piles on top of our corpses, regret will be the last thing we ever feel, no matter how many times we try to make amends for our past transgressions. 

With the book in hand, she walks over to the window that connects to the outside world. The faint light of the moon barged inside, but vanished with the overpowering light of her bedroom lamp. I walk behind her and sit on her bed, looking outside along with her.

There was nothing out there but the moon and a black sea. Waves of a thick black liquid crash against the side of the house, coming through the window and falling on the floor. The black stripes began dripping and expanding along the wall until the normal yellow paint job was nearly gone. 

She doesn’t turn around, but somehow she throws the book onto my lap. It landed perfectly, so the woman on the cover was looking up at me. Her eyes were cutoff the top of the cover, cutting off before I could see them. Blood trickled down her cheek before falling into a puddle of red beneath her feet. If I could see her eyes right now, what would they look like? How would they look at me? Would it be disappointment or pity? Am I doing something that will make her look at me with pride, or embarrassment? I can’t tell. I can’t see her eyes.

“When I stare into the night sky, I see so many stories taking place. Look at the moon and tell me you can’t make a good story with that. Look at the stars and explain why some of them can’t be planets harboring life of their own.”

I don’t see any stars in the sky. All I can see is an endless black sea leaking its way inside. It leaked inside, filling the floor with the unidentifiable liquid. It’s already up to my knees now, so I had to grab the book to keep it from being damaged.

“I want to become one of the greats. I want to be an author like all those people on the bookshelf. It’s my dream to write something so outstanding and time defying that it lasts all the way to the sun’s demise. Don’t you agree with me, Ty.” She turned and looked at me, crying black. “Did you let your curious nature rot away, Ty?”

A giant wave collided against the window and swallowed Freya whole. The liquid rammed into me, sticking to my skin and clothes. It dripped off me as I coughed up some of the liquid that got into my mouth. It had such a vile taste that I wanted to forget it forever. 

I looked where Freya was once standing, but I couldn’t see anything but more liquid. The moon vanished with her, being drowned out by the darkness. The only light shining came from the room lamp, but the liquid threatened to turn it off as well as it rose higher and higher. 

I look at the book in my hand, and I hold it tight to my chest. I have to keep it safe for Freya. When she returns from wherever she went off to, then she’ll want to read it with me. This is how I can make everything up for her. 

But, out of curiosity, I opened the book. I at least want to read the first page. I want to know if Freya was right about this book. I open it to the first page and read.

Inside the Wall of Lost, there is nothing but you. This is all you. Everything you see around you is nothing but everything that makes you, you. From the moments that you enjoy most, all the way to the moments you want desperately to forget, this is who you are.

There is no way to leave here. You are trapped looking at parts of yourself that you hate the most. Whether it be an embarrassing moment, a wonderful memory becoming polluted, or even a fictional memory you made up, it’s all here. 

There actually is a way to escape the Wall of Lost, but you have to follow a careful set of instructions. If you don’t follow them completely, you could find yourself wandering the road forever.

You already know them, however. You just have to find them within the memories that you hate to look back on. You hate on the people that look back fondly as if they’re weaker than you are or are doing it for mischievous purposes, but you have to look back. Because if you don’t look at all the bad that’s been done to you, and the bad that you’ve done to others, then you will never know how to move ahead. 

You’ve never left your room once, because you don’t want to look back. Please, look, and right the wrongs, even if you have to fake it.

Do it for me. From you onto me and me onto you. I’m you. Please help me.

The light vanished completely, and the room filled with the liquid, drowning me in its thick embrace. It went inside my throat, my nose, and other places, and it entered my body. It became my new blood, and in turn, I can no longer live without it. I need to learn to live with it.

But how can I. I’m drowning in the thick liquid, unable to move a muscle. It filled my lungs and went even further. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I’m drowning. I’m dying.

Suddenly, the liquid began draining out of nowhere. I could still feel it inside me, but the liquid began leaving, draining into the ground. It turned into a giant black whirlpool and it vanished inside the floor. I looked around the place. I’m somewhere new, sitting on a couch that I knew all too well. I’m in a place that I know all too well. 

This is my home. The place where I grew up.