by DC Wilson
THE
CLAVERHOUSE
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THE WHITE ROOM
by Anon.
Copyright 2013 Claverhouse Press
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The White Room
Further Reading
THE WHITE ROOM
THIS ALL HAPPENED SOME time ago, so I apologize in advance if I'm a little hazy on the details. I was a very different person back then, so it's difficult to dredge it all up again like this.
Looking back, I was probably depressed in some way. On the face of it, everything seemed to be going fine in my life: I had a beautiful wife, a great job, and a young baby daughter. Everybody always told me I was so lucky. But I wasn't really happy – deep down within myself there was always this nagging sense that something wasn't right, that my life was just happening around me while I cruised through it on autopilot. It was like I was on rails and just going through the motions every day, doing what was expected of me, and never really being myself.
Of course, it's hard when you've got a young child. All of a sudden you never get a moment to yourself, and your life isn't your own. Don't get me wrong, I loved her with all my heart, but sometimes, in my darkest moments, I would wonder what my life might have been if I'd made different choices. I'd even think about just running away, although I knew I'd never actually do it. It was just a notion I entertained every now and again.
I'd reached that stage in life where all your friends are settling down and having kids, and it feels like you have to book time weeks in advance just to meet for a couple of drinks or something. Like I said, I had a good job, but I was just beginning to realize that it was going to probably be my career for the rest of my working life, and if I really wanted to get the most out of it I'd have to stop marking time and start making a concerted effort, even though my heart really wasn't in it.
So I suppose I was looking for some kind of refuge, a space in my life that was mine and mine alone, where I didn't have to pretend and there was no-one relying on me. I guess I found a pretty strange way to do it, though: I took up lucid dreaming.
I'd always been fascinated by dreams, ever since I was a kid. My dreams were always incredibly vivid and seemed a lot more coherent than most people's – they seemed to have more substance to them, more reality. Maybe more than my actual life had at the time. I can still remember my first lucid dream. I wish I could properly describe what it felt like, that sudden realization that everything around me was an illusion, and an illusion that was totally under my control. It was literally like becoming a God.
After that first time, I began using every spare moment I had to read up on the subject. Methods and techniques for achieving lucid dreams, other people's accounts of their own adventures in their subconscious mind – I devoured everything I could find, and quickly became an expert. I built entire kingdoms for myself in my sleep, and would retreat there every night, finding there the freedom and excitement that didn't exist in my waking world.
I was the architect of my own imagination, and travelled through the farthest reaches of space and the deepest fathoms of the ocean with equal ease. I led armies, fought epic battles against fearsome monsters and founded nations which hailed me as their king. I began living solely for the hours of darkness, for the moment when my head hit my pillow and I could leave my humdrum life behind and enter an existence that felt more truly my own. I didn't mind my job anymore, I was getting on better with my wife, and my daughter was once again the apple of my eye. Things were good. Or so it seemed.
Slowly, though, an intruder began to impinge upon my perfect little world. At first I sensed him more than saw him – a figure always on the edges of things, a presence that disturbed and intrigued me in equal measure. After a while I began to get glimpses of him. I'd see him for a second through a dirty window pane, or speeding past in a car, only for a moment, but he was always staring directly at me, and always grinning a leering, maniacal grin.
He was a tall, gangly man always dressed in white, with wild eyes full of dark intent and a shock of black hair that made his pale, high-cheekboned face even more intense. He unsettled me deeply. Whenever I encountered him he ruined whatever fantasy I was playing out, yet I could never approach him or confront him directly – despite my unlimited powers in the world of dreams, he always slipped away from me, and this fact alone ruined each dream he appeared in. He became a constant reminder of the unreality of my dreaming world, and made me aware of the fact that all this was just make-believe, just so much meaningless idle fancy.
And then I began encountering the White Room. I'd be in the middle of a fantastic dream, running through a door in an ancient medieval castle or diving through an airlock in a city-sized spacecraft, when suddenly I'd find myself plunging into a completely white, featureless room with no doors, no windows and no exit back to where I'd been.
And he'd be there. The gangly man. Grinning at me with his twisted, unnatural grin, fixing me fast with his crazed, evil eyes.
He didn't speak at first. He'd just watch me as I pounded on the walls and explored every inch of the room looking for some means of escape. All my powers were gone – usually I would have just blasted my way out with the power of my mind, or created a trapdoor that would have got me out of there, but somehow no matter how hard I tried, there was nothing I could do. There was just me, and him. Standing there in the White Room for what seemed like hours at a time, until eventually morning would come round and I'd wake up, pale and shaking and bathed in a sheen of cold, clammy sweat.
This went on for months. Now, as soon as I fell asleep I was there, in the White Room, and I stayed there all night. I began to dread sleep as much as I had once loved it. I scoured through all the books and articles I had collected on lucid dreaming to see if anyone else had experienced something similar, but couldn't find anything. It seemed I was totally alone. Just me and the gangly man, night after night, until I was afraid even to look at him.
Eventually, he began to talk to me. He'd wait until I'd given up in my dream and curled into a ball on the floor, then he'd slowly approach, crouch over me and begin to whisper in my ear in a low, calm voice. A slow, even whisper without tone or inflection. A whisper that would crawl into my ear like a snake and take up residence in my brain no matter how hard I tried to shut it out.
I won't repeat the things he said. They were truly unspeakable. Terrible, evil things: what he was going to do to my wife, to my infant child. The agonies he would put them through, every tiny detail of the tortures he would inflict on them. All in that same careful, measured whisper, that same quiet tone that betrayed no emotion whatsoever. Hour after hour of this from the moment I fell asleep until the moment I woke up.
It sickened me: sickened my very soul. And it was all the worse because I knew this was part of my dream – on some level it was me thinking those awful, horrible things. His voice was my voice, and his whisper was really mine. It was like a cancer inside my head, eating away at me from the inside out like a worm in an apple. I could no longer look my wife in the eye, and I took no joy in seeing my daughter even though I loved her more than ever. Always the echoes of that terrible whisper would come back to me, and I would hear his voice silently in my ear throughout my entire waking life.
By this time I was at my wit's end. I felt like a hollow shell of a man poised on the brink of insanity. I decided to take sleeping pills before bed, hoping to enter a deep and dreamless sleep with no sign of the gangly man and no more of his horrific whispering.
My plan backfired. I awoke unexpectedly in the middle of the night, my eyes blinking open and my mind instantly alert and totally awake. I sighed inwardly, lay there for a moment, and then dec
ided to get myself a glass of water.
Except I couldn't move. In reading about lucid dreaming, I'd heard of sleep paralysis before, but never experienced it. The reality was far worse than I'd ever imagined. I was trapped in my body, lying on my back and staring up at the ceiling, unable to move so much as a muscle no matter how hard I tried. I felt both strangely disconnected from my body because I was no longer in control of it, and utterly rooted to it in a way I never had before. I could feel every inch of my skin, each fibre of the bedclothes tangled around me, yet even if a spider were to slowly crawl across my eyeball there would be absolutely nothing I could do about it.
I was terrified. Sleep – even if it meant another visit to the dreaded
