Random stuff kept coming into my head. All kinds of stuff – all totally random. No sense in it. I knew that it was the not-me that was doing it. Not me, but the not-me. It’s a little known fact that the human mind is incapable of producing genuine randomness. Too many unconscious associations. It’s all patterns of one sort or another, even when it doesn’t look like it. No such thing as an accident. You can’t escape the logical continuity of rational thought. That’s how I knew it was the not-me, making itself known. Tipping its hand. Letting me know that it is there. In me but not me. Incomprehensible and alien, the not-me revels in randomness. Randomness is its thing. It glories in randomness. It is the gleeful author of all randomness.

I walk for a while in the gathering darkness and arrive outside the iron gates outside a crumbling, dilapidated house, its windows all boarded up. It is a gloomy hulk in the darkness. Its looms up ahead of me in all its sinister glory and I suddenly get a bad feeling in my stomach. A very bad feeling. It is pure fear. Everything is overgrown – shadowy shapes are scuttling around in the undergrowth. Vast dark manta-like shapes are gliding somewhere just out of sight, on the very edge of my vision. They disappear when I turn to look at them. I can only see them unintentionally, when I don’t want to. It’s one of those things. When you mean to you can’t. When you do mean it to happen it doesn’t. Nothing happens. You’re blocked.

Random stuff comes into my head. “I’m meant to be here,” I think involuntarily, and then realize that it wasn’t me that thought this but the not-me. The thought was pretending to be mine but it wasn’t. It came from the not-me. The true source of all the randomness in the universe. Odd ungainly shapes shuffling around in the periphery of my vision. Darting here and there. Snatches of conversation washing over me in waves and then ebbing away again. Not making any sense. Coming and going. Things moving about in the dark, out of sight.

I pushed at the gate and it groaned on its rusty hinges. I noticed that that it was padlocked. The padlock was eaten up by rust too, along with the chain. I knew I had to get into the house. Into the decrepit sinister hulk of that boarded up old mansion. The bad house. It was part of the evil world I realized, but I didn’t know what I meant when I thought that. It just came into my head. “We fled from the light and became evil” a sad voice whispered somewhere out of sight, somewhere in the shadows. Then there was silence, filled with odd little rustling sounds. The suggestions of movement in the darkness. The house had a sinister presence to it. It was tangibly malign and yet I still felt I had to find entrance to it, one way or another. It was frightening me out of my wits and yet all I could think about was how to get in.

I pushed again at the gate and it swayed slightly, the hinges completely eaten away with rust. I didn’t know what else to do apart from keep on pushing at it. I was starting to get tunnel vision. I could barely see ahead of me. The periphery of my vision was crowding out my actual vision. The stuff I wanted to do, I couldn’t. I could only do the stuff that I didn’t want to do. The stuff I didn’t intend to do. The stuff the not-self wanted to do. The accidental stuff, the random stuff, the stuff out there in the periphery. Everything else was blocked. Boarded up. No way to get through.

I had to get into the house – I couldn’t think of anything else. Voices whispered close up to me but when I turned my head I could see no one there. My tunnel vision was so bad now that my visual field was a rapidly dwindling disc of light in front of me, crowded out on all sides by the darkness. All around was darkness, full of little things rushing here and there. Jumping from tree to tree. Small shapes moving about in the undergrowth. Larger manta shapes gliding about with supernatural ease. Unimpeded. Unlike me. I was impeded on all sides. I was impeded to the point where everything I tried instantly backfired on me. It came back and hit me in the face. I was impeded to the point of virtual extinction.

I had to get into the house. A house that now seemed strangely familiar to me. It was both very familiar and utterly terrifying. I was terrified of getting any closer. Darkness pressed in on me from all sides – the rustling whispering darkness of the not-me. Full of odd little noises. Full of muffled voices. Full of things. All sorts of things. Things that scuttled. Things that scampered. Things that glided. Things that darted from place to place – nimble little things. Unimpeded things. Manifestations of the not-me assailing me on all sides. Hemming me in. Crowding me out, even though I couldn’t see them.

The darkness was inside me too, struggling to get out. Struggling to join up with its brother on the outside so that there would be no more of me. The not-me on the inside pushing hard to meet up with the not-me on the outside and join hands. And choke me right out of existence at the same time. Which was about to happen any minute now. Then I understood several things all at once. It all came in a rush. All of a sudden I understood everything. I understood that I wasn’t trying to break in to the decrepit boarded-up house – I was trying to break out. I’d never left. I never could leave. I never could leave because that sinister gloomy boarded-up old house was me. And at the same time I knew this I also knew that I wasn’t me at all – I was the not-me…