Sleep Revised

by Wright, Michael

  Clark whirled around again and saw the foyer had been replaced with a large stone wall, on it was an ancient wooden door of massive size. Wet and molding, dripping with viscous yellow fluid that seemed to be coming from the other side. A pounding began from beyond it. Rhythmic like a drum in unholy timing.

  He turned back to the priest and he saw he was standing in front of the casket, with him was a large stone pitcher, white, and a baptismal font was set at the end of the line of pews. Behind him, and behind the table, was a line of terrible black shapes, shifting.

  The crowd stood and turned around to face Clark. They all were rotted and filled with holes. Their eyes were gone, filled instead with writhing worms and the chittering cockroaches. Each one had an eye carved deeply into their forehead. Samantha had remained seated.

  “Come to the baptism, Clark!” The priest shrieked, “Come to be baptized into the new world!” Blood began seeping from his nose and he lifted the pitcher to pour more crimson blood into the font in front of him, not taking care to pour gently. Red splashes flew to all sides around the bowl, crusting onto the carpet and speckling the white tile.

  Clark saw Samantha stand, and begin to walk toward the altar.

  He looked behind him and saw more shadows approaching, out of the corners, as if out of thin air they approached. Growing in size, monstrously tall and wide.

  The priest beckoned him forward, the front of his surplice almost covered in the red fluid that ran from his mouth and his nose. Clark felt himself being pulled forward, and his legs kept moving despite the fact that he wanted so desperately to stop, to halt right there at that moment and not go any closer. Though where he would go he had no idea, as the shadows closed in behind him and the drumming from the ancient door continued to press him forward.

  Samantha approached the table, the dressings fell to the floor as she stripped it, and climbed on top of it. The shadows approached her, their forms just as massive as the ones that chased him through the sanctuary, arms reaching out long and thick, fingers like forearms wrapping around her arms and then her legs.

  Clark stopped in front of the font. The grinning priest reached forward a bloody hand, throwing the pitcher away behind him, smashing it against the tile.

  Above him, where the angels once were, monstrous creatures hung, engaged in rape, murder and defilement. Pouring from their mouths were tender streams of red blood.

  “Welcome, Clark!” The priest crowed, “To the new world! The world of old, when great wickedness roamed will come again! The door will be opened!”

  “The door will be opened!” The corpses in the crowd answered back.

  Jon was out of the coffin and stood to the side of the priest. His jaw hung loose, but Clark could swear that he was hellishly grinning. He raised a hand to Clark’s shoulder, and the dead cold weight settled on him, holding him into place.

  The priest reached out and grabbed his other shoulder. “My son, we must all walk the way of death to enter into this new life. This is the message of your Christian Cross, and it is the message of our new order. Death leads to the birth of darkness.”

  Jon looked at him, and spoke in twisted syllables, “Carol is waiting for you, Clark.”

  “What did you say?” He turned to Jon, and pulled away from the dead man’s grasp. “What did you just say?”

  “Come Clark. Be part of the awakening.” The priest reached for him again.

  Clark jerked away and felt something push him from behind.

  “We will awaken!” The priest said.

  The crowd responded: “The Elder Ones will waken us!”

  “We will bow!”

  “The Elder Ones will subdue us!”

  “We will bleed!”

  “The Elder Ones will feast on our flesh!”

  The blasphemous litany continued and Clark tried to push back against the crowd behind him, but they forced him forward, shoving him toward the font filled with blood. He could smell the sickness of it, the terrible scent of decay and rottenness filled his nostrils as the crowd pushed in.

  Samantha lay on the table, and pulled a shadow toward her, inviting him to take her.

  “We will open the door!”

  “The door will open!”

  They pushed him, shoving his shoulders forward. Jon and the priest seized him by either arm and pulled him toward the font, bringing his head closer and closer. The priest set a cold hand on the back of his head. He struggled against it, but the grip was too strong, the crowd behind him too overbearing.

  “No!” He yelled, “No!”

  The crowd pushed harder. The drum beat in his head, thundering through his whole body. He heard Samantha screaming on the table as the perverted shadows began to rape her. Her screams were of pain and sickening delight. He felt bile rise in his throat.

  In front of him, behind the font, he saw a woman standing there in a hospital gown. Attached to her was an IV, with a drip tube standing on a metal rod, the loose bag swinging in the beat of the drums from beyond the door. He saw her eyes were dead and glazed. Her mouth opened and a rat slowly began to crawl out.

  “NO!”

  They shoved his head down into the font, he felt the warmth of the blood as it soaked into his mouth and sinuses, covering his eyes and burning them. His screams were swallowed in gurgles. The dead hands of the crowd were behind him, the priest began to chant in a tongue he didn’t recognize as anything but utterly ancient and terrifying.

  From the side where Jon was, he heard a whisper: “Don’t fight them.”

  He struggled again. The blood in the fountain ran down his throat, choking him, smothering all breath, the more he yelled and resisted the harder it was to breathe. He yelled and thrashed against them straining for air.

  A familiar hand reached from in front of the font and touched his head.

  Clark jerked and yelled again as loud as he could into

  4

  the darkness of his apartment. A pillow smashed against his face, sweat covered and damp. The moment his eyes opened he was assaulted with darkness, and he scrambled around him for the flashlight he kept by his bed, dropping it to the floor until he found a switch on the lamp that sat by the bed, flooding the room with light again.

  Around him the room yelled. The air conditioner was working softly in the corner, a clock ticked in staccato motions, and from the adjoining bathroom he could hear the dripping of water in the sink. The rush of silence as opposed to the noise in the dream was almost deafening, and he felt a sickness rising deep in his stomach. His torso was covered with sweat, and his pajama bottoms were soaked all the way through along with his sheets that clung to his arm as he tried to work it free to shift his hair out of his face.

  It was just a dream, he told himself. Just a dream.

  The room around him filled with dull shadows—

  shifting

  —that stood over him like titans. He thought for a moment of the monstrous shapes that had filled his dream before he swung his legs over the end of the bed to push them out of his mind along with the terrible and agonized screams that came from the table as Jon’s sister welcomed violation.

  The clock told him it was barely after four in the morning. The squared digits gleamed at him as if they too had witnessed the dream and were haunted by the images. He felt he was still choking on the blood in the font.

  Jon’s note sat next to the clock. He had folded it after another reading, still unable to make any real sense of it. The words whispered to him as he felt the carpet form solid beneath his feet and his hand reached for the larger light switch that led into the poorly adorned hallway. His eyes followed the glow of the light provided from the screen above the ice maker, demanding you pick an option from either cubed or crushed varieties, that stained the room beyond the hallway dimly, as the hall light seemed never able to truly work properly beyond a dull glow.

  Clark stumbled past the box that he had hastily set down next to the dining room table, not pausing to look through the rest of the c
ontents the previous afternoon. Unable to stare at whatever it was Jon had sent his way in the ever-spiraling insanity that had ultimately consumed his life.

  From the counter, Carol watched him approach, and he paused when he caught sight of her. His soaked chest, still streaming with sweat and troubled breathing, slowed it’s heaving. He stared at her smiling gaze for a moment, soaking in the reality that the picture once represented. He reached out and touched it as his mind drifted back to the day he had taken it—before the brutality of the sickness, before the stench of death and vomit became the norm for them. Before those late night dinners of steak and eggs. Before it had all come crashing down.

  The glasses in the cabinet felt cold in his hand even before he filled it with ice. Heavy before he filled it with water. The tile remained cool as he padded across it, taking the glass back to the kitchen bar where he had spent so many of his evenings, trying to bury himself in work and forget.

  As he sat, be stared at the photo, and tried to remember. Anything that would push the dream out of his mind. The water swished in his mouth in attempt to wash the bloody taste away. He fought the urge to pour it over his head to wash away the filth that seemed to surround him.

  Only a dream.

  Carol smiled to him from before the bad times. His finger brushed the frame, and for a moment he could swear he felt her cheek beneath his fingers, the softness that resided there, smooth and kind. Welcoming and filled with laughter. He could feel her hands, soft and gentle, running down his back, rubbing the center where the spine and all the stress seemed to settle whenever the depths of worry and pain seemed to be the heaviest on the human body. He felt her fingers brush it all away, pulling from his mind the cobwebs of blood and debauched offerings. The chanting of the priest and the crowds of corpses began to grow dim in his mind, like a dying candle, forever fading into the black swallow of night. Her touch washed away the pain of seeing the corpse before him, and he wished so desperately to reach out and touch her again—to feel her warmth against him, the firmness of her arms and the soft side of her torso and breast squeezed against him in an embrace that would never end.

  Her hand traced a single tear down his face, and he told himself it was only a dream, that it wasn’t real. It was only a dream, even though he prayed to God in heaven that it wasn’t just a dream, that for once it would be real and that he would wake up to it as a reality.

  Clark reached for the memory, deep in the back of his mind and he held her tight.

  He remained like that a long time in the darkness, until the first glimpses of the sun peeked through his window. He fought against the light, trying to prolong the dreamlike dullness of early morning, bathing his coveted dreams in the dull glow from city lights. As the memories faded away, pulling him from the hangover of a dream and into the world of the waking—into the light of day.

  5

  “Mind if I bum one?”

  Samantha turned toward him, pulling the butt of the fresh cigarette from her mouth. She let out a small puff of smoke from between full lips, and looked at him.

  Clark wrapped the coat around him tighter against the wind that slapped his ears as the air wrapped around the massive stone church they were directly in front of. The early winter had already begun to burn at his ears and nose, drying them out and caking dead skin.

  “You kidding?” She asked.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” He put out a hand, in it was fifty cents, “That should cover the cost.”

  She shook her head, “Keep the money, I don’t charge for cancer.” She produced a black handbag from beneath the black coat, and whipped out a pack of cheap cigarettes and a Zippo. He took them from her and whipped open the pack. Menthol and 100’s, someone had a nasty habit.

  He stuck it in his mouth and took the Zippo, clanking it open and flicking the flint at the same time. The flame exploded above it and he brought it to the end of the cigarette, gliding it across the tip and drawing in slowly to pull the flame toward the tobacco. It lit and he slapped the lighter closed, handed it back. “Thanks.” He pulled the butt away from his mouth and exhaled in a long, even stream. Only a little smoke emerged from his small drag, but he felt the menthol hit at the back of his throat, and went in for another hit.

  “A doctor who smokes?” Samantha said, tucking the items back in her bag.

  He gestured, “An Episcopalian who smokes?”

  “I didn’t say I was a full Episcopalian.”

  “I didn’t say I was a full doctor.” He grinned, “I’m just a therapist. My job is to tell you why you smoke, not tell you to quit.”

  She nodded and took another drag from the lipstick-stained filter. The red turned to a much brighter pink that looked almost neon in the overcast daylight, he noticed. Her hands were shaking as they held it. “I guess I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “Most people don’t.” He took another long drag. “So why do you smoke?”

  She shrugged, “Bad habit I picked up in high school. I work around it. I really don’t smoke much anymore, I got into the e-cigarette thing. Helped me quit. I left it behind though, and needed something.”

  “Those battery boxes people carry around?” He shrugged, “I guess everyone needs something.”

  “What about you?” She asked suspiciously.

  “I started in college. I quit after my wife asked me, and now that I have nobody to tell me no, I started back up again.” He tapped the end, ash fell to the ground, pirouetting like snowflakes in the chilly breeze. “Only once in a while.”

  She went silent and took a few more puffs. They were soft puffs, the kind that someone who actually just wants to taste the cigarette takes, not the huge lung hits a reasonably developed smoker takes. Her eyes tilted down and she flicked the ash off of the one she was holding carefully.

  He let the cigarette burn down for a second before he broke the silence again, “I’m sorry about the other day.”

  Pause. “It’s okay.”

  The sleeve of his coat slid back and he glanced at the time, realizing that he had arrived extremely early.

  “Have you made any progress on the apartment?” He asked.

  She shook her head, “I haven’t been inside yet.”

  “I see.”

  Another cool, throat hitting drag, “You can leave it like that if you want for a little bit. I can put some rent up and keep an eye on it.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to have to do that,” she said. “It’s too much.”

  He shrugged, “Wouldn’t be a problem to me. It’s not like I have much else to do, really.”

  Silence drifted between them with the leaves from the tired oaks around them.

  “How long were you married?” She said suddenly, shoving the cigarette back to her lips as she did so. Pulled in a longer drag as if to cover her words up with the thick smoke before continuing, “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I was married for almost ten years. I wore the wedding ring until it was eleven.” He took a couple drags from the cigarette, his turn to cover up his words. “After that it was just too much to walk around with a reminder all the time.” He rubbed the worn spot on his finger. “Even with it imprinted on me.”

  She was staring at his hand, those cutting eyes narrowing at the strip on his ring finger where once a golden band had sat for years on end, through countless days, nights, showers, walks, work days, yard projects, hikes, and each precious moment. Right until the end. Over a year after the end.

  “I’m sorry.” She said.

  “Me too.” He sucked down one last drag and flicked the hot end with his finger, sending the ash into the concrete below him, and leaned against the stone wall to rub it there, making sure it was all the way out.

  She offered him an Altoid tin. He took it with a raised eyebrow, and shook it to hear the sound of dull thuds on the other side. He crumpled the cigarette butt and stuffed it into the tin with the others. She tucked it back into her bag and closed her cocoon again around her, reaching th
e end of her cigarette as well. He was surprised to have beaten her, but he had been puffing a lot harder.

  “You ready for this?” He said.

  Samantha shook her head.

  “Me either.”

  He started walking toward the door of the church. “Thanks for the smoke.”

  “Clark!”

  He turned around, and saw her coming toward him, dropping her cigarette into the tin. “About the other day, I’m sorry too.”

  “I understand.”

  “I was really cruel.”

  “I know.”

  She paused a moment, and then nodded her head. “We good?”

  He extended a hand: “Truce?”

  She took it. “Truce.”

  Father Capaldi was at the head of the stairs when they reached them. Clark was relieved to see that he did not look like the devilish priest of the dream, but had eyes that were warm and welcoming, drawn into his face by a gentle peppery beard and wide bald dome draped with gray. His vestments were like the dream however, which he supposed was probably due to the fact that most vesting was pretty uniform. “Samantha!” The man called, and she rushed to him. He opened wide arms, his cassock and surplice spreading like a mother hen’s wings. He hugged her warmly.

  “Is this a friend of yours?” He asked, gesturing to Clark.

  She shook her head, “No, Father. This was Jon’s therapist, Dr. Bell.”

  He extended his hand toward the priest, “Clark, if you please.”

  The man grabbed his hand and pulled him into a hug, patting his back with a bare palm. “I don’t shake hands,” he said as he did so, and then moved back, smiling brightly despite the somber occasion. “I don’t think we’ll be doing that around the Lord’s table, so why do it now?”

  Clark nodded politely, and tried to shake off the awkward feeling.

  “Come in now, it’s far too cold out here.” He pushed open the wooden door, and it creaked against the hinges as he did so, echoing through the stonework that surrounded them into the depths of the foyer and beyond. Clark felt a rock shift in his stomach, and felt the urge to look on the other side as if there was going to be some—