“What in the world are you doing out of bed? You need your rest, John. How can you expect to recover if you don’t sleep? You’re not sleepwalking again, are you?”
Her words snapped me out of the fugue I’d been in. “I hear strange noises and can’t sleep,” I responded. “The meds aren’t strong enough.”
“Then tell the doctor, not me,” she said. “Have him phone a stronger prescription to the pharmacy. I’ll pick it up for you. I don’t want you anywhere near that pharmacy until after Halloween. Your last visit cost us over six hundred dollars.”
“Six hundred dollars?”
“Your rampage destroyed or ruined their entire stock of two dozen costumes and masks. They’d just arrived that morning and a dozen were out on display with the rest stacked nearby in boxes. You ripped the display apart, tore up the costumes, and somehow set fire to the full boxes. They erupted in flames as if constructed of combustible material waiting for a spark to ignite and completely consume them.”
“I told you those costumes were dangerous!”
“Oh, stop it! Stop being such an ass. It’s not the costumes that are dangerous, John. It’s you. You’re a danger to yourself, to me, to our children. I’m certainly not scared of any silly Halloween costume. But I am scared of you, John. I’m scared of what you might do.” She picked up the phone and handed it to me. “Call the doctor. Do it now. Tell him you need stronger medications. I’ll get the kids ready and take them with me. We’ll pick the pills up for you. I want you to get into that bed and stay there. Don’t go anywhere or do anything.”
I telephoned the doctor, got transferred to his answering service, left a message. Twenty minutes later, Doc Hornsby called back. I explained all that had happened since he saw me three days ago. Hornsby agreed to double the strength of my meds, adding two more prescriptions to the ones I already had. He also agreed to telephone them directly to the pharmacist.
After Linda and the children left to pick up my new pills, those weird scrapings and scratchings resumed behind the drywall. I remained in bed and tried to ignore them.
Despite the incessant noise, I fell deeply asleep. I suppose I could blame the sleeping pills Linda insisted I swallow before she departed, or perhaps the raging fever that suddenly came over me after she was gone, but I’m certain the real reason I fell asleep was because that repetitive noise lulled me to dreamland as surely as a lullaby, sung by my long-dead mother, had so often lulled me to sleep as an infant.
I dreamed, and my dreams were horrible nightmares. Like other fever dreams I’d recently experienced, these were crudely disjointed and made little logical sense. Surreal landscapes, houses with no doors and no windows, people with no faces, raced past as if I rode aboard a speeding train and they stood still.
And then my train derailed taking a curve atop a high cliff overlooking the ocean while proceeding ten times too fast to remain on the tracks, and I was falling, falling…
And down, sang my long-dead mother’s voice, will come cradle, baby and all!
As the train plunged into the sea, tentacles of the same puke-green hue as the waves, reached out for me, wrapped suckers around both of my arms and legs, and dragged me deeper into the fathomless depths. Down, down, down into madness.
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs threatened to burst within my chest. Darkness enveloped me like a shroud. Certainly, goodness and mercy had deserted me and only death waited for me at the bottom of the sea.
Only there was no bottom. I fell and fell, pulled ever-downward by gravity and those terrible tentacles.
Down into an ancient city that had existed on the floor of the ocean nearly forever, fabled Atlantis or lost Lemuria, I knew not which. There was an eerie green glow, some kind of bioluminescence, that illuminated tall spires on a foreboding castle where the ruler of this underground kingdom must reside. Off in the distance, mountain-like crags rose where shifting tectonic plates had buckled bedrock, beyond which seemingly-bottomless caverns yawned.
All kinds of aquatic creatures inhabited this land beneath the sea, including many with rows of teeth sharper than a shark’s and some with eyes and hands that looked human.
As tentacle suckers deposited me on solid ground outside the castle walls and withdrew, releasing me to wander this strange place on my own, I found I could breathe again, almost as if I had grown gills, which I discovered I had.
Moving about in water of any depth is difficult. It’s nearly impossible on the bottom of an ocean. Two-legged creatures weren’t meant to walk on or under water, but I managed to make my way inside the castle as if drawn there by some invisible force like iron to a magnet. Once inside the castle walls, I no longer had to fight the currents.
My feet became flippers. Fins sprouted along my spine.
The stone edifice felt familiar to me. I had seen it often enough before, I suppose, not in my own dreams, but in the vivid imaginings of others. It looked a lot like the castle wherein Sleeping Beauty lay dreaming of Prince Charming, as depicted in illustrated books of children’s fairy tales.
Now I could discern the odd shape of everything wasn’t simply because water distorted and bent visual images but was really because the shapes I saw were unlike anything I’d previously witnessed anywhere. Walls appeared jointed at weird angles, doorways were misshapen, roofs peaked like a tall black witch’s hat.
I was wrong. This place wasn’t like castles pictured in fairy tales but more like the demented drawings of M. C. Escher.
It wasn’t built for humans. Nor by humans. It was already ancient when Adam and Eve left Eden.
Some entranceways were quite huge, tall and wide enough for an elephant or whale to easily pass through. Others were minuscule, like mouse holes chewed in baseboards of old houses. Floors were slanted and made not of bricks nor wood nor cobblestones but of human bones piled together one atop another.
The castle was a charnel house, the bones picked clean of flesh.
If I could have fled, I would have run away as fast and as far as my legs would carry me. Everything about this place was repulsive to humans. Unfortunately, some obscure compulsion assured the only direction my feet would move was deeper into that unspeakable darkness at the heart of the castle where neither sunlight nor bioluminescence penetrated and a monstrous evil eagerly awaited my arrival.
Although no humanly-perceptible sound existed in such total darkness at the bottom of the sea, I swore I discerned scrapings and scratchings and titterings like those inside the walls of my own home. Surely, there were no rats this far under water.
Again, I was wrong.
Swarms of small, furry, sharp-toothed things emerged from the darkness calling my name.
“John!” I felt their paws upon me, shaking me, repeatedly slapping my face. “John! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes to find Linda, my wife, plus David and Julie, my two children, staring at me as if I were a stranger, an alien from another galaxy or different dimension, who had invaded their otherwise-normal world.
“We returned from the pharmacy to discover you wandering aimlessly around a neighbor’s back yard in your pajamas, thoroughly soaked in salty-smelling sweat, as if your fever spiked and you didn’t know where you were or what you were doing. You broke your promise, John. You promised me you’d stay in bed, and you didn’t. I can’t trust you anymore.”
I saw I was indeed in the back yard adjacent to our own, my nightclothes drenched as if I’d been for a swim in the ocean. Since we lived a thousand miles from the nearest seaport, visiting an ocean was patently impossible in the brief time it took Linda and the kids to go to the pharmacy and back.
Linda insisted on moving me from the master bedroom I shared with her into the guest bedroom on the first floor. “Just until you get well,” she said. “We’ll both sleep better if we don’t sleep together.”