The Nightmare Game (13 page)

I managed to make it to the kitchen on very
unsteady legs, continuing to cling to the furniture for support, breathing a
sigh of relief at the successful completion of that effort. On the kitchen
table lay a piece of paper with something written on it. I picked it up and
read the handwritten note.

“I hope I’m wrong, but I figure you probably need
this real bad right about now. There’s some food in the ice box. It should help
a little to get you going. – Virginia.”

 The penmanship was barely legible and looked more
like a man’s. Funny, I would have imagined that Virginia’s handwriting would be
pretty and old-fashioned. What a completely meaningless observation, my addled
brain realized. What did it matter? This was a gift horse. Who cared? She was
incredibly sweet and thoughtful to have provided this for me. Bless her, what a
doll she was. She’d given me sustenance, been the answer to my prayers. Who
needed elves, I thought, with such a good friend like Virginia around? How
could she possibly have known just how badly I needed something to eat right
now? The answer was clear the second I realized that while it might be my first
shot at this game, it was by no means hers, for she’d been through this
scenario hundreds of times before. I made my way over to the refrigerator,
opened it, and there was food, lovely, glorious food. A take-out bag was lying
on the top shelf, beckoning to me along with a couple of bottles of water that
sat next to it. I bent over and fished the package and one of the bottles out
of the icy environment, put them on the counter next to the sink and closed the
door to the fridge. Another wave of dizziness came over me as I did so, and I
felt as if I were going to black out. I had to eat something urgently, so I
remained standing at the kitchen counter, holding onto it, afraid I’d probably
pass out before I could make it to the dining table. I wasn’t even up to
pulling out a glass for my water, so I just drank from the bottle, draining
most of it before stopping. That helped a little. A sandwich wrapped in butcher
paper was lying on one side of the bag. It was the first thing I pulled out,
followed by a Styrofoam container that had a translucent white plastic cover,
along with a plastic spork and a few paper napkins.

Thinking that the sandwich would be a little too
heavy on my stomach to start with, I took off the cover to the white dish, for
it looked easiest to digest. It turned out to be rice pudding. It tasted like
heaven and I devoured it in just a few bites. I felt a surge of relief now that
the brunt of my gnawing hunger was appeased, so I went to the dining area, set
the sandwich down carefully upon the table and plopped into a chair. It felt so
good to sit down. I put my head in my hands for a few seconds and tried to
compose myself because the room was beginning to spin again and little black
dots were floating in front of my eyes. My nerves were stretched so taut that
not only were the tips of my fingers tingling, I could have sworn I even felt
the dragon on the necklace vibrate. After a few moments of gathering myself, I
was able to begin functioning again.
Oh, thank you,
Virginia
, I thought to myself.
I appreciate
this so much. You couldn’t possibly know how much this means to me
. But
then she did know, didn’t she?

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.