by Richard Ayre
I sighed loudly and Charlie looked at me. ‘Get with the times grandad.’
It was meant as a friendly jest, but it just annoyed me more. This was increasingly becoming more common. In my house, probably in a few other houses, but also in the media. If you didn’t like stuff like DreamSphere, you must be old and out of touch. There seemed to be a divide opening, not between generations, because plenty of people my age and older were using it, but between those who thought it was ‘just a laugh’ and those who thought it was invasive. The news channels were becoming more and more derogatory about stories of people who were giving up on technology and moving out of the cities to live a quieter life. They were labelled ‘tree-huggers’ and ‘greenies.’ It was my opinion that the media moguls who owned the news channels were very much in favour of these labels because they wanted anyone who thought differently, and therefore were not going to partake in subscribing to their various websites, to be outsiders. To be a minority. But it seemed more and more people were taking this approach. If you believe what you read in the news of course.
Whilst Charlie watched the TV show, I picked up a paperback. They still existed thank God, but they were becoming cripplingly expensive. This was a one I’d read before. Before I knew where I was Charlie was saying she was going to bed. I followed her a little while later and found her sorting out her phone and setting the Bluetooth connection to her DSM, the DreamSphereMonitor. This was how the company that made the app actually got paid. For it to work you had to buy a DSM. It wasn’t that expensive. But it wasn’t cheap either. At the last count over fifty five million units had been sold in Britain alone, and something close to two hundred million units in the USA. A lot of people had them. Charlie sorted out her electronic paparazzi and turned off her light. I did the same.
I think it was about two weeks later when the first troubles began. In Arkansas, a man had seen a dream his wife had recorded. It was of her having sex with the neighbour. The husband had gone next door and blasted the neighbours head off with a six gauge. When the police arrived they found him sobbing beside the corpse. He said he could not remember committing the murder.
A few days later a woman in Birmingham hanged herself. She left a note saying she couldn’t face herself after watching a dream of her killing a baby in its cot. Neither the cot nor the baby was real, but the horror she felt was.
And these went on. Every now and then another story would appear about someone whose DreamSphere experience was less than satisfactory. People were actually dying because of it. But no-one seemed unduly worried. Those people must have been wrong in the head to start with.
About six months after the app was launched, we heard about the first divorce it had caused. It was the usual thing. Lurid, sexually charged dreams viewed by the partner, until it got to the point they couldn’t stand it anymore. Presumably the wife had asked the husband to stop recording his dreams and he refused. This was probably the real reason for the divorce. The guy must have loved it; watching himself having sex with a bevy of different women. It must have been like starring in his own porn film. But I could understand why his wife would not take kindly to it. I was starting to feel the same way.
And as the months wore on, the deaths started to happen with a frequency that was alarming to me, but boring to the rest of the country who had their noses buried into various brightly lit screens.
One night I came home late. I had been out with an old friend of mine, John. John had been telling me how he had recently detached himself from the world. He had sold his laptop and his tablet, got rid of his phone, and had disconnected the internet from his TV. He said he had joined a group that went away into the countryside at the weekends. He said they had a place up in the Borders, between England and Scotland. There was no electricity, no hot water, and no distractions. He said they spent their weekends having barbeques and sitting looking up at the stars. ‘Is that it?’ I asked him. ‘Sounds a bit boring.’
John looked at me then, frowning. ‘I think you’d like it,’ he eventually said. ‘We talk. We sit for hours and just talk. We communicate.’
When I got home that night I looked for Charlie, but couldn’t find her. Eventually I peeked in Will’s and then Michael’s rooms. Charlie was in Michael’s room, standing over his bed. And she had a kitchen knife in her hand.
Startled, I moved into the room. My boy was asleep, unharmed. I looked again at Charlie. I called her name twice, until she slowly looked at me. Then she screamed in terror and launched at me with the knife.
I threw up an arm and the blade cut wickedly into my forearm, the slice deep. The pain was a dull pain so I knew it was serious. But I had no time to dwell on this, for Charlie was attacking me again, her face terrified. She lifted her arm to strike again, and God help me, I saw my opportunity. Her defenceless jaw was just where it needed to be. I walloped her as hard as I could.
She went down without a sound. I stood there, breathing hard, staring down at the woman I loved, when I heard a sound. I looked at the bed, and at Michaels’s accusing face, before stirring myself to some sort of action. I bent down towards my wife.
We were still at the hospital four hours later. The neighbours had agreed to look after the lads, and it was them who had called the police, once we had set off for the hospital. They questioned us as we waited. In the fashion of the day, everyone else in Casualty got to hear it.
Eventually, they put it down to a domestic. Neither of us was going to press charges. My arm was stitched and dressed. We got home late, and both of us had a drink. We sat on the settee and looked at each other.
‘Were you connected tonight?’ I eventually asked her. She just stared back at me. I went upstairs and retrieved her phone from the DSM. I handed it to her. She played her dream back.
It showed Charlie in that old dark house again, and once more her dead father was trying to hold her back, stopping her from going down that corridor. But that corridor, in the old, haunted house, had a picture on the wall. I knew it well. I had painted it myself. And it hung on the landing of our house.
In the dream Charlie broke free from her father’s grasp and entered a room. In the room was a crouching beast, a green skinned, lumpish horror of a beast, and it glared up at her. Charlie gripped the knife she held and stepped towards it. She turned as something entered the room, and as stupid as this sounds, she was confronted with Frankenstein’s Monster. The old Boris Karloff version. But the 30’s movies had never shown a monster such as this. There was a malevolence in its eyes that spoke of a true horror, and it lurched towards her. Charlie lifted the knife and rushed towards it, slicing its arm. Then the playback stopped.
We eventually looked at each other.
‘You’re obviously getting rid of the app,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ she responded dully. ‘The app isn’t the problem here. Dreams are just subconscious thoughts. My subconscious turned you into a monster. You are the problem. Not DreamSphere.’
I was dumbfounded. I shook my head a couple of times to try and organise my thoughts.
‘You were going to kill Michael,’ I said at last. ‘You tried to kill me.’
‘I wasn’t going to kill Michael. That’s ridiculous.’
‘Charlie, he was a monster in your dream, you’ve just seen it. This app is doing things. It’s not just recording your dreams. It’s fulfilling them. You’ve seen the stories in the news.’
‘Oh, we can believe the news when it suits you can we?’ she replied scathingly. ‘I thought you didn’t want to believe anything you saw or heard anymore.’
‘What the hell do you think happened tonight?’ I shouted at her. ‘You were going to kill our son, and you tried to kill me!’
Charlie closed her phone with a snap and shook her head.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied firmly.
‘Why do you think your dad was in your dream?’ I asked. ‘He’d been conjured up because you know, deep down you know that this thing is bad. It’s turning you bad. He
was trying to stop you!’
For a reply, she simply went to bed, and I was left on my own.
When the boys came back the next day from the neighbours, they avoided me and made more of a show of being with their mother. They had obviously made up their minds about what had happened that night. Over the following weeks I moved out of the bedroom and into the spare room. And over those weeks, more and more people, all across the world, began to die because of DreamSphere. And nobody accepted that fact. Humanity sleepwalked its way into oblivion. I moved out of the house, and moved in with John.
And three weeks later, almost to the day, my wife murdered my children and then killed herself. But by then, even this didn’t make the news. Because the day after it happened, there was no news.
None of us know what really occurred. But someone pressed the button. Did they do it because of DreamSphere? Did the President of some country have a nightmare of being attacked and retaliated by launching the weapons? Who knows?
I was at the Retreat, in the Borders, when both the deaths of my family, and the end of the world happened. John had taken me there, introduced me to the others who had gone that weekend. The others that survived.
We sit now, on an evening, watching the far away glow of a civilisation burning. We watch for a while, but then we begin to talk. Not of the past, but of the future. We talk. It really is the best kind of communication.
The idea behind Communication came from Cath. It was her idea to write a story about an app that can record dreams, but it is my words here, so if you don’t like it, blame me, not her. The underlying themes of Communication are pertinent though. I think we all understand the need to just sit down and talk sometimes. Evolution has given us this marvellous gift. We should make use of it from time to time maybe.
A dead man’s revenge
The man matched his car. Dusty and crumpled and old. He parked the Sierra and locked the door before moving towards the reception of the motorway motel. As he walked he looked towards the East, noting the orange glow. He needed to stop now. He needed rest.
The girl at the reception did a double take when she looked at him, a small jolt of fear flooding her system for a second. He looked wrong, this man.
He was dressed like a young man, in jeans and a short canvas jacket, with green trainers on. But his hair was sparse and white and thinning, his cheeks sunken. His young man clothes hung from the emaciated body of a pensioner. The girl tried not to turn away when he attempted to smile at her and she saw his yellow and brown teeth and the way his skin crinkled like parchment. When he asked for a room she smelled his breath, and she coughed self-consciously, unable to stop a hand rising to her own mouth in defence of that awful stench.
The man seemed to understand this and took a step back, keeping his mouth closed as much as possible as the transaction was completed. He paid in cash and quickly took the key, moving along the corridor to the allotted room. When he was gone, the girl chastised herself. How could she be so cruel? She shook her head. Cancer was such a horrible disease. That’s what she thought. That the man had cancer. He would have eagerly exchanged his predicament for one even as awful as that.
Inside the room, the man stepped across to the window and closed the curtains, cutting off the sight of the car park outside. They were thick curtains. That was good. He took off his jacket and his aroma attacked his nostrils. He smelled like a corpse. He could really have done with a shower but the thought of the running water froze him with fear. Could he manage to run a bath? Could he put up with the taps splashing and throwing their burning droplets around? For the benefit of lying in the calm water?
He shuddered. No. He couldn’t face it. He would have to smell. It wasn’t the outside of his body that stank anyway. It was the rotting flesh inside him that reeked.
He closed the bathroom door without looking at the mirrors inside. The room was in darkness. The man took off his trainers and lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling he could see quite clearly, his stench still assailing his nostrils.
The Hunger clawed its way into his being again. So much so that he clutched his stomach as the old pain attacked him. His thoughts turned to the young girl at the reception desk and he swallowed, saliva erupting in his dry mouth. He remembered her look of fear, the look of disgust on her face as she took in his appearance. And he remembered the veins throbbing and pulsing in her body. He could hear it. He could hear it now even though she was down the corridor. He could hear everyone’s pulses in this motel. They throbbed in his head.
It would be so easy. He could be glutted. He could be satiated. He could be strong again. Wasn’t it worth it? His mission would fail if he did not have the strength to carry it out. How could he face her in his depleted state? Surely he owed it to those he had failed in the past? To continue with his mission? To kill her for what she had done?
He stood and moved to the wall of the room, placing his ear against it. He could hear two heartbeats next door, slow in their sleep state. It would be so easy. Their deaths would give him the strength to continue. The strength to gain his revenge.
He moved to the door and opened it. He stood outside the next room’s door. His hand closed on the handle. One push. The lock would fracture under his touch. He would be in and upon his victims before they even knew what had hit them. He could get his strength back.
His stomach growled again, and his eyes became slits, giving his horrifying face a feral, demonic grimace. His hand gripped the handle of the door.
No!
Monica’s face sprang into his mind and he snatched his hand from the door, turning away quickly and re-entering his own room.
He could not do it. That would make him as bad as her. The innocents could not be sacrificed because of his need for revenge. This is what the disease did. It took away humanity. Took away feelings of guilt, of remorse. Took away everything that was to be human. One feast. One feast was all it would take. And then he would be the same as her. A monster.
There was another way however. One way which would mean he would keep on surviving, although the thought of it made him feel even sicker than the Hunger did. He pulled on his trainers and walked out, along the corridor, past the receptionist and out into the car park. He glanced again at the sky. It was brightening. He didn’t have long.
He turned and went around the corner of the motel, finding what he was looking for in the bushes immediately. A rabbit sat near the kerb, munching grass. It stopped chewing and looked at him.
By the time it had moved its eyes, he was upon it, covering the distance instantly. He grabbed it by the head and shook it, once. It didn’t even have time to squeal. He bit into its neck and drank down its warm, salty blood, draining the small animal in seconds. He gagged as he did so. It tasted vile but he forced himself to empty the carcass, throwing it down violently when he was finished.
He clasped a hand over his mouth as he felt bile rise, but he forced it back down and stood, gasping. Eventually the nausea faded, leaving only faint cramps in his stomach. He leaned on the corner of the motel and waited until his breathing slowed down. He then grabbed some leaves and wiped his mouth roughly. He did this several times, making sure all the blood was gone. After all, he couldn’t check in a mirror, could he?
He then went back into the motel, and the receptionist glanced up at him, her face showing surprise. It was definitely the same man who had entered only half an hour before. But his hair seemed thicker now, darker. And his complexion was less sallow. Fuller somehow.
She shook her head as he went past her without a word. It had been a long shift. She needed sleep.
When he returned to his room, the man once again unlaced his trainers and lay down. He felt better now, the queasiness had passed. He took a deep breath, suddenly exhausted. As night turned to day, the vampire slept. He dreamed.
He parks the Merc in the garage as usual, clicking the remote as he leaves so the door slides down. It’s late. He has been working long into the night recently. His new
boss is really making him work for his money, but he thinks she is pleased with the project he’s been working on. The client is pleased anyway. There should be a nice juicy bonus coming his way soon.
He steps onto the porch and fumbles in his pocket for his key, squinting for the right one but unwilling to get his glasses out of his bag. Eventually he opens the door.
Millie does not run up to him as she usually does. He pauses, frowning. There is no noise. No radio, no TV. The house is silent. For some reason a shiver runs down his spine. The light is on in the sitting room. He moves towards it. As he gets closer to the half open door he sees there is a dark figure in there…
The vampire awoke with a jolt, breathing hard. That smell washed over him again. The animal’s blood had not lasted long.
He glanced at the window, noticing that no light was shining through. He opened the curtain very slightly, standing to one side and looking at the floor. But he was ok. It was night again. Time to leave. If he drove all night he believed he could be there before morning.
He checked out and noticed it was a different receptionist, a boy this time. He paid in cash, trying not to stare at the carotid artery pushing the boy’s blood around his sweet, youthful body.
He took his receipt and left without talking, knowing his breath was stinking again. He got into the car and pulled the road map out of the glove box. His destination was marked with a red cross. He reckoned six hours would see him there.
He filled the car up and then set off, keeping to the speed limits. He didn’t want to be stopped by some random patrol, even though he was desperate to get to the place where she waited for him. He didn’t want to explain the small but heavy box stowed in the boot.