I had reached a point of weariness that even reality seemed questionable. Or was this another dream? The cracks in my sanity were starting to show. I was tired and weak and all I wanted to do was sleep.
It felt like I had walked for miles, afforded only the option to go forward. This place was one continuous hallway, endless and clinically white. A fluorescence from above cast a brutal shine on the same sanitized door ad nauseum. My feet ached from the endless walking, bleeding and leaving a trail of crimson behind me.
I could hear it prowling, savoring my terror. It hadn’t made itself visible yet. Sound didn’t make sense in this place, it could be fifty feet behind me or it could be five hundred. All I knew these nights was to shamble forward. This was no life to live, yet I was forced to live in it. It seemed like madness- or maybe it was the antithesis of madness.
I kept dragging myself forward because I wanted to goddamn live. I needed to live.
And to live I needed to get out of this goddamn single direction maze.
The doors were getting sparser, I didn’t know what that meant. I was going for increasingly long stints without seeing them when they were once crammed closely together. All the doors were the same white door with the same flat white handle and the same flat white eleven on it- over and over again. I bashed my shoulder against each one, trying to get away from the predator that stalked me in squelching shadows.
Every door was locked, every tenant seemed ignorant of me-but I heard them. Some gibbered in terror, some screamed out their pleasure for all of the hall to hear; ignoring me while I was DYING OUT IN THE HALL. WHY WON’T THEY HELP?
Why couldn’t they hear me?
Time was meaningless. The distance was meaningless. I am meaningless.
That was a dangerous thought. It always comes when I have that thought.
The nearest door was barely in sight when I heard that first hissing growl.
I chanced the look back- why? I never chance a look back, that thing was too fucking big and scary. My own bloody footprints betrayed my travel until they vanished into the shadowy and inky blackness. I knew the hall disappeared about 47 steps behind me, that never got any easier to see.
For the last year; my only dream was this hall, this blackness, and the thing in the smoke. The closest thing I had to a name for it was “Dream Eater.”
Deep in the roiling dark, I heard it move. My own blood was slickening beneath me, causing me to slip and nearly fall.
I heard the sound of something sharp dragging across the tiles. The breath of the Dream Eater huffed and chuffed and echoed through the hall. It was getting closer; I could see its eyes glowing beyond that oppressive, ashy fog- a mess of seven glowing points of orange arranged in a nonsensical pattern.
I had not seen it beyond the deception of the dark, but I had felt it breath upon me. It had a terrible, rotting breath filled with damp heat and an undercurrent of almond.
It was moving faster, but never really picking up a pace that could be described as anything other than a swift walk. The rhythm of the approach seemed quadrupedal. Panic was starting to swell up in my throat, beginning to shake my nerves.
That wave of adrenaline gave me the will to run again, even after I slipped in the slick of my blood and slapped down on the tile. My nose popped as it struck the cool surface, spewing out a fresh payload of blood.
The Dream Eater made a curious and cruel noise- what I imagine a grizzly bear would sound like if it could laugh.
I slipped again in the scarlet mess I made in the hallway, fighting to my feet and rushing forward. Whether the door in the distance would open or not; I had to make a break for it.
Every slap of my naked foot against the tile seemed too numb to be real. The black behind me swelled even faster.
I gripped the white of that door’s handle as the black filled and infested the sterility of the hall. In the dark, those seven blazing eyes bobbed as the Dream Eater began to jog.
I turned the handle, desperation flooding my being and turning to jitters as my bloody grasp slipped against it.
It’s locked. They’re all locked. Please, please, please, I need help!
I slammed my shoulder against the door, echoing a dozen other attempts that I had made that night. I was screaming and crying, begging for help. Music was drifting serenely from the other side of the door; golden oldies, barely muffled.
The blackness was nearly upon me, inches away and hiding the eyes of the Dream Eater. This was the first time that I noticed the temperature of the fog; a damp coolness not unlike the chill that sticks to you when you’re lost at night.
The door gave out after I hurled my right side against it a second time. It splintered away like a fragile set piece. On cue, a laugh track bellowed- that same canned laughter of the long dead that accompanies sitcoms. It was just as meaningless as it felt when heard from a television show; if not more hollow.
I tumbled, dashing my head against the doorframe and into a new, merciful blackness. The last sensation I recalled was spiraling downward, deep into the dark and away from the hall.
-----
I came to, seated at an overly long dinner table that was set for Thanksgiving. That canned laughter was even louder here. Others were seated at the table, all dressed in 80’s fashions- but most seemed featureless or out of focus. I was seated at the end, out of place in my bloodied tee shirt - but not as out of place as the blonde woman in a red bikini seated directly to my left. It was like being shoved into some old film, complete with a grainy filter going over my perception. At the head of the table was a man dressed in a full tuxedo, with thick rimmed glasses and a mustache that spilled well over his lips. Sweat was beading atop his exposed scalp and all attention was on him as he set a too plump and crispy turkey upon the table. He lanced a pitchfork through the cooked beast and plucked up a pistol from a red silk napkin and pointed it at the meat.
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“Go ahead,” the woman next to me said as she adjusted her top and over-pursed her lips,”...we all love you Johnny. Cut the turkey and we’ll all be together forever.”
“What the fuck?” I blurted out, unable to reconcile what was happening to my reality.
The rest of the table remained in rapt attention, fixated on Johnny. He however, snapped his gaze up at me. Johnny went pale with surprise as he gasped and raised the weapon in my direction.
Time began to move slowly, like the hands of a watch with a dying battery. The image I dwelt in began to bubble and tear, like when the filmstrip at a vintage theater finally gave up the ghost and tore on the projector during a screening.
The dream was slurped away, casting me through the dark and snapping me abruptly back to the waking world.
I fell, probably about a foot; my impact loud and cushioned by emptied cans upon a tan and deeply stained carpet. My surroundings were cramped, even more than the claustrophobic white hallway. I was in some sort of home, littered with cans, wrappers, and refuse from gas station foodstuffs. The clamor I made rising to my feet was terrible, but not as terrible as the very distinct stickiness of the carpet beneath my bare feet. Across from me sat Johnny, shaking away the veil of slumber in his ancient lounge chair. He was not nearly as well dressed in this reality, a profound gut hanging off a relatively thin frame, peeking out from the bottom of a too small sleeveless shirt and hanging over ratty plaid boxers. In his left hand was a crumpled beer can, in his right was the same pistol from Thanksgiving.
I was panting and fighting off the shades of sleep myself; my groggy mind only able to usher forth a simple question.
“Is this real?”
Johnny responded by raising the pistol and taking a wild shot in my direction. It went wide, but the impact still splintered the ajar cabinet door just to the right of my head. He was hollering at me to freeze and to get on the ground- to keep my hands where he could see them.
I complied; he was the one with a gun after all. I laid before Johnny in his domain, hands behind my head and face pressed against the sticky fibers of his carpet.
He kept his gun trained on me as he called the police. He mocked me as I cried, exhausted and scared at his feet. My every attempt to explain my situation was met with threats of murder.
----
He made it clear to the responding officers that he intended to press charges as they cuffed me. I cried out as the steel crushed my wrists, a pain that only increased when they wrenched me up by the chain. The one who cuffed me was a bull of a man, who hauled me out to an ancient looking police cruiser as his gawky partner finished his business with Johnny. I think Johnny called me a “heretic” in that exchange; along with a variety of other insults.
My surroundings were wholly foreign and very difficult to perceive in the yellowing light of the park. Night was heavy in the sky when I looked up- at least from what I briefly saw before Officer Bull shoved me in the back of this cruiser.
They took me away from the trailer park, whose well faded sign I could not read. Neither officer had any interest in speaking to me, but at least I could track the twenty-two minutes of travel via the dash clock. If that was correct, my journey from the park began at 1:11 in the morning.
Fear puts a muzzle on you, especially when you are anxious and in the custody of the police. I desperately wanted to plead my case, but I had no options. What was I going to do? Explain to them that I had just popped out of a suicidal man’s dream?
It seemed better to remain silent.
They brought me to their precinct, the doughy officer working intake was visibly frustrated at my lack of identification and inability to articulate my name. My mind was growing more foggy, my eyes aching for the release of sleep.
I realized as they questioned me that I only knew the name of one person and that was Johnny. I very nearly confessed that to the officers, but managed to keep it in. Eventually, I was shoved away into a holding cell. They told me I could rot until I was willing to talk. Officer Gawky was smug in his assurance that they would figure out my identity “one way or another.”
Maddening, that’s what it was: to only know the name of the man that shot at you; to be devoid of even the knowledge of your own name. To be sitting in a holding cell in some rural place wearing only pajama pants and a white tee stained with your own blood.
For two hours I fought the urge to sleep, pacing back and forth in the confines of that cell. I paced so much that the wounds on my feet reopened.
Eventually, I grew too tired.
I sat down on the flimsy bunk provided, knocking the back of my head against the concrete of the cell’s wall. Even in that moment, I was desperate to resist the call of sleep. At least wherever I was could be construed as real.
----
The thing about fighting against sleep is that it will always win. So much time spent in perpetual fear and debilitating anxiety takes a very physical toll on you. Even if sleeping brings you nothing but terror, the body needs it to keep living.
Maybe that was the thing. I hated to think about it; but it was very possible that Johnny’s ideations had some credence. Was this life really worth living? Was I just holding on to the concept of it getting better without any real evidence to support the idea?
Shit. I didn’t even have a name that I could remember. The very thing that defines you to other people- and I was lacking it.
I sat against the coldness of the white wall, with no door in the immediate area and no intention of searching for one. I was drained by the tolls that life demands to survive. I concluded that Johnny was right, that I really just would prefer it to …. stop.
“I am meaningless.”
The words were not as cathartic to say as I expected them to be. If anything, they felt as hollow as the laughter in Johnny’s dream. I was deceiving myself. As much as I wanted to keep going; I just did not think I had the strength to continue on.
I didn’t stand when the cold, black fog caressed my exposed forearms. I didn’t wince when the Dream Eater’s breath was upon me. I just stared at the pristine white tile that sat beneath my battered feet, then shut my eyes.
I was ready.
“You lie.” growled a voice with an unearthly baritone and the timber of lost potentials. I felt the heat of the breath that carried those words moisten my face.
Gasping, I looked up to face the origin of those two words. The blackness had wholly encircled me, much more textured than the absence of light should be. It resembled tendrils as it drifted around me. I finally looked upon the Dream Eater directly; that was the moment that I realized the thing did not just dwell in the dark, it exuded it. Dream Eater’s fur was as crimson as the blood I had tracked through this hall. It possessed the shape of a grizzly bear, but the visage of the creature was covered with a scattering of seven glowing orange eyes. Its mouth was filled with teeth that possessed the same glow, like pieces of iron pulled freshly from the forge’s fire. Even the talons of the ursine were imbued with the same brightness.
It looked down upon me, seeming to pity me with that legion of eyes. The Dream Eater had no other words for me, but I found some of my own. Even after the moment had passed, I was uncertain if they actually were my own.
“It’s time to go home, Ethan Chamberlain.”
The Dream Eater stood to its full height, filling the darkened hallway. Looking to my right, I could see the ether of the shadows part slightly- allowing another glance at that featureless and sterile hallway. The temptation to flee was there and very real; but somehow I was no longer frightened by the Dream Eater. I was ready to be done.
At least I was going to die with a name. That most basic of dignities gave me a swell of joy. I looked back up to the Dream Eater, nodded away my hesitation, and told it that I was ready to rest.
“Not yet.” Their response was simple and not unkind. Their mouth began to widen to increasingly impossible lengths, defying the boundaries set by the jaw. There were not dozens of glowing teeth within that maw; there were hundreds, lining the cheeks and illuminating all of the way down to their gullet. The Dream Eater spared me the agony of chewing me up:
it ushered me home with a singular and swift consumption.
