As Though Before A Vengeful God: A Horror Page 2

  He was in a hospital bed. His vision swum with painkillers. Moans and murmurs echoed softly from the hallway. A tube in his arm led up to a glass jar of dark red blood. A goateed man in a white coat stood over him, watching the blood drain from the jar, through the tube, into his body. His vision blurred as he fell back below the surface of consciousness.

  After he awoke again he unceremoniously abandoned his job out of fear and shame, knowing that when push came to shove he abdicated everything he thought he stood for. The life he’d made in the past three years crumbled in an instant.

  He fled the east side and ran back to familiar environs. He got a job giving change in nickels at the automat. He hid from anyone who might know how completely he had failed. He noticed an odd lingering side effect.

  His dreams became much more vivid and much less affecting. They were not his usual dreams. Usually he’d be far enough gone to the sauce that he had no dreams at all until his brain re-awoke an hour or two before he did, prompting a rapid flurry of hyperreal dreams that hung in his mind long after he opened his eyes.

  He found himself witnessing situations that exemplified fears he had heard about but did not have for himself. He found himself underwater, abstractly aware that he was supposed to be afraid of drowning, but only finding the water refreshing and the sea life fascinating. He found himself staring down from great heights and knowing there was a distant echo of vertigo, while he only appreciated the view. He found himself falling to earth and knowing there was a distant scream of terror as he relished the wind and the momentum, calm in his knowledge that what he was experiencing was not real.

  He knew it was not real, but he could not control it, and this confused him. In the past when he’d had dreams he was aware were dreams, he had then been able to influence his environment, to bend it to his will. It was his mind, so if he had any say in the matter he was going to be doing whatever he wanted in there. Yet in all of those dreams there had always been a moment where his awareness that he was asleep grew enough to wake him. Usually, just when things were getting good.

  But now, thankful for having survived his wound, he was only a passenger in a dream that seemed to be going along without him. He did not know what to make of this and did not speak of it to any other soul until months later, when he had a passenger-dream, as he’d come to think of them, and saw someone else entirely.

  This was not the symbolic abstraction of the self that dreams often held, but a clear other person entirely. This mirror was in their home. The mundane dream continued without ceremony for some time as he wondered why he was watching a man shuffle around his apartment.

  The single constant in the passenger-dreams had been that they seemed like they should have been nightmares, but this was one of those mundane dreams close enough to reality that one might mistake a misremembered dream for an actual event. He felt himself putter around an unfamiliar room in a body that was not his own, only vaguely aware of a sense of concern that was unlike the usual nightmare fear.

  The primary dreamer body meandered over to a kitchen table covered in papers instead of food, sat down, and stared at bills. The ashamed failure of a man saw through his eyes and saw debt. He recognized the man’s address on the bank statement and heard the muffled voice through the wall saying something about having to go sell more blood to Dr. Fantus to make ends meet this month. Then he woke up.

  The dreamer traveled across town to the address from his dream to sit in a coffee shop across the street and begin his stakeout. He consumed coffee at a steady trickle to justify his continued presence, and did this for long enough that he became unusually aware of the tension of the individual muscles in his face and neck and the pounding of his heartbeat.

  Then the man who he had been in the dream arrived. The man from the dream came walking down the street and paused in front of the diner. That man tossed a brief longing glance at the food beyond the glass before turning towards his apartment, when the dreamer ran outside and offered to buy him a meal if he could just talk to him for a minute. The man from the dream stared at him for a moment, bewildered, then accepted.

  They sat back down in the dreamer’s booth, and the dreamer introduced himself. He said his name was Augie Wall, and then he asked how the other man had been sleeping.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO: THE BLOOD SELLER

  “Good to meet you, Augie. I’m Paul. Been sleeping fine.”

  Augie didn’t immediately respond and keep the conversation going. Given what he was about to say, he didn’t want to barrel ahead, and given what he was about to say, he should’ve planned this a bit better. In this moment of silence, Paul stared at Augie. Augie could feel his stare. In fact, Augie realized, he could feel far too much about Paul. Paul was gaunt but his eyes were clear and bright. So bright that his gaze seemed like a ray of sunlight that warmed him, his voice echoed with two voices at once, his body shimmered.

  Looking around the coffee shop, Augie realized that he felt Paul’s presence with a hallucinatory intensity that made every other human in the room seem insubstantial. Theoretical. There were theoretical versions of Paul too, but layered over each other, barely out of sync, the glimmers of intentions and impulses unconsciously and immediately considered and discarded.

  Augie stared back as these hypothetical Pauls all collapsed into one waveform and said, “You don’t look like you been sleeping too well yourself.”

  Paul’s food arrived. Bacon and eggs and potatoes and milk and coffee. The waitress set it down and Augie watched the shimmering hypothetical Pauls tear into it with animalistic abandon, shoveling food into their mouths like they were about to go to the electric chair, while the Paul-in-actuality carefully placed his egg above the potatoes before breaking the yolk and swirling everything in it.

  He started to eat with the exaggerated focus on precision and decorum of a drunk man trying to pass as sober, but the hunger took him once he broke the seal and he started wolfing down the meal, fast but in control, and the shimmering possibilities again collapsed into one man eating breakfast in front of him.

  “You were hungry.”

  Paul washed down a mouthful of bacon with a swig of coffee and said, “What gave me away?”

  Augie said, “Did you just lose blood or something?”

  Paul actually stopped chewing for a second that time. Other versions of Paul immediately whipped their heads to stare straight at him. Real Paul did not. He kept his head down. He then took a swig of milk, carefully swallowed as if consciously resisting a spit-take, and said again, “…What gave me away?”

  “You look a bit pale.”

  “I’m not hurt.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “I didn’t hurt anyone either.”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  One version of Paul unceremoniously walked away from the table entirely and vanished.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m just saying you’re clearly hungry but also well-rested.”

  “Sure.”

  “But you did lose blood? Is that why you’re so hungry?”

  “Well, yeah, but I been pretty hungry pretty often for a while.”

  “You don’t seem too worried about that.”

  “Harder to be worried when I’m currently eating a plate of hot food. Being hungry again is a problem for later.”

  “I mean, you don’t seem too worried about blood loss.”

  “It’s safe. It’s not like I’m losing any more. I’m fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “I sold it.”

  “What?”

  “I sold blood.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yeah, at the blood bank.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “For real.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Hand to God. Good racket, too, if you don’t need all your blood that day.”

  “I’m accustomed to having all of it.”

  “Yeah, wel
l, I used to be accustomed to eating like this every day. You learn to get by with less. It’s not so bad. With the blood, I mean, you just gotta make sure to eat plenty and drink enough fluids right after.”

  “What were you going to eat if I hadn’t offered?”

  “Probably a peanut butter and mayo sandwich, quart of milk.”

  “Huh. I used to live on straight peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “You gotta try it with the mayo, kid. Keeps it from sticking with the roof of your mouth so bad, really rounds out the taste. Gotta toast the bread though or it’s just wet mush the whole way through.” He took a big bite of yolk-soaked potatoes. “I like this better though. A lot better. Thanks.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “So what do you want, then? No such thing as a free lunch.”

  “You said you were sleeping well?”

  “Like a stone. One good thing I got going for me. Wake up every day ready to go. Didn’t always. Seemed to get better this past year.”

  “Not having any nightmares?”

  Paul stopped to think for a moment. He had not taken note of the absence of nightmares as an extraordinary phenomena to be considered and filed away for future discussion. He did not notice the absence of an occasional distress that he’d never quite put his finger on in the first place.

  “No, not lately.”

  “Good dreams, then?”

  “Yeah, sometimes.”

  “You afraid of heights?”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Me. I used to ride the sky wire every chance I got.”

  “Still, easy guess.”

  “You afraid of water?”

  “I’ll handle a pitcher just fine, but I can’t swim and I’d prefer not to drown.”

  “Listen, I think I’ve been having your nightmares.”

  Every shimmering hypothetical of Paul froze and aligned into actuality.

  “…What?”

  “You have a recurring nightmare of falling from a great height above the ocean. Above the clouds, far from any land. You are so high up that it takes minutes to fall. You spend the entire time terrified that you are going to die the moment you hit the surface. But as you approach the surface you start to see the outline of an enormous leviathan, rising fast, opening its mouth, and the dread of what would have been an instant death on impact magnifies into something else, almost religious terror, as the mouth of the thing opens and consumes you. Its throat is so deep that it goes below the surface, and you fall into the maw, further and further, until everything goes black and you wake up.”

  Paul stared and chewed slowly.

  “You have another recurring dream of trying to explain to your father why you can’t find a job as all your teeth fall out. Your father has been dead since ’31 and you realize this as you look for your teeth on the floor on your hands and knees. When you realize your father is dead you look up and he’s gone. Then you’re looking for him again in a place that looks like your childhood home, but it’s too big, and none of the doors lead outside.

  “While you’re frantically looking, you suddenly know something else is looking for you. You don’t know what it is but you feel it as a malevolent presence. In the labyrinth of your home you encounter a door that you know leads to your father’s room, and you know he is in there but the other thing is too, and it already has him, and you can’t bear to see what it has done to him, so you reach for the doorknob, but you panic and run, and then you wake up.”

  They stared at each other for a long time. Paul saw Augie just blankly regarding him. Augie saw shimmers of Paul standing and screaming, flipping the table, storming out, throwing a punch, flipping him off, and continuing to eat ravenously. In a minute all the shimmers faded and resolved back into a man sitting at a table.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, you’ve been having my nightmares.”

  They stared at each other for a moment longer until Paul broke eye contact to eat another mouthful of potatoes. He had already planned on eating it anyway, and emotionally and intellectually processing the sudden appearance of seemingly impossible psychic phenomena in his life had done nothing to lessen his hunger. The potatoes, however, had, so he decided he would let them keep fulfilling their duty while some other part of him worked on the new considerations.

  Augie watched Paul and saw no shimmers breaking off from him in any capacity— something about Paul hearing his own nightmare that he’d never spoken to anyone described back to him clicked off something in his mind, and he existed in this moment only as a vessel for acceptance and home fries.

  Paul looked up and said, “What do you want?”

  “I want to stop having your nightmares.”

  “Well I don’t want them back. And besides that I have no idea how I could take them back.”

  “So you’re selling your blood to Dr. Fantus to make ends meet?”

  “I never said his name.”

  “I saw it in your dream. Same with your address. That’s how I found you. And I saw you look at yourself in a mirror.”

  “Okay, I’m starting to want them back. I’m not… I don’t know what you’ve seen in there, but I’m no weirdo or nothin.”

  “And you clearly have more teeth than your dreams would suggest, and you’re not trapped in a labyrinth or falling out of the sky. I know you aren’t your dreams. Mine aren’t great either. I still get my own nightmares too. I also get the teeth thing.”

  “I hate the teeth dreams.”

  “Yeah, well, I get a double dose.”

  “I guess I should ask the obvious question. How the fuck… why are you having my dreams?”

  “No idea. Well, no idea how. As to why, at least as to why you and not anybody else, is because I think I got some of your donated blood.”

  “Is that… is that a common side effect? I mean, I’ve never gotten any blood back from the bank. It’s been all deposits. No withdrawals. I’d prefer the real bank work like that for me but no such luck.”

  “I don’t know. I hoped you would know.”

  “I don’t know shit neither.”

  “Should we ask the doctor?”

  “Huh?”

  “I lost blood, I got your blood, I’m having your dreams, and now you tell me there is actually a bank of blood in town, which means— I’m not sure what it means. But it means enough blood is being used that we might find if this happens to anybody else. So let’s ask the doctor. It’s worth a shot.”

  “Oh my god,” said Paul.

  “What?” said Augie.

  “What if it’s me? What if everybody who gets some of my blood starts having my dreams? What if more people get my blood and find my address and find me?”

  “Yeah, see, I figured you wouldn’t want that. How many times have you given to the blood bank?”

  “Six times in the past year, I think.”

  “Fuck.”

  “So let’s go see Dr. Fantus.”

  “Alright, let’s go.”

  Augie started to stand and reach for his wallet but looked and noticed Paul was still chewing.

  “I’m not going fuckin anywhere until this plate is spit shine clean.”

  “Right, sorry. Just a bit eager to stop having your thoughts in my head.”

  “You just get the dreams, right? It’s not like you can actually read my thoughts? I mean, you ain’t a mind reader, right?”

  Augie watched all the shimmering potentialities of Paul fidget in various expressions of paranoid discomfort while the real thing just kept chewing.

  “No, I can’t read your thoughts.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “I could kind of sense you coming, though. Before I ran out to offer you lunch. I knew you were about to be there before you came into view. I could almost see you through the wall. Same as every other part, I don’t know why. Even with you in front of me right now, I can sense your presence in a way that I can’t with anyone else. Now that I know what that feeling is, I think
I could point to you like a compass from wherever else I was.”

  Paul listened, nonplussed, as he chewed the last of his bacon and washed it down with the last of his coffee and milk. He said, “Disregard what I said before. I am eager to have you out of my head”

  “Great. I’ll get the check.”

  “You better.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER THREE: THE MAN OF SCIENCE

  Cook County Hospital was an imposing institution. Gothic archways alternated with Roman columns across the facade, which was wide enough to fill the edges of your peripheral vision on approach. While labeled as a place of healing, the architecture gave the impression that it had been here long before you and would remain long after you were gone, and depending on why you were getting a closer look at the architecture that day, you might be gone quite soon.

  Augie had been unconscious his last time coming in, and eager to put it behind him on the way out. Glad to see it shrinking in the distance that time. Now as they walked and it grew to fill his field of vision entirely, he began to get nervous. Paul, however, strolled in with casual familiarity, and Augie tried to match his stride. Once they cleared the threshold, though, the shimmers of Paul’s intentions flourished out of him.

  While Paul maintained a steady, inconspicuous pace, his suppressed impatience showed as his shimmers ran ahead through the halls, darting and juking around all passerby and obstacles. Augie noted that when they entered a stairwell, one shimmer simply floated straight up through the central column, so apparently these shimmers were not limited by the potential physical possibility of their behaviors.

  They went mostly in silence. Augie did not feel the need for small talk from a man whose innermost fears were regularly displayed to him, and Paul did not feel the need to disclose any of them to a man who was regularly rummaging around in his brain looking for clues. In the situation at hand, all the communication that was required was for Paul to walk in front of Augie and show him how to get to the blood bank.