Razorblade Dreams: Horror Stories

by Mark Lukens

  Saul smiled, his face crinkling up with laugh lines. “Only if you want to.”

  A beautiful young woman came in carrying a tray with a small teapot and two cups balanced on it. His daughter? No, his wife or girlfriend. She set the teapot and cups down on the table between their chairs, pouring tea into the two cups. She smiled at Cassie. “I thought you might like some tea.”

  “Thank you.”

  The woman had a pleasing, clean scent—like fresh laundry hung out on a sunny afternoon. Both the woman and Saul looked so healthy, so radiant, practically glowing with vitality. They seemed . . . happy. Of course they probably both got more than two or three hours of sleep a night.

  After the woman left the room, Cassie sipped the tea. It didn’t seem to have sugar in it, but she tasted a vague sweetness. It was soothing, and it felt good on her throat.

  “I guess Zoe told you why I needed to see you,” Cassie said as she set her tea cup down.

  “She told me it was an emergency. I cleared the rest of my schedule for the day so I don’t want you to feel rushed in any way.”

  Cassie felt flattered.

  “Please,” Saul said, his smile disappearing, only concern in his eyes now. “Tell me everything.”

  So Cassie did. Much like with Zoe a few days ago, Cassie poured her guts out. And she cried, thankful that the tissues were handy.

  Saul listened patiently, hardly interrupting, only a quick question here and there. His eyes were light blue, and they seemed so bright in his dark face; they were expressive eyes, compassionate eyes.

  “Zoe thinks this man, the one in my dreams, is psychically attacking me.”

  “She’s correct,” Saul said without hesitation.

  “But isn’t it possible that this guy started harassing me, calling me, and then my nightmares started? Isn’t it possible that I’ve been implanting this stalker into my own dreams?”

  Saul stared at her for a moment, reptile-still, his hands together in front of him, his forefingers together in a “psychiatrist’s steeple.” And then he spoke: “Do you feel that’s true?”

  The question seemed simple enough, but it hit her like an ice-block. She’d never really asked herself what she felt was true; she just tried to rationalize things, trying to come up with answers that she wanted to be true. Somehow the idea of being mentally disturbed in some way seemed preferable to her than the idea that this man was actually able to enter her dreams and control them.

  Saul didn’t wait for Cassie to answer his question, like he didn’t need to hear her rationalizations. “This man has some . . . abilities that you may not understand, that you may not even believe in, that you may not want to accept. But he has locked on to you somehow, and now he is harassing you in your dreams . . . as well as in your waking life, with the phone calls and the photos of your house.” He paused for a moment, his eyes still intense. “It’s only going to get worse.”

  Cassie nodded. She felt like crying again. She always felt like crying these days. “So what do I do?”

  He sat up straighter, hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fierce with intensity—he almost looked angry. “You fight back.”

  “How?”

  He leaned back in his chair, that warm smile back on his face. “I’m going to show you how.”

  “Okay.” Cassie wiped her eyes, sniffled. She took another sip of the tea.

  “You’ve heard of lucid dreaming,” Saul said like he already knew the answer.

  “Yes. I told you about my experiences with that.”

  “At least you’ve taken the first steps. We’re going to take it a lot further than that. I’m going to teach you to control your dreams more than this man does. You will be the master of your own universe and of your own dreams.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say it,” he snapped.

  She was a little shocked by his outburst, but she repeated the phrase: “I will be the master of my dreams.”

  “No. You are the master of your dreams. Say it.”

  “I am the master of my dreams.”

  “And you are the master of your own universe. Say it.”

  “I am the master of my universe.”

  “You will conquer your fears. Say it.”

  “I will conquer my fears.”

  He sat back, relaxing and smiling. “Good. I want you to say those things to yourself over and over throughout the day. Those phrases will be your grounding. I want you to meditate several times a day. Do you know how to meditate?”

  “I . . . uh . . .”

  “I’ll show you. I also want you to take a week off of work. I can write a doctor’s note if you need me to. Can you afford to take a week off?”

  “Yes,” Cassie answered, suddenly looking forward to week off of work. She had plenty of money saved, more than enough. And her boss probably wanted her out of the office until she could focus on her work again.

  “Good. I want to see you every day this week, around this time of day. I need to see you for at least two hours a day. Can you commit to that?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. We’ll work on meditating today. As I take you through the meditation, you’ll be in a half-awake and half-asleep state. You’ll have one foot in the waking world and one foot in the dream world.”

  “What? Like hypnosis?”

  “Sort of. But don’t think of it as hypnosis. Think of it as a state of being.”

  “Okay,” Cassie answered. She didn’t know why, but the idea of hypnosis had always frightened her a little.

  “As we meditate, you are going to enter your dream world while still being grounded in the waking world. You will learn to do this over and over until you can remain conscious in your dreams. But first you’ll need an object to ground you in your dreams.”

  Saul got up and walked over to a large, old-fashioned desk with a roll top. He searched through the drawers. “I want you to wear something while you sleep,” he said over his shoulder.

  He found what he’d been looking for and came back.

  Cassie had been expecting him to bring back a necklace with some kind of charm on it, or something along those lines—she hadn’t been expecting what he held in his hand.

  “This goes around your wrist,” he said, holding out a black leather contraption with buckles and a steel ball with sharp studs on it. There was also a little brass padlock dangling from the larger buckle. It looked like some kind of S&M gear.

  But Cassie took it from him and held it.

  “Buckle that strap around your left wrist,” he instructed as he sat back down. “You are right-handed?” he asked, but again it seemed more like an affirmation.

  “Uh . . . yeah,” she answered, feeling a little strange suddenly.

  He smiled, sensing her confusion. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “It’s fake leather.”

  She nodded and buckled the strap around her wrist. The smaller strap went around her hand and it had the metal ball covered with sharp points attached to it.

  “You will wear this when you sleep,” he explained. “You’ll have the metal ball in the palm of your hand, and you’ll squeeze the ball when you want to come awake and out of your dream. You will have the ball with you in the dream and with you in the waking world. When you squeeze the ball in the dream, you’ll squeeze it in the waking world.”

  Cassie gave the metal ball a squeeze. The little spikes hurt, but not enough to break her skin.

  “I’ve got something else for you,” Saul said, jumping up and hurrying back to the desk again.

  Oh God, what now?

  He came back with a sturdy notebook and a fancy ink pen clipped to it. “Use this to write down what you see in your dreams. Everything you can remember.”

  “But you said I would be controlling my dreams.”

  “To a point. And not entirely at first. You will have to learn to control your dreams. It’s going to take a little time. And this man will still have control of your dreams at first. At least until you becom
e more powerful.”

  Cassie must’ve given him a doubtful look because he continued on quickly. “You can do this. You do have some abilities just like the man in your dreams does. If you didn’t have those abilities, then he wouldn’t have been able to seek you out in the first place. Many people have these abilities and never even know it. But you know it now, and I can teach you to be stronger.” He handed her the notebook and pen. “And don’t forget to write everything down. You never know what could be a clue.”

  *

  Cassie stayed at Saul’s for another two hours. They meditated most of that time, and he showed her how to put one foot in the dream world while keeping one foot in the waking world.

  She left with the notebook and the leather (fake leather) cuff and metal ball that looked like some kind of medieval torture device. She felt a little glimmer of hope for the first time in ten days. Saul’s enthusiasm was infectious. She began to believe that this could possibly work.

  Of course those were daytime hopes and thoughts.

  As night came, her thoughts turned darker, and the fear came back. She ate dinner, picked at it really. She tried to watch TV, but she couldn’t concentrate. She repeated her mantra throughout the night. Before bed, she tried to meditate again, but it wasn’t working out so well without Saul beside her, guiding her. She could already feel the little bit of confidence that she’d built up earlier slipping away. And she could feel both of her cats watching her as she sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to meditate.

  At least she hadn’t gotten any calls from her masked nightmare man. But she kept her cell phone off most of the time now and her home phone unplugged all the time.

  Much like some of the websites she’d read, Saul recommended that she turn her bedroom into a “sanctuary of sleep.” She lit a few candles and played some relaxing music. She read a little from a paperback book (no TV or computer before going to bed). She set her alarm to get up early even though she didn’t really need to get up. She’d already called her boss on the way home and let him know that she needed the rest of this week off—and he seemed more than eager to oblige. Zoe had volunteered to take some of her workload—she was truly a great friend.

  Cassie lay down in her bed after fluffing her pillows. She’d blown out the candles and turned the music off. She left the bathroom light on, the door ajar. One cat, Slinky, was curled up at the foot of the bed, and Minky was wandering around the house somewhere, but she would be in soon.

  She laid the notebook and pen down beside the lamp on the table next to her bed. She also had her cell phone close by even though it was turned off; she still wanted the phone near in case this stalker grew bold enough to actually break in. She had her leather cuff buckled to her wrist and the padlock locked. Saul had told her that the lock was important, and the lock would also be there in the dream. Even though the stalker could control many aspects of her dream, he wouldn’t be able to remove the leather band from her wrist because it was locked here in the waking world. She didn’t need to understand exactly how it worked, he’d told her. She only needed to believe.

  She got comfortable under the bedsheets, the metal ball resting in her palm. She squeezed it gently just for reassurance. She lay on her back, closing her eyes, concentrating on her breathing as Saul had instructed her . . .

  . . . and she was in a dream. She was in that abandoned factory that she’d found herself in so many times recently. Rusty pipes lined the walls, running off into the darkness. Steam drifted by. Multi-colored lights shined from some unseen source. Something dripped in the shadows.

  “You’ve been trying to ignore me,” the man’s voice boomed.

  She couldn’t see him anywhere, but she knew he was coming.

  Her heart skipped a beat and she started to panic. She needed to run before she saw him, before he came after her, before he caught her.

  But then she stopped herself. She looked down at her left hand. She was wearing the leather cuffs on her wrist and hand, the metal ball dangling from her palm. She squeezed the metal ball hard and . . .

  . . . she woke up.

  She sat up and looked down at the spiked metal ball in her hand. Her palm hurt just a little from squeezing so hard, and she relaxed her fingers, the pain subsiding.

  It worked. It actually worked.

  Both of her cats were watching her, their eyes already closing again to slits as they drifted off to sleep again—both of them apparently used to her sudden and explosive awakenings by now.

  What time was it?

  She looked at her alarm clock on the crowded table next to her bed. Three o’clock in the morning. God, she must’ve slept for a few hours before she slipped into that nightmare.

  The man’s voice still seemed to linger in her mind. He’d been angry in the dream, his voice booming. He would come after her again . . . he would find her in the next dream. But at least now she had a chance.

  Cassie lay back down, concentrating on where she wanted to go in her dream. Not his world, not his creation. She wanted to go to her own creation.

  “I am the master of my life,” she whispered as she closed her eyes.

  “I am the master of my dreams.”

  “I will conquer my fear.”

  In her dream, Cassie stood on a crowded city street that she didn’t recognize from her “waking life,” but it was a place she’d seen in her dreams before. People were walking around, moving past her. Some seemed purposeful in their walk, a destination to be reached. But others seemed to be wandering around aimlessly. A lot of the people talked to each other; some of them huddled together in small groups; nothing conspiratorial, just normal conversations.

  Cassie looked around at the people as she moved past them, but she didn’t see the masked man anywhere. He couldn’t be far, though.

  She started walking faster through the crowd of people, brushing by the ones who didn’t seem to want to move out of her way. She was going somewhere in the dream, yet not really sure where she was heading to. But her dream knew where she was going, her subconscious propelling her forward.

  Was she running from her masked stalker?

  Maybe, but she wasn’t sure.

  The crowd began to thin out, almost like the people were parting for her, backing away from something. And then she saw what it was. A little girl stood on the sidewalk—the same girl she’d seen in a dream before, the one when she’d been driving in the car and they’d gotten lost. The girl had been in the back seat. She wore the same white dress, and she had the same long blond hair. Only now she was holding a pink piggy bank, the big ceramic kind of a cartoonish pig. There was blood dripping out of the bottom of the piggy bank where the rubber stopper to empty the coins was. And the slot on the piggy’s back was smeared with blood, like a piece of flesh had been somehow squeezed down into that narrow slot.

  The girl held out the piggy bank, her expression blank. “He wants to show you something. He wants to show you what’s inside.”

  “Inside the piggy bank?” Cassie asked.

  “Inside everything. He wants to see what’s inside of you.”

  Cassie tore her eyes away from the girl and looked at the crowd that surrounded her. She hadn’t noticed before, but all of them had stopped walking and talking, they just stared at her, all of them sharing the same blank expression that the girl had, their mouths hanging open like a zombie’s slack jaw.

  The crowd began to move towards her as one, closing in slowly. Cassie had nowhere to run.

  “I can control them!” the nightmare man’s voice boomed from somewhere beyond the crowd. “I can control everything here!”

  She couldn’t see the masked man anywhere, but she knew he was working his way through the crowd of people like he was moving through a cornfield, getting closer and closer to her.

  The little girl dropped the piggybank down onto the concrete. Cassie forced herself not to turn around and look; she didn’t want to see what had been stuffed inside of it, the bloody pieces of flesh amid the shards
of shattered pink ceramic.

  She looked down at her left wrist; the leather cuff and metal ball were still there. She squeezed the spiked metal ball as hard as she could . . .

  . . . and she was awake.

  She didn’t sit bolt-upright this time. She just laid there for a moment with her eyes open, relaxing her grip on the metal ball, her heart jackhammering in her chest, and that strange creepy-crawly feeling dancing along her skin.

  Then she smiled. She had escaped from the dream again. The masked man had controlled the dream, but she’d been able to get away before he could get to her. And now Cassie began to believe that these lucid dreaming techniques that Saul was teaching her might really work.

  *

  Cassie met with Saul for the rest of the week. Because she had taken the week off of work, she’d gotten a lot of chores done around the house. She went to the gym every morning and worked out, nothing too strenuous. She also tried to take a walk in the park in the afternoon. But most of all she relaxed. She meditated, getting better at it. As she meditated, she repeated her mantras. “I am the master of my own dreams.”

  During her sessions with Saul, she showed him the things she’d written down in her notebook after waking up from her dreams.

  “Does any of this mean anything to you?” Saul asked about the writings in her notebook at the end of their Friday session.

  “No. Not really.”

  “Well, keep writing. There will be clues in your dreams, clues to help you fight this stalker.”

  Cassie knew she had to be patient, but she was frustrated that the masked man was still haunting her dreams. He was still sending threatening text messages to her cell phone, and he’d sent two more photos of the front of her house. There wasn’t much she could do besides keep her doors and windows locked. Calling the cops would be useless. Until her stalker actually did something, there wasn’t much they could do. The only other thing she could do was learn how to control her dreams.

  “It takes time,” Saul told her.

  She nodded. “I know.”

  He smiled at her. “What if I told you that you can already control your dreams?”

  “I’d say that you’re mistaken.”