13 Minke Street

This is not reality… 

After waking up half a month ago, Karen spent almost a week accepting and proving that he had crossed over to another ‘real world’, instead of it being his own dream or fantasy.

But now, what he was facing was definitely not reality! He should…no, must still be in the basement of the Inmerales’ house; all the abnormalities started when he tried to twist Jeff’s head.

Plus, the huge pair of red high heels and the woman’s face in front of him, such extremely irrational transcendental products and environments that do not conform to reality, can only indicate one thing: that was, he had been hypnotized.

The word ‘hypnosis’ has many interpretations. At present, it referred to himself being stripped from physical existence while being confined in mental existence at the same time. 

Vaguely put: he was now…dreaming.

The static sound on the radio was still buzzing, and above, the woman’s mouth was slowly opening,

After reaching the extreme arc that a normal human face could achieve, she continues to split her mouth open, and you can even hear the zipper-like tearing sound clearly.

As her entire face was torn horizontally from the mouth, the once compact teeth began to reveal wide gaps as they were pulled apart, while the huge and flexible tongue slithered down rapidly in an even more bizarre manner!

Like a gecko trying to swallow a little mosquito.

Buzz!

Karen felt himself being wrapped up in a warm, wet, and sticky mess, and then his whole body was lifted up.

When a person was moved quickly, like riding a pirate ship or a big swing, there will be a ‘ticklish’ stimulating feeling; and this feeling, once stimulated to a certain degree, can easily make people lose themselves or even faint.

This is a dream, this is a dream… 

Karen chanted in his heart. What he needed to do now was to wake up immediately.

He didn’t really know the reason for the current situation, but this didn’t prevent him from dragging the unknown into the realm he was familiar with and good at to solve it.

Just like solving problems, instead of sitting there scratching ears and cheeks, try to apply the formulas you already know little by little, even if you are…forcing it.

In fact, the spiritual world of human beings has always been an extremely mysterious place. When ordinary people starts dreaming, and when the dream reaches a certain extent, they would naturally wake up. With an extremely low probability, there are times when they would realize it was a dream but they can’t wake up from it. It was also called ‘sleep paralysis’.

In another group of enthusiasts, they call it ‘lucid dreaming’. Through certain training and some self-suggestion techniques, the success rate of entering the state of ‘lucid dreaming’ can be improved.

The vast majority of people, after entering this ‘state’ out of interest at first, often end up avoiding it in the end – because every time they force themselves awake, that feeling of despair, like a drowning person surfacing from the abyss, was enough to drive people crazy and terrified.

For people whose mental faculties are often engaged in practical work, it becomes remarkably easy to render their dreams hyper-realistic. It is tantamount to literally being a self-imposed prison. Even more concerning is the phenomenon of layered dreams, where the subconscious takes on a life of its own. In such cases, the mind deceives itself by crafting dreams that prompt awakening, only to plunge the dreamer into a new layer of dreams, thereby diminishing their resistance to the dream state. This phenomenon is referred to as ‘true self-deception’.

If the ‘sleep paralysis’ experienced by ordinary people is akin to surfacing from the abyss, then this type is like a winter swimming enthusiast diving deep into a cold pool and surfacing back up, only to find there is a thick layer of ice over their head.

The consequences of not being able to wake up in a dream are temporarily unknown, because there is no ‘died in a dream’ option on the death certificate, and people who survived from such dreams will let it go because it was just a dream and the body did not suffer substantial harm.

The wind blew violently around his ears, and the elasticity of the tongue was very strong. After Karen was rolled up, he was pulled into the mouth at an extremely fast speed.

Next, there were dense chewing and sucking sounds. 

Those sounds, one after another, one after another, kept reaching Karen’s ears….

You are being eaten, you are being bitten, you are being swallowed…

You are dying…you are dying…you are dying…you…died!

Karen realized that if he didn’t wake up soon, his fate would be very undesirable.

A person who has died once often does not take life and death lightly…on the contrary, they will cherish the beauty of being alive even more. Karen was the same.

I don’t want to die!

In this environment, he must give himself enough faith and courage to help break through the barrier of this ‘dream’ and return his consciousness to his physical body, back to reality.

In the past, due to work reasons and his own interests, Karen had encountered similar situations before, although not as bizarre and scary as it was now. He had a set of practical response strategies for situations like this.

The false should be pierced with the truth;

The weak should be reshaped with ideals;  

Evil should be eliminated with truth!

When you are powerless yourself, you can try to borrow strength.

So, Karen started singing, singing loudly with all his heart:

“Arise, ye slaves suffering from hunger and cold; 

“arise, ye people suffering all over the world;

“My heart’s blood is already boiling, to fight for the truth…”

At this moment, faith and beliefs need to burst forth as the strongest will, so that he can break free from this mental quagmire. Besides, Karen was a firm materialist in his previous life.

In the singing, the sound of his body being chewed was slowly weakening. Karen felt his body floating upwards. He kept singing while slowly lowering his head.

He saw the woman’s teeth, 

her tongue, 

then her mouth, 

and finally, her entire face. 

However, when he saw the face that seemed to have grown between those two legs, appearing as if it had been connected together… this image filled him with a very strong sense of disharmony.

At this moment, the static sound abruptly stopped. Then, the male voice that had spoken before returned with some doubt: “Huh…who are you?“

Then, “Where is this…?“

Karen raised his head and started mobilizing all his bodily senses, opening his eyes, 

opening his eyes,

opening his eyes!

…

Thwack!

Karen opened his eyes. He saw Aunt Mary squatting in front of him, looking at him anxiously.

“Phew…phew…phew…”

Seeing Karen wake up, Aunt Mary plopped down on the ground, constantly slapping her chest. “You scared me, scared me to death, Karen…do you know how scary it was when you suddenly fainted just now…”

This nephew had just recovered from a serious illness recently, and he almost died. If something happened to him again now, Aunt Mary really didn’t know how to explain to her father-in-law, especially since Karen helped her push the corpse down.

Karen took a deep breath, forced out a very reluctant smile, and said, “It’s okay, Auntie, I’m probably still a little weak.”

Karen looked up and saw Jeff’s face had gone back to normal on the stretcher in front him.

“Meow…” 

A cat’s meow came from outside Aunt Mary’s studio. The black cat ‘Poe’ poked his head in, seemingly a little curious about the situation inside.

Karen propped himself up to stand, but suddenly felt a numbing pain on his face. Then a warm flow surged in his nose, and blood dripped out.

“I…I slapped you just now to wake you up,” Aunt Mary explained.

This is called…a slap? 

But what can Karen say? He could only reply with: “Thank you, Auntie.”

“Go upstairs and rest, call Mina to clean you up. I don’t need you here.”

Aunt Mary didn’t dare let her nephew stay here any longer.

Karen nodded, and after getting up, took another look at Jeff lying on the stretcher. He instinctively felt that his sudden dream just now was connected to this corpse, so letting Aunt Mary stay here alone, wouldn’t she be in danger too?

At this moment, his cousin Trent’s shout came from the basement revolving door: “Mom, grandpa is back!”

Grandpa was the absolute head of the Inmerales family. Normally, when he returned home, the people in the family, especially the women, had to come to greet him, even if you were working.

Trent came running. He also saw the corpse on the stretcher, but he wasn’t too scared.

Anything scary, after constantly coming in and going out of your home, would start to feel like nothing.

“Trent, take your brother to find your sister to stop the bleeding with the medicine box,” Mary ordered.

She was worried that she had broken Karen’s nose when she slapped Karen just now. If the nosebleed was not treated, it might really not stop.

“Oh, okay, Mom. Come on, brother.”

Karen held his head up with one hand on his nose, and the other hand held by Trent as they walked out. As they passed through the revolving door, he felt someone standing in front.

The figure of that person was not very tall, but standing there, it gave people a very calm feeling, as if he could easily handle anything.

Karen’s anxious mood eased a lot at this moment.

“Grandpa,” Trent shouted.

“Grandpa,” Karen shouted as well.

In his memory, Grandpa Diss Inmerales was a very serious man, but he often had a soft spot for Karen, his eldest grandson.

“Hmm.” Diss nodded, came down, and didn’t say anything or comment on Karen’s nose.

Trent seemed a little afraid of his grandpa, and quickly led his brother upstairs to find his sister.

The light in the basement was a little dim.

When Diss came down, he just happened to see the black cat Poe walking gracefully in front of him.

Diss stopped.

The black cat stopped too.

“You have a lot of free time today?” Diss said.

“Meow…”

The black cat Poe wagged his tail and tilted his head, seeming puzzled by Diss’ words.

Diss waved his hand, seemingly having no interest in talking to the cat anymore, and went straight to his daughter-in-law Mary’s studio.

Mary was sitting there lighting a cigarette. She was still a little shaken by her nephew’s situation just now, but she didn’t expect her father-in-law to come over so quickly. She immediately pinched out the just-lit cigarette. The puff of smoke that was supposed to blow out of her nostrils had just spilled out a little and was sucked back in and swallowed.

“Cough…cough…cough…”

Mary coughed out, in tears.

Diss didn’t pay much attention to this daughter-in-law, but first set his eyes on Jeff. He reached out and propped Jeff’s eyelids open, then placed his palm on Jeff’s chest.

Immediately, Diss’ eyes constricted slightly.  

Then, he took a step back, seeming to be looking at the environment of this studio, and sniffed.

Mary immediately said, “I will never smoke in the studio again, never again…”

Mary was really afraid of this father-in-law, not just because she and her husband were living under someone else’s roof now, but simply because her father-in-law himself was a man who made people…inexplicably afraid, even though he was still the benevolent priest at Minke Street Church.

Diss waved his hand, and asked, “What just happened?”

“I…Karen suddenly fainted, and I broke his nose to wake him up, I…”

“Karen fainted?”

“Yes…yes.”

“Then Poe came in, right?”

“Poe?” Mary was stunned for a moment before realizing that this was the name of that black cat in the family. She could never understand why her father-in-law had given such an ugly name to the cat.

“It seems…I…” Mary recalled as much as she could, “Karen woke up by himself…. Poe, Poe didn’t come in.”

Mary didn’t notice whether there was a shadow of that black cat outside the studio earlier, but she was certain that the black cat had not appeared in front of her. At least it didn’t come in.

“No?” Diss seemed to be thinking. “Karen woke up by himself?”

“Yes, Father.”  

“Where did this body die?”

“This is a welfare corpse, Father. He should have frozen to death on the roadside last night.”

“Wellfare corpse? Call your husband back.”

“Mason went to Flower Bay Nursing Home…”

“Call him back.”

“Yes, I know, Father.”

Even though she had lived in this house for quite some time, Mary still felt pressured when facing her father-in-law. Many daughters-in-law in other families called their parents-in-law directly by name, but she would never dare.

The appellation ‘Father’ had taken on some religious meaning to her.

The flustered daughter-in-law left the studio.

Diss reached out and closed the door, then walked over to the stretcher and sat down in the chair where Mary had sat, looking at Jeff lying in front of him.

The studio fell silent, with only the occasional slight change in brightness of the light bulb due to voltage reasons.

Diss reached his hand forward, and clasped it in front of him. From under his feet, strands of black shadows began to diffuse, like madly growing vines, immediately covering the tiles and surrounding walls, wrapping up everything here.

At this time, Diss said, “Tell me how you died.”

It was absurd that he was asking a dead man questions.

But something even more absurd happened next.

Jeff, who had long been dead on the stretcher, slowly sat up by himself…