A Beautiful Nightmare
John slapped the alarm clock off his nightstand cursing under his breath. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! The alarm continued to screech jolting him out of his restful sleep. He fiddled with the accursed machine trying to find the snooze button as the device continued to drag him away from his blissful dreams. A world of perfection, a world in which he had control. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
“Fuck!” he shouted. Five minutes had flown by far too quickly. It wasn’t enough time, he needed to go back. As John rubbed the grime out of his eyes, the pain returned. A dull throbbing pulsed through his head. He shouldn’t have been sleep deprived. “Why am I so damn tired again?” he thought. Eventually, he managed to roll himself out of bed and jumped in the shower. The hot jets of steam and water jolting him out of his fatigue. Quickly toweling off, he threw on a t-shirt and headed to work.
John sped through the empty roads of Kansas. The symmetrical rows of cornfield flying by his window in a blurry haze. The thirty-minute commute led him to a rundown laboratory that he worked at. Though it was a stretch calling what John did work. He wasn’t an employ of the laboratory but rather a test subject. A role he had accepted five years prior after being laid of during the great recession in 2007. The research was intensive, requiring a 10-hour daily commitment but paid nearly $4000 a month. He was expected to show up at 7 every morning and departed at 5 in the afternoon. It was a large time commitment, but his role was easy.
The building came into view as John pulled into the parking lot. The laboratory was a long white concrete structure with a battered exterior. Years of neglect and weathering had created shallow fissures that ran along the walls of the building. Surrounding the structure like a fence were endless fields of thick uncut prairie grass. The overgrowth giving the place a sense of abandonment. Contrasting the vibrant colors of grass was a mass of spiny black vines that draped around the building, encasing it like a python constricting its prey. Internally the building was equally neglected. Dust caked the windowsills. Cobwebs were woven into every nook and cranny. And the paint on the wall was chipped, peeling off in an attempt to escape. Paired nicely with its disastrous appearance was a horrendously confusing design. The building was a labyrinth of spanning corridors. Each one leading to another without any discernable pattern or reason. Nearly every room looked identical and there were no distinct features or maps to determine one’s location. It was as though the architect wanted you to get lost. The place was a lab but it better suited to be a prison.
Back outside the laboratory, the air had an eerie quality to it. It was thick, viscous, almost like syrup. It surrounded the area like a barrier, but not a barrier to entry but a barrier from escape. As John got out of his car and walked towards the building, the air clung to him slowing his movements down as though he were walking through a swimming pool. As he slowly made his way towards the building, the temperature of the air around him began to rise and fall simultaneously. As he grabbed the door handle, a shiver ran up his spine and a sense of dread filled his body. In a swift motion he yanked the door open. Its unoiled hinges shrieking loudly in warning as he stepped into the deteriorating building.
As John walked through the building, he looked through the windows of the adjacent rooms. He wasn’t the only participant in the research study and occasionally he would get a glimpse of the other patients in session. He would stare uncomfortably as he watched the wires and monitors wrapped around their still bodies like an electrical casket. John knew this was standard procedure but something about it made him feel uneasy. It made him realize just how vulnerable he was. But he pushed this thought to the back of his mind and pressed forward. As long as he was getting paid, who was he to complain? He knew better than to ask too many questions. ‘Show up, Shut Up, and Get Paid,’ that’s how he saw things.
Shuffling through the hallways, John made a sharp left turn and found himself at room A201. He never knew how exactly he reached his room but always seemed to manage. He had never been given a map and the only instructions he had received from the receptionist was to follow the left most wall. It didn’t really make any sense, but it always seemed to work so he didn’t question it. Why should he? He sulked into the room plopping himself onto the bed. Then he pulled his wallet out of his pocket and opened it up. In the frontmost compartment was a picture of a little girl in a tiny blue dress and joyous smile. For a moment, John’s face lit up. She was the reason he was doing all of this for. He smiled and for the first time since he had stepped into the laboratory, he felt a spark of hope. A knock at the door jolted John of his thoughts.
“Good morning Mr. Lennox” said Harry, the burly nurse who had been assigned to him.
“It’s been 5 years and you still can’t just call me John, huh” John replied chuckling uncomfortably.
“Absolutely not Mr. Lennox, this is a professional institution and I must conduct myself in such a manner. Now, you know the routine. I’m going to ask you a series of questions, please answer them to the best of your ability”
When they had finished, Harry’s questionnaire was marked as such.
Patient Name: Johnathan Lennox
Age: 35
Birthdate: 1/4/1977
What is the quality of the patients sleep during the study?
Sleeps restfully but doesn’t feel rejuvenated upon waking
What is the quality of the patients sleep outside of the study, if at all?
Can’t fall asleep until late in the morning. Sleeps for around 3 hours between 4 AM – 7 AM before returning to the lab
On a scale of 1 to 10, how vivid are the patients dreams during the study?
Score 1
Barely dreams and passes out immediately after given sedative. States that the sleep feels lifeless
On a scale of 1 to 10 how does the patient feel physically when they are awake?
Score 3
Feels fatigued all the time, continuous ongoing headaches, tendency to get ill easily, feels feeble
On a scale of 1 to 10, how vivid are the patients dreams outside the study?
Score 10
Shockingly Vibrant, exciting with occasional nightmares
Still ripe
“Alright, thank you Mr. Lennox. The doctor will be in to see you shortly” Harry said leaving the room. John took a second to breathe as he relaxed his shoulders. Harry’s stuffy personality always seemed to make him uncomfortable. But it was different than the discomfort John felt around the doctor.
As John waited patiently, he thought about how easy his work was. The research study was a simple operation. Patients vitals were monitored in their sleep over the course of several years. The claimed goal of the research was to determine the benefits of sleep and what the optimal amount of sleep is.
There was a knock on the door and then Dr. Ivan Lucius entered the room moments later.
“Hello John” he said slowly. “How are you today? It’s been so long”
“You saw me yesterday!?” John replied confused.
“Ah yes, time is something isn’t it. It flies by so quickly” he said eerily looking out of the window, into hallway. He turned around facing John. His bright translucent eyes gleamed like fragmented crystals. Looking into them felt like staring into eternity itself. A point in which time and space intersected like the X and Y axes of a coordinate grid intersecting at a singular location on an infinite plane. When he looked at you his gaze was piercing, ripping past the flesh of your face and body staring directly into your soul. Then he would sit there gazing at you, watching your life play out in front of his eyes, so flippantly as if it were an insignificant movie. He had seen it before, it was nothing new to him. When he spoke, he spoke softly. Just one octave above a whisper. Not in a way that he couldn’t be heard but in a way that forced you to listen. His presence was that of a cloud. Existing between states of structured matter and vapor simultaneously. He was both there and not there. Operating in reality and his own world, both of which seemed equally real.
Dr. Ivan terrified John. It wasn’t the kind of fear that one experiences when being chased by a bear or facing treacherous heights. It was not a fight or flight reaction. It was the kind of fear a child feels walking alone in the dark. A subtle nagging feeling and an intuitive awareness that potential danger lurked near.
Dr. Ivan stared at John, his bright glossy eyes filled with an unquenchable thirst. A silence hung in the room for several seconds, each second escalating the tension. John tried to avert his eyes but something about Ivan’s gaze forced him to comply like electrons drawn to a magnet. Nearly 15 seconds passed by. John could no longer handle the tension.
“So are you gonna administer the sedative now?” John asked.
“Huh? Oh yes, of course. That slipped my mind. I was just thinking about… ohhh never mind actually” Dr. Ivan replied slowly as if he had just been awoken from a deep slumber. He pressed a button on his monitor and a red liquid pulsed through a tube attached to John’s arm. As he drifted off into sleep, A wry smile spread across Dr. Ivan’s face.
John awoke to the sound of Harry’s overly polite voice. “Good morning, Mr. Lennox. I’ve left your payment for this month on the counter. I’ll see you again tomorrow, have a good rest of your evening” he said before walking out of the room. John rubbed the grime out of his eyes, the pain returned. A dull throbbing pulsed through his head. “Ughh not again” he thought. John knew he was well rested, but his body told him differently. His eyes unwilling to open, fighting to keep out the painful industrial lighting that beamed down from the ceiling. His body felt fatigued as though he had spent the day working in a sweat shop. He let out a loud yawn, “all right time to go home” he thought. John grabbed his wallet, phone, and keys; check, check, check and headed out the door. He was in a rush. After all every minute spent in the lab was a minute he wasn’t spending with his daughter, Estella.
Estella was seven years old and the best mistake that John had ever made. Three years before he had lost his job in the recession, John was out on the town with his coworkers. He was drinking, dancing, and chatting with some girls. The night went as many alcohol fueled nights went and John ended taking home a girl whose name he would later find out was Katy. He learned it when she called him a month later to tell him that she was pregnant.
John didn’t want a child, but he didn’t dare ask Katy to get an abortion. Katy wanted an abortion, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell John she wanted one. 8 months later, they had a beautiful baby girl. When she was born, they both cherished her despite their initial reservations. They named the girl Estella after the stars they had seen the night they met.
When John wasn’t working, he was with Estella. He wasn’t married to nor lived with Katy, but they had an amicable relationship. Katy let him see their daughter whenever he wanted, and he contributed both financially and emotionally to Estella’s upbringing. John would always bring Estella a treat when he visited her every evening, whether it was a small toy or a chocolate chips cookie. He showered her with love and affection. Every afternoon, they would sit in front of the fireplace solving puzzles, playing board games, and drinking hot cocoa. Whenever they played checkers he always seemed to lose in winning positions and when they played snakes and ladder, John coincidentally seemed to land on every snake. Estella won every time and each time she did, she jumped up onto her short pudgy legs, raised her hands in the air victoriously, and would shout with joy, “I WIN!! YAYYYY!!” as she danced in circles around John only stopping when he would scoop her in a big warm hug and lift her into the air smiling. At night, when she was all tuckered out, John would read her a bedtime story and gently tuck her into bed. As she closed her eyes, he gave her a warm kiss on the forehead, and turn the lights out. “I love you” he would whisper as he gently closed the door behind him.
As of lately though, John found himself visiting less and less frequently. What had once been an everyday event, had now become a once a week event over the past two years. A strange fatigue had set in since he had started visiting the lab and it had only compounded as the experiment wore on. But today, he was planning on surprising her. It was the start of the new month and he wanted a fresh start.
With that thought in mind, he rushed out of the laboratory, the image of Estella in his mind bringing a smile to his face. As he reached his car, emerging from the thick syrupy air that surrounded the building, he took a deep breath in. The cold crisp air shocking his system awake. “God damn it!” John thought, “I forgot this month’s money inside”. Normally he would’ve waited until the next day to pickup it up, but tonight he was planning on taking Estella out to her favorite restaurant, the Cheesecake Factory, and he was running low on cash.
John hustled back into the ghostly building making his way back towards his room. He dashed through the empty corridors passing by vacant rooms and navigating the symmetrical hallways by instinct. It had been nearly 20 minutes before John realized he was completely lost. But he was in no position to give up so he convinced himself that he had hadn’t been walking that long and that the room would just be up ahead. That was until he hit a dead end. “What the hell!?” he exclaimed in a puzzled tone. He should’ve definitely passed by his room at this point but now there was nowhere to go. John just stared at the wall. It seemed as though the nature of the building itself had shifted. He turned around and tried to backtrack. Perhaps he had accidently skipped past his room. He kept walking until he heard a sound that made him stop dead in his tracks.
A piercing shriek echoed through the halls. The sound tearing into his eardrums like a carving knife mangling the soft flesh of a turkey. The screech grew louder and louder and soon the whole building began to shake violently, writhing in pain at the sound of the hideous wail. The pitch of the shrieks increased, and the light fixtures began to vibrate, glowing disorientingly. They flickered on and off, rattling hazardously. CRASSHHH!!! The lights all broke simultaneously, their bulbs raining down from the ceiling shattering into fragmented glass. The jagged pieces eviscerating John’s skin. As this occurred, the whole corridor began to glow a dangerous shade of blue. A bright electric blue that resembled the flames of the stove top that lingered near the burner. As the warm light illuminated hallway, John watched as blood trickled down his arm onto the shuddering ground beneath him. As he tried to regroup his thoughts, the piercing shrieks continued to grow louder, and the blue light glowed with increasing intensity. The walls seemed to react to the energy, melting away like a wax candle. When they had been stripped away John found himself in a completely new but familiar location. He once again found himself in front of his room, A201 but this time the blinds were drawn.
John’s clothes were torn from the glass and freshly stained with blood. Sweat poured down his forehead profusely, and his body was pumping with adrenaline. He knew he shouldn’t go into the room. The room whose blinds had never been closed once in the 5 years had been there were now shut tight. Something was wrong but it was too late. He was too far into this mess already. There was no point and nowhere to turn back now. ‘Get the money and get out’ he thought himself before entering the room.
Dr. Ivan stood over a young woman. His spiny finger wrapped delicately around her temples. Blue waves of light similar to an aurora borealis cascaded around the room, the pulsing energy originating from the women’s head. Dr. Ivan’s eyes were an empty white, his irises rolled into the back of his head. He stood there with a look of orgasmic bliss rippling across his face. As he did so, the woman would intermittently let out a shriek. The same shriek that had torn through the hallways. Dr. Ivan didn’t seem to notice it. Nor did he seem to notice John’s presence. John stood there, paralyzed by fear, watching the doctor in horror. Suddenly, Dr. Ivan began hovering over the woman, his feet inches above the ground he had been standing on just moments before. The electrical energy that filled the room flowing from the woman’s head, now coated Ivan’s body like an aura. Second by second, the intensity of the energy grew pulsating faster and brighter. Visibly struggling to contain the energy, John watched as the crackling energy ran up and down Dr. Ivan’s body like lightning bolts, ripping off the doctor’s skin piece by piece. When no more skin remained, the energy tore through his muscles, and then finally his internal organs. Piece by piece, his body was dismantled until all that remained was the dense white bone of his skeleton and the white of his eyes.
Dr. Ivan remained motionless in the air, his skeletal frame soaking in the energy, basking in its immense power. Suddenly, his head snapped towards John with precision, his eye’s rolling back to their normal position. He looked at John with intent.
There was a long pause.
“You know, you’re not supposed to enter a room without knocking John. Very impolite of you. Did you learn nothing from Harry’s manners?” Dr. Ivan chided in eerily calm tone. John’s heart skipped a beat and time slowed down to a standstill.
Another excruciating halt as the two stared at one another.
“I.. I.. I.., ju.., just want.. wanted.. my .. payment” John whimpered. There was a lull in room as Dr. Ivan stared at him silently. The calm before the storm. The stillness of a tiger before it pounced. Dr. Ivan let go of the woman’s temple landing squarely on the balls of his feet. As he did so, the blue energy dissipated, and his body began to rematerialize onto his skeleton. John watched as the doctor’s body began to regenerate. Blood soaked the floor as it gushed out of Ivan’s new beating heart. His muscles be to rematerialize, wrapping themselves around his bones, stretching and yanking in a gruesome fashion. As his body reconstructed, his chest cavity remained open, and his vital organs were still beating and visible. He took a deep breath in. John watched in gruesome awe as the lungs expanded, filling with air only to then shrivel as Dr. Ivan spoke.
“John, John, John. You know, you always been such a good patient. You always show up on time, you do your best to hide your fear of me, and you have some of the most delicious dreams out of all my patients. What a shame it is that you had to witness this”. The doctor paused and for a moment looked genuinely sad. “I’m going to miss you John, I really am” he said before lunging at him.
John ran. John ran like he had never ran before in his life. The fatigue, the dull throbbing, his age; everything disappeared. There was only one thing that existed, one thing that was actually real; and that was terror. His instincts took over and his fight or flight response was automatic. His legs burned from lactic acid, his lungs gasped and sputtered for air. But none of that mattered. He had a dinner planned for his daughter and his death was not on the menu. He sprinted down the hallway without a single of notion where he was going except for that it was away from what he had just witnessed. He looked behind to see if he was being followed. Empty. He had managed to temporarily escape Dr. Ivan somewhere in the maze of a building. John slowed down to catch his breath. It didn’t matter how fast he ran he could not find an exit. Stealthily now, John made his way through the corridors until he came across a bright sunlit room. It was the first time he had ever encountered this area of the building but then again, he had encountered a lot of things he didn’t normally see today. It was his first pleasant surprise as he actually got a glimpse of the outside world as this was the only room in the building that seemed to have windows. This was his only chance of escape because he knew he was not going to find the main entrance and if he did there was a good chance Dr. Ivan would be waiting to ambush him there. John closed his eyes and charged, flinging himself at one of the windows. The glass shattered behind him, lacerating his already bloodied body. John landed with a soft thud into the overgrown prairie grass. Quickly, he rose to his feet and raced around the building scanning for his car. There it was. His black Camry sat in the parking lot, awaiting his arrival. As he approached the vehicle, he noticed something was wrong. Perched on the hood of the car Dr. Ivan lay calmly looking up at the sky. His blue fragmented eyes glowing eerily.
John stopped dead in his tracks 10 yards away from the Doctor. They stared at each other. This time John didn’t look away. In that instant, John charged straight towards Dr. Ivan like a bull trying to slay its matador. Despite his lackadaisical demeanor, Ivan was surprisingly present. He moved swiftly to the side dodging the attack positioning himself directly behind John. Quick as bullet, Pop! Pop! Ivan smacked John across the cheek with a jab and a straight right. Momentarily dazed, John swung wildly to keep the Doctor at bay. But the tactic was ineffective. The doctor waited patiently easily avoiding John’s reckless barrage of punches. A faint smile twisted across his face as he toyed with his prey. As John quickly tired himself out, his punches came slower and his reflexes less sharp. He was already exhausted from having sprinted through the building and was slowly bleeding out from all the glass cuts. It was only a matter of time before Ivan would beat him. As this realization crossed John’s mind, he lost focus. Precisely at that moment Ivan slipped underneath a right hook. Striking with the ferocity of a viper, Ivan stepped in close, unleashing a vicious uppercut. The blow struck John in the chin and knocked him to the ground. CRAAAASH!!! John fell to the floor with a thud. Like a predator ready to slaughter its prey, Ivan pounced anticipating the kill. But the fight was not over yet. John fought with ferocity of a cornered animal. Impossible to pin down, he writhed and struggled shaking Ivan off of him and eventually clambering back up. As they rose to their feet, Ivan clasped the back of John’s neck placing him in a clinch. He threw a knee, driving it deep into John’s stomach. The blow drove deep into the soft flesh of John’s stomach causing him to stagger backwards, gasping for air. John keeled over, clutching his stomach, barely able to stand. Ivan stepped in for the finishing blow. He dropped his hands low, tensing for the knockout blow. BOOM!!! That was when John caught him. The bluff had worked.
Knowing that he was outmatched and that his stamina was fading, he needed to find a way to get Dr. Ivan to drop his guard. Allowing himself to get hit and then feigning injury, he had tricked Ivan into lowering his guard for an instance and that was when John had retaliated. BOOM! He dropped Ivan with a looping right hand.
As Ivan fell to the floor, John thought of escape. He had the opportunity to get to his car, but he knew he would never be safe as long as Dr. Ivan was alive. Who would protect him from the doctor? The police wouldn’t believe him if he told them what he had witnessed. In fact, they would most likely send him to a mental institution. Hell, after what he had been through today, maybe he belonged there regardless. But no, there was only one option. He had to finish him here and now.
John jumped on top of Ivan, mounting him with his weight over Ivan’s stomach and wrapping his hands around the doctor’s throat. Ivan fought to remove the hands, but the savage unrelenting look in John’s eyes told him that it was an effort in futility. As his circulation was cut off, Ivan began to slowly lose consciousness. In a final desperate attempt, Ivan threw his arms up, clawing at John’s head managing to grip his ears. With malice, he pulled Johns head down by the ears and then drove two thumbs directly into John’s eyes forcefully. Blood poured out of the cavity, soaking the doctor’s hands. John shrieked letting go off the choke clawing to pry away the doctor’s hands, but it was too late. John had spent all his energy and the massive amount of blood loss had sapped his strength. Ivan would not relent and drove his thumbs deeper into John’s eyes. John’s trump card had been played and he was now blind. Caving into exhaustion, John’s body went limp and he passed out. His bloodied body draping over the Doctor. He would not survive. His body had eclipsed fatigue too many times over. He had sustained too much damage. Ivan kept his finger dug deeply into John’s eye sockets and stared at him with a fierce intensity. John did not look back. Dr. Ivan rolled over, reversing the position now laying on top of John’s dying body; fingers still pressed into the eyes. “Have a taste you bastard”, Dr. Ivan roared expressing true emotion for the first time. Blue light streamed down Ivan’s arms, through his fingers, flooding into John’s mangled eyes, spreading through the rest of his body.
John’s body convulsed in ecstasy. John now saw what Ivan saw. Every dream and every desire he could ever imagine manifested itself around him. John’s was transported away. A warm cloud enveloped him like a blanket, healing his blood-soaked wounds, carrying him high into the bright orange-pink skies of sunset. The velvety cloud felt like silk and fresh laundry. Below him lay the ocean, vast and expansive. He watched as volcanoes erupted from the depths of the seabed, their lava colliding with the waves forming majestic mountains that towered over the great expanse. Time felt endless here. Years felts like seconds, centuries like minutes. As he stared down at the sea below him, the sound of music and laughter erupted around him. He glanced up only to see people flocking into him in the skies. They danced naked across the clouds, leaping from one to the other like adult cupids on trampolines. As they danced, the sang cheerful melodies and hummed sweet uplifting tunes. Above him the stars had gathered twinkling in delight, no longer afraid of the sun. On each star sat a musician, serenading him from the heavens with symphony of sounds, filling his body with warmth. In the background, the smell of lavender and cherry blossoms swirled in the air with a scent so lovely it that it could’ve made the grinches heart grow not three but four sizes. As he took it all in, he saw a figure in the distant approaching him. A little girl in bright yellow dress twirled across the sky. Her tiny shoes glided across the air like a skater on ice. “Estella!” he cried, tears forming at the corner of his eyes.
“Hi daddy!” she exclaimed with delight as she ran towards him. As they met, he lifted her off her feet spinning her in the air and giving her a kiss on the cheek. Estella squealed with joy and gave John a big hug.
“I love you daddy!” she said to him, joy radiating from her face, excited to see him.
“I love you too sweetie!” he said.