Chapter 1: 4am
There was a sharp gasp and the man in the bed jerked bolt up-right, spluttering and chocking as he swam up from the murky clutches of the nightmare. Time ticked by and for a moment, as he sat amongst the knotted nest of bed sheets warm and clammy with his own damp sweat, he couldn't stop his muzzy eyes from unscrupulously racing between each and every shadow loitering about the room's corners as if the very absence of light would lunge right at him. The lurid green figures displayed by a digital clock buried on the night-stand by his bed under an assortment of late-night and dog eared reading material got to flicker and morph at least twice before the man was finally satisfied that his night-time antagonist hadn't somehow found a way to come lumbering after him into the world of the living.
His heart began to slow and he let the pent up air in his lungs go. No, he was safe for now; the nightmare and all the monsters that lurked with in it had remained safely locked away within his skull for at least another night.
The man exhaled and let the little ball of tight tension in his spin unravel. Slumping, he turned to the window adorned with its half drawn and far from expensive curtains, squinting at the garish orange light that peculated in from some lonesome street lamp outside.
"This makes it the third time this week…" His hushed voice muttered to no-one but the gloom hovering about him. Indeed, this was the third time that the dream had visited him while he slumbered since Sunday night.
Today was merely Wednesday.
With a groan, the man clambered up out of the bed, wiping the sleep that had taken up residency in-between his eye-lids and staggered out onto the worn carpet of his apartment with all the grace of a blind drunk as his body tried to get used to the idea of being awake. His dozy joints protested and the little voice of concise that his head played host to mumbled sleepily something about just rolling over and going back to the land of nod.
The man paid them no heed. Like one of those unidentabel extras from one of those b-movie zombie flicks that often plagued the air-waves at this ungodly hour of four am, he absentmindedly shambled off to the bathroom with the soul aim to relive the stabbing sensation tickling his bladder which, his sleep-numbed mind dully noted, felt as though it had been replaced with a lead ball.
However, this wasn't the soul though that occupied his mind as he tripped and blundered his way to the ajar bathroom door. Oh no, the short walk that would take no more that fifteen seconds for even the most out-of-it gave him more than enough time to meditate upon the subject of The Dream.
It was always the same, every single time. He'd find himself standing in a hallway that looked as though it hadn't been used by another homo-sapian for about half a centaury… and that was being grossly generous. The grimy over-head light bulb that half-heartedly tried to shed some light on the grimy, dust caked corridor was just strong enough to pick out the long, jagged grooves that had been maliciously tattooed into the few ceramic tiles that hadn't already subsumed to gravity and fallen to ground... not that the bare, exposed plaster was spared from being scrawled all over either. Whatever had etched the crazy network of cuts and lines looked as though it had been sharp… very, very sharp indeed. To make matters worse, something that looked a little too akin to dried, caked blood had been splattered everywhere, clinging in thick, crusty lumps to anything that was unfortunate enough to have a globule of the stuff land on it.
The man would always be given a handful of a few short seconds to take all this in while trying not to drown in the pungent, sharp reek of spoilt meat that swamped his nostrils, but then, as regular as clock-work, something would interrupt the silence behind him, cutting the sound of the rugged breathing short and making it catch in his throat.
He knew what lurking in the rancid dark, every single time he would fall asleep and wake up here, he was more than aware of what had made that noise and was lurking just behind him, safely out of view.
So why oh why did he always have to turn around and expose himself to it?
Well, he would and, as always, he would be there waiting for him to do so, hovering just at the edge of the glow of sickly, dying light that just about illuminated the hallway. However, it was not so pathetic that it couldn't pick out some vauge details of the entity that skulked with in the inky darkness as he beamed back at the dreamer with the soft, beguling smile of a crocodile trying to intice you that little bit closer to its seemingly innocent maw.
Despite having been plagued by this nightmare for months on end now, the white hot flush of panic never failed to bowl straight into him as his eyes danced over the form of the man shaped thing, drinking in the ashend shaed of his leering visage and the deep, crimson stains littering the material of his long white coat that stood out painfully against the bleached material. Funnly enough, the coat was one of those long things self-imoportant doctors like to sheath themselves in as they strut about hospitals, looking as spick and span as their sterile environment… however, this particular doctor looked as though he'd just come staggering out of an operating theatre where he'd been star of the show at a corony by-pass.
The irony of it never failed to catch him it, even if it were just for a single tick of a moment, for as soon as the dreamer laid eyes upon this leering presence, that warm smile pinning back his face would dissolve, twisting into something horrible as it the true sentiment behind it was finally allowed to bubble to the surface. Before the man even got the chance to even thinking about turning on his heels and bolting, he would come from him with hands splayed wide as the man in the dark lunged at him, rocketing out from the black, all absorbing back-drop and still grinning like a lunatic.
And then he'd wake up.
A shudder shook the dreamer as he reached for the cool, metal handle and let the sound of flushing water resonate about the tiny bathroom as the contence of the ceramic bowl before him gurgled away. Looking back on it now that he was reasonably with it, this dream didn't sound like much of a nightmare on paper. Hell, being jumped by a manic doctor in a corridor that made the subway look like the entrance to the New-York Hilton wasn't exactly the kind of thing that should tare one from the land of nod wondering if their heart is going to give out there and then…
…But it did. It just felt… it felt so very real.
The man just gave another shrug. It was far too early to be trying to un-ravel the logic behind dreams… and anyways, it was just a dream. There honestly was no point whiling away his waking hours fretting over something that was just a mish-mash of fantasy and subconscious anxiety.
There was a soft click and a blast of sharp light invaded the cramped room just in-time to highlight the man's hand falling away from the stringy chord of the bathroom lamp and thud limply to his side. He looked up, turning his face all swollen with sleep towards the cabinet mirror that was pinned in just above the spotless white bowl of the toilet sink.
The visage of a man in his mid thirties, blighted with sallow skin complete with crater like scars that were a testament to an itchy fingered teen's war against acne and muddy (and currently thumping shade of bloodshot red) eyes that tried to hide behind the flop of dirt-blond hair that was a more than content with being an unruly and short mess. The name that went hand in hand with the face that blearily glanced back from the mirror's reflective depths was Frederick Goldfarb; a man who lead an unbelievably un-eventful and bone dry existence. Screwy dreams asides of course.
Something that might just have been disappointment tugged at the muscles of the man's face as it dawned on him that the person looking right back at him was actually his self and, along with that face and name, came the unremarkable and lonely life attached. Suddenly, Fred found himself wishing he'd never reached for the bathroom light and instead, just been content with mulling over that god damn dream as he loitered there in the dark, alone with his delirious, sleep deprived thoughts. Numbly, he looked down at the bulky wrist watch clamped around the end of his arm, blinking hard at it as he tried to make sense of the metallic strips that glared up at him sharply from underneath the thin cataracts of glass, gleaming vindictively with the tart light provided so graciously by the sixty watt bulb over-head.
Seven minuets past four.
With nothing more than a dull 'oh' of acknowledgement, Fred absorbed the information and let the array and network of neurons and brain cells crammed away inside his skull run out the automatic functions. It was horrendously early…the kind of time that no one in their right mind would chose to pass awake and if he didn't want to be doing a Oscar winning performance of a corpse tomorrow down at the library, it would be wise to saunter back into his cold, empty and waiting bed right now.
Having completely forgotten what possessed him to turn it on, Fred reached for the still swinging chord and, with a sloppy flick of the wrist, plunged the room back into the bleak shade of early morning grey. He took the voices in his head's suggestion and crawled back between the sheets that hosted him each and every night.
Frederick spent the few remaining morning hours on his back and boring holes into the ceiling, watching the rising sun creep away its plastered surface while waiting for a slumber that just refused to catch. This was probably a good thing as, come this ugly time tomorrow, something would crash into his life and smash apart the repetitive sequence of events that composed each day to which he'd grown so accustomed to.
In short, with in the next twenty-four hours his world would be turned on its head and its new found view was far from pretty.
A/N: yup, bugger all happened then… personally, I fell the first chapter is weak and feeble and it took way too long to get up. Oh well.
Just call me blue- heh, tis fine…. just as long as you don't get as creepy as that 'wrath's lover' guy. And Eva's a great series and thoroughly deserves to be read just for what it is.
Deacon87- thank you very much. And I promise there will be more. This story's probably going to take a long while.
Wiezerdgamir- what can I say, I just like working with really, really minor charaters, the nurse being a prim example. I hope the rest of this will live up to your expectations
EPO- Yep, he was derived from walter and rest assured.. I didn't acctualy even finish SH4 so the similaites will probably only crop up with the location and one or two of the charaters.
Slap-Dash- Good to hear I've still got it, even if it was only the first chapter. Heh, I wish it was down to carlessnes but I just can't spell at all which is somewhat off putting when you look over a page and see pretty much the whole thing's underlined with sgwiggly, angrey red lines.
Elric- Ah-ha! You are a sharp one, arn't you? Kudos to you for spotting that.