Sleep Revised

by Wright, Michael

  The towel holder was raised.

  Water slicked down her legs onto the tile in uncaring drips. As she came close to the door she felt her legs pause, pulling her back, holding her away from the idea, holding her back from continuing on.

  C’mon girl, you can do this.

  She raised the holder and with held breath hitching in her lungs, she whirled around the corner, and fixed her eyes on her attacker, prepared the swing, raising it high into the air, and—

  Shadows

  —nothing was there.

  Her eyes searched the motel room, from one side to the other, but nobody was there.

  The shower roared and protested behind her, as if it was frustrated at her interruption to their time together.

  The room was empty. The sack of food still sat on the counter, waiting for her to finish her bathing session and come back to it. The dress was still passed out on the bed, right where she had left it. Her suitcase was even still as it had been. Untouched, it seemed, just as she had left it.

  What?

  The towel holder fell by her side, bumping the edge of her thigh, right at the end of the towel’s border. She held it there as she stared at the empty motel room. Her heart was still racing, and she felt anger mingle in with her fear, anger at her own stupidity and paranoia.

  The yelling outside the window had stopped. She walked toward the suitcase, looking at it carefully, scanning it for anything that may have moved. She only saw all of her clothes, mostly comprised of jeans and black T-shirts. They were left alone. They were rolled exactly as she always did when she packed to make the most room she could.

  She turned and glanced out the window, and saw someone new standing by the pool. The teenagers had gone on and a lone figure stood there, someone young and thin. He had long hair that hung around his face, black and curly, a thin jacket hung on his even thinner frame. He was staring at her window.

  Sam watched him and realized she was still wrapped in a towel. It was probably just some horny kid looking for a show, but she hadn’t thought you could see through the blinds at that angle. How could you see through the window like it was? That was impossible.

  She opened up the blinds, and stared straight back at the boy.

  He pointed up at her.

  She froze.

  He brought both palms to his face and covered his eyes, then flapped them open: Peekaboo. He smiled and began laughing.

  Instinctively, she flipped him off and then turned away from the window, disgusted by the audacity of the kid. He wasn’t much younger than her, he was around Jon’s age. She closed the blinds tight and secured the curtains around it again, determined to ignore the kid any further and return to the shower from her grand adventure.

  She looked across the room and saw something taped to the door.

  The chain was undone.

  It was a piece of paper and a crudely drawn eye done in dark red marker. It looked like it might have been blood, but she was sure it wasn’t, after all it couldn’t be.

  The ice returned to her spine, and she crept across the room toward the drawing. It had been taped there with simple scotch tape, like the drawing of a little kid that he had produced in a kindergarten class and with great pride displayed it on his wall for all passersby to observe and lavish praise on.

  The eye stared at her, a strange symbol occupying the center of it, drawn a lot more carefully than the eye actually was. The eye itself looked as if it had not been in fact done with a marker but with a fingertip. A small one, but a finger nonetheless. Like a finger painting picture that would come out of a child’s activity in hell.

  The towel slipped down a little bit, and she didn’t bother to fix it that time, she just let it hang lower, it didn’t seem to be as important anymore. She reached the door and stared at the drawing for a moment, unsure what to make of it. She felt like she had seen it before, like someone had gotten it tattooed on them, or maybe it was tagged on a wall near her apartment back home…something. She knew that it was familiar, even if only in the vague corridors of her subconscious.

  Sam dropped the towel stand to the ground, not caring about the noise it made that was bound to disrupt the people below her who were probably engaged in an hourly paid sex session, if she had any guess about the people who wandered the lower deck of the motel, and reached out for the drawing, holding it up and staring at the eye—almost certain that she had seen the eye before, but not the symbol that accompanied it. It looked like a letter, part of a language that would have popped up on the X-Files. She had never seen anything like it before except on television. But there was no Mulder or Scully to call in about it.

  She flipped it over and on the back, in equally crude letters there was a note written: Open the door.

  The drawing fell to the ground and she approached the peep hold in the door, squinting her eye and staring outside, expecting to see the boy with the curly long hair, staring back at her and laughing, maybe with his hands over his eyes, waiting for her to open the door.

  Peekaboo.

  She saw nothing in the hallway.

  Carefully, regretting it the moment she did, she grabbed the knob and twisted it open, pulling open the door quickly—as she had expected there was nobody there. The hall was empty except for an equal line of doors that resembled her own in the unkempt uniformity that was so characteristic of motels. In the center of the door frame a string was hanging down. She followed it down to the end of the string where a key was hanging, swinging back and forth lightly as if in a breeze. She knew what it was before she even examined it.

  It was Jon’s apartment key. The one she was certain she had left in her suitcase, sealed away in a compartment that was sealed tight with a zipper, undisturbed when she had looked only a moment ago before spotting the pervert kid with the long hair, before she had seen the drawing.

  She snatched it down and closed the door. It had been held with scotch tape as well, and the sticky strip swung at the end of the string in her hand.

  The towel almost slid completely off as Sam marched across the room to the window, a rage building inside of her, mixed strongly with a terrible and unquenchable fear that reached far back into the recesses of her mind. Back to that moment where she stood defenseless with her little brother—trying to be strong.

  She whipped the blinds and curtain, prepared to open the window itself and scream at the boy, to let him know what she felt about him and his games—

  Peekaboo

  —that he was playing.

  The curtain whipped open, but the boy was gone. The waters of the pool, icy and uninviting, were still—as if nobody had been there at all.

  Sam stepped back and fell onto the bed, the towel abandoned her on the surface of the comforter, and she stared at the ceiling.

  2

  Clark poured the box out on the floor of his apartment. The papers scattered in all directions, piling one on top of the other. Photos and printouts and pages out of old books stacked on top of each other and slid out forming a wider and wider pile as they landed on top one after the other. He scooped it together with his hands as it fell to keep the pile a little smaller, and then continued pouring, until a black orb fell out, and rolled away from him toward the couch.

  He reached over and grabbed it, spinning it around in his hand. The black surface felt beaded in his hand and textured. He ran a fingernail along the lines that formed various shapes and seams in it. They all ended on either side of the orb where a black circle was formed, top and bottom. The seams seemed to form panels that shifted as he twisted it around in his hand, but they didn’t move out of alignment, they only wiggled a little bit.

  He set the orb aside, looking at the photos.

  “Where to start?” He wondered aloud.

  He could already see that there were printouts from cheap websites, pictures gathered from obscure sources and pages that he was pretty certain came from a book that he should not have been cutting into. Given the circumstances, he supposed that he could
let Jon off the hook.

  Don’t fight them

  He pulled out a notebook, it was adorned around all the edges with post-it notes, some pink, some yellow, and on it was a scrawled title: “Timeline”. Clark reached behind him and put it next to the strange orb, then began pulling photos out of the mess in front of him.

  He didn’t know what he expected to find. What were you supposed to find in the last package from a mentally ill patient who very well may have committed suicide or under the influence of his mental disorder been killed? It was honestly crazy to consider, and he knew that he should probably be on the phone with Detective Morrison than on the floor with a box of papers that was sent to him by the late Jon Morgan.

  The box had been calling to him since the dream, which had continued to haunt him even in his waking hours. He had slept since then, and it had not reoccurred, but it still felt like a weight resting on his shoulders, bearing down on him as he walked through his apartment, to and from his bedroom, glancing at the picture of his wife. Whenever he looked, he saw her standing in front of him with an IV attached, and a basin of blood beneath him.

  The pile of photos began to take shape, and he began placing all of the Internet research into a separate pile next to it. Most of the sites he had never heard of, but they bore titles like “insidetheeye.com” or “opendoors.co.net” and one that stuck out was “believemeeyes.blogspot”. They were articles and blogs, all of them, and they all seemed to be based around the subject of the drawing that had been in his pocket that Morrison had shown him. The same one that kid with the long hair and the Macbook had scribbled on a note for them. Morrison had said that the symbol was popping up all over the place, the county, state and country—he supposed that he should have expected that there would be a lot on the Internet about it. The collections Jon had were more than loose information, they were in-depth articles and dissertations on the subjects.

  Clark pulled a picture out of the stack, it was of a woman standing in front of the camera, against a pale wall, only in a bra and jeans, on her stomach was an eye drawn. Hand prints were spread across her body, notably he saw that they were focused around her breasts and sides. As if she had been fondled by a group of men before the photo was taken. In her hand was a long and sharp looking knife. He set it into the pile.

  In another photo he saw a picture of a tattoo on a man’s arm, it was the symbol that occupied the center of the eye, around it was a circle of letters, the same Latin phrase that had been on the paper in Jon’s pocket.

  He tossed another blog printout onto the pile and saw he had reached the end of the mess. There were only a few papers, one of which was from a book, and the other one from a Bible, somewhere in the Book of Revelation.

  He turned his head up toward the picture on the counter, Carol, smiling back at him. “What do you think, girl?” He said, “Does any of this make sense?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He flipped through the final few pages, sorting them together and paused to survey his mess. It made no more sense to him than it had when he began, it was just a random group of pages with pictures, like an out of order Dr. Seuss from hell. He grinned at the thought of Dante’s Inferno being illustrated by the whimsical children’s author, even though it really should not have even been funny in the slightest.

  Clark pulled an article from the pile, the title read: “They Are Waiting” and he smiled uncontrollably. It sounded like a story from Astounding Tales, or EC Comics. He glanced over it, there were images of giant creatures, some of them humanoid, other ones of various shapes, all drawn in pencil, and very well done. Were it not for the comically Lovecraftian nature of them. He tossed it back into the pile and pulled himself back up on the couch behind him, wishing desperately for a beer.

  The orb rolled to him when he sat, following the sink in the cushions and rattled as it slapped his thigh. He signed and loosened the tie he had failed to take off from the funeral a little more, tired and weary of his little adventure already.

  He picked up the orb and turned it over in his hands. He noticed that those strange little seams were forming symbols, somewhat in the same vein as the one that occupied the middle of the eye. There was no Latin on it, which he guessed would be far too cliche even for Jon to take an interest—but at the same time he had no clue what language it could be, or why it he had bothered to send it to him. He set it down and looked over at the marked and beaten notebook. The cover had been blue at one time, but with time and stains from coffee and probably energy drinks, it had faded to a strange off purple mess that didn’t seem like it belonged at all. He picked it up, and thumbed the tabs packed around the edges of it, seeing various markers. “Greek, Roman, Sumerian, American, Chinese,” and even “Unknown.” He read them to the air. “What do you think, Carol?” He turned to the picture again. “What the heck was our boy into?”

  He saw a tab marked: “Start Here” and he pulled it. It opened to the first page, and a drawing greeted him first. It was a tall humanoid like thing, with scant wings and short horns. In it’s hand was a large scepter that had a sharp spear point at the bottom and a curved, two prong fork at the other end. Beneath him were small beings, probably people, all running away, some fallen and terrorized by the being. He stared at it, trying to remember if Jon had ever spoken about drawing before. It was pretty good, he had to admit. He turned the page.

  On the other side was a long letter, written in shaky uneven script, as if the person who wrote it was either on an unstable surface or his hands were shaking. He supposed it was probably the latter considering what he had seen thus far.

  There was a sharp rap at the door and he pulled himself away from trying to decipher the script.

  Who could that be?

  The he pulled his sleeve back. It was already nine in the evening.

  He tossed the notebook down on the couch with the orb and stood. “Just a minute!” His voice echoed off the kitchen sink and refrigerator, vibrating in the emptiness of the apartment. He straightened his tie a little bit so he didn’t look like a drunk when he answered and approached the door, reached for the deadbolt.

  There was something inside of him that protested, but he pushed it down.

  He could see opening the door, Jon standing there, jaw crooked, staring with dead eyes, asking him if he’d read the notebook. Asking him if he liked the pictures he put with it.

  —do you like my pictures dr bell I thought you would how do you like them theyre nice arent they how do you like my pictures—

  Clark pulled open the door and was greeted with an empty hallway. The dim light above, that in the warmer months was surrounded by bugs, was devoid of fraternizing insects reflected dully on the painted wood that was long overdue for a paint job. He poked his head out and looked around, looking for anyone who might be standing nearby to get a laugh at their little prank, how they pulled a ding-dong ditch on the upstairs neighbor. But there was nobody. He listened for footsteps on the stairways that led up to his apartment, and there was no sound. There wasn’t even the creaking on the walkway below him that led to more doors. It was empty. A cool breeze blew in and rustled a paper taped to his door that he hadn’t noticed before.

  He pulled it down and shut the door, double checking the deadbolt as he did so out of undue paranoia.

  The note was folded over three times, but the ink had bled through and he could already see one thing clearly through the paper, the drawing of an eye.

  Clark unfolded it roughly and met the gaze of the eye, drawn big with letters surrounding it flowing in a circle, as if dancing around it. He rotated the note and read the letters carefully, feeling his spine ice up and blood boil at the same time.

  Have you started dreaming yet?

  “Screw this.” He said and reached into his pocket, drawing out his cell phone.

  Carol stared at him from the counter, her face looked worried, almost disturbed, as if she knew what was happening. Even though he knew that she didn’t and the picture hadn’t cha
nged at all since the last time he looked at it, it was just his head playing an evil trick on him, that was all.

  “Hello?” A voice said on the other end.

  “Morrison?”

  “That’d be me. What’s up Clark?”

  Clark looked at the note and sighed heavily. “A whole bunch, I’m afraid.”

  3

  Samantha stood in front of the building unsure of what she was actually doing. She flipped over the card in her hand again, reading through the narrow lines with a barely legible address on it and checked it against the numbers on the building. She had the right place, and it was just as much of a hellhole as she expected.

  The wind tossed her jacket and one side hugged tight against her black Metallica T-shirt and jeans. Her rough boots clacked against the concrete, sweeping at the small cuffs in the bottom of the jeans. She listened as the cab that had brought quickly made his way to the end of the street and pulled a turn out of the dead end neighborhood as fast as he could. She couldn’t blame him, it was a bad place for someone to be with that much money sitting around in a very ill-protected box. He might as well have had a sign that said “Rob me” on the car. At the same time, it made her uneasy however. Not having someone else hanging around to keep an eye on her.

  Gotta be a big girl, now. She thought to herself.

  She stepped off of the main street and onto a cracked and ill-repaired sidewalk that was spotted with the remains of chalk where someone had once drawn a profane message that was left for nobody in particular. The steps leading up to the apartment building were grime-covered brick, her boots almost slipped in the strange greenish fungus that grew where rainfall had brought the spores in. She caught herself and stopped at the second step, straightening her cap and glancing behind her. On the other side of the street a man looked at her, bloodshot eyes cutting toward her under the edge of his hood. His slack jeans flopped around his hips and she could see a dull black bulge toward the back. He gave her a once-over and continued on his way.