The Nightmare Thieves

The city lives on nightmares. It’s a living city. You’d be better off if they took anything else, but that’s not how it goes. The negative pulses are what it craves. The city is alive. It has hearts and lungs hidden behind building facades, scattered here and there. The hearts pump the nightmares throughout the city, and the nightmares are oxygen for the lungs. The city of terror. The infinite city.

I woke up in my room. Lindsey, or Lydia or someone, was lying next to me. I rolled over and took a cigarette out of a soft pack on my nightstand. I lit it and inhaled. Calming. Relaxing. She — whoever she was — started coughing dramatically.

“Nobody smokes in bed except in the movies. Hell, nobody smokes cigarettes anymore.”

“I suppose I’m special, then,” I said. I told her to get out of bed and get dressed. She was pissed, but she did it anyway. I enjoyed the rest of my cigarette in peace. It would be the last fully peaceful moment I would have for a long time.

I fell back asleep and awoke to the sound of my roommate Billy screaming. I got out of bed, grabbed a pair of jeans off the floor and put them on as quickly as I could. 

Billy was in the living room by the window that overlooked the street twelve floors below. I hurried to the window and looked out. Shit. The Faceless. Dreaded brown clay skin creatures with nothing but a jaw where their face should be. Fatty folds creasing their foreheads. Nine feet tall with sharp claws that paralyzed the victim upon penetration. They caught you and took you — well, nobody was positive where exactly, but it was rumored that they were the ones who took you to the machine that extracted your nightmares.

The Faceless grabbed a homeless drunk that I’d seen many times hanging around the building. It stuck its claws in the man’s neck and carried him away. 

I’d heard that you wake up and find yourself in a hospital bed. They attach wires to your head and those wires are plugged into the nightmare machine. Microscopic needles dig deep into all parts of your brain. They dig and dig, until they find your terrors. Then the extraction process begins. 

At first, it sounds like it might be therapeutic to have your nightmares drained, but you lose a very essential part of yourself. What is a person without their terrors? What kind of person would you be with half your reality missing? Maybe more than half? 

Two days later, Billy and I sat at our kitchen table, trying to forget the paranoia that seeing the Faceless had left us with. 

“Hey, listen,” I said. “It’s not like they come back to the same place very often. I mean, how many have you seen in your lifetime?”

“Four. But that’s enough.”

“But that’s my point, right? The sightings are so far between that you probably won’t see another one for a decade.”

“That guy’s face when the claw went in.” 

“He probably wasn’t even hurt. They say those things sedate you instantly.”

They say that at the center of the city, underground, there is a river that doesn’t reflect. On that river is a ferryman. Pay his fee and he’ll take you to paradise. But you have to match his asking.

Twenty, maybe twenty-five people had gathered at our apartment for a little party. That was how many people saw Billy start to phase out of reality. 

Most of us were stunned, and just stood there and watched. A couple of people tried to grab him, but he wasn’t solid anymore. He was like a hologram. He phased in and out, never regaining anything like a solid form. And then suddenly he was gone. 

I sat at the bar and looked at my glass of beer, almost untouched. This had been a real bummer of a week. But what was there to do about it? People phased out of reality sometimes. It was just something that, however unlikely, could happen at any moment. But why Billy? Man, it’s hard as hell to make friends when you’re not in your twenties anymore.

The cuffs were cold on my wrists. They were tight enough that it felt personal. I hadn’t meant to start that fight, but that’s how things go sometimes. How was I supposed to know she had a jealous boyfriend when I asked her to dance? And when she put her hand on my crotch, I took it as a sign that she liked me. And so we kissed. 

Anyway, I took everything out on the guy. It had been a stressful week, and I wasn’t having any bullshit. 

We are dreams dreaming of themselves. We have to be taken from the city to understand what the city means. But the city is infinite. So this is difficult to do. 

The most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to me? I once found myself in an unfamiliar alleyway. I was twisted drunk and I wasn’t sure what street I was on. Suddenly, in front of me was a very tall, very thick woman with golden skin and dark gold eyes. She tore at her chest until it heaved open and dozens of tentacles slicked out. I turned to run, but the woman overran me. She grabbed me with her tentacles. They suctioned me inside her chest. I half hung out and tried to wriggle away, but the tentacles held me in. Suddenly we were flying. I screamed, but my terror was muffled by the thickness of her chest fluids as they stuck in my mouth and throat. 

She landed on the sidewalk and I slopped out of her chest. I lay there, all wet and sticky, in incredible pain, looking up as the golden woman laughed at me. 

“It has to do, like,” when they take your dreams and you’re all happy, but you’re not supposed to be that way.” Sherry was drunk again. But it’s not like what she was saying wasn’t true. But that’s not what I had been talking about.

“Sherry,” I said. “What does that have to do with Billy phasing out of reality?”

“Oh, nothing, really. Hey, you want to order some shrimp?”

I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet for a few minutes, gathering my thoughts.

The meditators levitate in circles and underneath each circle is a fire. They’re a few feet in the air. The fire almost catches their clothes. At least that’s what I heard. But I’ve heard a lot of things. 

I should say, that’s the most terrified I’d been up until the point that I saw a Faceless staring down at me. This past week had driven me to drink more than usual, and usual was a lot. I was stumbling out of Malagoon’s Bar when the Faceless ambled down the sidewalk in my direction. But these sightings were supposed to be rare. And here I was, looking at my second in a week. Well, fuck.

There’s a certain poetry in losing your mind. The machine was nothing like I had expected. It was all ecstasy, yes, but also there was something missing. Something essential. I had visions of my mother and my tenth birthday. It was the day my mother’s wife agreed to adopt me. But it was more than just good memories. It was, how to put it, an abstraction. Light stretching itself around the body. Calm. Comfort. Serenity. Why couldn’t I be like this forever?

Because the body doesn’t last forever. When they took me out of the machine and pulled the wires out of my head, I was barely human. My bones had dissolved and I was a gelatinous mixture of blood and water. I had melted into a kind of flesh sack. There was a man in a tie. He scooped me off the bed. My neck was useless, turning my head was upside down. My legs drooped over his arm.

And then they put me in here with you guys. We slick around all day like snakes and we eat our slop and we’re not exactly sure why except this is what we do. I heard this used to be a problem. And so we flop around on our bellies and we drink from the slop they drop on us after we’ve flipped onto our backs. Something is missing, but we’re not sure what it is. It doesn’t matter, though, does it? We’re happy. That’s all that counts.

The Swamp

Oh, how the swamp stunk in the sticky humid August night. That sweet reek of the endless purgatory in the marshlands. Somewhere lost in the middle was the shack where Brad Gum lived with his wife. He let his toe dip into the black nebulous of the duckweed plated water and watched as the ripples shimmied outward catching the white moonlight on their crests. The oppressive heat sweltered under the arms of Brad Gum and he shifted on the dock as hot beads of sweat ran down his lower back into the band of his three-day-old underwear. He looked out over the bayou through the vapors of humidity and lights of fireflies that winked as the stars above. A frog trilled from somewhere under the ramshackle dock made of rotting, moist planks. Locusts sawed on from the pitch. Brad’s jeans were ripped into capris above the ankle. Oh, did the swamp stink this time of year. 

The axe which was gnawed and splatted with orange rust was leaning restfully on a soggy, moss-capped, timber that was sunk in near the tall grass at the shore. Brad knew the swamp smelt, he knew that his floundering home in the swamp stunk, but he himself could not smell it. Brad was devoid of all sense of smell. His own stink, the stink of others at the store in summer, and the mildew stench of his homeland, of the swamp, were all but scentless steam in his hair filled nostrils. The light of orange embers smoldering at the end of his smoke, and the moon above was caught up in the silvery pools of the eyes of alligators staring, watching, lurking below him. They were invisible apart from this singular give away and would have otherwise been lost to the backdrop as logs or clumps of dirty weed in the murk. But they, like he, were there, part of the night, part of the swamp, predatory and monstrous.  

His wife was upstairs in the bathtub. Happier than he? As he watched the ripples evaporate into the gloom and blackness of the bayou mists perhaps, perhaps not. He could not find the capacity to care. He breathed in deep in a vain attempt to take in the odious bouquet of the marsh but nothing came to him, nothing more than breathing in the vapors over a boiling pot of water on the stove. The only light in the shabby dwelling was coming down in a warm shaft onto the dock from the cracked bathroom window on the second floor. Brad got up from the end of the dock as he heard the grinding of car tires coming along the long gravel driveway leading to his secluded bit of land in the wild swamp. He threw his smoke down from the dock into the water which hit with a sound like a match dying under a faucet. Something jumped at this and splattered in a large waking wave into the black water. He pictured something with pale eyes and ribbed skin that would be eaten by a largemouth bass or a snake upon making such a debut into the stinking surf.  The headlights cut through the stifling summer mugginess in two long glowing poles before the police car. The car came to a slow rolling stop as Brad made his way to greet the officer. 

“Eve’nin’ Offisah,” said Brad. The officer stepped out from the car which had all the windows down on account of the mug in the air.  

“Evening Brad,” said the sheriff, “The missus home?” 

“Aye,” said Brad spitting a large wad from his mouth, “She be in-dis-posed. In the tub. You need ‘er? I’ll fetch ‘er.” 

“No need to trouble ‘er,” said the sheriff. His expression hardened and he stepped closer to Brad. “But Brad, there’s been some odd complaints from the neighbors down yonder,” he pointed to the Landry’s home a bit to the south. The policeman drew a carton of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket and lit one with his, as Brad would assume it, fancy city lighter, which clacked and clanged as he flipped the lid open and closed. 

Dumb bastards Brad thought to himself. “Complaints, of wut natchya?” Brad asked. 

“Sump’in’ ‘bout a smell, Brad, something ‘bout a smell like hell. Like a rottin’ animal. They say it waftin’ down on them real bad and they want us to take a look ‘round here,” said the sheriff. “Matta of fackt, place is smellin’ awful ripe tonight.” 

“Swamp,” said Brad as he fingered his mildew ridden bellybutton. He sniffed the cheese that he pulled forth from the cavity with indifference even as the sheriff let his hand casually rest on the revolver strapped to his hip. 

“You got one of dem permits now cher??” Brad said before spitting again. It landed with a loud wet pat on the rocks. 

“I don’t, not yet. Don’t want to trouble you with it, but tell me true, there anything I need to know?” The sheriff asked. Eyes reading Brad’s rather vacant and simple face. 

“Swamp always stinkin’, this time of year. Shit, might be a deer fell down a sinkhole. I can help ya look in the mornin’ okay?” he said. 

“Well sure, that’d be just fine,” said the sheriff who turned back to his car but paused before taking a step. “Say Brad, got any coffee on? I could sure use a cup on the graveyard shift, only if ye please.” 

Brad coughed up something large and gunky in his throat and held it in his mouth before discharging it into the gravel at his bare feet. “Sure, I’m sure missus got something for ye.” 

Brad did an overly polite bow to the officer and bid him towards the porch. The timber plank stairs yelled in protest as the two ascended them, almost cutting out the shrill trill of the tree frogs and crickets. The screen door flapped open with a simple and misused wheek before clacking back into its lock as Brad and the officer entered the putrid residence. 

Water-stained walls, cabinets left open to expose the chipped china like bone beneath a wound, plates and tins on the counters, two matching rough wood chairs with their arched backs pushed out from the small round table where old coffee was left in metal mugs, the officer sniffed. Stink. Swamp? An old oil lantern hung from the ceiling from some old cabling and was the sole source of light in the room. It rocked on the breeze from the open window and allowed its light to cast odd and sharp shadows around the room giving all a distinctly purgatorial feel. The wallpaper, once painted with bright sunflowers, roosters, and diamond patterns sagged on the walls like an ill-fitted dress on a woman and was bunched and torn by water exposing the ribcage of timbering beneath. 

“Awful quiet Brad, thought you said missus is upstairs?” Inquired the officer. 

“Indeed, she be. Coffee still?” Brad inquired back. 

“Matter a’ fact, think I might have a look upstairs?” Asked the officer. 

Brad turned and poured himself a cup of old cold coffee from the moldy pot. The officer quietly unsnapped the cover of his pistol. 

“Uh sure,” shrugged Brad. 

The policeman made his way around through the narrow kitchen avoiding the dirty walls for the earnest desire not to get the filth on himself. The banister to the stair was unsurprisingly cracked in the pillars and rail and as he assented the dirt smeared steps. The pistol was lifted with a creak from the leather holster as the stained steps quacked beneath his boots. He knocked on the bathroom, no answer. He knocked again upon the door and entered. 

There the maggot ridden corpse of Mrs. Gum stared back. Holes where eyes had been, now just an eggy residue dribbled from the sockets. Skin blackening, lips pulled back around yellow teeth. An undefinable and dark liquid dripped from her mandible. She was mutilated in places and her stomach cavity was a gutted hole revealing nothing but a dark pocket under her ribs. She was not the only, nor by appearances, the oldest one left here. The officer’s eyes scanned over other bodies, reddened with fresh blood and blackened with old. Some missing teeth, others seemed chewed and sawed. A fest of gore. The stench, unmentionable other than it burned with purification, roadkill left to decompose for months was the only comparable testament the officer could fathom in the seconds the synapses of his mind had to fire the thought into consciousness. The bathmat caught his attention as small things seem to do in times of crisis such as this, and even the once floral pattern was almost unidentifiable under the smudge of liquid and tissue that stained it. He turned to the door, Brad was there. He was stripped bare, showing the thick forest of fur that extended from the scruff of his chin to his loins. Brad was looking at Ms. Gum in the tub. 

“Well, hun, they think a God-damn deer is making that stink!” Brad hooped, “But by god come morning, the po-lice dogs ain’t nevah gonna ever find you in that damn stinkin’ swamp!” 

That axe, orange with rust still managed to flash in the light of the single hanging bulb of the bathroom. The axe knocked the bulb but did not break it, flashing strobes of shadow and light in dizzying arrays around the room. The freshest red blood flowed over the black stains of the old and the sawing of crickets, frogs, and the lapping of swamp water took over the night. 

The next morning when more officers came, Brad’s bathroom was as ordinary as yours. Clean and welcoming to the point one wouldn’t actually mind using it, despite the rest of the house. All the while the police searched the grounds around the home, Brad brewed fresh coffee for them from a clean pot, and no one noticed that the police car was missing. Only Brad knew now where the vehicle settled, deep in the stinking swamp.