“Man, it’s cold outside,” Tad says in his head. Tad is a 22-year-old theorist trying to prove there is an alternate universe taking millions of lives each year from the world. Is he successful? No. His dad, a successful theorist that has proven ghosts to be real, becoming well known around the globe. Ever since Tad was a boy, he wanted to prove himself to his father.

As Tad walks into his apartment, “Hey, do anything today?” shouts his uncle. Of course, he already knew Tad had done nothing and was just trying to get at him. 

“No, I haven’t Uncle Pete,” says Tad. 

Tad, as usual, goes to his desk and stares out of his window. It was the winter of 1990. The beautiful lights glimmered with a light goldenrod yellow laying on the snow softly covering the sidewalks in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The sight of a snowman on the sidewalk got him thinking, “What can I do to make dad proud?” Suddenly, sharp pain in Tad’s right palm causes him to fall off his chair. A clock-shaped scar appears on his palm. Upon seeing the scar, he thinks he’s hallucinating, so he gets up and goes to bed at 3 pm. 

As Tad falls asleep, he is brought to the Grand Rapids Township Park, entering a new “realm”. He will do this a couple more times back and forth, but Tad did not know that.

The bright sun wakes Tad up. “uncle, turn off the lights,” he says. After a few seconds, Tad gets up with his eyes still closed and tries to hit the switch, but there isn’t one. Finally, opening his eyes, he looks around and then realizes he’s no longer in his room but he is in a park. This specific park brings back memories of his father and him. Curious about why he is here, he gets up and walks around.

A similar pain on his palm he had in his room drops him to the floor. The clock-looking scar reappears on his palm. This pain is so immense that it knocks Tad out.

It has been 12 hours since the time Tad went to bed and noticing his surroundings. Uncle Pete is just entering the apartment at 3 am. 

Tad rushes over and then attempts to tell Uncle Pete what had just happened, “I,… I was,” stopping mid-sentence because he knew for a fact that his uncle would not believe him, “never mind,” he says, instead, he walks back to his room and shuts the door. Later going back to sleep. About 10 hours later, Tad wakes up and goes to a coffee shop to get some coffee.

Night arrives and Tad’s father, Roy, was lying cold on the floor with a bullet between his eyes. He rushes over to his side, tears flooding out of his eyes and staring into his father’s cold eyes.

“Um excuse me, are you ok?” says a girl to his right. 

Tad is on the floor crying over his fallen espresso, “Yeah, I’m fine,” he quickly blurts, and then dashes out of the cafe back to his apartment, leaving the girl alone and puzzled. He hadn’t noticed it, but the pain from the nightmare had stopped when she had been with him. 

He is now running to his apartment and as he runs; the pain comes back, and flashes of the nightmare reappear. More and more, the nightmare reveals itself. When he reaches his apartment, the clock-looking scar reappears, and he is losing consciousness and doesn’t have much left. As he tries to grab the coat hanger for balance, he misses and instead falls to the floor. 

The sun wakes him up once again. He is back at the park. There is a distant forest a little north of the park that he hadn’t seen before. Tad is confused about what is happening to him right now, so he investigates by walking toward the forest. The forest is silent, but he sees a creature shifting through the woods. The pain in his palm comes back and takes him out cold once again. 

Tad wakes up at 15:00 at the cafe to get an espresso. While he is waiting for his usual shot of caffeine, he unexpectedly falls to the floor. 

Tad has a dream of his dad looking down disappointed at him and then getting up, about to walk away. Tad was stuck. Painfully spectating, his dad leaves him. While Tad is in this dream, he is lying on the floor whimpering.

“Hey, c’mon get up,” says the girl he had seen yesterday. Tad, being on the floor, couldn’t focus. He was in so much pain and then this girl stopped all of his pain. 

“What happened?” she asks. “Do you need me to call someone?” She continues to talk, but Tad just enjoys her company. 

Suddenly she gets up, but before she leaves, Tad asks, “uh, what is your name, and do you want to meet up sometime??”

“Clover, and yes,” she says back and then continue to walk out of the cafe. 

After about 10 minutes, Tad gets up and goes back home. He sits at his desk, and the pain comes back with the scar, inevitably making him pass out.

After looking at his eyelids for a couple of seconds, he opens his eyes and is staring eye to eye with a wretched creature. (This was the creature that Tad had seen “shifting” in the woods.) This living thing, if Tad could call even define the beast like that, was about 6 feet and staring down at him with the eyes of a murderous crimson jaguar. Ready to run for his life, he feels an urge to stay, a sensation. It’s too late. The wretched-looking beast slashes him on his left arm; and without another second passing by, the beast flees into the forest. Tad chases the beast but quickly loses him. For hours, not knowing where to go and a not so hurting arm, he walks deeper into the forest, finding a poorly built shed. 

When he walks into the shed, there is a man the size of about 6 feet. Tad, being 5 foot 2 and a half inches finds that to be slightly intimidating. The man immediately sees his arm and asks if he wants him to patch it up. Tad agrees. The man quickly covers his wound and gives him a chair. As Tad looks around the room, he sees a book by Roy Charles, strangely the same as his father’s, but he hadn’t realized that yet. They talk for hours on end. Roy was quite the storyteller, just like his father. He tells a story of how he has slain a stuffed bear with a fork and has murdered a monkey with a spoon, which was about the size of an average human being. He went into great depth into his stories as if it was yesterday. As Tad was listening to his stories, he found something slightly off with this man, named “Roy”. He was twitching often and murmuring little verses to himself mid-sentence. That’s when it all clicked. As a little boy, Tad had read all about his father’s theory and how ghosts resemble your idol and replicate them perfectly. (But Tad didn’t know that this was his father when he was younger.) When he was young, his father had bought him a toy stuffed bear that one day he dropped a fork on, truly unfortunate. Also, for Tad’s 13th birthday, he received a massive gummy monkey and, together with his dad, ate all of it in one day, with a spoon. A ghost possesses this man, or so he thinks. Tad isn’t the best at hiding that he knew something, and so Roy tries to grab him, but Tad swiftly dodges and bolts toward the door out of fear, grabs the handle but it burns his palm revealing the scar. Without another second, Tad falls to the floor unconscious. 

As Tad thinks he will wake up in his apartment but little did he know, he wakes up tied to a chair and the sight of the man that is possessed.

“Where do you think you’re going, little fella?” says the man or ghost. 

“What have you done with my father!?” demandingly screams Tad. 

A few seconds later, Roy ignores him and says, “well, if you have nothing else to say, I’ll bid you adieu,” as Roy leaves the shed, Tad searches around to see if there is anything around him that can break him away from the chair he had been tied up to. He spots a book, a switchblade, and a picture of someone, a girl? 

“Is that my mother, wait could this man be my father from the past?” Tad thought. Desperate to find answers, he attempts to escape, but falls to his side and knocks himself out.

“Ayoooooooo gonna get up? You got things to do, places to be,” Pete stops talking and keeps looking at Tad for a minute, “who am I kidding myself? You don’t have anywhere in the world to be. You were born from greatness but clearly, Ka lee ear lee, you don’t have any of that in you, your dad would be disappointed in you!” Uncle Pete screams at Tad. Immediately Tad gets up looking thirsty for answers, totally ignoring Uncle Pete’s speech, and asks him question after question. 

“What was Dad like when he was young?” “When did Mom and Dad first meet together?” Curious about what his dad was like when he was younger and if this “Roy” is his dad. Later, he finds out his dad used to be a very crazy and interesting kid. Till the day he met Flora, and his dad, Roy had changed, he had become more lovable, and friendlier, and he stopped twitching and murmuring. Roy had become more relaxed. He had turned into someone that no one had ever seen before. 

Exhausted from this “interview,” Tad lies on the couch and covers his face with a pillow. Before he can feel the pain of the scar, he falls asleep. 

Tad wakes up on the floor untied. He gets up and sees that the picture is of his mother, Flora. Tad walks out of the shed to find the trees sitting there as if it was a normal day, but behind him was the man Tad now thinks was his dad. 

“Are you my dad?” Tad asks. He forgot that this man is a past version of his dad.

“What the f***! Are you crazy!?” Roy exclaims, not knowing anything about the future.

 Tad remembers that this could be his young dad, “here, how about we sit down and talk,” says Tad calmly. 

After a couple of seconds “I guess,” Roy replies, “we can do that.” The sun slowly sets and Tad sees Roy become the wretched beast he had seen before in the forest. Roy has the figure of a human, but his body is the purest of crimson red. Tad couldn’t muster the strength to move his lips and start talking. “This can’t be my father, who or what is this?” Tad thought to himself.

“YOU SAID YOU WOULD TALK, NOW TALK!” Screamed Roy. 

“Uhhhhh ummmm so ummm uhhh well, it was the winter of 1960, you ha-had just graduated from high school. You-you met a girl named Flora, she was the most beautiful girl you had ever seen. For some time, you had stalked her and looked from the shadows. Till one day she saw you and you guys talked. Immediately, you both could sense that there was a connection. You started hanging out in this very shed for days, then that turned into months, and then that turned into years. After being together for a while, you asked her to marry you at the shed. She agreed, and then everything sped up. Some time passed and Flora was pregnant. It was November 6th, 1968; I was born. The best memory I had with you when I was young was during the fall. I was about 7. You picked me up from school and we sat on a bench at the Township Park. And at the bench, you told me the most fascinating story I am telling you right now, but with more detail, of course, because I’m not that good at telling stories, as you might have found out. And before we headed back home, you gave me a book called ‘To The Future’ by Roy Charles,” says Tad timidly. 

Roy straight away goes over and grabs the book on the desk Tad had seen, as he looks at the green book with gold lettering that spells out ‘To The Future’ by Roy Charles, he drops the book and turns to Tad with a bright smile and says, “Come here boy, give your old pops a hug.” Deep down Roy had found himself and all the memories came back. As they hug, Tad feels this slightly satisfying feeling in his right palm. The clock-looking scar reappears, but it seems as if the clock’s alarm is going off. Tad is slowly dissolving and returning to the “real” world. 

“Dad, no, I need you, I am so lost, please we need more time,” says Tad, while grasping his dad’s back. 

“Tad, you are ready. Don’t let me be the reason your life is terrible.” These are the last words Roy says to his son before he leaves.

It was snowing in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It has been a week and Tad is sitting at his desk looking at the green book with gold lettering “Father” by Tad Charles. Not knowing how to start, he looks out of his window and sees Clover, the girl that had been there with him when he was having nightmares. Remembering he had asked her on a date, Tad is ready to finally meet her for real, he grabs his Patagonia coat and dashes out to meet her. 

Fast forward 10 years, Clover and Tad marry and have 2 children, a girl named Calla, and a boy, Lance.

One evening Tad is in his studies and starts thinking about what he should write in his green book, and then is interrupted by, 

“Daddy, everyone is outside, Commmmmeeee,” squeals Lance naggingly. 

“I’ll be there in a few minutes bud, daddy just gotta finish this little thing,” says Tad reassuringly. 

“Ok,” grumbles Lance while dashing out the front door to Clover and Calla.

 It’s been 20 years since Tad has ever thought about what happened. He sat at his desk, looking at his empty book. All the stress of living up to his dad’s name is gone. He now knows that his dad was once like him, if not worse, and most importantly, his father believes in him. As he writes, all the ideas flood like a tsunami onto the page, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page after page. After about a month, Tad publishes his theory that “when someone enters the alternate realm, (which he later renamed as the Clover Realm) because we are struggling to find reasons to live or simply depressed.” Tad names the realm after his wife because she had saved him from that very realm.

Months later, after his book had been published, no one believed it at first. But as scientists do tests and experiments, it proved his theory flawless. Tad’s theory eventually saves millions of lives in depression that sought help because of Tad. The President of America later gives him a medal of honor. The President and Tad’s father, Roy, go long back. 

The President approaches Tad, “well-done boy, your dad would be proud of you,” says the President. 

His dad could not be more proud of him. 

The End.