Dreamfall

by Amy Plum

  When they finish, Dr. Vesper climbs the steps up to the monitoring station and takes his seat in front of a pair of screens. Dr. Zhu makes her way to me and leans over to switch on my giant monitor. “Good morning, Jaime,” she says. I say good morning back as my screen springs to life. It is divided into seven windows with bird’s-eye views of the subjects in black and white.

  Three green lights glow in the upper right corner of each window. “Since you’re just observing, we’ve put you in front of the screen that monitors each subjects’ video, audio, and power feed.” She gives me a slight smile. “As we explained yesterday, there’s nothing really for you to do per se, but feel free to read the general file. If it seems like a quiet moment, you are welcome to ask Dr. Vesper and me questions. And, though you may take all the notes you want for your project report, you aren’t to show them to anyone except your supervising professor—who we’ve spoken with—until our results have been published.”

  “You made that clear yesterday,” I reassure her.

  Zhu nods efficiently and takes her chair next to Vesper. “Ready to go?” she asks, and then taps on the microphone positioned next to her screen. “It is March thirty-first, and the time is seven thirteen a.m. Administering general anesthetic . . .” She types a key, and a clicking sound starts up from the Tower. “. . . now.”

  A couple of minutes later, Vesper announces that the subjects are unconscious and starts the electroconvulsive current.

  I turn to watch the scene behind me. The only sign that anything is happening to the subjects is a slight flexing of their fingers and toes each time the current flows, which is signaled by a crackling sound . . . like static.

  This happens five times before the innovative part of the test begins. In regular ECT, the electrical current is shut off after the last pulse is given. But now it is left flowing through the subjects’ brains at low levels. The static continues, but quieter, becoming a background noise.

  According to Zhu’s running commentary, the subjects begin dropping into REM sleep . . . all except for one. After exchanging several worried looks with Vesper, Zhu walks down into the test area and watches the boy in bed seven like he’s a bomb about to go off. A second later, Vesper announces, “Subject seven has entered REM.”

  Zhu relaxes. “Thank the gods for that,” she murmurs, and, casting an appraising glance across the sleepers, returns to her chair. The researchers busy themselves staring at the screens and talking into their microphones.

  In my binder, the methodology section says we have twenty minutes to go before the next phase begins, but for now, the sensors indicate that everyone is dreaming.

  CHAPTER 2

  CATA

  FROM THE DARKNESS COMES A SOUND.

  It is one that I know too well: a bare foot squelching against the bathroom floor, painting a bright red footprint on the time-cracked tiles.

  I lie paralyzed on my four-poster bed, unable to do anything but listen to the footstep, and then the pause, and then the inevitable next step as the monstrous figure drags itself from the stained enamel bathtub in the room adjoining mine. Blood squishing between skinless flesh and hardwood floor.

  I’m staring at the ceiling of my cavernous old bedroom, veined with mysterious lines and cracks. Open windows like staring eyes are hung with white linen curtains billowing in the night breeze, and the floors creak at the slightest weight. Like they do now as the Flayed Man steps into my bedroom.

  I try to lift an arm. My fingers shake; my hand rises an inch from the mattress but that is as far as I can move it. My body is made of lead. I am helpless. Unable to run. To hide.

  I grit my teeth, summoning another ounce of strength, and am able to raise my head. There he is, framed by the bathroom door, an eerie green light shining from behind him, outlining his body as it unsteadily emerges from his space into mine. Thick blood oozes from the surface of his skinless carcass, where, in places, white bone protrudes from dark red bands of muscle. The orbs of his eyes bulge horrifically—there are no lids to hide them. A hole gapes where his nose should be, and the exposed teeth of his lipless mouth protrude like a jagged row of leaning, crumbling tombstones.

  He takes another step, his head drooping slightly to one side as he staggers in my direction. He points his finger at me, raising it on a trembling hand as blood sloughs from his wrist and pools on the floor beneath his arm.

  I try to scream but my throat doesn’t work—the choking sound I make is swallowed by the muffled terror filling the room like a fog. With renewed determination, I manage to push myself up to a sitting position and swing my leaden legs over the edge of my bed. My feet brush the floor. When I look back up, he has abruptly crossed the room and stands mere feet away.

  He takes another step toward me, reaching, dripping. His bare eyeballs give him the grotesque appearance of surprise. A shrieklike groan comes from somewhere inside him, and that is the trigger that releases me from the paralyzing gravity that’s been weighing me down. As I catapult myself across the room, he lunges forward and grabs me, covering my arm with blood.

  Jerking away, I struggle with the knob before throwing the door open and pitching myself into the hallway. To my left, a spiral staircase leads to the ground floor, and I fling myself down it, tripping as I go, leaning against the wall for support. I glance upward and the Flayed Man, though moving at a sepulchral pace, has suddenly advanced from my bedroom door to the landing at the top of the stairs. I hurl myself toward the front door. I grab the handle and pull with all my force. Nothing happens. It’s stuck.

  I scream—my voice has returned—and slam myself ineffectively against the door. The Flayed Man is halfway down the stairs, leering at me, doing his shriek-groans as he leaves a trail of gore behind him. I give up on the door and glance around to see that the coat closet is ajar. It’s a futile hiding place but I take it anyway.

  I scramble inside, pulling the door shut behind me, and crouch down. I push myself back until I feel the wall against my shoulders.

  I know he will find me. My heart constricts as long seconds of terror-laden silence tick by, and then I hear his jagged nails scratch at the door handle. It catches. The door opens. As it widens a bony hand reaches in and scrabbles around, ripping at the coats, inches from my face.

  I breathe in the coppery smell of blood and shudder from its raw stench.

  The groping fingers reach my skin and grab, clawing my arm as I leap up and smash out of the closet and past the man. For some reason, I know the front door will be open now, and there it is, standing wide, waiting. I throw myself outside, running across the front porch, past the cast-iron chairs and white wooden swing and into the perfectly mown grass of the front yard. The ground is cold beneath my bare feet, and I shiver and fold my arms across my chest as I breathe in the heady smell of gardenias and wet earth.

  I feel something trickling down my arm. Blood flows from the gash the Flayed Man scratched near my shoulder. A current of alarm runs hot through me.

  I swing around to see him emerge from my house. There is no one around but him. No one to run to. No one to save me but myself. I cut across the lawn and up into the backyard, my feet crunching against dry pine needles as I enter the forest of evergreens that bordered our house.

  The man appears at the corner of the house. I blink, and he is halfway across the backyard. The spiny leaves of the holly bushes tear my skin, leaving welts on my arms as I plunge deeper into the woods.

  The Flayed Man’s shriek rings out from behind me, and I hurtle up over the top of the hill and back down the other side toward the crawfish stream. I’m getting ready to jump over a rotting log when I’m suddenly blinded by a flash of light. A tremor shakes the landscape, as if a bomb exploded. I am paralyzed with my body suspended in midair, midstride, as if God pressed pause and everything froze. A full second passes, and then I unstick and land on the other side of the log. The light has disappeared, but something weird has happened. It’s like I’m running inside a shimmering bubble. Inside the b
ubble, nothing has changed—I’m still scrambling down the hill toward the stream. But outside it I see other people . . . in other places.

  A shantytown where a boy hides behind a broken window from a truck full of soldiers. A swimming pool, water green with algae, with a girl standing at its edge watching the floating body of a child. The inside of a creepy room, where someone is blindfolded and tied to a chair. A basement lit by a single, hanging bulb, a boy beneath it staring at a line of padlocked doors. A beach in what looks like a hurricane . . . torrential winds and rains and an empty bed sitting halfway out in the waves.

  And, parallel to me, a field of long grass where a boy runs, limping along frantically like he too is being chased. He looks over and our eyes meet. He glances behind me and his eyes widen. As if on cue, the Flayed Man’s groaning shriek rings out, blinding me with terror.

  I forget the boy and run for all I’m worth until suddenly before me stands a wall of dark, empty nothingness. The forest runs right up to the edge of it. The bleeding man gives one last cry as I fling myself face-first into the wall and my world goes black.

  CHAPTER 3

  JAIME

  THE ROOM SMELLS LIKE DEATH. NOT THAT I KNOW what death smells like exactly. But there’s this kind of mix between the sanitized smell of the AIDs clinic where I did my last internship and the airlessness of the mortuary where my father was laid out. I shudder, and immediately feel like an idiot for it.

  If, after med school and residency, I achieve my goal of opening a free clinic in the Detroit neighborhood I grew up in, I’ll be facing much worse things than this. The results of gang violence, drug addiction, and domestic abuse will be my everyday reality. So why am I allowing an overly sanitized lab to give me the creeps?

  I reopen the test manual. I need to better understand what’s going on. Maybe then I won’t want to make a run for it.

  The section after the summary is the Alpha test report. Seventeen-year-old Charles B went through the same trial I’m witnessing today. Picking up my pen, I note:

  •Normal sleep has five different stages that together last ninety to one hundred minutes.

  •For this test, Zhu and Vesper broke the five stages into two groups: rapid eye movement (REM) and non–rapid eye movement (NREM).

  •After treatment with initial high-level electrical pulses, subjects go into REM sleep and the charge is lowered and maintained at a steady level.

  •After twenty minutes of REM, the charge is lowered even more, kicking the subjects’ brains into NREM sleep.

  •After fifty minutes of NREM, the charge is upped and they reenter REM.

  •Repeat for five seventy-minute REM/NREM cycles

  •After the five cycles, the brain is conditioned into repeating this in real life—outside the lab—guaranteeing the subject something close to regular sleep.

  •For the Alpha subject, this was a success.

  •The results are to be verified by repeating the Alpha test identically using multiple subjects with varying sleep issues in a Beta test.

  I look up at the monitor. The subjects are in the first sleep cycle—REM—which is supposed to last twenty minutes. So when the timer at the bottom of my screen gets to nineteen, I stop reading and put the file down.

  Zhu and Vesper’s monitors show heart rates and brain waves scribbling up and down in zigzagged charts. They seem attentive but calm. Everything is going as planned.

  But at exactly nineteen minutes and thirty seconds, just before the sleepers should transition, the earth rumbles, like a subway train is passing beneath us. Then the building shakes—just a slight tremor that sends pencils rolling off desks and monitors quivering on their stands. The lights go out.

  There is a second of dead quiet, and then Zhu and Vesper are all over the place—I can see them in the green glow of the safety lights, cursing and flipping switches. But even though our screens are dark, the Tower remains unaffected: its lights are steady, and the humming and beeping of its monitors uninterrupted.

  “Thank God for the backup generator.” Vesper’s low voice rumbles in the dark.

  A clicking noise comes from the Tower, and Zhu breathes a sigh of relief. “The current decreased. They’ll transition into the NREM sleep cycle. We’re still on track.”

  And then the earthquake hits again, harder this time, and the Tower goes silent and dark. Even the safety lights are extinguished, and the room is plunged into pitch-black nothingness.

  Seven mind-numbing seconds pass. Then there is a booming sound like a cannon; the lights flick on and the machines start back up.

  And, all at once, the bodies of the trial subjects convulse, their arms and legs flying up in a motion that looks freakily like they’re jumping through the air, before their limbs go limp and fall back onto the beds. Zhu and Vesper stare at the scene in horror, then throw themselves in front of their computers and begin frantically studying the feedback on their screens.

  “Heart rates spiking,” Zhu says.

  “Erratic eye movements intensified,” Vesper says, his already-deep voice a full pitch lower. “Breathing uneven. Brain-wave activity in gamma and rising off the charts!”

  Lights start flashing red, and several of the even-paced beeps accelerate into high-pitched whines.

  Zhu turns to Vesper, eyes wide, and says, “Wake them up. Now!”

  CHAPTER 4

  FERGUS

  I AWAKE IN A COLD SWEAT. I’M SO DISORIENTED that I don’t even know where I am for the first few seconds, and then I realize . . . I was just dreaming. I raise my arm to check my tattoo—my go-to for immediate comfort—but I can’t see anything. It’s pitch-dark in my room. I reach for my bedside lamp and then realize I’m standing.

  My eyes are open and I am in complete darkness. What. The. Hell.

  I listen for the typical nighttime noises: the splashing of the swimming pool fountain, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway, the various vehicle and animal sounds that compose the sound track to my life in the Connecticut suburbs. But it’s dead silent.

  Am I still dreaming? I squeeze my arm, pinching the flesh between my fingertips. It feels totally real.

  And then the strangeness of my nightmare comes back to me. It was my lobotomy dream—the one that starts with my father telling me what a failure I am and that he’s scheduled me for brain surgery, and ends with him saying he’s going to do it himself and chasing me with an ice pick. Not terribly original, I know. I’ve watched way too many horror movies. But this dream has stuck in my psyche and now plays on regular repeat.

  Except this time weird shit was happening that never had before. I fell and twisted my ankle, and Dad actually caught up with me and stabbed me in the shoulder. And it hurt like hell. I touched it, and my fingers came back dripping with warm blood. Like so hyperrealistic I could practically smell it. And I had to push myself up and run for my life to get away from him, limping awkwardly because my ankle was blazing with red-hot pain.

  Then there was this flash of light, everything froze, and when it unfroze I had a window into all of these other places. In one of them, I saw this girl running away from a monster.

  I hesitate, feeling a tug of déjà vu. I could swear I’ve seen her before. But that thought quickly evaporates as I remember what came next.

  This black wall appeared in front of me—like a curtain stretching from the ground up so high it met the sky. I looked back: my father was still chasing me, ice pick raised, eyes rolled back into his head. I turned and ran for the darkness—plunged straight into it—and woke up here.

  That was the most lifelike dream I have ever had, and I’ve had some vivid ones, especially if you count the hallucinations that come as a bonus prize with my narcolepsy. I force myself to switch channels from What the Hell Was That About? to Where Am I Now? Fighting the mounting fear that something is very wrong (Stay calm, Fergus), I shuffle blindly forward, groping in the darkness to feel out the room I’m in, but there is nothing to touch. I crouch down and place my hands near my
feet. Even the ground is unreadable: not cold, not warm, just hard and smooth, like glass.

  I’m no longer in my lobotomy dream. I’m not in my home. Where am I? Did I spend the night somewhere else? I try to think back to what I did last night before going to bed. My mind is blank. I can’t remember anything before the nightmare. I mean, I remember my mom and dad, of course. The fact that I’m in my first year of college. The fight I had with them about wanting to live away from home and Dr. Patterson taking their side, saying it was “too dangerous” for someone with my “condition.”

  My condition. This must have something to do with the narcolepsy. I must have passed out somewhere and hit my head hard enough to knock myself unconscious. It’s happened before, but it’s never given me amnesia—at least those times I remembered how I got there. But where could I be?

  Something moves in the darkness. A slow, slithering sound. I freeze, a coil of fear twisting in my stomach. I’m torn between calling out and staying silent, and opt for the latter—whatever it was, it didn’t sound human.

  Then, from another direction comes a rhythmic tapping noise: tap tap tap tap, long pause, tap tap tap tap, long pause. My face turns ice-cold. Don’t freak out, I think, wishing I could see my tattoo. It’s just the hallucinations signaling you’re about to fall asleep again. The tapping continues, and I leap away from it, plunging blindly into the darkness.

  From somewhere close comes a girl’s voice. “Hello?” It’s barely a squeak—she sounds terrified.

  “Who’s there?” I ask.

  There is a pause, then the voice responds, “Cata.” I whip around and grope in the direction it came from. Nothing. A bodiless voice. You’re hallucinating. Dread creeps a slimy path up my back. And then something brushes my arm.

  I jump, and whatever it is shrieks, “What is that?” It’s a girl’s voice, but not the same as the first. This voice is lower, and comes between sobs. “Oh my God, where am I?”