With hands still trembling, I started on the sandwich. After a few bites, I began to feel much more human again. The illusion of the vibrating dragon was passing and my state of being didn’t feel quite as scary any more. I still felt a little woozy but the severe, bruised rawness that had previously possessed my body and mind had left considerably and what I was experiencing now felt simply like a normal, garden-variety hangover and not a terrible one at that. I sat back for a few minutes, closed my eyes, and just relaxed for the first time since I’d awakened. Yawning and stretching, I became embarrassingly aware of my immediate need for a shower. My hair was uncombed with strands of it sticking together. It was dirty and rank with the odor of garbage and stale cigarette smoke from last night. The smoke was probably from the bars and Troy’s cigarette, but why did I smell like garbage and dried vomit? I only now noticed how dirty my arms and hands were and wished I’d realized that before I started eating because I hadn’t washed up. Completely disgusted at myself, I couldn’t wait now to take that shower. I got up from the table, unable to eat another bite, and wrapped up and put the rest of the sandwich in the fridge. Not quite up to any more effort than that, I made a mental note to throw the empty stuff on the table away later, when I’d feel cleaner and hopefully better.
I went into the bathroom, where I looked in the mirror and again did not like what I saw. Gone was whatever radiance yesterday’s dream energy had given me. I looked old. While the troubled, haggard, sick-looking woman direct from Rochere’s office yesterday wasn’t staring back at me, thank goodness, to say that I looked well-worn around the edges would have been a gross understatement. I shuddered to think of what I looked like before I’d eaten, when I felt so lousy. I was glad I’d avoided eye contact with the dresser mirror in the bedroom then. Maybe a shower and a long nap would help get me back to normal. I washed my hands and face and brushed my teeth, drying off on the hand towel near the sink. I leaned over the counter to get a closer look at my reflection in order to survey the damage, when something dark, a shadow, abruptly appeared behind me in the background of the mirror and then disappeared completely as quickly as it came. “What the…” I said out loud, startled. When I turned around, there was nothing there. Just floaters in my eyes, I rationalized, not really buying the explanation but still feeling it was not wise to add any more stress to my already stressed out body. Even so, fear registered within me in a place I chose not to examine.
I stripped off my clothes, tossed them under the sink counter in a pile. Then placing the bath mat on the floor, I noticed for the first time that the bathroom had a separate, extra drain outside of the bathtub. How odd. I had never seen a drain like that before. Maybe it made the floor easier to clean because the maid wouldn’t have to mop; she could just hose the floor down. I gave the drain no more thought as I eyed myself in the mirror under the pretext of checking to see if I looked any thinner naked than I did yesterday. My real motivation, though, the one I did not want to admit to myself, was that I needed to see if the phantom shadow would reappear. If it showed itself in the reflection again, I would pass up the shower, regardless of how dirty I was. I could always just wash off, very quickly shampoo my hair in the kitchen sink, dress fast and get the hell out of here. It didn’t return, so I chose to stick with my “eye floaters” rationale, deciding it would be safe to take a shower. After all, didn’t Virginia say that the necklace would protect me? So I peed, turned on the water until its temperature was just right and stepped inside the tub. I would rather have taken a bath but I was still somewhat hung over and quite sleep deprived; I didn’t trust myself not to fall asleep in it and drown.
Taking a shower might not have been as luxurious as a nice, hot soak in the tub, but it was still supremely delightful. I reveled in it, delighting in the little streams of purity running all over my body, banishing every bit of the smell and grime and dirt down into the drain at my feet in tiny little counterclockwise circles. I always felt most satisfied by a shower or a bath when I was at my most grimy. It was probably the contrast. It reminded me of my childhood, when, like most children, I used to enjoy getting so encrusted with dirt that there were times my mother wouldn’t let me set foot into the rest of the house until I took a bath first. I would always fight her efforts until I actually stepped into the tub and the water surrounded me with its cleansing properties, working in tandem with the soap’s marvelous bubbles to perform the magic of cleansing, inevitably making me feel so much better than any amount of ingrained dirt ever could. Then, getting out of the tub, I would dry myself on my mom’s clean white towels, wrap myself in my thick bath robe and sit on the sofa, watching TV and sipping the hot chocolate she would have ready for me atop a coaster on the coffee table. As an adult working in an office and taking daily baths, I rarely experienced that contrast anymore, the dichotomy of states of extreme filth followed so closely by the state of extreme purity, external only though it was.
Curiously, standing here, luxuriating under my shower, those images of my childhood that I thought I’d forgotten sent me spinning rapidly into tangent thoughts of deeper cleansing, thoughts of spirituality, sin and redemption. I wondered if, like my baths of childhood, spiritual cleansing and redemption meant the most to the wickedest sinner, the person that had screwed up the worst. My mind willingly went down the path of these thoughts. All of my life, I’d always been far too intrigued by the dark side of nature, all nature; it had always been a forbidden, unwelcome fascination for me. The true evil that had its real home within the dark side of human nature and that confused me totally. Why did it have to exist at all? It was so counterproductive from any sensible point of view. Why did our abilities to misuse our marvelous brains even exist? Why did our species, and our species alone, wallow in its own perversions, use its own inventions, regardless of how benign the original intent, to ends so grotesque, so twisted, and so horrible that only a devil from the pit of hell could look without wincing? For such evil within us to exist at all seemed to me so inexplicable from any natural perspective; I simply could not grasp it. It seemed to have no use, no purpose other than to multiply; it seemed to be a virus, perpetuating itself by feeding upon the human race. Like most people, I had tried, for the most part, to be a good person in my life. But, also like most people, I was not completely immune to the virus of evil either, not as a perpetrator, of course, but as an all-too-interested observer. What was it that compelled us, what was it that made us look? On a personal level, what was it that instilled in me a fascination with magicians, who, in their tricks, pretended to cut their assistants in half and then put them back together again before the eyes of their audiences, pretending it was real and not illusion? What was it that made me drawn to horror films, even if I had to peek through fingers and half-closed eyelids so I could turn away if they got too intense? And why did I, along with countless others, rubberneck at traffic accidents, straining to see how bad the wrecks were, if anyone had been hurt or killed? Sure, we were relieved if no one had been and glad it wasn’t us if they had, but what was it that made us look?
As a child, I paid dearly for this enthrallment with the macabre by terrible nightmares, almost as if heaven were exacting its penalty upon me at night by forcing me into the role of perennial victim of all the celluloid evil I’d observed in the day. In my sleep I was stalked on an almost nightly basis by the monsters of the movies I’d seen, movies I’d watched with such fear and fascination. Dream zombies attempted to feed upon me; ghouls endeavored to force me into pools of blood that I knew would dissolve my body into a liquified soup that they would later slurp eagerly; werewolves tried to tear me limb from limb. But the worst were always the vampires, who, not content with simply draining my body of its life’s blood to satiate their unnatural hunger, set out instead to change me into one of their own, to steal my very soul and in so doing, make me like themselves, the very embodiment of this evil that had preyed upon humanity for eons.
Wow, I wondered, suddenly aware of the track my thoughts had taken
, how did I get here? Why was I thinking all of these dismal thoughts? How did my beautiful memories of childhood bath time spiral downward into these dark tangents? While I sometimes thought about the subject of good versus evil, usually my reflections were more academic, simple warnings that popped up in my meditations and served to keep me on the right track and make sure that I didn’t stray too far from the type of person I wanted to be. But the subject of evil wasn’t just academic now, was it? At least not to me anymore. Now that I was supposed to be facing real evil, or at least that’s what I’d been told, I didn’t want to think further about darkness in any way, shape or form.
Conscious thought was unable to keep this darkness away, however. Feelings of despair slowly wafted over me as these thoughts continued without permission to prey upon my mind. The hangover was reasserting itself, making my head throb with pain, as was the overreaching exhaustion, as if these black thoughts had sucked real life energy from me. I supposed now that I was clean enough for all practical purposes and I could get out of the shower, dry off and get some sleep. Disoriented, I put my hand out, leaning against the shower tile for support and closed my eyes. But instead of darkness, I saw red, as if I were looking into the sun through closed lids. Dark floaters once again appeared, moving across the screen of my closed eyelids; they merged with the red, turning into a blurred, moving crimson and black miasma. From within that abstract setting I imagined I could hear the voices and cries of the damned. They were pleading, they were screaming. They were begging me, me of all people, to save them, to release them, to give them peace. When I reopened my eyes, my head began to swim and my stomach to turn. The nausea came back suddenly with a vengeance and I clutched onto the shower rod for dear life with my other hand. But still the voices came, louder and louder, moaning, shrieking, demanding freedom and deliverance, for nothing less would do. I clamped my closed eyelids shut as tightly as I could, as if that could somehow lessen the sound, but that vain attempt accomplished only one thing and that was to give the voices form so I could now see those who cried out to me. It was as if my eyelids were a red filter through which I could see the suffering of Dante’s damned. Mouths open, frantic, they reached their arms out to me, clutching at the air, insisting I help them, insisting I release them from the inferno in which they were, it appeared, hopelessly and forever trapped. Trying to make this horror disappear, I decided to open my eyes, logically expecting these nightmare images to end, taking for granted my sight would awaken to the rather boring, mundanely comforting reality the shower.
Yes, that’s what I’ll see, I told myself. I’m just so tired that I’m dreaming standing up. When I open my eyes, I’ll just see the tub, the shower curtain, the water, the bathroom. Reason within me said, That’s all that’s here, Ashley. That’s all that’s really here. You know it and I know it and that’s all you’ll see. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that will come out of the dark and frighten you. You’re an adult, you’re not afraid of the dark, there is no boogie man. OK, Ashley, let’s do it now.
Then I opened my eyes. Instead of going away, the red hell still lay before me, available now in much greater detail and clarity than it had before. Whenever I opened or closed my eyes, each time it was made worse. At last the damned of the inferno, while still there, began to recede away, as if my viewpoint were a camera that was panning out for a far shot. Soon there was nothing in front of my eyes except for the red murk, heat waves slithering snakelike through the scarlet and black mire. The cries and moans of the doomed souls were the only evidence of their presence that remained behind. I now saw something new. It was a dividing line – no, not a line, but a plane – between my world and the hell right in front of me. Not a straight plane, though, it rapidly evolved into the entry to a gaping pit, an irregularly shaped hole within the space of the bathtub that undulated in a primitive, sexual, almost reproductive way. It surged at me aggressively then retreated in a coquettish, seductive manner, creating an energy force that drew me in, an force that I knew was trying to suck me into itself. I had to get out of here. With my leg, I felt the edge of the tub and tried to step out of it, but I couldn’t. Every time I made an effort to leave the bathtub, the vortex seemed more able to suck me into it as my balance shifted to one leg in order step out. Unable to escape, I moved out of the stream of the water, holding on tightly to the shower rod with one hand, the pipe to which the shower head was attached with the other hand and planted my feet as solidly as possible on the non-skid surface decals of the tub. I wasn’t going into it, this tunnel into the underworld. I couldn’t let it get me. I would stand here, naked and wet and wait for this storm to pass, fighting it until I escaped or it died out.
Its fury showed no signs of passing, however; it only became more and more violent. I could feel a hot wind whipping about me, trying to push me into the vortex as its undulations tried to suction me into itself. I clung as best as I could to the shower head and shower rod. Flimsy lifelines, indeed, they were, for they shook intensely, each trying to work its way out of the ceramic tile that held it into place. Finally, the shower head gave way and the water, with full intensity, began to spray out violently in all directions, no longer guided or contained by its nozzle. The force of this liquid explosion almost caused me to lose my grip on the pipe. I could feel the pipe itself now pulsating, vibrating, trying to rip itself out of the shower wall by the violence of its unrestrained flow, its water drawn now into the vortex, water that evaporated with a hiss as soon it entered this hellish dimension, water that now came out with a power seemingly in league with the force that was trying to draw me into itself, trying to entrap me with those poor, captured souls whose cries for rescue from their hideous prison I could still hear.
I held onto the pipe that was once attached to the shower head with all my might. I clamped my eyes shut from the strain, but again it did not shut out the scene before me. If anything, any changes I made caused the panorama to become even more clear, for it was in sharper focus now than it had been when my eyes were open. My viewpoint was once again panned back to the hopelessly imprisoned souls, although they were in the background now, crying “save me” as they pleaded even louder than before. This has to pass, I thought to myself, it has to. It can’t go on forever. As I watched the poor beings writhe in front of me, however, the unthinkable suddenly became thinkable. Oh, my dear God, what if it doesn’t end? What if I become one of them? This thought terrified me beyond belief. My heart began to beat rapidly in my chest and I knew I was on the verge of losing all reason. I had to get out of here, I had to.
Perhaps I could kneel down. Balancing myself in a kneeling position to crawl out of the tub would provide me more stability than standing. I managed to force my view away from the vortex for a split second to look around and orient myself on whatever fixtures I could grasp for support, but my choices were very limited. Two water taps and a faucet were the extent of my life lines. Maybe I could crouch down far enough to reach the tub faucet, which looked sturdier than anything I was holding onto at the moment. If I could get a firm enough grip on it with one hand, maybe I could latch onto the cold water tap with my other hand so I could get down and kneel. Once there, I could wrap my right arm around the outside of the tub for more support and hopefully crawl or fall out. I prayed I wouldn’t be sucked into the vortex during this attempt and I prayed it wouldn’t follow me outside of the tub, but as far as I could tell, this was my only chance.
Before I could make a move, though, my concentration was broken when, amidst the wailing of the lost, I heard a baby cry. It was the intense, desperate cry of a child in great pain, a cry so hoarse I knew immediately that it had been screaming for a long, long time, unheard, uncared for, ignored. I looked down into the vortex, towards the direction of the cry and there, in that other world too close to me, lay an infant, naked, at my feet. My heart broke. It was weakly thrashing about with its tiny arms and legs, trying so hard to get someone, anyone, to help it. It was emaciated, almost a skeleton, with the bloa
ted stomach of a child in a famine dying of starvation and thirst. I panicked, not only for myself now, but also for this child, a girl, who was scarcely more than a newborn. I would have to make an attempt to rescue not only my own self, but hers as well. My hold on reality was tentative as it was and I was in no position, quite literally, to reach out and grab hold of that baby. The weak lifeline of the shower pipe was not nearly strong enough to support that much stress, especially in its present state. A plan to place myself into a stable position on my knees was even more urgent now, lest I be pulled headlong into the void during my attempt to rescue her.
Holding onto the shower pipe with all my strength, I let go of the shower rod. Even leaning backward as I was, I had to fight the forward pull of the vortex as I bent to one side first and grabbed the cold water tap as quickly as I could with my left hand. Crouching, I then released my grip on the shower pipe, and quickly snatched the thick tub faucet with my right. Clumsily, I knelt down hard, my knees smarting as I used all my strength to resist the whirlpool-like pull. I got as firm and stable a grounding as possible, holding fast onto these slightly stronger, lower bathtub fixtures, grateful that this was an older, larger bathtub, for at least there was enough room between myself and the sucking pit to make some maneuverability possible. I then released the cold water tap and hooked my left arm around the side of the bathtub, clinging onto it as firmly as I could. The tub was the strongest thing to grasp because it was set into the wall as one solid piece. My stance more stable, I felt stronger here, more able to resist the vacuuming action of the pit. I hoped against hope that the void would at least remain stable and not get any larger or any closer.
The Nightmare Game Page 12