Parallelium

As the doorknob shakes back and forth, RUTH stares at the door, fixated on whatever is on the other side of it. CRYSTAL comes out of her room, once again awoken in the middle of the night by Ruth trying to get into the den. Crystal tries to steer a sleep-walking Ruth away, but not before Ruth says something that chills Crystal to her core – “I have to clean the blood. It’s everywhere.” After getting Ruth back into bed, Crystal returns to the den. She unlocks the door, and as always, there’s nothing there. No blood. Nothing out of place. And yet, Ruth is obsessed with this room, so much so that they had to put a lock on it to keep Ruth out at night. Whatever Ruth believes is in there is affecting her sense of reality, to the point that she has attacked Crystal and GABE on multiple nights. The next day, Ruth behaves in a way that’s strange even for her. She’s angry at her brother Gabe for tearing up their kitchen. This is a renovation that has been going on for weeks, and he doesn’t understand how Ruth seems to have no awareness of this. It gets even weirder later that night when Ruth is found in the den with scratches on her arm. She claims her mother, who has been dead for a year, did this to her. Crystal and Gabe are alarmed, because whatever Ruth is experiencing is escalating. Not only that, but Ruth’s obsession with the den is growing out of control. She is especially fixated on an old typewriter, which continuously pulls her to it like a magnetic force. Ruth is often found staring down at it, in some sort of trance. When Crystal discovers that Ruth is communicating with someone through the typewriter, she feels that Ruth needs serious help. There are pages of conversation, going back and forth between Ruth and someone (or something) that is responding. But Gabe doesn’t share Crystal’s concerns. He thinks Ruth is just writing and getting her thoughts out. As much as Crystal wants to help Ruth, she’s neck deep in her own demons. She’s drinking again and spiraling backwards in her addiction battle. When Gabe discovers this, he’s eager to help her, but struggles to find the energy as he’s working night and day on the renovations. As Ruth’s condition worsens, all of their individual struggles begin to coalesce into a single fever pitch. It’s clear that Gabe is obsessively working to numb something – something that happened in that den, that involves Ruth, that neither of them will talk about. Something that will explain everything that’s happening, but that neither will tell Crystal. When Crystal finally gets to the truth, she discovers that Gabe and Ruth killed their own mother in the den. What they had said was an accident was the culmination of years of abuse, and something Ruth desperately wishes she could do over – even if it’s in another reality. It’s through the typewriter that Ruth is attempting to contact her own self, so that she can free herself from the prison of guilt and fear she feels trapped in. As Ruth falls deeper into this alternate reality she’s obsessed with, she comes close to a breakthrough – but it may come at the expense of her own life. When her confusion over what is real leads to her getting hit by a car, she finally finds what she was looking for. She survives the accident and is taken into a mental health facility where she can finally address her issues. Gabe and Crystal have also been shaken out of their own denial and are ready to work on their healing, no matter how painful and difficult it will be.