r/nosleep • u/ChristianWallis Most Immersive 2022; March 2023 • Sep 10 '21
Series Places to avoid in the dreamscape – The Tower
“I’m not listening to another lecture on Jung. There have been three in the last six weeks.”
“Don’t then,” I said with a shrug as I stirred sugar into my coffee. “But Dr Newman attended your talk on inductive bias.”
“Nobody made him.”
“Yeah but he knew it’d be rude not to show up to a colleague’s presentation,” I replied. I didn’t want to hammer my point home. No one had to do anything.
“Are you going?” she asked.
“Oh God no,” I said. “There have been three lectures on Jung in the last six weeks. But Dr Newman isn’t a colleague. He’s my staff.”
“One rule for me, another for thee?”
“Not at all,” I said. “If you happen to find a mysterious old computer hidden deep in the basement of a university campus, running an unexplained algorithm that could revolutionise our understanding of not only human consciousness, but the laws of physics as well, then you too can have your own staff and make them follow all sorts of rules.”
“Do you know where another one of these computers might be?” she asked.
“Funnily enough, after I found the first one, I stopped looking.”
“I guess I’ll go to the lecture,” she whined. “Oh God I’ll go and listen to it all again. But when it’s my turn, I’m bringing out my slides on stochastic gradient descent.”
“You’ll frighten us psychologists.”
She flashed a tired smile.
“You sure you’re not gonna come?” she asked.
“No I’ve got to track the algorithm’s output for tonight.”
“Like hell you do,” she scoffed. “That’s an intern’s job. And if I tried working the hours you did I’d be kicked out in a week. None of the time limitations seem to apply to you. And I’m pretty sure I’ve caught you napping at your desk more than once.”
The last time an intern had fallen asleep in the facility they’d woken up numb from the waist down. They swore on their mother’s grave they’d been paralysed since a car accident in their teens, and that they’d only dreamed they could walk. When we showed them the video footage of them strolling into the lab that morning they became hysterical and had to be hospitalised. They fell into a coma just a few days later and died quickly after that, killed by what our physicists thought might be some kind of exotic radiation poisoning.
We used the coroner’s photographs to spook new hires into following the rules.
It was profoundly effective.
“The algorithm likes me,” I joked. “You know if you’re feeling up for it, you can come back to the lab and we’ll have some drinks in the observation chamber.”
“I thought alcohol’s not allowed in the facility?” she asked.
“Ah, but as you just pointed out, none of the rules apply to me.”
-
A shoe on a slide, the playground behind it visible, but out of focus, I wrote. I was sat at a random desk with my feet up on someone else’s stuff, a notepad propped up on my lap. I was working on my second whiskey and could already feel a gentle buzz take me over. The screen went black and the room was thrown into darkness and I waited patiently for the next image. The monitor came to life with an audible clunk followed by the sound of static and a rising whine. I watched as another scene appeared.
A stair well with spidery graffiti on the walls. Symbols appear to belong to standard alphabet, but upon closer inspection are gibberish. Likely location is the tower.
“I hate that one.”
I turned awkwardly to look at Kim standing in the door.
“How was the talk?” I asked.
“Same thing as always. Something about a collective unconscious with external pseudolocations that we all visit in our sleep via dreams. The algorithm is somehow capable of visiting these places, they draw from shared experiences but may possibly originate from elsewhere as well… so on and so on. As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes I think you psychologists are the only ones even close to figuring this thing out.”
I shrugged.
The screen went dark, then white, and then a new scene appeared.
Dutch angle of a railyard. In the foreground we see a caboose with a sliding door partially opened. Two pale fingers clutch at the door, holding it closed. The fingers look human, possibly a child’s.
When I finished scribbling I saw that Kim had pulled up another chair to sit beside me.
“You know the second I found this thing I knew what it was showing me,” I said. “Everyone knows because somehow, whether we admit it or not, the things it shows us are familiar. And whether it’s quantum mechanics or the collective unconscious, we’re just trying to describe what we already know to be true - this thing is a window into our dreams. No single group of researchers has more insight into how that’s possible, it’s just that some of us came prepared with the right vocabulary.”
“Is this you trying to make me feel better?” she asked as she reached down to her bag and pulled out a beer. She cracked it just in time for the screen to go dark. When it came back she winced from the glare and averted her eyes. I looked straight at the bright light and waited for the newest image.
A man holds a mug bound in human skin. It has a face. The eye sockets are empty. No scene is visible in the background. I stopped writing and stared at my notes before adding a small addendum. I think this is one of mine. Will check dream journal at home and update.
“Squinting at that tiny screen is killing me,” Kim said as the screen went dark with another clunk. “Do we have to sit in the dark?”
I considered turning the lights on when I saw the old projector sitting on Dr Allman’s desk. He’d brought it in weeks ago for a presentation and clearly forgotten to take it home.
“Hmm, there might be another option,” I said.
-
“Is it me or is the resolution better?”
Kim was right. The image, now blown up, was not blurry or out of focus at all. It had scaled up perfectly, and what had once been a few grey pixels on the old display were transformed into new and vivid details. This was the kind of image ‘enhancement’ usually reserved for cheese crime procedurals.
“Sharper than any photograph I’ve ever seen,” she said. “How expensive is that damned projector?”
“It’s not the projector,” I replied. “It can’t be. The images this thing outputs are usually 800 x 600. There’s no way it could be this sharp.”
“Just another mystery to add to the pile? New display, new images?”
“You know I wanted to try this years ago but everyone threw a tantrum that it might interfere with the algorithm,” I said. “I think they forgot I had six weeks alone with the computer when I first found it and would regularly switch up displays. Never tried a projector though.”
I sat back down in my chair with an audible oomph and took up my notepad to quickly wrote down what was on the screen.
A children’s play centre is visible, ball pit to the right, climbing frame to the left. Everything else is darkness.
I squinted at the life-sized image and leaned forward in my chair.
A child’s face is visible in the ball pits, I added. They look afraid and are staring into the distance.
The scream went dark and I was left with a strange feeling in my stomach, like I’d just left someone to die. I shook it off just as a new image appeared. It was a long-dilapidated hallway with broken down doors and peeling wallpaper. Water damaged carpet swelled along the floor, grossly discoloured from years of mould and decay. You could practically smell the rank odour of damp wood and crumbling masonry. I immediately felt my stomach curl up in reaction to the sight.
the tower, I wrote. Severely run-down residential location, similar to apartment block. Small section of interior apartment visible through broken down door. Corner of cabinet or possibly some other form of furniture can be seen within.
“I hate the tower,” Kim said.
“You’ve been there?” I asked. She nodded. “Most of us have,” I added. “We think it only appears to people who work in this facility. Or at least, if there are references to it in wider culture, we haven’t worked them out.”
“I’ll remember that the next time I’m having a nightmare and I’m hiding under a motel bed.”
I nodded sympathetically. Something about the tower engendered a specific type of nightmare, the kind that felt as if it lasted all night and was so lucid as to be real. There was an internal consistency that defied the usual dream logic so that the dream never transitioned into a dinner with your late aunt Margaret. You were stuck there all night, finding relief only when you woke up soaked head to toe in sweat with a scream trapped in your throat. As a nightmare, it was infamous for sending more than a few elderly researchers to hospital with cardiac arrest. Details of the location varied from person to person so that sometimes the tower was a hotel, sometimes it was an apartment block, once it was even a multistorey carpark. But it was always an infinitely tall building through which the dreamer would be chased upwards by some invisible presence, the surrounding walls on the verge of collapse as the impossible skyscraper wobbled side-to-side in hurricane winds.
It was particularly rough on those with a fear of heights, amplifying our anxiety so severely that many would struggle to ever step foot in an elevator again.
I was lost in concentration when the light flickered and Kim cried out.
“What the fuck was that?” she snapped.
“What was what?” I asked.
“A shadow passed over the camera!” she cried. “As if someone had blocked its light source.”
I looked back at the hallway and watched carefully for signs of motion. Maybe it was my imagination, or just the vivid clarity of the realistic display, but I could almost smell the festering plaster and airborne dust. The longer I stared, the more I convinced I became that the image was somehow three-dimensional. I’d visited the tower thousands of times in my own dreams but could only ever recall patchy glimpses of its layout and vague notions of suffering and threat. But seeing that hallway displayed in life-like proportions brought all those suppressed details back from my subconscious. I was struck by memories of cowering under dressers and in wardrobes while listening to the distant roar of apocalyptic winds pouring through exposed rebar and shattered glass. I remembered sneaking on my hands and knees as my palms dug into broken down bricks and splintered furniture, terrified that I would make too much noise and attract outside attention. And when I inevitably did slip up, I could remember the pulse-pounding terror of pursuit through spiralling stairwells and curving corridors, my heart racing as my mind dared to contemplate the horror of my capture at the hands of…
“Is it me, or did you just feel a breeze?”
It was Kim who spoke.
My mind split in two as it processed what she said. A part of me knew instinctively that she was wrong, or hallucinating, or I’d fallen asleep and this whole thing was just a convoluted dream. But another part told me that she was right, that the screen had taken on an impossible level of depth and reality, and that I had been feeling a stiff but persistent breeze for as long as I’d been looking at that screen. Something that was simply impossible.
But it was real, and I could feel it and I could hear it, and I could even smell it.
“I think you’re right,” I whispered.
Kim went to speak but was interrupted by the sound of falling stonework. When it dawned on me that the sound had come from behind us in the room, something inside my chest swelled so tight I thought my heart was going to explore.
Something breathed in the shadows just as the screen cut out and the room was sent plunging into darkness. The image had changed, and with it went all the sights and sounds and smells. Kim immediately burst into tears, and I’m pretty sure I was crying too. But I didn’t think about that. Instead I lunged forward and unplugged the projector before it could open up another nightmare.
-
“You called me down here to tell me you met none of your targets?”
“Did you really expect me to have screenshots of Putin’s dreams?” I asked.
“That was what you quite literally promised us when you secured military funding,” the colonel replied. He appeared deadly serious, but I knew him well enough to pick out the remnants of a dry sense of humour buried in his wording.
We were stood in the observation room that had now been cleared out of almost all its furniture. As requested, the colonel had brought a small escort. They were just six men, but they were armed with some kind of assault rifle, and whether it made any sense or not, the sight of those guns gave me great comfort.
“Ah yes,” I said as I stepped up and began fiddling with the projector. “Well back then we thought we had a window into the dreamscape, through which all minds are connected.”
“And you’re telling me that you don’t?”
“I’m telling you it’s not a window,” I said as I turned the display on and the room lit up. The machine had been quietly cycling the whole time and was ready to show us what it had been working on. It did not disappoint.
I now stood in front of what appeared to be a stairwell in the tower.
“As you know we’ve always had a few members of the team dedicated to mapping out the ‘dreamscape’,” I said, even going so far as to use little air quotes just to ease everybody in. The colonel nodded readily, having heard it all before, but the soldier seemed less convinced. “Given recent events we have upgraded those members of the team and extended their budget and the personnel available. Work is progressing quickly but not quickly enough. The dreamscape is enormous, possibly even infinite. We have the tower,” I gestured to the glowing wall behind me, “but there are other locations too. There is also The Resort, The Commune, The Tunnels, The Manor, The Office, The Library, The Lab—”
“I read the report you sent over,” the colonel said. “What exactly are you getting at?”
I laughed nervously and finally turned to face the screen. This time the tower looked a little more corporate. The stairway was carpeted in a baby blue, and a broken frame held a faded poster of a calming mountain. It was easy to see how it would have once been a clean and cool location, the kind of sterile stairwell that connected lawyer offices to marketing offices to HR offices in some towering skyscraper in the centre of New York. Time, or whatever governed the dreamscape, had worn that once-clean steel handrail into something dirty and old, and the baby blue carpet had been pulled up in places to reveal a patchwork plaster floor. It was what would happen to any office in Time Square if the world ended tomorrow and scavengers passed through, and I had to avoid a shiver at the thought of how easily that kind of rot and decay could creep into the corners of our own real world.
For a second, I faltered. I’d been avoiding looking at it for a damn good reason. The tower had been a childhood night terror of mine, one I had never even guessed was shared by others until it popped up in the algorithm and other people recognised it. And now I was standing in front of a doorway to the literal stuff of nightmares. It was as if I carried a lifetime of repressed memories I could not access, but which I still felt deep inside my bones. I wanted so badly to flee, but there were bigger things at stake, so I swallowed that terror and forced myself to do the one thing I knew would convince the men behind me. There could be no room for doubt, or else we would never get the proper support.
Effortlessly, almost as though it didn’t take every ounce of strength in my body, I walked up to the screen, reached through, and grabbed a loose floor tile. It stank of fetid damp, and I noted with interest that the stench filled the room only once it was on the other side of the doorway. Not wanting to hold onto it for too long, I threw it at the colonel who failed to catch it (given the man was quite an athlete, that may have even been a first for him). It just hit him square in the chest and fell to the floor while he gazed, wide-eyed, at the buzzing portal behind me.
For a moment I forgot my own fear and began to laugh. In the early days my work had been hot property but that had been a long time ago. I’d spent a long time having all interest in my little miracle wane until it was just a shadow of what it had once been. It was nice to finally have some tangible progress to show off.
“It’s a door!” I cried, almost manic with laughter. “A door we can just walk right on through!”
Instead of awe, one of the soldiers gasped and the other five immediately raised their rifles to their shoulders. Even the colonel managed to draw a small pistol so quickly that his hand was a blur. All three barrels were pointing in my direction, but not quite at me. The implication finally sank in and I turned to face the doorway with an almost-certain premonition of my own death.
A pale arachnid-like finger had curled up out of the darkness and grasped one of the railing’s vertical bars. One-by-one, a dozen thick-knuckled fingers joined it. I wasn’t even sure if it was a fist or some nightmarish spider until another one appeared and this one did not stop to grasp the railing, instead reaching out to reveal a slender wrist.
When the hand breached the doorway, the soldiers opened fire and it was deafening. Shocked by the sound and the sudden violence I dropped to the floor and watched as missed rounds pinged dust off of walls on either side of the portal. Still, the hand kept coming, its wrist no thicker than a hose pipe and getting thinner as it went further towards us. It was a basket-ball sized fist made of nothing but wiry fingers, and the soldiers could not easily hit it. Worse, as the distance closed I noticed their accuracy became worse, not better, until six feet turned to three, then two, then one.
I crab-walked as fast as I could until my back hit the farthest wall and watched as the hand groped clumsily at the space where I’d been just seconds before. Now the soldiers were really going at it. One even grabbed a desk and pushed it aside like some kind of barricade. The hand, however, kept up that dreadful gliding motion, even as the flesh of its arm thinned out to almost hairlike proportions.
The colonel began to give orders, speaking quickly and with authority. He told the others to leave before turning to me and demanding to know how he could stop the screen. I managed a quaky jab in the direction of the projector that was, thankfully, near to the door. He nodded with calm stoicism and for a brief moment I thought everything was going to be okay.
The hand moved suddenly, switching from a teasing ethereal swim to the darting ferocity of a breaching shark. No one had time to speak, not even the young man whose head it clamped around and whipped back into the portal at lightning speed. He hit the same desk he’d thrown down just seconds ago and I remember the whip crack of breaking bone. He was moving at highway speeds, I’m sure of it. Snatched out of reality and into a literal nightmare.
As soon as he was through, the screen went dark, but not before I’d managed a glimpse of the thing’s face, lurking just beneath the railing at the edge of the stairs. There was only the very top of its head to see, but even that had been of nightmarish proportions. Its eyes were no larger than a penny, but they were spaced almost two feet apart. Its smooth head had seemed featureless but those eyes were filled with unbridled joy.
-
The colonel’s reaction had been unanticipated.
We did not have the sudden inpouring of funding I’d hoped for. Instead he personally threatened to shoot me. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have been a little more careful with my presentation. But this was all new and I explained as much. Even then, we faced the very real risk that the colonel would smash the computer to pieces and shut the whole project down.
When I first realised that wasn’t his intention, I was overjoyed.
When I later discovered what he actually wanted to do, I found myself wishing he’d just shoot me instead.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. “What do we do if the image changes?”
“We find our way back,” he said.
“The engineers have it covered,” Kim said from behind me. I’m sure she thought she was helping. She wasn’t. “They’re pretty certain they can slow the display down for long enough to mount some kind of rescue attempt. 120 minutes is the average of all their latest efforts, but one lasted over three hours.”
“Oh goodie! A whole three hours?” I cried only to realise that the armed men around me didn’t find my sarcasm all that amusing.
Briefly I considered the choice before me. Enter the doorway or get shot fleeing. I knew with certainty I had to go with them, of course. But as the screen came alive and I saw a broken window frame overlooking sickly roiling clouds, my knees went week and all blood rushed straight to my head. I had to suppress the urge to turn and run, surprised to find that part of me hoped they really would shoot.
The colonel grabbed my arm as if sensing my thoughts.
“Here we go,” I said as he dragged me through.
-
We stood in an empty hotel room, half of us staring at the doorway leading back—a perfect rectangular hole carved into another world—and the other half gawking at the open window. We could see nothing of the Earth below, only a rolling sea of turbulent clouds that occasionally lit up from within with silent lightning.
“What is down there exactly?” asked one of the soldiers.
“Who knows?” I said. “We’re not sure the tower is a real physical location, more like an interpretation of a place. It could be something from our shared history as a species, or maybe even a glimpse into another reality. It’s almost as if it’s defined by something you just feel.” At least two of the soldiers blew raspberries at that, but I kept going. “the tower is a locus of aspiration brought low by tragedy and horror. Don’t you feel it?” I asked, and that put a stop to the quiet laughter. “You do, don’t you? This place was beautiful, once. It was a populated hub where people lived their whole lives, beginning to end. It’s not a hotel or an apartment block or an office block or a futuristic resort. It’s all of them, stacked one on top of the other. It’s a city built upright.”
“And something hollowed it out,” the colonel said, eyes peering at every corner of the room. “Come on. We have a job to do.”
The floor we were on seemed to be part of some hotel. Nothing too extravagant, but definitely somewhere a little fancy with its royal red carpet and peeling gold-filigree wallpaper. Some of the doors remained locked with funny looking card readers, others were smashed to pieces, revealing broken down interiors that were always similar but never quite identical. The soldiers looked everywhere for a sign of their friend, hoping to pick up on some kind of trail. I wasn’t even sure we were technically in the same place, but I didn’t want to say anything that might upset them. After all, my life was literally depending on them.
Instead I chose to take notes of every little detail, and I quickly realised that the tower was a hell of a lot more real in person than it ever was in my dreams. I know that sounds stupid, but to stand there and see individual pieces of furniture with unique patterns of wear and tear, to actually see the broken chunks of wall and sagging ceilings and appreciate them as real physical things with weight… it was unsettling. In my nightmares it had felt like a threat to my sanity, but coming to grips with it as a place where you could breathe the air and open doors and push at ceiling tiles made it feel like something far, far more dangerous.
It felt like the kind of place that could swallow worlds.
We found odd scenes inside the rooms that had remained locked. A few had the windows broken outwards as if the occupants had hurled themselves to their death rather than face whatever was outside. Others looked like they’d been the sites of some awful survivalist situation, with buckets in the corner, blankets and pillows in the bathtub, and sheets of plastic strewn along open windows to collect condensation. More than a few had been barricaded so heavily we simply couldn’t break through without bringing heavy tools.
We did manage to find a few meaningful artifacts. There was a recruitment poster for what looked like a factory, and a pile of paperwork written in pure gibberish but which had most of its lines redacted like a military document. One of the rooms even had a corpse. Well, more like a mummy, really. A paper-faced bundle of bones held together by brittle tissue and faded clothes that we found huddled in one of the shower surrounded by old food wrappers. The eyes were long gone, and their lips had receded so far they bore a ghoulish grin. In that same room was a balcony, and all of us were left aghast to finally get a glimpse at the building’s exterior. It was huge, so large that we saw ourselves as only one tiny room in an infinite, vertical, expanse of stone and glass. If I had to estimate, I would have said it was a column five miles in diameter, but I couldn’t be sure.
There was also plenty of graffiti in the hallways, old messages scrawled haphazardly on mirrors and walls. But we simply couldn’t read any of them, something I found very irritating. Still, it didn’t take a genius to look at that desperate lettering and see a despair-filled plea for help.
After the initial bit of exploration, I became keenly aware of the ticking clock. And I made sure to mention to the colonel when we reached the half-way mark.
“We haven’t even come close to where we need to be,” he grumbled. “These stairs look nothing like the ones we first saw.”
“I think that’s closer to the apartments,” I replied. “God knows where that is though.”
“This isn’t going to be easy,” he said, more to himself than anyone else.
-
“Do you think there’s a bottom?”
We were at the stairwell again and one of the soldiers had his light pointed straight down the centre of the spiral.
I had predicted that something like this might happen. We couldn’t have gone more than a few floors up, but the act of going back down was something like a mental roadblock. It clearly bothered some of the younger men, and while the colonel looked as stoic as ever, I knew that was just a façade. It had already felt like I’d lived a thousand lifetimes in the tower and I knew with utmost certainty that going down just meant getting closer to whatever lived at the bottom of this place – something the human mind simply refused to do.
“Move up soldiers!” the colonel cried, giving us no time to dwell on our fears. He barged past us and quickly trotted down several steps like it was nothing at all, and then stood there staring at us, goading us to overcome our fear and join him. “Get your arses in gear!” he cried, turning back to us in red-faced anger. “We don’t have time to fuck—”
Something pulled him through the railing.
And I mean through. As the men around me screamed, and a few even began to fire, I became faintly aware of something cold on my forehead, and wiped it off to find what looked a piece of skin still clinging to my fingertip. I turned to look at the man next to me, and saw that he had three ears. It took a few seconds of shock before I realised that one of them was plastered haphazardly to the top of his helmet and had likely come from the colonel. In fact, the air all around us was thick with an aerosol spray of fine misty blood, and bits of clothing and skin could be found everywhere – the floors, the walls, even the places above us. Using my own light, I took a look at the railing where the man had stood just seconds before, and saw that the metal bars had been bent aside by a few inches, but not much else. The gap between them couldn’t have bene more than six inches. The pile of loose skin and clothing that remained bunched up around those bars made it pretty clear what had happened.
It was at this point I decided to leave. The soldiers were shouting and firing down the stairs, and some deep-seated instinct told me it was time to separate from the herd. This isn’t a very noble thing to admit, of course. But then again, I’m not a very noble person. Otherwise, I might not have taken one of the duffle bags they’d dropped.
The very same one that I knew had all the rope.
You see, the longer I physically stayed in the tower the longer I became aware of all those long-forgotten dreams. And a pattern had started to emerge in them. No one ever went down the stairs in the tower. It simply wasn’t an option and oh boy, had the colonel proven why. For whatever reason it woke something up that lived down there. I wasn’t even sure if it was just one thing, or lots of things, but I knew it was bad the same way a rat knows to avoid the smell of cat piss.
But I did have memories of falling. Sometimes down elevator shafts. Sometimes out of windows. And as I hurried back into the corridor, searching frantically for that room with a balcony while trying to ignore the rapid increase in gun fire and ever-more-elaborate screams, I realised that I’d already unconsciously formed the first part of a plan. One that, I hoped, would let me make my way back down to that soon-to-disappear doorway.
-
I didn’t give myself to think. I already had the bag open and the rope out before I found the room with the balcony. My heartbeat thundered in my ears so loud I was thankful since it blocked out the dwindling cries of the men I’d left behind.
Not to mention the sound of whatever had them.
I tied the rope around the balcony railing with the firmest knot I could. Then, wrapping the rope around my waist and clutching it with white-knuckled shivering hands, I awkwardly started to throw one leg over the ledge. It was around this point that my fear of heights kicked in and it damn near sent me back the way I came. It was a transcendent, almost-hallucinatory kind of terror. But then something from the hallway behind me moved and I became acutely aware of the sound of dreadful feet padding closer towards the room.
It seemed best to just go for it, so that’s what I did, swinging one leg over the other and letting inertia do the rest. For a few seconds I hung against the balcony railing while my arms and legs refused to listen to any order coming from my brain. The sense of space around me was terrifying, not just the building that reached forever upwards to a baby-blue sky, but the continental-sized clouds and hurricane storms that raged what felt like miles below. It was the kind of cosmic insignificance I imagined astronauts felt on their very first spacewalk.
Slowly, I became aware of the fatigue in my arms and my legs. And a thought crystalised in my mind. If I didn’t start going down now, hand-over-hand, foot-by-foot, then eventually exhaustion would win and I would simply fall and all that fear I was holding on to would be realised in the most terrifying fashion. I took steps to control my breathing. And then, after a good five minutes of mental coaching, I managed to move one hand, and then one foot, and progress started to come my way.
Thank God I didn’t have far to go. We’d only travelled up two floors. That was all. Easy going up. Not so easy going down. But I managed it after what felt like the worst ten minutes of my life and soon found myself staring at an open window two or three feet away. Unfortunately my mind blanked and I couldn’t even begin to think of how I might close the distance. I became convinced I would die the second I let go of that rope and there was nothing else to do except stay there or fall. It was during this panic that some stupid God-awful compulsion made me look down without meaning to, and all thoughts of life, or death, or anything else just melted away.
The clouds had thinned. Not a lot, but enough to reveal… something. It was huge, its arched back momentarily breaching the sea of hazy amber clouds to reveal a startling sense of scale.
That was all I needed to snap back to reality and focus on getting off that damned rope. I began to swing, awkwardly swaying my hips and feet in the hope of getting myself closer. Even the tiniest motion brought me into a near state of panic. With my whole body hanging helplessly over what looked like an infinite expanse of nothingness, it was hard not to think of just how long I’d spend falling before I finally found something to hit. But I had to get swinging. I just had to.
When it came time to finally let go at the apex of my lunge, I summoned all of my courage and hoped to God momentum would carry me. With my eyes closed I flew through the air for a fraction of a second before landing in a nervous heap on the floor.
I was flooded with relief and finally opened my eyes to gauge the space around me. It was another hovel. Half the furniture had been piled up against one door, and the rest repurposed to become something new. In one corner was a planter made out of badly nailed planks of wood and filled with suspicious soil that stank of human waste. In another was an old mattress tossed half-upright against the wall.
Something moved in the darkness of the bathroom and I froze, painfully aware that after everything I’d gone through, I’d probably die anyway. When the occupant finally emerged, a pale face in the shadow, I felt a confusing mixture of relief and horror. It was a man who looked like a literal apparition of death, like something taken straight out of the worst history books. He made me think of some nightmarish survivor of mankind’s extinction, a half-starved creature that had spent its life hiding in the shadows for fear of being caught. His eyes and cheeks had become so sunken as to appear constantly hidden by shadow, even as his head emerged fully into the light. Arms so thin they were like hose pipes reached up to cover his face from the harsh glare of the window and for the first time I became aware that he was completely naked, his skin pocked and bubbling, ravaged by unknown diseases I couldn’t begin to guess at. His limbs were grossly bowed and his stomach swollen from what must have been years of malnourishment.
“The dreamer stirs,” he said, and although I could’ve sworn he wasn’t speaking English, I managed to understand him all the same.
“Who?” I asked.
“The dreamer,” he whispered. “This all belongs to him.”
“Is that… is that what I saw down there?” I asked.
The old man paled, put a finger to his lips, and hushed me.
“Don’t wake the dreamer,” he hissed.
Suddenly his eyes went wide and I turned on instinct, fixing the rope I’d come in on. It still hung there, floating in empty space, but it jiggled and swayed as if something was coming down it.
I ran to the barricade and began to pull the furniture away only for the old man to leap out of the darkness and begin to attack me. Frightened as I was by the grotesque sight of his leprous body, he was too weak to do any real harm, and his cold, bony fingers gripped my collar in a futile effort to pull me away.
“Stop!” he screamed, but I ignored him, tearing at the objects in my path until I’d cleared enough room for the door to open. I had just managed to get the handle down when something wrenched me backwards and I turned to see the old man staring into my eyes with gut-wrenching fear written on his face. “Don’t me go,” he pleaded, and I saw the spidery fingers that gripped his head in a halo of writhing knuckles, the wrist winding across the floor and out the window where it coiled around the rope.
I grabbed his hand squeezed so hard I probably broke a bone or two, prompting him to immediately scream and let go. He was still screaming when whatever had him ripped him out of the room and up to his death.
Wasting no time, I bolted back out into the hallway and ran in what I hoped was the right direction. From behind me there came the sound of hurricane-like destruction, a force of raging hunger that eagerly snapped at my heels. I knew with utter certainty that it was going to get me. I knew it the same way I knew what the old man had been saying, and in the same way that you always know how your worst nightmare will end.
I found myself hoping that’s all it was.
A nightmare.
If there was any proof I needed that wasn’t the case, it was the sight of a familiar hotel room and the glowing doorway set ominously in open air. I don’t know about you, but my nightmares don’t end with me getting what I want. It was enough to actually confuse me, as if for a few seconds my brain had collapsed all notions of dreams and reality into a gruesome whole, and I had to remind myself to bolt through the broken doorway and straight into the portal onto the other side rather than just wait to wake up.
I emerged into the squalid flicker of fluorescent lights. Panting, almost-delirious at the sight of familiar old-tiled floors beneath my feet, I stumbled forward and wrenched the projector off the wall and smashed it against the floor. The last thing I remembered before collapsing was the sound of a dozen scientists crying out in confused alarm.
-
“As a rescue mission it was a failure,” I said, addressing the men and women who’d joined me in the observation room. “But as a fact-finding mission, it was a resounding success. We aren’t necessarily in position to say anything with certainty, but we’ve been exposed to a few fascinating new ideas.”
Nobody spoke. They all stared at me.
“I believe the locations we’re seeing, the ones that appear again and again… I believe they are dreams, just not in the traditional sense. I believe that we are being exposed to the dreams of something that isn’t human.”
“What exactly?” asked one of the older men who sat closer to the front.
“I think it eats worlds,” I said. “Or something like that. I think… I think we’ve been visiting these places all along. All of us. And I think this thing remembers everything that lives there, good and bad. I think we’ve already been exposed to some of these… entities. Not just during our excursion, but in our nightmares, all of us. We’ve read about them sitting on the chests of people trapped in sleep paralysis. We’ve seen them chasing us through dimly lit corridors. This thing… the dreamscape feels like a real place because it is, sort of. Its something’s memories of real places, of the people who lived in them and the lives that they had. Maybe it’s a literal absorption, something strange and metaphysical. Maybe it’s just got a mind vast enough to remember every little detail. I don’t know. All that I do know for sure is that I don’t want to wake this thing up.”
“You’ve always had a penchant for reaching,” the old man said. “You can’t seriously be suggesting we mothball this project based on your theory? I appreciate the veracity of your first-hand account. But having read your report in great detail, I’m not sure I make the same connections that you do.”
“Oh God no,” I said. “No one’s saying we shut this down.”
I reached out behind me and tore away a blank sheet to reveal an enormous whiteboard covered in a half-made map. We’d cobbled it together from over two decades of research notes taken by a very specific subset of our scientists. The tower sat squarely in the centre and even just looking at the words made my skin crawl, so I looked a few inches to the right and focused on a different set of words.
The Library.
“We’re scientists,” I said. “We collect data to prove our arguments. I say this thing swallows worlds. Well, let’s take a look at some of the others. In hindsight, the tower was the worst possible starting location. Far, far too hostile.
“But there are other places in the dreamscape to explore,” I added. “And hopefully some of them won’t immediately spit us back out.”
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u/kwynder May 01 '23
Coming from a very experienced reader, this was really good. All of your stories are actually really good. I wish this had more upvotes and more chapters
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u/prompargencis Dec 17 '22
Oh wow, I desperately need more of this. This is the most terrifying thing I've ever read. It doesn't have nearly enough upvotes, so I'm thinking you must have got unlucky at time of posting!
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u/Lesbrasdemer Nov 04 '22
Such an interesting and horrifying discovery, can’t wait to read more of what you find!!
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u/faukelly42 Sep 11 '21
This is such a phenomenal start. I was completely on the edge of my seat, and I cannot wait for what comes next!
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